“Ay, ay, divil, all’s raight! We’ve smashed ’em!”: Translating Violence and 'Yorkshire Roughness' in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley

Franklin, Sophie

Abstract

By taking Yorkshire Luddism as Shirley’s (1849) framework, Charlotte Brontë places political violence at the centre of its narrative. Despite this, much of the novel’s inclusions of violence are largely undescribed and even unwitnessed, often displaced to another site, such as a letter or nameless voice. When politically motivated attacks committed by working-class characters are represented, these moments are mediated by an upper-middle-class spectator or translator. This paper seeks to identify and explore the presence and significance of politically motivated violence in the novel, emphasizing its centrality within the text and highlighting its connection with nineteenth-century attitudes to issues of regional dialect, the legitimacy of force and ‘Yorkshire roughness’.

Citation

Franklin, S. (2018). “Ay, ay, divil, all’s raight! We’ve smashed ’em!”: Translating Violence and 'Yorkshire Roughness' in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley. Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society, 44(1), 43-55. https://doi.org/10.1080/14748932.2019.1525875

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 17, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Dec 17, 2018
• Publication Date: Dec 17, 2018
• Deposit Date: May 17, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 17, 2019
• Journal: Brontë Studies
• Print ISSN: 1474-8932
• Electronic ISSN: 1745-8226
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 44
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 43-55
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14748932.2019.1525875
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1358610