I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure, born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld; or offered only at a price I cannot afford to pay —Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
I am Heathcliffe — Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Poeple little know the injury they do to children by laughing at their faults, and making a pleasant jest of what their true friends have endeavoured to teach them to hold in abhorrence … [my employers had] a surprising effect in repressing all familiar, open-hearted kindness, and extinguishing every gleam of cordiality that might arise between us … I was used now to wearing a placid smiling countenance when my heart was bitter within me. Only those who have felt the like can imagine my feelings, as I sat with an assumption of smiling indifference — Anne Bronte, Agnes Grey
The Bronte house in Haworth
Dear Friends and readers,
I’ve been away for about 5 days during which time I read a couple of books I’d long wanted to read — mostly because of the way I heard academic colleagues talk about them: one was Lucasta Miller’s The Bronte Myth, which seemed ever to be accompanied by phrases meaning Miller had at long last (relieved tones here) freed the Bronte sisters from a context just filled with falsehoods. Now I know that the Brontes are yet another literary group of women around which a fan cult of sentimental emotionalisms and present day (not just Victorian) identity politics swirl. The question was, what was so inaccurate or were the people advocating the book referring rather to skewed presentations. It did not sound as if it was the latter. So I was even eager to know what I had been mistakenly believing.
It turns out to be highly debatable whether the Bronte stories are filled with inaccuraries. Rather the obstacle for understanding the books partly by understanding the lives and other writing or art of the writers was a matter of prejudiced and unexamined interpretation and emphases, some of which simply is that the popular audience prefers to learn not so much all they can about writers’ lives rather than study their books, but what will reinforce their own belief system. Lucasta Miller’s book is valuable because she really treats so many biographies (novelizing and non-fiction) of Charlotte and Emily, and offers a detailed picture of what scholarly and primary documents there are to study. She often also seems to be correcting various inaccurate details about major people in the Brontes’ lives.
But alas, not always. She also produces her own biases, most often when it comes to presenting Charlotte and Emily as suffering from having been made victims. What she wants to do is substitute another ideal or norm, one as feminist (in her book a very ambiguous word) as any she attacks: she is concerned to make us see Charlotte (and Emily at times as well) as bright (in tone), ambitious, resilient, robust career (need I use the word net-workers) women, thwarted perhaps, but more from death than any particular local injustice. The portrait reminded me of the one nowadays replacing the older view of many a Renaissance woman writer as withdrawn, austere, with a new assumed stereotype, a woman whose main goal is her career, someone who resembles a modern woman academic.
Charlotte Bronte (1850) by George Richmond
Emily Bronte (n.d.) by Branwell Bronte
Anne Bronte is mostly omitted as someone not needing such whole-scale re-drawing; she has only recently been paid adequate attention to and is from the get-go being presented as fighting robustly for women’s rights. The bitter caustic quality of Agnes Grey, its strong depiction of the social world as dysfunctional is ignored by Miller in favor of briefly describing and praising Anne’s nowadays conventional targeting of alcoholism and feminist critique of permanent marriage bonds.
I find Miller’s book to be in fact a continual sustained and unfair attack on Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography as well as “the interfering” Gaskell who is (somewhat ironically) presented as a normalizer (see my other blog for Gaskell analyses). Miller is concerned to defend Patrick as good father who encouraged all his children to read. Nowhere though do we learn his income (which would account for much misery) nor why he left his daughters at Cowan Bridge. Charlotte’s husband, Arthur Nicholls may be perfectly understandable his distaste for publicity, but that Charlotte married him rather than George Smith or someone else does seem to be the result of her less than acceptable status as a clergyman’s daughter (the Austens had trouble marrying out of their immediate clan too). We are told they are misrepresented but are not given evidence beyond thumbnail sketches which turn them into common modern-like decent men. She even (though not wholly unexpectedly since her sympathies do not encompass Branwell), justifies Mrs Robinson or Lady Scott (Branwell’s employer who may have committed adultery with him) as within her rights to defend her reputation. Lady Eastlake’s withering scorn and resentment of the low governess-writers is not clearly brought out.
To Miller, the isolation of these women, their deprivation, the instilled class insecurity and stigmas, were all exaggerated, much of it the product of Gaskell’s determination to excuse them for having written their radically shocking novels (which Gaskell is presented as mostly disliking), perceived by Gaskell as a danger to the careers of women like herself. By the time she finished describing Haworth village it sounded like the apparently cheerful and business-like corner mall near my house. It may be that Gilbert and Gubar’s interpretation of Bertha Mason as a double for Charlotte herself is not one Charlotte would have recognized and it may be the way the Brontes regarded their neighbors shows their own desperate narrowness and alienation (which would include an attack on sexualized women such as Bertha is supposed to represent), but it is a legitimate way of our understanding Charlotte’s novel.
I wondered if Miller had read Mary Barton, arguably just radical and threatening (to the capitalist establishment). If so, she does no justice to Gaskell’s own complicated politics (though she quotes Jenny Uglow now and again).
Miller’s defensiveness about Emily is especially fierce and tendentious. No Emily was not angry that Charlotte tried to publish her poems; of course she would have wanted them published. She probably didn’t like the patronizing. Emily was a fully conscious and even learned (two translations from the Latin in Emily’s younger hand exist) writer. She was not a pantheistic mystic. She was probably often “happy and relaxed” when alone. Miller’s way of retelling the story that Charlotte told Gaskell of how Emily kept and once cruelly beat a bulldog into quivering submission, wounding the animal is typical. Miller scrutinizes Gaskell’s imagery as melodramatic and therefore not worthy of belief. Then she quotes a servant “who could remember nothing of it.” Hareton’s cruel hanging of animals in Wuthering Heights is offered up as influencing Gaskell’s anecdote when the text could just as well represent a lingering memory of Emily’s own behavior. Within 10 pages, the incident has become the “dog-beating caricature” (see pp 224-33). We are to dismiss it as exaggerated if not wholly untrue.
Emily (it is implied and also said) is just not explainable. She is too private. Is she? Miller asks us to read many of the poems as about characters in the fantastical sagas of Emily’s younger imagination. Do they then have nothing to do with her?
I don’t mean to say Miller is obtuse or hides evidence: she retells the story of Heathcliff to show how disturbingly sadistic and vengeful he becomes.
The 1991 film of Wuthering Heights which presents both generations and Ralph Fiennes as an searingly angry half-crazed man is a perceptive enactment
She tells of a new find of translations from the Latin by Emily which are accompanied with sketches by her of a man holding a boy up by his hair; he is about to beat the boy in front of another man. Another man is flogged next to a heap of corpses. Miller wants us to believe these are extrapolations from Horace’s text where there is an allusion to Medea. But this is not the Medea story (pp. 286-87).
For some texts Miller is particularly good, e.g., Charlotte’s rich analyses of Lucy’s breakdown in Villette (though not as willing to bring in Heger as an explanation). Her analyses of Emily’s poetry, especially when she separates out the original lines from those Charlotte rewrote or added to, together with her probable list of books read by all four Brontes gives us a literary context to understand Emily’s work in.
But she is obfuscating. She distrusts biographies as legitimate art and the biographical as a legitimate approach; one can predict how she will judge a critic by how he or she regards biography. Henry James is used as an insightful authority because he inveighed against the uses of biography. Mary Robinson’s biography with its original emphasis on Branwell becomes “an exercise in moral rehabilitation,” “biographical apologia” (pp. 238-43). Repeatedly the implication of Miller’s responses to the Charlotte’s letters and Emily’s leftover fragments to whomever is they are performances, a kind of personating an identity, and letters are the very lifeblood of biography. What then do we do with Emily’s student essay, “The Butterfly:”
Nature is an inexplicable puzzle, life exists on a principle of destruction; every creature must be the relentless instrument of death to the others, or himself cease to live (quoted not by Miller, but by Bluestone in his chapter on the 1939 film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, in Novels into Film, p 109).
