Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century

The Transatlantic Production of Fame and Gender

Brenda R. Weber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134772193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Focusing on representations of women's literary celebrity in nineteenth-century biographies, autobiographical accounts, periodicals, and fiction, Brenda R. Weber examines the transatlantic cultural politics of visibility in relation to gender, sex, and the body. Looking both at discursive patterns and specific Anglo-American texts that foreground the figure of the successful woman writer, Weber argues that authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Fanny Fern, Mary Cholmondeley, Margaret Oliphant, Elizabeth Robins, Eliza Potter, and Elizabeth Keckley helped create an intelligible category of the famous writer that used celebrity as a leveraging tool for altering perceptions about femininity and female identity. Doing so, Weber demonstrates, involved an intricate gender/sex negotiation that had ramifications for what it meant to be public, professional, intelligent, and extraordinary. Weber's persuasive account elucidates how Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë served simultaneously to support claims for Brontë's genius and to diminish Brontë's body in compensation for the magnitude of those claims, thus serving as a touchstone for later representations of women's literary genius and celebrity. Fanny Fern, for example, adapts Gaskell's maneuvers on behalf of Charlotte Brontë to portray the weak woman's body becoming strong as it is made visible through and celebrated within the literary marketplace. Throughout her study, Weber analyzes the complex codes connected to transatlantic formations of gender/sex, the body, and literary celebrity as women authors proactively resisted an intense backlash against their own success.

Chapter 1
Reconstructing Charlotte:
The Making of Celebrated “Female Genius”

Charlotte Brontë is without doubt a most remarkable woman. Up to the publication of Jane Eyre three or four years ago, she was unknown. That wonderful story and its no less wonderful successor have fixed the fame of the author forever. Wherever men and women speak and read the English language, she is known – the thin disguise of “Currer Bell” having long since parted from her form – as the most powerful female writer of fiction that employs that language at all. We might go further. We might call her the most powerful now living. With the single exception of that frenzied Circe of French romance – Madame Dudevant – we know no woman who works so strongly upon the feelings as this Charlotte Brontë.

—The Southern Literary Messenger, 1853

The above testament to Charlotte Brontë’s talent and renown may strike us today as obvious. Of course, this author of Jane Eyre, Shirley, The Professor, and Villette, this suffering sister of the moors, this writer who is read widely in the Anglophone world would be considered one of the most revered writers of fiction who ever lived. More surprising than the hyperbole of the above epigraph, then, is the fact that this American literary magazine based in Richmond, Virginia, published such a statement in 1853, four years before Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography paved the way for Charlotte’s genius to be perceived as a commonplace. Indeed, though Brontë’s works were best-sellers in her own time and the mystery surrounding her sex and identity incited great curiosity in both Britain and the United States, she was more frequently considered notorious than meritorious. It was not until her death in 1855 and Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857 that Charlotte achieved a level of genius that would forever secure her fame. As the above epigraph attests, in her own lifetime Brontë already constituted at least one literary journal’s conception of “the most powerful female writer of fiction” and as such, she possessed considerable notice due to the force of her talent, even if such celebrity did not also credit the goodness of her character. It will be the work of this chapter, however, to argue that Charlotte Brontë’s lasting fame earned its saliency through Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography that fixed Brontë in the public imagination as the perfect embodiment of both female genius and feminine literary celebrity, in turn recalibrating a transatlantic conception of gender through fame.

In his introduction to the second edition of Myths of Power, Terry Eagleton regrets that he did not more fully engage with the Brontë myth. “The Brontës, like Shakespeare,” he observes, “are a literary industry as well as a collection of literary texts, and it would have been worth asking why this should be so and how it came about” (xix). In 2005 Lucasta Miller heeded Eagleton’s call for a discussion on the celebrated significance of this literary family with The Brontë Myth, which offers an impressive overview of the British fascination with the lives, works, loves, and tragedies of the three Brontë sisters. Miller notes that all of the sisters, but Charlotte in particular, have been appropriated to serve a wide array of political and ideological agendas, from domestic femininity to radical feminism, their representations becoming “fictionalizations” largely “unconcerned with historical precision” (168). Miller’s analysis is important for its careful charting of social myth, but it largely discredits the significance of such myth, instead wanting to reclaim the real authors from behind the veil of created personae. Miller acknowledges the significance of Gaskell’s biography but gives little credit to Gaskell’s artistry. Though she concedes that Gaskell possessed literary talent, Miller contends that Gaskell’s biography was “misleading” (33), filled with countless “inaccuracies and half-truths” (40) and “literary trickery” (68). Miller argues that Gaskell herself was two-faced (34) and “gossipy” (37), her lesser talent clearly manipulated by Charlotte’s superior genius. Given this, Miller reflects, “We have to wonder to what extent Charlotte actively promoted the exaggeratedly tragic, and thus exonerating, view of her own life which Gaskell later transmitted” (45).

