Chapter Two

The Novel and the Crisis of Conscience
The Brontës—The Caged Rebels of Haworth

I wish you would not think me a woman. I wish all reviewers believed “Currer Bell” to be a man; they would be more just to him. You will, I know, keep measuring me by some standard of what you deem becoming to my sex; where I am not what you consider graceful, you will condemn me… Come what will, I cannot, when I write, think always of myself and of what is elegant and charming in femininity; it is not on those terms, or with such ideas, I ever took pen in hand; and if it is only on such terms my writing will be tolerated, I shall pass away from the public and trouble it no more. Out of obscurity I came, to obscurity I can easily return.

—Charlotte Brontë to G. H. Lewes, 1849

The village of Haworth, in Yorkshire, was in the early nineteenth century—to use the words of one of its visitors—a “dreary, black-looking village,” defying, through a steep ascent of its roadway, the footing of a visitor. The street leading to the top was paved with flagstones, so placed that pedestrians, horses, and carriages would not slip back. Past uninviting stone dwellings, one clambers till one comes to the church, the churchyard, and finally the Haworth parsonage. Today, hundreds upon hundreds of pilgrims make their way as to some shrine of a “saint” or “martyr,” once the home of the three Brontë sisters; and the modest parsonage ranks second in popularity only to that other “shrine” at Stratford on Avon. Many come to Haworth to honor literary genius; others, heroic womanhood.

Such posthumous celebrity would have astounded no one more than a certain visitor, who, in the fall of 1853, two years before Charlotte Brontë’s death, made her way to the home of the last surviving of the three sisters. This was Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell, her future biographer, herself a novelist of some distinction. She had met Charlotte Brontë a few years before and had been deeply impressed by her personality, perhaps even more than by her celebrity as the author of Jane Eyre.

This was Mrs. Gaskell’s first view of Haworth. Standing at the front door of the parsonage, she reflected on the loneliness of the spot. “Moors everywhere, beyond and above,” she wrote. “Oh! those high, wild, desolate moors, up above the whole world, and the very realms of silence!”1

These realms of silence also included the churchyard, with its time- and weather-stained tombstones lying flat, stretching far and wide. Here lay buried many members of the Brontë family—the mother, three daughters, and a son. Another daughter, Anne, had been laid to rest in Scarborough.

And now, since 1849, the parsonage was emptied out: only Charlotte and her father were there, along with their lifelong servant Tabby, now ninety years old.

It was hard to believe that at one time not very long ago, despite the sombreness of the surroundings, the inclemencies of the weather and the isolation, the house had been bright, ringing with noises, even the laughter of young people. Once there had been five daughters and a son; and an aunt who had replaced the mother, deceased when the children were very young.

But here are Charlotte Brontë now, and her father the Rev. Patrick Brontë, to receive the guest. Miss Brontë is thirty-seven years old, and an “old maid,” or “spinster” in the customary parlance of the day. Her figure is diminutive, almost childlike. She is “very plain,” a source of distress throughout her life; though her plainness is redeemed by beautiful, though very near-sighted, eyes, a shy manner, and a sweet voice. From her behavior one would not conceive that she is one of the famed writers of the day. Beside her looms the stately, forbidding form of her father, now in his seventy-sixth year, for thirty years now perpetual curate at Haworth—a dominating patriarchal figure encased in a white neckcloth, aloof and retiring.

At last Mrs. Gaskell has Charlotte Brontë all to herself.

“We talked over the old times of her childhood,” she wrote later. The story as it was to unfold at that time, and more elaborately after Charlotte’s death, was one that might well entrance a novelist. It may have been that at that moment the idea of eventually writing her biography was born in Mrs. Gaskell’s mind. It was a fascinating story, sad and exciting, even tragic at times—a chronicle of light and darkness.

Light—as in the year the family arrived at Haworth. Mr. Brontë was to take over the curacy. There were then five daughters and a son—the youngest, Anne, a babe in arms. The mother was ailing. Between 1813 and 1819 she had produced a child practically every year. Two years after their arrival in Haworth she died. An aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, arrived from Penzance to take over as surrogate mother.

Such were the beginnings at Haworth.

Darkness—four of the children, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Anne are sent to a school at Cowan Bridge, an institution for needy clergymen’s daughters. Here the two older girls, aged ten and eleven, contract a noisome fever—is it typhus or perhaps typhoid?—then epidemic—that sweeps the institution, and die soon after being removed. Charlotte and Emily too are brought back home.

Whatever might have been the children’s predisposition to disease, particularly tuberculosis, their susceptibility was without doubt aggravated by the general unsanitary conditions that prevailed at school, in Haworth, and sad to say, all over the country. Perhaps Haworth may be said to have outdone other localities. The water supply was polluted, in part by the seepage from the graveyard. The barbarous absence of any adequate sewage disposal and the limited outhouse facilities contributed to the frequency of epidemics, whether pulmonary or intestinal. Even in the 1850s, at the time of Mrs. Gaskell’s visit, conditions were little different from what they had been in the ’20s. A health inspection undertaken in 1850 found that at Haworth 516 houses shared 69 privies; that an open channel ran down the main street. “Fastidious villagers walked half a mile to the Head Well to draw their water, which nevertheless was scanty and occasionally so green and putrid that cattle refused to drink it. The (Haworth) parsonage boasted a pump in the kitchen—the well sunk in the ground just yards away from the cemetery.”2 Is it any wonder that between 1838 and 1849, 41.6 percent of the population of Haworth died before reaching the age of six? In the country at large the normal life expectancy, especially among the lower classes, was around 26!³ Let the encomiasts of “merry old England” consider some of the common afflictions that beset Victorian life—measles, croup, whooping cough, scarlet fever, enteric fever, typhoid and typhus, tuberculosis, and not least, frequent epidemics of cholera. And oh! the “sweet Thames” thus celebrated by the Elizabethan poet, Edmund Spenser, did in the days of Victoria smell to such high heavens, that it even reached the Houses of Parliament!….

* * *

The Brontës’ was a religious household, with regular prayers during the day, and, of course, with services at the church on Sundays. Its religious intensity varied from the more strict near-Calvinism of Aunt Branwell, deeply impregnated with the sense of original sin, election, reprobation and eternal damnation, to the more moderate faith of Patrick Brontë, in whose creed there was still a possibility of redeeming the sinner if repentant and reformed, but also of a horrible fate if unregenerate. Given to poetry and narrative prose, Patrick wrote,

With horrible din,
Afflictions may swell,—
They cleanse me from sin, They save me from hell:
They’re all but the rod Of Jesus, in love,
They lead me to God,
And blessings above…

He also warned,

Both rich and poor, who serve not God,
But live in sin, averse to good,
Rejecting Christ’s atoning blood,
Midst hellish shoals,
Shall welter in that fiery flood,
Which hissing rolls…⁴

How could the young children avoid the sense, the ever-present sense, of mortality? Inside the house they had witnessed the passing of their mother and two sisters. Outside there was that eternal memento mori, the graveyard with its innumerable tombstones. Death and the preparation for death, the weaknesses of the flesh, “the burning lakes of hell”—and on the other side, the blisses of eternal life—these were to seep into their consciousness and remain there for a long time…

At the Cowan Bridge school were sown the seeds of that rebellion which was to be the earmark of their thinking and one of the sources of their imaginative creations. Here Charlotte and Emily witnessed the physical and moral ravages visited upon the inmates: the tyranny and cruelty of some of the mistresses, even down to the physical punishments; the insufficient and often revolting diet; the exposure to cold weather during the long marches to church on Sundays; and not least, the bigotry and hypocrisy in the person of one of the most influential of the school’s patrons—in fact, its founder—the Rev. Carus Wilson, whose addresses to the young were spicily sprinkled with mortuary and charnel-house visions. Here were born many of the figures of Jane Eyre, particularly that of the Rev. Mr. Brocklehurst—an unmistakable Mr. Wilson. Here too was born that revulsion from what Charlotte was to call the “doctrine of endurance”—the doctrine of docile acceptance of pain and suffering and abuse—that self-abnegation which she had seen embodied in her sister Maria, and later, when she came to write Jane Eyre, in the unforgettable figure of Helen Burns.

Liberated from school, Charlotte and Emily rejoined the Haworth household, and now, in conjunction with sister Anne, they began to lead that double life—one public, the other secret—which in a way was to determine their future. The public life consisted of household duties, under the supervision of Aunt Branwell and Tabby the maid. The other was a collusive, private life. They were all of them, Charlotte, Emily, Anne—and in a lesser sense their brother, Branwell—“born writers.” They were also astonishingly precocious, and already voracious readers. They began building their own world, a world of fantasy, which they set down in writing—in what they called “plays,” and in stories. Here they were to find that freedom which was denied them in daily life. Branwell alone was excepted, for he was a boy. He was free to roam.

Of this “secret” life their father was scarcely aware. Secluded in his study much of the time, he emerged for breakfast, prayers, and tea. He almost always dined alone. He could scarcely have suspected what a dangerous brood he had spawned, nor what a direct agent he was in spurring these literary activities when he bought Branwell a box of toy soldiers. Had he known, he might have shaken his head in kindly condescension. Writing was a fitting avocation for girls who were growing up. For the boy, however, he harbored lofty ambitions. Branwell was “destined” for a glorious career. As for the women, he would like to keep them home forever—he was extremely possessive— or he would wait until some respectable and well-to-do suitor might appear and take them off. He was not ready to yield any of them to some neighboring curate, even if it were one of his own assistants—some poor devil earning no more than £90 a year. His own means were scant enough, £200 or so, and there was little or nothing left of that to set aside for a dowry! How could he be blamed for having such thoughts? He had himself led a hard life. The son of a poor Irish Protestant farmer, one of ten children, he had by dint of his persistent ambition and force of character succeeded in making something of himself. He had been able to attend Oxford and attain to clerical orders. Ambitious, proud, intelligent, and endowed with an irrefragable will, he was also something of a writer. He must have had attractive qualities to win the lifelong devotion and near-worship of a wife whose touching letters during their courtship reveal a woman of deep feelings. Her last agonized illness and her untimely death at the age of thirty-eight scarred him deeply.

He believed in having educated children, and he made sure they had instruction in music, drawing, and French. He himself took charge of Branwell’s education, teaching him, among other subjects, Latin and Greek. The boy showed some talents, especially in art—in fact he had enough talent in other departments to make him a passable mediocrity. What would the father have made of the notion that it was not his son, but his daughters who were to make him immortal!

It was not an utterly secluded world in which the young Brontës lived. There was a library at home, and a more copious one in nearby Keightley. “Nearby” must not be construed in modern terms: it meant trudging ten miles or so. After 1831, when Charlotte attended Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head and had made what were to be lifelong friendships with Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, there were the books in the Taylor household which she would borrow. The collection was rich in French and English books, for Mr. Joshua Taylor, a well-to-do manufacturer and banker, was a man of the world, a genuine lover of art and letters, and a person of strong liberal political views, slightly to the left of the Whigs. He was a staunch Republican, and it was probably from his library that Charlotte was able to obtain the works of modern French writers like Balzac and George Sand. He and his daughter were later to be immortalized in Charlotte’s novels.

At any rate, while still in their early teens the Brontës read widely. Of course, they could not escape the current mania for the so-called “Gothic” novels, those tales of terror and mystery, thrillers of which Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is still remembered today. There were hundreds of such “shockers” produced by experts like Mrs. Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis, whose highly scurrilous and strongly anti-Catholic Monk proved among the most popular. There was also, on a more serious level, the great Sir Walter Scott, the most successful novelist of that time both at home and abroad. But not least, there was the inescapable, magnetic and entrancing poet George Gordon Lord Byron, the much reviled and attractive leader of the so-called “Satanic School,” whose notorious poems and plays such as Childe Harold, Cain, Manfred and Don Juan were read by all—even if only privately.

Here is Charlotte Brontë at the ripe age of thirteen, writing of a day’s doings:

… While I write this I am in the kitchen of the Parsonage, Haworth; Tabby, the servant, is washing up the breakfast things, and Anne, my youngest sister (Maria was my oldest), is kneeling on a chair, looking at some cakes which Tabby is baking for us. Emily is in the parlour, brushing the carpet. Papa and Branwell are gone to Keightly. Aunt is up-stairs in her room, and I am sitting by the table writing this in the kitchen. Keightly is a small town four miles from here. Papa and Branwell are gone for the newspaper, the “Leeds Intelligencer,” a most excellent Tory newspaper, edited by Mr. Wood, and the proprietor, Mr. Henneman. We take two and see three newspapers a week. We take the “Leeds Intel-ligencer,” Tory, and the “Leeds Mercury,” Whig, edited by Mr. Baines, and his brother, son-in-law, and his two sons, Edward and Talbot. We see the “John Bull”; it is a high Tory, very violent. Dr. Driver lends us it as likewise “Blackwood’s Magazine,” the most able periodical there is….5

So that even as children they were exposed to politics and political discussions. The name of the Duke of Wellington was a household word—the hero of heroes.

They were “prolific authors.” By the time Charlotte was thirteen, she drew up with all the seriousness of a mature professional a “catalogue of my books,” with the periods of their composition—all in all “making in the whole twenty-two volumes.” The father’s gift of the wooden soldiers had become the source of their most fertile fantasies, each of the children selecting his or her own for hero. Charlotte’s soldier was the Duke of Wellington; Branwell’s, the more martial Bonaparte. The others followed suit. Charlotte and Branwell between them created the kingdom or realm of Angria and peopled it with heroes and villains, rulers and subjects. They built magnificent cities; and they spawned intrigues, adventures, loves both licit and illicit, conspiracies, and irresistible men whom all women adored, and whom they regularly betrayed; Branwell supplied the military campaigns, not at all sparing of human blood and wholesale slaughters. In Charlotte’s tales a sultry eroticism pervaded the action. Emily and Anne created their own imaginative world which they named Gondal. Unfortunately the prose version of these tales has disappeared, leaving us only the intercalated poems—some of Emily’s best.

They bound these productions in over a hundred little “books” in wrapping papers; they were written in that minuscule hand of Charlotte’s which defies reading without magnifying glasses.

It is impossible to describe the hold these fantasies had on the growing youthful authors. A hothouse fever pervaded their activities, which lasted, at least in Charlotte’s case, till she was twenty-three. She lived more closely with these creations of her imagination than with the human beings surrounding her, whether these were her young charges or her employers’, the Misses Wooler. Emily, at Haworth, no doubt continued in the same vein. While Charlotte was away, Branwell continued the narratives, and she lived in imagination with her Byronic dark-browed hero Zamorna and his entourage of women, defying all the laws of accepted morality—cruel Zamorna! beautiful as ever!6

Thus armed, in their own special enclave, the young Brontës became the denizens of a special world. Here their “genii,” as they called themselves, could create and uncreate; here they could destroy and undo destruction; here they could mete out death and restore to life. Here Eros could have free play, and Thanatos could be shackled. Outside servitudes, whether as pupils at school or as governess-teachers, gave way to freedom. Or so they imagined….

And beyond the parsonage stretched the moors, their own domain in Nature, voicing their own inner feelings, at times magnetic, inviting, at others hostile and defiant, like themselves—sometimes even terrifying. They could remember as little children, when Branwell and Anne were out with their maids, how the moors literally exploded with volcanic violence—probably as a result of the gathered subterranean gases—and the “peaty subsoil roared down… hurtling boulders into the valleys.” But there were also seasons of enchantment, when the moors burgeoned with the purple heath and flowers, and the air was filled with the noises of larks, throstles and blackbirds. Then the ravines and the brooks proved inviting, and there was enough beauty and enchantment to make one of Charlotte’s later novelistic characters exclaim: “Our England is a bonny island… and Yorkshire is one of her bonniest nooks.”⁷

Recalling what they thought were magic years, Charlotte celebrated them in a poem:

We wove a web in childhood,
     A web of sunny air;
We dug a spring in infancy
     Of water pure and fair.