Miller does make an exception for Rebecca Fraser’s The Brontes: Charlotte Bronte and Her Family, one of the few biographical texts Miller praises. This one too is often praised and I wanted to read it for the same reasons I wanted to read Miller: to help me see what is accurate and inaccurate. Now (from Miller’s descriptions admittedly) I realize Fraser’s contribution is also to target Gaskell’s biography as what has to be done away with, to use biographical methods comes up with a strong defense of Patrick Bronte and to normalize Charlotte in terms of modern academic career women’s lives and goals.
Patrick Bronte in old age
In the the later parts of the book Miller has an easy time making fun of modern novelizations by pop authors, filmic and textual versions of the Brontes’ lives, but again makes her academic norms and life biases clear when it came to dealing with recent writers. Recalling how recently free adaptations of texts have found more favor with critics than faithful ones, she praises post-modern playful fictions with play with the biographical facts.
Oddly (except he is such a respected figure), she is careful to take Hughes’s appropriation of Emily Bronte seriously: “it reflects his impulse to clear up the mess left by Plath’s suicide by imposing a fatalistic order.” What should have been said is his impulse to erase how much he was to blame for his adultery and desertion of Plath. We see how she is careful to distinguish her heroines from Plath’s misery, whom she half-blames while (very much in her vein of wanting to deny death-wishes in her women writers) mentioning how “other commentators on Plath’s suicide reject the idea that it was an inevitability” and suggest maybe “she did not really want to die and expected to be saved” (pp. 279-80). I suppose that’s why she sealed the room she gassed herself in.
The book is an eye-opener certainly — but one where Miller is trying to substitute a new modern academic career woman stereotype for a more complicated and in some ways historically accurate portrait which emerges from a careful reading of traditional and recent scholarship. She exposes herself and the world she is praised by, as much as she does her variously respected, resented and mocked targets. What we get is a suggestive new Bronte myth. Pace all Miller says, Gaskell’s book is a masterpiece of imaginative and biographical art and offers rich insights into all three Bronte sisters’ work. It’s carefully substantiated, thick ethnography too. If Gaskell is silent, reticent, evasive when it comes to a presentation of Charlotte’s sexuality so too is Miller, especially when she gives no alternative for Freudian-psychoanalytical & hidden-injury-of-class approaches.
Elizabeth Gaskell (in 1854) by Samuel Lawrence
The Brontes lived a hard inward life in Yorkshire, a deprived life as young women in an awful school, they had few opportunities for advancement of any kind, and three young died, within one year (Emily is a kind of rage) and Charlotte not long afterward, of a pregnancy she should not have risked. The reader can also use Miller’s book as a sort of encyclopedia for Charlotte and Emily as it cites & describes so many sources and criticisms, including Patsy Stoneman’s.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
P.S. Good articles on the Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights films may be found in Barbara Tepa Lupack’s 19th Century Women at the Movies: Adapting Classics Women’s Fiction to Film:
Lin Haire-Sargeant, “Sympathy for the Devil: The Problem of Heathcliff in Film Versions of Wuthering Heights” and “Feminism is Bronte’s Jane Eyre and its film versions (with a new postscript by E. Ann Kaplan), pp 167-207.
E.M.
A reply from Maria Torres:
Hi Ellen – what an interesting, thoughtful essay on Miller and the Brontes. I bought Miller’s book as soon as I could, and came away with some mixed impressions. I posted them on the Bronte discussion group, and, if you’re interested, here it is for you too. Hoping you find it useful,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BRONTE/message/15217
If you cannot reach it, she has given me permission to put the text here too:
“Well, over coffee and a spiced-apple muffin yesterdayafternoon, I finished
“The Bronte Myth”. Nice, good read with lots ofideas and lots to think over.
But, early on, I felt some mental red flags start todistract my attention.
As one major result, I put in order for the edition ofMrs. Gaskell’s letters that Lucasta Miller is referring to (I think it’s the standard edition for Mrs. Gaskell’s letters). It came yesterday, morning. Lemmetellya, it’s about 1,000 pages, and hardcover, so unfortunately, it isn’t the kind of thing I can lug around during the work week. But I did drag both books with me on my break, and I started a preliminary comparison of what Miller says Gaskell says and what Mrs. Gaskell actually says.
There are differences. But first let me spout about how I came to my current position:
The red flags started waving because of particular wordsLucasta Miller
inserted while discussing Mrs. Gaskell and her work. Words like “chatty”,
“gossipy” and especially “trickery” stood out to me and came across as an
attempt to steer the reader into a condescending view of Mrs. Gaskell, and
also into a position of distrust.Instead of having this effect on me, I began to debate Lucasta Miller when she described her take on Mrs. Gaskell.
Now, I’m all too willing to concede that Mrs. Gaskell did a great dis-service to Papa Bronte, and that she is responsible for the foundation of the Bronte myth; and that, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, no matter how much scholarship will dig up, the imagery of Mrs. Gaskell will continue to
permeate the popular view of the Brontes because she is so solidly true.
Having now read some of Mrs. Gaskell’s novels and stories, including “Cranford”, “Wives and Daughters”,”Mary Barton” and her gothic tales, I find that one of the qualitie sI most like about Mrs. Gaskell is her general ability to find humanity, humo rand compassion even for most of her villains. Her style is engaging but not superficial.
In addition, having a small idea of her life story, I know that Gaskell’s situation and development was not, as Lucasta Mille rimplies, all peaches, cream and marital complacency. Mrs. Gaskell was an infant when her mother died, and when she’s expecting her own first child, she lets you
know, quietly and uncomplainingly, the void and uncertainty this loss
ha sleft her with. She lost most of her care-takers before the age of 20, and spen tmuch time nursing them — yesterday evening, I scanned a restrained and painful letter Mrs. Gaskell writes to her sister-in-law while nursing her aunt through the stroke that would kill her. She had a strained and painful relationship with her stepmother. Her brother disappeared at sea, and you can sense the loss and wish for recovery in some of her stories, like “Cranford”. She had a baby son, Willie, who died at the age of nine months and whose deathresulted in a depression for his mother, who wrote in a letter how much she misses watching the baby by the hearth, and that no one knows how much this has changed her. Lucasta Miller mentions
this event, but her treatment of it tends to make it feel less full of impact than Charlotte’s losses and griefs. Her oldest daughter, Marianne, was delicate and a constant source of constant worryfor Mrs. Gaskell.
Carrying my own view of Mrs. Gaskell, which came into conflict with Lucasta
Miller’s, I decided that the defendant should speak a little for herself. Now, since the Letters only came yesterday, and since it’s a monster volume, I only had time for a couple of spins of comparison, but I’ll give one discrepancy discovered over muffin and caffeinne yesterday afternoon:
In a footnote, Lucasta Miller, talking about the beginnings of the relationship between Charlotte and Mrs. Gaskell, says that, on a walk during
a visit to (the Shuttleworths?) Mrs. Gaskell took the opportunity”as an
excuse to quiz Charlotte about the moors at Haworth.” She gives the source
as page 127 in the Letters book. Off I hopped, in the letter sbook, and
relay to you this quotation, which I scribbled on a piece of paper:
“Briery Close was situated high above Low-Wood and of course commanded an extensive view and wide horizon. I was struck by MissBronte’s careful examination of the shape of the clouds and the signs of the heavens, in which she could read, as from a book, what the coming weather would be. I told her that I saw she must have a view equal in extent at her own home.She said that I was right, but that the character of the prospect of Haworth was very different; that I had no idea what a companion the sky became to anyone living in solitude — more than any inanimate object on earth — more than the moors themselves.”
