+ Ambivalent Views Toward Woman's

w«. ft» / +

AMBIVALENT VIEWS TOWARD WOMAN’S ROLE

IN THE NOVELS OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE

Shari Barefoot Eason

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

December 1977

visor ;lish ABSTRACT

Several studies have explored feminism in Charlotte Bronte's

fiction, but few have focused on the ambivalence of her views toward

the "woman question." The purpose of this study is to demonstrate

that the attitudes expressed toward the role of women in her novels cannot be neatly categorized as either feminist or anti-feminist but, rather, should be recognized as ambivalent. The terms "feminism" and

"anti-feminism" have acquired political connotations that have little to do with the problems encountered by Charlotte Bronte and her heroines. Therefore, one aim of this paper is to make a distinction between the views of the activists of today's women's liberation move­ ment and the perspectives of the early Victorian feminists.

In the l8UO's and l85O's, the established view of the nature of woman and her proper sphere was the traditional one. It was held that the ideal lady should be intellectually and sexually passive; her behavior toward her male superior should be submissive; her sphere should not extend outside the home. The traditionalists far out­ numbered the feminists, whose views were largely unsanctioned by the respectable Victorian middle-classes.

The heroines of Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette are all torn between the Imperatives of convention and the desire to fulfill individual needs. It is important to emphasize that the divisions and conflicts experienced by Charlotte Bronte's women characters are centered not so much around political or socio-economic matters as around, emotional or psychological ones. The Bronte heroines

are not fighting to gain rights in the political sense, but

struggling to become whole people in the face of the Victorian

notions about womanhood, that they have assimilated..

Charlotte Bronte's attitudes toward her own role as a woman and the role of women generally were ambivalent. Although this

is not a biography, some parallels are drawn between Charlotte's personal views and experience and those of her heroines. Hope­ fully, the correlations of the biographical and fictional materials

demonstrates that her novels are not theoretical tracts on the

"woman question" but honest testimonies of the inner strife of the

Victorian woman.

ii CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Jane Eyre 21

Shirley 41

Villette 66

Conclusion 100

Bibliography 107

iii 1

Introduction

In 1848, Charlotte Bronte wrote: "I often wish to say some­

thing about the 'condition of women' question, but it is one re­

specting which so much cant has been talked that one feels a sort of repugnance to approach it."''' Because feminism today has be­

come a bandwagon movement and feminist criticism has become a wholesale approach to literature by women, a student might well

feel, with Charlotte Bronte, "a sort of repugnance" to pursue a

topic that lends itself so readily to cant. Therefore, one of my primary goals is to avoid reducing a literary study to a

forum of feminist opinion by detaching myself and my arguments

from modern feminist assumptions.

Several studies have explored the attitudes expressed to­ ward woman and her role in Charlotte Bronte's fiction, but few have focused on the ambivalence that pervades her works. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the views of Char­ lotte and her heroines on the "condition of women" question cannot be neatly categorized as either feminist or anti-feminist, but rather, should be recognized as ambivalent. In the context of our discussion, the term "ambivalence" will be used in two senses. The first type of ambivalence can be defined as simul­ taneous attraction toward and repulsion from an object, idea or

1 To W. S. Williams, May 12, 1848; quoted in The Brontes: their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence, eds. T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1932), Vol. II, pp. 215-16. 2

person, while the second type--which could be characterized as diachronic--denotes a continual oscillation between one thing and its opposite. In Charlotte's novels, for example, a heroine may be torn at a given moment between two sets of demands, de­ sires or principles or she may vacillate, over a span of time, between these two sets. In either case, contradictory emotional or psychological attitudes are involved.

Charlotte's conflicting views on the position of women are in keeping with the character of the period in which she lived, for division and self-division on political, moral, theological and social issues typify the intellectual and emotional life of most of her contemporaries.

That the Victorian age was characterized by dichotomy and paradox has become almost a critical dictum. One eminent com­ mentator has written: "Almost every Victorian thesis produced its own antithesis as a ceaseless dialectic worked out its de­ signs" and "Victorian society was forever subject to tensions 2 which militated against . . . singleness of purpose." Another scholar of the period observes: "The confusion, the perplexity, the deep unease of the English nineteenth century are impressed on all who study the period. . . . Victorian men of letters ex­ perienced the self-division endemic to their times and gave ex-

2 Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 6. 3

press ion to it in their writings." One very Important recent

study analyzes the conflicting characteristics of optimism and

dismay, hypocrisy and sincerity, intellectual rigidity and in-.

tellectual flexibility, religious fervor and religious scepti­

cism.

Within this tense environment the controversy on what came

to be called "the woman question" developed. The conflicting

Victorian attitudes toward the female and her role, in the home

and in society, operated on two overlapping planes: the social

and the individual. On the social level, two groups with oppos­

ing ideologies can be identified: the traditionalists and what

I will designate (with qualifications that will be discussed

later), the feminists. By surveying the views of these opposing

camps, one can better understand how the conflicting attitudes which were rooted in the culture extended into and influenced the lives of individuals--in this case, Charlotte Bronte and her characters.

Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette were written between 1846 and 1852. These dates are significant because in the first three decades of Victoria's reign, we stand at the threshold of the nineteenth century sexual revolution. One historian has com­ mented that there was "a breath of change in the air which called

3 Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians (New York: New York University Press, 1969), IX-X.

In Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 8-23. 4

forth just at this time a definite statement of the whole posi­

tion. It was as if it were felt necessary to put into words and

to teach in the most deliberate manner the duty of female sub­

missiveness which before had been taken entirely for granted.""’

The years during which Charlotte wrote her novels are interest­

ing precisely because there was yet no self-conscious agitation

for reform but rather what has been described as a "feeling of

imminence," a sense that the old assumptions and values were

about to be eroded.

Feminism in Charlotte Bronte's day has little in common

with the women's liberation movement of our time, for there were

few established doctrines, almost no activists in the political

sense and no central organization. J. A. and Olive Banks remark .

that it was not until after 1850 that "the sporadic and largely

isolated attempts of individual reformers showed consistent evi­ dence of becoming welded into an organized movement."? Through­

out our discussion of Charlotte's novels, it might be helpful to

bear in mind Patricia Thomson's observation that it was more diffi-

- cult for the early Victorians, than for those at the close of the

century, "to decide on which side of the fence they .would sit,

5 Ray strachey, Struggle: The Stirring Story of Woman's Advance in.England (New York City: Duffield and Company, 1930), p. 46.

6 Patricia Thomson, The Victorian Heroine: A Changing Ideal, 1837-1873 (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 8.

? J. A. and Olive Banks;, Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England (New York:' ; Schocken Books, 1964), p. 27. 5

for the fence was only in the process of construction."®

Two concepts of woman, and her role were present during the

Victorian era. Of these concepts, the traditional one had a strong foothold in the popular mind; the liberal or feminist or progressive concept of woman had not yet gained wide acceptance, but it was gradually drawing more support.

The traditional concept defined woman as intellectually and constitutionally weak, sexually passive and naive, and inept at work of almost any kind. Martha Vicinus, in her introduction to an anthology of essays on the Victorian woman, explains that the popular Victorian model of femininity, the "perfect lady," "was most fully developed in the upper middle classes. . . . Before marriage, a young girl was brought up to be perfectly innocent and sexually ignorant. The predominant ideology of the age in­ sisted that she have little sexual feeling at all, although fam­ ily affection and the desire for motherhood were considered in­ nate. . . . Once married, the perfect lady did not work; she had servants. . . . Her social and intellectual growth was con­ fined to the family and close friends. Her status was totally dependent upon the economic position of her father and then her husband. . . . Throughout the Victorian period the 'perfect lady' as an ideal of femininity was tenacious and all-pervasive,

® The Victorian Heroine, p. 7. 6

in. Spite of its distance from the objective situations' of count­

lesswomen.To Vicinus's statement, I would add that there

¡were women within the culture.who were forced to work for a liv­

ing but who adhered to the popular standards of womanhood in all

other respects. Although these women had less social status

than their idle counterparts, they were still considered "feminine"

in the popular Victorian sense of the word; after all, they had

not chosen independence, but had had it thrust upon them.

The fiction of the period is swarming with perfect lady

types. Dickens created numerous passive, meek, blushing angels, including Agnes Wickfield10 (David Copperfield), Esther Summer-

son (Bleak House) and Florence Dombey (Dombey and Son). Thack­

eray's, heroines Amelia Sedley (Vanity Fair) and Laura Pendennis

(The Adventures of Philip, The History of Pendennis and The New-

comes) approximate the ideal, as do Anthony Trollope's Lily Dale

(The Small House at Allington) and Lucy Morris (The Eustace

Diamonds).

Dickens, Trollope and Thackeray sometimes mitigate some of

the qualities of the perfect lady type, but Coventry Patmore, in

his best-selling poem "The Angel in the House" (1854-56) created

a heroine who epitomizes the ideal to a degree that charmed a

9 Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1972), pp. IX-X.

10 George Orwell, in "Charles Dickens," Dickens, Dali and Others (New York, 1946), p. 73, comments that Agnes Wickfield is "the real legless angel of Victorian romance, almost as bad as Thackeray's Laura." 7

great many Victorians but that strikes most modern readers as farcical. Patmore describes how the dear girl feels on the eve of her wedding day:

Lo sleepless in her little bed She lies and counts the hours till noon Ere this tomorrow she'll be wed, Ere this? Alas, how strangely soon! A fearful blank of ignorance Lies manifest across her way. . . .

Once married, her considerate husband avoids impinging upon her delicacy or becoming too intimate too quickly; he waits until after their son is born before calling her "Dear"! This woman, who lives in "a rapture of submission," is raised to the stature of a celestial being:

Her disposition is devout Her countenance angelical The best things that the best believe Are in her face so kindly writ The faithless, seeing her, conceive Not only heaven but hope of it.

A key element here is how the authors view the characters they have created. If Agnes or Laura were being satirized rather than canonized, the conclusions we would reach about popular Vic­ torian attitudes toward women as reflected in popular Victorian / fiction would be quite different. In all fairness, it must be

H Coventry Patmore, "The Angel in the House" (1854, 1856) in The Poems of Coventry Patmore, ed. Frederick Page (London and New York, 1949), pp. 61-208. 8

acknowledged that among the works of the three novelists men­ tioned, women with pluck and determination or with mature minds 12 and adult needs are occasionally presented sympathetically.

But the type of women usually satirized in Dickens, Trollope and

Thackeray--and in most Victorian novels written before 1870--are those who violate the ideal. It is because Charlotte Bronte em­ pathizes with women who violate the ideal that some critics and readers have classified her as a feminist. Hopefully, in the course of this study, it will become clear that this is an over­ simplification, that Charlotte is a defender, as well as a critic, of the popular ideal.

Among the most influential supporters of the traditional concept of woman were Mrs. Sarah Ellis and John Ruskin. Mrs. 11 Ellis, whose Women of England (1839), Daughters of England

(1843), Wives of England (1843) and Mothers of England (1845), instructed thousands of Victorian middle class women on matters of morality, etiquette and household management, held that women were "from their own constitution, and from the station they occupy in the world, strictly speaking, relative creatures" and that woman’s function was "to make sacrifices in order that his jjman's^ enjoyment may be enhanced.

12 This occurs more frequently in Thackeray than Trollope, and more frequently in Trollope than Dickens.

13 Duncan Crow, in The Victorian Woman (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), p. 48, states that "Women of England went through six­ teen editions in its first two years and was republished again in 1843, 1844 and 1846."

14 From Mrs. Sarah Ellis, Women of England (1839), pp. 155 and 223; quoted in Crow p. 51-52. 9

John Ruskin's response to the question of the position of

woman is a little more subtle, but no less conservative, than

Mrs. Ellis's. His 1864 lecture "Of Queen's Gardens" (which was

published as an essay in Sesame and Lilies in 1865) is a reac­

tionary expression of the "normative beliefs of the Victorian middle class.. . Walter Houghton has called it "the single most important document I know for the characteristic idealiza­ tion of love, woman and the home in Victorian thought."^ in

this lecture to an audience of middle-class men and women, Ruskin

attempts to come off as a moderate by disclaiming the notion of

the superiority of the male. Comparisons are meaningless when

speaking of creatures who "are in nothing alike. . . ." Each sex,

he explains, has what the other has not; "each completes the

other."^ He then launches the doctrine of the separate spheres, which Kate Millett has characterized as "the period's most in-

genious mechanism for restraining insurgent women." The man,

Ruskin emphasizes, "is eminently the doer, the creator, the dis­

coverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and in-

15 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 89.

16 Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1957), footnote on p. 343.

17 John Ruskin, "OF Queen's Gardens," Sesame and Lilies (Great Britain: T. Nelson and Sons, Ltd., n.d.), p. 144.

1® Millett, p. 91. 10

19 vention; his energy for adventure. ..." The mind of the

woman, on the other hand, "is not for invention or recreation,

but sweet ordering, arrangement and decision. . . ." Just what Ruskin means by "sweet ordering, arrangement and decision"

is not certain.

Ruskin's ideas on the duties of women are very similar to

Mrs. Ellis's. He feels that it is the chief duty of woman to

serve her husband and children by setting a good example and by guiding them down the path of righteousness: "She must be endur-

ingly, incorruptibly good, instinctively, infallibly wise - wise not for self-development, but for self-renunciation . . . wise not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but with

the passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable . . . modesty 21 of service." Since Ruskin, like Mrs. Ellis, sees woman as a relative creature, he advocates that she should be educated only to the extent necessary to render her capable of appreciating the conversation of man. He comments: "A man ought to know any language or science thoroughly while a woman ought to know the same language or science only so far as to enable her to sympa- 22 thize in her husband's pleasures and those of his friends."

19 Ruskin, p. 144.

20 Ruskin, p. 145.’

21 Ruskin, pp. 147-48.

22 Ruskin, p. 158. 11

Perhaps thé most revealing passage in "Of Queen's Gardens" is

the one in which Ruskin describes those heroines of Greek litera­

ture who mirror his personal ideal of womanhood: "the housewifely

calm of that of Penelope, with its watch upon the sea;, the ever

patient, fearless, hopelessly devoted piety of the sister and

daughter, in Antigone; the bowing down of Iphigenia, lamb-like 23 and silent. ..."

While the traditional portrait of a lady was complete in

Charlotte's day, the feministic portrait of a woman was, as yet,

a sketch. The proponents of emancipation, who included John

Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor and Florence Nightingale, had no pat

image of woman that could function as a counterpart to the popular

ideal x>f the perfect lady. The reason for this lack of a fully

defined feminine ideal was twofold. First, they believed that it

was not possible for anyone to know the real capacities and true

character of the female sex because both had been repressed or dis­

torted by the culture. Mill wrote that he considered it presumptu­

ous for anyone "to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot

be, by natural constitution. They have always hitherto been kept,

as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a state,

that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and dis­

guised; and no one can safely pronounce that if women's nature were left to choose its direction as freely as men's . . . there would be any material difference, or perhaps any difference at all,

23 Ruskin, p. 136. 12

0 / in the character and capacities which would unfold themselves."

Second, the men and women who were arguing for sexual equality

were not inclined to shift women (or men, for that matter) from

one set of role expectations to another. The "ideal" held by the

feminists was necessarily an uncircumscribed one, as the follow­

ing statement by Harriet Taylor (Mill) makes clear: "The proper

sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest which they

are able to attain to. What this is, cannot be ascertained, with- 25 out complete liberty of choice."

John Stuart Mill was the leading exponent of feminist thought

in mid-Victorian England. The arguments he advances in "The Sub­

jection of Women" are almost diametrically opposed to those Ruskin

advances in "Of Queen's Gardens." While Ruskin advocates "true

wifely subjection" and urges a revival of a true order of chivalry

in which man would assume the title and office of "Lord" or "Master" 26 and woman the corresponding title and office of "Lady," Mill

asserts that we "have had the morality of submission and the moral­

ity of chivalry . . . the time is now come for the morality of • «.27 justice."

24 John Stuart Mill, "The Subjection of Women" (1869), re­ printed in Essays on Sex Equality: John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, ed. Alice S. Rossi (Chicago and London: The Univer­ sity of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 190.

25 Harriet Taylor, "The Enfranchisement of Women," The West­ minster Review, IV (July, 1851), p. 83, reprinted.in Essays on Sex Equality, p. 100. There are some critics who attribute this, and many other portions of "The Enfranchisement of Women" to John Stuart Mill. The reader will be spared an account of this con­ troversy .

26 Ruskin, p. 143 and pp. 178-79.

27 Mill, p. 173. 13

Perhaps the most interesting of the nineteenth century fig­ ures who may be spoken of as a feminist is Florence Nightingale.

It is ironic that the Victorians made her into a cultural heroine; they regarded her as a saint who nobly sacrificed her comfortable existence as an upper-class young lady to help the sick. The idea of this "lady with the lamp" soothing wounded English soldiers during the Crimean War deeply touched the sentimental Victorians.

If they had known that Miss Nightingale was a hard-minded, hard- driving woman whose entrance into nursing was not an act of self- denial but a means of escaping the sheltered, idle life she de­ spised, most of them would have viewed her in quite a different light. Certainly many of Florence's fans would have been dis­ tressed had they read a passage she wrote in her diary in 1846:

"We do the best we can to train our women to an idle superficial life; we teach them music and drawing, languages and poor peop­ ling - 'resources' as they're called, and we hope if they don't 28 marry, at least they'll be quiet."

