https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6196-3490
![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Playwright and director Polly Teale’s biodramas After Mrs Rochester (2003) and Brontë (2005) boldly feature dog women to embody the psychological shadows of Jean Rhys and Charlotte Brontë respectively. In developing the figures Teale draws inspiration most explicitly from artist Dame Paula Rego’s Dog Woman series (1994) and Charlotte Brontë’s blurring of the species boundary human/animal in her representation of Bertha Mason Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847). The intersections between the aesthetics of Teale and Rego provide, I show, a critical frame within which to read their dog women. To weigh Teale’s treatment of her biographical subjects, intimacy and the relation between sexuality and writing I also draw out the scope of her engagement with canine images in Rhys’s fiction and a letter Brontë wrote to Constantin Héger.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Teale, “Brontë’s Eyres,” 42.
2 Ibid., 43.
3 Macedo, “After Mrs Rochester,” 281.
4 Poore, Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern British Theatre, 139. They were not used for the Glasgow production of Brontë I saw.
5 Rudolf, “Paula Rego and the Theatre”.
6 Teale, “How We Met. Polly Teale & Paula Rego”, 62, quoted in Macedo, “After Mrs Rochester,” 286.
7 Rudolf, “Paula Rego and the Theatre”.
8 Teale, “How We Met,” 62, quoted in Macedo, “After Mrs Rochester,” 286.
9 Macedo, 280.
10 Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 160, 158, 152.
11 Rees-Jones, Paula Rego, 23.
12 Meckler, qtd. in King, ed. After Mrs Rochester, 3. Emphases in the original.
13 Macedo and Poore dutifully note Teale’s use of her Jane Eyre series on the set of Brontë. Macedo, “After Mrs Rochester”, 280-1; Poore, Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern British Theatre, 139. Neither Macedo (“After Mrs Rochester”) nor Mildorf (“Mad Intertextuality”) consider the scope of Teale’s allusions to Rhys’s fiction other than Wide Sargasso Sea or her recycling of text across the trilogy of plays Jane Eyre, After Mrs Rochester and Brontë. Macedo makes only passing reference to Rego’s Dog Woman series (286); Mildorf is not aware of the series. Rego says of one of her representations of Bertha in her later Jane Eyre series, Bertha (2001), “But she’s really more like a dog woman isn’t she?” She relates this condition to her being “Very cross at being shut up in the attic” (quoted in Rosenthal, Paula Rego, 178). The Bertha figure here is slumped to the floor against a wall. In Keeper (from the Jane Eyre series) she is slumped between Grace Poole’s legs. Jane looks on; her shadow is projected onto a docile, two-dimensional dog figure. In Biting (2002) from the Jane Eyre series, she is slumping against Richard Mason’s body, and is recognisably human. Bertha is figured as a monkey doll in the Jane Eyre triptych and in Girl Reading at Window in the Jane Eyre series.
14 Poore, Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern British Theatre, 128.
15 Rees-Jones, Paula Rego, 24.
16 Ibid., 155. The juxtaposition of images of Rego’s Sleeper and Degas’ After the Bath VI is very telling (162-3).
17 Paula Rego, directed by Willing.
18 Quoted in Jaggi, “Secret Histories”.
19 Rego, Dog Woman [catalogue].
20 Quoted in text accompanying an image of Paula Rego’s Dog Woman at https://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages,rego_paula_dog_woman.htm.
21 Rosengarten, “An Impossible Love,” 91.
22 Ibid.
23 Fortnum, Contemporary British Women Artists, 159.
24 Spira and Lampert, Paula Rego, 92; Paula Rego, directed by Willing.
25 Rosengarten, “An Impossible Love,” 86.
26 Paula Rego, dir. Willing.
27 Jaggi, “Secret Histories”.
28 Rees-Jones, Paula Rego, 57.
29 On the story see Rosengarten, “An Impossible Love,” 88–9.
30 Teale, “Three Sisters”, in King, Brontë, 10.
31 “Interview with Writer/Director Polly Teale”, in King, Brontë, 30.