Okay. I don’t get much sense of Mrs. Gaskell opportunistically seizing a
chance to “quiz” Charlotte about anything. I see Charlotte displaying a
skill, Mrs. Gaskell drawing a logical conclusion from it, and Charlotte
volunteering a subjective response. I sense communication, not an interview
aimed at getting information. Lucasta Miller’s interpretation was, to me,
evidence that she has an agenda every bit as sharp and subjective as did
Mrs. Gaskell or any other writer on the Brontes, and that I should carry my
salt-shaker when reflecting on what she says just as much aswith anyone
else — even more to a degree, since one of her aims is to debunk agreat
deal of what previous authors had to say.
Other discrepancies, un-Gaskell related:
Lucasta Miller, reporting on Muriel Spark’s bio of Emily,says that Spark
has a view of Emily as self-perpetuating, quasi-mystical creative force
without many influences in play. My take on Spark was verydifferent: she
goes through great length to explain that she sees Emily aseccentric but
practical, understanding that money and security was necessary tosupport an urge to write, and only coming into her ultra phase very late,developing
slowly from about the Brussels period. She makes a point of considering Aunt Branwell’s legacy in Emily’s perspective on current security;and, as I
recall, treats her as a writer with mystical tendencies rather than as a
mystic who put words on paper.
When discussing Chitham’s bio of Emily, Lucasta Mille rexamines, then
focuses and zeros in as his major point, Chitham’s speculation that Emily
had a particular connection with Shelley, and with a particular poem by
Shelley. Like Miller, I’m not clear on how far I want to ride this theory,but Chitham is very, very clear that he is speculating, and taking his speculations to what seems to be a logical conclusion. He very clearly
leave sopen a space for the reader to question him and form other opinions.
By thesame token, Lucasta Miller does not discuss Chitham’s extensive
discussions on Emily’s in-depth education, including studies in geometry,
evidence of which exists among Emily’s papers, and some of which Chitham
reproduces, and which are, I think in “Art of the Brontes” book. Chitham
shows plenty of evidence that he considers Emily to be an untidy but
concentrated and skillful craftsperson in her developing art, and, contrary
to what Lucasta Mille rimplies, discusses German influences such as Novalis
not only on Emily but on Anne, too.
Also, if she had paid more attention to Anne, she would probably have been
able to note that Anne knew Latin, on the basis of her purchases at Thorp
Green, and, I believe, other evidence, and that if Anne knew Latin, it
should be no surprise that Emily did, too.
These two points make it evident to me that Lucasta Miller should be read
very carefully, and with an eye to what she may be wanting to make the
reader think.
Maria Torres
Dear Maria,
Thank you for the endorsement. I think I would never be able to get into conventional print my critique of Miller. She is just too centrally appealing to women academics — and her take on the Brontes is found in revisionist takes of other women. I was unable to publish a review of a literary translation and article about Vittoria Colonna because I centrally critiqued the idea that Colonna was performative (you’d think she was going for tenure)
Your posting is very valuable, especially where you quote the originals and show Miller’s bias several times — in more than Gaskell’s case and I love that you add she should have dealt with Anne too.
It’s important to push back these new forms of what is ultimately an anti-socialistic feminism — we are to dismiss the idea there are any victims and admire what is presented as natural when it’s a cultural enactment of the upper middle class..
Ellen
I read this book some years ago and, like others, was inspired to read Gaskell’s “Life” of Charlotte. I remember getting sort of lost after a few chapters of Lucasta Miller and thinking that any minute now some great revolutionary “myth” about the Brontes would be revealed to me. Then the whole book got a bit technical and I failed to make the grade in terms of understanding.
However I did end up reading Gaskell and drawinga few conclusions about the Brontes, not least being that there was something very strange here … What Gaskell did do was to accidentally paint the sisters accurately and when you hear about sadistic incidents like Emily beating her own dog with her own fists (a loving act of discipline?) and then tenderly restoring it to health, you begin to see Wuthering Heights …
The Brontes and DH Lawrence have certainly got a myth attached to them. They are both regarded as infinitely more worthy because “soulful expressions of that which is present in all of us”. Perhaps it’s my pragmatic soul … The myth appears to be that these are great works of imagination when in fact they owe much to the cathartic outpourings of abused people.
Anielka
Thank you for your reply, Aneilka. It’s interesting that you are not taken by the “myth” and see the books as products of abuse. Social abuse is the way I’d put it: two were franker about it (Charlotte and Anne), Emily so alienated could only express her rage through metaphor as well as violence in story and (occasionally) behavior. Branwell couldn’t cope at all and became alcoholic. Patrick Bronte was apparently a poet too (a book of his poems has now been published), but he was clearly part of the abuse (why did he leave them in that school) — though one must remember it was not his fault at all he had such a tiny income and his position in a cold, damp (unhealthy in the rooms) area in Yorkshire.
I think some of their novels and poetry masterpieces, and to me you need only read the prose styles to know we are in the presence of geniuses, and do agree with Miller that the works give rise to the myth but think the works are more responsible for this than Gaskell. Gaskell is like James-Edward Austen-Leigh who didn’t quite invent the “myth of Austen” as a chaste witty spinster with some dark understandings but who provides refuge for us, so much fun she is. Gaskell and JEAL put together in a palatable way for the average person what they misunderstand from the books. I don’t think Gaskell misread the book but her biography was used by those who do; I do think JEAL misread and then was used to make Austen popular for the first time. That’s how I’d see it.
And without going into a long proof, I’d distinguish the great works “nearly perfect as works of art as Jane Eyre (Trollope agrees with me here, and thinks Austen’s P&P another “perfect” in its way), Villette (a more mature JE), Tenant of Wildfell Hall (marred a bit by too much preaching against alcoholism, but brilliant in the use of perspectives & time), Agnes Grey (gem). Wuthering Heights is powerful but problematic because its amorality is not admitted to nor well understood and its depiction of sexuality child-like. Emily wrote great poetry, and Charlotte and Anne have some great poems. I’ve never read Patrick’s. Gaskell’s biography is one of the masterpieces of biographical art in our language (as JEAL’s memoir is not). And I’d add that Daphne DuMaurier’s Infernal World of BB ought to be regarded as part of this core of works. Miller did make me want to read Gerin’s books on each of the Brontes.
Ellen
Just a word on Patrick Bronte (I know I’ve gone on about this before…!): Mrs. Gaskell pretty well shafted him in her biography of Charlotte, and rather unfairly. Taking from primary documents, Juliet Barker, Edward Chitham, and others have discovered that this was a man interested in educating daughters as well as sons; who was curious about and encouraging of developing intelligence in the young; who, though a clergyman, tolerated the unorthodox belief systems of all his children; who spent hard-earned money on music and art lessons for all his children.
The Cowan Bridge fiasco is much more complicated than is usually represented:
The two eldest girls had been sent to a school prior to Cowan (I’ll have to find the name and the years at home, in my Barker book or Chitham). The school was, as I recall, expensive, and the two girls had been sick. Cowan School claimed to offer good education for a low fee. Maria aned Elizabeth were enrolled at Cowan in July 1824. Charlotte was enrolled in August 1824; Emily in November 1824.
A family friend from Thornton, Elizabeth Firth Franks, visited Maria, Elizabeth and Charlotte during her honeymoon with James Franks, clergyman at Sowerby, and gave them each some money. Since Emily isn’t mentioned, this implies a visit between August and November. The note is in a diary entry, which I would dearly love to get my greedy hands on; but Elizabeth Firth Franks was a good and lifelong friend. If she had seen anything wrong at the school, she would have written to Mr. Bronte or at least have mentioned it in her diary. Since no one has leaped on anything in her diary, I have to assume, for the time being, that she didn’t see anything horrible between August and November.