Fig. 1.1 Illustration from the American printing of The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Author’s collection.

My position on this material is that, as far as it concerns gender and celebrity, there is no productive difference to be made between the fiction and the fact of Charlotte Brontë. As John Fiske has theorized, in an age of mass communication “we can no longer rely on … a clear distinction between a ‘real’ event and its mediated representation” and so a mediated event is “not a mere representation of what happened, but it has its own reality” (2). Although different from our present high-tech moment, the discursive climate the Victorians experienced contained its own multiply-layered forms of information transfer as aided by increasingly affordable printed materials circulated through and between transatlantic distribution networks. Thus the “exaggerated” and “historically inaccurate” personae of Charlotte Brontë—as mutually created by Brontë, Gaskell, other authors of the time, and a larger transatlantic discursive climate—constitute an idea of Charlotte that is, in itself, an authentic, if not necessarily an accurate, figure of fame.

In order to accept such a claim that representation is its own reality, we must also resist the reification of Romantic artistry, which holds that genius grows in isolation and earns fame only through the force of its own talent, rather than through machination or self-promotion. Instead, we must perceive fame as the by-product of historical circumstances, biographical representations, and media portraits. “Inaccuracies” in this regard, only serve to make those representations more striking. If the Life, as Miller argues, “evolved out of a subtle interplay between Gaskell’s preconceived assumptions and Charlotte’s own self-projection,” so much the better for my project (31). My aim, consequently, is not so much to sort out what was accurate from what was fiction and thus to reveal the “real” Charlotte Brontë, but to attend to the texture of representation in the Life so as to better see how it established a register for later iterations of women’s fame and genius.

Gaskell’s depiction of Brontë, much like the coverage of contemporary entertainment celebrities, relied on the personal, perhaps presciently foretelling Graeme Turner’s claim in Understanding Celebrity that a public figure first turns into a celebrity at the moment when interest turns from public acts to private lives. Gaskell spoke of Brontë’s desires and hopes, her disappointments and trials, her great suffering and forbearance. We learn of Charlotte’s weak body, her glowing jewel-like eyes, her captivating plainness. We learn, too, of the character of her family, her overbearing father, her spirited and stubborn sister, Emily, her meek and comely sister, Anne, her incorrigible brother, Branwell. Indeed, the personal nature of Gaskell’s biographical treatment caused the National Review to upbraid Gaskell, stating their frank conviction that she was mistaken in being so forthcoming about the private matters of Brontë’s life: “The principles and the practice which in England make it indecorous to withdraw the veil from purely domestic affairs, – the joys, the griefs, the shames of the household, – have a true basis in fortitude and delicacy of feeling, and are paramount to considerations of gratifying public curiosity, or even to that of securing a full appreciation for the private character of a distinguished artist” (“Miss Brontë” 129). This notion of a protected private zone where prying public eyes should not gaze was a frequent mandate of the period, a point Mary Jean Corbett elucidates in her discussion of Margaret Oliphant’s critical reading of Harriet Martineau. Oliphant was also none too happy about what she considered to be Gaskell’s indiscrete discussions of Brontë, a point I address further in Chapter 3.

It was this very tearing of the private veil, however, that transformed Brontë from a woman who wrote into a figure of fame. Gaskell thus made of Brontë a representative character, as S. Paige Baty uses the term, an exemplary figure that, through body and person, communicates culturally significant iterations of authority, legitimacy, and power. Baty notes that the representative character “embodies and expresses achievement, success, failure, genius, struggle, triumph” in cultural narratives that may be read as either cautionary tales or testaments to achievement (8–9). Constructing Charlotte as a representative character who could stand both for ideal gender and artistic excellence not only solidified Brontë’s literary celebrity but also reinforced Gaskell’s claims to fame, since she will be forever connected to Brontë studies and lore.

