1
A STRUCTURALIST UNDERSTANDING OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S ART AND
FICTION
Eszter Krakkó
University of Debrecen, Hungary
As an enigmatic figure of the early Victorian novelistic tradition, Charlotte Brontë has
until recent years been considered to be only a writer with a special talent for displaying the
female mind and thus, has often been termed as an early feminist. The studies of recent years,
however – first of all of Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars – , manage to cast light on her
artistic accomplishments as well, and thus, enable us to interpret her lifework not only as an
inseparable part of the female novelists’ canon, but also as the manifestation of how a textual
space can give way to the appearance of the visual, and become a semiotic space of
interartistic nature. Seen in this way, to her lifework, which consists not only of verbal but
also of visual texts, we can fully apply what the Russian structuralist Jurij M. Lotman says
about the connection between language and other elements of culture: “in its actual
functioning, language is molded into a more general system of culture and, together with it,
constitutes a complex whole” (Lotman, Uspenskij 213). Applying this statement to Charlotte
Brontë’s oeuvre, it can be said that in her case the complexity provided by the common
presence of the verbal and the visual manifests itself not only in the fact that she created both
paintings and novels, but also in that the verbal texts of her novels can themselves be termed
“visual”. This may be true first of all because these literary texts can be seen as the
realizations of the ut pictura poesis theory (meaning, as is painting, so is poetry), and thus,
their investigation as textual pictures from a structuralist and semiotic point of view may cast
light on the importance of interdisciplinarity in Charlotte Brontë’s literary accomplishments.
At the same time, however, we must not start investigating the novels with the help of
close reading without having a glimpse at how Charlotte Brontë became acquainted with the
visual, and without examining the circumstances which made her transform her creative and
visually centred energies into her novels, in which she transgressed the borderline between
visual and verbal arts. This analysis of her artistic transformation is essential in a sense that it
may provide a framework for incorporating Charlotte Brontë’s artistic texts into the
structuralist theory about the common nature of various semiotic systems, because only after
giving a theoretical interpretation of the possible transformations between the visual and the
verbal substructures can it be understood what kind of a special role the closely connected
visual and verbal semiotic structures in her lifework – and first of all in her literary texts –
perform. As a consequence, besides the analysis of her various artistic phases, there has to be
given an insight also into the structuralist and semiotic conceptions about the relation and
difference between those sign systems which are manifest in a linear (like literature), and
those which are manifest in a simultaneous way (like painting).
According to Lotman, the essential characteristic of various artistic structures can be the
tendency towards the “synthesis and mutual influence” of the semiotic “systems of the artistic
type” (Lotman, “The Discrete Text” 337), the application of which in terms of the connection
between painting and literature may provide a possible way of analysis regarding the texts of
those artists in whose works a constant coexistence of and transformation between the visual
and the verbal can be depicted. To understand, however, how this can be applied to Charlotte
Brontë and how each of her literary texts carries the traces of the visual, first it is necessary to
elaborate on the biographical process through which a visual image, which was present
originally and literally in her paintings, becomes translated into the verbal sphere of her
novels. This analysis is of crucial importance, because it can be proved only in this way that
her literary texts are the manifestations of a kind of metamorphosis within her art, during
2
which its original visual quality was not lost, it was only transformed into something else,
namely, into the verbal texts of the novels.
As it will be described in detail, Charlotte Brontë’s lifework displays a threefold
structure in which the visual and the verbal are present to a varying degree, but all of these
phases have a shared element in the sense that they incorporate the visual either literally or in
a symbolic, figurative way. This close connection between the visual and the verbal within
her lifework can be depicted from her childhood, and maybe this early acquaintance with art
and visuality was the reason for her writing such novels which, because of their visible
language and textual pictures, can be interpreted as the manifestations of the “ut pictura
poesis” theory.
In the first phase of her lifework writing and drawing was manifested literally within the
same space, so it is quite evident that the diverse experiences in creating visual images played
an essential role even in that part of her life. The starting point of this first phase and thus, that
of visual representation in her writings, dates back to her childhood, the time when she,
together with her sisters (Emily and Anne) and her brother (Branwell) “had a profound and
continuing interest in the visual arts” (Alexander and Smith 18). Actually, critics claim that
the sisters’ “habit of reading pictures and their own practice of drawing and painting were
crucial to their development as writers” (Alexander and Smith 18).