A typhoid epidemic broke out in the school in December 1824. Maria Bronte was withdrawn February 1825. She died three months later of TB. Elizabeth was withdrawn at the end of May and died June 15; and Charlotte and Emily left June 1, 1825. Mr. Bronte was notified about Elizabeth’s condition and rushed to the school to get her. Edward Chitham, in his bio of Emily, comments that Charlotte and Emily were not, in fact, at Cowan itself at the time of Mr. Bronte’s arrival to get his daughters, but at, Silverdale, on Morecombe Bay. This was a home owned by William Carus-Wilson, the clergyman in charge of Cowan Bridge School.
The implication, therefore, is that, until December, when the typhoid epidemic broke out, Cowan Bridge was neither better nor worse than any
other school operative at this time. We don’t know for sure when Maria Bronte became ill (but the illness was not, apparently typhoid, but TB, though the one may have exacerbated the other). We don’t know when the authorities notified Mr. Bronte about Maria’s condition, but he got her in February, and she lived at home for three months afterward, May 6, 1825, so this was not, relatively speaking, waiting till the last minute to get her, and the implication is that if any of the other girls had been sick at the time, the implication is that he would have taken them, too. If Maria was sick enough to take home, Mr. Bronte may even have reasoned that it would be safer for the other sisters to be at the school; also, with Branwell and Anne still at home, a quieter place for Maria to hopefully recover; and possibly also an easier nursing assignment for Aunt Branwell.
Elizabeth was withdrawn May 31, already ill; Charlotte and Emily the day after, neither of them noted as ill, but both of them away from Cowan Bridge.
After this, all the Bronte sibs were educated at home until Charlotte went to Roe Head in 1831, about 6 years later. When Ellen Nussey visited Haworth, she remembered Mr. Bronte telling stories at the breakfast table, often “gothic” flavored, and how much Emily in particular seemed to enjoy them. Mr. Bronte mentioned having to step in to moderate arguments among the sibs resulting from their imaginative games, and remembered that Charlotte was almost always the winner of these arguments. Considering how busy he was in Haworth, a place which was big, industrial and needy, he was a concerned and involved father, who appreciated the eccenctricities of all his children, and, within the scope of his means, did his best to encourage their minds and independence.
Maria
ejbronte@gmail.com
Maria again:
I’ll answer as fully as I can here at work and away from my sources. These (would!) include Orel’s collection of contemporary testimony about the family, including comments from servants, Haworthians, and the usual suspects (Ellen Nussey, Mary Taylor); also Barker’s biography; Chitham’s bios on Emily and Anne; and the three volumes of Bronte letters edited by Margaret Smith.
Anyway. Mrs. Gaskell’s impressions of Mr. Bronte are from very late in his life when he was 77 years old or thereabouts; blind; bereft of all his children except Charlotte, whom he would soon lose as well. It was Charlotte whose marriage he opposed, on the basis that she wasn’t strong enough (and he was proven correct — though she was happy in the short time that her marriage lasted). This was a particularly negative time to be introduced to him — and after the biography was published and the damage done, Mrs. Gaskell visited Mr. Bronte on his deathbed, with her daughter Meta, and apologized to him for the impression she had made. He was very gracious to her both before and during the apology. So even she herself admitted that the portrait was overdrawn unfairly.
As for the name change, it was probably a rather wise move, career-wise, considering how the Irish were often perceived during this period of history. Mr. Bronte had always admired Wellington (a perception which Charlotte took up enthusiastically), and the choice of “Bronte” was a kind of serendipitous tribute at least as much as pretentiousness.
The isolation of the Bronte sibs is a little over-blown. All the sibs taught Sunday School. They were perceived differently by their students — Emily didn’t like it much and gave it up. Branwell was disliked by the children; Charlotte perceived as tending toward too much attention to detail and Anne generally liked. One boy remembered her always having a little cake or treat for him on Parsonage baking day; the Brown family, the Greenwoods and others in the area were all on a friendly basis with individual or collective members of the Bronte family — so the idea that Haworthians may have been discouraged from visiting the Brontes (on either side) needs examination and questioning (Emily being the notable exception).
Stories about shoe-burning and the like were told by a servant who was
fired, and can be balanced by stories told by the Garrs sisters, both
of whom worked for the Bronte family before the Cowan School period.
They both had positive views of Mr. Bronte and his children. Sarah
Garrs (I think it was) remembered that when a bog exploded on the
moors and the children had been outside (Emily, Branwell, Anne and I
think Sarah or her sister), Mr. Bronte ran out onto the moor to look
for them. This bog explosion made a big impression on the community.
Mr. Bronte wrote a sermon about it, including an informal lecture on
earthquakes, and mentioned the children being outside. It was the
Garrs sister who noted that he ran outside to look for them.
As for brooding, I don’t doubt he had periods. I think the effects on
him of the deaths of his wife and eldest children have been
under-estimated (much in the same way the deaths that marked Mrs.
Gaskell’s life have been). But he seemed to give a great deal of his
time and energies to his community and to his children — and who, of
anyone, would stand unblemished under such close (and often biased)
observation? For me, he deserves more sympathy and credit than he’s
been dealt.
Maria
While clearly Maria has made a persuasive case that Gaskell overdrew Patrick Bronte, I suggest we still have to to some extent trust to the person on the spot. Gaskell did see him; she sat next to him, spent time with him. There is an enormous amount about us as people that just does not get into words easily, that escapes and slips them — let alone that so much is never written down, sometimes (as Byatt says at the close of her _Possession_) things that seem unworthy of recording at the time but provide a central clue to the reality and history of a personality. I presume he was an intensely passionate man and strongly gifted — and, like his children, not given an opportunity or respect commensurate with these gifts. Far from it, a small salary, a position as a clergyman which was not that respected (consider how Mary Crawford looks at clergymen) by the upper classes (the Austens basically married in, they too could not get a partner from outside their milieu, not themselves having power or money), a hard job in a hard and tough (unhealthy in the houses) environment. Not his fault but I think he was probably a very disquieting presence — he himself taught them a lesson about the world’s behavior no one else could. Gaskell had this unitarian (all reasonableness) and genteel environment, brought up by women, and may have rightly attributed to him some of what his children grew up feeling and thinking. Had he not, we would not have had the books.
Miller does have this point: again and again the reason the Brontes are defended is ultimately people think the books need defending. They are bothered by the books. I do not think they defending in the least. _Wuthering Heights_ is simply (like some of Austen) not altogether under the author’s conscious control; Emily is Heathcliff at some level. I love how Anne Bronte rejects society in her _Agnes Grey_ and think she’s quite right in her assessments. We ought to hate what Charlotte Bronte hated.
Gaskell takes a more distant and what would be called balanced view of evil in human nature and hence society. I suggest _Shirley_ represents Charlotte’s attempt to write more like her friend, Gaskell. In _Mary Barton_ and _North and South_ Gaskell perfectly intertwines her human story with an brilliant and devastating critique of class and economic arrangements. Charlotte doesn’t pull that off in _Shirley_; the parts do not cohere and her heart is not in that (plus she was virulently anti-catholic — Gaskell is just not virulent). Charlotte rivets us much more in the long lugubrious sequence about the dead child and the housekeeper deprived of her daughter — a strongly proto-feminist sequence approaching transgressive female sexuality from another standpoint. Gaskell does not present transgressive female sexuality in a deeply sympathetic way, but rather from the point of view of the problems it causes (_Mary Barton_ it leads to a murder). Her _Ruth_ does not cut it; the heroine is incessantly punished.
So I’m saying that Gaskell tells us truths we can’t get it because we weren’t there and if she doesn’t have the language to present this, plus herself is not sympathetically angry on behalf of the Brontes, we need to supply this from our vantage point.
I would not excuse Cowan Bridge either — there are too many sources in the era showing others saw the cruelty and brutality of such places. To do this kind of excusing is to endanger ourselves today, for it helps inurn people to cruelty and injustice today — on the rise in the US frigtheningly in the last couple of decades. There is a serious and partially successful attempt going on right now to destroy good education for a vast majority of people, privatize it and make what is valuable available only to an elite.
