Fictional and Factual Topology in Lives of the Brontë Sisters
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MASARYK UNIVERSITY BRNO Faculty of Education Department of English Language and Literature Fictional and factual topology in lives of the Brontë sisters Thesis Written by: Zuzana Wachsmuthová Brno Super visor: Mgr. Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D. 2006 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. Zuzana Wachsmuthová 2 Acknowledgement: I would like to take the opportunity to thank Miss Podroužková for her helpful guidance and valuable advice. 3 Anne, Emily and Charlotte by Branwell Brontë 4 CONTENTS ILLUSTRATIONS 6 PREFACE 7 INTRODUCTION : Sense of place 8 1. THE BRONTËS ’ FICTIONAL HOUSES 15 1.1 Jane Eyre and her houses 15 1.2 Emily Brontë and her houses 21 1.3 Helen Graham and her houses 25 2. THE BRONTËS ’ FACTUAL HOUSES 29 2.1 Getting to Haworth 29 2.2 The outside impression 30 2.3 The inside atmosphere 31 2.4 Reason for depression 34 CONCLUSION 38 RESUMÉ 40 BIBLIOGRAPHY 41 LIST OF APENDICES 43 APENDICES 5 ILLUSTRATIONS Anne, Emily and Charlotte by Branwell Brontë (A Brontë Parsonage Museum Guide ) 4 6 PREFACE The Brontë sisters were great writers of the Victorian age. In their works they boldly describe a realistic life of the society of that period. The time was not easy in those days and was typical of the strict roles division between men and women. Boys were usually given an education while girls were more engaged with home duties. The sisters were brought up by their father, a curate of the Haworth Church, who insisted on their higher education and used to send them to study at various schools. Thanks to their education they were placed socially above the other inhabitants in Haworth. I became acquainted with novels of the Brontë sisters when I was a little girl. I found them fascinating. They touched me with the realness of their stories and lively plots. Brontë sisters pay great attention to the settings of their novels. All three sisters choose very similar locations that have various dark features in common. Particularly houses become the centre of these unusual appearances. In my thesis I want to examine one work of each Brontë sister, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, The tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë, to find out the elements that make the houses unusual and mysterious. I have chosen two works of Daniela Hodrová, Místa s tajemstvím and Poetika míst , where she analyses a place and its mystery, to compare her descriptions with the houses of the Brontë sisters. I would also like to involve their own houses, particularly the Parsonage in the Haworth village where they spent most of their lives, and discover possible resemblances between their fictional and factual houses. I, myself, visited their former home in the West Yorkshire and therefore I intend to express my own feeling and experience. At the end I want to pay attention to the life in the Haworth village in the first half of the nineteenth century and find the elements that could have influenced the sad tone of their novels. 7 INTRODUCTION : Senseof place Space in literary works is created by a web of places and their relations. There are ordinary places and unusual places distinguished (Hodrová, 1994). Ordinary places are the well-known places for all people around. A human being comes to this place and finds nothing that can surprise him. They are places from common life where people feel safe. On the other hand, unusual places are such places that carry some exceptionality. Here we cannot foresee anything, we do not know what to expect and if we can expect anything. Because they are unfamiliar for us, such places become mysterious. We are usually scared of something unknown, we do not feel so strong and we approach it carefully. Mysteriousness evokes interest in our minds. It is caused by the unfamiliarity that creates in our minds a feeling and a desire to explore. We satisfy our longings in this way. We can never grasp inner space or space with a mystery as a whole unit, because we cannot know its extent precisely. It has a huge depth and grows through all possible things and angles. We are able to perceive just a small fraction (Hodrová, 1994). Mystery does not remain in one room only, but it spreads over the entire house. A mysterious place contains memories of all human beings that have stayed or lived there. They have influenced the place in a way and their stories often become an important part of its plot (Hodrová, 1994). Each space has enormous history and experience of many human beings and its character must be richly interlaced with their stories. A mysterious place can have several different images. The individual experience is important, because a certain place may be mysterious for one person but it can be absolutely ordinary or even routine-like for another. A mysterious place can be both closed and open. An example that carries both characteristics together is an idyllic place. We take an idyllic place as a part of that unusual one. It is very probable that it cherishes something mysterious, but it never holds anything dangerous that is commonly found in a mysterious place. An idyllic place must be formed naturally, by itself, without striving. It must contain a certain charm that makes it ideal. If this place is created unnaturally, by a group of people who make an effort to realize their idea, charm cannot be found there at all. 8 Everything is familiar to us as it is planned in advance. Mysterious countryside started to occur in paintings of the Pre-romantic period. In literature a mysterious countryside fully developed in Romanticism (Hodrová, 1994). “An idyllic place has a character of space intrinsically homogenous, unique, even though it consists of several minor places” (Hodrová, 1994. p.29) 1. These places can be in such a perfect harmony that they give an impression as a whole unit. “These places and objects, hidden in each other as drawers of Chinese box, are closely connected with story telling” (Hodrová, 1994. p.30). “Chinese box serves as a metaphor for many layers of encapsulation, similar to Matryoshka dolls or the layers of an onion“ (www.wikipedia.org). There is always a smaller box fitted inside the bigger one until the process is completed. Its order creates a parallel to how the idyllic place is structured. There are several rooms found in a cosy house that harbour objects and people we like and which we are pleased to be surrounded with. The house is set in our sweet village or town that lies in our favourite countryside. An idyllic place has a character of a story with no dramatic action. We cannot find any strong vertical dominants, such as dramatic mountains and hills there, only a gentle relief that represents a protective character. An idyll likes familiar processes that do not deviate from the norm and do not disturb its atmosphere. Its characters are usually calm and constant. An idyllic place is originally a profane ideal space (Hodrová, 1994). The mountain became most significative in the Romantic period. This place with a function of a vertical dominant feature of landscape represents a symbol of the centre of the world. According to the mystics, “mountain often symbolically denotes the highest stage of the mystic life” (Hodrová, 1994). Mountain, unlike idyllic countryside, is traditionally connected with a dramatic plot. It is a place of fights with monsters, supernatural phenomena or sick people that threaten the others. According to various explanations, these fights symbolize death, subconscious, overbearing and overwrought imagination: “Sometimes we see such a phenomenon that mystery does not have to be found only in a mountain, but it is spread all over the mountainous 1 Daniela Hodrová’s translated definition of an idyllic place drawn on her book Místa s tajemstvím (1994). All her other definitions and descriptions in the thesis I present by my own translation. 9 land that carries out the marks of mystery features” (Hodrová, 1994. p.63). Mountain is characterised as something wild. It is a place that differs with its location and characteristic from the other places. The distance between the mountain and our position does not have to be long (Hodrová, 1994). Wilderness does not necessarily have to be distant in proximity. It is its character that renders it unfamiliar. It might seem to us as an exotic place, but it is simply a different place than is familiar to us. A conception of mountain as a mysterious place does not necessarily represent it as a huge rocky massif with its sharp top rising towards the sky. A place with these features and functions may be held by any mound or highly located place or house. Mountain best expresses the function of imprisonment. Imprisonment is represented by a closed space where the human being appears involuntarily and desires to get out of this place. Imprisonment is an adventurous place and it is an analogy of a punishment. According to Hodrová the involuntary stay, imprisonment, is a form where the inner arrangement begins to play an important role. The atmosphere of a jail is strengthened by certain objects that are marked out by their imperfection and damages like broken ladders, chairs and scattered tools (Hodrová, 1997). “The whole space is sometimes perceived and held as an imprisonment; the world is considered as closed. The human being’s stay in a jail is only one of the variants of temporary being in a bad mood” (Hodrová, 1997.