Gaskell’s construction of Brontë was formative, yet we should be cautious about implying a too-simple causality between Gaskell’s rendition of Brontë and all others that followed. Indeed, I believe Gaskell offered an influential template but not a concrete prescription. In this regard, it is important to heed Rosemary J. Coombe’s reminder that the “celebrity image is a cultural lode of multiple meanings, mined for its symbolic resonances” (59). So, though it is possible to trace the polyvalence of the celebrity image, that image functions, in itself, as “a floating signifier, invested with libidinal energies, social longings, and political aspirations” (Coombe 59). Charlotte, as celebrity, thus stands as the direct creation of Gaskell but also as a free-floating and multiply-signifying idea, communally authored through a conglomerate of sources, as the opening epigraph attests.

Through a close reading of the Life as augmented by a study of Victorian Anglo-American periodicals, I aim to demonstrate how the making of the genius Charlotte not only fused womanliness and femininity to literary professionalism, it legitimated an idea of the writing woman as simultaneously fully feminine and deservedly famous. Ironically, in her construction of famous (and female) genius, Gaskell used the very indictments lobbed at Brontë: Charlotte’s passion, which verged on frenzy; her unconventional family life and background; her enactment of gendered behavior, which often struck critics and readers as inappropriate, at best, and unsexed, at worst. One of Gaskell’s primary devices for reconstructing Charlotte was her use of a compensatory body, a delicate, sick, and weakened physical Charlotte that worked to lessen the perceived threat of her literary genius. Anglo-American periodical and newspaper accounts created a version of Charlotte that was remarkably faithful to Gaskell’s conception: the delicate and sick victim, Charlotte, who suffered through loss and pain, and whose womanliness and femininity merited her reputation as one of the most famous literary geniuses of all time.1

Inserting the Thin End of the Wedge

Of the many critiques of Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Rigby’s December 1848 Quarterly Review piece has arguably generated the most attention. Writing anonymously, Rigby condemned both Jane and Rochester as models of “vulgarity” and “ignorance”; they were “singularly unattractive” characters, she wrote, who deserved little more than each other’s perpetual, insufferable company. Rigby was even less complimentary when speculating on the identity of the androgynous author of Jane Eyre, known only as Currer Bell: “Whoever it might be, it is a person who, with great mental powers, combines a total ignorance of the habits of society, a great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of religion …. [I]f we ascribe the book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex” (119–20).

Even in a twenty-first-century context, Rigby’s criticisms have been denounced for the intensity (and seeming ignorance) of their attack on Charlotte Brontë’s femaleness and femininity; yet, these same charges that Currer Bell had “long forfeited the society of her own sex” are often raised when talking about Charlotte Brontë (as I am doing now). Rigby’s review functions as a variation on the return of the repressed—in this case, no one fully believes the claim that Brontë is vulgar, and yet no one is allowed to forget it. In The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell uses Rigby to articulate this same shock at and reminder of Charlotte’s oddly engendered experience. Gaskell scolds Rigby’s vain desire to “write a ‘smart article,’ which shall be talked about in London” (260), charging that the critic completely misses the pathos of this misunderstood artist who is not vulgar at all but a poor motherless waif. But Gaskell also devotes textual space to Rigby’s review, quoting from it quite specifically, when she only paraphrases other contemporary reviewers. Thus, though Gaskell attacks Rigby, she also reproduces her claims.

This somewhat counterintuitive rhetorical turn also marked the genesis of the Life. Indeed, given that Gaskell casts herself in the role of savior to the misunderstood Charlotte, it is ironic that the very impetus for the Life arose from a different anonymous article on Charlotte Brontë, this one called “A Few Words about Jane Eyre” published in Sharpe’s in 1855 soon after Charlotte’s death. The Sharpe’s article is less openly critical of Charlotte, though still acknowledging an abundance of “odd and incorrect” stylistic quirks replete with “real wicked oaths” (340), although the article fits with other tropes demonizing the tyrannical father, Patrick Brontë. Ironically or conveniently, the Sharpe’s piece was almost certainly written by Elizabeth Gaskell herself.2 The article was one of many remembrances published in honor of Brontë and as Hughes and Lund note, it helped cement the obituary as an important literary form. The ongoing discursive obituary of fan worship was also an important precursor to posthumous fame.