We sowed in youth a mustard seed;
     We cut an almond rod.
We now are grown to riper age:
     Are they withered in the sod?

Are they blighted, failed, and faded?
     Are they mouldered back to clay?
For life is darkly shaded,
     And its joys fleet fast away.

Faded! the web is still of air,
     But how its folds are spread!
And from its tints of crimson clear,
     How deep a glow is shed!
The light of an Italian sky,
Where clouds of sunset lingering lie;
     Is not more ruby red.

But the spring was under a mossy stone,
     Its jet may gush no more.
Hark, skeptic, bid thy doubts be gone:
     Is that a feeble roar
Rushing around thee? Lo! the tide
Of waves where armed fleets may ride,
Sinking and swelling frowns and smiles,
An ocean with a thousand isles
     And scarce a glimpse of shore.

The mustard seed in distant land
     Bends down a mighty tree,
The dry, unbudding almond wand
     Has touched eternity.8

Did they in fact realize that in weaving and continuing to weave those fairy webs they were in fact seeking some magic charm that would enable them to retain their childhood forever—perhaps some elixir which would save them from the outside world? That they were actually reluctant to grow up? That in them lay a false freedom that might bear within itself infinite dangers? That fantasy is only one element in the process of growing?

* * *

But soon Necessity intruded. They would have to venture out of the magic enclave. To eke out the family income, it would be necessary to find work. And what work was there for a woman like Charlotte, aged nineteen? The field was narrow: teaching or being a governess. In their fantasies they had been the “genii,” masters of fate—now a stark reality faced them. Charlotte announced the news to her friend Ellen Nussey in a letter written in 1835. “Emily is going to school, Branwell is going to London, and I am going to be a governess.”9

Branwell, the favored child, was to be sent to London to apply to the Royal Academy of Art. He had shown some talent for painting. He had also displayed a modest talent for writing. The talents had been magnified at home and in his imagination to the point of megalomania. Fantasy had taken over completely. To anticipate somewhat: instead of reporting to the Academy, Branwell went a-roaming, to museums at times, and, much more frequently, into London pubs, his favorite haunts. Already he was exhibiting a profound instability and insecurity. Thereafter he would return home to Haworth, to commence one career after another, all marked eventually by failure…

Charlotte was to be a teacher-governess. She was going back to Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head. What was it like to be a governess? As late as 1890, the comic journal Punch described that profession, which must have been even more arduous and unsupportable sixty years earlier:

Poor Miss Harker went to Stockton, to Stockton on the Tees,
But not to make her fortune, or to loll at home at ease;
She went to be a governess, and hoped, it would appear,
To board and lodge and dress herself on £15 a-year.

So all day long with urchins three Miss Harker toiled in chains,
And she poured the oil of learning well upon their rusty brains,
And she practised them in music, and she polished up their sense
With the adverbs and the adjectives, and verbs in mood and tense.

And they said, “She’s doing nicely, we will give her something more
(Not of money, but of labour) ere we show her to the door,
Why, we’ve got two baby children, it is really only fair
That Miss Harker should look after them and wash and dress the pair.”
Etc. Etc…

So it was scarcely the road to freedom upon which they were entering. For they were leaving a sanctuary and entering upon the outer world unarmed, literally and figuratively orphans. All through life they would carry on the battle against strangers, with that pathological shyness in the presence of others, that withdrawal, which would be imbedded in Emily throughout her life and would characterize Charlotte even in the days of her celebrity when she had become a cynosure in London. An even heavier burden was theirs—a sense of their moral imperfection, a burden of putative sinfulness, an inheritance no doubt from their Aunt Branwell. “If Christian perfection be necessary to Salvation,” Charlotte wrote to Ellen Nussey, “I shall never be saved…. I abhor myself, I despise myself—if the doctrine of Calvinism be true, I am already an outcast.”¹⁰ Not the least disadvantage under which they were to labor was their total ignorance of how to deal with children, which was to make for an additional hardship when they entered into the lives of strangers. Emily, who was with Charlotte at Miss Wooler’s as a free pupil, could not stand what she considered imprisonment. Three months sufficed and she returned to Haworth. Anne replaced her; Charlotte remained. She too felt a heavy bondage, more mental than physical. The hauntings that she was a sinful creature would not abate, she felt “unreconciled to God,” wretched and hopeless as ever. She asks her friend to pray along with her, and sends her own “polluted petitions” along with with Ellen’s “own pure requests.” Was it flippancy, flightiness, thoughtlessness to have engaged in those writing enterprises? Wasn’t it a sin to rebel? The monotony of her present life became unbearable. She had no sympathy for her charges. “Teach, teach, teach,” she writes. There was no relief in sight. Her anger was even directed against Heaven! “You cannot imagine how hard, rebellious and intractable all my feelings are. When I begin to study the subject, I almost grow blasphemous, atheistical in my sentiments.”11 “The thought came over me: Am I to spend the best part of of my life in this wretched bondage?”¹²

Her home was not here, in Roe Head. Her home was ever that imagined Angria she and her brother had constructed and which by that time had become a constant obsession. How deep, one can judge from her journals of that time, her confessions. What was happening in that kingdom of theirs, of which her brother had possession? What was happening to that satanic Zamorna, hero and sinner? What was happening in the city of their own creation, Verdopolis? Everything around her faded. She listens to the howling wind outside. Surely that wind is heard in Haworth!

I fulfil my duties strictly and well [she writes in her Journal]… As God was not in the fire nor the wind nor the earthquake, so neither is my heart in the task, the theme, or the exercise. It is the still small voice always that comes to me at eventide… It is that which engrosses all my living feelings, all my energies which are not merely mechanical…¹³

Inspired by that almost divine voice, at that moment she feels that she could write a narrative “better at least than anything” she had ever produced. But alas! just then a “dolt came up with a lesson.”¹⁴

She was possessed.

Never shall I, Charlotte Brontë, forget what a voice of wild and wailing music now came thrillingly to my mind’s, almost my body’s ear, nor how distinctly I, sitting in the schoolroom at Roe Head, saw the Duke of Zamorna leaning against that obelisk… I was quite gone. I had really, utterly forgot where I was and all the gloom and cheerlessness of my situation. I felt myself breathing quick and short as I beheld the Duke lifting up his sable crest… “Miss Brontë what are you thinking about?” said a voice that dissipated all the charm…¹⁵

The “web spun in childhood” had become a dangerous snare.

And quite as suddenly she became terrified. “I had had enough of morbidly vivid realizations. Every advantage has its corresponding disadvantage. Tea’s real. Miss Wooler is impatient.”¹⁶

A momentous event. This was a prelude to a “Farewell to Angria.” It would take time, but in that moment of panic Charlotte Brontë the novelist was born. She left Miss Wooler’s school in 1839, and in the following year she went forth once more as a governess to the family of the Sidgwicks. A few months before, her sister Anne had gone to work for family in Mirfield. Emily’s attempt at teaching three years earlier had proved a failure, and she left after six months, totally weakened. Branwell continued his career of failures—in turn as a portrait painter, a railway clerk, and finally as a tutor. There were other trials as governesses for both Charlotte and Anne. But each new experiment brought on nervous distresses. It was obvious, as Mrs. Gaskell remarked, that “the hieroglyphics of childhood were an unknown language to them.”17 It cannot be said that the three of them had not tried hard to fill the place of governess in the various families. But the status of that occupation was such that it left its occupants without status. Recruited mostly from middle-class families with limited means, governesses found themselves, when employed, in that sea of indefiniteness, floating somewhere between the position of servant and an undefined member of the family—in “no woman’s land.” Typically deprived of authority, they were incapable of handling the problems of discipline, faced as they were with an unsympathetic attitude on the part of the mistress of the household. They were overworked, miserably underpaid, with neither privacy nor leisure. Often high-strung, nervous, sensitive, and—as in the case of the Brontës—gifted, governesses were frequently brought to the verge of nervous collapse by these tensions.

Such was their situation, then, made particularly difficult because they had literary talent and ambition. But they were poor and must suffer. Freedom seemed as far off as ever. Charlotte cried out in one of her letters to Ellen, expressing “a strong wish for wings… wings such as wealth can furnish,” envying her friend Mary Taylor who was traveling on the continent and was visiting galleries and cathedrals. There was so much in this world still to absorb and so much yet to learn! And as for writing….

In 1837, while still with Miss Wooler, she had sent a poem enclosed in a very humble letter to Robert Southey, the poet laureate and former associate of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The poem, it must be admitted, was mediocre. Southey’s reply was kind, for he granted that she had talent for verse, but at the same time warned her not to indulge in daydreams, thus unfitting herself for “the ordinary uses of the world.” “Literature,” he added, “cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it even as an accomplishment and a recreation.”¹⁸ She replied with gratitude and humility, citing her own devotion to home and parent and giving a short picture of her life. Yes, she would give up her ambition to see her name in print, and if “the wish should arise,” she wrote, “I’ll look at Southey’s letter and suppress it.”¹⁹ Southey graciously acknowledged the missive, and added an invitation to visit him at Keswick in the Lake Region. That, however, was out of the question. There was no money for such a trip.

But the decision to leave the imaginary Angria for other regions closer to home had not been abandoned. Charlotte had been saddened and set back by Southey’s counsel. But she knew that she had to write. No one would be able to dissuade her. Addressing an imaginary reader, she bids Angria farewell; it was with a heavy heart and some apprehension.

I have now written a great many books and for a long time have dwelt on the same characters and scenes and subjects…. My readers have been habituated to one set of features… but we must change, for the eye is tired of the picture so often recurring and now so familiar.

Yet do not urge me too fast, reader; it is no easy theme to dismiss from my imagination the images which have filled it so long; they were my friends and my intimate acquaintances.

… When I depart from these I feel almost as if I stood on the threshold of a home and were bidding farewell to its inmates. When I strive to conjure up new inmates I feel as if I had got into a distant country where every face was unknown and the character of all the population an enigma which it would take much study to comprehend and much talent to expound. Still I long to quit for a while that burning clime where we have sojourned too long… and turn now to a cooler region where the dawn breaks grey and sober… and the coming day for a time at least is subdued by clouds.20

Charlotte Brontë was now twenty-three years old. She had had, and was still to have, many bitter experiences in her life. She was reluctantly leaving what she would later call “Elfland” for the “shores of Reality.”²¹ She was about to leave childhood—not forever; indeed, no one ever does—but against those unreal worlds, the real world she was now experiencing, and had experienced since childhood, began making its own urgent claims. If she was to be a writer, she would have to write for readers of this and not the Angrian world. The need that had forced the Brontës out of Haworth and into activity—the need, in brief, for some measure of economic independence—represented but the first step in the development of their artistic consciousness. If Charlotte wished to reach a public, she must write for the public. Of course, the fantasies of the past would not be totally abandoned. They were too deeply ingrained, and in some cases even of importance to the future writer. They would have to be recast and eventually fused into the new matter. The transition would be difficult, but it could not be evaded. It is the great “leap” that every artist who is maturing must ultimately make—the leap from a dependence into an independence—what Stendhal has called the “crystallization.” It would take some five years and important events before the hot metal of creativity turned into the ingot.

* * *

Reader, perhaps you were never in Belgium? Haply you don’t know the physiognomy of the country? You have not its lineaments defined upon your memory, as I have them on mine?… Belgium! name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such as no other assemblage of syllables, however, sweet or classic, can produce. Belgium! I repeat the word, now as I sit alone near midnight. It stirs my world of the past like a summons to resurrection; the graves unclose, the dead are raised; thoughts, feelings, memories that slept, are seen by me ascending from the clods—haloed most of them—but while I gaze on their vapoury forms, and strive to ascertain definitely their outline, the sound which awakened them dies, and they sink, each and all, like the light wreath of mist, absorbed in the mould, recalled to urns, resealed in monuments. Farewell, luminous phantoms!

Thus Charlotte, through the lips of one of the characters in her first novel The Professor, composed in 1846 for publication but not published until after her death. Some time late in 1841 the three Brontë sisters, still in search of security, decided to open a school of their own. In preparation for that enterprise, and in order to improve their French and German, Charlotte and Emily lighted on Brussels and the pensionnat of M. and Madam Heger as the most suitable place. Aunt Branwell generously supported the plan, and in February of 1842, accompanied by their father, they left Haworth. Until this time they had never been very far from the parsonage, and for the first time they saw London. For the first time they were on the Continent. For the first time, too, the sisters were literally alone.

Except for a few scattered English friends in Brussels, they were among total strangers, speaking a totally foreign language. They were also surrounded by Catholics. Charlotte was constitutionally hostile to Catholics and Catholicism, and no amount of experience was to temper that antagonism. Nor was she or Emily at ease among their fellow students. M. and Madame Heger were kind and considerate and did their best at first to mitigate the anguish of isolation.

For Charlotte, the Brussels experience would become perhaps the most vital, though not the happiest, of her entire life. Both sisters proved very good students: Charlotte meek and diligent, and very bright; Emily, very bright as always, but proud, stubborn, and rebellious. M. Heger was their master in French.

Charlotte’s first description of M. Heger is highly interesting. She writes to Ellen Nussey of her first reactions:

There is an individual of whom I have not yet spoken, M. Heger, the husband of Madame. He is professor of rhetoric, a man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable in temperament; a little black being, with a face that varies in expression. Sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane tom-cat, sometimes those of a delirious hyena; occasionally, but very seldom, he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air not above 100 degrees removed from mild and gentlemanlike…22

Two years before coming to Brussels, Charlotte had lectured her friend Ellen on the matter of Love:

… No young lady should fall in love, till the offer has been made, accepted—the marriage ceremony performed and the first half year of wedded life has passed away—a woman may then begin to love, but with great precaution—very coolly—very modestly—very rationally—if she ever love so much that a harsh word or cold look from her husband cuts her to the heart—she is a fool.²³

She was twenty-four when she wrote those lines. Now twenty-six, she fell in love with her master, M. Heger. Despite a number of proposals from an assorted number of curates, she had never had any profound emotional attachments. Now she fell in love with a married man eight years older than herself and the father of a family. In October 1842, Aunt Branwell died, and Charlotte and Emily returned to Haworth. Charlotte had been invited by the Hegers to come back as teacher of English, in return for instruction in French. Emily refused to go back. She preferred to stay home and pursue her own secret inner life (how rich that was to be eventually!)—and bake bread. Charlotte would remain in Brussels until January 1844.

M. Heger was no doubt attracted by this eager, now worshipful, student. How much more he felt, we do not know. She in turn was passionately in love for the first time in her life—unequivocally, irretrievably. What she expected of that love was far beyond anyone’s fathoming. Though there was of course no physical relation, and though M. Heger must have reacted with sobriety if not aloofness, all her passion, hitherto repressed, went out to him. And in that way, never to another…

Today, we would describe it as a “sticky” situation. In May 1843, Charlotte writes to Ellen: “Of late days M. and Mde. Heger rarely speak to me… I am convinced she does not like me…” As for M. Heger, she continues, “he is wonderfully influenced by madame…”24 And on August 6, a pathetic cry: “Alas, I can hardly write, I have such a dreary weight at my heart; and I do so wish to go home…”²⁵

Now more than ever alone, distraught, overwhelmed, she wanders through the city, visits the cemetery lying outside the town, returns to the rue d’Isabelle, where the pensionnat was located, and finds herself opposite the church of Ste. Gudule. The letter to Emily is dated September 2nd, 1843. “The bell, whose voice you know, began to toll for the evening salut. I went in.”… “In two confessionals I saw a priest….When people are by themselves they have singular fancies… I took a fancy to change myself into a Catholic and go and make a real confession to see what it was like… I approached… I actually did confess—a real confession.”²⁶ She continues:

When I had done he told me his address, and said that every morning I was to go to the rue du Parc—to his house—and he would reason with me and try to convince me of the error and enormity of being a Protestant! I promised faithfully to go. Of course, however, the adventure stops there, and I hope I shall never see the priest again. I think you had better not tell papa of this. He will not understand that it was only a freak, and will perhaps think I am going to turn Catholic…²⁷

Charlotte returned home, broken in spirit—heartbroken. On January 2, 1844, she was in Haworth once more. What Mrs. Gaskell was to say about her in connection with another episode proved true now. “Brave heart, ready to die in harness. She went back to work.”²⁸ Circulars were issued announcing the new school, but no pupils appeared. Another failure.

