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Rereading Anne Brontë The Priceless Treasure at the Bottom of the Well: Rereading Anne Brontë by Elizabeth Bridget Leaver Submitted in partial fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Literature in the Faculty of Humanities University of Pretoria Pretoria 2013 Supervisor: Professor David Medalie 1 © University of Pretoria I herewith declare that The Priceless Treasure at the Bottom of the Well: Rereading Anne Brontë is my own work and that all the sources I have used have been acknowledged by means of complete references. ____________________________ __________________________ 2 © University of Pretoria Acknowledgements: I would like to thank David Medalie most sincerely for encouraging me to resume my doctoral studies, and then for his sustained guidance and unfailing support as my supervisor. His enthusiasm and his steadfast belief in the value of my project helped me to complete my thesis timeously. He was always sensitive to the fact that the heavy demands of my teaching career obliged me to work sporadically. I could not have asked for a better, or more professional, supervisor. I also wish to thank my husband Terry Leaver for his love and his unwavering support for my studies. For all the cooked meals, missed social engagements, and lonely vigils in his study while I was working, thank you! 3 © University of Pretoria Abstract Anne Brontë died in 1848, having written two novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Although these novels, especially The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, initially received a favourable critical response, the unsympathetic remarks of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell initiated a dismissive attitude towards Anne Brontë’s work. For over a hundred years, she was marginalized and silenced by a critical world that admired and respected the work of her two sisters, Charlotte and Emily, but that refused to acknowledge the substantial merits of her own fiction. However, in 1959 revisionist scholars such as Derek Stanford, Ada Harrison and Winifred Gérin, offered important, more enlightened readings that helped to liberate Brontë scholarship from the old conservatisms and to direct it into new directions. Since then, her fiction has been the focus of a robust, but still incomplete, revisionist critical scholarship. My work too is revisionist in orientation, and seeks to position itself within this revisionist approach. It has a double focus that appraises both Brontë’s social commentary and her narratology. It thus integrates two principal areas of enquiry: firstly, an investigation into how Brontë interrogates the position of middle class women in their society, and secondly, an examination of how that interrogation is conveyed by her creative deployment of narrative techniques, especially by her awareness of the rich potential of the first person narrative voice. Chapter 1 looks at the critical response to Brontë’s fiction from 1847 to the present, and shows how the revisionist readings of 1959 were pivotal in re-invigorating the critical approach to her work. Chapter 2 contextualizes the key legal, social, and economic consequences of Victorian patriarchy that so angered and frustrated feminist thinkers and writers such as Brontë. The chapter also demonstrates the extent to which a number of her core concerns relating to Victorian society and the status of women are reflected in her work. In Chapter 3 I discuss three important biographical influences on Brontë: her family, her painful experiences as a governess, and her reading history. Chapter 4 contains a detailed analysis of Agnes Grey, which includes an exploration of the narrative devices that help to reinforce its core concerns. Chapter 5 focuses on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, showing how the novel offers a richer and more sophisticated analysis of feminist concerns than those that are explored in Agnes Grey. These are broadened to include an investigation of the lives of married women, particularly those trapped in abusive marriages. The chapter also stresses Brontë’s skilful deployment of an intricate and layered narrative technique. The conclusion points to the ways in which my study participates in and 4 © University of Pretoria extends the current revisionist trend and suggests some aspects of Brontë’s work that would reward further critical attention. Key Terms: Anne Brontë; Patrick Brontë; Charlotte Brontë; Emily Brontë; Branwell Brontë; Elizabeth Gaskell; Agnes Grey; The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; feminism; Victorian patriarchy; coverture; ideology of separate spheres; evangelical Christianity. 