Another day, another example of our cultural heritage in the hands of people who hate it; or at least can’t bring themselves to love it as it is. The Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, the childhood home and centre of study and interest in the Bronte sisters, has produced various baffling LGBT-themed resources as part of its series “Pride at the Parsonage: The Brontes and Gender Identity”.
I should be clear; I am not against gay historical figures having that side of their personalities and contributions explored. You can imagine it being quite a big deal, say, for the estate of Oscar Wilde. But trying to shoehorn 21st-century concepts of the “queer” into the lives and works of three vicar’s daughters from the mid-19th century, isn’t just deranged but faintly insulting.
One justification for this fantasy alternate universe appears to be that the Brontes used male pseudonyms to publish their work. Yet they adopted these not for fun, or to achieve the “queering” of gender boundaries, but out of cold necessity. (In Charlotte Bronte’s case, nothing screams “gender-queer” like being forced to publish under a man’s name, before dying from complications in the early stages of pregnancy.)
To most people, claiming something that was the product of repression as a choice made as part of some greater struggle sounds tangibly insane. However, it gives an insight into the mindset of many custodians of our cultural treasures. Theirs is a moral world where it is impossible to say that something is “good” for its own sake, because that would imply the existence of categories of objective “goodness”, or, shock horror, a morality different to their own. Instead, culture must always be repurposed to fit the prevailing ideology.
Read here
Archive
Another day, another example of our cultural heritage in the hands of people who hate it; or at least can’t bring themselves to love it as it is. The Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, the childhood home and centre of study and interest in the Bronte sisters, has produced various baffling LGBT-themed resources as part of its series “Pride at the Parsonage: The Brontes and Gender Identity”.
I should be clear; I am not against gay historical figures having that side of their personalities and contributions explored. You can imagine it being quite a big deal, say, for the estate of Oscar Wilde. But trying to shoehorn 21st-century concepts of the “queer” into the lives and works of three vicar’s daughters from the mid-19th century, isn’t just deranged but faintly insulting.
One justification for this fantasy alternate universe appears to be that the Brontes used male pseudonyms to publish their work. Yet they adopted these not for fun, or to achieve the “queering” of gender boundaries, but out of cold necessity. (In Charlotte Bronte’s case, nothing screams “gender-queer” like being forced to publish under a man’s name, before dying from complications in the early stages of pregnancy.)
To most people, claiming something that was the product of repression as a choice made as part of some greater struggle sounds tangibly insane. However, it gives an insight into the mindset of many custodians of our cultural treasures. Theirs is a moral world where it is impossible to say that something is “good” for its own sake, because that would imply the existence of categories of objective “goodness”, or, shock horror, a morality different to their own. Instead, culture must always be repurposed to fit the prevailing ideology.
Read here
Archive