Charlotte Brontë

Legacies and afterlives

Amber K. Regis, Deborah Wynne

• Editore: Manchester University Press
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526119858
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: English Literary Criticism

Charlotte Brontë: legacies and afterlives is a timely reflection on the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë's life and work. The new essays in this volume, which cover the period from Brontë's first publication to the twenty-first century, explain why her work has endured in so many different forms and contexts. This book brings the story of Charlotte Brontë's legacy up to date, analysing the intriguing afterlives of characters such as Jane Eyre and Rochester in neo-Victorian fiction, cinema, television, the stage and, more recently, on the web. Taking a fresh look at 150 years of engagement with one of the best-loved novelists of the Victorian period, from obituaries to vlogs, from stage to screen, from novels to erotic makeovers, this book reveals the author's diverse and intriguing legacy. Engagingly written and illustrated, the book will appeal to both scholars and general readers.

Part I

Ghostly afterlives: cults, literary tourism and staging the life

1

The ‘Charlotte’ cult: writing the literary pilgrimage, from Gaskell to Woolf

Deborah Wynne

This chapter analyses how writers and literary tourists imagined Charlotte Brontë during the fifty years after her death. It is framed by the accounts of two writers, Elizabeth Gaskell and Virginia Woolf, both of whom travelled to Yorkshire to find evidence of Charlotte Brontë’s life and to assess her legacy as an author. Gaskell returned to Haworth shortly after Brontë’s death in March 1855 to research the biography, and the publication of The Life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857 unleashed the ‘Charlotte’ cult, whose devotees became instrumental in the establishment of the Brontë Society in 1893 and the opening of the first Brontë museum in Haworth’s Yorkshire Penny Bank in 1895 (Miller, 2001: 107). Many Victorian visitors, inspired by Gaskell’s biography, sought traces of Charlotte’s ghostly presence in Haworth, often writing emotional accounts of their experiences in books, articles, poems, letters and diaries. This body of writing contributed to the creation of Haworth as a literary shrine, prompting Virginia Woolf to visit in 1904. The resulting essay published in The Guardian in December, ‘Haworth, November 1904’, expresses her sense of weariness with the enduring image of the ladylike ‘Charlotte’, initiated by Gaskell and perpetuated by subsequent writers and literary pilgrims (Woolf, 1979). Woolf’s journey to Yorkshire occurred at a time when she was planning her own entry into the literary marketplace; indeed, ‘Haworth, November 1904’ was her first publication. Woolf’s career, then, began with a journey to Charlotte Brontë’s home, a literary pilgrimage described in an ironic register, a distinct break with the emotional and reverential accounts of her predecessors. Woolf also introduced a note of concern that the Victorian love of ‘Charlotte’ had distorted Brontë’s achievements as a writer.

The distorting lens of the literary pilgrim continues to intrigue and trouble academics today. Deirdre Lynch, Claudia L. Johnson and Helen Deutsch have each asked how academics might reconcile the need for rigorous scholarship and their own feelings of ‘author love’, a term coined by Deutsch to describe the longing experienced by devoted readers towards a revered writer. In her book, Loving Dr. Johnson, she identifies ‘author love’ as an amalgam of ‘desire, fantasy, narcissistic misrecognition and unsettling confrontation with the alien’, and central to her study is the challenge of remaining objective in the face of this strong emotional response (Deutsch, 2005: 16–17). Lynch raises the same question in her book Loving Literature when she asks whether ‘the English professor’s affective life is supposed to slop over onto her job’, and she concludes that because literary study is characterised by ‘boundary confusion’, textual analysis and the love of texts and authors are inevitably intertwined (Lynch, 2015: 3). Johnson also ponders this point in Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures, noting that academics work to ‘historiciz[e]‌ the canonization of authors’ while being susceptible to the same feelings of reverence and longing they are studying (2012: 13). From the eighteenth century onwards, as Lynch has shown, ‘lovers of literature’ became less inclined to ‘treat literature as a thing but as a person […] construct[ing] the aesthetic relation as though it put them in the presence of other people’ (2015: 8). This relation emerged from an understanding that geniuses were ‘a breed apart’, existing within ‘an aesthetic realm positioned at a distance from worldly conflicts’ (Lynch, 2015: 9). Gaskell drew upon this myth in her biography, which presented Charlotte Brontë as an otherworldly genius (Regis, 2009: 126). As Linda H. Peterson has noted, ‘The word “genius” appears sixteen times in Gaskell’s Life’ (2009a: 63). Unlike Woolf and more recent academics, however, Gaskell was untroubled about presenting her friend as vulnerable, ladylike, even fey, as she depicted Brontë as ‘faithful to both her womanly duty and her literary gift’ (Peterson, 2009a: 66, 68). The love she felt for her subject unleashed powerful emotions; for her, a primary aim was to make her readers feel a similar love for Charlotte Brontë, and she achieved this with remarkable success.

