Bronte
Sister
Charlotte Brontë (1816-55) admired
Thackeray quite as positively as Trollope. She saw his early satirical
journalism and his first works of fiction as moral statements emanating from
’the first social regenerator of the day’, and, provincially ignorant of the
existence of Thackeray’s insane wife, she somewhat gauchely dedicated the
second edition of Jane Eyre to the none the less flattered
fellow-author. Her own novels may lack the cultivated urbanity of Vanity
Fair and the experimental role playing of Thackeray’s personae, but they
are in no sense gauche or unsophisticated. Despite the intense privacy and
relative seclusion of the Yorkshire parsonage from which her novels emerged,
Charlotte Brontë shared with her sisters Emily (1818-48) and Anne (1820-49) a
particularly informed, if somewhat detached, view of the wider world.
As children, the three sisters had
immersed themselves in the ideological debates publicized in the great journals
of their time and in the late flickerings of European Romanticism. Their first
collaborative fictions, the elaborate narratives concerned with the fantasy
kingdoms of Angria and Gondal, are adaptations of, and variations on, oriental
and Gothic extravaganzas heightened by modern political realities and
personalities. In their adult fiction obvious escapism is diminished in the
face of an oppressive, isolating present; the romanticism and the Gothicism
are, however, creatively, forcefully, and sometimes threateningly, transmuted.
Charlotte Brontë’s first mature novel, The
Professor, was written in 1846, two years after she had returned from the
Pensionnat Heger in Brussels where she had worked as a pupil-teacher. ‘A first
attempt’, she later remarked of the novel in its Preface, ‘it certainly was
not, as the pen which wrote it had been previously worn a good deal in a
practice of some years’. This reference back to the juvenilia and to the years
of apprenticeship in fiction (‘many a crude effort, destroyed almost as soon as
composed’) suggests the degree to which she felt that she was turning away from
the ‘ornamented and redundant’ to the ‘plain and homely’. Her choice of the
word ‘homely’ here aptly suits the style and manner of her novel, though it
tends to conflict with the Brussels setting and with the version of her own fraught
and alien experience which she filters through the reminiscence of a male
narrator. The Professor was rejected six times by publishers before it
attracted the favourable notice of the literary adviser to the firm of Smith,
Elder in July 1847.
Although the story was held to be too
colorless to sell independently, the literary promise it suggested inspired
Smith, Elder to note encouragingly that the submission of another work of
fiction from its pseudonymous author ‘would meet with careful attention’. The
Professor finally appeared posthumously in 1857, but the publishers’ offer
to consider a new novel was taken up by Charlotte with alacrity. The
well-advanced manuscript of Jane Eyre: An Autobiography was
completed within three weeks, dispatched to London, enthusiastically accepted,
and published inOctober 1847.
Jane Eyre was, and
remains, an extraordinary phenomenon: a totally assured, provocative, and
compelling piece of realist fiction. To its first readers, and even its
publishers, it seemed to have come from nowhere, being ascribed to the
genderless figure of ‘Currer Bell’, the supposed ‘editor’ of an obviously
female narrative. It has not lost its power to surprise and provoke. However
much Jane Eyre has established itself as a ‘classic’ and popular
love-story, it in fact insists on independence as forcefully as it recognizes
the importance of sexual and marital interdependence. It recognizes the virtues
of self discipline and rejection as much as it tests the
probity
of passionate commitment. Primarily through the example and influence of Helen
Burns, it deals with submission and Christian resolution, but it also allows
for successive explosions of wrath, misery, and despair. Jane never quite
dissolves the iron that entered her soul as an unloved and unjustly persecuted
child, nor does she gladly suffer fools or readily love her persecutors. She
may profess to forgive the dying Mrs Reed, but her narrative periodically burns
with a sense of injustice which is as much sexual as it is religious and
familial. ‘Women are supposed to be very calm generally’, she explains in her
twelfth chapter, ‘but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their
faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they
suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men
would suffer.’ Jane never stagnates. Her quest is to find a partner worthy of
her intelligence, her judgemental wit, and her determined selfhood, one who
will learn to respect her integrity (as Mr Rochester, in their first courtship,
signally fails to do) and her determination (which St John Rivers misreads).