The memories of Brussels could not be expunged. What she felt now she expressed in a poem, and in those few of the letters she kept on sending to M. Heger that have been preserved. His have probably been destroyed. The poem is entitled “Reason.” Its date is uncertain; probably it was written sometime in 1843.

Unloved I love, unwept I weep,
Grief I restrain, hope I repress,
Vain is this anguish fixed and deep,
Vainer desires or means of bliss…

Devoid of charm how could I dream
My unasked love would e’er return?
What fate, what influence, lit the flame
I still feel inly, deeply, burn?

She calls to her aid “Reason, Science, Learning, Thought”—and comforts herself: “Doubt not I shall be strong to-morrow.”²⁹

The surviving letters to M. Heger were written between July 1844 and the latter part of 1845. They are all in French, with one paragraph in English. We cite a few passages here.

She is, she writes him, keeping up with her French studies “car je suis bien persuadée que je vous reverrai un jour—je ne sais pas comment ni quand—mais cela doit être puisque je le désire tant…”* She cannot overcome her lethargy, and can no longer do her writing. Besides, her eyesight is failing. “Otherwise do you know what I should do, Monsieur? I should write a book and I should dedicate it to my literature-master—the only master I ever had—to you Monsieur… The career of letters is closed to me—only that of teaching is open.”… And in another letter: “As soon as I shall have earned enough money to go to Brussels I shall go there—and I shall see you again if only for a moment….” When she receives no reply to her letters, she writes: “Day and night I find neither rest nor peace. If I sleep I am disturbed by tormenting dreams in which I see you, always severe, always grave, always incensed against me….You will say once more that I am hysterical—that I have black thoughts….All I know is, that I cannot, that I will not resign myself to lose wholly the friendship of my master…” “Monsieur, the poor have not need of much to sustain them—they ask only for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table. But if they are refused the crumbs, they die of hunger. Nor do I, either, need much affection from those I love. I should not know what to do with a friendship entire and complete—I am not used to it. But you showed me of yore a little interest, when I was your pupil in Brussels, and I hold on to the maintenance of that little interest—I hold on to it as I would hold on to life….” And in the last surviving letter: “May I write to you next May? I would rather wait a year, but it is impossible—it is too long. C. Brontë.” The editor of the letter adds: “It is on the edge of this letter that Professor Heger made some commonplace notes in pencil—one of them the name and address of a shoemaker.”³⁰

* “For I am well persuaded that I shall see you again one day—I know not how or when—but it must be, for I want to so much…”

The Brussels experience was to be one of the major determinants of her future creative career. It sets the stage, or is directly or indirectly implicated, in all her novels, whether the inchoate work entitled The Professor, or the mature Jane Eyre, or Shirley. It is the core and very soul of the last—and in many ways the most personal—of her confessional books, Villette.

* * *

She returned to Haworth and a household that was soon to take on the character of an infirmary. Emily and Anne were in constant ill health; Branwell was rapidly deteriorating after having been dismissed as tutor from the family in which Anne had served as governess. He had imagined himself in love with the master’s wife, and her in love with him, and was hopeful of marrying her once she attained widowhood. He was a shattered human being—addicted more than ever to alcohol and opium—a specter haunting the parsonage. And not least, there was the father, going blind and soon in need of an operation for cataracts. Though the small legacy Aunt Branwell had left them was helpful, the needs of the household had increased.

Charlotte felt herself growing old, for she was approaching thirty. “One day resembles another,” she wrote in March 1845, “and all have lifeless physiognomies—Sunday baking and Saturday are the only ones that bear the slightest distinctive marks… I feel as if we were all buried here—I long to travel—to work—to live a life of action…”31 And in January 1846: “Something in me which used to be enthusiasm is tamed down and broken. I have few illusions.”³²

Who, in reading these words, would imagine that just the preceding autumn Charlotte Brontë had made a discovery that was to change not only her own life, but also that of Emily and Anne?

She had one day unexpectedly come upon Emily’s poetry. The story is well known, and needs only a brief recounting here. Let Charlotte tell it:

One day, in the autumn of 1845, I accidentally lighted on a MS. volume of verse in my sister’s handwriting. Of course, I was not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse: I looked it over, and something more than surprise seized me,—a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write. I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear they had also a peculiar music—wild, melancholy, and elevating.33

It took some persuading to convince Emily to agree to publication. Anne had written poetry too, and she was amenable. So was Charlotte. Under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell—and at their own expense—they had the Poems published in 1846. As for using masculine names, Charlotte explained:

We had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.³⁴

They had, of course, the celebrated example of George Sand to guide them.

In addition, they confessed to their publisher that they had in preparation for the press a work of fiction consisting of three distinct and unconnected tales. The “tales” were Charlotte’s Professor, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s Agnes Grey.

The Professor was rejected by the publisher. The other two tales were accepted on payment of expenses of publication. The Professor went the rounds of many publishers, until at last it landed on the desks of Smith, Elder and Company, a highly respected firm. It was rejected, but with an accompanying letter which suggested that it had impressed, and added that if the writer had a three-volume work (the so-called “three-decker”) they would welcome examining it. The writer answered Yes, and sent Jane Eyre. It was accepted at once, and issued in October 1847. In the same year, the publisher of the Poems, again on payment, brought out Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. Let us remember that Charlotte began writing Jane Eyre in Manchester in August 1846 while her father was recovering from his cataract operation. Branwell, at home, was going downhill at a disastrous pace. We need more than astonishment to measure adequately the inner strength that was a part of Charlotte’s genius….

“I have to live, perhaps, till seventy years. As far as I know, I have good health. Half a century of existence may lie before me. How am I to occupy it? What am I to do to fill the interval of time which spreads between me and the grave?… What was I created for I wonder. Where is my place in the world?”

—Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

Such are the thoughts of one of Charlotte Brontë’s later heroines, Caroline Helstone. She has reached the age of eighteen. She is at the crossroads of her life. In one of those clearly autobiographical passages of that book the author speaks of the two worlds of the young woman, the one she is leaving and the other she is about to enter:

… At eighteen drawing near the confines of the illusive, void dreams, Elf-land lies behind us, the shores of Reality rise in front… Before that time our world is heroic; its inhabitants half-divine or semi-demon… What a moon we gaze on before that time! How the trembling of ours at her aspect bears witness to its unalterable beauty! As to our sun,—it is a burning heaven—the world of gods…

But now, we reach the “shores of Reality.”

Could we but reach this land we think to hunger and thirst no more! whereas many a wilderness and often the flood of Death, or some stream of sorrow as cold and almost as black as Death, is to be crossed ere true bliss can be tasted…, the heart’s blood must gem with red beads of the combatant before the wreath of victory rustles over it…35

“From Elfland” to “the shores of Reality.” Such, indeed had been the experience of the three Brontë sisters and their brother, the urgent need to leave the claustral security of the rectory and their life of fantasy and to engage in a life of reality, to come to grips with the problems of a livelihood, the economics of existence.

The challenge had now been met. The sisters had been writing in secrecy, sometimes, as we have seen, even concealing their productions from one another. Now, sparked by Charlotte’s discovery of Emily’s poetry and the prospect of the publication of their poetic work, they seemed ready to expose themselves to the public eye, even if only pseudonymously. Emily Brontë had already completed a novel, Wuthering Heights; Anne had one also ready, Agnes Grey. Charlotte was completing The Professor early in 1846; undismayed by the publisher’s rejection, she set about writing Jane Eyre in August of that year.

The Professor was not to be published until two years after Charlotte’s death. The “leap” from that novel to Jane Eyre represents an astonishing advance, rare in literary history considering the near-simultaneity of their production. It is as if by some strange chance the “inhibitions” so evident in the earlier work has been lifted, enabling Charlotte to risk greater self-revelation and candor. Biographers have speculated that the trauma of discovering the depth and force of Emily’s iconoclasm in both the poems and the novel might have acted as the catalyst of her sister’s creative growth.

The Brussels experience lies at the center of both works, as do the themes of the orphan-outsider, the rebellious young woman, the quest for understanding and love, for independence and self-realization.

But whereas in the later novels the major protagonists would be women, in The Professor it is a man, William Crimsworth, who is also the narrator. At first he appears as the “outsider,” what the Russian writers called a “superfluous” man. He has no true vocation. An orphan, descended from a well-to-do family, Crimsworth refuses to acquiesce in his relatives’ determination that he enter the Church, or in his uncles’ contempt for his father’s profession as tradesman. Though himself a contemner of the “counting-house” and commerce, he joins his brother’s manufacturing establishment, but finds this equally intolerable, as he is subjected to cruelty and humiliations.

The predicament of an “outsider” like William Crimsworth is sharply described by another character, the radical Whig manufacturer Yorke Hunsdon (modeled on Joshua Taylor, Mary Taylor’s father, who was to appear in greater detail as Hiram Yorke in Shirley), in a conversation with Crimsworth:

Now if you’d only an estate and a mansion, and a park, and a title, how you could play the exclusive, maintain the rights of your class, train your tenantry in habits of respect to the peerage, oppose at every step the advancing power of the people, support your order, and be ready for its sake to wade knee-deep in churls’ blood; as it is, you’ve no power; you can do nothing; you’re wrecked and stranded on the shores of commerce; forced into collision with practical men, with whom you cannot cope, for you’ll never be a tradesman.36

Crimsworth is persuaded by Hunsdon to go to the Continent, and with the help of an introduction from the latter, is enabled to obtain a position as a teacher of English in Mlle. Reuter’s establishment. This is the only truly positive measure that Crimsworth takes in his search for an independent career. In all other respects he is a passive figure, moved by chance, accident, happy coincidence, or the help of kind intermediaries. To his credit, he is not too snobbish to fall in love with a person of the lower classes, or to accept teaching as a worthy profession. The young woman, Frances Evans Henri, a lacemaker, is the protype of all the “orphan-outsiders” of the future novels. Of Swiss descent, she is alone in an alien world and has come to school to learn English, for she is an admirer of England and English institutions, and hopes to migrate to that country and become a governess there.

In making Crimsworth rather than Frances the narrator and chief protagonist, Charlotte Brontë hoped to veil the intrinsic and auguishing experience of Brussels— still in the spring of 1846 all too fresh in her mind and heart—or at least attenuate it. Herein lay the central blunder, for she was then in a much better position to assess and assay the feelings of a woman than those of a man, those of a pupil than those of a master. Crimsworth is scarcely an adequately equipped spokesman for the complex emotions which either he himself or Frances were to experience and express. He is neither emotionally nor psychological able to attain to the freedom that would be central to the women characters of her later work. Too fearful of passion, he is rarely “natural” in the sense in which Charlotte was to employ that term. Violence of feelings, even if only incipient velleities, alarms him.

An example or two will suffice: Frances, unable to bear the jealousy of the directress Mlle Reuter, has fled the pensionnat where she was teaching lacemaking, and after a great deal of trouble Crimsworth finds her in the Protestant cemetery before the tombstone of her lately deceased aunt. On seeing him, Frances cannot control herself, and exclaims, “Mon maître! mon maître!” Crimsworth recounts his reactions:

I knew how quietly and how deeply the well bubbled in her heart; I knew how the more dangerous flame burned safely under the eyes of reason; I had seen when the fire shot up a moment high and vivid, when the accelerated heat troubled life’s current in its channels; I had seen reason reduce the rebel, and humble its blaze to embers. I had confidence in Frances Evans…³⁷

And here is Crimsworth’s account of his proposal of marriage to Frances and its acceptance:

“Will my pupil consent to pass her life with me? Speak English now, Frances.” Some moments were taken for reflection; the answer pronounced slowly ran thus:

“You have always made me happy; I like to hear you speak; I like to see you; I like to be near you; I believe you are very good, and very superior; I know you are stern to those who are careless and idle, but you are kind to the attentive and industrious, even if they are not clever. Master, I should be glad to live with you always,” and she made a sort of movement, as if she would have clung to me, but restraining herself she only added with earnest emphasis—“Master, I consent to pass my life with you.”

“Very well, Frances.”

I drew her a little nearer to my heart; I took a first kiss from her lips, thereby sealing the compact, now framed between us; afterwards she and I were silent, nor was our silence brief…38

Such a conversation suggests nothing so much as what would be entered into if Frances were applying for a job as lacemaker and Crimsworth were in an employing mood. It also belies a later passage in which Frances proves far from the passive, prissy betrothed, and is already a foreshadowing of Charlotte’s later heroines like Jane Eyre. Here is Frances as recorded by her future husband:

… “Monsieur, I wished merely to say, that I should like, of course, to retain my employment of teaching. You will teach, I suppose, Monsieur?”

“Oh, Yes! It is all I have to depend on.”

“Bon—I mean good. Thus we shall have both the same profession, I like that; and my efforts to get on will be as unrestrained as yours—will they not, Monsieur?”

“You are laying plans to be independent of me,” said I.

“Yes, Monsieur; I must be no incumbrance to you—no burden in any way.”…

“Think of my marrying you to be kept by you, Monsieur! I could not do it; and how dull my days would be! You would be away teaching in close, noisy schoolrooms, from morning till evening, and I should be lingering at home, unemployed and solitary; I should get depressed and sullen, and you would soon tire of me…”

A declaration of independence such as would have, without doubt, sent either shudders of panic or thrills (certainly in much rarer instances) down the spines of lady readers, and throbs of alarm down those of their male counterparts!

In The Professor she had gone far beyond the limits of her talents in allotting the burden of narration to a man, yet asking him to speak in the name of both man and woman. To be true to her own dictates of honesty and reality, she would have to overcome her timidity and give herself wholeheartedly as a woman to the task of translating those experiences she had had as a woman, or with which she could identify as only a woman could. It was a triumph for her to recognize that to be true to her genius she would have to “dare,” within the limits of her own profound experiences internal and external, to speak out in the name of the feminine “I.” Where she failed to do so and wandered into strange territories of factitious or still insufficient knowledge, she would slip into falsifications that might prove disastrous. To be true to her own avowed program, the “I” of the woman must stand unambiguous. She sped to the new task with the assurance of a master craftswoman. The new coin rang true, and Jane Eyre emerged.

Her new heroine was unlike Frances of The Professor. Charlotte Brontë, stooping to the fashion of the times, had made her an attractive heroine, bound to draw Crimsworth’s heart. But Jane Eyre was of a different mould. She was to be “plain, small, unattractive.” No magnet here to rivet all eyes and cause all speech to stop. Plain and ordinary-looking as Charlotte Brontë was herself—and throughout her life knew herself to be, painful as was the admission—Jane Eyre lacked one of the prime assets of a marketable commodity in the Victorian world. Add to that disadvantage another: she was poor. Whatever notable assets she possessed did not lie on the surface for easy assessment and appraisal…

The editors of the London firm of Smith, Elder & Co., William Smith Williams and the partner, George Smith—be it said to their credit—bestowed on the book an enthusiasm rarely shown new writers. (They were not aware that the author, “Currer Bell” was a woman.) Before the year 1847 was out, a second printing became necessary. Charlotte Brontë earned £500 on the book….

The very first sentence of Jane Eyre (with its near-Tolstoyan ring) sets the tone: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” It is Jane Eyre, the narrator, sounding forth what is the central theme, the theme of “exclusion”—the theme of the “outsider.” The ten-year-old orphan, Jane Eyre, is living in the hostile world of the Reed family, the unwanted, the to-be-rejected. The seeds of rebellion are already being sown as she responds with violence to the physical and verbal abuses of the younger members of the family and the unsympathetic and tyrannical attitude of their mother, her aunt. The ultimate outrage is inflicted upon the child when she is shut up in the “red room” and exposed to the terrors of aloneness and superstition, for this is the room in which the elder Mr. Reed, her kindly uncle, had died.