Indeed, Juliet Barker observes that soon after Brontë’s death, a number of “selfimportant busybod[ies] got to work” to underscore their connection to the recently departed Charlotte Brontë (774). Specifically, Barker points to John Greenwood, the local Haworth stationer, who took on the task of notifying Brontë’s “famous friends” of her recent passing. This list of famous friends included Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Martineau, both of whom responded with sympathy and public tributes. Barker explains that Martineau’s “well-meant but highly coloured obituary” set off a trend of “prurient and speculative” notices feeding the Brontë legend (778). This legend was fueled by accusations of ill-treatment and abuse suffered by Charlotte and her sisters, as well as by exaggerated accounts of Patrick Brontë’s icy remove with his children (both of which are key components in Elizabeth Gaskell’s rendition). As Martineau put it in a passage that blended the author with her character, after Charlotte’s experiences at Cowan Bridge, “‘Currer Bell’ (Charlotte Brontë) was never free, while there (for a year and a half) from the gnawing sensation, or consequent feebleness, of downright hunger; and she never grew an inch from that time. She was the smallest of women, and it was that school which stunted her growth …. She was living among the wild Yorkshire hills, with a father who was too much absorbed in his studies to notice her occupations in a place where newspapers were never seen (or where she never saw any) and in a house where the servants knew nothing about books, manuscripts, proofs, or the post” (5). It is not difficult to see how Gaskell could improvise on this theme for her larger treatment of Brontë’s life and how both Gaskell and Martineau’s writings provoked a curiosity that grew into an insatiable hunger, enabling the growth of Brontë’s celebrity status and her consequent construction and re-construction in the mass media.

After Charlotte’s death, many authors sought to write of her life, but it was Gaskell who won the role of biographer.3 The chain of events leading to her selection as the family’s “official” biographer bears consideration. Following the publication of Gaskell’s Sharpe’s piece, Ellen Nussey, Charlotte’s life-long friend, Patrick Brontë, Charlotte’s father, and, eventually, Arthur Nicholls, Charlotte’s husband of nine months, appealed to Mrs. Gaskell, as a friend of the deceased author, to set down the record of Charlotte’s life in a manner allowing some degree of control in the production and thus reception of her image. For her part, Gaskell responded to their request with alacrity, and her eagerness has always clouded the issue of intent: was Gaskell self-serving in authoring the Life, having sought out an intimacy with Charlotte, jotted down notes of their conversations, logged the pithy anecdotes she knew would hold a reader’s attention, or was she simply acting as a good friend should? Meta Gaskell felt her mother deliberately fostered an intimacy with Charlotte, intending to write a posthumous biography of the sickly author and thus further her own career (Wise and Symington 239). Deirdre D’Albertis argues for a literary rivalry between Gaskell and Brontë with the Life as the terrain on which Gaskell could best fight and win by turning the genius Charlotte into her subject. Alison Foster views the bond between Gaskell and Brontë as one of deep camaraderie, indicating they had an “intimate friendship” established in three days that “would ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A Right to Call Herself Famous
• 1 Reconstructing Charlotte: The Making of Celebrated “Female Genius”
• 2 “A sort of monster”: Fanny Fern, Fame’s Appetite, and the Construction of the Multivalent Famous Female Author
• 3 “Great genius breaks all bonds”: Margaret Oliphant and the Female Literary Greats
• 4 Correcting the Record, Creating a New One: Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes and Eliza Potter’s A Hair-dresser’s Experience in High Life
• 5 The Text as Child: Gender/Sex and Metaphors of Maternity at the Fin de Siècle
• Conclusion: Doing Her Level Best to Play the Man’s Game: Literary Hermaphrodites and the Exceptional Woman
• Afterword: In Search of the Cult of Charlotte
• Works Cited
• Index