Eros and Psyche (Routledge Revivals)

The Representation of Personality in Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot

Karen Chase

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317675464
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

How does Victorian fiction represent personality? How does it express emotion and how does it imagine the mind? These questions stand at the centre of Eros and Psyche, first published in 1984. In examining how three authors – Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and George Eliot – depict the mind and organise emotion, Chase approaches their works as expressive structures, and analyses their struggle to accommodate rival imperatives in depicting personality: desire and duty, guilt and innocence, love and autonomy.

The title begins with Brontë's early Angrian tales, which introduce the problem that unifies the book: the attempt of Victorian fiction to escape the constraints of the romance mode, while assimilating its energies. There follow readings of The Pickwick Papers, Jane Eyre, Bleak House, and Middlemarch, in the light of such problems as confinement and exposure in Brontë, tragic doubt in Dickens, and the image of the moral mind in George Eliot.

1 Brontë's Romance

DOI: 10.4324/9781315771465-2

A suggestive image with which to begin depicts the young Brontës — Branwell, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne — secluded in Haworth and lost in reverie on two dominant themes. The first was the heroism of Wellington, who had not yet suffered the embarrassments of historical revision. The second was the poetry of Byron. It is one thing for us to designate the period as an age of Romanticism. It is another to see it from the point of view of children and adolescents who submitted to the romantic/heroic influence with extreme and sustained fervor and who began to write in the vein of Scott and Byron almost as soon as they could write. Precisely because of their youth, the Brontës deepened and extended the romantic inclination, acknowledging no constraints to their imaginative fantasies, making no concessions (since none were demanded) to editor, publisher, reader, or critic, and indulging therefore in Byronic romance uncorrected by Byronic irony.

The Angrian tales, written between 1829 and 1839, are the closest to a direct expression of the romance impulse as we will confront in this study. ¹ No one but the Brontë children read the stories, which therefore escaped the censorship that often restrains the imaginative enactment of adolescent fantasies. (Mary Taylor, a friend of Charlotte Brontë, compared the secret imaginings to “growing potatoes in a cellar.”) ² Indeed, the Angrian tales reflect a tendency, which belongs to adolescence as much as to romance, to indulge the imagination, to release instinct, and to withdraw into a world in which law is subordinate to desire.

With the earliest fragments I am little interested. Nor am I concerned with the Gondal narratives of Anne and Emily, nor even with Branwell’s share in the Angrian stories. The attention here will remain upon Charlotte Brontë, since she was the one to develop so considerably, moving from the early adolescent fantasies to a self-willed maturity. This was a painful, and painfully slow, process, whose steps are worth charting, since Brontë was among the first of the Victorians to struggle out of romance, after having so enthusiastically yielded to it.

The virtue of beginning with Angria is that it allows us to pose the question of origins. For, in several important respects, the Angrian saga can be regarded as an ur-text. In the most obvious sense, it stands behind Brontë’s own later development, introducing certain motifs persistent in her work. More generally it serves as a paradigm for the romance origins of Victorian fiction. Angria, that is, will enable us to identify literary tendencies, from which much mid-Victorian fiction derives and against which it frequently struggles. Finally, it is an ur-text in the sense that it stands on the margin between pre-literary and literary composition — a body of imaginative labor which has not yet surrendered to the constraints of tradition or convention, but which remains in process, revising its bearings as it proceeds, beginning, but only just beginning, to make choices about genre, mode, and character.

No reader of Angria can fail to be struck by its excesses: its elaborate fantasies, its inordinately complex plots, its exoticism, its violence, its exotic violent love. We will need to confront each of these features but at the start it is worth insisting on a point too easily overlooked: the way that history aliments this fiction. Arthur Wellesley stands at the center of the early tales, a real hero assimilated to the purposes of fantasy, his actual triumphs obsessively re-enacted and imaginatively heightened. ³ Before we can make sense of these stories as romance, then, we need to acknowledge them as products of historical enthusiasm.

Put briefly (though the Brontës themselves never put matters briefly), the early events unfold in this way. ⁴ Travelling with the aged Captain Crashie, twelve young Britons — who will come to be called “the original Twelves” — sail from England in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Among them is the young Wellesley, very young, twelve years old. After some time, the adventurers arrive on the west coast of Africa, which for the young Brontës was no doubt tantamount to ultima Thule, and some of the men undertake the construction of a great city, while others, among them Arthur Wellesley, return to England. Years later, Wellesley returns, now as the Duke of Wellington, “conqueror of Bonaparte and the deliverer of Europe,” bringing with him a vast army. ⁵ The Duke gains a kingship and gains too the central role in complex tales of political and military conflict, concerned for instance with the building of Glasstown, the founding of Angria, the suppression of rebels, and the repulse of invading forces. Much like their older contemporaries, the adolescent Brontës anguished over national instability in the post-Napoleonic era, and they persistently rehearsed the period’s great political drama: the threat of revolution and the assertion of state authority.