Prison and rebellion. One might say that these mark the various stages of Jane Eyre’s “progress” through life as she embarks on her pilgrimage toward maturity, toward full womanhood and the full flowering of consciousness and self-consciousness. In the prison of the “red room” she becomes cognizant of the world’s injustices and of herself as the victim. “Unjust, unjust!” her reason cries out. “And all my heart in insurrection.” The description of Jane’s mounting terror, frustration and rage, ending in a hysterical seizure, are unequalled in contemporary Victorian literature. In this way she obtains partial freedom, only to be now subjected to new servitudes. She is sent off to a poor clergyman’s daughters’ school, the “Lowood Institution.”

In the Reed family she had been made well aware of her dependent economic position, being assured on the one hand by young John Reed, “You are a dependant, mama says; you have no money,” and on the other by the servant Bessie, “You are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep.”

Jane Eyre had brought to school with her a heart that was in “insurrection” against any show of tyranny, injustice, or brutality. Here, however, she encounters the total obverse of her own attitude in the person of young Helen Burns, also an orphan charge, slightly older than herself. Helen, unlike Jane, is no rebel. She is the congenital martyr, passive, humble, all-suffering, who accepts even physical punishment, unjustly meted out by a sadistic teacher, with incredible submission and passiveness. Jane is outraged. “I could not comprehend the doctrine of endurance.” She expostulates with her young fellow-student:

“If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should—as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.”39

Helen dies in the school, a victim of tuberculosis, her death hastened by an outbreak of an epidemic at the institution. In writing of Helen, Charlotte Brontë had her adored oldest sister Maria in mind, who, similar in spirit to Helen, had been carried off by a pestilential outbreak of “low fever” at Cowan Bridge and died at the age of twelve.

Already Jane is no partisan or upholder of the Victorian doctrine of “suffer and be still” applied to womanhood. Life, she has already learned, is warfare. Passivity is self-imprisonment.

Activity is the essence of life—is life itself. That is what she learns in her eight-year residence at the school, where she ends up as one of the teachers. Here, too, she feels the walls of a prison-house beginning to close in upon her. She is now a grown woman. The combat must take new forms. The wide world outside beckons. What is she to do? Until now she had been sheltered. The orphan had found at least one person in Lowood who stood her “in the stead of mother, governess, and latterly companion.” That had been Miss Temple, the superintendent of the school, an extraordinary personality, at once sympathetic and understanding—a person of feeling. But she leaves to be married. Once more, Jane is alone. And the departure precipitates an internal revolution in Jane’s mind, a new stage in the process of her growth, in the process of her liberation as a woman and as a person. A new element of self-understanding has entered, which she is able to clarify for herself:

… Another discovery dawned on me, namely that in the interval I had undergone a transforming process; that my mind had put off all it had borrowed from Miss Temple— or rather that she had taken with her the serene atmosphere I had been breathing in her vicinity—and that now I was left in my natural element… the reason for tranquillity was no more. My world had for some years been in Lowood: my experience had been of its rules and systems; now I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils…

All within the boundaries of Lowood “seemed prison-ground, and exile limits.”

I desire liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication; for change, stimulus: that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space: “Then,” I cried, half desperate, “grant me at least a new servitude!”⁴⁰

From passivity to activity: she takes the step of advertising for the position of governess…

This marks the end of the first act of the drama of Jane Eyre. Actually, the novel falls almost naturally into the dramatic form, in which the second act might be entitled Love and Loss, and the third Triumph of the Self. Each of the two last acts is marked by a highly intensive Crisis (which might be called the Testing of Self). As a matter of fact, Jane Eyre herself speaks of her life at the beginning of the second phase as a new chapter in a novel being “something like a new scene in a play,”41 and about drawing up the curtain.

She is now governess at Thornfield, Mr. Rochester’s estate, in charge of a young girl, Adèle Varens. When she arrives, Mr. Rochester is absent, and while waiting for his return, she once more becomes fretful in the somewhat “vault-like” atmosphere of the manor and its air of antiquity. She is still restless. For she is much alone, the unknown master being away. Will Thornfield prove another prison, chaining her into passivity and inertness? She longs for the “busy world, towns, regions full of life,” she has heard about. Once again, her reflections mark her ever-expanding maturity, as she considers the plight of women in general and her own in particular:

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people the earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; the need of 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; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.⁴²

How could Jane have foreseen at that moment that her prayer would be answered in ways altogether unimaginable, and very soon at that? And that a life of “activity” was preparing for her?

For as she is returning one day from a walk to post a letter, she encounters a horseman and his dog. As they approach, the horse shies and the rider is thrown and injured. She helps him remount his horse. She does not know that this is Mr. Rochester, her new employer. This act of hers is revelatory, symbolic and real, and she recognizes its true import:

The incident had occurred and was gone for me: it was an incident of no moment, no romance, no interest in a sense; yet it marked with change one single hour of a monotonous life. My help had been needed and claimed; I had given it: I was pleased to have done something; trivial, transitory though the deed was, it was yet an active thing, and I was weary of an existence all passive…⁴³

It has fulfilled for the moment the need to be needed, to be of use to someone; the need to do.

The new life she had been longing for does not require removal to other, strange places. The transformation takes place at Thornfield. It takes place within her. It embodies the emancipation of her own inner self—the emancipation of feelings. She falls in love with Mr. Rochester and for the first time enters upon those new realms of ecstasy and terror, hopes and fears, joys and pangs that accompany that mystery. Concentration on the secondary and ancillary elements of the novel, such as the so-called “Gothic” elements of horror and mystery that Charlotte Brontë employs, has frequently obscured for her critics’ eyes the subtleties which the author has utilized in depicting the evolution of love in a young woman. Thornfield is haunted; not, it is true, by a “ghost” out of the novels of terror that had also infatuated the young Brontë household, but by a living threat, constant and inescapable, “a foul German specter—a Vampyre,” in the form of the madwoman in the garret, Rochester’s mad wife. That is the “terror” upon which the flourishing love and hopes of the young woman threaten to be wrecked. The other and more significant “terror” resides in the person of the demonic, Byronic Mr. Rochester himself—typically burdened with a guilty “past,” an enigma difficult for Jane to unravel. The child in Jane is affrighted, the woman in her is challenged. The subtleties that work a change in Jane as she becomes overpowered by her love are no less apparent in the changes wrought in the character of Rochester, as the two interrelate and interplay. The pupil becomes the teacher and the teacher, the pupil.

For Jane immediately brings into the household the element of genuineness, a candor that startles. Already at the beginning of her service Rochester becomes aware of it. To her he had at first appeared by turns stern and gloomy, smiling and grim, with his “granite-hewn features and his great, dark eyes.”

“You examine me, Miss Eyre,” said he: “do you think me handsome?” I should, if I had deliberated, have replied to this question by something conventionally vague and polite; but the answer somehow slipped from my tongue before I was aware.—“No sir.”

“Ah! By my word! there is something singular about you,” said he….44

Free of sham, she in time makes him aware of the sham of the life he had been living, as well as that of the aristocratic and wealthy Ingram family, of whose daughter he is a pretended suitor.

What she was to call the “fire of her nature,” which had been kept low and repressed, now bursts into full flame as she becomes aware of tenderness on his part— the first expression of which he openly manifests after she has been instrumental in saving his life from a fire set by the strange woman of the garret. He had called her “My cherished preserver.” Jane records her feelings:

I regained my couch, but never thought of sleep. Till morning dawned I was tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea, where billows of trouble rolled under surges of joy. I thought sometimes I saw beyond its wild waters a shore, sweet as the hills of Beulah; and now and then a freshening gale, wakened by hopes, bore my spirit triumphantly towards the bourne; but I could not reach it, even in fancy—a counteracting breeze blew off land, and continually drove me back. Sense would resist delirium: judgment would warn passion. Too feverish to rest, I rose as soon as day dawned.⁴⁵

Her “self” is still weak. She compares herself unfavorably with the attractive Miss Ingram, and in imagination draws two portraits, of herself and of the woman she deems her rival. “You,” she reflects in an interior monologue, “a favourite with Mr. Rochester…?” Hers was the portrait of a “a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain.” What had Mr. Rochester to do with this “indigent and insignificant plebeian”? Very soon thereafter, she does sketch the two portraits, and thus believes she has reconciled herself to her fate… Reason had triumphed…

After a brief absence Mr. Rochester returns, and all her rational resolutions collapse. In the variegated company present, she is able to compare herself with the others, Miss Ingram among them, and realizes that Rochester is “not of their kind.” Not beautiful in the accepted sense of beauty, he is “more than beautiful to her”—with his “colorless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad jetty eyebrows, deep eyes”—“all energy, decision, will.” “I had not intended to love him”… and now, at the first renewed view of him, the sparks of love are rekindled. “He made me love him without looking at me…” and even if she is sure that they are “for ever sundered…” “yet while I breathe and think I must love him.”46

With the growth of her love and of her own sense of selfhood, she becomes more daring, less affrighted by the complexities of Rochester’s character. His volcanic temper, sometimes appearing so sinister, now challenges her to deeper explorations of his true nature. “Instead of wishing to shun, I longed only to dare—to divine it.”⁴⁷ She believes herself even capable of understanding Rochester’s and Miss Ingram’s ideas of marriage as an arrangement “for interest and connections,” as very much an aspect of their class upbringing. And she brings the same feeling of self-confidence to bear upon her relations to her aunt Mrs. Reed, whom she had left in such a turmoil of resentment when she was sent to Lowood. Now Mrs. Reed is on her deathbed, and in a repentant mood has summoned her niece. As Jane approaches Gateshead, she is conscious of her change of feelings:

The same hostile roof now again arose before me: my prospects were doubtful yet; and I had yet an aching heart. I still felt as a wanderer on the face of the earth; but I experienced firmer trust in myself and my own powers, and less withering dread of oppression. The gaping wound of my wrongs, too, was now quite healed; and the flame of resentment extinguished.⁴⁸

But in reality she knew she had a home—Thornfield; and the prospect of leaving it, in view of what she believed to be the impending union of Rochester and Ingram, is terrifying. Thornfield had given her what she had yearned for: she had not been, as she put it, trampled, buried with inferior minds, excluded from communion with other spirits. With Miss Ingram established as the new mistress of Thornfield, she cannot possibly stay. But Rochester is not about to marry Miss Ingram, and with near-sadistic strains plays upon Jane’s feelings, at the same time having concealed his own, now full-grown, love for her. He evokes from her that highly explosive and eloquent declaration which is one of the climactic scenes of the book. Rochester is urging Jane to remain on after the presumed marriage. And Jane flares up:

“I tell you I must go!” I retorted, roused to something like passion. “Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you,—and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh:—it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal—as we are!”⁴⁹

She asserts her moral superiority over him, for she would have scorned the kind of union he is about to enter, a union of convenience and not of love. “Therefore I am better than you—let me go!”

It is then that he proposes to her: “My bride is here… because my equal is here, and my likeness… You—poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are—I entreat to accept me as a husband.”

She accepts him, but her acceptance is that very night accompanied by a serious storm, and the next morning she is told that “the great horse-chestnut at the bottom of the orchard had been struck by lightning… and half of it split away.”50

For Jane lives a life also full of fantasies, omens, and dreams; and the very world of Thornfield she is living in is conducive to anxieties. Now, particularly, that she is on the eve of her emotional fulfilment, there are presages that sometimes darken the blue crystal of her blue heaven. Storms in particular are frightening, for they are evocative of the deep eroticism that has been submerged; love has sharpened her sensibilities, her sensitiveness, and expanded her emotional capacities and sensual reactions, naturally plunging her into a vortex of contradictory emotional experiences. Her dream-life is one major aspect of that awakening—filled as it is with visions of infants—now laughing, now wailing. She interprets one such dream as premonitory of death, and in fact it proves to be such, for she is soon informed of the impending demise of her aunt Mrs. Reed. But such dreams will continue, though she will scarcely recognize that the child in the dream is often her own self—the outsider, the orphan, the wanderer, subjected to threats… And so too, the horsechestnut in the orchard becomes a symbol, as we shall see, both for evil and for good. As a child, she had wanted nothing so much as to be loved, as she confessed to Helen Burns; now she was loved, and she could give her own love full sway. She was no longer the “unworthy” reject. She could fully assert her “selfhood.”

Now she can exact a “charter” of equality from her beloved. She will not be a “kept” woman, like the French mother of Adèle, her ward. “I shall continue to act as Adèle’s governess; by that I shall earn my board and lodging, and thirty pounds a year besides. I’ll furnish my own wardrobe out of that money, and you shall give me nothing but—” “Well, but what?” “Your regard; and if I give you mine in return, that debt will be quit.”⁵¹

My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days see God for his creature: of whom I had made an idol.⁵²

She had as yet no clue as to the identity of the inhabitant of the upper story, though a horrifying experience preceding the wedding ceremony apprises her of her true physical existence. Her dreams acquire more and more terrifying intensity, now once more featuring a child, and herself in great anxiety; now presenting her with a vivid picture of a ruined Thornfield Hall. But the climactic fulfilment of her dread is still to come, and to bring tragedy with it. The wedding ceremony which is to join her to Rochester is dramatically disrupted by the arrival of the brother of the madwoman in the attic—who is now revealed as being Bertha Mason, the legal wife of Rochester. A succeeding episode, a visit to the attic, in which Jane participates, discloses the “clothed hyena”—the madwoman turned into a near-beast. There is nothing now for Jane to do—she decides she cannot remain at Thornfield, and resisting Rochester’s plea that she remain as his beloved, she makes her escape. Heartbroken, Rochester has in her eyes lost “the attribute of stainless truth.” But she is still in love with him.

What follows constitutes the last “act” of the novel-drama, which we may call Triumph of the Self—perhaps also Resurrection. Not knowing where she is heading, with very few possessions (which she loses on the way), Jane wanders for two days and two nights, until one evening she sinks, exhausted and thoroughly famished, at the door of the Rivers family—consisting of two sisters and their brother St. John Rivers, parson of a neighboring parish. Here she finds a cordial sympathy, and is persuaded by the Rev. St. John to undertake charge of a newly-established girls’ school, attended mostly by poor farmers’ children. A new element enters her life, and new conflicts ensue. In the course of time, she is pressed by the cleric to become his wife.

For in the Rev. St. John Rivers she is faced with a personality of seemingly monolithic power and determination. And she in turn lays bare her own ambiguities—her own drive to submit as a child, warring with the drive of insurrection. She is attracted by power, and St. John draws her and at the same time repels her. His singleness of purpose and mind seem almost irresistible. Almost—but not entirely. She stands in admiration of his monomaniacal decision to sacrifice himself in the cause of the Church by a martyrdom as missionary to India. But he is no hypocrite, no mealy-mouthed tyrant. His tyranny is toward himself, a need to subjugate within himself all earthly passions. Jane Eyre, however, is clearsighted enough to perceive that that selfsame dedication was in truth a passion for mastery and domination, which might as easily have turned him into an army general, a ruler of nations, an autocratic leader. She even senses his strong erotic nature, which he is sublimating in those other drives. She is aware that he is in fact incapable of love—whether of a woman or of humanity at large. He speaks of mankind as “worms.” Yet, she is almost swayed by his strength into joining him in his crusade to convert infidels. She will go, she says finally, not as his wife, but as his sister, his curate, his adjutant, for that is what he needs. But he is intractable….