32 Styan, Expressionism and Epic Theatre, 1, 2, 6, 3.
33 A Taste of Honey [theatre programme], 1993, 3, Theatre Museum.
34 Kuhns, German Expressionist Theatre, 2.
35 Quoted in King, Jane Eyre, 8, 17.
36 “Interview with Writer/Director Polly Teale”, in King, Brontë, 30.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Teale, After Mrs Rochester, title page; “Interview with Writer/Director Polly Teale”, in King, Brontë, 30. Hereafter page references to the play text of After Mrs Rochester will be given within parenthesis
40 Angier, Jean Rhys, 657.
41 Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas, 124.
42 Angier, Jean Rhys, 656
43 Ibid., 657. The comment about being alone is even quoted in “Letters and Love Letters,” in King, After Mrs Rochester, 21. For Teale’s “beautiful eyes” motif see After Mrs Rochester, 22, 57.
44 Barker, The Brontës, 830.
45 Teale, “Three Sisters”, in King, Brontë, 12.
46 Pouliot, “‘Swallow It’”, 137–8.
47 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 293.
48 Teale, Brontë, 13; Teale, “Introduction”, Brontë, 6.
49 Ibid., Brontë, 13.
50 Alfreds, Different Every Night, 64.
51 The term “biographical hypothesis” is used by Stoneman, “Sex, Crimes and Secrets,” 342.
52 Quoted in King, Jane Eyre 17.
53 Shuttleworth, “Hanging, Crushing, and Shooting,” 42.
54 Teale, Brontë, 49.
55 Angier, Jean Rhys, 275–7.
56 Teale, After Mrs Rochester, xv.
57 Wilson, “Jean Rhys as Autobiographer,” 2.
58 Certainly, practices of confessional reading of a biographical subject’s fiction are widespread among writers of biofiction, biodrama, and biographical poetry.
59 Teale, Brontë, 12.
60 Edwardes, rev. of Brontë, 1459; Poore, Heritage, Nostalgia and the Modern British Theatre, 138.
61 Teale, Jane Eyre, vi. Poore represents Teale’s adaptation as a remaking of “melodrama” as high art suitable for British Arts Council funding, giving scant consideration to Teale’s aesthetic (Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern British Theatre, 133).
62 Felski, Literature after Feminism, 65–6.
63 After Mrs Rochester, performed by Shared Experience, National Video Archive of Performance, staging Teale, After Mrs Rochester, 14; Rego, Jane Eyre triptych, in Paula Rego, by Rees-Jones, 234–5.
64 Teale, After Mrs Rochester, 38.
65 Ibid., 3, 26, 42; After Mrs Rochester, performed by Shared Experience, National Video Archive of Performance.
66 Angier, Jean Rhys, 218.
67 Davison, “Ghosts in the Attic,” 206.
68 Teale, After Mrs Rochester, xv.
69 Barker, The Brontës, 444.
70 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 89
71 Teale, After Mrs Rochester, 44.
72 “Letters and Love Letters”, in King, After Mrs Rochester, 22. There is no evidence that Rhys ever read Charlotte Brontë’s letter to Heger.
73 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 137.
74 Teale, After Mrs Rochester, 55; Rhys, Quartet, 76.
75 Rhys, Quartet, 16.
76 Ibid., 102.
77 Teale, After Mrs Rochester, 55.
78 Ibid., 61.
79 Ibid., 26.
80 Rego, Jane Eyre, 48–9.
81 On the biographical practice of othering Rhys, see Thomas, “Adulterous Liaisons”.
82 Alfreds, Different Every Night, 61; King, Brontë, 39.
83 Teale, Brontë, 63.
84 Ibid., 30.
85 Ibid., 50; Brontë, Jane Eyre, 161.
86 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 160.
87 Teale, Brontë, 48.
88 Teale, Brontë, 62–3.
89 Pouliot, “‘Swallow It’”, 141.
90 Teale, Brontë, 63.
91 Ibid., 64.
92 Ibid., 66–7.
93 Ibid., 94.
94 Lackey, “Introduction,” 6.
95 Rees-Jones, Paula Rego, 18, 20.
96 Pernes, “Entrevista com Paula Rego”, 1–2, quoted in translation in de Oliveira, “‘To Give Fear a Face’”, 284; Meckler, qtd. in King, After Mrs Rochester, 3, emphasis in original.
97 “Portrait of the Artist”.