Early in the cycle of stories, the Duke of Wellington recedes from the dramatic foreground, deferring to his son, also Arthur, who becomes the ruler of Angria. One might put it another way. One might say that history defers to romance. For with the passing of the first generation, these tales free themselves from their original historical sources. The young Arthur’s names begin to multiply, and his titles grow more grand: Arthur Augustus Adrian Wellesley, Marquis of Douro, Duke of Zamorna, King and Emperor of Angria, or, more familiarly and more conveniently for our purposes, simply Zamorna. The changing names reflect a changing fictional domain, and when Zamorna first assumes power in Angria, the political act is at the same time a decisive imaginative act. A new literary terrain has been mapped, existing now at still further remove from the contemporary England which provoked it. The establishing of the Angrian world serves as an exemplary instance of the romance tendency, at least as we will be concerned with it here. Angria is not a creation of the autonomous imagination elaborating worlds ex nihilo. It is the product of successive transformations of experience. The Brontës begin with pressing facts of contemporary historical reality: rebellion, nationality, and leadership. But they submit these facts to such liberal revision; they place them at such a great distance from their original context, that the constraints of that context lose their hold. The early Angrian tales typically derive from a specifiable bit of contemporary reality — an article in Blackwood’s, a biography, an atlas — but by the time the tale runs its elaborate course, an English theme succumbs to Angrian variations. The contours of reality are exuberantly redrawn.

One of the least considered aspects of this little considered body of work, and a subject which opens easily into related subjects, is the issue of narrative form. Almost all of Brontë’s tales are reported by a peripheral figure in the romance, most often by Lord Charles Wellesley, Zamorna’s younger brother. He assumes the pose of a “haughty and sarcastic,” easily antagonized fop, envious of his heroic brother, whose character he often assails, but whose exploits he dutifully records. ⁶ William Holtz has suggested that the device of Lord Charles allows Brontë to gain distance from emotionally charged material. ⁷ No doubt — but I am interested in another side of the question: the way this erratic narrator provokes erratic narration, the way his instability conforms to an instability in the fictional world. ⁸

The love of Zamorna and Marian Hume receives its first chronicling in the story “Albion and Marina” (1830), written, Lord Charles tells us, “out of malignity for the injuries that have lately been offered to me.” ⁹ He has changed the lovers’ names, trusting, however, that the “reader will easily recognise the characters through the thin veil which I have thrown over them.” ¹⁰ Albion and Marina fall in love and plan to marry. But when Albion’s father insists on a period of separation, the son obediently travels to Glasstown, where he meets the dazzling and wilful Lady Zelzia Ellrington (elsewhere Zenobia), a “miller, jockey, talker, blue-stocking, charioteer, and beldam united in one.” ¹¹ Just as Albion’s thoughts turn toward Zelzia, Marina appears a few yards from him, pleading “Do not forget me” — a vision Albion cannot explain, “except by the common solution of supernatural agency.” ¹² He returns home at the first opportunity, only to discover that Marina had died at the very moment of her appearance before him. Her demise would have marked an abrupt end to the blossoming romance, were it not for our narrator’s terse confession: “The conclusion is wholly destitute of any foundation in truth, and I did it out of revenge.” ¹³

This is narrative by disclaimer, a common device in these tales. A story may culminate in thorough disaster, but with a casual aside — “it never happened” — the disaster is undone. In one of Brontë’s most complex stories, “The Spell” (1834), Lord Charles reveals the existence of Zamorna’s secret twin, one Ernest Valdacella. At some length the story discloses Valdacella’s secret past, his relations with Zamorna, his surreptitious intervention in Angrian life. Then, having contrived this short novel, whose plot turns entirely on the revelation of Zamorna’s double, Lord Charles adds this in a postscript: “Reader, if there is no Valdacella there ought to be one.” ¹⁴ Well, is there a Valdacella? This is not a question that the story allows us to ask. We are not in the presence of that familiar modernist strategem: a limited narrator’s record of events which is made to imply a more complete truth. No second version, complete or otherwise, appears here. A narrative report is made, and then it is simply withdrawn, disclaimed, made hypothetical. The young Brontës bestowed upon themselves the title “Genius” — “Genius Brannii,” “Genius Tallii” — and the prerogative of the Genii included the power to alter the fictional world at will, with no concessions to consistency. When Branwell would slaughter their heroes, Charlotte would calmly revive them. Magical intervention was commonplace. No causal laws, no historical inevitabilities, no geographical necessities imposed restrictions, and, assisted by obliging Genii, the Angrian narratives are therefore free to give and then to withdraw what they have given.

Reality is tractable. That is the governing presupposition of the Brontë romance, as it has been presupposed by so many other works within the romance tradition. But whereas traditional romance most often suspends causal norms in order to point toward an ultramundane reality, Brontë exploits another possibility: the liberation of mundane desire. For if reality is lawless, structureless, pliant, then characters need not adapt to it; it will adapt to them. Although Brontë freely employs supernatural intervention, especially in the early tales, she betrays no interest in a supernatural realm. Supernatural agencies exist in order to help satisfy strictly human appetites. When Ernest d’Alembert wants to cross a river, a boat conveniently appears; when he falls off a cliff, a spirit breaks his fall, and he comes to enjoy the sensation of his drop. In “The Four Wishes” (1829) the protagonist not only may have wishes fulfilled but may have them withdrawn if they prove unsatisfying. The interventions of the genii set the tales free to follow their obsessively reiterated course: human desire pursuing its objects.

