MORRISON AND THE BRONTËS: THE ARCANA OF THE ARCHETYPAL THREE SISTERS

Abstract

This article presents a reading of the play We Are Three Sisters, written in 2011, by the British poet and playwright Philip Blake Morrison, in order to discuss the links among fiction, reality and biographical information based on the perspectives of Adaptation Studies and Imaginary Studies. As backdrop for the creation of We Are Three Sisters, Morrison uses the text Three Sisters, written by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, adapting its historic and social context, filling his play with information about the life of the Brontë sisters. Besides being three great authors of the Victorian canon, the Brontë sisters are also British cultural icons, so often represented as characters in fictional biographies, novels, movies, ballets and plays. To write his appropriation of the Brontës' life, Morrison utilizes Juliet Barker's biography, while using Chekhov's play as a shadow text, a matrix that serves as the basis for his creation, a scaffold around which he builds up his fiction. This paper both analyzes the intertwining of reality and fiction performed by Morrison through adaptation and transposition processes and presents a reading of the symbolic content of the three sisters archetype from the perspective of the Imaginary Studies.