In an essay entitled "Cassandra" Florence disclosed her con­ viction that the popular concept of woman was false and that the restrictions imposed upon women by society were unfair. She stated that ladies "go about maudling to each other and teaching to their daughters that 'women have no passion.' In the conven­ tional society, which men have made for women, and women have

Quoted in Duncan Crow, The Victorian Woman (New York, Stein and Day, 1972), p. 42. 14

accepted, they must have none, they must act the farce of hypocrisy,

the lie that they are without passion - and therefore what else

can they say to their daughters, without giving the lie to them­

selves?" Why, she asked, "have women passion, intellect, moral

activity - these three - and a place in society where no one of 29 these three can be exercised?" One cannot but be struck by the parallel between this passage and a passage from Jane Eyre, in which the heroine reflects:

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need 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 suf­ fer; and it is narrow-minded of their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine them­ selves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and knitting bands. It is thought­ less to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

Even though it is not likely that Florence Nightingale had read

Charlotte's novel, or that Charlotte had read Florence's essay, it is not really surprising that, given the conditions under which

Victorian women lived, two such brilliant, capable and energetic

29 "Cassandra" is included in Florence Nightingale's book Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth. The passages above are quoted in Crow, pp. 42-43.

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, ed. Temple Scott (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1905), Vol. I, pp. 181-82. All subsequent quotations from Charlotte's novels will be from this, the Thornton Edition. 15

women were experiencing the same feelings of frustration, resent­

ment and dismay and expressing those feelings in nearly the same

way. ; . 7 '■

We cannot conclude our synopsis of the attitudes toward women in’ Charlotte's time; without discussing a third concept of woman which functioned independently of both the traditional and

the feminist concepts. This concept, which is rather more diffi­

cult to describe than the other two, requires a few prefacing re­ marks .

The Victorians are often regarded as prudish and sexually

inhibited, and not without reason. Walter Houghton observes that even though the Victorians had huge families, sex, in most homes,

"was the skeleton in the parental chamber. No one mentioned it.

Any untoward questions were answered with a white lie (it was the great age of the stork) or a shocked rebuff." Few men and women associated the sexual act "with an innocent and joyful experience.

The silence which first aroused in the child a vague sense of shame was, in fact, a reflection of parental shame, and one suspects that some women, at any rate, would have been happy if the stork had 31 been a reality." Queen Victoria herself wrote to her daughter:

"The animal side of our nature is to me too dreadful . . ." and 32 reputedly told a daughter who married abroad to "think of England" when the occasion for performing marital chores arose.

51 Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, p. 353.

52 Quoted in Crow, The Victorian Woman, p. 52. 16

The angelization of women, or "woman worship" as it came

to be called, was useful in encouraging the ethic of "purity."

The young boy was taught "to consider nice women (like his

sister and his mother, likd his future bride) as creatures more

like angels than human beings - an image wonderfully calculated

not only to dissociate love from sex, but to turn love into wor- 33 ship, and worship of purity." One social scientist has observed

that women were "desexualized" to help men control their own sex­

ual impulses. A man would hardly be likely to develop wicked de­

signs toward a woman he considered an angel. Victorians persuaded

their sons that the "sins of the flesh scarcely troubled angelic q / women." Even an intelligent and fairly open-minded individual

like Dr. William Acton, a mid-Victorian authority on sexual be­

havior, claimed that "a modest woman seldom desires any sexual

gratification for herself. She submits to her husband but only

to please him, and but for the desire of maternity would far rather

be relieved from his attentions. No nervous or feeble young man

need, therefore, be deterred from marriage by any exaggerated notion

of the duties required of him. The married woman has no wish to be 35 treated on the footing of a mistress."

33 Houghton, pp. 354-55.

34 Peter T. Camino'S, "Innocent Femina Sensualis in Unconscious Conflict" in Suffer and Be Still, ed. Vicinus, p. 162.

33 William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Repro­ ductive Organs in Childhood, in Youth, in Adult Age, and in Ad­ vanced Life, Considered in their Physiological, Social, and Psychological Relations (3rd ed., London, 1862), pp. 102-03. 17

But, as J. B. Priestly perceives, Dr. Acton "gives the game

away" in the last sentence, for woman "has now been divided into

two. There are the modest women . . . all the household angels.

There are also those sexual demons, the mistresses. . . ." Clear­

ly, then, "a man might have two very different relationships with 36 the fair sex, one delicate and the other wildly indelicate."

The dual image of woman as chaste/unchaste, demonic/angelic,

is not peculiar to the Victorian Age, but it was especially salient at that time. One might well wonder how a culture that imagina­

tively raised women to the level of angels could lower them to the

level of whores, or how the concept of woman as sex fiend could exist among a people who covered piano legs with a skirt to avoid the connotation of human "limbs." I think an answer can be found in Gordon Rattray Taylor's theory that when normal sexuality is made impossible "the amount of auto-erotic, perverted and fan- 37 tasied sexual behavior" increases.

By these remarks I do not wish to imply that this third con- 38 cept of woman, which has been termed "the school of fantasy," should be exclusively linked to the traditional or popular concept of woman. Although the traditionalists regarded ideal women as sexless angels, they did not necessarily harbor fantasies of women

36 j. B. Priestly, -Victoria's Heyday (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 33

27 Taylor, The Angel-Makers (1958), quoted in Priestly, Victoria's Heyday, p. 39.

2® Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, p. 128. 18

as depraved seductresses. It would be closer to the truth to

insist that "the school of fantasy" was not a function of either anti-feminism : or feminism. As Kate Millett has pointed out:

"The fantastic is the most ambivalent of the three schools of attitude's. Each of the first two had a definite stand to take for or against the sexual revolution, but the third is confused 39 in its response."

Moreover, it is not to be inferred that Charlotte Bronte or her heroines ever struggled between the images of "pure" woman and corrupt woman. Instead, they were caught between the stand­ ards of ladylikeness established by the traditionalists and the cluster of needs that were acknowledged by the Victorian femin­ ists. .The importance for this study of the third concept of woman will emerge when we turn to the male characters in the novel, for the school of fantasy "involves itself with a point of view which is nearly exclusively masculine."^ Like many real men in the

Victorian period, several of Charlotte's male characters are in­ capable of viewing decent women as human beings with sexual needs.

They could perceive women in only two ways: as either totally innocent or totally corrupt. Examining the attitudes and behavior of these characters hopefully will demonstrate that Victorian men, as well as Victorian women, were victims of the assumptions and values of their culture.

39 Millett, p. 129.

40 Millett, p. 128. 19

The terms "feminism" and "anti-feminism" (sexism) have gathered to themselves various political connotations that have little to do with the problems encountered by Charlotte Bronte and her characters. The term "feminism," for example, implies to many people today commitment to an ideology or a cause; how­ ever, the divisions and conflicts experienced by the heroines of Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette are centered not so much on

f political or socio-economic or ideological issues as on emo­ tional or psychological matters. On the one hand, these women, all orphans, who crave love and friendship, are drawn toward con­ forming to the. traditional ideal of woman as a means of gaining approval and acceptance. Moreover, they are products of their culture and, inevitably, have assimilated many of the myths of that culture. On the other hand, Jane Eyre, Caroline Helstone and Shirley Keeldar (the two heroines of Shirley) and Lucy Snowe

(the heroine of Villette) have needs--for example, the need to develop intellectually and the need to be autonomous--which can not be fulfilled without violating the Victorian ethic of passive, dependent feminity.

Charlotte Bronte’s correspondence and the facts of her life reveal that her attitudes toward her own role as a woman and the role of women generally were ambivalent. Although this is not to be a biographical study, some parallels will be drawn between

Charlotte’s personal views and experience and the views and ex­ 20

perience of her heroines. Hopefully, the correlation of the biographical and fictional materials will help demonstrate that

Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette are not theoretical tracts on the "woman question" but honest testimonies of the inner strife of the Victorian woman. 21

Jane Eyre

It is safe to conjecture that more has been written about

Jane Eyre than Charlotte's other three novels combined. Both the quantity and quality of criticism devoted to the novel stand as a tremendous challenge to the critic who wishes to analyze it.

Fortunately, its elusiveness leaves it forever open to new in- sights--the definitive study of Jane Eyre can never be written.

Bronte scholars have classified Charlotte's first published novel as a Bi1dungsroman, as a Gothic romance, as a neo-Gothic romance, as a mythopoeic work, as autobiography, as picaresque.

Jane Eyre really incorporates elements from each of these sub­ genres. Similarly, a multitude of meanings can also be extracted from the novel. The theme that we will be considering—the hero­ ine's ambivalence toward her role as a woman--is only one of several that run through the work.

As we have stated, each of Charlotte's central female char­ acters is torn between the desire to conform to the traditional pattern of femininity and the impulse to define and pursue her own values and establish a separate identity. As society's child, she has imbibed many of the popular assumptions about woman and her proper role and has discovered, moreover, that in order to gain the love, approval- and friendship she craves, it is often necessary to conform to the pattern of non-assertive, sexless, juvenile femininity dictated by tradition and popular opinion. 22

However, a part of her seeks release from this restrictive, un­ natural pattern. Many of her emotional, intellectual, sexual and social needs are thwarted through adherence to the conventional

feminine role.

At an early age, Jane Eyre shows signs of being divided be­ tween the compulsion to submit to cultural expectations and the yearning to retain her individuality and set her own standards of right and wrong. For example, after mutely enduring abusive treatment for years from her wicked aunt and guardian, Mrs. Reed,

Jane finally revolts, giving the woman a tongue-lashing that terrifies her. Jane derives a sense of real freedom from speak­ ing her mind to Mrs. Reed, feeling "as if an invisible bond had burst and that I had struggled out into liberty" (Vol. I, p. 54).

Soon afterwards, however, she begins to feel guilty. The elation she initially felt "subsided in me as fast as did the accelerated throb of my pulses. A child cannot quarrel with its elders as I had done; cannot give its furious feelings uncontrolled play as

I had given mine; without experiencing afterwards the pang of re­ morse and the chill of reaction" (Vol. I, p. 55).

The position of the child is in some respects similar to that of the woman. In the nineteenth century, both were expected to be submissive and obedient to their "superiors." The rights of women and children alike were generally unacknowledged or, at best, were less well-defined than those of men. 23

When the child Jane Eyre rebels against authority, she ex­

periences, on the one hand, a deep sense of release and of per­

sonal power, but feels, on the other hand, guilty and remorseful,

for she has violated her society’s image of the good child. As

she approaches maturity, this pattern of self-division recurs

frequently. Several scholars have pointed out that Jane Eyre is

torn between opposing sets of values or ideals or standards of

behavior. One commentator has characterized Jane's struggle as

that between self and the world,1 while another sees her as torn

between nature and grace. David Lodge, in his fine essay "Fire

and Eyre: Charlotte Bronte's War of Earthly Elements" argues that

Jane is caught between an "instinctive, passionate, nonethical

drive-of Romanticism" and "an allegiance to the ethical precepts of the Christian code and an acknowledgement of the necessity of exercising reason in human affairs.Lodge goes on to demonstrate the association within the novel of fire and air with Romantic passion, and of snow and ice with cold, hard reason. Richard

Chase has commented that there are "two alternate images of Jane

Eyre's soul, two possible extremes which, as she believes, her be­ havior may take. At the one extreme is Bertha, Rochester's mad

1 Philip Momberger, "Self and World in the Works of Charlotte Bronte," in ELH, Vol. 32, No. 1 (March 1965), pp. 349-69.

2 Richard Benvenuto, "The Child of Nature, the Child of Grace, and the Unresolved Conflict of Jane Eyre," ELH, Vol. 39, No. 1 (March 1972), pp. 620-38.

3 David Lodge, "Fire and Eyre: Charlotte Bronte's War of Earthly Elements" in The Language of Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1966), pp. 114-15. 24

wife, at the other extreme is St. John Rivers. . . . Bertha represents the woman who has given herself blindly and uncom­ promisingly to the principle of sex and intellect. ... In

St. John Rivers she meets duty incarnate.

My views of the polarity within Jane's character correspond to some extent with those of each of the critics referred to above; however, none of these commentators has related the ten­ sions between opposing sets of principles to Jane's ambivalent attitude to her role as a woman, or her inability to reconcile her personal standards with the standards set for women by Vic­ torian culture. And, after all, it is imperative to place Jane's inner struggle in the context of her sexual status, for the code of dutiful and virtuous conduct which existed for women contrasted significantly with that which existed for men.

A crucial point to make is that at times Jane is depicted as struggling, not between the culture's standards of ladylike­ ness and her own natural needs and desires, but between the oppos­ ing images of purity and corruption. As my introductory remarks established, Victorians held that a good woman was passive, depend­ ent, self-sacrificing and sexless. Only a wicked woman experienced any sexual feeling; only a selfish one sought pleasure or fulfill-

4 Richard Chase, "The Brontes: A Centennial Observance," from The Kenyon Review, IX, No. 4 (Autumn, 1947), reprinted in The Brontes: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Gregor (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970), p. 24. It is interesting that the implication in Chase's essay is that sex and intellect are related, while Lodge sees passion and reason as being at odds. 25

ment from any quarter beyond that of the execution of domestic and philanthropic duties. The result was that women tended to gravitate toward one of two extremes: either Pagan indulgence and sensuality, or Puritan restraint and asceticism.

There is evidence in Jane Eyre that Charlotte Bronte could neither fully accept nor completely repudiate the dogma which linked virtue with celibacy and wickedness with sexual desire.

Her perplexity is revealed by the fact that she sets up a polarity between fire (represented by the passionate, hedonistic Rochester) and ice (represented by the cold, rigid St. John Rivers), exposes both as undesirable, but then implies that the two sets of quali­ ties should be merged. Charlotte believed that a decent woman could -experience passion, but at several points she intimates that this passion must be of a certain tepid, elevated order.

Sexual expression must somehow co-exist with sexual repression; fire should be tempered with ice.

The very idea of "purifying" sexual feeling might seem pre­ posterous to modern readers. Since Charlotte defends "passion" and love between a man and a woman as natural and normal, we might wonder why she finds it necessary to purge sexual experience, to diminish its physical aspect. Her inconsistency can be best under­ stood in terms of her upbringing in a society which disseminated the doctrine that sex is the root of all evil. In her own home, at the knee of her Aunt Branwell, Charlotte was taught scorn for 26

the flesh and for pleasure.Her impulses and needs simply did not square with the inhibitions she inevitably assimilated.

Jane Eyre has to contend with conflicting elements within her own nature. Some of these sets of conflicting elements have their counterparts in the two men who want to marry her. Edward

Rochester and St. John Rivers excite ambivalent feelings in Jane— she is both attracted to and repelled by each man, because in each she recognizes one of the extremes within her own nature.

Rochester is paganistic in his indifference to religious command­ ments, while St. John Rivers is a rigid Puritan. Rochester is governed by his passions, St. John by his conscience. Rochester flouts convention, St. John Rivers conforms to it.

It is ironic that Jane’s inner conflict, which is largely provoked by her role as a woman, is seemingly reflected in two male personalities. While Rochester and St. John do not directly correspond to the two poles of Jane's character they do, in sev­ eral respects, superficially suggest them.

St. John Rivers is self-disciplined and ultra-rational. He is capable of loving and feeling, but he rigorously checks his emotions. For example, he is deeply in love with Rosamond Oliver, but does not allow their relationship to develop, reasoning that she is not fit to be a missionary's wife, to take up the cross and follow him into the tropics. Jane, on the other hand, he deems

5 See Françoise Basch, Relative Creatures : Victorian Women in Society and the Novel (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), p. 173. 21

worthy of this office; he admits that he does not love her as a

woman, but values her as a comrade whose "tractability" and "un­

tiring assiduity" he can rely on (Vol. II, p. 286). Jane is re­

pelled by the idea of a loveless union, but a part of her is

drawn momentarily to a vision of a life of duty and self-sacrifice.

Moreover, St. John is a powerful, imperious man who has consider­

able influence over the thoughts and feelings of impressionable

Jane Eyre. At one point, she discloses: "I was tempted to cease

struggling with him - to rush down the torrent of his will into

the gulf of his existence and there lose my own. I was almost as

hard beset by him now as I had been once before by another" (Vol.

II, p. 313).

The other person to whom Jane is referring here is, of course,

Edward Rochester. Rochester, who is influenced more by his feel­

ings and impulses than by a sense of duty or a set of principles,

laws or conventions, determines to marry Jane Eyre despite the ex­

istence of a living (although insane) wife. He defies the laws of

religion and society in forming his intentions; he even attempts to

force Jane to stay with him through violence once she learns the

truth about his wife Bertha. Although Jane resists him, the part

of her character which corresponds to his longs to surrender to him. On the night she decides she must leave Thornfield and

Rochester, she is barely able to carry out her escape, so torn is she between her sense of duty and her desire to stay and live with

Rochester. 28

I would have got past Mr. Rochester's chamber without a pause; but my heart momentarily stopping its beat at that threshold, my foot was forced to stop also. . . . There was a heaven - a temporary heaven - in this room for me if I chose: I had but to go in and say - "Mr. Rochester, I will love you and live with you through life till death," and a fount of rapture would spring to my lips. I thought of this. ... My hand moved towards the lock: I caught it back and glided on. Drearily I wound my way downstairs: I knew what I had to do, and I did it mechanically (Vol. II, p. 139) .