I don’t mean to quarrel with Maria, only suggesting that we have to take records for what they are: Hayden White’s theory about how we imitate histories with all their faults and blindnesses and re-compound new versions with our own is a good one to remember here.
And on how the Brontes were not liked: A word on this too. My feeling is the insistence of Henry’s portrait of Jane (this is what she really was in private, what others didn’t see) stems from her having been disliked by many people who met her. We have not many portraits of her outside her family and these often negative. The average person often dislikes unconventional very intelligent people who will not support the world’s lies. All the burden of lying fell upon Elinor (a paraphrase of a line from Austen’s S&S).. Austen’s letters are a testimony to her refusal to lie, to be a pious or kind hypocrite. The four we’ve just had before us are just filled with utterances socially unacceptable that Austen does write down. I’m glad we know so few of the dead is only the most startling.
Ellen
An important reply:
I have two stories to tell briefly. In 1982, I went with two friends to visit Haworth and the Bronte parsonage. At the time, Haworth was an isolated village and touring the parsonage was a low-key, uncrowded affair, even during the height of the summer. Our tour guide spoke of Patrick as a less than exemplary father–she did, as I remember, follow Gaskell. I went back to Haworth with my family in 2007 and stepped into a changed world. Suburbs had sprung up around Haworth, destroying the sense of isolation. Although it was April, there were long lines to see the parsonage, hordes of Japanese tourists, and we were issued tickets for a certain time to take a
tour, given specific instructions about how to enter (through the church and across a yard), and herded through the parsonage, forced to see the rooms from roped off stances, as if the were viewing the 18th century palace rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And Patrick Bronte had been transformed into a benign and loving father. I was startled by that and at the time, thought, rather strangely, that it might be due to not wanting to upset the “respect your elders” sensibilities of the Japanese. (I now don’t think that’s why.)
Similarly, in 1987, I visited Louisa May Alcott’s home in Concord with my husband, then went back again with my children and husband in 2003. Once again, the father had amazingly transformed from a less than stellar individual who hurt his family with his wild schemes and then leeched off his more successful daughter into a benign patriarch. (In contrast, Louisa’s anger, as I remember, was part of the 1897 tour–the bolster pillow that she set on end would signal to people, including her father, not to go near her.) That anger (and depression) is evident in Little Women, if in a more suppressed way than in the Brontes. It’s what gives all these books their drive. As I write, I think too of the Kershaw bio of Hitler I am now reading–to
read Kershaw, who has read Alice Miller (writing in the early 1980s) on Hitler, is to think that Hitler grew up in a perfectly benign home with only some “tensions” with his father (that’s the word Kershaw uses) developing in adolescence, merely over Hitler’s career aspirations. Later in the biography, Kershaw does allude to Hitler’s extremely “troubled” sexuality, but doesn’t connect this to his childhood.
My sense is that a cultural shift has taken place, and we are back to protecting the father and hence, protecting patriarchy. My guess is that this is connected to moving away from a “victim mentality,” when, in fact, that move away is often simply a hijacking of the word victim that applies it to the perpetrators. (Hence whites become “victims” of attempts to redress racism.) In any case, I have read Miller’s biography, and she is part of the fad or trend to dismiss abuse in a rather off-handed or high-handed way.
Wuthering Heights is a very controlled and precise attack on patriarchy, relentless and almost naked. It’s a work of genius and as such, Heathcliffe is always more than a monster, but he is anything other than a brooding Romantic hero, though people in and out of the novel persist in seeing him that way. (Much of this is Hollywood.) The adult Heathcliffe is never a sympathetic character–any time the reader might veer into sympathy, EB deliberately shows us a repellent action. The book is a sustained scream against patriarchy, an extended exposure of its ideological falseness, ills and cruelties. It’s set in the past, spanning roughly 1775-1800 (it’s actually got a completely accurate calendar; there is nothing rough about it )–this is the gap in my memory–which gives Bronte some “cover,” but of course, nobody remembers this and nobody is fooled. Catherine dies in the middle, as Miller points out, because that originally was the end. EB needed to
lengthen it and was strongly urged to give it a happy ending, which she did, but not without first, in contrarian fashion, continuing and extending her exposure of patriarchy.
The Brontes wrote brilliant and controlled novels, but filled with such anger, such a relentless exposure of cruelty, that it’s difficult to believe they were not abused. They are Munch’s scream in text. I remember trying to read Jane Eyre as 10 year old and having to stop– the abuse in the novel was too felt, was too profound, too shocking and too real to a child who could easily, with a few changes in circumstances, be in a similarly helpless, abused situation. How did Jane not suffer from PTSD? I got as far, as a child, as Helen Burns dying at Lowood and had to drop the book. It was unbearable. Yes, of course Emily beat the dog. Probably more than once. Hitler beat his dogs, explaining once to a horrified onlooker (Hitler used a whip) that he was compelled to, that he “had” to. Yes, the anger and fear of
being the victim builds up to such a point that it becomes unbearable-
it needs a release–traditionally, animals would provide one target. (Perhaps now women cut themselves, as that’s more acceptable than
beating an animal.) It shocks us more when a Victorian lady spinster does it, but why should it?
D.R.
I want really to thank Diane R for pointing this out to us. We are all a product of our surroundings, and with the erasure of feminism, I too don’t remember to see this angle. Yes the long defenses of Patrick are ultimately a defense of patriarchy. The problem is, if I were to put this on Austen-l and then back it up with a reading of the novels (especially _Wuthering Heights_ I’d say and _Tenant of Wildfell Hall_) as attacks on patriarchy, I’d be laughed at. Typical militant feminist exaggerating, ignoring all the details, giving an absurd reading of the novels. Miller rejects Gubar and Gilbert’s reading of Bertha Mason, but their reading is the feminist anti-patriarchal one. I suppose this isn’t fair but I noticed my interlocutor on Austen-l put a posting onto Victoria where she quoted an incident that amused her. It’s one about people drinking tea, but what I notice is how everyone is afraid Mr Bronte will not grant permission for them to drink tea together and how grateful they are when he condescends (supposedly genially) to allow it. Here is a snippet:
“Celia Amelia, Mr. Bronte’s curate, a lively, handsome young man fresh from Durham University, an excellent classical scholar. He gave a very good lecture on the Classics at Keighley. The young ladies at the Parsonage must hear his lecture, so he went off to a married clergyman to get him to write to Mr. Bronte to invite the young ladies to tea, and offer his escort to the lecture, and back again to the Parsonage.
Great fears were entertained that permission would not be given it was a walk of four miles each way. The Parsonage was not reached till 12 p.m. The two clergymen rushed in with their charges, deeply disturbing Miss Branwell, who had prepared hot coffee for the home party, which of coarse (sic) fell short when two more were to be supplied. Poor Miss Branwell lost her temper, Charlotte was troubled, and Mr. Weightman, who enjoyed teasing the old lady, was very thirsty. The great spirits of the walking party had a trying suppression, but twinkling fun sustained some of the party.”
“Twinkling fun” we are told sustained the party. How wonderful –did the mood suffuse the whole time? We are told that Charlotte was”troubled” and the other big authority figure, Miss Branwell “lost her temper”. Their real selves marginalized. I’ve never been at a scene which was all twinkling fun. I’ve read Victorian sentimental scenes which assert this.
*****************
My objection to Miller’s book is that it’s normalizing, subsitutes a careerist ideal and norm and insists we believe this controlled Charlotte’s behavior and influenced Emily and Anne’s if only we knew it. We are of course simply to despise Branwell — all alcoholics are dismissed nowadays in respectable discourse. On Womens’ Studies someone weekly advertises her blog which is about addiction and alcoholism in women: it’s a from of shaming people, continual nagging and silences women who drink or take drugs in a way different from the Victorians but just as steadily. Not just Miller, but I discovered that Renaissance women are now to be seen this way, and the flowering of studies of actresses comes out of a sense that here at last we do have career women. Do we? if so, not like us.