* * *

And yet, ever present beside the powerful figure of St. John, stood the other figure—that of Rochester. Nothing could obliterate the latter’s presence in her mind and, even more significantly, in her dreams. Here a potent erotic element makes its demands:

… I used to rush into strange dreams at night: dreams many-coloured, agitated, full of the ideal, the stirring, the stormy—dreams where amidst unusual scenes, charged with adventure, with agitating risk and romantic chance, I still again and again met Mr. Rochester, always at some exciting crisis; and then the sense of being in his arms, hearing his voice, meeting his eye, touching his hand and cheek, loving him, being loved by him—the hope of passing a lifetime at his side, would be renewed, with all its first force and fire. Then I awoke. Then I recalled where I was, and how situated. Then I rose up on my curtainless bed, trembling and quivering; and then the still, dark night witnessed the convulsion of despair, and heard the burst of passion. By nine o’clock the next morning

I was punctually opening the school; tranquil, settled, prepared for the steady duties of the day.53

So, torn between dreams of true love, impossible to realize, and the insistent, immediate presence of St. John, immense in his singleness, Jane almost breaks. What she calls an “iron shroud” seems more and more to be constricting her. St. John appears to be engrossing her own “liberty of mind.” She is almost magnetized into admiration at his dedication to Him, whom he calls his “king… lawgiver… captain… the All-perfect.”⁵⁴ Under that influence, she abandons her study of German and begins to study, at his side, Hindustani. She feels that he prizes her “as a soldier would,” as “a good weapon.” Yet she is also aware that within him rages a struggle, a constant warfare to down the “human” side of himself, and that her imprisonment, should she yield, would mean the death of her feelings. She would always be forced “to keep the fire of her nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital. This would be unendurable.”

She is finally brought to a climactic explosion—her vision having become clearer and clearer—with a psychological insight that had not yet appeared in any of the Victorian novels. When she again refuses to marry him, she adds that the reason for her refusal was “Formerly… because you did not love me; now, I reply, because you almost hate me. It I were to marry you, you would kill me. You are killing me now.”⁵⁵There is one more effort on his part, as he refuses to give her up “to perdition” and “the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone,” and warns her away from being sinfully misled by “the good things in life.”

Who could resist such persistence, such strength, such self-assurance and such self-dedication? Life in death, or life itself is the choice. She had told him before that “God did not give me my life to throw away.”

And at the point of yielding, when she and St. John are alone, she has that extraordinary experience that determines her for life.

… The one candle was dying out: the room was full of moonlight. My heart beat fast and thick: I heard its throb. Suddenly it stood still to an inexpressible feeling that thrilled it through, and passed at once to my head and extremities. The feeling was not like an electric shock; but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling: it acted on my sense as if their utmost activity hitherto had been but torpor; from which they were now summoned, and forced to wake. They rose expectant: eye and ear waited, while the flesh quivered on my bones.

“What have you heard: What do you see?” asked St. John. I saw nothing: but I heard a voice somewhere cry—“Jane! Jane! Jane!” nothing more. “Oh God! what is it?” I gasped.⁵⁶

She finds Rochester again, but not at Thornfield Hall. Thornfield Hall is wrecked, burnt down as a result of a fire set by the madwoman, Bertha Mason. Bertha Mason is dead; and Rochester himself is blinded and crippled. Jane Eyre becomes his strong arm, and his eyes.

“Reader, I married him.” The line became celebrated.

She had found both love and the right to be useful. Once upon a time he was sole “giver and protector.” Now she is in a position to give, to give wholeheartedly. She is in a position to act. This, she assures her future husband, is no sacrifice.

“Sacrifice! What do I sacrifice: Famine for food, expectation for content. To be privileged to put my arms round what I value—to press my lips to what I love—to repose on what I trust: is that to make a sacrifice? If so, then certainly I delight in sacrifice.”

And when he compares himself to the old lightning-struck chestnut tree in the Thornfield orchard, she counters

“You are no ruin, sir—no lightning-struck tree: you are green and vigorous. Plants will grow about your roots, whether you ask them or not because they take delight in your bountiful shade; and as they grow they will lean towards you, and wind round you, because your strength offers them a safe prop.”57

Almost without being aware of it, she finds herself replying: “I am coming! Where are you?” And it seems to her that she hears the answering cry: “Where are you?”

She has her answer, no doubt in the making for a long time, even when she had been under constant siege, an answer that was to speak of her own growth as an individual. Whether this is to be accounted an extrasensory experience or not, matters little. And she herself comments,

“Down superstition!” I commented….“It is the work of nature. She was roused and did—no miracle—but her best.”

Nature had once more reasserted herself, in no equivocal accents. Once more, Jane had been recalled from the torpor of death, loosed from the “iron shroud,” the prison of submission, and recalled to an acceptance of Life: living, feeling, and love.

In his despair he had called to her and had heard her reply, “I am coming, wait for me.” She makes no effort to enlighten him about this telepathic miracle and her own part in it, for she would not further darken his mind. After telling his story, he utters a devout prayer of thanks to the Lord. Though blinded, he had been restored to a newer “seeing.”

Then he stretched his hand out to be led. I took that dear hand, held it a moment to my lips, then let it pass round my shoulder: being so much lower of stature than he, I served both for his prop and guide. We entered the wood, and wended homeward….

Reader, I married him…

After so much that is truly motivated and convincing, the conclusion of Jane Eyre must strike the reader as mechanical and somewhat contrived. Rochester’s conversion from an avowed “atheism” to a firm belief in God appears factitious. Setting aside these and other minor lapses, the book stands out as a superbly moving study of the struggle toward humanization of two characters, self-recognition, and recognition of other selves, of the worth of the human being, especially of a woman, and the value of the struggle to achieve that sense of worth.

* * *

A year ago—had a prophet warned me how I should stand in June 1849—how stripped and bereaved—had he foretold the autumn, the winter, the spring of sickness and suffering to be gone through—I should have thought—this can never be endured. It is over. Branwell—Emily—Anne are gone like dreams—gone as Maria and Elizabeth went twenty years ago. One by one I have watched them fall asleep on my arm—and closed their glazed eyes—I have seen them buried one by one—and—thus far—God has upheld me. From my heart I thank Him.

—Charlotte Brontë to William S. Williams, June 13, 1849

“The book is now finished (thank God).
—August 29, 1849

It might seem as if a tidal wave of calamities had broken loose upon the Haworth household, and for a while it appeared as if Charlotte, too, might be overborne. Between the end of September 1848 and the end of May 1849 she lost her brother and her two sisters, and was left alone to support a heartbroken father—she, in her own words, “the weakest, puniest, the least promising of his six children.”58 The Reverend Patrick Brontë had regarded his son Branwell as the jewel of the family, the ever-bright hope and heir, and had, like the others, watched with grief his unremitting moral and physical deterioration.

Had it not been for these afflictions, Charlotte would have had good reason to feel satisfaction, perhaps the greatest of her life. In April 1848, Jane Eyre had gone into a third printing, and she had earned altogether £500, a not inconsiderable sum. There had been the brackish taste of a few savage reviews, but there were more that had been vociferous in their appreciation and enthusiasm. In July she had gone to London, along with Anne, to visit her publishers and clear her name; for the unscrupulous publisher of Emily’s and Anne’s novels, capitalizing on the success of Jane Eyre, was proclaiming one of Anne’s works as being by “Currer Bell.” In London, Charlotte Brontë became something of a reluctant lioness, honored by the eminent of the day. Such triumphs could not mitigate the apprehensions with which she returned to the parsonage. Branwell died in September; Emily in December, 1848. In the following year Anne, too, was gone.

Sometimes she was near despair. “There must be a Heaven,” she wrote to her publisher-friend William S. Williams, soon after Anne’s death, “or we must despair—for life seems bitter, brief—blank.”⁵⁹

Who, besides her ailing father, was there to share her many griefs?

She had, however, one refuge—what she called “the faculty of imagination.” She had a talent to safeguard and to exercise. “It is for me a part of my religion to defend this gift and profit by its possession.”⁶⁰ She had her work; and with customary resilience she rose to the occasion. Interrupted as she had been, and was, time and again, she had managed to complete her second major novel, Shirley. It was published in October 1849.

* * *

If the year 1848 was an anguished one in the Haworth vicarage, it was no less tumultuous and disruptive in the wide world outside. It was a year of revolutions which, commencing in France in February, soon spread over all of Europe. An inveterate Francophobe, Charlotte Brontë had little sympathy with the insurrectionary movement in France.

… Every struggle any nation makes in the cause of Freedom and Truth has something noble in it—something that makes me wish it success; but I cannot believe that France—or at least Paris—will ever be the battle-ground of Liberty, or the scene of its real triumphs… Has Paris the materials within her for thorough reform?61

And in a letter to her old friend, Miss Wooler, in March of the same year:

… Convulsive revolutions put back the world in all that is good, check civilisation, bring the dregs of society to its surface—in short, it appears to me that insurrections and battles are the acute diseases of nations and that their tendency is to exhaust by their violence the vital energies of the countries where they occur. That England may be spared the spasms, cramps, and frenzy-fits now contorting the Continent and threatening Ireland, I earnestly pray! With the French and Irish I have no sympathy. With the Germans and Italians I think the case is different—as different as the love of freedom is from lust of license….⁶²

Alas! England was not destined to be spared upheavals and violence. Charlotte Brontë undoubtedly remembered the stormy days in the 1830s when the working population of the country, depressed and aroused by a serious economic crisis, and in utter disenchantment with the Reform Bill of 1832 that left their great body utterly unfranchised, fashioned their so-called Chartist Petition for the Reform Bill and marched in thousands on Parliament. Now, once again, heartened by the events on the Continent, and once more in the midst of another economic depression that brought down their wages and increased unemployment, they began recovering from the defeats of the preceding decade. They pressed for their Charter, asking not only their rightful vote, but also a decisive role in determining their working condition and their life’s destinies.

In setting about writing Shirley, Charlote Brontë took as her subject, locale and time, not the present upheavals or those of the eighteen-thirties, but rather the disturbances that had erupted in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire in the years between 1811 and 1823.

Chartism had not yet been born then, nor had the rapid expansion of workers’ organizations yet occurred. The industrial revolution was still in its incipient stages, although advanced enough to arouse serious discontents. New machines, steam-driven or driven by hand, had begun to make their way, and the displacement of the domestic weaving and spinning industry by the factory had already begun. Europe was in a state of war, and the reciprocal blockades were working havoc with the clothing industry. Those were years of extreme hardship, even hunger. Wages were being depressed. The domestic weaver, apprehensive of his doom, began agitating with ever greater violence against the factories and the new machinery. Under the legendary leadership of Capt. Nedd Ludd, the new “Robin Hood” of the weavers, and with his name on their lips, they banded together to redress their grievances, first in Nottinghamshire, then in the Yorkshire West Riding. Far from being the murderous mobs imagined by the panic-stricken citizens, the weavers worked in disciplined contingents. They had their printed appeals, songs, and broadsheets, such as proclaimed

Chant no more your old rhymes about Robin Hood,
His feats I but little admire.
I will sing the Achievements of General Ludd,
Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire….⁶³

Or,

Come all you cotton weavers, your looms you may pull down;
You must get employ’d in factories, in country or in town.
For our cotton-masters have found out a wonderful new scheme,
These calico goods now wove by hand they’re going to weave by steam.64

Such were the “Luddites,” the so-called “machine-wreckers.” They discriminated, records show, between the “good” and the “bad” masters, and they had numerous supporters in towns and villages, whose inhabitants often refused to reveal their identities. The equally depressed and aroused farmworkers vented their despair in the so-called “rick-burning” on farms and estates.

Charlotte Brontë was not unaware of the difficulties she faced in entering upon so complex a subject with what she herself recognized as insufficient knowledge.

As she wrote to her publisher W. S. Williams in January 1848,

… Though I must limit my sympathies; though my observations cannot penetrate where the very deepest political and social truths are to be learnt… though I must guess and calculate and grope my way in the dark… yet with every disadvantage, I mean still, in my own contracted way, to do my best. Imperfect my best will be, and poor, as compared with the works of the true masters . .⁶⁵

For the history of the Luddite struggle she used the contemporary accounts available in the Leeds Mercury, which she could obtain in the neighboring Keightly Library, as well as the oral recollections of her father, Miss Wooler, and various other witnesses, and her neighbors in the immediate surroundings.

The narrative centers on the Luddite uprising in April 1812. The woollen mill owned by William Cartwright at Rasfolds in the Spen Valley was attacked by 150 insurgents in an attempt to destroy the new shearing frames he had recently introduced into his factory. The attackers were foiled, there were a number of casualties, and William Cartwright became a kind of “hero” to the neighboring manufacturers and the local squirearchy. In pursuit of the rioters, the Rev. Hammond Robertson distinguished himself for his unremitting zeal in hounding out what he called the “vermin.” In the novel he appears as the Rev. Matthewson Helstone, and Cartwright as Robert Gerard Moore. The remaining characters are drawn from Charlotte Brontë’s immediate knowledge and vicinity. The Whig “radical” Taylor family became the Yorkes. Her own sisters are drawn upon in the principal female personalities.

Yet in another way she was embarking on a revolutionary change in her own writing. Hitherto, her novels had been “autobiographical”; the principal characters had been the narrators, and the personal “I” dominated the scenes. Such had been the case with The Professor and Jane Eyre. In Shirley, however, Charlotte Brontë is the omniscient authorial narrator, observer, and commentator. The canvas is broadened; the characters can be seen from the “outside” as well as from the “inside”; the viewpoints are multiple. In content, too, themes are multiplied and broadened to include the sociopolitical, the familial, and the clerical landscapes. Not that Charlotte’s personal “self” completely disappears from the scene, for her own experiences in Brussels reappear, albeit in an utterly disguised manner. In addition, both her sisters, Anne and Emily, emerge as the principal protagonists, highly idealized, as Caroline Helstone and Shirley Keeldar, respectively.

The style of the novel, too, shows an extraordinary diversification. The novel ranges all the way from the “satiric” and realistic to the poetical and lyrical, and even to what we might call the “mythical.” Dialogue frequently alternates with “interior” monologue.

If the “drama” of Shirley is set in a distant 1812, a time of convulsions, the ideas are those of the Charlotte Brontë of 1848, and applicable, so far as she was concerned, to her own time. The multiple points of view allow her to enlarge the canvas; the world now is seen through the eyes of three principals, all women: Caroline Helstone, a young woman of 18; Shirley Keeldar, 21; and the author herself, through her own authorial comment.

Once more the usual polarities are established: polarities of characters, as in Caroline Helstone, impecunious niece of her uncle the Rev. Helstone, the embodiment of the “passive” but rebellious young woman, longing to escape from the “gray” Rectory; and Shirley, the “active” personality, now come of age and full heiress of a considerable estate that includes the factory owned by Robert Moore. The other polarities are those of clerical import, the “good” and the “black” shepherds and their service or neglect of service to their flocks; and not least important, the polarities now of immediate and urgent history: the conflict of the “mercantile” and the “landed” interests in a time of war and serious economic crisis, social upheaval and rioting.

Once again we find Nature and the “natural” human being at war with social convention, rigid conformity, blind authority; human individuality as against oppressive rigidity; feelings against repression. The book is in essence a vindication of the worth of the human being, the individual personality, and the need to safeguard its inner values against erosion and annihilation. The Rectory thus becomes symbolic of the prison, as is the matrimonial market that sets status, wealth, and social position above the heart’s inclinations and needs. At the center stands the woman, and that is only natural; for she is the “natural” victim and “prisoner” in Victorian society.

The personal crisis and dilemma of Victorian womanhood may be said to be most sharply crystallized in the utterances of Caroline Helstone: “What was I created for?… What is my place in the world?… Does Virtue lie in abnegation of self?… I do not live. I endure existence…”

They are also expressed in the defense of Life, and one’s personality, by youthful Rose Yorke, daughter of the Whig radical Hiram Yorke, the recollected image of Charlotte Brontë’s friend Mary Taylor: “I am resolved that my life shall be a life, not a black trance like the toad’s, buried in marble, nor a long slow death like yours in Briarfield Rectory.” (This to Caroline.) And to her mother, who had observed that “solid satisfaction is only to be realized by doing one’s duty,” Rose objects:

Right, mother! And if my Master has given me ten talents, my duty is to trade with them, and make then ten talents more. Not in the dust of household drawers shall the coin be interred. I will not deposit it in a broken-spouted teapot, and shut up in a china-closet among tea-things. I will not commit it to your work-table to be smothered in piles of woollen hose. I will not prison it in the linen-press to find shrouds among the sheets; and least of all, mother… least of all will I hide it in a tureen of cold potatoes, to be ranged with bread, butter, pastry and ham on the shelves of the larder… Mother, the Lord who gave each of us our talents will come home some day, and will demand from all an account… Suffer your daughters, at least, to put the money to the exchangers, that they may be enabled at the Master’s coming to pay Him His own with usury.66

The real Mary Taylor acted upon her own injunction and went off to New Zealand.