That Jane sees her struggle as one between passion and reason, duty and desire is evident from the language she uses. The nouns

"heart" and "rapture" are tied to Jane's emotional life, while the adverbs "mechanically" and "drearily" describe the actions initi­ ated by the voices of duty. Jane's reflections during her stay at

Morton, after she has left Rochester, also demonstrate her aware­ ness of a conflict between inclination and "duty." She asks her­ self:

Which is better? - To have surrendered to tempta­ tion; listened to passion; made no painful effort - no struggle - but to have sunk down in the silken snare; fallen asleep on the flowers covering it; wakened in a southern clime, amongst the luxuries of a pleasure villa: to have been now living in France, Mr. Rochester's mistress; delirious with his love half my time - for he would - oh yes he would have loved me well for a while. He did love me - no one will ever love me so again. I shall never more know the sweet homage given to beauty, youth and grace - for never to anyone else shall I seem to possess these charms. He was fond and proud of me - it was what no man be­ sides will ever be. - But where am I wandering, and what am I saying; and above all, feeling? Whether it be better, I ask, to be a slave in a fool's paradise at Marseilles - fevered with delusive bliss one hour - suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and shame the next - or to be a village-schoolmistress, 29

free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England?^ Yes, I feel now that I was right when I adhered to principle and law, and scorned and crushed the insane promptings of a frenzied moment (Vol. II, p. 209).

It is obvious, from the digression in the middle of this passage, that Jane has not been completely successful in con­ vincing herself that eventually she would have regretted the decision to live with Rochester. This can be explained in part by the fact that her actions and her ideas of "freedom" and

"honesty" are, in this case, inauthentic, springing from a mechanical acquiescence to the conventional concept of "woman's duty" rather than from her own heart-felt convictions.

Another pair of characters also symbolize the dichotomy be­ tween duty and desire, the spirit and the flesh, asceticism and sensuality. But while Edward Rochester and St. John Rivers are not wholly unsympathetic and unattractive personalities, the cari­ catured characters of Jane's cousins, Georgiana and Eliza Reed, are presented as inferior and detestable. Georgiana, who is a worldly, shallow voluptuary, brags to Jane Eyre about her ro­ mantic conquests. This parallels, to some extent, the scene dur­ ing which Rochester recounts to Jane the history of his past love affairs; however, his motives for doing so and his perspective

& In the above passage, we can discern the continued use of the symbols of fire and ice: France is associated with heat, England with coolness. It is generally recognized that Charlotte tended to associate France with self-indulgence and sinfulness, and rural England with pious self-control and virtue. 30

on his past behavior are markedly different than those of the

vain, corrupt Georgiana. While Rochester's tone throughout his

narrative is almost confessional, Georgiana is, as Jane observes,

"wholly taken up with reminiscences of past gaiety, and aspira­

tions after dissipations to come" (Vol. I, p. 394).

Eliza Reed is a radical version of St. John Rivers. An

ascetic, mechanical, bloodless creature, she divides her day

into precise portions and to each assigns a specific task. To

this routine she rigidly adheres, becoming very distressed when

anyone or anything interferes with its "clock-work regularity"

(Vol. I, p. 395). Her self-exile to a convent in some ways

parallels St. John's decision to become a missionary, with the

distinction that Eliza is plainly seeking a refuge from the world, while St. John is sacrificing himself to what he believes to be

a noble mission.

Jane's observations on the lives and natures of Eliza and

Georgiana Reed are very revealing. She notes: "True generous

feeling is made small account of by some, but here were two na­

tures rendered, the one intolerably acrid, the other despically

savourless for want of it. Feeling without judgment is a washy

draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter

and husky a morsel for human deglutition" (Vol. I, p. 399). Neither

Georgiana nor Eliza, St. John nor Rochester, possess what Jane has

called "true generous feeling"—that is, feeling tempered by judg­ ment. All four of these characters are at one or the other extreme. 31

Harriet Bjork, in her fine study The Language of Truth, writes that Jane's reunion with her cousins demonstrates Jane's superiority "to the two main types of femininity and the female role throughout history, the nun and the woman of the world.

The descriptive analysis of Eliza and Georgiana Reed is the irrefutable argument insofar as the two traditional branches of female education are concerned. . . . The upbringing for the marriage market and the world, stereotyped in Georgiana's story, and the training for celibacy and the convent, which is given an anti-Anglo-Catholic tendency in the case study of Eliza, are re­ pudiated in favour of the Jane Eyre pattern."?

It is not clear, however, just what the "Jane Eyre pattern" is. Bjork's reference to Jane's nun-like dress as a symbol of her "integrity and freedom," her emancipation from the role of the husband-hunter, would seem to indicate that the critic sees

Jane as something of a separatist who is "liberated" from romantic interest in men. Later, Bjork comments that Jane is so carried away by her feelings for Rochester in the "temptation scenes" that she is on the brink of endorsing free love. Jane's behavior simply does not follow a consistent pattern. Certainly she steers nothing like a middle course between the nun-likeness of Eliza nor

7 Harriet Bjork, The Language of Truth: Charlotte Bronte, the Woman Question, and the Novel, Lund Studies in English, 47, eds. Claes Schaar and Jan Svartvik (Lund University, 1974), p. 97.

8 Bjork, p. 97. 32

the "femme-fatality" of Georgiana. Nor, on the other hand, are

the extremes between which jane vacillates directly analogous to

the poles of human behaviorrepresented by the Reed sisters.

In the studies of Georgiana and Eliza Reed, and of Rochester and St. John, it might appear that Charlotte Bronte has used the

technique of "figure-splitting"--that is, a technique that drama­ tizes two sides of the protagonist's nature through the creation of a pair of diametrically opposed figures who mirror the con­ flicting qualities within the protagonist. Actually, Charlotte has done nothing as straightforward as figure-splitting in Jane

Eyre. While Georgiana and Eliza are diametrically opposed to each other, neither truly personifies the extremes within Jane's nature. Georgiana's laziness, stupidity and superficiality and

Eliza's self-centeredness, insensibility and misanthropy are qualities not found in Jane Eyre. Similarly, Edward Rochester and St. John Rivers are diametrically opposed to each other, but they are not the male counterparts of the Reed sisters, nor do they actually duplicate the two halves of Jane's personality.

The function of these pairs of antipodal characters is not, then, to highlight specific faults found in Jane Eyre, but to underscore the undesirability of gravitating to extremes. Char­ lotte Bronte evidently saw her heroine as ultimately achieving that balance she calls "true generous feeling" but throughout most of the novel, Jane's thoughts and actions reveal her self-division. 33

At one point in the novel, Jane declares that "I never in

my life have known any medium . . . between absolute submission

and determined revolt" (Vol. II, p. 281). Frequently Jane sub­ mits—sometimes almost slavishly--to the will of the men in her

life. For example, Jane consents to St. John's request that

she terminate her study of German to assist him in learning an

Eastern language. After this sacrifice on Jane's part, St. John begins to acquire over her "a certain influence" that usurps her

"liberty of mind" (Vol. II, p. 276). She explains: "I felt under a freezing spell. When he said 'go,' I went; 'come,' I came; 'do this,' I did it. But I did not love my servitude"

(Vol. II, p. 277). And yet, she can openly defy this same man.

When he asks her to accompany him to India, he insists that they must be married as a practical measure, adding that "'enough of love would follow ... to render the union right even in your eyes'" (Vol. II, p. 295). To this, Jane replies: "'I scorn your idea of love. I scorn the counterfeit sentiment you offer: yes,

St. John, and I scorn you when you offer it'" (Vol. II, p. 295).

Jane is alternately subservient and defiant with Rochester as well. One of the most interesting scenes in the novel illustrates her deep-seated ambivalence toward her own status. Immediately after their engagement, Rochester takes Jane on a shopping trip with the intention of purchasing for her a very showy trousseau.

Jane's thoughts and actions on this occasion show that she both acquiesces to and rebels against Rochester's patronizing treatment 34

of her: "The hour spent at Millcote was a somewhat harassing

one to me. Mr. Rochester obliged me to go to a certain silk warehouse: there I was ordered to choose half a dozen dresses.

. . . By dint of entreaties expressed in energetic whispers,

I reduced the half-dozen to two: these, however, he vowed he would select himself . . he fixed on a rich silk of the most brilliant amethyst dye, and a superb pink satin" (Vol.. IT, p. .

49). Although she persuades him to exchange these flashy gowns

for two dark, subdued ones, he assures her that he will yet have his own way in this matter. Jane sees him smiling at her and thinks his smile is "such as a sultan might, in a blissful and

fond moment, bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched.

. . .u She lets him know that he '"need not look in that way'" for "’I'll not stand you an inch in the stead of a seraglio . . . so don't consider me an equivalent for one; if you have a fancy for anything in that line, away with you, sir, to the bazaars of

Stamboul without delay; and lay out in extensive slave-purchases some of that spare cash you seem at a loss to spend satisfactor­ ily here.'" Emphasizing her repudiation of the role of a "kept" woman, Jane declares to Rochester that "'I will not be your

English Celine Varens'" (Vol. II, p. 52).

In the first part of this scene, Jane has to "beg," "entreat" and ^'persuade" Rochester to permit her to choose the kind of clothes

$ Celine Varens is his former mistress, and Adele's mother. 35

in which she feels most comfortable, rather than the kind that

he wants to purchase in order to decorate and display her. That

she consents to the ordeal at all indicates that she allows

Rochester to manipulate her. But in the verbal exchange at the

end of the scene, Jane expresses herself in a manner that is

foreign to that of the typically non-assertive Victorian woman.

Jane is unequivocally rejecting here one of the most common roles

to which the Victorian lady was assigned: that of a domestic

ornament who was, by her uselessness and her total dependence

on her husband, reduced to the status of a "kept" woman. Jane

declares:

"I shall continue to act as Adele's governess; by that I shall earn my board and lodging, and thirty pounds a year besides. I'll furnish my 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" (Vol. II, p. 52).

Jane is so overcome "with a sense of annoyance and degrada­ tion" at Rochester's treatment of her that she resolves to write to her uncle, John Eyre, who intends to make her his heir. The prospect of receiving "an independency" relieves her, for, she

10 Interestingly, Jane's belief that she would lose her dignity and self-respect if she did not earn her own way is a reversal of the popular Victorian view of women who worked. Generally, women achieved status through marriage; those who did not marry and had to work for a living were nearly declasse. (The question of the social status of the single woman in the Victorian period is analyzed at some length in the next chapter.) 36

reflects, "I never can bear being dressed like, a doll by Mr.

Rochester, or sitting like a second Danae with the golden 11 shower falling daily round me" (Vol. II, p. 50),

Jane, then, does not want Rochester to be her benefactor.

She wants to be his equal, not his dependent. And, in the end,

the Rochester she marries needs her as much as she needs him.

During Jane's absence from Thornfield, Rochester, loses his eye­ sight and his right hand. Of course, these injuries render him less self-sufficient than he had been.

Many critics assert that this ending reveals Charlotte

Bronte's anti-male sentiments. Martin S. Day, for example, ar­ gues that "the maiming of Rochester . . . suggests symbolic cas­ tration, as it most certainly reduces the dominant male to the 12 dependent child."

Eleanor Widmer, in her doctoral dissertation, interprets the conclusion of the novel from a similar perspective. She claims that Rochester's terrible injuries indicate "Charlotte

Bronte's subterranean wish to punish the male." Masculinity, and especially male sexual force, must be "truncated or distorted" to mollify women who are "not prepared to accept masculinity on

H This is an intriguing metaphor, because Danae was im­ pregnated by that shower.

12 Martin S. Day, "Central Concepts of Jane Eyre," Person- alist, Autumn 1960, Vol. XLI, No. 4, p. 505. 37

13 its own terms." Richard Chase is among the several others who

argue that Charlotte generates Rochester's injuries in order to

quell his virility. He writes: "Rochester's injuries are, I

should think, a symbolic castration. The faculty of vision,

the analysts have shown, is often identified in the unconscious with the energy of sex. When Rochester tries to make love to

Jane, she had felt a 'fiery hand grasp at her vitals;' the hand, 14 then, must be cut off." Chase reasons that Jane's conflict be­

tween duty and desire is resolved by transforming her husband

into a eunuch.

It is highly questionable that Charlotte Bronte entertained

any notion that Rochester's injuries represent a symbolic castra­

tion.' The arguments of Chase and many others typify that line of

criticism that is bent on uncovering a Freudian symbol at every

turn.

Robert Martin's theory that it is likely that Charlotte views Rochester's injuries in terms of "the great archetypal pat-

13 Eleanor Widmer, Love and Duty: The Heroines in Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, doctoral dissertation, University of Washington, 1958 (Ann Arbor, Michigan University Microfilms, Inc.), p. 38 and p. 178.

14 Richard Chase, "The Brontes: A Centennial Observance," The Kenyon Review, IX, No. 4 (Autumn, 1947), reprinted in The Brontes: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Gregor, p. 25.

15 Kate Millett discusses, in Sexual Politics, the sexist nature of Freudian thought. Freudian female psychology is based on the premise that the girl possesses penis envy--the natural consequence of her discovery of what Freud termed "the boy's far superior equipment" (Sexual Politics, p. 179). 38

tern of sin, suffering and redemption" is an acceptable alterna­

tive to the "castration" theory. He writes that "one has diffi­

culty in finding patience for accounts of the novel that try to

see it in terms of twentieth-century psychology, finding in it

feminine-masculine antagonisms. ... It does not seem to me

too revolutionary to feel that sin, suffering, and redemption 16 may loom larger than sexual rivalry in Christian thought."

Certainly the text itself does not support the contention

of some commentators that Charlotte Bronte and her heroine are

hostile toward men and repulsed by the idea of a sexual rela­

tionship. While Jane is both repelled by and attracted to

Rochester in the temptation scene in the garden, her ambivalent

feelings do not stem from hostility toward the male but from

the scruples she has assimilated from her culture. It cannot be concluded that Jane is "not prepared to accept masculinity on

its own terms" because she refuses to live with Rochester. She tells herself that she must adhere to "the law given by God,

sanctioned by man. . . . Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for moments such as this. . . . If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth- so I have always believed, and if I cannot believe it now, it is because

I am insane - quite insane with my veins running fire and my

16 Robert Bernard Martin, The Accents of Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1966), pp. 99-100. 39

heart beating faster than I can count its throbs" (Vol. II, p.

134).

Jane's decision to leave Rochester is related to her struggle between her personal inclinations and desires and the traditional moral code for women, but it is not indicative of either anti-sex or anti-male feeling. As a matter of fact,

Jane's remark, after her marriage, that "I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh" (Vol. II, p. 318) demonstrates that Jane truly loves

Rochester and appreciates the sexual aspect of their marriage.

I do not mean to imply, however, that the ending of Jane

Eyre 'is a particularly strong one. While Rochester does not lose his masculinity as a result of his injuries, he does de­ velop a radically different perspective on life, on God, on marriage and on himself and the woman he loves.1? His views on every important subject perfectly coincide with Jane's. Ten years after their marriage, Jane reflects that "to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking" (Vol. II, p. 368). This makes for a happy ending, but also a somewhat unrealistic one. For in real life, a metamorphosis such as

Rochester undergoes very rarely occurs. If the ending of this novel had not been contrived, Jane would have had to cope with

17 To cite just one example, it is no longer important to Rochester to have his fiancee adorned in showy, expensive gowns. He tells Jane: "Never mind fine clothes and jewels now: all that is not worth a fillip" (Vol. II, p. 360). 40

a husband who ruthlessly manipulated her feelings, or insisted on patronizing her, or refused to recognize her right to free­ dom of choice. The truth.is that Jane Eyre does not solve her own crisis; Charlotte solves it for her. As one scholar ob­ serves, "Does not the aesthetic unease felt by the reader . . . come from the fact that Charlotte Bronte wanted at all costs to resolve the contradictions--marriage and 1'amour fou, permanence and passion, duty and happiness--in an improbably reconciled world, instead of carrying them to their logical and tragic end. „18 • • •

1® Françoise Basch, Relative Creatures, p„ 174. 41

Shirley

The peculiar greatness of Shirley, Charlotte Bronte's third novel, is too frequently overlooked.'*' One reason why the novel

has not been fully appreciated is that many critics come to it

with a set of assumptions about what Charlotte's work is supposed

to be like and in what direction her proper sphere extends. It

is taken for granted that Charlotte "shows little sense of so­

ciety as a web of interrelationships, obligations and shared

sustaining values" and that to Charlotte "the all-important di­

mension of the human being must be individual, personal, pri- 9 vate." While the focus in The Professor, Jane Eyre and Villette

is almost solely on the individual, in Shirley, Charlotte's en-

during interest in the life of the heart does not preclude an

absorption in the social realities of Yorkshire in the early

1800's. Interspersed throughout the novel are illustrations of

the prevalence of religious strife, the problems of different

groups of women, the plight of the unemployed working class man

1 For example, Robert Heilman finds it necessary to justify giving "so much space to a lesser work." See"Charlotte Bronte's 'New Gothic'" in From Austen to Conrad, ed. R. C. Rathburn and M. Steinmann (Minneapolis, Minn.: The University of Minnesota Press, 1958), p. 127

2 Mark Kinkead-We?kes, "The Place of Love in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights" in The Brontes: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Gregor (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1970), pp. 77-78.