Miller’s book also separates the books from the lives. She attacks the biographical approach, and Emily’s book really emerges as a kind of mystery. We are told it’s conscious art and uses literary allusion. Whoopee. Is that a reason to read it? Books come out of our lives and the connection is essential if we are to see how women’s books are feminist and why too.
Yet I do know that the approach Diane and I outline risks people coming to be titillated and gawk and walk away — see the woman beat her dog, the man set fire to the old shoes (probably they grated on his hidden injuries of class as symbols — has no one here not thrown something out because the sight of it filled his or her mind with painful memories?). But then the gods themselves inveigh against stupidity ….
The important thing to remember is that Lucasta Miller’s book is the one ceaselessly cited today as one of the best books on the Brontes and one to be read _before_ Gaskell. Sort of inoculating yourself? Gaskell’s book insists on the connection of the place and people and these books and she too — albeit quietly and implicitly more indirectly – is aware of how her women are subject to their men. Wives and Daughters is partly about this. She may infer not as penetratingly as the Brontes. When Mary Barton allows Carson to court her and her father murders him and her beloved Jem is blamed, it’s really implied it’s partly Mary’s fault. She should have avoided such sexual encounters. We may see that Mary is caught up with the ugly aspects of men fighting over their control of women’s bodies.
Really the fuss made about Mr Bronte is symbolic here; the man must be respected once again — as long of course as he doesn’t drink.
E.M.
PS. to previous: I think it’s equally crucial to see Austen’s books as coming out of her life and when we read her letters see them as crucial documents — and read all the tones not look for what is pleasant and amuses us. My proposal for the coming JASNA was rejected: I wanted to show that to understand sex, money and power in the book we should look to their treatment in the letters. That’s not what’s wanted any more — if it ever was at a JASNA. I participated in proctoring a contest of student essays for this conference and the topic as stated encouraged students to read the books as seeing the character as manipulative in their quest for power and money, manipulating sex to get it. We are back in E.L. James’s 50 Shades of Grey world with some of these assumptions and some of the essays were hopelessly entangled distortions of Austen’s books. Not the kids’ fault.
Ellen
Hi Ellen – and thanks, as always, for thought-provoking post. I tend to avoid sentimentality when possible, and try to look, as a well-trained playwright, for character objective.
As I read it, the concern about Mr. Bronte’s giving permission was that the lecture was in Keighley, four miles away from the Parsonage, and late: “12 p.m. (noon)” is an unlikely time to return home from a lecture on the classics, which would have meant a very, very early start for Mr. Weightman. “12 a.m.” return home is more likely; tea at 4:00, lecture at say 7:00 or 8:00, and home by after midnight. This would have been one reason that they needed a suitable escort: walking across the moors late at night, and with a young, charming, single man with Mr. Weightman’s ladies-man reputation would be cause for concern today, let alone in the 1830s-40s.
This is the equivalent of asking a father’s permission to go to a concert in the city when you live in a suburb. Any father worth the title will subject the child – especially a daughter – to an interrogation of how far away, how to get there, who’s going with you, how long will you be there, how will you get back; etc. I would be more worried if Mr. Bronte had said something like: “Oh, a walk to
Keighley and back at midnight? Across the moors in pitch black? Sure, no problem.” Over-protective? Maybe. Tyranical? No more than a father living in, say, Long Island, questioning his daughters’ taking the railroad into the city and back for a late-night event.
The return home is the equivalent coming home from the concert, your mother having waited up for you, and then expected to supply coffee not only to you but to the entire group of friends who went to the concert with you. Now she has to grind more coffee beans, get out extra cups and wash them, maybe find some snacks to serve with them, because they are company, after all, and figure you have to get up early the next day and it’s already after midnight. Charlotte’s being troubled is in reaction to Aunt Branwell’s fussing about the coffee shortage and has an equivalent to a daughter being embarrassed by her parent in any similar circumstance.
This is my reading on this incident.
Maria
I’m afrad your response proves my point, Maria: the outlook you are endorsing reinforces a patriarchal point of view. You put it “any man worth his salt’ would control his unmarried daughters. By conflating a modern instance (I assume) you have teenagers in mind who are going out with boyfriends or a crowd with older young woman and saying “any man worth his salt” would function as controller and barrier you show you don’t trust these older women at all. They are not to be allowed to make up their own minds. You yourself in your first description describe this man as delightful; now he has turned into a risk, dangerous. A tea-drinking exercise becomes a threat to reputation and chastity. This kind of thinking stops relationships for women. Trollope, no radical, makes fun of this kind of thinking in _Ayala_. It just happens I’m now reading Charlotte Smith’s _Young Philosopher_ and she makes a point of having her hero allow his sisters to govern themselves in such situations — socializing with others in the same milieu in his house.
The anecdote included other important details about how Charlotte was trouble and Miss Branwell losing her temper. We are not told at all who causes this. Perhaps the patriarch who permitted the tea-drinking was not that benign after all during the exercise.
I remember a parallel instance in Wives and Daughters where Mr Hamlet wants to stop Roger Hamley from going to socialize with another family. He uses norms of who his family should socialize with as his rational, and Roger (being a sort of Fanny Price character) is willing not to go, to lose the opportunity of talking to a similarly learned man who could help him with his work. Osborne is quite right the father is wrong and Roger should ignore him. Roger’s reason is his father’s sensitivity and the idea he’ll meet the man anyway. In the end (this being Gaskell who softens things) Mr Hamley sees the error he is making. Well before the end of the novel Mr Hamley is no longer trying to govern Roger.
Gaskell is making a point against how hierarchies in themselves.
The phrase startles me. My husband (and I, but I guess I’m not the one expected to do this controlling) had but one rule for my older daughter while in high school. She had to be home every night and by 12. I guess he wasn’t worth his salt? She never did get pregnant or in trouble with the police and went on to do a BA and now works, has a partner, and so on. I say this because I see that Diane’s point is right: I feel unless I say this he (my husband) will look bad.
I also agree with Diane R on the white-washing and acceptance of brutalities to children in school — then and now.
Maria,
You make a cogent argument for adding some nuance or shading to our
portrait of Patrick Bronte–I’m not convinced and don’t want to overly discount Gaskell, but I will think more about it–and what more can you ask? On the other hand, to keep thoughts distinct, what I am most interested in is the macro-trend that I see to rehabilitate the patriarch in general, and naturally, I ask why?
I find it interesting that Gaskell was recruited by Patrick to help shore up Charlotte’s reputation and see a parallel between that and the JEAL memoir’s largely successful attempt to cast Jane as a sweet Victorian spinster who chiefly reveled in domesticity and just happened to scribble lovely novels on the side, while not sewing or improving her handwriting. It’s interesting, if nothing else, that the Victorians seemed to intuit the radical nature of these women–or at least subversive nature of their writings–more than we do. It’s
interesting too that Gaskell would cast Patrick as the villain, when he, in fact, urged the book to be written.
D.R.
I do take Diane R’s position too, and I like the parallel that both books (JEAL and The life of CBronte) can be seen as attempts to cast the women into normative spinsters. It’s telling that Bronte was not happy with the book. In fact Gaskell’s book did not turn the Brontes into a sweet nest ruled by benign father in Yorkshire.
Gaskell wrote one of the masterpieces of biography. It can be seen as an equivalent in importance and weight and truth to Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Both have seen attempts to wipe them out, and all have failed.
JEAL’s book early on was seen as narrow, a pro-family account — and LeFaye continues that tradition.
