Tolmacheva Agatha Andreevna – postgraduate student, Assistant, Department of Roman and German Philology, Far Eastern Federal University; ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-8091-0435; Scientific supervisor: Modina Galina Ivanovna – Doctor of Philological Sci-ences, Professor, Department of Roman and German Philology, Far Eastern Federal University; ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1179-9666; modina.gi@dvfu.ru
The article presents an analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s poem Mementos, which is included in her first (and only published during her lifetime) poetry collection, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846). Firstly, the unique structure of the volume is taken into account, wherein the sisters’ poems are grouped into thematic triptychs, allowing for the tracing of the evolution of key motifs – for example, the transition from the theme of faith in the first triptych to the theme of memory in the second. Secondly, the intertextual connection between Brontë’s early lyric poetry and her mature prose is identified. In Mementos, the theme of memory unfolds through the dialectic of light and darkness. While the motif of light, which connects the images of the mother and daughter, subsequently finds its development in the figure of Helen Burns from the novel Jane Eyre (1847), the motif of darkness embodies the threat of all-consuming oblivion. The author of the article concludes that all three images (the mother, the daughter, and Helen) are rooted in Charlotte Brontë’s deeply personal memory of her elder sister, Maria. Their authentic being, affirmed against the darkness of non-being, exists not in physical reality, but within the illuminated space of the narrator’s memory.
Charlotte Brontë; the Brontë sisters; motif of light; motif of darkness; theme of memory; Mementos