J Kinkead-Weekes, p. 77. 42

and the struggle of the small industrialist to withstand the 4 devastating effects of the Orders in Council and the destruc­

tive acts of the Luddites.Because social realities are so

closely examined in Shirley, the novel has been cited as Char-

lotte's least characteristic. Some commentators, confronting

the anomalous nature of the novel, do not know quite what to make of it, so settle by relegating it to the position of a

sort of interesting failure.

It must be acknowledged that the appraisal of Shirley as a

lesser work than either Jane Eyre or Villette is not wholly un­ justified. Several factors, some of which we will be discussing

in greater detail later in the chapter, combine to weaken the novel. Charlotte has an irritating tendency, in Shirley, to mount a soap box through the transparent guise of one or another of her characters and as a consequence, the character is made

less believable. Another, related problem is that a few of the characters undergo changes that do not seem in keeping with their natures or that occur too abruptly. Moreover, the "woman ques-

4 "The 'Orders in Council,' provoked by Napoleon's Milan and Berlin decrees, and forbidding neutral powers to trade with France, had, by offending America, cut off the principal market of the Yorkshire woolen trade, and brought it consequently to the verge of ruin" (Shirley, Vol. I, p. 38).

5 The Luddites we're a group of workmen who, during the in­ dustrial crisis of 1811 and 1812, organized to destroy newly- invented labor-saving machines which were replacing thousands of workers.

6 Inga-Stina Ewbank, Their Proper Sphere: A Study of the Bronte Sisters as Early Victorian Female Novelists (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 176. 43

tion" is discussed much more overtly in this novel than in the others. In Jane Eyre and Villette (and also Charlotte's first novel, The Professor) the reader gains a sense of the problems of the Victorian woman chiefly through action and characteriza­ tion. In Shirley, dialogue and monologue are used extensively to comment on a number of issues, such as female employment, married vs. single life and the duties of woman. Charlotte's use of dialogue and monologue as vehicles for conveying views on the position of women sometimes lacks subtlety.

However, the strengths of the novel should not be obscured by considering these problems. The insights into the social problems of Yorkshire in the early 1800's are penetrating; the story itself, if not as gripping as Jane Eyre, sustains our in­ terest; there is a large cast of subsidiary characters, too, and many of these—Mrs. Pryor, Martin Yorke, Matthewson Helstone, the three eccentric curates--are as unforgettable as any in Vic­ torian fiction. But the real greatness of the novel lies in its two heroines, Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone. Unfortun­ ately, a great many critics have not dealt adequately with the complexities of these two characters or have failed to understand them at all.

Robert Bernard Martin, who has written a very fine study of

Charlotte's novels, does not analyze the characters of Shirley and Caroline as perceptively as he does those of Jane Eyre and

Lucy Snow. In his assessment of Caroline Helstone, he suggests that "she is the epitome of the popular idea of the Victorian

'heroine': pretty, sweet, gentle, retiring, trembling at a

frown, and with no particular gifts of intellect. With a change

of clothes and name, she might double for . . .Dora Spenlow or

Amelia Sedley ... a conventional girl of little spirit.It

is true that Caroline is timid and retiring. But her position

as the titular head of a minister's household (she lives with

her uncle, the Rev. Matthew Helstone) does not permit her to be- g have aggressively. She has been cornered into a passive, vacuous

life, but she is far from satisfied with it. Inwardly, she re­

bels against, rather than resigns herself to, her situation.

Moreover, Caroline is far more thoughtful and far less conven­

tional than the popular Victorian heroine, as the following bit

7 Martin, The Accents of Persuasion, pp. 123-24.

8 It has been argued that Ellen Nussey, Charlotte's long­ time friend, was the model for the character of Caroline Hel­ stone. Several factors, however, convince me that if anyone could be called the real-life counterpart of Caroline, it would be Anne Bronte. First, Charlotte was writing Shirley during the illnesses and deaths of Emily and Anne. Naturally, her mind was filled with thoughts of these sisters, whom she loved so much and who were swiftly slipping away from her. Second, there are a number of passages in the novel that mention the sisterly bond between Shirley and Caroline. Emily and Anne were extraordinarly close--so close that some who knew them observed that they were like twins. If Shirley can be seen as a fictional version of Emily Bronte (and there is little disagreement among critics on the affinity between these two),' and we bear in mind that Emily and Ellen were never close, it is more logical to conclude that the character of Caroline more nearly approximates Anne Bronte's than Ellen Nussey's. 45

of dialogue illustrates:

"Caroline," demanded Miss Keeldar, abruptly, "don't you wish you had a profession - a trade?" "I wish it fifty times a day. As it is, I often wonder what I came into the world for . I long to have something absorbing and compulsory to fill my head and hands, and to occupy my thoughts" (Vol. I, p. 326).

This passage is not an isolated one; there are a number of others which also illustrate Caroline's intelligence and spirit­ edness. In the chapter entitled Coriolanus, Caroline draws a lesson from Shakespeare which she shrewdly and boldly applies to the situation of her cousin Robert Moore, who owns and operates a mill. Surely the Amelia Sedley "type" would have neither the boldness to advise an important, somewhat formidable man of business, nor the originality and intellectual capacity to in­ terpret Shakespeare, that Caroline reveals in this scene.

Caroline Helstone's forcefulness is also established in her confrontation with Mrs. Yorke, an overbearing, smug, sour- tempered housewife who would like all women to be as miserable as herself. During a tea at Hortense Moore's home, Mrs. Yorke assails Caroline for being a romantic, sentimental fool and

9 Compare Caroline's disclosure to a passage from one of Charlotte's letters written while she was completing Shirley: "Lonely as I am - how should I be if Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career. . . . I wish all your daughters - I wish every woman in England had also a hope and a motive?' Quoted in The Brontes: their Lives, Friendships and Corre­ spondence , ed. T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington (Oxford: 1932), Vol. Ill, p. 4. 46

insinuates that she is plotting to become the wife of her

cousin Robert Moore. Mrs. Yorke assumes that the timid self-

conscious young lady is an easy target for her slurs, but

Caroline has the pluck to stand up to this bully.

"Excuse me, - indeed, it does not matter whether you excuse me or not - you have attacked me with­ out provocation: I shall defend myself without apology. Of my relations with my two cousins, you are ignorant: in a fit of ill-humour you have attempted to poison them by gratuitous insinua­ tions, which are far more crafty and false than anything with which you can justly charge me. That I happen to be pale, and sometimes to look diffident, is no business of yours. . . . That I am a 'romantic chit of a girl' is a mere con­ jecture on your part. I never romanced to you, nor to anybody you know. . . . You dislike me: you have no just reason for disliking me; there­ fore keep the expression of your aversion to yourself. If at any time, in future, you evince it annoyingly, I shall answer even less scrupu­ lously than I have done now" (Vol. II, p. 127).

Robert Martin argues that Charlotte Bronte is establishing

a polarity between the "shrinking femininity" of Caroline Hel- 10 stone and the "aggressive masculinity" of Shirley Keeldar.

But Shirley's aggressive masculinity is, as I hope to demon­

strate, as illusory as Caroline's shrinking femininity. Martin

further claims that each possesses what the other lacks, and if

the two types could be merged, the result would be a perfect woman.1110 It is more likely that Charlotte was suggesting that

10 Martin, p. 126.

11 Martin , pp. 133-34. 47

Caroline's negative traits--timidity and lack of direction--and

Shirley's negative traits—bravado and assumed masculinity--are varying reactions to the dilemma of being a woman in the male- oriented culture of nineteenth-century England, Merging one set of negative qualities with another could certainly not re­ sult in perfection.

Shirley is one of the most complex characters, male or female, that Charlotte ever created. Her aggressive masculin­ ity is, as I have intimated, superficial and deceptive. The im­ pression of masculinity is derived from her strikingly peculiar habit of repeatedly referring to herself in masculine terms.

She speaks of herself as Captain Keeldar, or as Shirley Keeldar,

Esquire. As a single woman, into whose hands has fallen a large country estate, it is true, as she says, that she holds "'a man's position'" (Vol. I, p. 292). She is responsible for managing certain business affairs, but her position of responsibility alone does not fully account for her way of viewing herself as

"'indeed no longer a girl, but quite a woman and something more

. . . really I feel quite gentlemanlike"' (Vol. I, p. 292). One very sound explanation of Shirley's affected manliness has been offered by M. A. Blom: "By its insistence that all independent action ... is improper for the female, society produces some passive saints, but it more frequently creates women who, un­ able or unwilling to accept such restrictions, adjust by re- 48

12 jecting their femininity. . . ." Shirley's negative feelings toward her womanhood are evoked by daily contact with people who hold that women are inferior to men in almost every re­ spect. Joe Scott, for example, refuses to discuss politics, business or any serious topic with a woman, for he is sure that he won't be understood. Apparently convinced that "'all the wisdom in the world is lodged in male skulls,'" he thinks that women should "'take their husband's opinion, both in poli­ tics and religion: it's wholesomest for them"' (Vol. II, pp.

15-16).

It is interesting that Shirley assumes the masculine guise most frequently in the presence of the bigoted, woman-scorning clergyman, Mr. Helstone, who "could not abide sense in women: he liked to see them as silly, as light-headed, as vain, as open to ridicule as possible; because they were then in reality what he held them to be and wished them to be - inferior: toys to play with, to amuse a vacant hour and to be thrown away"

(Vol. I, p. 166). Strangely, Mr. Helstone not only respects, but really seems to like strong-minded, strong-willed Shirley.

He goes so far as to entrust her with a brace of pistols on the eve of the anticipated uprising. Shirley, then, sometimes must adopt a masculine guise in order to gain status as a human be­ ing in the eyes of men like Mr. Helstone. What is even more pathetic is that Shirley must act out this role in order to achieve status in her own eyes.

12 B1qj9j ^Charlotte Bronte, Feminist Hanquee, Bucknell Review, XXI (Spring, 1973), p. 94 49

Shirley's complexity is well illustrated when a whole new dimension of her character emerges two-thirds of the way through the novel. Shirley, who has been flaunting her independence and calling herself the finest gentleman in Briarmain since she arrived at Fieldhead, reveals herself as a childlike, weak, passive woman in the presence of Louis Moore, her former tutor, with whom she has just been reunited after a lapse of several years. If the reader is seeking an Amelia Sedley type in this novel, he is more likely to find it in the second Shirley than in Caroline Helstone. Shirley curtseys, blushes, lowers her gaze, and so forth, when she is with Louis—but she does not always perform this role with him. She shifts between two modes of behavior—timid and bold, obedient and assertive, prompting 13 Louis to comment on her inconsistency.

Shirley has an idiosyncrasy which adds to our understanding of hef divided nature: she very often refers to herself, both in masculine and feminine terms, in the third person. This in­ dicates her lack of a sense of self, of a fully realized "I."

She is not satisfied with the restrictive, and at times humili­ ating, feminine role assigned to her by convention, so she periodically escapes by fashioning for herself a male role.

However, she can hardly be comfortable with the masculine guise, for it involves a denial of her real nature and makes it impos­ sible to fulfill her profound need to love and be loved by a man

13 See Vol. II, p. 265 and p. 282. 50

she can respect and admire. To complicate matters, Shirley has accepted the Victorian notion that one's husband must be above one, rather than at the same level, that a woman cannot really venerate her equal, only her superior. Shirley con­ fides to Caroline that she longs to meet "'one who sincerely makes me feel that he is my superior . . . the higher above me, so much the better: it degrades to stoop - it is glorious to look up'" (Vol. I, p. 311). In order to bring herself below

Louis's level, she metamorphoses into a child, a weakling.

There are indications that she is as uneasy with this pattern of behavior as she is with the masculine one: she becomes de­ pressed and nervous as her submission becomes absolute. Shirley, then, can be seen as a sort of misfit, vacillating between two patterns of behavior, but reluctant or unable to assimilate her­ self into either a man's world or woman's traditional sphere.

In Shirley, the plight of the unmarried Victorian woman is dramatized via Caroline Helstone's preoccupation with spinster- hood. At eighteen, Caroline reaches the conclusion that she will never marry. She has fallen in love with her cousin, Robert

Moore, but is convinced that he does not love her enough to ask her to become his wife. Since she has resolved to accept no other man, she regards herself as fated to spinsterhood. Caro­ line's attitude towards remaining single herself is not ambiva­ lent—she dreads the prospect, because she imagines that life 51

with Robert would be beautiful. Still, she makes a heroic effort

to reconcile herself to what she supposes to be her lot, and

during this process of attempted reconciliation, she analyzes

the lives of the old maids about her.

The most contented of these old maids is Miss Ainley, a

saintly woman who has devoted her life to serving others. Mr.

Hall, the wise, kind pastor of Nunnely parish, claims that she

comes closer to living the kind of life Christ did than any human being he has ever known. Mr. Hall's spinster sister,

Margaret, is modeled along similar lines; she is benevolent, sweet-natured and happier than a great many married women, hav­

ing "her books for a pleasure and her brother for a care . .

(Vols I, p. 408). Miss Mann, on the other hand, is a wretched person—morose and hypercritical, with a "Gorgon gaze" and a

"corpse-like" appearance. But Caroline learns that Miss Mann has a good heart; she has spent her life exercising "rigid self-denial," attending the sick and the dying, making "large sacrifices of time, money, health, for those who had repaid her only by ingratitude . . ." (Vol. I, pp. 259-61).

Caroline views the lives of spinsters other than her future self ambivalently. At several points she recognizes that Miss

Ainley is happy—she seems to delight in doing for others.

Caroline acknowledges Miss Ainley's moral superiority, discover­ ing "so much goodness, so much usefulness, so much mildness, patience, truth, that she bent her own mind before Miss Ainley's 52

in reverence" (Vol. I, p. 266). And yet, she can reflect to

herself that

certain sets of human beings are very apt to main­ tain that other sets should give up their lives to them and their service and then requite them by praise: they call them devoted and virtuous. Is this enough? Is it to live? Is there not 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 be­ lieve it. . . . I suspect it would conduce to the happiness and welfare of all if each knew his allot­ ment, and held to it as tenaciously as the martyr to his creed (Vol. I, p. 253).

The attitudes expressed in Shirley toward married life are

also ambivalent. Marriage is not consistently regarded as the

solution to the frustrations and limitations of spinsterhood, because marriage, for most women, involved a species of frustra­

tions and limitations of its own.

A married woman was free from the loneliness, poverty and

ridicule which often accompanied Victorian spinsterhood, but she was restricted in other ways. Some women were bullied by hus­ bands who felt it was their prerogative to keep their female de­ pendents in line. Mrs. Pryor, Shirley's governess and Caroline's

long-lost mother, is an outstanding example of the abused wife; years after her husband's death, she has still not recovered the

spirit that was knocked put of her. Other Victorian wives were not so much bullied as ignored, or treated like infants or idiots.

Matthewson Helstone, Caroline’s uncle and Mrs. Pryor's brother- 53

in-law, is convinced that women "were a very different, prob­ ably a very inferior order of existence; a wife could not be her husband’s companion, much less his confidante, much less his stay. His wife, after a year or two, was of no great im­ portance to him in any shape." She "gradually took her leave of him and of life" but he "scarcely noticed her decline" (Vol.

I, p. 71-2). Some years later, he thinks of marrying again, but, fortunately for Hannah, the young woman to whom he is at­ tracted, "the impression still left on him of the weight of the millstone he had once worn round his neck" keeps him from pro­ posing. The narrator remarks that "the second Mrs. Helstone, inversing the natural order of insect existence, would have fluttered through the honeymoon, a bright admired butterfly, and crawled the rest of her days a sordid trampled worm" (Vol.

I, pp. 166-67).

The majority of both single and married women were caught in a round of obligatory feminine duties that included visiting, fancy hand-work and charity or church work. Much is made of the tiresomeness and irritation occasioned by the fulfilling of these duties in Shirley. Caroline must be prepared to receive visitors at any hour of the day. One afternoon, for example, a set of ridiculous ladies descends upon the parsonage and it falls upon

Caroline "to usher them upstairs, to help them to unshawl, smooth their hair and make themselves smart; to reconduct them to the drawing-room, to distribute amongst them books of engravings 54

. . ." (Vol. I, p. 159). From her reflections, it is clear

that she does not enjoy these occasions. Another duty which

Caroline reluctantly discharges is contributing to and purchas­

ing from the Jew-basket. The vein in which the Jew-basket is

discussed indicates that Charlotte viewed somewhat contempt­ uously this

. awful incubus ... of the capacity of a good-sized family clothes-basket, dedicated to the purpose of conveying from house to house a monster collection of pincushions, needle-books, card-racks, work-bags, articles of infant wear, &c., &c., &c., made by the willing or reluctant hands of the Christian ladies of a parish, and sold perforce to the heathenish gentlemen thereof, at prices unblushingly exorbi­ tant. The proceeds of such compulsory sales are applied to the conversion of the Jews, the seeking out of the ten missing tribes, or to the regenera­ tion of the interesting coloured population of the globe. Each lady-contributor takes it in her turn to keep the basket a month, to sew for it, and to foist off its contents on a shrinking male public. An exciting time it is when that turn comes round: some active-minded women with a good trading spirit, like it, and enjoy exceedingly the fun of making hard-handed, worsted-spinners cash up, to the tune of four or five hundred per cent above cost price, for articles quite useless to them; other feebler souls object to it and would rather see the prince of darkness himself at the door any morning, than that phantom basket, brought with "Mrs. Rouse’s compliments, and please, ma'am, she says it's your turn now" (Vol. I, pp. 159-60).