Many of the attacks on Gaskell’s book came from her telling some truths about still living people. Ian Hamilton and (cited by Miller) Janet Malcolm write about how difficult it is to overcome the relatives, friends’ egoisms, ambitions, perspectives.
E.M.
[…] so much as be like them fundamentally; the ultimate precursor is Prevost. Another problem with Lucasta Miller’s The Bronte Myth is she apparently does not know of these novels, still very much part of the reading of Victorian […]
I believe that people who purport to be scholars should not distort and
misrepresent, as Lucasta Miller does over and over.
Miller does this with the modern myth that Haworth was a remote village.
Attributing the “origin” of this to Gaskell’s biography, as she does, is a
complete falsehood. Gaskell spends the first two chapters of her biography
making it very plain that Haworth (which she visited several times) was in an
industrial area. She points out all the mills on the road to Haworth. She
describes the industrial nature of the area, the railroad connections, and how the towns are growing rapidly and have lost their character of market towns. It is blatantly false to assert that Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte is “at the
origin” of the modern myth that Haworth was a remote or pastoral place. Here is
part of Gaskell’s description:
“on the way from Keighley to Haworth. The distance is about four miles; and, as
I have said, what with villas, great worsted factories, rows of workmen’s
houses, with here and there an old-fashioned farmhouse and out-buildings, it can
hardly be called “country” any part of the way. For two miles the road passes
over tolerably level ground, distant hills on the left, a “beck” flowing through
meadows on the right, and furnishing water power, at certain points, to the
factories built on its banks. The air is dim and lightless with the smoke from
all these habitations and places of business.”
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?pageno=2&fk_files=1447041
If the air is dim and lightless with smoke, and there are factories all around,
and the beck is being used for water power, how can Miller possibly see this as
a pastoral description?
She can’t. She either did not read Gaskell’s description, or is deliberately
misrepresenting it.
Miller claims that Gaskell implies that Patrick Bronte, Charlotte’s father, did
not accompany Charlotte and Emily to Belgium, and that in concealing the fact
that he did in fact accompany his daughters Gaskell is trying to portray him as
a bad, neglectful father. Here is Gaskell’s account:
“Mr. Bronte determined to accompany his daughters. . . . Mr. Bronte took his
daughters to the Rue d’Isabelle, Brussels; remained one night at Mr. Jenkins’;
and straight returned to his wild Yorkshire village.”
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1447041&pageno=107
How can you say that Gaskell is asserting that Patrick Bronte is not
accompanying his daughters? This is upsidedownism. (If anyone thinks he went
home too fast, Charlotte Bronte’s old friends the Taylor family also accompanied
Charlotte and Emily, and the Taylors remained in Brussels to reside there, as
Gaskell makes clear.)
She claims that Gaskell portrayed Charlotte as a tortured woman and she assures
us that this was not so. But well over 50% of Gaskell’s biography consists of
quoting Charlotte’s letters — I have seen estimates as high as 70%. Gaskell’s
Life of Charlotte Bronte is told mostly in Charlotte’s words, not Gaskell’s.
The great majority of the “tortured” statements–and there are many– come from
Charlotte herself. The rest are statements from Charlotte’s closest friend
Ellen Nussey about how unhappy Charlotte was. Ellen knew her from a very young
age. Nussey made these statements not only to Gaskell, but also to Clarence
Shorter 20 years later.
Based on her own letters and Ellen Nussey’s, Charlotte went through severe
depression as a teen-ager, to the point that she felt unable to visit Ellen, who
lived a short walking distance from her school, again in Belgium, and at many
other times. She was depressed enough at her first teaching post that she could
not continue and had to return home. Needless to say, the deaths of Emily and
Anne was agony to Charlotte, as was her terrible loneliness afterwards. Her
letters at the time of their deaths are heart-rending. I don’t have her exact
quote in front of me, but she wrote her publisher, “The people I understood and
who understood me are dead.”
(For most people, the experience of death is that you go visit the person in the
hospital, where they have been medicated for pain. But Emily and Ann literally
wasted away — slowly losing weight until their bones showed, to complete
emaciation — in the same room with Charlotte, who nursed them for months. I
have seen emaciated anorexics. It is a terrible, terrible sight, even when
voluntarily chosen by self-starvation. Charlotte could hear Emily and Anne
coughing at night. The thought of some one I love slowly wasting to that point
over a period of many months is horrifying to me. Tuberculosis was a terrible
disease, and must be agony to watch) No “fun and merriment” here.
Lucasta Miller claims that Gaskell suppressed instances of Charlotte enjoying
herself. This too is untrue. Gaskell includes many of Charlotte’s letters
about merry childhood frolics, having good times with her sisters in adulthood,
and enjoying her visits to Scotland, which Charlotte fell in love with, and the
few visits to London that Charlotte enjoyed (most she did not). Gaskell
appreciated Charlotte’s sense of humor (as I do) and quotes many of her witty,
acerbic letters. She does not include passages in which Charlotte sliced and
diced people who were still alive, which I think was a wise choice.
Lucasta Miller is also distorting the truth in claiming that Gaskell disregarded
or underestimated Charlotte Bronte as a writer. Gaskell repeatedly states that
she considered Charlotte a genius, that she was a writer of the very highest
order, that her novels were extraordinary. Gaskell’s feelings about Charlotte
as a writer approach reverence. Gaskell quotes all of the letters she can find
where Charlotte speaks of Charlotte’s own writing and also any where Charlotte
offers opinions on the writings of others. (These are very well chosen and a
delight to read.) Gaskell championed Charlotte Bronte as a brilliant writer and
as a perceptive critic of other writers.
It is just crazy to say otherwise.
Gaskell gives far more space to Bronte’s opinions on Balzac, Lewes, and
Thackeray than she does to Charlotte doing housework. I wonder if Miller really
understands how perceptive and witty Charlotte’s literary criticism letters are.
I suspect Miller hasn’t a clue as to why Gaskell admired and included those
particular letters. Bronte’s comments on Balzac are a gem. But Lucasta Miller
is a myth-buster, so only the housework catches her eye.
It is completely false to say that Gaskell freely “re-imagined” the facts. She
interviewed everyone she could find who knew Charlotte Bronte, and travelled
extensively, everywhere Charlotte had been, and sought out people who knew her,
including at Cowan Bridge and Brussels and every school Charlotte taught at.
She quotes extensively and at length from Charlotte’s two lifelong friends,
Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, and also from Charlotte’s publisher who knew
Charlotte well and had had her stay at his house.
Gaskell did admire Charlotte’s devotion to duty and to caring for her sisters,
her father, and Tabby. The instances she provides of Charlotte doing housework
come from Charlotte’s own letters. The clearest expression of Charlotte’s ideas
about this come from her letter to Mary Taylor, urging Mary to sacrifice any
prospects she may have for employment and financial security to staying home to
care for her aging mother as a self-sacrificial Christian duty.
The way that Miller makes Gaskell’s quoting Charlotte’s own letters about
Charlotte doing housework and Charlotte’s own ideas about it into a “myth”
propagated by Gaskell is through Miller’s unstated belief that a woman cannot
both be a great writer and a household drudge, so if both are asserted, one of
the two must be false. The problem is that in reality a woman can be both at
the same time. Miller pretends that it is an either/or choice and that since
Gaskell is quoting Charlotte Bronte’s letters on doing housework and on thinking
it important, then Gaskell is ipso facto saying that Charlotte Bronte is not a
great writer.
This is all nonsense, and incoherent, as so much of Miller’s book is.
Often the way Lucasta Miller operates is to point out how modern movies and
popular treatments of the Brontes are inaccurate, then to label this a myth, and
declare without any evidence, or even specifics of what she is alleging, that
the myth “began” or “originated” with Gaskell. She rarely provides particulars,
just this vague idea that some unspecified aspect of the myth “begins” with
Gaskell. She avoids specifics because they would show that modern myths about
the Brontes have almost no overlap with what is laid out in Gaskell’s biography.