The children of the Yorke family are fortunate that, save for their mother, they find responsive sympathy and hearing from their father, the well-to-do Yorkshire industrialist with radical Whig proclivities. But Caroline Helstone, one of the two chief protagonists of the novel, has no such fortunate court of appeal. Her uncle the Rev. Helstone is a hidebound Tory and a good exemplar of extreme Victorian male chauvinism. He has no understanding of the young woman who is sensitive and thoughtful, of her yearning for some sort of self-fulfilment, whether emotional or intellectual. He is a “man of bronze” who has no respect for women as such, or for their “weak female minds.” He would have been (and this is not the first time such a clerical character is so characterized in Charlotte’s novels) a soldier, or a huntsman.

He thought, so long as a woman was silent, nothing ailed her, and she wanted nothing. If she did not complain of solitude, solitude, however continued, could not be irksome to her. If she did not talk, and put herself forward, express a partiality for this, and aversion to that, she had no partialities or aversions, and it was useless to consult her tastes. He made no pretence of comprehending women, or comparing them with men: they were a different, probably a very inferior, order of existence; a wife could not be her husband’s companion, much less his confidant, much less his stay….⁶⁷

Caroline’s hesitant wish to become a governess offends his genteel, status-conscious soul. “While I live, you shall not turn out as a governess, Caroline. I will not have it said that my niece is a governess.”

Barring marriage, what prospect lies before her? Spinsterhood and loneliness. As for marriage, dowerless as she is, there is not much hope….unless… unless… She is young, and beautiful, and very much in love with her cousin Robert Moore, owner of the adjacent woollen mill. At first hopeful, she soon despairs as she sets herself beside the wealthy young heiress Shirley. Her uncle’s advice is scarcely a comfort:

Stick to the needle—learn shirt-making, and gown-making, and pie-crust making, and you’ll be a clever woman some day. Go to bed, now; I’m busy with a pamphlet here….Put all crotchets out of your head, and run away and amuse yourself.”⁶⁸

With Helstone’s “air of a veteran officer,” the author remarks, “Gospel mildness, apostolic benignity, never seemed to have breathed their influence over that keen brown visage.”⁶⁹ He views marriage as a capital aberration.

Caroline is a devout Christian, and under such circumstances she cannot but feel she had been abandoned by God as doomed to eternal reprobation. She cannot believe that life’s fulfilment can lie in abnegation of the self, that life’s sole purposes can be satisfied in doing good to others and annihilating oneself.

Hers is a rebellion against Death and desiccation. Hers is an affirmation of the sacredness of Life and a purposeful existence.

Is there not, she asks, a terrible hollowness, mockery, want, craving, in that existence which is given away to others for want of something of your own to bestow it on? I suspect there is. Does virtue lie in abnegation of self? I do not believe it.⁷⁰

Was she merely a “poor doomed mortal” asking in vain why she was born and to what end she was living? Measuring time at the Rectory, not really living but “enduring” existence, what was there in this enclosed prison to satisfy “a famished heart”?

She addresses herself to the “Men of England” in tones that almost echo those of John Milton’s Areopagitica:

Men of England, look at your poor girls, many of them fading around you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating to sour old maids—envious, backbiting, wretched, because life is a desert to them… Look at the numerous families of girls in this neighbourhood….The brothers of these girls are every one in business or in professions: they have something to do. Their sisters have no earthly employment, but household work and sewing, no earthly pleasure but an unprofitable visiting, and no hope, in all their life to come, of anything better. This stagnant state of things makes them decline in health; they are never well, and their minds and views shrink to wondrous narrowness… What do they expect them to do at home? If you ask, they would answer, sew and cook… as if they had not germs of faculties for anything else… Could men live so themselves?… God surely did not create us, and cause us to live with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe in my heart we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it….71

Caroline is Nature—embodiment of the “natural” woman, advocate of spontaneity, feeling, of the Self. “Untaught, intuitive, fitful, she is revolted by any denigration of Love, the blaspheming of what she calls the “living fire, seraph-brought from a Divine altar,” and she is horrified by any denigration of marriage.⁷²

If Caroline Helstone is the exemplification of “Nature” and what might paradoxically be called “passive” rebellion, Shirley Keeldar is “Nature” as an active element. Caroline is the imprisoned victim, incapable of realizing her potentialities, incapable of achieving the freedom she longs for, fettered as she is by both family ties and her economic dependence. The best she can hope for is the “freedom” of a subordinate governess. But even that is denied her by her status-conscious uncle. Where, then, is her emancipation to come from? There is only one person around her who would understand her true feelings and her plight. That is Shirley. In Shirley’s company she find herself as an equal.

Shirley stands for power. She has the capacities generally attributed to men. Her name is in fact masculine, for her parents had hoped for a son, and instead…. She is twenty-one, and has come into her estate. She is, as she says, “landed proprietor and lord of the manor.” She alludes to herself as a “gentleman,” and she even whistles! She is fearless and independent. But she, too, in spite of all her advantages, is seeking to find meaning to her existence. And like Caroline she is a rebel—against constrictions, against the falseness of conventional life, against the repression of feelings and thought.

Louis Moore, a brother of the manufacturer, and her former tutor, thus describes her to herself:

There is not a shoulder in England on which you would rest your hand for support—far less a bosom which you would permit to pillow your head. Of course, you must live alone.⁷³

But above all, she rebels against the dominant conception of womanhood entertained by society, the derogation of woman, and particularly the traditional vilification of our first Mother, Eve. Bitterly, she reproaches the poet John Milton for the role he assigns the first of created woman in Paradise Lost. In a highly poetic, often rhapsodic apostrophe, she places Eve among the Titans: The passage is one of the most eloquent, and indeed one of the boldest that Charlotte Brontë ever wrote. The Sunday church bells are summoning both Caroline and Shirley to church, but Shirley insists on remaining in the open, and to Caroline’s dismay, declaims a paean to Nature instead. Her devotion will be of a different strain:

… Here I must stay….Nature is now at her evening prayers; she is kneeling before those red hills. I see her prostrate on the great steps of her altar, praying for a fair night for mariners at sea, for travellers in deserts, for lambs on moors, and unfledged birds in woods. Caroline, I see her, and will tell you what she is like: she is like what Eve was when she and Adam stood alone on earth.

As Caroline interposes: “And that is not Milton’s Eve, Shirley.”

Milton’s Eve! Milton’s Eve, I repeat! No, by the pure Mother of God, she is not! Cary, we are alone: we may speak what we think. Milton was great; but was he good? His brain was right; how was his heart?… Milton tried to see the first woman; but, Cary, he saw her not… It was his cook that he saw… I would beg to remind him that the first men of the earth were Titans, and that Eve was their mother: from her sprang Saturn, Hyperion, Oceanus; she bore Prometheus… I say there were giants on the earth in those days— giants that strove to scale heaven. The first woman’s breast that heaved with life on this world yielded the daring which could contend with Omnipotence… The first woman was heaven-born. Vast was the heart whence gushed the well-spring of the blood of nations; and grand the undegenerate head where rested the consort-crown of creation… That Eve is Jehovah’s daughter, as Adam was His son.

And in response to Caroline’s insistence that they go into the Church:

Caroline, I will not; I will stay here with my mother Eve, in these days called Nature… Heaven may have faded from her brow when she fell in Paradise, but all that is glorious on earth shines there still…

Such was Shirley’s “Titan vision,” and one does not wonder that Caroline dubs her a “Pagan.”74

Her vision is indeed “Pagan”—a worship of Nature as primal goddess—and Eve as a primal deity, none other than grand Nature herself. At a far remove from Milton’s “snare,”⁷⁵ Eve is here rehabilitated womanhood.

The unrest within them is paralleled by the turbulence of their outside world. Far and wide the Luddite agitation is threatening the mills and their masters. The new shears and frames that were being transported for Robert Moore’s factory have been waylaid and destroyed, and soon his very mill is threatened with attack. Both Caroline Helstone and Shirley are involved in Moore’s fortunes: Caroline because she is in love with her cousin, and Shirley as proprietor of the land on which the factory is built. Both witness from a distance the attack and the resistance, each with her own emotional reference and emotional investment.

For Caroline the struggle is a heroic contest between good and evil, a knightly tilting against maleficent forces, a combat seen through a haze:

A crash—smash—shiver—… A simultaneously hurled volley of stones had saluted the broad front of the mill, with all its windows; and now every pane of every lattice lay in shattered and pounded fragments. A yell followed this demonstration—a rioters’ yell—a North-of-England—a Yorkshire—a West-Riding—a West-Riding-clothing-district-of-Yorkshire rioters’ yell. You never heard that sound, perhaps, reader? So much the better for your ears—perhaps for your heart; since, if it rends the air in hate to yourself, or to the men or principles you approve, the interests to which you wish well. Wrath wakens to the cry of Hate; the Lion shakes his mane, and rises to the howl of the Hyena: Caste stands up, ireful against Caste; and the indignant, wronged spirit of the Middle Rank bears down in zeal and scorn on the famished and furious mass of the Operative class. It is difficult to be tolerant—difficult to be just—in such moments.76

Caroline is ready to go to Robert Moore’s aid. “I would help him,” she says to Shirley, and the latter, more levelheaded and less sentimental:

“How? By inspiring him with heroism? Pooh! These are not the days of chivalry: it is not a tilt at a tournament we are going to behold, but a struggle about money, and food, and life.”

“It is natural that I should be at his side.”

“As queen of his heart? His mill is his lady-love, Cary! Backed by his factory and his frames, he has all the encouragement he wants or can know. It is not for love or beauty, but for the ledger and broad-cloth, he is going to break a spear. Don’t be sentimental; Robert is not so.”⁷⁷

The attack is repelled; there is gunfire, and six of the assailants are injured, one fatally. None of the defenders suffers appreciable harm…

The true implications of the Luddite clashes, that incipient class-struggle that the poet Shelley had understood so clearly and that in time would have such a determining influence on English society, escapes Shirley, as it did the author herself. But they do understand the nature of the economic crisis besetting the country, the way in which England’s war against Napoleon and the consequent blockades are damaging the interests of the commercial and industrial classes, represented by the Whig opposition, that desired an end of the war and sought a change of government. They also sought the abolition of the restrictive Corn Laws that worked in favor of the agricultural squirearchy by keeping up prices, raising the cost of bread. The fall of wages, unemployment and even hunger, the introduction of more efficient machinery into the factories, were the sparks that finally flamed into violent response on the part of the lower orders.

The failure to penetrate into the meaning of the struggles is reflected in Shirley’s (and Charlotte Brontë’s) attribution of the insurgence to a few rabblerousers, to a disreputable and degenerate leadership, and to their misunderstanding of the organization of the various groups of agitators and insurgents. Thus the spokesman for the local Luddites, Moses Barraclaugh, is a one-legged tailor, a “Methodee,” a crapulous and ranting “hypocrite”; another agitator, Michael Hartley (the man who later shoots Moore), is a “half-crazed weaver… a frantic Antinomian in religion, and a mad leveller in politics.”78 That the insurrectionists were moved by moral as well as social and economic considerations, that many of them were devout dissenters with considerable understanding of the issues, is completely overlooked.

Shirley lectures the radical Whig manufacturer, who is anti-government, anti-Church hierarchy, and a near-republican, on his extremism:

All ridiculous, irrational crying up of one class, whether the same be aristocrat or democrat—all howling down of another class, whether clerical or military—all exacting injustice to individuals, whether monarch or mendicant—is really sickening to me: all arraying of ranks against ranks, all party hatred, all tyrannies disguised as liberties, I reject and wash my hands of… You think you are a philanthropist; you think you are an advocate of liberty; but I will tell you this—Mr. Hall, the parson of Nunnely, is a better friend both of man and freedom than Hiram Yorke, the Reformer of Briarfield.⁷⁹

Shirley is forthright and honest in her consciousness of her own class-interests as an aristocrat, landowner, and factory owner. She is generous, and has aided the mill owner Moore through this hard period. She is benevolent in recognizing the plight of the suffering poor and unemployed. She is charitable, and believes that benevolence and philanthropy are the ultimate cure for the evils generated by the incipient industrial system. But she will not stand for “ruffian defiance,” and she will resist it with all her power. Her ideal “working-man” is William Farren, who has lost his factory job:

He had the aspect of a man who had not known what it was to live in comfort and plenty for weeks, perhaps months past: and yet there was no ferocity, no malignity, in his countenance: it was worn, dejected, austere, but still patient.⁸⁰

Yet this was the man who just a while before had been brusquely rebuffed by manufacturer Moore, with whom he had pleaded to go slow on the replacement of machinery; this was the man whose family was starving!… And Shirley’s favorite clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Hall, who is all sympathy for Farren and his family, and offers him some financial help, has no better counsel for the unemployed man and his plight that to say, “Sad times… And they last long. It is the will of God: His will be done! But He tries us to the utmost.”

Charlotte Brontë, we may guess, had little knowledge of what went on in the factories, and it is with a certain startling surprise at her naïveté that we read her description of the children’s morning procession to work in Mr. Moore’s plant. Remember, it is six o’clock in the morning:

… The mill windows were alight, the bell still rung loud, and now the little children came running in, in too great a hurry, let us hope, to feel very much nipped by the inclement air. And, indeed, by contrast, perhaps the morning appeared rather favourable to them, than otherwise, for they had often come to work that winter through snowstorms, through heavy rains, through hoarfrost.”⁸¹

Charlotte Brontë might have overlooked that she was describing a situation that was occurring before the 1830s, that is, before the passage of a law that restricted children’s employment to 48 hours a week; those above 13, to 68 hours! And that it was not until 1850 that a ten-hour law affecting women and young persons was passed! And that the little ones in 1811 and 1812, whether they worked in their home cottages or in the mills, were kept from early dawn to sunset and beyond. She feels satisfied that “neither Mr. Moore nor his overseer ever struck a child in their mill….The novelist may be excused from sullying his page” with a record of the deeds of “child-torturers, slave-masters and drivers”…

It was eight o’clock; the children released for half an hour from toil, betook themselves to the little cans which held their coffee, and to the small baskets which contained their allowance of bread. Let us hope they have enough to eat; it would be a pity otherwise.

It is not that either Shirley or her author is in favor of the machine industry or its masters. Both of them are violent in their feelings about the new industrialism as well as the “mercantile spirit” which has taken hold of their country.

Here is Charlotte Brontë speaking in her own voice:

All men, taken singly, are more or less selfish, and taken in bodies they are intensely so. The British merchant is no exception to this rule; the mercantile classes illustrate it strikingly. These classes certainly think too exclusively of making money; they are too oblivious of every national consideration but that of extending England’s (i.e., their own) commerce. Chivalrous feeling, disinterestedness, pride in honour, is too dead in their hearts. A land ruled by them alone would too often make ignominious submission—not at all from the motives Christ teaches, but rather from those Mammon instills… Whoever is not in trade is accused of eating the bread of idleness, of passing a useless existence. Long may it be ere England really becomes a nation of shopkeepers!82

And her heroine, Shirley, has her own bitter experience at the hand of the “mercantile” Robert Moore, whom she admires, and whom she has helped financially. Hard-headed and cool in the advancement of his threatened establishment, he sues for the hand of the wealthy Shirley, frankly professing his objective. She, who is fond of him though not in love, is horrified:

“You have made a strange proposal—strange from you; and if you knew how strangely you worded it, and looked it, you would be startled at yourself. You spoke like a brigand who demanded my purse, rather than like a lover who asked my heart… You want to make a speculation of me! you would immolate me to that mill—your Moloch!⁸³

Shopkeepers, Mammon and Moloch! Incipient industrialism and the mercantile establishment have rarely been so upbraided!