In the middle-classes, managing the household was the chief duty of most married women and many single ones. Very often a

Victorian spinster lived with her widowed father and/or bachelor brother and kept house just as a married woman did. This is the case with both Margaret Hall and eccentric Hortense Moore in 55

Shirley. The lives of these women are centered around keeping

house, for an unmarried brother, but apparently neither old maid

is dissatisfied with her lot. Hortense, especially, is a

zealous drawer-cleaner-outer and finds darning socks a highly

rewarding occupation. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte lived

with their widowed father and brother Branwell, and sacrificed

a large portion of their time and energy in doing for the men 14 of the household. That Charlotte did not find domestic duties

quite as fulfilling as Hortense Moore is evident in her reply to

Southey's letter advising her to relinquish, for the sake of

executing her "proper duties," hopes of a literary career:

"Following my father's advise - who from childhood has coun­

selled me, just in the wise and friendly tone of your letter -

I have endeavoured not only attentively to observe all the duties

a woman ought to fulfill, but to feel deeply interested in them.

I don't always succeed, for sometimes ... I would rather be reading or writing; but I try to deny myself; and my father's approbation amply rewarded me for the privation.

The views of another character in Shirley are relevant to our discussion of the duties of the Victorian woman. Rose

The sisters tried to arrange their affairs in such a way that at least one of them stayed at home while the others attended school or worked as governesses.

15 Quoted in Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte" (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1905), p. 141. 56

16 Yorke, at twelve, rebels against the prospect of spending her life keeping house. It is a weakness in the novel that this pre-adolescent is burdened with the convictions of a mature woman. She firmly informs her mother that she does not intend to bury her talent "'in the dust of household drawers'" or

"'shut it up in a china cabinet 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 . . . 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'" (Vol. II, p.

120).

Caroline, too, protests against the kind of life most women lead at home, reflecting that men expect women to "'sew and cook . . . contentedly, regularly, uncomplainingly all their lives long, as if they had no germs of faculty for any­ thing else. . . . Could men live so themselves?"' (Vol. II,

16 The character of Rose Yorke is based on Charlotte's iconoclastic friend, Mary Taylor, who despised the conven­ tional life to which most women were committed. If Rose had been endowed with the years, as well as the opinions, of Mary Taylor, her words would have the ring of truth. Mary's re­ peated exhortations to Charlotte that she would ruin herself if she did not escape her dull, cloistered life at Haworth (see Gerin, pp. 174-75 and pp. 287-88) are echoed,in Rose's declaration to Caroline that "'I am resolved that my life shall be a life: not a long, slow death like yours in Briar- field Rectory. . . . Might you not as well be tediously dying, as for ever shut up in that glebe-house - a place that, when I pass it, always reminds me of a windowed grave?"' (Vol. II, pp. 118-19). 57

p. 108). Her long mental tirade on the fettered Victorian

woman, powerful as a bit of social criticism, is too stilted

and formal to give the illusion of being a string of Caro­

line’s private thoughts. We feel we are reading a lecture as

a series of accusations, questions and demands are fired at the

"’Men of England!'" and the "'Men of Yorkshire!'"--an audience

that exists for Charlotte, but not for Caroline (Vol. II, p.

110).

It is helpful to examine Caroline Helstone's obsession with spinsterhood and Shirley Keeldar's reflections on married and single life against Charlotte's private experience and views on the subject. Contemporary societal concepts of the "old maidu also add to our understanding of the situation of single women in the nineteenth century.

The single adult female was viewed by most Victorians "as a violation of a natural law."'*'? Victorian social critic W. R.

Greg estimated that over a million women in England and Wales were "unnaturally single." He coined a phrase to characterize these unfortunate creatures: "redundant women"--those "who in place of completing, sweetening and embellishing the existence of others are compelled to lead an independent and incomplete 18 existence of their own." His point of view was shared by

17 Mrs. Lynn Linton, Sowing the Wind (1867), quoted in Thomson, The Victorian Heroine, p. 117.

18 William Rathbone Greg, "Why are Women Redundant?", Literary and Social Judgments (Boston, 1873), p. 276 and pp. 282-83. 58

Anthony Trollope, who wrote: "The best right a woman has is

the right to a husband, and that is the right to which I 19 recommend every young woman to turn her best attention."

The conviction that woman's only function was to be a wife and

mother was so widespread that emigration societies, which en­

couraged women to emigrate to America or Australia to find

husbands, flourished through much of the period. The old maid 20 was seen as a social problem.

Charlotte Bronte, who was past thirty and still single

when she wrote her novels, spoke out on the subject of spin­

sterhood in her personal correspondence. To Miss Wooler, head­

mistress of Roe Head School which she attended in 1831, Char­

lotte wrote: "There is no more respectable character on this

earth than an unmarried woman who makes her own way through

life quietly, perseveringly - without support of husband or 21 brother. . . ." To Ellen Nussey, she wrote that her heart

ached not because "I am a single woman and likely to remain a

single woman - but because I am a lonely woman and likely to

be lonely.

19 Quoted in Thomson, The Victorian Heroine, p. 84.

20 Ray Strachey comments: "A girl could go on being some­ body's daughter only so long as her father was alive; and after that, if she had not succeeded in becoming somebody's wife, she was adrift. . . . With the laws of inheritance as they were, the single woman nearly always had narrow means; and her life was passed in trying to be as little in the way as possible" (Struggle, p. 17).

21 The Brontes: their Lives,Friendships and Correspond­ ence, Vol. II, p. 77.

22 The Brontes: their Lives . . . , Vol. IV, p. 6. 59

In 1853, Thackeray wrote of Charlotte Bronte:

I can read a great deal of her life as I fancy her in her book, and see that rather than have fame, rather than any other earthly good or mayhap heaven­ ly one she wants some Tomkins or another to love her and be in love with. But you see she is a little bit of a creature without a penny worth of good looks, thirty years old I should think, buried in the country, and eating up her own heart there and no Tomkins will come.

But Thackeray was not the seer he imagined himself in this

case, for at least four suitors proposed to Charlotte. Her

reactions to the first three proposals indicate that she was

not interested in marriage for its own sake. To Ellen's

brother, Henry Nussey, who asked her to marry him in 1839,

Charlotte wrote: "I will never, for the sake of attaining

the distinction of matrimony and escaping the stigma of an

old maid, take a worthy man whom I am conscious I cannot 24 render happy." Charlotte received a second proposal in

1839 from a young Irish curate, Mr. Bryce, who had met her

just once. She wrote to Ellen: "I have heard of love at

first sight, but this beats all. I leave you to guess what my answer would be, convinced that you will not do me the in­ justice of guessing wrong. ... I am certainly doomed to be an old maid. Never mind, I made up my mind to that fate ever

23 Quoted in Winifred Gerin, Charlotte Bronte: The Evo­ lution of Genius (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 523.

24 Quoted in Gerin, p. 128. 60

25 since I was twelve years old. ..."

That Charlotte was not waiting for just any "Tomkins"

to marry her is made clear by a remark she made to Ellen re­

garding James Taylor, one of her publishers, who she knew

intended to propose to her.

It would sound harsh were I to tell even you of the estimate I felt compelled to form respecting him; dear Nell, I looked for something of the gentleman - something of the natural gentleman; you know I can dispense with acquired polish, and for looks, I know myself too well to think that I have any right to be exacting on that point. I could not find one gleam, I could not see one passing glimpse of true good breeding; it is hard to say, but it is true. In mind too; though clever, he is second rate; thoroughly second rate...... No, if Mr. Taylor be the only husband fate offers to me, single I must always remain."26

Charlotte's responses to the advances of Arthur Nicholls,

her father's curate, were more complex than her responses to

Nussey, Bryce and Taylor. Early in the courtship, she spoke

of "a sense of incongruity and uncongeniality in feelings,

tastes, principles." While she later stated that her "esteem

and affection" increased as she came to know Mr. Nicholls bet-

ter, her tone is never enthusiastic. Even after the marriage

had been arranged, she confided to Ellen: "What I taste of happiness is of the soberest order. I trust to love my hus­

band. ... I believe him to be an affectionate, a conscien-

25 Quoted in Gerin, pp. 129-30.

26 The Brontes: their Lives . . . , Vol. Ill, pp. 228-29.

27 Quoted in Gerin, p. 517 and p. 531. 61

tious, a high-principled man; and if, with all this, I should yield to regrets that fine talents, congenial tasts and thoughts are not added, it seems to me I should be most pre- 28 sumptuous and thankless." Once married, Charlotte referred in her letters to her husband's kindness and tenderness to her and her growing attachment to him; but several passages indicate that she was not completely satisfied with married life. To Ellen, as always, she communicated her feelings openly:

During the last six weeks the colour of my thoughts is a good deal changed; I know more of the reali­ ties of life than I once did. I think many false ideas are propagated, perhaps unintentionally. I think those married women who indiscriminately urge their acquaintances to marry, much to blame. For my part, I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance, what I always said in theory, 'Wait God's will.' Indeed, indeed, Nell, it is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife. Man's lot is far, far different.

The question of whether or not Charlotte was happy in the nine months of married life that preceded her death is an intriguing one, but for the purposes of our discussion, the question of why she married Nicholls in the first place is more important.

Decidedly, he was no better suited to her than Henry Nussey and no less second-ra’te than James Taylor. One of Charlotte's friends, Katie Winkworth, reported a conversation she had with

28 Quoted in Gerin, p. 532.

29 Quoted in Gerin, p. 555. 62

the novelist shortly before her marriage. Charlotte told her that "it has cost me a good deal to come to this. I cannot conceal from myself that he is not intellectual; there are so many places into which he could not follow me intellectually.

. . .' He is a Puseyite and very stiff. I fear it will stand in the way of my intercourse with some of my friends. But I shall always be the same in my heart towards them. I shall 30 never let him make me a bigot."

There are no clear-cut answers to the question of why

Charlotte consented to marry a man like Nicholls, but one can speculate that Charlotte, like the heroine she created, valued her independence, while at the same time she required the se­ curity of being governed by a man. All her life, her omniscient, forceful father, the Reverend Patrick Bronte, who was "the liv- 31 ing symbol of the nineteenth-century patriarch," had governed her. And it seems that Charlotte solicited, rather than merely acquiesced to, his control. Mr. Bronte lurked behind a great many of his daughter's decisions and actions. For his sake, she declined to accept the highest-paying, most prestigious teaching job she had ever been offered (as first governess in a large school), sacrificed the opportunity of returning to

Brussels, and refused numerous invitations to travel or visit

30 Quoted in Gerin, p. 536.

31 Richard Chase, "The Brontes: A Centennial Observa­ tion," p. 20. 63

with friends. At the time that she became engaged to

Nicholls, her father was seventy-seven years old. It is

conceivable that her decision to marry was tied to an aware­

ness that Nicholls, as her husband, would function as a male-

authority or simply a father-figure after her father was gone.

This biographical data can illuminate Shirley Keeldar's behavior in the last part of the novel. Shirley's need to be "mastered" reflects Charlotte's need to submit to a male-

authority figure. It must be stressed that Shirley was writ­

ten two or three years before Nicholls began to court Charlotte

Bronte, so that no chronological correlation between the court­

ships of the heroine and the author exists. That both Char­

lotte and Shirley expressed doubts and misgivings about their

impending marriages is an illustration of Oscar Wilde's obser­ vation that not only does art imitate life, but life imitates art.

Shirley's ambivalent attitude towards marriage is rooted in a basic psychological conflict: the need to be independent 32 and the need to be mastered. She rejects Sir Philip Nunnely, a very good, amiable man whom she respects and likes, on the grounds that he is "'not my master"' (original italics, Vol.

II, p. 331)., She explains to her uncle, whois incensed at her refusal to marry Sir Philip: "'Did I not say I prefer a

32 i am indebted to M. A. Blom, whose brilliant article, "Charlotte Bronte, Feminist Manquee," has helped me to clarify my ideas on Shirley's conflicting needs. 64

master? One in whose presence I shall feel obliged and dis­

posed to be good. One whose control my impatient temper must

acknowledge. A man whose approbation can reward - whose dis­

pleasure punish me. A man I shall feel it impossible not to

love, and very possible to fear'" (Vol. II, p. 333). Her

future husband, Louis Moore, reflects: "'However kindly the

hand - if it is feeble, it cannot bend Shirley; and she must

be bent: it cannot curb her; and she must be curbed'" (Vol.

II, p. 295). During their courtship, Shirley is repeatedly

compared to a leopardess, a pantheress, a wild creature. Once

she agrees to marry Louis, she stalls, "putting off her mar­

riage day by day, week by week, month by month." Finally,

she' is "fettered to a fixed day. . . . Thus vanquished and

restricted, she pined like any other chained denizen of

deserts. Her captor alone could cheer her; his society alone

could make amends for the lost privilege of liberty . . ."

(Vol. II, p. 458). So Shirley longs at once to be shackled

and to be free, to be a submissive wife and to be her own mistress. Surely what we are being given here is an insight

into the fundamental dilemma of being a female in the nine­

teenth century: divided between her need, instilled by years

of cultural brainwashing, to conform to society's image of a

good, passive woman, and her natural desire to be a free in­

dividual, the Victorian woman is ridden with anxieties in modeling her self-image and establishing her way of life. 65

The proud, strong and beautiful Shirley Keeldar becomes,

by the end of this novel, one of the most pathetic figures in

fiction. One cannot help but feel bewildered and dismayed at

the fate of this "chained denizen," for whom the following

remark is an appropriate epitaph:

On the day when it will be possible to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger. In the meantime love represents . . . the curse that lies heavily upon woman con­ fined in the feminine universe . . . woman muti­ lated, insufficient unto herself. The innumerable martyrs to love bear witness against the injustice of a fate that offers a sterile hell as ultimate salvation.

33 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Bantam Books, Inc., 1970), p. 629. 66

Villette

There is a good deal of autobiographical detail in all of Charlotte Brontd's fiction, but readers who are familiar with her biography are likely to feel that in no other novel is Charlotte's own experience more nearly approximated than

in Villette. However, Charlotte's last novel cannot be re­ garded as her autobiography in the literal sense, for the plot of Villette really bears only a superficial resemblance to the Brussels episode of Charlotte Bronte's life. Rather, it is more fruitful to view Villette as a re-creation of

Charlotte's inner life during her stay in Brussels--to see

Lucy Snowe's craving for love and genial human society, her terrible bouts with depression, her struggle between con­ science and passion--as offshoots of similar emotional ex­ periences in the author's life.

Lucy, it seems to me, is closer to Charlotte than any of the other heroines. As we have noted,the characters of the two heroines of Shirley are apparently based on Charlotte's sisters. Quiet, thoughtful, sweet Caroline Helstone is much like Anne Bronte and the forceful, complex Shirley Keeldar re­ minds one of the Emily Bronte that biographers have been puz­ zling over for a century. Many readers have tended to identify

Charlotte with Jane Eyre, but Jane is more highly idealized

1 See Chapter II, p. 44 of this study. 67

than Lucy Snowe, who is a mixed character. Her faults make

her more human and their inclusion helps to fashion a more honest, though less flattering, delineation of a phase of the author's personality.

Some readers might conclude that there is little affinity between the author and the heroine of Villette because certain passages from Charlotte's letters seem to imply that she had negative feelings toward Lucy Snowe. Charlotte wrote to her publisher George Smith that "I am not leniently disposed to­ ward Miss Frost:from the beginning I never meant to appoint 3 her lines in pleasant places." In another letter to Smith, she wrote that Paul Emanuel was better off drowned than mar­ ried to "'that - person - that that individual - Lucy Snowe.

It is my impression that Charlotte Bronte's criticism of

Lucy--even when the tone is facetious, as in the second passage quoted above--is a sort of projected self-criticism, rather than a display of hostility toward the character. As her cor­ respondence reveals, Charlotte judged herself severely. More­ over, all of her life she suffered from feelings of inferiority and inadequacy--feelings which are familiar to Lucy too. We

2 charlotte vacillated between the surnames Frost and Snowe for her heroine.

3 Letter dated Nov. 3, 1852, quoted in Elizabeth Gas-' kell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1905), p. 479.

4 Quoted in Martin, Accents of Persuasion, p. 186. 68

can expect, then, that Charlotte Bronte would be no more "len­

iently disposed" toward Lucy Snow than toward herself.

It might be well to note at this point that the self-

concept of the Victorian woman in general was weakened by the views of popular authorities, which of course fed popular opinion. Mrs. Ellis, author of a best-selling series of books on etiquette, wrote in 1839: "In her intercourse with man, it is impossible but that woman should feel her own inferior­ ity. Women were considered inferior to men on several counts, but especially intellectually. Herbert Spencer, in his The Study of Sociology (1872-73), concluded that since the male expended less energy than the female in procreation, more energy was available for intellectual advancement.0

Virginia Woolf wrote of the Victorian period that "there was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually. Even if her father did not read out loud these opinions, any girl could read them for herself, and the reading, even in the nineteenth century, must have lowered her vitality, and told profoundly upon her work."?

3 Mrs. Ellis, Women of England (1839), p. 155, quoted in Crow, The Victorian Woman, p. 51.

6 Spencer's theory is explained by Jill Conway in "Ster­ eotypes of Femininity in a Theory of Sexual Evolution" in Suffer and Be Still, p. 141.