The first remaining illustrations made by Charlotte in this first phase of her oeuvre are
tiny watercolour illustrations which can be found in the first Brontë manuscript. This is a tale
written by Charlotte to her sister Anne, to cheer her up with the fantastic stories, whose
heroine was the first reader herself (Alexander and Sellars 37), (Pictures 1., 2.). These first
sketches and drawings, however, are the most imaginative ones made by Charlotte as a child,
because she – like her sisters – was soon inserted in what was thought to be the correct notion
of art at the time, namely, that of copying. Although Charlotte had an ambition of becoming a
professional artist, the “sisters were taught art as one of the female accomplishments and in
preparation for their careers as teachers” (Alexander and Smith 18). Among the children only
Branwell – the only son in the family – had the opportunity to have professional trainers and
professional education; his sisters had no chance at all to try their hands at oil, this being the
privilege of the male child.
As children they all began copying nearly at the same age, and “they seem to have
examined and imitated whatever illustration came their way, from plates in annuals and
drawing manuals” to landscape scenes “and trees” (Alexander and Smith 18). After being sent
to a boarding school, however, “the sisters were exposed to the conventional art education of
every middle-class Victorian young woman” (Alexander and Smith 19). This old system of
art education meant that “a carefully graded series of copies should be made before a student
was experienced enough to translate nature. This was the chief function of the drawing
manuals, many of which are identical, with simply the same plates rearranged and reissued
under different titles” (Alexander and Sellars 42) the usage of which ultimately led to the loss
of artistic imagination. It is quite evident that all the girls “copied the same prints” (Alexander
and Sellars 43), since there are surviving copies of the same engravings made by Charlotte
and Emily (mostly from the Forget Me Not Annual). Charlotte and Anne also “copied many
of the same exercises of eyes, ears, noses, lips, profiles and classical heads” (Alexander and
Smith 18), (Pictures, 3., 4.).
It was only during the holidays that they could draw from nature, but because of the
rigid and conventional way of their artistic education, they could not create the dramatic effect
they had intended to, so they returned to copying. At a later phase they were introduced also
to the pattern of painting flowers and picturesque scenes. Charlotte’s flower studies, however,
are highly stylized, there is a lack of background and they give the impression of having been
pressed. Although there are some flowers which bear the title ‘From Nature’, they are hardly
3
natural (Alexander and Sellars 49), and rather seem to be inscribed by norms (Pictures 5., 6.).
In the case of the picturesque scenes and landscapes almost the same can be told, although
they necessarily embody a higher level of visual representation as well (Pictures 7., 8.).
Drawing, however, was not Charlotte Brontë’s only solution to express her visual
creativity. Bringing together texts and the visual in a literal way was also a common notion in
her case, too: she often accompanied her poetry or letters with drawings connected to the
texts. This was the case when she drew two “unfinished sketches: a pencil outline of a
woman’s head, facing left, on the left-hand side of the page, immediately below the text” of
one of her poems, “and a half-length sketch of an elegant young woman in the centre of the
page” (Alexander and Sellars 247). These were the illustrations of her poem written from a
governess’s point of view about the rich and elegant, but not very sensitive heiresses of a
grand family.
Sometimes she wanted to make the addressee of her letters laugh, and that is why she
indicated comic sketches at the end of the letters. This was her intention when she drew a
comic sketch at the end of her letter written to her friend Ellen Nussey, after they had parted
for months due to Charlotte Brontë’s return to Brussels to continue her studies (Picture 9.).
The sketch shows a grotesque little female figure on the left representing Charlotte waving
“Good bye” to a beautiful woman accompanied by a man on the right-hand side of the letter.
Although the drawing is intended to be humorous, it also “reflects Charlotte’s growing feeling
of isolation at the time and her increasingly low self-esteem” (Alexander and Sellars 262).
These examples show how the common presence of the visual and the verbal can take place
within the same text, emphasizing the statement made by Lotman that a text (in this case the
letter) can “itself become a generator of further texts”, and in this way it may become “a
semiotic space within which languages interact” and “interfere with one another” (Lotman,
“The Text” 378), as it can be seen here, because the verbal and the visual narration carrying
the same meaning complement each other within the same space both in the case of the poem
and that of the letter, too.