Shirley is a Tory, yet a rebel. Now, having come of age, she can declare her independence of the taboos and proscriptions of her class. In that respect she offers defiance to her own class, particularly in the matter of marriage. She will not marry for rank, status or greater wealth. Like Caroline she affirms the mandates of the heart, the sanctity of Love. Defying her uncle and former guardian Mr. Sympson, she rejects the proposal that she make a “brilliant” match with the aristocratic Sir Philip Nunnely. Her ideal of marriage is shockingly different from his:

I walk, she says, by another creed, light, faith, and hope than you… an infidel to your religion; an atheist to your god. Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you too, if not an infidel, are an idolater… Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon rises before me as a demon… Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best—making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile… He fetters the dead to the living… Your god is a masked Death!… My heart, my conscience shall dispose of my hand—they only…84

Pursuant to her feelings—her heart—she accepts the indigent former tutor of the Sympson household as her betrothed, and later as husband. The outraged Sympsons break all ties with her. The tutor is none other than Louis Moore, a brother of Robert Moore, whose confession of love for Shirley, with all its prior uncertainties, hopes, and despairs, is contained in a series of notebooks, unmailed letters, and interior monologs in which he fights out his inner emotional battles. Thus, once again, Charlotte Brontë’s unforgettable Brussels love for M. Heger, that tenacious obsession, is recapitulated—but, as in The Professor, with a reversal of roles. If it is the man Louis Moore who is writing, it is Charlotte Brontë the woman who is guiding his pen, with all her affection, diffidence, and doubts. This time, fantasy ordains success for her imaginary characters…

If Shirley is affirmative womanhood, Nature and Eve, assertive Nature and Freedom, brave in her acceptance of the lowly tutor as betrothed and bridegroom, she is also the embodiment of Power—a power derived from wealth, which enables her to engage in an active life and exercise her philanthropies toward the less fortunate of her neighbors. Through humane benevolence and charity she hopes to mitigate the injustices of her society. She is Power because she has Money, just as Caroline is helpless because she lacks it. Yet for all her affirmation of the Titanism of Mother Eve, and her manifesto of emancipation from traditional detraction, Shirley stops short of complete self-emancipation, of the assertion of woman’s equality with man. Even the superior woman needs a “master.” In an exchange with her hidebound uncle, she describes the kind of man she would choose—one that would be her “master.”

I will accept no hand which cannot hold me in check… Did I not say I prefer a master? One in whose presence I shall feel obliged and disposed to be good. One whose control my impatient temper must acknowledge. A man whose approbation can reward—whose displeasure punish me. A man I shall feel it impossible not to love, and very possible to fear.⁸⁵

Untamed Shirley is referred to repeatedly in Louis Moore’s “little blank book”—his confessional—as a “leopardess,” “pantheress,” “lioness”—a wild and beautiful animal, perverse, unpredictable, capricious. But she will eventually bow to her “keeper.” In condescending to her tutor, she is indeed “rising.” She is willing to be tamed by a stronger, wiser hand. The relationship hitherto existing between pupil and master is thus symbolically and actually now extended, as each of them achieves “freedom.” He abjures his tutorship, and she, her rank and wealth:

“Mr. Moore,” said she, looking up with a sweet, open, earnest countenance [the reader must remember it is Louis Moore who is recording the incident], “teach me and help me to be good… Be my companion through life; be my guide where I am ignorant; be my master where I am faulty; be my friend always.”

Charlotte Brontë’s authorial benevolence brings the novel to a fortunate close. Despite the Rev. Helstone’s cynical warnings about marriage, Caroline weds Robert Moore. In defiance of her uncle, Shirley marries a tutor. Robert Moore, reformed mill-owner, learns charity, and plans to build new factories in the region and replace rural beauty and greenness with cottages for laborers, and with mills and their mill stacks (much to the annoyance of the author of the book). Troubled times fade into the background. The personal element triumphs over the social, as a number of rioters are either transported overseas or hanged….

Yet in spite of these accommodations, the novel did not escape serious censure. Both the publishers and a number of reviewers (the Times being preeminent) asserted that “Currer Bell” had been uncommonly brash, if not utterly blasphemous, in his treatment of the clerical establishment, particularly in his satirical and quite impious treatment of the local curates. That practically the author’s whole life had been spent in the vicinity of those worthies, and that she knew them as few of the critics did, did not matter. That each of of the personalities so sharply delineated in the book had his prototype in reality—that, too, did not matter.

It is true, the poor curates got short shrift at Charlotte Brontë’s hand. They are described as “shuffling”; they exploit the hospitality of their hosts, come to tea and dinner in droves, frequently even unannounced; they are demanding and, worst of all, indulge in backbiting, are intolerant of other sects, and disparage one another.

As Shirley remarks to Hiram Yorke,

When I hear Messrs. Malone and Donne chatter about the authority of the Church, the dignity and claims of the priesthood, the deference due to them as clergymen; when I hear the outbreaks of their small spite against Dissenters; when I witness their silly, narrow jealousies and assumptions; when their palaver about forms, and traditions, and superstitions is sounding in my ear; when I behold their insolent carriage to the poor, their often base servility to the rich, I think the Establishment is indeed in a poor way, and both she and her sons appear in the utmost need of reformation.”86

But they are not all of them a bad lot! There are the devoted shepherds like Mr. Hall and others like him, but for whom the Church of England would be in a sad state indeed. “Britain would miss her Church if that Church fell. God save it! God also reform it!”⁸⁷

To her critics, Charlotte Brontë responded with courage.

To her friendly publishers, who had remonstrated with her that her critical attitude toward the Church might offend many readers, not to mention the Church establishment itself, she replied:

… What you say with reference to the first chapter shall be duly weighed. At present I feel reluctant to withdraw it, because, as I formerly said of the Lowood part of Jane Eyre, it is true….I should like you to explain to me more fully the ground of your objections. Is it because you think this chapter will render the work liable to severe handling by the press? Is it because knowing as you now do the identity of “Currer Bell,” this scene strikes you as unfeminine? Is it because it is intrinsically defective and inferior? I am afraid the two first reasons would not weigh with me—the last would…⁸⁸

She will write, she insists time and again, without considering “what is elegant and charming in femininity.”—“I must have my own way in the matter of writing.”⁸⁹

How could they understand that writing had been her salvation during the years of indescribable distress and grief; her affirmation of independence from Time and Death; in fact her transformation of Death into Life—the life of Caroline and Shirley—both of them transfigurations and heightened reinvocations of her sisters Anne and Emily; her way of saying Aye to Life itself, in the zestful, humor she lavished along with satire on the curates; her rebellion and wrath against the Rev. Helstone and the high-handed and low-minded family of the Sympsons; and her own frustrated affective life sublimated in the ultimately happy union of Caroline with Robert Moore, and of Shirley with Louis Moore? She had built happy monuments for her two sisters, without mawkishness or bathos, and enshrined courageous and outspoken womanhood as titanic Eve.

Shirley as a work of art is obviously flawed—flawed, in the first place, because the canvas is too large and too broad; too immense for the “parochialism” of its author to master. The world is viewed from the narrow vantage grounds upon which both Caroline Helstone and Shirley Keeldar stand—the self-occlusive, the personal. They are both protesters against the enslavement of woman, but neither (and that includes Charlotte Brontë herself) can see that such enslavement is bound up with the society which includes not only the dominant male, but also the Luddite incursion into the life of Yorkshire. Thus, resolutions are entirely individual and personal: Caroline’s problem is revolved by marriage; Shirley’s larger concerns, by both marriage and philanthropy. Shirley is able to “act” where the less opulent Caroline moves “passively,” because Shirley has money and Caroline does not. Louis Moore, the poor tutor who is in love with “freedom”—as he so fervently proclaims—attains to it by marrying into wealth, so that he too can turn from the “passive” into the “active.” Robert Moore, now reformed, and with the economic crisis over, will convert the countryside into ideal factories, ideal housing for the operatives; he will put “justice” above self-interest…

As for the “woman” question, Charlotte Brontë has perhaps given us the clearest of her views in one of her letters, redolent of a quietism, if not utter pessimism, for which she was sharply reprimanded by her militant friend Mary Taylor, who was making a new life for herself in New Zealand:

Here is Charlotte Brontë to her publisher, W.S. Williams:

I often wish to say something about the “condition of women” question, but it is one respecting which so much “cant” has been talked, that one feels a sort of repugnance to approach it. It is true enough that the present market for female labour is quite overstocked, but where or how could another be opened? Many say that the professions now filled only by men should be open to women also; but are not their present occupants and candidates more than enough to answer every demand? Is there any room for female lawyers, female doctors, female engravers, for more female artists, more authoresses? One can see where the evil lies, but who can point out the remedy? When a woman has a family to rear and educate and a household to conduct, her hands are full, her vocation is evident; when her destiny isolates her, I suppose she must do what she can, complain as little, bear as much, work as well as possible… At the same time, I conceived that when patience has done its utmost and industry its best, whether in the case of women or operatives, and when both are baffled, and pain and want triumph, the sufferer is free, is entitled, at last to send up to Heaven any piercing cry of relief, if by that cry he can hope to obtain succour.90

* * *

So stood I, in Heaven’s glorious sun
And in the glare of Hell—
My Spirit drank a mingled tone
     Of seraph’s song and demon’s moan—
     What my soul bore my soul alone
     Within itself could tell.
            —Emily Brontë

It seems almost incredible that a household like that of the Brontës, with all the intimacy that bound its members together, should still have been marked by secrecy and mystery. As sisters and brother had once been secret collaborators on the juvenile Angria narratives, so too in their maturity they harbored their own secrets. These included nothing less than their creative works. Thus the father, the Rev. Patrick Brontë, was not aware that he had major novelists and poets in his house, whose works had achieved publication—until he was so informed. And it was only by sheer accident that Charlotte Brontë discovered that her sister Emily had been composing numerous poems. In 1845 Charlotte set about getting these published, along with poetry by herself and her sister Anne. They appeared in 1846 under the pseudonyms of “Currer,” “Ellis,” and “Acton Bell.” And in 1847 there was cause for rejoicing when novels by the three sisters saw the light: Jane Eyre by Charlotte, Wuthering Heights by Emily, and Agnes Gray by Anne, all of them under their assumed names. But whatever their joys, and their reclusive father’s total surprise, during the following years these were to be heavily paid for, almost as if some malignant spirit was hovering over the rectory and demanding retribution. The father was losing his sight. The brother, Branwell, was living through a self-inflicted decline in both body and mind, a hapless victim of alcohol and opium. Death struck three times: between September 1848 and January 1849, Branwell, Emily, and Anne died. After attending Branwell’s interment on October 1, 1848, Emily caught cold, and on December 19, she died. Anne died early the following year. At their deaths Branwell was thirty-one years old, Anne was twenty-nine, and Emily thirty.

The “secret” of Emily Brontë’s interior life will probably never be resolved. Whatever documentary material existed at one time has, with very few exceptions, disappeared, or was destroyed by Charlotte herself. In Emily’s case we unfortunately do not have letters that might have supplied us with a partial key, as do those of Charlotte. The few scraps of self-revelation we have from Emily only tease us into sad reflection on how much we are indeed missing. Left to surmises, we must turn, for even a partial comprehension, to her poetry, to Wuthering Heights, and here and there to Charlotte herself.

“Bleak solitudes” (Emily own words) might be said to describe Emily’s self-enclosed existence. Within that solitude she lived a strangely tormented and excited life—a life of the imagination. Whatever her living experiences of the outer world, such as her brief tenure as governess or teacher or her stay in Brussels as a student; whatever she was able to gather in the talk of the Haworth household, servants’ tales or gossip, and not least, from reading; could only form a small element in her life of imagination. Such life was expansive and daring. It supplied the needed surrogates for her creative activity, her poetry and her novel. Here it was that she could tread strange and even dangerous paths—paths that no doubt startled, alarmed, and perhaps even appalled Charlotte.

When Emily spoke of the “mingled tone of seraph’s song and demon’s moan,” she revealed a dualism, a dichotomy, which seems to have haunted her throughout life. When still very young, she gave evidence of heterodox thinking about the universe. While at school in Brussels, she wrote a French essay on butterflies which, we may be sure, must have startled M. Héger, her Catholic master.

The essay was entitled “Le Papillon”—“The Butterfly.” Actually it is a kind of confession of faith, the full meaning of which is conveyed in its conclusion, when she addresses the butterfly directly: “Mais pourquoi m’adresser à toi seul?” she asks.

Why do I address myself to you alone? All of creation is equally unfeeling. The flies above the brook, the swallows and fish diminish their number every minute; and they in turn become the prey of some tyrant of the air or of water. And man for his amusement or his necessities kills their murderers. Nature is an inexplicable problem. She exists on the principle of destruction: either all beings become an indefatigable instrument of death of others; or they cease to live themselves. And yet we celebrate our day of birth, and we praise the Lord for allowing us to come into the world….I am almost in doubt as to the goodness of God, for not having destroyed man on the day of his creation….However, a voice within me speaks: Let no human creature judge His Creation; for just as the caterpillar is the origin of a splendid butterfly, so is the globe the embryo of a new heaven and a new earth, whose least beauty will exceed the human imagination….God is the God of justice and mercy.91

Thus she tries to escape from a profound pessimism, taking refuge in the assurance of some ultimate divine justice that would somehow resolve the world’s and nature’s unending warfare.

Like Goethe’s Faust, she nurtured “two souls” within her breast, one striving upward, the other drawn downward. Within Emily, there was this warping sense of inner “corruption” that threatened perdition and doom (undoubtedly an inheritance from her Calvinist aunt Branwell); the other, the rebel soul, revolted by such doctrine. Already, in an earlier poem she had spoken unmistakably of her inner feeling and especially her sense of isolation:

I am the only being whose doom
No tongue would ask, no eye would mourn;
I never caused a thought of gloom,
A smile of joy, since
I was born.

In secret pleasure, secret tears,
This changeful life has slipped away,
As friendless after eighteen years,
As lone as on my natal day.

And she concludes:

And then experience told me truth
In mortal bosoms never grew.
’Twas grief enough to think mankind
All hollow, servile, insincere;
But worse to trust to my own mind,
And find the same corruption there.92

She had always been something of a stranger even in her own family, a kind of resident “outsider,” even though she took part in the household duties and actually enjoyed them. Stubborn, proud, fearless yet morbidly timid, she was rarely seen in the streets of Haworth, and its inhabitants scarcely knew that she existed.

Her vision of the world darkened with the years. As she looked up at the heaven of “glorious spheres… rolling on its course of light in eternal bliss,” she expressed the hope that at least on high there might exist a world where Love and Virtue were not besmirched and betrayed, where Truth did not war in vain against Treachery, where Life was not a “labour void and brief,” ruled by Death, “despot of the whole.” Perhaps there, too, was a realm where humankind was not the victim of an inexorable, merciless Fatality, holding sway through “relentless laws that disallow virtue and true joy down below.”⁹³

Like Charlotte, she recoiled from their aunt’s rigid Calvinism, with its dread of eternal damnation for the many, the doom of reprobation, and its proclaimed salvation for the “few.”

And say not that my early tomb
Will give me to a darker doom:
Shall these long, agonising years
Be punished by eternal tears?

No; that I feel can never be;
A God of hate could hardly bear
To watch through all eternity
His own creations’ dread despair….

If I have sinned, long, long ago
That sin was purified by woe.⁹⁴

Such then her world! a theatre of woe, with Death an ever-present reality. As she looked out of the windows of the parsonage, there it was, engraved on the gravestones in endless rows. In 1841 she wrote a death-haunted poem, in some ways her most touching:

I see around me tombstones grey,
Stretching their shadows far away….