7 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Har­ court, Brace and Company, 1929), p. 94. 69

Virginia Woolf's comment on the Victorian woman being

conscious of intellectual inferiority is especially applicable

to Lucy Snowe. Lucy has the kind of ambivalent feelings to­ wards her intellectual capacities that must have disturbed many bright women in the nineteenth century. Lucy is a highly

intelligent, an even brilliant woman. She is imaginative, creative and highly observant. But on many occasions, Lucy denies, to herself and to others, that she has such talents.

For example, when Madame Beck asks her to assume the duties of English teacher (she had held the rather unchallenging post of nanny since her arrival at the pensionnât) Lucy is seized with panic, convinced that she is not equipped for the job.

And yet Lucy Snowe, who reflects that "as far as my own mind was concerned, God had limited its powers and its actions"

(p. 201), can be goaded out of habitually underestimating her­ self when another person presents himself or herself as a critic or an opponent.

Thus, in thé encounter with Madame Beck, Lucy decides to enter the classroom only after Madame stops trying to persuade her that she can meet the challenge and inquires instead:

"'Tell me then ... do you really feel so incapable of doing it?'" (Vol. I, p. 123). This question, and something Lucy reads in Madame's countenance, makes Lucy "think twice" on the subject. "At that instant she [Madame Beck] did not wear a woman's aspect but a man's. Power of a particular kind strongly limned itself in all her traits . . . neither sym­ 70

pathy, rior congeniality, nor submission, were the emotions it

awakened. I stood - not soothed, nor won, nor overwhelmed.

It seemed as if a challenge of strength between opposing gifts

was given, and I suddenly felt all the dishonour of my diffi­

dence - all the pusillanimity of my slackness to aspire."

Another question—'"Will you ... go backward or forward?’"

and another significant expression--this time a sneer--on

Madame Beck's face are enough to arouse Lucy into deciding

that she is capable of giving the lesson. Other confronta­

tions of this sort occur between Lucy and Paul (Vol. II, pp. O 165-71) and Lucy and Messieurs Boissec and Rochemort (Vol.

II, pp. 249-50), and in each case Lucy is goaded out of her

sense of inferiority and into positive action. One explana­

tion of the shift in Lucy's attitude toward herself and,con­

sequently, in her behavior is that she is inured to the tra­

ditional concept of woman as an inferior being but can be

jarred into rejecting this view by a crisis or a confronta­

tion. We can understand Lucy's conviction that she will fail

as a teacher or falter badly on an examination if we realize

that the typical Victorian woman was conditioned, culturally,

to view herself negatively, to expect little out of herself

intellectually or otherwise. Fortunately, Lucy is not quite

typical and is brought, during the course of the novel, to an

® The pedants who, Lucy remembers, had tried to seduce her in the streets of Villette on the night she arrived. 71

awareness of her real capacities.

Lucy has more collisions with Paul Emanuel than with any

other individual in her life. The relationship between Paul

and Lucy is characterized by even more conflict and tension

than that between Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester. Lucy's re­

sponses to this man who insists she must "'be kept down'"

(Vol. I, p. 257) can help us to understand her ideas about

her own role as a woman, specifically, and the role of women,

generally.

Paul tries to subdue Lucy in a number of ways--intellec­

tually, socially, sexually, emotionally--in an attempt to push

her'into the traditional feminine role. He is disturbed, for

example, when Lucy advances intellectually beyond the limits he deems suitable for women. When Lucy first begins receiving

lessons in mathematics from Paul, he is delighted with her,

for she is ignorant and slow to grasp the material. So long as Lucy's difficulties continue, Paul remains "very good, very kind, very forbearing: he saw the sharp pain inflicted and

felt the weighty humiliation imposed by my own sense of in­ capacity. His own eyes would moisten when tears of shame and effort clouded mine . . ." (Vol. II, p. 164). But when Lucy begins to make progress in her studies, "his kindness became sternness; the light changed in his eyes from a beam to a spark; he fretted, he opposed, he curbed me imperiously; the 72

more I did, the harder I worked, the less he seemed content.

Sarcasms of which the severity amazed and puzzled me harassed

my ears; then flowed out the bitterest innuendoes against the

'pride of intellect.' I was vaguely threatened with, I know

not what doom, if I ever trespassed the limits proper to my

sex, and conceived a contraband appetite for unfeminine

knowledge" (Vol. II, p. 165).

Lucy denies that she has had longings for knowledge and

discovery, insisting that "these feelings were known to me

but by briefest flashes" (Vol. II, p. 165). This passage is

revealing, for it indicates that Lucy finds it necessary to

protest, even to herself, that she has "conceived a contra­

band appetite for unfeminine knowledge." We can surmise that

the flashes of desire for "masculine" knowledge have been very

brief because Lucy has checked them, not daring to permit the

flashes to become a forbidden flame.

After Paul begins instructing Lucy, however, his hostile, unjust attitude toward her progress gives "wings to aspiration."

At first, Paul's sneers hurt Lucy, but after she "had penetrated

to motives" her eyes are opened to the absurdity of the theory

of the limits proper to feminine intellectual development.

Paul's sneers and malice now stimulate Lucy to learn as much

as possible. She concludes: "Whatever my powers - feminine or the contrary - God had given them and I felt resolute to be

ashamed of no faculty of his bestowal" (Vol. II, p. 166). 73

It was Paul, ironically, who suggested in the first

place that Lucy become his pupil. Initially, he enjoyed

patronizing this young woman who was, in his words, "'as yet

in a state of wretchedly imperfect mental development'" (Vol.

II, p. 164). But as soon as Lucy begins to approach his own

level, Paul feels threatened and insecure. His Galatea has

gone further than he wished her to, but there is no way to make her retrace her steps now.

A parallel can be drawn between Paul's response to Lucy's success as a scholar and his response to Madame Panache, one of the most learned, most effective teachers in Madame Beck's establishment. Madame Panache's cleverness, combined with the "masculine" qualities of aggressiveness and tremendous confidence in her own abilities, absolutely infuriate Mon­ sieur Paul. He labors "vindictively and implacably" to effect her dismissal from the school. Months later, Paul learns that

Madame Panache has not been able to find employment since

Madame Beck fired her. Forgetting his former aversion, he

"moved heaven and earth till he found her a place" (Vol. II, p. 162). There is a curious link between Paul's change of heart toward Madame Panache and toward Lucy Snowe. Paul's shift from belligerence to compassion toward Madame Panache is the result of her movement from the position of a competi­ tor or an equal to that of an underdog or an inferior. In the case of Lucy Snow, Paul's attitude changes from compassion to belligerence as his pupil moves from the position of a de- 74

pendent or an inferior to that of a rival or an equal. We

might conclude from this that Paul Emanuel feels friendly to­

ward women who are beneath him, intellectually or profession­

ally, but hostile towards women who approach his own level;

however, he is a complex character whose feelings, motives,

and beliefs are as dynamic as Lucy's. In the course of this

study it will become clear that Paul is no more a consistent

"chauvinist" than Lucy is a consistent "feminist."

As we have seen, Paul is disturbed when Lucy advances

scholastically beyond the limits established for her sex.

He is also agitated when he observes that Lucy deviates from

what he deems the norms of behavior for young ladies in other matters, such as dress. Lucy's grave, simple mode of dress

had always met with his approval, but one evening, he spots

her at the concert wearing a pink dress with lace trim.

Later, Paul reprimands her for appearing in a "'scarlet

gown.'" He claims that it wounds him to see her wearing

"'babioles'" and "'flaunting, giddy colors'" (Vol. II, p.

133).Paul completely misinterprets Lucy's reasons for wear­

ing the pink dress. He accuses her of vanity, worldliness and

frivolity, but the truth is that Lucy wears the dress only to

please her godmother, Mrs. Bretton, who gave it to her as a gift.

9 Paul's feelings in this matter are not entirely con­ sistent, for he himself actually prefers bright colors (see Vol. II, p. 134). Lucy gauges his taste correctly in design­ ing the showy watch-guard for his birthday. 75

However, the irony operates at another, more subtle level.

During the argument, Paul makes an oblique reference to "'a

fateful influence’" that had induced Lucy to deck herself out

in frippery. He suggests that Lucy should be more "sedate, more sober . . . less taken by show, less prone to set an un­ due value on outside excellence - to make much of the atten­ tions of people remarkable for so many feet of stature . . .

’un nez plus ou moins bien fait' [a nose more or less well formedJ and an enormous amount of fatuity" (Vol. II, p. 132).

It is clear that Paul is making a connection between Lucy's appearance in the pretty pink dress and her relationship with

Graham Bretton, the tall English physician (with a well-formed nose) who accompanied Lucy to the concert. Although Lucy is infatuated with Graham at the point in the story when he es­ corts her to the concert, she would never substitute a fancy pink dress for her customary grey clothing to allure a man.

To Paul, Lucy's appearance in clothing so drastically differ­ ent from what she always wears signals her intent to attract

Dr. Bretton. In reality, Lucy hopes that the dress will not draw attention to herself and is relieved when Graham takes little notice of it.

A recent critical discussion on the symbolic signifi­ cance of clothes in the novels of Charlotte Bronte has a bearing on our analysis here of the pink dress episode.

Harriet Bjork contends that the garb of Charlotte's female characters is indicative of the stage of emancipation reached. 76

Wearing somber, plain "nun-like" garments can indicate in­

tegrity and autonomy—defiant lack of interest in attracting

men, freedom, from dependence on male approval.Nun-like

dress becomes "the garb of protest" for women who refuse to

use themselves as bait or be treated like dolls. Wearing

sensual, eye-catching clothing can indicate an intent to at­

tract the opposite sex, or catch a husband. Ms. Bjork is

arguing that women who attempt to snare a man by these means

are slaves to a system which treats wives like ornaments or

pretty dolls.

Ms. Bjork's basic insight into the symbolic significance

of clothes in Charlotte's novels is a valuable one, but some

of-the conclusions she draws are questionable. She ignores

the fact that in the 1840's and '50's middle class English-

women--especially those who worked as governesses or school- mistresses--usually wore very subdued clothing. For women

who did not move within the fashionable circles of London,

plain brown, black or grey clothing (such as Jane Eyre, Lucy

Snow or the Bronte sisters themselves wore) was hardly a "garb

10 It strikes me that Ms. Bjork is insinuating that the "nun-like dress" of some of Charlotte Bronte's characters is the Victorian equivalent of the "garb of protest" (unshaven skin, the neuter look) of some of today's militant separatists.

H Unfortunately, Ms. Bjork does not comment on several characters whose clothing preferences really reinforce her theory. In Villette, for example, Ginevra Fanshawe is pre­ occupied with collecting--from any source and by any means-- beautiful gowns and jewels to be used as tools for making conquests. Ms. Bjork's discussion can be found in her study The Language of Truth, pp. 58-64. 77

of protest" against sexist attitudes toward women, but rather,

standard apparel.

Ms. Bjork's interpretation of the significance of Lucy

Snowe's way of dressing, with which we are most concerned

here, is confused and confusing. She remarks that "Lucy

Snowe does not put on her grey clothes in a mood of healthy

self-reliance. In proud and neurotic independence she chooses

to dress with the typical severity of the poor, plain and

lonely self-supporting English lady. Her reaction against

her cowardly choice of the sexless garb of the convent is manifested in her use of lighter colours - pink, not red,

though - and more elegant materials on certain social occa­

sions" (p. 63). It is inconsistent to assert that Lucy's

preference for grey clothing is "cowardly" and "neurotic" while the "nun-like dress" of Jane Eyre "means integrity and

freedom" (p. 61).

Amid the complexities and ironies of the tutoring epi­

sode and the pink dress episode, a pattern emerges: Paul

Emanuel tries to manipulate Lucy Snowe in the direction of a conservative model of femininity, and she resists. The pat­

tern of manipulation and resistance recurs at other points in

the story, but one of the most forceful illustrations of this pattern shows that Charlotte could approach the topic of the position of women with a sense of humor. 78.

The scene is set in a museum in Villette, where Dr.

Bretton has conducted Lucy, with an understanding of calling for her in a few hours. Lucy has not been in the galleries long when her attention is arrested by a huge picture entitled

"Cleopatra." Lucy’s reaction to the sensual creature depicted on the canvas is one of quiet amusement rather than of lady­ like shock. Lucy reflects that this woman was

extremely well-fed: very much butcher's meat - to say nothing of bread, vegetables and liquids - must she have consumed to attain that breadth and height, that wealth of muscle, that affluence of flesh. She lay half-reclined on a couch: why, it would be difficult to say; broad daylight blazed around her; she appeared in hearty health, strong enough to do the work of two plain cooks; she could not plead a weak spind; she ought to have been standing, or at least sitting bolt upright. She had no business to lounge away the noon on a sofa. She ought likewise to have worn decent garments; a gown covering her properly, which was not the case: out of abundance of material - seven-and twenty yards, I should say, of drapery - she managed to make inefficient raiment. Then, for the wretched untidiness surrounding her, there could be no excuse. Pots and pans - perhaps I ought to say vases and goblets - were rolled here and there on the foreground; a perfect rubbish of flowers was mixed amongst them, and an absurd and disorderly mass of curtain upholstery smothered the couch and cumbered the floor (Vol. I, pp. 333-34).

Lucy is concluding that this production is "on the whole an enormous piece of clap-trap "when Monsieur Paul taps her on the shoulder and asks for an explanation of her unseemly, im­ modest behavior. He is shocked that she is unaccompanied by a matron (it was considered proper for unmarried ladies under thirty to have a chaperone with them in public) but even more 79

dismayed at her astounding audacity in viewing 111 that picture.’"

He leads her to a series of pictures "in a particularly dull

corner" and orders her, as if she were a disobedient child,

to '"asseyez-vous, et ne bougez pas - entendez-vous? jusqu'a ce qii'on vienne vous checher, ou que je vous donne la per­ mission'" [sit down and don't move - do you hear? until some­ body comes to find you or I give you permissionJ (Vol. I, p.

336). Lucy checks the catalogue and finds that the series of four pictures Paul has recommended to her are entitled "La vie d'une femme" (A Woman's Life). Lucy reacts as unconven­ tionally to this series as she did*to the "Cleopatra." The four "ugly pictures, she observes,

were painted rather in a remarkable style - flat, dead, pale and formal. The first represented a "Jeune Fille," coming out of a church-door, a missal in her hand, her dress very prim, her eyes cast down, her mouth pursed up - the image of a most villainous little she-hypocrite. The second, a "Mariee" with a long white veil, kneeling at a prie-dieu praying desk in her chamber, holding her hands plastered together, finger to finger, and showing the whites of her eyes in a most ex­ asperating manner. The third, a "Jeune Mere," hanging disconsolate over a clayey and a puffy baby with a face like an unwholesome full moon. The fourth, a "Veuve" widow , being a black woman, holding by the hand a black little girl, and the twain studiously surveying an elegant French monu1 m9e nt,7 set up in a corner of some Pere la Chaise. All these four "Anges" were grim and grey as burglars, and cold and vapid as ghosts. What women to live with! insincere, ill- humored, bloodless, brainless non-entities! As bad in their way as the indolent gipsy-giantess, the Cleopatra, in hers (Vol. I, p. 337). A

12 A famous cemetery in Paris. 80

Lucy's description of the Cleopatra painting and "La vie d'une femme" series indicates her rejection of two of the

images of femininity we discussed in the introduction: the seductress and the eternal virgin, the totally corrupt and the totally innocent woman. To Lucy neither the "temptress type" nor the "madonna type" is genuine. Real women are too complex to be categorized as wicked or virtuous.

Kate Millett, in her brief discussion of Villette, has written that the two works of art Lucy scrutinizes represent

"the two faces of woman whom the male has fashioned, one for 13 his entertainment, one for her instruction." Paul Emanuel's reaction to "Cleopatra" and "La vie d'une femme" gives some substance to her claim. While he insists to Lucy that a woman he really cares about must follow the pattern established by the prim and proper model of "A Woman's Life," he is person­ ally drawn to the siren Cleopatra, who is the antithesis of primness and propriety. Lucy notices that while she is sup­ posed to be studying the dreary series he has recommended to her, Paul himself is studying the censored Cleopatra. She teasingly observes: "'Monsieur, too, has been looking at

Cleopatra; what does he think of her?'" He replies that she is a superb woman, but he wouldn't want his wife, daughter or sister to be like her, so '"vous ne jeterez plus un seul coup d'oeil de son cote"' [don't you give her even another

13 Millett, Sexual Politics, p. 143. 81

Lucy indicates her awareness of the operation of the double

standard in this case by gently poking fun at Paul, rather

than by displaying a sense of outrage. To vex him, she says

that she has been looking at Cleopatra "’a great many times while Monsieur has been talking: I can see her quite well

from this corner.'" When he orders her to return to her four

insipid little pictures, she remarks: "'Excuse me, M. Paul;

they are too hideous: but if you admire them, allow me to vacate my seat and leave you to their contemplation'" (Vol. I, p. 341). By laughing in her sleeve, Lucy shows that she does not take Paul's notions seriously.

The implications of Lucy's rejection of the polar images of-woman that she views in the gallery become clearer when we turn to the characters in the novel, Ginevra Fanshawe and

Polly Home, who seem to represent the extremes. Paul's atti­ tude toward the images in the gallery is put in focus, too, when we compare it to the attitude of Dr. Graham Bretton to­ ward the two women who resemble Cleopatra and the virtuous prig in "La vie d'une femme" series.