Actually, at this time – the letter was written in 1843 – Charlotte Brontë had already
given up the idea of becoming a professional artist, although most of the second phase of her
oeuvre was devoted to painting, in which the textual became hidden for a while. In this
second phase Charlotte Brontë was consciously preparing for becoming a professional artist,
and she realized only gradually “that the system of art education she was taught was directed
more towards fitting middle-class girls for society” than “towards acquiring the skills
necessary for entering a profession in art” (Alexander and Sellars 51). “It seems likely that
she thought of becoming a miniaturist, painting tiny portraits, scenes and flowers”, which
possibility is suggested also by “her concentration on pencil and watercolour portraits”
(Alexander and Sellars 52). She was also “encouraged by the acceptance of two” of her
“pencil drawings” (although only copies from an annual), “for the summer exhibition of the
Royal Northern Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts in Leeds, 1834” (Alexander
and Smith 19).
While being an artist, however, whose works had already been exhibited, Charlotte had
to realize that what contemporary society expected of women was a much more practical and
less artistic use of what they had learned. Actually, painting “was seen as assisting in
needlework, since a knowledge of composition and colour was considered necessary for
embroidery” (Alexander and Sellars 50). Although “art as an accomplishment was” thought to
be “the prime motivation”, there was usually also “some practical application for the art
taught to girls” (Alexander and Sellars 50), while professional artistic education was
practically unattainable for women at that time. The remaining handcrafted lady-like
accomplishments produced by the Brontës – collars, needlecases – also suggest that the
4
circumstances had a great impact on their artistic notions, and that for them art and sewing
were practical necessities, too (Alexander and Sellars 50), (Picture 10.).
Although in this second phase no clear trace of an overlapping between the visual and
the verbal can be found, it must not be forgotten that this made way for the third and at the
same time most complex phase of Charlotte Brontë’s lifework, in which she translated the
visual into the textual, namely, into the texts of her novels. At the same time, this
development from the first phase – in which the visual and the verbal appeared in the same
space – towards the third phase, in which the literary texts include the visual in a verbal form
(and thus, narrate the transformation from the visual into the verbal) is the one which gives
way to the application of structuralism and Lotman’s theory of the I-I communication
concerning Charlotte Brontë’s lifework.
Before turning specifically to Charlotte Brontë, however, we have to examine the
theoretical framework which is offered by structuralism concerning the common usage of
linear and spatial arts manifest in the same space. According to Lotman – who, besides being
a structurslist, was a semiotist as well – , a synthesis can be made between the linear and the
spatial forms of art, because it is possible to convey meaning also “by a message in which we
cannot single out signs in the sense in which they are defined … as the words of natural
language” (Lotman, “The Discrete Text” 333). This means that not only literary texts convey
the ability to be based on signs, and although music, cinema and painting are not comprised of
signs of a “natural language” (meaning a nonartistic sign system, such as the languages
Russian, English or Hungarian), these forms of art also fall under the category of a “sign
system”, which creates a basis for a common investigation. Still, – as structuralists argue – ,
there can be traced an opposition between linear and spatial arts, which is “the antithesis
between semiotic systems that have spatial structure and that have temporal structure”,
meaning, “the antithesis between texts which are displayed in space, and those whose
existence is bound up with time”. Painting “is usually given as an example of the former.
Examples of the latter are the narrative genres of literature and music” (Lotman, “The
Discrete Text” 333).
Lotman argues, however, that this opposition can be questioned and turned into a
synthesis if an insightful investigation takes place, through which a kind of connection can be
created between the linear and the spatial forms. According to him, it has to be considered
“that the narrative text can be constructed in two ways”, the first of which “is the construction
of the narrative text on the basis of a natural language”, where the “word-signs are joined into
chains according to the rule of the given language”, while the “so-called iconic signs are the
most usual examples of the second type” (Lotman, “The Discrete Text” 333). Seen in this
way, the presence of the iconic signs can be the common denominator concerning the
investigation of literary texts and visual images in relation to each other. The reason for this
can be that both iconic verbal and iconic visual languages contain a succession of images,
which differ from the signs of a natural language, because “an image” of this kind can “take
on the function of a text”, and in this way “become the conveyor of a message” (Lotman,
“The Discrete Text” 334). This means that an image may have several meanings depending
on the context in which it appears, and that the basic message it conveys may remain the same
during the transformation from a system to another unrelated to its form.