Jane’s rejection of an adulterous, bigamous, and perhaps glamorous relationship
with Rochester, is complemented later in the novel by her firm rejection of the
far more sombrely respectable prospect of life as a missionary’s wife (a
proposal that some Victorian Evangelical readers might have assumed would have
opened up the yet more glorious prospect of her salvation). In both cases Jane
follows the dictates of her refined conscience. She finds it her ‘intolerable
duty’ to leave Thornfield Hall, and she does so by solemnly echoing the ‘I do’
of the Anglican Marriage Service in reply to Rochester’s passionate question:
‘Jane, do you mean to go one way in the world, and to let me go another?’ When
pressed by St John Rivers to accept him she is equally firm in her strangely
insistent ‘I will be your curate, if you like, but never your wife’. The
serenity of the novel’s conclusion (in which Jane and the widowed and maimed
Rochester are reunited) is qualified by its final references to the sacrificial
ministry of St John Rivers in India. The novel’s last sentences enforce the
co-existence of alternative duties and vocations. Jane has chosen secular
happiness as a means of salvation; as her narrative has so often demonstrated,
free will and the due exercise of a God-given conscience lie at the core of the
divine scheme of things. Shirley (1849) lacks the intensity and the
compelling narrative direction of Jane Eyre. It is, in many ways, a
‘Condition of England’ novel, one which offers a bold retrospect on the Luddite
agitation and machine-breaking that had characterized the politics of the
industrial North in the early 1810s. This retrospect allows for a certain
distancing and for an examination of period details and assumptions, many of
them culled from the first-hand witness of the Reverend Patrick Brontë and his
acquaintance. The main interest of the story derives from its particularly
distinctive female characters, most notably that of Shirley Keeldar (whom
Elizabeth Gaskell affirmed in her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) was a
‘representation’ of Emily Brontë). Some of the local and thematic material of The
Professor was strikingly reshaped into a far finer novel, Villette (1853).
Villette may avoid touching on ‘topics of the day’ in a limited
political sense, but it deals directly and often painfully with the pressing
issues of women’s choice and women’s employment. The novel’s narrator, Lucy
Snowe, is an autobiographer denied the scope, the certainties, and the happy
personal resolution of Jane Eyre. She is priggish and frosty where Jane Eyre
was bold and fiery. Her English Protestant isolation, and indeed alienation, is
stressed by the novel’s unlovely, urban Belgian setting, by its frequent
recourse to French dialogue and terminology, and by its variously intrusive,
inquisitive, flirtatious, and restrictive Catholic characters. Lucy’s
circumstances and her hyperactive conscience oblige her to assert her
separateness and to insist on the superiority of her own personal, moral, and
professional sensibility. Her confessions, both to the reader, and, awkwardly
and desperately, to a Villette priest, are restless and self absorbed and
played against an equally uneasy, not to say suspicious, background. Lucy’s
growing love for a waspish Catholic, Paul Emmanuel, ultimately allows her
glimmers of real emotional happiness and professional achievement, but the
narrative ends with an Atlantic storm and a profound uncertainty as to whether
her love will ever be fulfilled.
Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey was
co-published with her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights in 1847. Its
first grudging reviews were inevitably overshadowed by the often bemused
notices given to Emily’s novel. All three sisters had maintained the use of the
non-specific pseudonyms they had chosen for the unsuccessful publication of the
Poems, by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell in 1846. This very
non-specificity originally gave rise to suppositions about single authorship or
of collaboration and, even since the nineteenth century, Agnes Grey has
remained firmly in the shadow of the work of Charlotte and Emily. Its
governess-narrator endures loss of status, humiliation, snobbery, and insult,
but her account of herself is characterized by a calm sense of her own moral
justification. It presents an impressively harrowing picture of the
restrictions on contemporary middle-class women seeking the only respectable
form of paid employment, but it lacks the fire and anger which blaze up in ‘The
Tenant of Wildfell Hal’l (1848). Anne Brontë’s second novel describes the
events surrounding a drastically unhappy marriage and the escape from that
marriage by its heroine, Helen Graham. The story is told by means of a receding
double narrative. It ends happily, but the graphic descriptions of the
alcoholic Huntingdon’s brutality provoked one early reviewer to complain of
‘coarse and disgusting’ language and another to deplore ‘the tendency of the
author to degrade passion into appetite’. To Charlotte Brontë, acting as her
sister’s literary executor, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall seemed barely
‘desirable to preserve ... the choice of subject in that work is a mistake’.