In the course of the story, Dr; Bretton falls in love

With Ginevra Fanshawe and Polly Home, successively. Ginevra and Polly, who are cousins, are both about eighteen years old, pretty, and friends of Lucy Snowe. Apart from these factors, the girls have little in common. Ginevra is large and volup­ tuous, Polly is petite; Ginevra is bold, Polly is shy; Ginevra is flighty, Polly is steadfast. 82

Dr. Bretton becomes attracted to Ginevra early in the story because he is convinced that she is the kind of pure and innocent child-woman he has been seeking. As it never occurs to Dr. Bretton that Lucy loves him, he makes her his confidante. He assumes that Lucy, who knows Ginevra well, can appreciate her: '"You - every woman older than herself

- must feel for such a simple, innocent, girlish fairy a sort of motherly or elder-sisterly fondness. Graceful angel!

Does not your heart yearn towards her when she pours into your ear her pure child-like confidences? How you are privi­ leged !'" (Vol. I, pp. 249-50).

Lucy has had the "privilege" of discovering what the real

Ginevra is like, and knows that she is not the guileless, an­ gelic creature Dr. Bretton imagines she is. Lucy has listened to Ginevra prattle about her power over men and has watched her parade triumphantly in front of a mirror, gloating over her own beauty. Ginevra is a vain, flirtatious social-climber who makes it her business to know the exact value of every trinket Dr. Bretton and her other suitors give her.

Lucy insinuates to Graham that his vision of Ginevra has no basis in reality, but he persists in idolizing her.

Disillusionment finally comes to Dr. Bretton during the con­ cert he attends with his mother and Lucy. Graham perceives

Ginevra exchanging a glance with another of her admirers--a glance which he evaluates as "'marking mutual and secret under­ standing - it was neither girlish nor innocent. No woman, 83

were she as beautiful as Aphrodite, who could give or receive such a glance shall ever be sought in marriage by me'" (Vol.

I, p. 375).

Just as Lucy had understood earlier that Dr. Bretton's initial impression of Ginevra as a perfectly virtuous and naive girl was a chimera, she now views as distorted his assessment of her young friend as an immoral seductress.

Ginevra is, in truth, reckless, selfish and frivolous, but she is not wicked. Although Lucy has nothing to gain by con­ testing Graham's view of his former idol as a harlot—after all, she loves him herself—she defends Ginevra. When Graham asserts that he would not trust her with his honour, Lucy re­ plies that Ginevra might vex her husband in many ways, but she would not spot his honour--a Victorian way of saying that she would not commit adultery. Lucy had rejected the visual images of woman as seductress and angel, judging the first as clap-trap and the second as insincere. This is precisely how she appraises the successive images of Ginevra that Graham creates.

Graham seeks a wife who will fulfill the specifications of the ideal Victorian lady. When he discovers that Ginevra

"'is neither a pure angel nor a pure-minded woman'" (Vol. I, p. 365), his love for her turns to scorn. He wants a divinity to worship, and finds her at last in the tiny person of Polly

Home, whom he falls in love with after his infatuation with 84

Ginevra has ended. He is attracted to the same qualities of

purity and child-like naivete in Polly that he had once at­

tributed to her cousin, but he is sure that Polly will not

disappoint him as Ginevra did.

Indeed, Polly's purity and child-like innocence are not

the products of Graham's imagination. Polly really does seem

to fit the popular Victorian ideal of femininity. She is an­

gelic: "as she took her sire's cold hands and rubbed them

and stood on tiptoe to reach his lips for a kiss, there

seemed to shine around her a halo of loving delight" (Vol.

II, p. 46). She is childlike, possessing "an infantine

sparkle" (Vol. II, p. 51): "the child of seven was in the

girl-of seventeen" (Vol. II, p. 51). Polly lisps like a

seven-year old and, absurdly, blushes and corrects herself

whenever she does so. She is docile and subservient, cater­

ing to the every need of the men in her life (actually wait­

ing on them hand and foot), denying herself the little lux- 14 uries she presses on them. Most importantly, she is "pure"

(sexually naive), directing glances at Graham that are "shy

but very soft - as beautiful, as innocent, as any little fawn

could lift out of its cover of fern, or any lamb from its meadowbed" (Vol. Il, pp. 61-62). Piety, childlikeness, docil­

ity, subservience, sexual innocence — these are the feminine virtues that Coventry Patmore eulogized in his poem "The

14 See especially Vol. I, pp. 31-32 and Vol. II, pp. 52-53. 85

Angel in the House." But these qualities represent only one aspect of Polly's nature. Unlike Ginevra, Polly is a complex creature whose moods, all genuine, vary dramatically. Lucy observes: "With her father she really was still a child.

With me she was as serious and as womanly as thought and feeling could make her. With Mrs. Bretton she was docile and reliant, but not expansive. With Graham she was, at present, very shy" (p. 255). It might appear that Polly pre­ tends to be a child around her father and a blushing maiden around Graham, but in reality different individuals call out the different qualities that are within her. She has what might be called a heterogeneous personality.

- Although Polly is not a hypocrite—that is, she does not pretend to be what she is not--she does choose to conceal that aspect of her character that she knows would be offensive to certain individuals. Lucy Snowe discovers that in Polly

"there was more force, both of feeling and character, than most people thought - than Graham himself imagined - than she would ever show to those who did not wish to see it. . . .

Graham would have started had any suggestive spirit whispered of the sinew and stamina sustaining that delicate nature . . ."

(Vol. II, p. 103).

Several passages in the novel reveal Polly's thoughtful­ ness and forcefulness (for example, at the reception at the

Hotel Crecy, she converses with the local intellectuals with dignity and intelligence). Nevertheless, some critics have 86

insisted on categorizing Polly as a silly, shallow, babyish

young woman. Robert Bernard Martin, in The Accents of Per­

suasion, refers to her "essential childishness" and adds that

she is "a bit vacuous" (P. 180). Kate Millett, in Sexual

Politics, claims that "this female paragon" is "delightful

when she appears as Miss Home at the beginning of the book;

clever, affectionate, precocious - but nauseating when she re­

appears as a woman of nineteen and still a mental infant . . .

a cute preadolescent" (p. 143). Lucy's comment that in Polly

"there was more force, both of feeling and character, than

most people thought" has a supplementary application with re­

gard to these commentators.

-Lucy informs us that Paulina Home de Bassompierre and

John Graham Bretton marry and live very happily together. One

might well wonder how this marriage can succeed when Polly is

a more intelligent, dynamic and mature woman than Graham had

bargained for. There are only two ways of accounting for their

happiness together: either Polly adjusted to the permanent

role of passive and demure child-woman, or Graham's concept of

the ideal wife underwent modification.

Could Paulina have smothered the forceful and highly re­

flective aspect of her character for the whole of her married

life? Could she have been a happy person if she had done so?

It seems to me more likely to suppose that Graham was the one who made the major adjustment. Gradually, he could reach an 87

awareness of another side of his wife’s nature. He might think

to himself that married life had naturally made Polly less

childlike, less naive, less frail. He would probably not be

disturbed by what he perceived as a change in her, for she would tetain her sweetness, her puremindedness, and her faith­

fulness. (These are among Polly's stable qualities.)

One passage in the novel supports this conjecture. Lucy

Snowe assures us that after his marriage, Graham's "faults de­ cayed, his virtues ripened; he rose in intellectual refinement, he won in moral profit: all dregs filtered away, the clear wine settled bright and tranquil. Bright, too, was the destiny of his sweet wife. She kept her husband's love, she aided in his progress - of his happiness she was the cornerstone" (Vol.

II, p. 308). It is reasonable to assume that as Graham devel­ oped, intellectually and emotionally, he discarded his fantastic notions about the perfect wife. His views on women expanded to the extent that his demand for a plaster saint yielded to his love for a real woman.

Lucy has an integrated view of both Ginevra and Polly.

She perceives that these women defy the kind of stereotyping that the Graham Brettons of the world attempt to impose.

Similarly, Lucy resists the efforts of her friends to categorize her. To Graham, she is an "inoffensive shadow"

(Vol. II, p. 108). To Ginevra, she is a "nobody" when she is merely an indigent schoolmistress, a "somebody" when she has 88

established connections with the socially prominent Bassom-

pierres (Vol. II, p. 94). To Madame Beck, she is a blue

stocking (Vol. I, p. 392), while Polly's papa, Mr. Home, con­

siders her "the essence of the sedate and discreet . . . the

pink and pattern of governess-correctness" (Vol. II, p. 83).

To Monsieur Paul, Lucy is passionate, fiery and excitable

(Vol. I, p. 257; Vol. II, p. 83 and pp. 132-32).

Because Lucy has respect for herself as an individual,

she is rarely influenced by her friends' views of what she is

or should be. But Lucy deliberately restricts herself to the

role of an "onlooker" in life and is convinced that it is im­

perative to struggle "with the natural character, the strong

native bent of the heart" (Vol. I, pp. 295-96), to subdue her

feelings. For example, when Louisa Bretton and her son offer

Lucy their friendship, she forces herself to check her en­

thusiasm and her affectionate feelings toward them. She im­

plores "Reason" to "’let me be content with a temperate draught

of the living stream: let me not run athirst, and apply passionately to its welcome waters: let me not imagine in them a sweeter taste than earth's fountains know. Oh! would to God

I may be enabled to feel enough sustained by an occasional, amicable intercourse . . . unengrossing and tranquil: quite

tranquil!'" (Vol. I, p. 293). Lucy's response to her first acting experience illustrates her determination to resist in­ 89

involvement with the joys and excitement of life. She

thoroughly enjoys performing in the play, but resolves never

to allow herself that kind of pleasure again. "A keen relish

for dramatic expression had revealed itself as a part of my nature; to cherish and exercise this new-found faculty might gift me with a world of delight, but it would not do for a mere looker-on at life: the strength and longing must be put by; and I put them by, and fastened them in with the lock of a resolution which neither Time nor Temptation has since picked" (Vol. I, p. 233).

Lucy has resolved to expect little out of life. She feels she must reconcile herself to a cheerless, loveless existence.

It is possible that her resolution is related to the Victorian woman's spirit of self-denial and self-sacrifice. Laura Ann

Bromley, in her short study on Charlotte Bronte's novels, has suggested that Lucy Snowe's suppression of her emotions and her refusal to accept pleasure are the result of her sense of the necessity to conform to the Victorian model of a good woman.

The "good" Victorian woman was expected to maintain "a proper calm exterior"^ and conditioned to resign herself to suffer­ ing, self-sacrifice and self-renunciation. Hence, Bromley contends, Lucy does not allow herself to feel or enjoy too

15 Bromley, "The Victorian 'Good Woman' and the Fiction of Charlotte Bronte," doctoral dissertation, Rutgers University, 1973 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms), p. 120. 90

16 much because "her role is to suffer." The critic even

suggests that Lucy sometimes behaves toward herself with

"masochistic brutality."1?

Although Bromley’s thesis is helpful in accounting for

some of Lucy's actions, I am much more inclined to view her

compulsive self-restraint and withdrawal from pleasure as an

outgrowth of her individual temperament and circumstances

rather than as a product of her cultural conditioning as a

Victorian young lady. As a child, Lucy Snowe was given

little love and even less security. As an adult, she is 1 8 afraid of getting hurt by caring too much for or expecting

too much from anybody or anything.

-It is not, as one might suppose, because she neurotic­

ally craves suffering but because she wishes so much to avoid

it that she behaves as she does. She trains herself to stifle

her emotions because she is convinced that there will never

be any real outlets for them. It seems unlikely to her that

a plain, poor schoolteacher in a girls' boarding school would

16 Bromley, p. 120.

17 p. 119.

1® Ms. Bromley's comment that Lucy is "defending her­ self" from pain by curbing her emotions (p. 118) is in keep­ ing with my argument here. However, it contradicts her own main thesis. 91

19 ever find love or have a family of her own. She tells

herself: "I suppose, Lucy Snowe, the orb of your life is

not to be so rounded; for you, the crescent-phase must suf­

fice" (Vol. II, p. 181). Moreover, Lucy tries to inure her­

self to pain in order to build an immunity to anguish. Lucy

tells us that she had wanted "to escape occasional great

agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and small

pains" (Vol. I, p. 56). Similarly, Lucy denies herself small

pleasures because she does not want to become addicted to

something that, for her, is so fleeting. She remarks that

"the negation of suffering was the nearest approach to happi­

ness I expected to know" (Vol. I, p. 121).

Andrew D. Hook, in "Charlotte Bronte, the Imagination and

Villette," astutely observes: "Feeling, excitement and imagina­

tion are all resisted by Lucy Snowe because . . . she believes

she knows their dangers. Jane Eyre, we recall, struggled to

check and subdue her feelings, usually in accordance with some

Charlotte conveyed to her friend Ellen her feelings about her own prospects of marrying. In May, 1840, she wrote: "I am tolerably well convinced that I shall never marry at all. Reason tells me so, and I am not so utterly the slave of feel­ ing but that I can occasionally hear her voice." In April, 1843, she wrote: "Not that it is a crime to marry, or a crime to wish to be married, but it is an imbecility, which I reject with contempt, for women, who have neither beauty nor fortune . . . not to be able to convince themselves that they are un­ attractive, and that they had better be quiet and think of other things than wedlock" (quoted in Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte, p. 176 and p. 230). 92

moral or religious ideal. Lucy may not listen to the voices

of feeling and hope, not so much because to do so is morally wrong, but because she believes that such voices direct her

towards a painfully unrealizable world. . . . To combat these voices, Lucy calls on the power of reason," which urges her

to avoid emotion, excitement and imagination. However, Lucy eventually rebels against the dictates of reason: she falls

deeply in love with Paul and, for the first time in her life,

the love she feels for another human being is returned in full measure. In the final pages of Villette, we observe Lucy ex­ pressing her feelings openly and passionately. The experience of loving and being loved by Paul induces Lucy's emotional liberation. Dr. Hook remarks that this new-found "freedom to feel" is perhaps only"fleetingly enjoyed" (because Paul's death is hinted at in the ending) but in any case "the value 21 of that freedom remains."

We have not yet considered in depth Lucy Snowe's attitudes toward marriage. Shirley Keeldar, and to some extent Jane Eyre, are torn between the need to be independent and the need to be

"mastered." I think it is safe to conclude that this pattern does not repeat itself in Lucy Snowe.

2® Andrew D. Hook, "Charlotte Bronte, the Imagination and Villette," in The Brontes: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Gregor (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970), p. 148.

21 Hook, p. 156. 93

Lucy greatly values her economic independence and per­

sonal freedom. On one occasion she speaks of "the comfort

of mind it gives me to think that while I can work for my­

self, I am spared the pain of being a burden to anybody"

(Vol. II, p. 56). Lucy's remark that she would rather have

"starved" than be a paid companion indicates that she places

a higher premium on personal freedom than on security, social

status or physical comfort. She avows that rather than ac­

cept the office of companion "I would deliberately have taken

a housemaid's place, bought a strong pair of gloves, swept bedrooms and staircases, and cleaned stoves and locks, in peace and independence" (Vol. II, p. 77).

To Lucy, however, there is not necessarily a connection between single life and freedom, and married life (at least married life to Paul) and the loss of independence. We have seen that this connection exists for Shirley, as it must have for a great many women in a society in which it could be ob­ served by so judicious a critic as Mill, that in general "no slave is a slave to the same lengths and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is." That Lucy Snowe assumes that she will retain her autonomy after marriage might surprise some readers who recall Paul's incessant attempts to control, subdue or change her. But Lucy just as incessantly resists

22 John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, p. 159. 94

his efforts to govern her. She observes that the "idea of

’keeping down* never left M. Paul's head; the most habitual

subjugation would, in my case, have failed to relieve him of

it. No matter, what did it signify? I listened to him, and did not trouble myself to be too submissive; his occupation would have been gone had I left him nothing to 'keep down'"

(Vol. II, pp. 184-85).

Paul and Lucy collide over numerous issues, including

Lucy's taste in art, her mode of dressing and her "unfeminine" desire to excel in her studies; but in each case Lucy succeeds

—more often by raillery or reasoning than by storming and raging—in retaining her opinions and doing what she feels is right.

It is interesting that Paul's regard for Lucy grows despite (or perhaps because of) her refusal to be "kept down."

One could conclude that Paul does not really want for himself the weak, demure kind of woman that he lauds as the ideal. He professes to despise intellect in women, but seeks out as a companion the most intelligent woman in Madame Beck's estab­ lishment. On several occasions, he tries to persuade Lucy that submissiveness and passivity are among the highest femi­ nine virtues, but he chooses to love a woman who repeatedly defies him and his advice. M. A. Blom has unearthed a sound explanation for still another contradiction in his conduct.

She suggests that although Paul "is attracted to a woman who 95

has a passionate nature akin to his, he assumes that in the

female such passion is indicative of evil. Thus Paul's courtship of Lucy consists of a vituperative denouncement of

the very fire which draws him to her." Another conclusion that could be drawn is that initially Paul really does believe that "lovely, placid and passive femininity was the only pillow on which manly thought and sense could find rest for its aching temples; and as to work, the male mind alone could work to any good practical result . . (Vol. II, p. 170), but that in the course of his relationship with Lucy, his eyes are gradually opened to the reality that a spirited, highly-productive, self- reliant woman is not the antithesis, but the apotheosis, of femininity.