Besides the common characteristics of verbal and visual texts, however, a difference can
be also detected between them, because while “the reader of the text simply knows the
meaning of all the words” and “knows to which ‘points’ of reality outside the text they are
related”, although “the function which sets up the correspondence between a given word and a
given extratextual object remains implicit”, in the case of pictures there is no need to relate
each image to an extratextual object, because here “the semantic relations”, so “the type of
projection are uniform for the whole text” (Lotman, “The Discrete Text” 334). At the same
5
time, in both cases it is necessary to have a certain code through which the object of
representation can be transformed into an image of the text, and “the presence of the code is”
a “necessary condition for” the image “to be able to appear as a message” (Lotman, “The
Discrete Text” 344). Thus, in iconic texts which comprise the transformational code, “there
are essentially no signs” which could be separated from each other, because “the message is
communicated by the text in its entirety” (Lotman, “The Discrete Text” 335). This means that
instead of the antithesis a synthesis is present concerning the semiotic texts, which is based on
their being constructed as a whole, unrelated to their being displayed either in space (like
painting) or in time (like literature).
As Lotman states in his study entitled “The Twofold Model of Communication in the
System of Culture”, in the unified system of culture a kind of connection between the
descriptive (visual) and the verbal instruments can be found. These elements, however, can
create a system of unity only if both constituents are included (Lotman, “A kommunikáció”
566). Seen in this way, the art of Charlotte Brontë can be termed as the manifestation of the
term myse-en-abyme, because it includes both the visual and the verbal aspect of culture, and
its twofold nature becomes even more complex if it is considered that Charlotte Brontë used
the visual in her literary texts not only as an abstract entity, but she also translated her own
earlier visual products into the verbal system of language, thus reinterpreting them in a new
context and at the same time creating a discourse with her own previous works of art.
In this aspect her lifework can be the manifestation of what Lotman terms as the I-I
communication (namely, a communication within the self). According to Lotman, the
difference of this term from the communication between two different persons becomes
evident if it is considered that while in the second case the information remains the same
while being sent from the subject (sender) to the object (addressee) in order to create a
meaningful communication, this pattern is reversed in the case of the I-I communication,
where the sender and the addressee are the same person, and the information goes through a
transformation. Thus, it can be stated that the main aim of the I-I communication is to
transform the information and to provide it with a new function and a new meaning while it is
shifted within an earlier and a later form of the self, which ultimately implies that the I-I
communication – which can be termed as “a dialogue with myself” – can only have a cultural
function if the utterance gains an additional meaning during the process. A new way of
understanding, however, can be created only if a complementary code is inserted and if the
original message becomes recoded in the basic elements of its structure, and thus, takes the
characteristics of a new message as well (Lotman, “A kommunikáció” 567).
This kind of recoding takes place in the case of Charlotte Brontë’s novels in a way that
the previous visual texts are transformed into verbal texts, which means that what was
previously manifested in a painting offering a simultaneous reading is now present in a
literary text offering a linear way of reading, and thus a new possible way of understanding is
created. It also has to be mentioned, however, that the presence of the verbal necessarily
implies that the indefiniteness of the visual is now restricted by the boundaries of the verbal
definiteness. Thus, according to Lotman, the I-I communication is never immanent in its
nature, because the complementary codes of the extratextual presence automatically postulate
the transformation of the iconic code and, as a consequence, of the message (Lotman, “A
kommunikáció” 568).
At the same time, through the investigation of this theory concerning the novels of
Charlotte Brontë, it can be observed that although the transformation of visual signs into
verbal signs usually generates a new meaning while it increases the number of the possible
interpretations, it does not lead at all to the creation of a new message, because the basic
meaning of both the original and the transformed information serves the same purposes. As a
consequence, it can be stated that although during the I-I communication the information
6
undergoes a transformation which creates a space for new ways of interpretation, this results
instead of a new message only in new codes, which are the manifestation of a certain
transformation within the form of her art (Lotman, “A kommunikáció” 573).
In the case of Charlotte Brontë this transformation can be depicted the most clearly in
the fact that – realizing that her father could not afford to pay for private art lessons as for her
brother – Charlotte “clearly resigned herself to drawing in miniature with pencil and
watercolour”, and “never attempted painting in oils” (Alexander and Sellars 52-53). She
refused even the kind request of her publisher’s reader in 1848 to illustrate herself the second
edition of Jane Eyre. She replied that “but when I examine the content of my portfolio now, it
seems as if during the years it has been lying closed some fairy has changed what I once
thought sterling coin into dry leaves” (Brontë quoted by Alexander and Sellars 36). This
translation of the “sterling coin” into “dry leaves” can be interpreted in a literal way as a
reference to the likeness of the leaves to the sheets of papers she was writing on. At the same
time, there is a metaphorical interpretation as well, because the leaves of her books can by no
means be called dry, but instead illuminated by her talent and vitalized by the bright,
gleaming unification of text and vision used through the description of the different settings
and the presentation of the characters. Thus, the crossover between textual and visual arts can
also be taken as a reference to the interdisciplinary and interartistic analogy between text and
vision within Charlotte Brontë’s novels.