And, reflecting on the “torments, and madness, and tears and sin” that lay buried there, she contends that Heaven itself, and its fortunate children, those blessed ones, could never understand the sufferings that bow down mortal man and woman. And even more daringly, in near-pagan tones, she insists that it is only Earth, mother of us here, who alone understands and compassionates them fully. Earth has no wish for any one else to share her misery. And she addresses her:

Indeed, no dazzling land above
Can cheat thee of thy children’s love….
We would not leave our native home
For any world beyond the Tomb;
No—rather on thy kindly breast
Let us be laid in lasting rest;
Or waken but to share with thee
A mutual immortality.95

Exultantly, defiantly, she cries out,

I know our souls are all divine:
I know that when we die,
What seems the vilest, even like thine
A part of God himself shall shine
In perfect purity….⁹⁶

What havens of refuge then for herself? And what solace for a world so woefully afflicted?

For herself there were two havens: the Mind or Imagination; and Nature. There was also a third—Death; and the death wish was often with her:

O for the time when I shall sleep
Without identity,
And never care how rain may steep
Or snow may cover me.⁹⁷

For the living Emily, it was the Mind, the Imagination—her Mind, and her Imagination—that formed the sacred retreats where she found the Freedom she was seeking. Here she could create her own world, a world of vividness and reality. Here she could revel in all the exaltations of self-knowledge and creation. And the other refuge, Nature, too, was a secure habitation. Here, like some pagan deity, she could roam. The moors were her pastures of freedom.

Imagination is her “God of Visions.” It is her “slave… comrade and King.” And she speaks to that “god”:

So hopeless is the world without,
The world within I doubly prize…
Where thou and I and Liberty
Have undisputed sovereignty.⁹⁸

And am I wrong to worship where
Faith cannot doubt nor Hope despair,
Since my own soul can grant my prayer:
Speak, God of Visions, plead for me
And tell why I have chosen thee!⁹⁹

As for Nature,

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

What have these lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.100

Such, too, Emily’s “secret.” The poems offer the best clues to her novel Wuthering Heights.

* * *

After Emily’s death, Charlotte Brontë wrote a preface to the reissued edition of Wuthering Heights. What emerged was more an apologia than an illumination. Charlotte was nonplussed by what she termed the “rough utterance, the harsh manifested passions, the unbridled inversions, the headlong partialities of unlettered hinds and rugged moorland squires.” What would readers make of this “horror of great darkness” that broods over so much of Wuthering Heights? She was baffled by the character of Heathcliff. “Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know,” she wrote. “I scarcely think it is.” In her eyes he appeared like some “magnate of the infernal world.”

Dismayed, Charlotte sought to explain Emily’s creation as the product of some unconscious or subconscious driving force that her sister could not control—a sort of demonic presence that took possession, breaking through all rational restraints—and that propelled the central characters, in the novel, Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, toward each other, and toward Death. How often, in her own life, had not Charlotte herself called upon Reason to restrain and curb her own dangerous feelings! In her sister’s novel she found an insupportable glorification of Passion as a redemptive power. Where, she wondered, could this maelstrom have come from? It was scarcely surprising that a number of reviewers of the book viewed it as a product of a wild, barbarous imagination.

Scholars have tried to trace the literary sources of Wuthering Heights in Emily’s far-ranging reading, say, of Byron, George Sand, Sir Walter Scott, and the very popular contemporary novels of “terror”—the so-called “Gothic” romances of such writers as Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, author of the notorious Monk, or the tales of the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann.

Setting aside all these possible derivations, Wuthering Heights is a consciously developed, original entity, the product of a thoughtful mind and a rich imagination, embodying the writer’s emotional and metaphysical outlook in a superbly constructed action containing all the elements and inevitability of true tragedy. Critics have remarked how carefully Emily Brontë ordered the chronology of events, and with what precision she treated such details as land tenure and inheritance.¹⁰¹

What was no doubt to shock early readers of the novel, and is striking even today, is the element of violence that dominates the narrative from its beginning almost to its very end, a violence that is set against the physical background of the rugged Yorkshire moors. Wuthering Heights is well named, the local term “wuthering” being suggestive of storm and tumult. The very first scene sets the ultimate tone of the novel: strangeness, gruffness, and disorder. The narrative has a double structure: an outer “scrim,” which serves to frame the inner retrospect or flashback that is the central core of the book. We begin in the year 1801, that is, when what we like to call the “drama” is over. The action really commences in 1771. In 1801, Mr. Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, visits its owner, Mr. Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights. Thereafter we move back to 1771, through the second “scrim,” as the story unfolds through the narration of the principal raisonneur, Nelly Dean, the housekeeper. Nelly Dean has the great advantage of having lived long enough to be a member of two households. From childhood to the very end she has been an eyewitness of all significant happenings.

At the opening, Mr. Lockwood meets the raw and powerful figure of Heathcliff; his daughter-in-law, the younger Catherine Heathcliff, née Linton; and the strange wild young Hareton Earnshaw, son of Hindley Earnshaw, once owner of Wuthering Heights. Mr. Lockwood encounters a weird and disorderly household.

Forced by a snowstorm to remain overnight, Mr. Lockwood, through a perusal of her handwritten notes in books and in an Old Testament, becomes aware of another Catherine. While asleep, he has a nightmare vision: the long-dead Catherine Linton, née Earnshaw, appears at the window, pitifully pleads for admittance, and is brutally shut out by the dreamer. When on the following morning Heathcliff is told of this experience, he gives way to a frenzied outbreak. Such is our prologue to the entire story which, a short time later, Mr. Lockwood is enabled to obtain in full from the lips of Nelly Dean, a simple woman, housekeeper at Thrushcross. Not only has she been both participant and onlooker, but she is endowed with a somewhat startling memory. She is levelheaded, though superstitious and full of premonitions. The full import of what has happend is beyond her. This is wisely left to the reader.

The novel has, as we have suggested, all the elements of a classical tragedy. It has a “tragic error” with all its unfailing consequences, and moves toward a dénouement and a final restoration—“all passion spent.” The drama is staged against the self-enclosed world of Yorkshire. The outside world exists physically only as if by hearsay. We live for a time in an enclave of thoughts, feeling and actions, segregated like Emily Brontë’s own world, yet always aware of wider implications—almost cosmic in character. It is a little world full of wide contentions, physical, psychological, and even social.

* * *

What is central to Wuthering Heights is warfare, manifesting itself in the spiritual as well as the material realm—a war between Nature and Social Convention; a war between the “natural” in man or woman against the conventional social order; a war between the “non-possessor” and the “possessor.” It is a war between Power and Weakness, of Life against Death, and in the moral order, Integrity of the Heart against Corruption. In the fierceness of the combat there is something that suggests an element of the “demonic” in the participating characters.

The struggle begins when Mr. Earnshaw, head of a farming family, on returning from a business trip to Liverpool, brings back with him a young boy, a “waif”— nameless, homeless, emaciated—whom he found wandering in the streets of the city. He had been moved by compassion for the “swarthy” child, who seemed to belong to another race. The boy is given the single name of Heathcliff and no Christian first name, as if to underline his role in life—the unpossessed and the unpossessing outsider. More ominously, he is seen by Mr. Earnshaw and, more insistently, by Nelly Dean, as harboring within him something of the demonic. The one-year-old Catherine Earnshaw is drawn to this outsider in a kind of conspiracy of identities. For she too is something of an outsider in the family, already a rebel, insubordinate, wayward, capricious, and capable of both cruelty and sympathy. Catherine is a mystery to her father and to those around her. She is as complex as she is beautiful. In the household, Catherine and Heathcliff have two enemies: the sanctimonious servant Joseph, and Catherine’s older brother Hindley, who resents the intruder and “usurper” and perpetrates various acts of cruelty against him; surreptitiously while the father is alive, and outrageously and inhumanly when he falls heir to Wuthering Heights. Nelly Dean is and remains ambivalent, suspicious and premonitory, as she watches Cathy, who in her eyes “was too much fond of Heathcliff.”102 Now and then she is inclined to sympathize with Heathcliff when she sees him humiliated, abused, and eventually reduced to the status of a servant. But on the whole she perceives in him an element of the diabolic.¹⁰³ Her commonplace mind cannot, of course, gauge the true natures of Catherine and Heathcliff or penetrate into the mystery of their reciprocal attraction. Nor can she perceive the “demonic” element in Catherine herself. They are both “children of Nature” akin to the Yorkshire moors, which have become their true homes. Here they roam like wild native creatures, sharing nature’s wildness and terrors, as well as her beauty.

It is on one of those wandering expeditions that Catherine and Heathcliff stumble upon the home of the Lintons, a gentry family. Peering through their windows, they become aware of another world, one of opulence and comfort—an adventure which is to become a crucial turning point in both their lives. Their intrusion is soon discovered—Catherine is bitten by the watchdog. She is admitted into the household, and her identity is soon disclosed. Heathcliff is driven away—another such humiliation as he will add to his catalogue of abuses, never to be forgotten or forgiven. But even more tragically for him, Catherine is taken up by the Lintons. Edgar Linton eventually becomes a suitor for her hand, and will marry her.

Here, one may say, is the first part of the “tragedy.” Here lies Catherine’s “tragic guilt”: in her betrayal of her own nature, and of Nature herself, by yielding to the allurements of status and wealth. She has done so deliberately, consciously.

Her “error”—or her “tragic guilt”—is only too evident to herself, as she confesses to Nelly Dean in a memorable and moving scene. Catherine is nearing sixteen. During all her years she has been witness to the outrages perpetrated against Heathcliff and has seen him finally reduced to service in field and stable. She recounts a dream to Nelly in which she saw herself in heaven. Yet, she adds,

Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth, and the angels were so angry they flung me out into the middle of the heath on top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy….I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there (i.e. her brother) had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, but because he’s more myself than I am…

Catherine is not aware that, while she is speaking, Heathcliff is not far from her, and remains listening long enough to hear her say that it would degrade her to marry him. Infuriated, he slips away, and does not hear her declaration of love, nor the passionate words that followed:

What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here: My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it….Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.104

After an absence of three years, Heathcliff returns, thoroughly transformed. Where he has been, what he has been doing during that time is as mysterious as his own origins. Now he is a wealthy man, and as Nelly describes him, “grown tall, athletic, well-formed.” His face shows no mark of his former degradation.

With his reappearance Catherine’s obsession flares up, now to its fullest intensity. Nor has Heathcliff’s passion for Catherine been diminished. But now it is conjoined with the seething fury of vengeance, first directed again Hindley Earnshaw, his former foe, but now also again the Linton household. Nor has he forgiven Catherine her betrayal and her marriage to Linton. His malice now achieves something of a Satanic grandeur, as he skilfully weaves his net around his victims. Once himself expropriated, Heathcliff becomes the insatiable expropriator. Once a humiliated servant, he prepares to tread down his former masters and oppressors. Like an anarchic world-destroyer he sets about his work. In his rage against Linton, he abducts the latter’s sister, marries her, and after she and their son both die, becomes heir to the Thrushcross estate. In like manner, by playing on Hindley Earnshaw’s weaknesses and dissipations, he becomes possessor of Wuthering Heights.

But Catherine, his beloved, is dying. While Edgar Linton is away, Heathcliff obtains entry into Catherine’s death chamber. Nelly Dean records their last meeting:

An instant they held asunder, and then how they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive; in fact, in my eyes, she seemed directly insensible….She put up her hand to clasp his neck, and bring her cheek to his as he held her; while, he, in return, covering her with frantic caresses, said wildly—“You teach me how cruel you’ve been—cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed your self. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they’ll blight you—they’ll damn you. You loved me—then what right had you to leave me?….Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us; you, of your will did it. I have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine….”

And Nelly continues:

… About twelve o’clock that night was born the Catherine you saw at Wuthering Heights….A puny, seven months’ child; and two hours after, the mother died.¹⁰⁵

For a moment, then, this chaotic world is relieved by the human and emotional outpouring that sweeps over both characters. For Catherine there is nothing but death; for Heathcliff, a life in death. Heathcliff has attained through his power the vengeance he has sought, but at what price! At the price of utter dehumanization, which, in the end, he recognizes bitterly. Now, it is as if the graveyard has taken possession of him. A pathological, morbid hallucination surrounds him—the presence of Catherine. In a near-necrophilic derangement he even uncovers her grave, sees her still unmarred face, and feels that she is present at his side.

Yet there are two creatures living with him at Wuthering Heights to remind him of the past and recall him to the present. There is young Hareton Earnshaw, son of Hindley, Heathcliff’s former tormentor and victim, who is dead; and there is young Catherine, widow of Heathcliff’s deceased son. She is now eighteen, and Hareton, twenty-three. When Heathcliff looks at their eyes, he believes he is seeing Catherine. He is himself near death, for his will to live is gone. When he dies he will be buried by the side of her who had never been his, and yet had never left him. He insists that he be buried without the benefit of a Christian service.

He has left behind him earnests for the future. Catherine and Hareton are to be married and will live at Thrushgrove Grange. Wuthering Heights will be inhabited by the superstitious old servant Joseph.

And here the retrospective portion of the story ends.

We are again at the beginning. Lockwood is listening to Nelly’s long tale. As they sit there, the garden gate swings open. Catherine and Hareton are returning from their walk. Mr. Lockwood reflects: “They are afraid of nothing….Together they would brave Satan and all his legions.”

The “tragedy” of Wuthering Heights is over. As in all tragedy, we end with a restoration of Order. In young Catherine and young Hareton there will be the new birth. Hitherto uncouth and almost savage, Hareton (another Heathcliff, only younger) will be humanized by Love. For Catherine is the young Eve, leading Adam; she is guide, teacher, and mate. The elder Catherine’s “tragic guilt”—her violation and betrayal of the heart—have been sufficiently atoned for. Love, the redemptive power of true Passion, has been justified. One can almost hear Emily herself whispering, “It is the only redemptive force of Nature that justifies itself.”

* * *

The metaphysical universe that Emily Brontë appears to be constructing postulates a dualism in which the forces of good and evil, light and darkness, are in a constant state of war. The two principal characters of the novel are in fact “anarchs” in defiance of such a universe: Catherine the “anarch” within the social system; Heathcliff, outside it. She is a “rebel,” without understanding the nature or grounds of her rebellion, a source of constant grief to her domineering father; Heathcliff’s rebellion is the revolt of the “outcast,” the nameless and propertyless foundling. There is a demonic element in both these figures that drives them toward one another in an almost half-conscious instinctual recognition of their identity. They fuse and complement each other, forced toward one another by a natural passion that is its own justification. When Catherine affirms that she is Heathcliff, she is also affirming the demon within herself. It is her betrayal of that element in herself that makes for Heathcliff’s destruction, and turns him into a debased Lucifer—a demonical Nemesis. For in a nihilistic world the only redemption lies in Passion, Love, and the Imagination. It is Emily Brontë’s rebellion against a constrictive universe, a rebellion against a constrictive life, against oppression, against a denial of Nature. It is the rebellion of the biblical Eve when she submits to the fatal temptation which, while “unparadising” her, will also bring her the ambiguous paradise of knowledge, sex, and love.

Is it any wonder that Charlotte Brontë was abashed when she read Wuthering Heights, at its depicted world: on the one hand bounded by the Haworth graveyard, Death; on the other by the wild moors, eternal Nature herself!

Emily Brontë died as she had lived, defiant even when near death. Not until the very last hours would she agree to have one of what she called the “poisoning doctors” attend her. Charlotte had spoken of Emily as possessing an “upright heretical and English spirit.” How heretical, Charlotte would not admit even to herself….

As the old, bereaved father and his two surviving children, Charlotte and Anne, followed the coffin to the grave, they were joined by Keeper, Emily’s fierce, faithful bulldog. He walked alongside of the mourners, and into the church, and stayed quietly there all the time that the burial service was being read. When he came home, he lay down in Emily’s chamber door, and howled pitifully for many days…106