Perhaps the simplest psychological relation is that between a desire and its object, and perhaps the simplest narrative is the history of a gratified desire. Fauntleroy loves grapes; he sees them; he eats them. Angria begins in such simplicity. Zamorna, wanting a kingdom, wins it; wanting a wife, he wins her. The Brontës take pains to decorate their fictional empire with the trappings of advanced culture — poets, architects, artists — but these remain merely ornamental, vestiges of history that cling weakly to the central romance. In “A Leaf From an Unopened Volume” (1834), one of the principal characters is the painter William Etty, who appears to all the world as “a modest artist, an upright courtier” but who in fact harbors the “dark recesses of a character to which the world does not contain a parallel,” and who figures in the story as a “dark character,” not as a painter. ¹⁵ Politics, too, becomes a mere surface manifestation. Leaders rise and fall; rebellions and civil war are commonplace. But these events prompt no reflection on the nature of community or social organization. Angrian politics has no content. Political struggle is simply an occasion for the exercise of individual desire, and political conquest always leads to romantic love. The stories, in other words, enact a process of imaginative retrogression, in which higher cultural reaches are invoked, only to drop away. Inevitably, at the center of the drama, loom the passions and their vicissitudes.

“The Bridal” (1832) addresses the period just before the marriage of Zamorna and Marian, when Zenobia Ellrington makes a last attempt to win Zamorna for herself. She gains his attention by promising important information about his bride. When Zamorna agrees to listen, she throws a “certain powder” into a fire, and the two are transported into the presence of the revered Crashie, the leader of the original twelve settlers. Crashie warns Zamorna that if he were to wed Marian Hume, he would cause her death and his own. Zamorna prepares to accept the prophecy, when a “friendly spirit” whispers in his ear, “There is magic. Beware!” Immediately the image of the venerable Crashie fades, revealing an “evil genius” in league with Zenobia. Zamorna treats the incident as closed and prepares to marry as planned. ¹⁶ And yet, of course, from a rational or empirical point of view, Zamorna’s position has scarcely improved. He rejects one apparition in favor of another — but on what grounds? That one demon may deceive but not two? He simply accepts the authority of portents, as characters in this romance habitually accept dreams and visions. Indeed, no alternative exists to knowledge by portent. A crisis cannot be resolved by inspecting reality; there is nothing stable to inspect. There can be no question of Zamorna weighing evidence, or testing facts. In the face of a fluid reality, an “empirical” perspective can find nothing firm to grasp. The real becomes a question of relative power: a stronger demon defeats a weaker, and with the victory goes the right to determine which “truths” will obtain.

Rational agency, in other words, has no access to external reality. Nor does it have access to an inner reality. “I can and do sin deeply,” says William Etty, “without compunction, without remorse — but, as it were, instinctively.” ¹⁷ That is a standard confession. Characters possess consuming desires struggling toward satisfaction, but they have no faculty which might allow them to scrutinize these desires, no guilt, no restraint, in short, no inner articulation which might place desire against a countervailing force. The world without is infinitely pliable, changing as the whims of the Genii dictate. The world within is clamorous, insistent, appetitive. Between a reality that possesses no consistency and appetites that are limitless, there is no hold for a mediating consciousness, which might weigh alternatives, test possibilities, or negotiate compromises. Our account of Angria must acknowledge one of its most notable features: the poverty of the inner world, its lack of differentiation, lack of structure.

The result is that no private conflict afflicts Angrian characters, no war within like the war without. Doubt, for instance, is simply not a mental trait. When Zamorna listens to the spirit posing as Crashie, his duty is clear: he must abandon Marian Hume. When he listens to the “friendly spirit,” his duty is clear again, though now it is another duty entirely: he must marry her. Between the two is no period of irresolution. Zamorna simply turns from one passionately held belief to another contradictory one. Indeed, at moments when inner struggle seems likely, the stories often swerve to avoid it. When Zamorna receives the dire prophecy in “The Bridal,” he acknowledges that “Love” points in one direction and “Duty” in another, but before this situation can cause inner conflict, the friendly spirit makes its appearance, not only resolving the conflict but displacing responsibility from an inner to an outer sphere. The contest between love and duty is averted, replaced by a contest between spirits. “The Spell” begins with Zamorna brooding over the death of his son, and it appears that the story will address the str...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A note on texts
• Introduction
• 1 Brontë's Romance
• 2 Personality in a Pickwickian sense
• 3 Jane Eyre's interior design
• 4 Where is Jane Eyre?
• 5 Bleak House: plot, character, and the tragic sense
• 6 Family feeling in a Bleak House
• 7 Mind and body in Middlemarch
• 8 The cygnet in the pond, the current in the mind
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index