Seen from a structuralist point of view, however, with this answer Charlotte Brontë
refused to reverse the process of the code switch from pictorial signs to verbal signs, and in
this way she also refused to use the pattern of the communication between two different
persons, a main characteristic of which communicative pattern is that the sender and the
addressee constantly change roles, maintaining in this way the flow of information. This is the
pattern which is rejected by Charlotte Brontë with the usage of the I-I communication, since
she – although only metaphorically – defines the transformation of her visual works (namely,
her paintings) into verbal texts as a non-reversible process. Using her terms, the paintings
(being referred to as coins, which are three-dimensional) symbolize wholeness as opposed to
the verbal signs which are referred to as dry leaves locked into two-dimensionality; which
contrast may relate to how burdensome it was for her to abandon painting for the sake of
writing. Still, this transformation, taken by her so mournfully, can be interpreted also as a
move carrying the promise of a new and more fruitful talent, which had already appeared at
that time in the form of her literary texts, which were the manifestations of the third and at the
same time last phase of her oeuvre.
Before turning to the close reading of the texts, however, we have to emphasize that the
application of Lotman’s theory about the I-I communication (although he used it first of all in
connection with Russian poetry) to Charlotte Brontë’s works on the basis of the threefold
structure of her lifework may generate a new way of understanding of these literary texts.
This theory can be valid to an even greater extent, because in these texts her previous
paintings come up not only in one way, but in various forms through landscape description,
characterization or the establishment of a situation. Thus, my intention is to show with the
help of two examples taken from her most famous novel, Jane Eyre, and another one from
Shirley – on the basis of the theoretical framework of both structuralism and
interdisciplinarity – , how the visual manages to manifest itself within the boundaries of the
verbal.
In relation to Jane Eyre, an eminent moment of the presence of Charlotte Brontë’s
previous artistic work can be traced in the text when Jane Eyre as a young child is locked into
a room, which causes her both physical and mental illness. At this time, Bessie, the maid in
the house brings her “a tart on a certain brightly painted china plate, whose bird of paradise,
nestling in a wreath of convolvuli and rosebuds, had been wont to stir in me a most
7
enthusiastic sense of admiration” (Brontë, Jane Eyre 23), an image like which was drawn by
Charlotte Brontë herself while she was “staying with her friend Mary Taylor’s family”
(Alexander and Sellars 198), (Picture 11.). This painting on silk shows six “stylized flowers
and attached green leaves arranged … in centre at the bottom” from which “long swirling
tendrils of stylized leaves” arise with an “ornamental grey bird” perching “on one of the left
tendrils” (Alexander and Sellars 198). The bird of this silk painting can be compared to the
“bird of paradise”, because both of them indicate something colourful and vivid, and thus
create a common ground for the appearance of the visual and the textual within the same
space. At the same time, it also has to be mentioned that both the image on the silk and the
plate in the novel display a bird which is painted and thus, is untouchable, which may refer to
the intangible and in a sense unnameable nature of pictures as separate substances.
Another important scene of the presence of Charlotte Brontë’s earlier drawings comes
when later, when she has spent some time at the school at Lowood, Jane Eyre is “allowed to
commence … drawing” (Brontë, Jane Eyre 76), which means that she gets access to a new
language through which she can express herself. After sketching her “first cottage” (Brontë,
Jane Eyre 76) she ceases to think about food before she gets asleep, which shows that she has
entered a new level of artistic understanding, when to provide imaginary food for the mind
becomes more important than to feed the body with real supply. Actually, this can be a
biographical allusion as well, because the first remaining pictures of Charlotte Brontë
represent cottages and small houses, too (Pictures 1., 2., 12.). Thus, it can be said that she
makes her heroine get acquainted with painting and art through the same steps as she did, and
in this way she transforms her own relation to visuality into the verbal sphere of her novel.
Displaying her own artistic works in the verbal texts of her novels, however, is not
confined to describing paintings or objects within the literary texts, but in a more complex
way these previous paintings may also display the whole emotional atmosphere of a scene.