5 © University of Pretoria Table of Contents Chapter 1: The Critical Response 1847-2013 7 Chapter 2: Contexts 38 Chapter 3: Biographical and Other Influences 69 Chapter 4: Agnes Grey 103 Chapter 5: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 174 Conclusion: 246 Bibliography 252 6 © University of Pretoria CHAPTER 1: THE CRITICAL RESPONSE 1847-2013 In 1959 Derek Stanford offered an important reading of Anne Brontë’s fiction, blaming Charlotte Brontë’s unsympathetic comments, made in 1850, for the way in which Anne Brontë had been ignored by the critical scholarship for more than a century. Stanford wrote: there is not the slightest doubt that [Charlotte’s] words – repeated parrot fashion by the critics, or echoed with a kind of timid variation – have kept the stone at the mouth of Anne’s tomb for over a hundred years. It is time the stone was rolled away (Stanford, 1959: 245). My thesis will argue that Stanford, together with Ada Harrison and Winifred Gérin, set the tone for the revisionist trend in the scholarship regarding Anne Brontë’s fiction that has resulted in a dramatic ‘roll[ing] back’ of ‘the stone at the mouth of Anne’s tomb’. For a hundred years, Anne Brontë was marginalized and silenced by a critical world that adored the work of her two sisters, Charlotte and Emily, but that refused to acknowledge the substantial merits of Anne’s own fiction. My study therefore seeks to locate itself within this revisionist trend in critical studies 1 that considers Brontë’s own, specific contribution to the world of literature, and that moves beyond traditional critical approaches that always see her writing as inferior to that of her sisters. My work is revisionist in orientation, and the gist of what follows is therefore a study in revisionism. While this first chapter looks at the critical history of Brontë’s work from 1847 to the present, it highlights the contributions of revisionist scholars such as Derek Stanford, Ada Harrison and Winifred Gérin, whose more sympathetic readings of Brontë in 1959 were centrally important in liberating Brontë scholarship from the old conservatisms and directing it into new directions. My central line of argument will integrate two principal areas of enquiry: firstly, an investigation into how Brontë interrogates the position of middle class women in their society, and secondly, an examination of how that interrogation is conveyed to the reader. My thesis thus looks at the way in which Brontë uses creative narrative techniques in order to reinforce her critique of some of the social, political, and economic issues that affected middle class women in 1 Throughout the thesis I will refer to Anne Brontë as ‘Brontë’, unless it is necessary to use her first name ‘Anne’ to distinguish her from her sisters. 7 © University of Pretoria mid-Victorian England. My work therefore has a double focus that appraises both Brontë’s social commentary and her narratology. The two aspects of my enquiry are inextricably linked; each one shapes, and is shaped by, the other. The core issues at which the thesis looks are centrally important feminist issues that directly affected the human and civil rights, the happiness, the spiritual and physical welfare, and sometimes even the literal survival of middle class women in mid-Victorian patriarchy. These issues concern the position of the woman in the home as well as in the wider society. The most important is undoubtedly that of marriage: Brontë’s analysis of marriage lies at the very heart of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and is also carefully considered in Agnes Grey. This provides an appropriate framework for her meticulous examination of many related issues with which she is concerned, such as the position of the single middle class woman, parenting, the custody of children, divorce and separation, the restitution of conjugal rights, women’s education, and the paucity of respectable work opportunities for middle class women. Brontë is profoundly aware of the patriarchal constraints imposed on women, and she deeply resents such limitations and injustices. Her resentment and frustration are entrenched in her two novels to such an extent that the polemical nature of her fiction, especially The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, is unmistakable. The consequence of her anger is that Brontë portrays many of the male characters in her novels as behaving inappropriately or inadequately in some context. Men are shown to be hypocritical, cruel, weak, selfish, and complacent. The hostility of her depiction of men stresses the intensity of her resentment and confirms her polemic. However, this does not mean that she portrays her female characters in hagiographic terms because they too are depicted as fallible and often flawed individuals. My study will argue that one of the strengths of Brontë’s fiction is the way in which her characters possess psychological verisimilitude. Brontë’s fictional interrogation of the position of middle class women reflects her participation – even if she does not use the terms of the debate explicitly – in one of the most hotly contested ideological arguments of the Victorian era: the so-called Woman Question. The Woman Question is a term that loosely describes Victorian society’s sustained interest in the position and role of women in that society: matters of female sexuality, class, money, respectability, and gentility were vigorously discussed but seldom agreed upon. The Woman Question is central to my study because the issues that inform the Woman Question are precisely those issues explored in Brontë’s fiction.
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