Gaskell’s ‘wild little maiden from Haworth’

Indeed, The Life of Charlotte Brontë remains compelling today because of Gaskell’s emotional investment in her subject: an investment which she presumes her reader is also willing to make. This is most evident towards the end of the biography when she bequeaths the reputation of her friend to those readers capable of appreciating ‘extraordinary genius’, proclaiming: ‘to that Public I commit the memory of Charlotte Brontë’ (Gaskell, 2001: 457). ‘Commit’ is an interesting choice of verb, a performative that is associated with burial rites and is defined in the OED as ‘to give to someone to take care of, keep, or deal with; to give in charge or trust, entrust, consign to’. The majority of definitions relate to concepts of trust or risk; one can commit crimes, marriage, goods, people, bodies to the ground, or battles, and many of the OED’s examples tend to come from the Bible, religious texts or legal documents. Using a formal statement and the present tense, Gaskell thus gives ‘Charlotte Brontë’ to her readers as a legacy, and in doing so understands the riskiness of the action she performs. Like a lawyer, she defends her dead friend from the accusations of coarseness and ‘moral perversity’ that had beleaguered ‘Currer Bell’, the pseudonym under which Brontë published her work; like a priest, she offers up a prayer to potential followers of the ‘Charlotte’ cult, those pilgrims who, after reading the biography, would travel to Haworth as to a shrine; like a guardian, she presents Charlotte Brontë as a vulnerable figure whose reputation will continue to need protection in the future. ¹ It is hard to imagine a more effective strategy for securing Charlotte Brontë’s reputation as someone to be simultaneously revered as a genius and pitied as an unfortunate woman. The biography thus effected the transformation of the controversial ‘coarse and grumbling’ Currer Bell, to quote the reviewer Ann Mozley, into ‘Charlotte’, the dutiful clergyman’s daughter and loving companion to her sisters (quoted in Wilkes, 2010: 99). The Life, demonstrating to Victorian readers that ‘female authorship posed no threat to feminine virtue’, was thus instrumental in inspiring a devoted group of readers to act upon, and express, their love for the dead author (Hughes and Lund, 1999: 136).

Part of the power of Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë was its ability to shame those who had condemned Brontë as coarse and immoral during her life. Charles Kingsley, for example, confessed in a letter to Gaskell: ‘How I misjudged her! […] Well have you done your work, and given us the picture of a valiant woman made perfect by sufferings’ (quoted in Delafield, 1935: 260). Anne Mozley, who had reviewed Brontë’s work negatively, acknowledged that the biography offered a ‘partial solution to a mystery’, for denied ‘tender maternal watchfulness’ throughout her childhood, it was now clear why Brontë had produced ‘unfeminine’ novels (quoted in Wilkes, 2010: 102). Gaskell had to some extent effected this change of heart by fictionalising her friend, as though she were the tragic heroine of a novel (Showalter, 1995: 106). ² Meghan Burke Hattaway has suggested that Gaskell also called upon the aid of ‘surrogate sisters’, Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, to make the Life ‘read as the collaborative work of a female community and self-styled family, through whose efforts a fallen, unfeminine genius is rehabilitated into the more socially acceptable image of a proper woman, who happened to write’ (Hattaway, 2014: 677). Charlotte’s positioning within this surrogate ‘family’ of protective female friends helped to raise Currer Bell from ‘his’ unfavourable image into someone resembling the familial feminine figures of sister, daughter and wife. This strategy was effective: Gaskell’s emphasis on Charlotte’s sororal qualities and motherless condition resembles the way Matthew Arnold had written about her two years earlier, when he also framed Charlotte Brontë as a sister. In his 1855 poem ‘Haworth Churchyard’ he imagined her as one of a ‘Loving, a sisterly band’ (reprinted in Kambani, 2004: 378–81, l. 147).