This happens when in Shirley one of the heroines shows the symptoms of a psychosomatic
illness partly because of being abandoned by the beloved man, and laments on her lost lover
in a way which is typical of a Byronic heroine. There is a scene, for example, which narrates
the habit of this young heroine, Caroline, of sitting at the window of her room at a given time
once every week to see Robert (the hero) when he rides towards Whinbury near the Rectory.
This habit is detected only by her mother, Mrs. Pryor, who nurses her in her illness: “From
this window was visible the churchyard, beyond it the road, and there, riding sharply by
appeared a horseman. The figure was not yet too remote for recognition: Mrs Pryor had long
sight; she knew Mr. Moore. Just as an intercepting rising ground concealed him from view,
the clock struck twelve” (Brontë, Shirley 431-432). This scene can not only be an
autobiographical reference to Charlotte Brontë’s interest in the Byronic imagery, but it may
also allude to a picture painted by Westall, which shows a deserted and abandoned woman
leaning towards a wall with sorrow on her face, sharing features with one of Charlotte
Brontë’s pictures entitled “The Disconsolate”. This latter displays a deserted woman “seated
in an arch-like cloister, leaning her right arm and head against the side of the arch in a pose of
distress” (Alexander and Sellars 177), while in the background there is a passage partly
hidden by trees.
Charlotte Brontë copied this picture from an annual in which a poem was attached to it
about a young woman lamenting on her lost lover, which can be a thematic connection
between the two paintings and – in a metaphorical way – can also be linked to this complex
scene of the novel. The common thematic elements are the representation of loneliness, the
power of the gaze, the growing distance between the lovers and the various ways of
displaying the feelings of sorrow and despair, and their common presence both in the painting
and in the novel necessary implies the problem of translatability between the visual and the
verbal arts.
8
As this example shows, in Charlotte Brontë’s works the visual and the verbal
representation of unfulfilled love – a common notion in Romantic literature – can
complement each other in a way which provides the audience with a more complex
understanding. This can be closely connected to the idea of Lotman, according to which,
“through the functioning of the I-I communication, a greater amount of information is
created” (Lotman “A kommunikáció” 576). This means that through the translation of the
paintings into the verbal structure of the novels, these literary texts necessarily offer a more
complex understanding than the visual ones, because of including not only verbal, but visual
codes as well.
Actually, as these examples prove, the novels of Charlotte Brontë can be seen to provide
a great amount of allusions to the visual through the paintings and drawings made by her, and
thus, they allow an investigation with a semiotic basis. Furthermore, considering that
according to Lotman, the parallel presence of spatial art and temporal art within the same
space represents the complex nature of the semiotic systems, it is even more crucial how these
texts written by Charlotte Brontë and thus, created well before the heyday of structuralism
and semiotics open themselves for a theoretical analysis in the core of which is the presence
of the I-I communication. Seen in this way, this analysis does not only enable us to draw a
parallel between the art and writing of a 19th century British writer and the oeuvre of a 20th
century Russian literary theorist, but it may also enable us to see Charlotte Brontë as a
forerunner of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, in whose texts language itself performs the
visual.
Works cited:
Alexander, Christine and Jane Sellars. The Art of the Brontës. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995.
Alexander, Christine and Margaret Smith. The Oxford Companion to the Brontës. New York:
Oxford Univesity Press, 2006.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1994.
Brontë, Charlotte. Shirley. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1994.
Lotman, Jurij. “A kommunikáció kétféle modellje a kultúra rendszerében”. Bókay Antal,
Vilcsek Béla. A modern irodalomtudomány kialakulása. Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 1998.
566-578
Lotman, Yury M. “The Text within the Text”. PMLA. Vol. 109., No. 3., May, 1994, pp. 377384
Lotman, J. M. and Frances Pfotenhauer. “The Discrete Text and the Iconic Text: Remarks on
the Structure of Narrative”. New Literary History, Vol. 6., No 2., On Narrative and
Narratives, Winter, 1975, pp. 333-338
Lotman, J. M. and B. A. Uspenskij. “On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture”. New Literary
History. Vol. 9., No. 2., Winter, 1978, pp. 211-238
All the pictures are from:
Alexander, Christine and Jane Sellars. The Art of the Brontës. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995.
9
1. Juvenile painting of a house
3. Study of eyes
5. Blue convolvulus
7. River scene with church and bridge
2. Juvenile painting of a castle
4. Study of lower face
6. Study of a blue flower
8. Lake and castle
10
9. ’Good bye’: a comic sketch
11. Stylized flowers and bird on silk
10. Lady-like accomplishments
12. Thatched cottage