(Modern myth-makers are interested in very different aspects of the Brontes than
Gaskell was.)
The whole concept of “myth” as used by Lucasta Miller needs to be deconstructed.
She uses it to mean a set of inaccuracies which she posits to be inseverably
bound together as a whole. There is no such thing. There is no Charlotte
Bronte myth in her sense, nor a Shakespeare myth, nor a Queen Elizabeth I myth
in her sense of the word. There are just a lot of inaccurate beliefs about
Shakespeare, a lot of different slants, and they include many incompatible ideas
that are not connected to each other in one interconnected totalizing “myth”.
People who believe that Elizabeth I murdered Mary Queen of Scots do not
necessarily believe that Elizabeth I was a virgin queen and never slept with
Leicester. If you say that Elizabeth might not have been a virgin, you are not
saying that she murdered Mary Queen of Scots. The way Lucasta Miller uses the
word myth to smuggle bogus ideas and connections past us and to allege where
misconceptions “begin” is itself bogus. She abuses–and misunderstands–
“Romantic” similarly.
More and more I believe that critics like Lucasta Miller do not read texts in
what I consider to be the meaning of the word “read.” They make up their minds
before they open the book, then very rapidly skim over the text, plastering
their pre-interpretation over what is actually there as they gallop through,
scotomizing all the discrepancies, however gaping.
Lucasta Miller claims that Gaskell “dramatized” Charlotte’s life. You cannot
get rid of the drama: Three motherless daughters of a poorly paid curate lived
in small parsonage. All three sisters wrote literary masterpieces in their
early 20s. Then two of them died before reaching the age of 30. You cannot get
the drama out of these bare facts. If you are human and have feelings, this is
poignant and gripping. The wild and stormy nature of the material in Jane Eyre,
Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, all written by young
unmarried women without much wordly experience, makes the Brontes’ lives all the
more singular and dramatic. Ditto for Branwell’s alcoholism and opium addiction,
and his early death. The story of Patrick Bronte, grandson of an Irish peasant,
adds even more drama. Gaskell did not come up with these things — they are
facts.
Ultimately Lucasta Miller’s argument is:
In Gaskell’s biography, the Brontes’ lives appear dramatic.
The Brontes’ lives were not dramatic.
So Gaskell injected drama that was not there and falsified the “real.”
But the drama inheres ineradicably in the bare facts that no one, not even
Lucasta Miller, denies.
Gaskell’s tendency is to de-dramatize as you can see in North & South, sometimes
to my regret, and even more so in Cranford. She favors the cheerful and
commonplace. Gaskell was doggedly convinced that all of Charlotte Bronte’s
depression came from physical ailments (unspecified), even when the situations
from which Charlotte’s torments arose cry out for a psychological and dramatic
explanation (agonizing inner conflict, brutal self-repression, unrequited love,
fear of a lonely and impoverished future– all of which Gaskell resolutely
ignores in favor of commonplace, temporary, and undramatic physical ailments as
the cause of Charlotte’s suffering).
One more example. Gaskell recounts Patrick Bronte’s refusal to give Charlotte
away at her wedding to a man he disliked and had forbidden her to marry, as if
it were the most natural thing in the world. She says Patrick wasn’t feeling
well. Not really sick, but just not feeling well–it came on at the last
minute! Gaskell seems charmed that Mrs. Wooler gave her away, as Charlotte and
Mrs. Wooler could not see anything in the Book of Common Prayer that interdicted
a woman doing so. Just the most natural, undramatic thing in the world.
Lucasta Miller thinks she is debunking Romantic myths conjured up by Gaskell.
Miller would not recognize a Romantic Myth if she tripped over it. The father
refusing to give his daughter away is a Romantic trope if there ever was one
(almost echoing Jane Eyre!), but the allegedly dramatizing Gaskell won’t touch
it. She just moves on and undramatically gushes over how nice and “comme il
faut” Mrs. Wooler was.
There is scads more like this in Miller. I suppose I should see all this
distortion and outright falsehood as the usual academic imperative to daringly
“reinterpret” any and everything. But Lucasta Miller attacks Elizabeth Gaskell
and Charlotte Bronte with real venom as well as disregard for facts. There is a
viciousness in today’s attacks on past writers. If a writer of the past has
stature and great talent, they are hated and demonized.
I can sort of understand it with Dickens, who was so horrible to his wife and
can be so irritating in his novels, and with Charlotte Bronte, who was a
“violent Tory” (her own words) who went into a fury at the idea that the “mob”
could ever be “insolent” to their betters, especially Wellington who she utterly
idolized to an almost unbelievable extent. (There is a lot of putting down of
insolence in Shirley, especially if it comes from “greasy” Methodists.)
But why must Gaskell be attacked, misrepresented, and villainized? She spent 2
years in a thankless task of expensive travel and arduous research to reach
everyone who had known Charlotte Bronte, up to and including the man who sold
her writing paper, in the ultimate homage to someone she admired as a
magnificent writer who should be rescued from sensation-mongering and calumny.
Gaskell visited Haworth during Bronte’s life, and asked her every question she
could think of about her life and her writing. What would we not give to have
someone who had had this kind of access and had done this so meticulously and
exhaustively for Jane Austen?
It is the “good guys” who critics most demonize and distort. For some reason,
these arouse real hatred and a vengeful desire to attack.
What drives me crazy is that no one who reads this stuff is going to GO LOOK.
Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte is online. Clarence Shorter’s account of his
additional researches 20 years later, when he contacted Bronte’s husband and got
additional Bronte letters and went to Belgium to interview more people who had
known Charlotte there, and also re-interviewed Ellen Nussey is also online.
Here is the Clarence Shorter url:
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1514768&pageno=1
It would not be difficult for Miller’s readers to satisfy themselves that
Miller’s account is a complete distortion as a whole and in many, many specific
particulars. But no:
From reading reviews on Amazon and GoodReads, I find that people are complete
sheep when it comes to Lucasta Miller and Julia Barker. It never enters their
minds to question any of it or to go CHECK and see if Gaskell and Charlotte
Bronte say what Miller says they say.
Thank you very much, Ruellia. I’ve added your culled list to my blog and any one who comes onto the Net and is taken by google to my blog can read your step-by-step persuasive refutation.
There are different sets of conflicting goals here. Women academics are determined to show “their” women writers as active in the world, cheerful and successful, to normalize them to make them people who might have gotten tenure too. That’s the heart of it.
No one attacks them because 1) they are themselves tenured and it threatens your job; 2) what, don’t you want to “rescue” authors from the idea they were not fit for success, were (god forbid) “morbid.”
Another ploy of the book is she contends that even if Gaskell is nuanced or not so far off, Gaskell’s readers have taken her book to be this “romantic mush” (don’t want to be romantic either, women careerists). But when she’s said this she just about promptly forgets it and instead of keeping with how Gaskell has been misread, it’s Gaskell who is writing myth.
Miller writes myth and so does Barker. They want men on their side too. No one must think them “militant feminists” — so they stick up for Patrick Bronte who made mistakes, had grave egoisms, and was a dominating patriarch. And Gaskell was right to show them in full context because it’s this that Bronte’s life was controlled by and her novels grew out of too
Of course they want to be seen as liberated, especially sexually (but only so far) so here’s an area they can hit Gaskell with: not sexually passionate enough. This is a stunner to anyone who has really read say _North And South_ and Gaskell has conscious sophisticated understanding of passion.
We are on the same page Ruellia, I’m coming at the now favored books from other angles too,
Ellen
[…] with the teacher about Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography and Patrick Bronte: see my review of Lucasta Miller’s hatchet job. There was little said about Branwell Bronte. The biography by Daphne DuMaurier which brings out […]
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