This over-protective, censorious attitude may derive from an honest desire to
cultivate the impression of Anne’s ‘meekness’ it may also, more revealingly, be
an embarrassed response to the fact that Anne had based Huntingdon’s language
and behavior on that of her singularly wayward brother, Branwell. Charlotte proved
to be an equally unsympathetic critic of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
She stresses its ‘faults’ and, most revealingly, seeks for an appropriately
local metaphor to explain its ‘rusticity’: ‘It is rustic all through. It is
moorish, and wild, and knotty as the root of heath.’ This ‘knottiness’ does not
necessarily refer to the quality that subsequent readers have most admired in Wuthering
Heights, its extraordinary narrative complexity. It plays with shifts of
time and perception by balancing the complementary, but not really concordant,
viewpoints of two major and five minor narrators. It juxtaposes the worlds of
Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights; the passive gentility of the Lintons
and the restless, classless energy of Heathcliff; the complacency of insiders
and the disruptive intrusions of outsiders. Above all, it opposes freedom and
restraint, love and pain, while holding all oppositions in a very specific
geographical area, in a tight community, and within an exceptionally neat
dynastic pattern. The exposed ancestral house of the title is, as the opening
sentences suggest, ‘so completely removed from the stir of society’; it is
subject to ‘pure, bracing, ventilation’ and to a wind that slants ‘a few
stunted firs’ and stretches ‘a range of gaunt thorns’. Nature, and phenomena
within and beyond nature, remain ‘wuthering’ and turbulent throughout the
narrative. In its last chapter, the parish church may lie peacefully under a
‘benign sky’, but its glass has been broken by storms, its roof slates hang
jaggedly, and there are reports that the ‘phantoms’ of Heathcliff and a woman
have been seen ‘under t’Nab’. Despite ‘the moths fluttering among the heath and
hare-bells’ the churchyard provokes images of ‘unquiet slumbers, for the
sleepers in that quiet earth’. The phrase ‘the quiet earth’ is that of the
prime narrator, the often impercipient, would-be misanthrope Lockwood. There is
little ‘quietness’ either in the landscape or the society which he has
observed. Both are marked by change, confusion, violence, and unpredictability.
When Nelly Dean interposes as an alternative narrator, she speaks as an insider
both to the family and to their environment, yet Nelly shifts not simply
perspectives but loyalties and emotional alliances (Heathcliff accuses her of
‘prying’ and of ‘idle curiosity’). It is she who conveys to us Catherine’s
stunning admission: ‘My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath
— a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff
— he’s always in my mind — not as a pleasure to myself but as my own being.’
But it is Nelly, never an unqualified adherent of Heathcliff’s, who feels
constrained to add: ‘I was out of patience with her folly.’ Where Catherine
feels like the unlovely, underlying rocks, Nelly is as sharp, deceptive, and
inconsistent as the northern weather. Throughout the telling of the story,
readers have to work to interpret the information and the impressions that the
tellers choose to recount. The seeming randomness of events and associations
and the arbitrariness of what and how we learn, fall into their proper place as
readers explore the diverse and multilayered narrative through the very act of
reading. If Wuthering Heights adjusts the conventional paraphernalia of
the Gothic, its unquiet graves, its explosive passion, its illicit
relationships, its wild landscapes, and its tempestuous climatic conditions, it
remoulds them into an unconventional narrative shape that neither follows nor
creates precedents. Despite its utterly assured mastery of form, it remains the
most unconventional and demanding of all English novels. Heathcliff’s insistent
claim that in opening Catherine’s coffin he disturbed no one, but rather ‘gave
some ease to myself ... I was tranquil. I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep,
by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my cheek frozen against hers’,
suggests the degree to which Emily Brontë strained to move beyond necrophiliac frissons.
Her novel is an evocation of freedom, a strange, tranquil, and compelling freedom
which also haunts her poetry. The themes of the soul set at liberty by death,
or calmed by the contemplation of death within a natural scheme, figure notably
in the song ‘The linnet in the rocky dells’ where the sounds of the moors
‘soothe’ those lying under the turf. Death may be a troubling severer in ‘Cold
in the earth’, but in the lyric ‘Shall earth no more inspire thee’ a voice,
perhaps from beyond the grave, or perhaps (as Charlotte Brontë believed) of
‘the Genius of a solitary region’, insists on the enduring and inspiring beauty
of wild and empty landscape. Her final poem, ‘No coward soul is mine’, speaks
of a God who is both internalized within the human creature and who is evident
in the creation which he continues to foster. This transcendent God animates
‘eternal years’ and ‘Pervades and broods above, Changes, sustains, dissolves,
creates and rears’. The lyrics, published from surviving manuscripts in the
early years of the twentieth century, powerfully reinforce the mood of ecstatic
intensity evident in the finest of the poems in the collaborative volume of
1846. Most of these poems date from the years 1837 and 1838. The landscapes
recalled are vibrant both in summer and winter, in rain and cloud, or when lit
by the last beams of ‘the cold, bright sun’. It is a landscape which is both
physical and visionary, both haunted and possessing:
The
night is darkening round me,
The
wild winds coldly blow;
But
a tyrant spell has bound me
And
I cannot, cannot go.
The
giant trees are bending
Their
bare boughs weighed with snow,
And
the storm is fast descending
And
yet I cannot go.
Clouds
beyond clouds above me,
Wastes
beyond wastes below;
But
nothing drear can move me;
I
will not, cannot go.
This
acute, passionate attachment to place, one so akin to Catherine Earnshaw’s self
identification with the rocks and the moorland, is not paralleled in the work
of Emily’s sisters. Anne’s placid verse may reinforce the impression we have of
a woman who was ‘a very sincere and practical Christian’ with a ‘tinge of
religious melancholy’, but it is insipid in comparison. Even Charlotte’s
poetry, which occasionally flickers with the narrative assertiveness of her
fiction, seems otherwise unexceptional and unadventurous.