Gaskell’s biography also presented the novelist as needing special protection because of her bodily oddities, and this was echoed by others who had known her. Thackeray, for example, referred to Charlotte Brontë’s ‘trembling little frame’ (reprinted in Delafield, 1935: 254); Harriet Martineau stated that she was a ‘frail little creature’ (reprinted in Allott, 1974: 304), while Gaskell herself noted that Brontë’s ‘hands and feet were the smallest I ever saw; when one of the former was placed in mine, it was like the soft touch of a bird in the middle of my palm’ (Gaskell, 2001: 76). Charlotte was thus rendered childlike and vulnerable, a woman who, for all her genius in the world of letters, was somehow, even after death, in need of care and protection. As Deutsch has shown, lovers of Samuel Johnson chose to ‘cling to their hero’s aberrations’, such as his disabling bouts of mental anguish, his facial tics, his ‘bodily difference’ and physical bulk, loving him all the more because he was freakish and vulnerable (Deutsch, 2005: 25). Charlotte Brontë’s Victorian following also felt that the author’s ‘abnormal’ stature, physical weakness, melancholy and painful death were important reasons to bestow love on her, perhaps because her reputation as a writer had suffered considerably from the attacks of hostile reviewers. Elizabeth Rigby, for example, had deplored ‘Currer Bell’s’ coarseness in ‘his’ powerful narratives of rebellion, and Rigby was not alone in her assessment of the author’s ‘unfeminine’ desires (reprinted in Allott, 1974: 105–12). Mozley, when the sex of Currer Bell was known, argued that Charlotte Brontë must have been split into two opposing sides, her mind being ‘masculine, vigorous, active, keen, and daring’, while her body was ‘feeble, nervous, suffering under exertion’ (quoted in Wilkes, 2010: 104).

Gaskell’s presentation of Brontë as a tiny, frail woman, a domestic and dutiful daughter who was also strong in moral probity and a boldly free spirit associated with the moors, helped readers to negotiate these apparent contradictions after her death. One literary pilgrim, who signed himself ‘W.P.P.’, visiting Haworth in 1856, summed up these oppositions when he wrote: ‘Those tiny fingers, those small hands, were to wield a sceptre more potent than any of their predecessors. That delicately formed head was to be the fountain of thoughts that should revolutionize the whole world of letters’ (reprinted in Delafield, 1935: 252). While Brontë’s literary legacy ostensibly provided the rationale for the ‘Charlotte’ cult, her texts did not actually seem to be sufficient for many of her devotees. As Deutsch has noted, the ‘power of the printed text’ is often of limited significance for those committed to ‘author love’, for literary cults usually depend ‘upon the sublimation of an author’s distinctive artifice in order to render him or her commonplace and communal property’ (2005: 17, 22). In other words, the author’s craft in skilfully manipulating language is rarely the primary reason for loving an author. Although Dr Johnson and Charlotte Brontë share little in common as writers, their afterlives are characterised by many similarities, perhaps because both writers soon after their deaths were tamed and made familial in public memory by the work of friends who produced remarkably persuasive biographies (see Boswell, 1934–50).

While Gaskell’s biography ensured that Charlotte Brontë was seen in the domestic context of her family and the parsonage home, she also carefully managed her reputation as ‘wild’, making it clear that her subject did not warrant condemnation as a radical who overstepped society’s mores but rather resembled a small wild creature who only understood the world from the context of her native habitat. Her use of the image of a fluttering bird to describe Brontë’s hand was only one of Gaskell’s references to the author as related to the untamed and natural world. Amber Regis has suggested that the ‘domestic rhetoric’ of Gaskell’s biography ‘has an excessive fairy-tale quality’, and this is particularly apparent when she describes her friend as uncanny, untamed, bird-like or fairy-like (2009: 126). Aunt Branwell emerges in the biography as a distant and eccentric spinster, unqualified to guide her young charges through the vagaries of polite society. Gaskell describes Charlotte at Roe Head School as ‘the wild little maiden from Haworth’ who did not fit in well with her schoolfellows, while at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels she and her sister Emily were remembered as ‘wild and scared-looking’ young women ‘with strange, odd, insular ideas about dress’, thus rendering them gauche and vulnerable (2001: 81, 177). Even as ‘a pale white bride, entering on a new life with tr...