It does not really matter whether Paul had been searching for a woman like Lucy Snowe his whole life but was never able to admit it to himself, or whether he fell in love with her in spite of his prejudices, and his views changed as a consequence of their relationship. What is important is that, as the novel progresses, Paul begins to accept Lucy as she is and finally stops trying to change her. The man Lucy consents to marry is not the despotic, tyrannical man who delivered lectures earlier on woman's proper place.

Several commentators have argued that once Lucy and Paul become engaged, her behavior towards him becomes submissive.

23 Blom, p. 97. 96

Inga-Stina Ewbank comments that "Lucy does not end as a blue­

stocking marrying her equal; she worships . . . and when he

declares his love (characteristically by presenting her with

a fully-equipped school), she kisses his hand: ’He was my king; royal for me had been that hand's bounty; to offer homage was both a joy and a duty.'"^ M. A. Blom cites the

same passage as evidence that Lucy has achieved only a "par­

tial victory" in her "power struggle" with Paul, for, though she has made him recognize that passion "on the part of a woman is not necessarily an indication of iniquity," yet in

the end "her very love for him raises him in her eyes to the position of master."25 Laura Ann Bromley, too, quotes this passage, suggesting that Lucy Snow is living up to the model of the Victorian "good woman" by being "servile and grateful 26 to a man who bestows his love on her."

It might be helpful to point out that the Victorians-- both men and women—tended to exalt the home, the family and 27 legitimate love. Furthermore, gratitude and adoration

24 Ewbank, Their Proper Sphere (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 202.

25 Blom, "Charlotte Bronte, Feminist Manquee, Buckne11 Review, XXI (Spring, 1973), p. 102.

26 Bromley, "The Victorian 'Good Woman' and the Fiction of Charlotte Bronte," p. 123.

27 Walter Houghton, in The Victorian Frame of Mind, sug­ gests that the "deification of love was partly an apologia for sex in a period when sex was evil ... to be able to ration­ alize love as a sacrament is to free oneself from every re­ pressive fear; and to transform what was evil . . . into some­ thing holy and divine" (p. 391). 97

should not be equated so readily with servility. If a man

expressed the same feelings toward a woman that Lucy expresses

toward Paul, it is doubtful that his behavior would be con­

strued as servile by feminist readers. (In fact, he would 28 probably be labeled a chauvinist.)

One of the most astonishing evaluations of Lucy and Paul’s courtship and Lucy’s views on the prospect of marrying is found in Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. Ms. Millett claims that "Villette reads like one long meditation on a prison break" and that Lucy Snowe is bent on evading marriage to her

"jailer" Paul. Further, Millett asserts that Lucy "plays tame"

in order to trick Paul into setting her up in a school of her own, hut the moment that the keys to the little establishment are in her hands, she makes her break. Since there is abso­ lutely nothing in the novel to indicate that Lucy left Paul,

Ms. Millett attempts to carry her point by suggesting that

Lucy somehow effected Paul's drowning: "The keeper turned 29 kind must be eluded anyway; Paul turned lover is drowned."

28 The problem here is that some commentators are so in­ tent on exposing the perniciousness of our male-dominated culture that they begin placing all men in the category of per- secutor/master and all women in the category of victim/slave.

29 Millett, p. 146.

Helene Moglen, in Charlotte Bronte: The Self Conceived (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1976), also stresses the punitive aspect of Paul's fate: "Paul Emanuel's death can be compared to the symbolic castration of Rochester" (p. 228). 98

One reason this statement is invalid is that it confuses

author with heroine. Charlotte Bronte, in constructing the

plot of Villette, decided to end her novel with the implica­

tion that Paul was drowned at sea. It should not be necessary

to state that Lucy Snowe, the character, could not be even re­ motely responsible for Paul's implied death. There is no evi­ dence that she so much as subconsciously desired it. If Ms.

Millett's interpretation is credited, Lucy would have to be seen as an unscrupulous, mercenary hypocrite.

Lucy's private thoughts about Paul should not fail to convince an unbiased reader that she loves him and wants to spend her life with him:

Once - unknown and unloved, I held him harsh and strange; the low stature, the wiry make, the angles, the darkness, the manner, displeased me. Now, pene­ trated with his influence, and living by his affec­ tion . . .1 preferred him before all humanity (Vol. II, p. 400).

Near me, as he now sat, strongly and closely as he had long turned his life in mine - far as had pro­ gressed, and near as was achieved our minds' and affections' assimilation - the very suggestion of interference, of heart separation could be heard only with ... a resistance of which no human eye or cheek could hide the flame, nor any truth accus­ tomed human tongue curb the cry (Vol. II, p. 397).

Ms. Millett adds that Paul's drowning left Lucy "free" and that "Free is alone. ... Lucy chose to retain the indi­ vidualistic humanity she has shored up. . . . Charlotte Bronte is hard-minded enough to know that there was no man in Lucy's 99

30 society with whom she could have lived and still been free."

The commentator is advocating the separatist doctrine that women must remain single to retain autonomy, for all men are tyrants. Incredibly, this twentieth century radical feminist viewpoint is being attributed to Charlotte, who wrote to her friend Ellen that if she ever married "it must be in the light of adoration that I will regard my husband . . . and if he were a clever man, and loved me, the whole world weighed in the 31 balance against his smallest wish should be light as air."

Charlotte’s sentiments toward the place of women in the home and in society, and her views toward marriage, were incon­ sistent and ambivalent, but it is distorting the facts to suggest that she was a separatist at any time in her life.

Lucy Snowe is perhaps the most interesting and complex of Charlotte’s heroines. Although she is the kind of person that can be intimidated easily, she is capable of defending her principles and resolutely asserting herself. Although her emotional health is intermittently precarious--in fact, she suffers a "nervous breakdown" after her attendance upon the cretin--Lucy’s views on woman and her role are healthier than those of the typical Victorian woman appear to have been. She presents a cold exterior--Charlotte chose her surname in order

3® Millett, p. 146.

31 Letter dated March 12, 1839; quoted in The Brontes: their Lives. Friendships and Correspondence, Vol. I, p. 174. 100

32 to convey this idea --yet she is a warm, passionate person.

Lucy Snowe is, in other words, "among the most fully realized

characters in fiction. . . . She is a 'character* in the

sense of somebody strikingly unlike other people; a character 33 we respect as a person to be reckoned with. ..."

32 in a letter to W. S. Williams, her publisher, Char­ lotte wrote: "As to the name of the heroine, I hardly know what subtlety of thought made me decide upon giving her a cold name; but at first I called her 'Lucy Snowe' (spelt with an 'e'), which Snowe I afterwards changed to 'Frost.' Subsequently I rather regretted the change and wished it 'Snowe' again. If not too late, I should like the altera­ tion to be made now throughout the MS. A cold name she must have . . . for she has about her an external coldness." (Letter dated November 6, 1852; quoted in The Brontes: their Lives . . ., Vol. IV, p. 18.)

33 Geoffrey Tillotson, Introduction to Riverside Edition of Villette (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1871), XIV. 101

Conclusion

The subject of woman's view of her own role was one which occupied Charlotte's thoughts for her entire creative life.

It is generally true that when an artist ponders a subject over an extended period of time, and deals with it in several different works, his or her vision of this subject expands.

This generalization applies to our author, for her insight into the subject of woman's ambivalent self-image became more profound and more mature from the writing of Jane Eyre to

Villette.

In Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette, each of the heroines is plagued, at various times, with feelings of inadequacy, in­ decision, insecurity and self-doubt, as she attempts to some­ how reconcile her personal concept of womanhood with that of the culture. A major difference among these three novels lies in the author's perception of this plight. In Jane Eyre, it is apparent that Charlotte herself does not always understand the source and the implications of Jane's struggle between opposing sets of values or patterns of behavior. For example, she relates Jane's mixed feelings for St. John Rivers and his marriage proposal to her desire for true love, on the one hand, and her longing for self-sacrifice on the other. She does not fully understand, however, that Jane's simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from her cousin is born of the dual contra­ 102

dictory needs to be free and in command of her own life, and yet to surrender herself to the direction of a man.

In Shirley, Charlotte Bronte has become more conscious of the difficulties that arise for a woman confronted with the dilemma of accepting or rejecting her appointed role, but the novelist’s consciousness often borders on self-conscious­ ness. Instead of letting each situation speak for itself, she sometimes employs unsubtle dialogue and monologue to make a point about "the condition of women question."

In Villette, Charlotte's awareness of the doubts and self­ division that can be generated by the role women were expected to fill is not diminished, but much of the self-consciousness that marred Shirley has been eliminated. Charlotte is success­ ful in making the reader cognizant of Lucy’s personal crisis from her actions and from the events of her life, rather than from the sometimes contrived verbal protests that Caroline and

Shirley deliver. In this last novel, then, Charlotte has exe­ cuted her theme without violating the integrity and credibility of her character.

As we view the three works collectively and retrospective­ ly, we discover that the relationship between author and pro­ tagonist changes from novel to novel. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte's emotional proximity to her heroine impedes the conversion of actual experience into art. Unable to separate herself from her character, Charlotte cannot view Jane and her situation 103

with complete objectivity. And yet, it is Lucy Snowe who

is more like the real Charlotte Bronte than any other heroine.

Lucy is a neurotic, insecure, introspective, sometimes bigoted woman whose fiercely independent spirit, rare powers of per­ ception and enormous capacity for loving are both a blessing and a bane. It is a mark of Charlotte’s growth as an artist that despite the fact that Lucy's personality so nearly approxi­ mates her own, she is able to step back from her heroine and grant her the degree of autonomy that animates her.

Shirley is another case altogether. In this novel, the experiences and personalities of the two heroines do not in the least resemble those of Charlotte Bronte herself. It was noted' earlier in this study that the characters of Caroline

Helstone and Shirley Keeldar resemble those of Emily and Ann

Bronte, respectively. An aesthetic distance between author and subject is achieved in this novel, but chiefly because so much of it is based on the experiences and personalities of

Charlotte's sisters. Thus, the objectivity that is missing in Jane Eyre is synthetically attained in Shirley through the substitution of second-hand for first-hand experience. How­ ever, this objectivity is genuinely attained in Villette by

Charlotte's ability to transmute raw personal experience into a base from which to initiate the exploration of the inner life of another character. 104

An examination of the endings of the novels supports the

contention that Charlotte develops, in the course of her

literary career, a stronger and stronger grip on the subject

of a woman’s struggle to define her self-image in the face

of the culture’s staid ideal of womanhood. As Charlotte gains

control over her material, she is less inclined to gloss over

the difficulties inherent in the situations of her characters.

Hence, the conclusions of the three novels become increasingly

less simplistic.

The solution to Jane Eyre's crisis is handed to her by that puppeteer, the author. Edward Rochester dramatically changes into the perfect husband after shedding his "macho" image and adopting Jane's religious and social values. There is no hint that Jane's life with him is anything but blissful.

Marriage to a tolerant, humble man is presented as the panacea to all of Jane's problems.

The description of matrimonial ecstasy that marked the ending of Jane Eyre is missing in Shirley. In our second novel there is an intimation, at least, that the heroines--particu­ larly Shirley--will not be absolutely content as the wives of

Louis and Robert Moore. Throughout much of the novel, Shirley has projected herself as androgynous, priding herself on quali­ ties she sees as "masculine." She is the most outspoken ad­ vocate of the equality of women of all the Bronte characters.

And yet, faced with the challenge of retaining an image and a 105

role that run counter to society’s ideal of the domestic angel, she simply capitulates. She herself establishes the rules of the marriage pact, and one of these includes shelving her talent, her goals, her very identity, in order to secure the sovereignty of her husband. But she must be half-dragged to the altar and the final, vivid image of Shirley is as a trapped animal grappling desperately to be free.

Lucy Snowe, a woman who expects never to marry and who has resigned herself to the part of an observer of life, finds herself in love with, and loved by, Paul Emanuel. This turn of events poses a threat to Lucy's cherished independence and personal integrity. Paul tries to control her, to convert her to his religion and to change her way of life and her image of herself. By the end of the novel, however, Paul himself has grown and has made considerable progress toward accepting Lucy as she really is.

The message of Villette is manifested in its very form: there are no certainties, no sure solutions for women like Lucy; her happiness is destined to be tentative. This open-ended novel closes on a note of sadness and uneasy anticipation, with

Lucy Snowe waiting for the, homecoming of a man who understood her and loved her, waiting for her dreams to become reality.

But another note is sounded in the closing pages of this last

Bronte novel--a note of elation in Lucy’s victory over herself and the forces that have worked against her. For one senses 106

that though she is lonely, she is not wretched, that she has

the strength to make it on her own, and that, with or without

Paul, she will begin to participate in life.

We have examined, in the course of this study, disparate

means by which the women characters in Charlotte's novels

strove to cope with "being female" in a masculine world. Some

succumbed or withdrew, some confronted the situation directly

or even pugnaciously. Most, however, simply floated between

the various, and never completely satisfactory, alternatives

open to them. It seems to me that the Victorian woman--who is

something of a composite of Charlotte Bronte's major and minor

female characters—could never achieve more than fractional victory over her situation. There is a sentence in Jane Eyre which capsulizes the plight of women in Charlotte's time:

I desired 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!' (Vol. I, p. 139). 107

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Scott, Temple, ed. Novels of the Sisters Bronte. Edinburgh: John Grant, 1905.

Wise, T. J., and J. A. Symington, ed. The Brontes: their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence. 4 Vols. Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1932.

Secondary Sources

Acton, William. The Functions and Disorders of the Repro­ ductive Organs in Childhood, in Youth, in Adult Age and in Advanced Age, Considered in their Physiological, Social, and Psychological Relations. London: 1862.

Banks, J. A., and Olive. Feminism and Family Planning in. Victorian England. New York: Schocken Books, 1964.

Basch, Françoise. Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the Novel. New York: Schocken Books, 1974.

Benvenuto, Richard. "The Child of Nature, the Child of Grace, and the Unresolved Conflict of Jane Eyre." ELH, 39 (1972), 620-38.

Bjork, Harriet. The Language of Truth: Charlotte Bronte, The Woman Question, and the Novel. Lund Studies in English, 47. Ed. Claes Schaar and Jan Svartvik. Lund: 1974.

Blom, M. A. "Charlotte Bronte: Feminist Manquee." Bucknell Review, 21, No. 1 (1973), 87-102.

Brayfield, Peggy L. "A New Feminist Approach to the Novels of Charlotte Bronte." Diss. Southern Illinois University 1973. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1973.

Bromley, Laura A. "The Victorian Good Woman and the Fiction of Charlotte Bronte." Diss. Rutgers University 1973. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1973. 108

Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture. New York: Random House, 1951.

Craik, W. A. The Bronte Novels♦ London: Metheum, 1968.

Crow, Duncan. The Victorian Woman. New York: Stein and Day, 1972.

Day, Martin S. "Central concepts in Jane Eyre." The Per- sonalist, XLI, No. 4 (1960), 495-505.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Bantam Books, 1970.

Ewbank, Inga-Stina. Their Proper Sphere: A Study of the Bronte Sisters as Early-Victorian Female Novelists. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966.

Gaskell, Elizabeth C. The Life of Charlotte Bronte. Edin­ burgh: John Grant, 1905.

Gerin, Winifred. Charlotte Bronte: The Evolution of Genius. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Greg,'William Rathbone. "Why Are Women Redundant?" In Literary and Social Judgments. Boston: 1873.

Gregor, Ian, introd. The Brontes: A Collection of Critical Essays. In Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970.

Heilman, Robert. "Charlotte Bronte's 'New Gothic.'" In From Aus ten to Conrad. Ed. R. C. Rathburn and M. Steinmann. Minneapolis, Minn.: The University of Minnesota Press, 1958.

Houghton, Walter. The Victorian Frame of Mind. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1957.

Lodge, David. "Fire and Eyre: Charlotte Bronte's War of Earthly Elements." In The Language of Fiction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1966.

Martin, Robert Bernard. The Accents of Persuasion. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966.

Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970. 109

Miyoshi, Masao. The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians. New York: New York University Press, 1969.

Moglen, Helene. Charlotte Bronte: The Self Conceived. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976

Momberger, Philip. "Self and World in the Works of Char- lotte Brontë." ELH, 32 (1965), 349-69.

Orwell, George. "Charles Dickens." In Dickens, Dali and Others. New York: 1946.

Patmore, Coventry. "The Angel in the House." In The Poems of Coventry Patmore. Ed. Frederick Page. London and New York: 1949.

Peters, Margot . Unquiet Soul: A Biography of Charlotte Bronte. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1975.

Priestly, J. B. Victoria’s Heyday. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

Rossi, Alice S. ed. Essays on Sex Equality. By John Stuart •Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Ruskin, John. "Of Queen’s Gardens." In Sesame and Lilies. Great Britain: T. Nelson and Sons, n.d.

Somervell, D. C. English Thought in the Nineteenth Century. New York: David MacKay Company, 1969.

Strachey, Ray. Struggle: The Stirring Story of Woman * s Ad­ vance in England. New York City: Duffield and Company, 1930.

Thomson, Patricia. The Victorian Heroine: A Changing Ideal, 1837-1873. London: Oxford University Press, 1956.

Tillotson, Geoffrey, introd. Villette. By Charlotte Bronte. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.

Vicinus, Martha, intro'd. Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age. Bloomington and London: Indiana Uni­ versity Press, 1972. 110

Widmer, Eleanor. Love and Duty: The Heroines in Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. Diss. University of Washington 1958. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1958.

Willey, Basil. Nineteenth Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929.