Charlotte Bronte’s Influence In Victorian Literature

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4.BRONTE FAMILY

4.1.CURRER, ELLIS AND ACTON BELL

Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte belonged to the Victorian period, which laid a great emphasis on the network of relationships and issues that made up family life. Their interest in the family lay in the Victorian idealization of the family, its concerns with Victorian fiction and the experiences of their personal lives. Early deaths, a note of poverty, a life of ordinariness and loneliness played an important role in forming the basis of their novels. Intense family bonding was an intrinsic feature of this family of writers. This bond was threatened by a series of deaths that struck the Bronte family. Absence of maternal love made them insecure and a fractured family with distressing orphans, is a regular phenomenon in all the novels written by the three Bronte sisters. The aspects of life described in their novels are pictures of a life of their imagination, accomplished with what they missed out in real life. They filled the account of their history with the more exciting pages of their fiction. Family as a theme thus occupies a vital place in Bronte fiction. The three were sisters but quite unlike as women or as writers. When we read from Jane Eyre, the Gondal Poems, Wuthering Heights and the Tenant of Wildfell Hall, we cruise through different worlds.

The variety of criticism to which the Bronte’s have been subjected to, mirrors every critical school. There is a vast quantity of critical commentary that a detailed survey of it would not be possible. The Bronte’s have been targets of various schools of criticism. Early critics looked at their novels as messages given out for the benefit of the readers. Criticism was based on style, theme, character and other related aspects. An early critic remarks in the “Westminster Review” that Jane Eyre was the best novel of the season. Wuthering Heights, comments the same critic in “The Leader”, is notable for its qualities in the treatment of its subject. Another early critic called Agnes Grey “the most perfect narrative in English prose.”13

13 G. Moore, The Novels o f Anne Bronte, Arnold Craig Bell, Great Britain: British Cataloguing in Publication Data, 1992: 28.

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Charlotte Bronte enjoyed remarkable success during her lifetime, but after her death, her sister Emily gradually eclipsed her reputation, so that by 1907, there was a critical consensus on the comparatively minor significance of Charlotte’s novels, measured against the greatness of Wuthering Heights. David Cecil in his influential re-evaluation Early Victorian Novelists (1934) remarks that Charlotte Bronte:

is our first subjective novelist, the ancestor of Proust and James Joyce … and like theirs her range is limited to those aspects of experience which stimulates … the private consciousness … The world she creates is the world of her inner life.14

Wuthering Heights, reflects David Cecil, has not been appreciated as it deserved, but Emily Bronte:

is an unequal genius, revealing flashes of extraordinary imagination, remote from the central interests of human life, often clumsy and exaggerated, incapable of expressing her inspiration in a coherent form.15

Fannie E. Ratehford’s The Bronte Web of Childhood (1941) is a study of the Bronte children’s creative fantasies including Emily and Anne’s world of Gondal. In 1968 Wendy Craik published The Bronte Novels, which analyses each novel in close detail avoiding biographical information.

Bronte biography attracts a variety of odd theories and mild speculations, about the personal life of the Bronte family. Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life o f Charlotte Bronte (1857), the first full biography, emphasized the family’s eccentricities and blamed Charlotte Bronte’s family for the tone and content of her writings. Margaret Lane’s The Bronte Story: A Reconsideration o f Gaskell’s Life o f Charlotte Bronte (1953) corrects Mrs. Gaskell

14 D. Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists 1934, New Delhi: Kalyani Publishers, 1972: 91.

15 Ibidem, pg. 117.

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and provides an excellent introduction to the Bronte’s. Good judgment is revealed everywhere in the writing. Phyllis Bentley in his The Brontes and Their World (1966) gives informative pictures of Yorkshire. It will be difficult to find a more informative and attractive shorter introduction than this book. In her three books on the Bronte’s, Anne Bronte (1959), Charlotte Bronte (1967) and Emily Bronte (1971), Gerin has done more research than any other writer. These biographies are valuable as there is an admixture of tradition and conjectural interpretation. The writer misses nothing and gives thought to many possibilities. In The Brontes (1975) by Brian Wilks, the family is seen with remarkable clarity. The author substantiates his views with pictures that speak volumes about the times in which the Brontes lived. Juliet Barker’s biography The Brontes’ (1994) deals with personal history and also tries to open gaps that reveal hidden aspects of their fiction.

Such is the variety of critical works, that a simple discussion would be confusing. F.B. Pinion’s A Bronte Companion, Literary Assessment, Background and Reference (1975) relates the stories of the inner world with the real world outside and analyzes the novels from the biographical point of view. The Bronte’s have been targets of various schools of criticism. Terry Eagleton’s Myths o f Power: A Marxist Study o f the Brontes (1975) adopts an explicitly Marxist viewpoint, which takes into account social issues involved, recognizing that they were indeed difficult to separate. His analysis of the relevance of biographical and social background of the Bronte’s is far more subtle and complex, than simple matching of fiction to fact, “That the Bronte sisters were compelled in real life to negotiate the rift between ‘imagination’ and ‘society’ seemed crucial for an understanding of their fiction.”16 Winnifrith’s The Brontes and their Background: Romance and Reality (1973) is the best study of the writers in their historical context. The books by Eagleton and Winnifirith, refer to many useful works of a more formally histographical nature.

By 1977, the tide of critical opinion was beginning to turn. Series of new critical and formalist analysis gradually replaced previous criticism and a new kind of exploration

16 T. Eagieton, Myths ofPower: A Marxist Study o f the Brontes, London: Macmillan, 1975: 12.

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evolved. In the last twenty years new critical theories altered the way in which we read literary texts. The most influential factor in the re-estimation of Bronte’s work is the emergence of feminist literary theory. There has been a natural interest in the Bronte sisters among women, “the unusual phenomenon of a sorority of three talented writers with a brother who failed to achieve anything, inevitably draws the interest of female readers and critics.”17 It is a notable feature that most of the Bronte biographers have been women and there have been attempts to address the problems of female authorship.

The real ground work for later feminist studies of the Bronte sisters is found in Eubank’s The Proper Sphere: The Bronte sisters as Early Victorian Female Novelists (1966). This book contains a descriptive analysis of each of the novels and discusses the Bronte’s relationship with early nineteenth century women writers. Jenni Calder’s Women and Marriage in the Victorian Fiction (1976) and Elaine Showalter’s A Literature o f Their own: From Bronte to Lessing, (1977) establishes an accurate and systematic literary history for woman writers. It is as if these feminist critics are establishing their own great tradition. Showalter’s reading of Bronte fiction presents a powerful challenge to the view that Jane Eyre is merely “escape reading for girls.”18 All this changes with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Mad Women in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth – Century Literary Imagination (1979), which is concerned with the position of the women writers, as they relate to the male mainstream. They point out that “the woman writer suffers an anxiety of authorship – a radical fear that she cannot create nor fight a male precursor on his terms and win.”19 It is perhaps this anxiety that made the Bronte sisters adopt pseudonyms, when they published their first novels. Margaret Homans in her book Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in 19th century Women’s Writing (1986), offers a series of feminist

17 G. Holdemess, Wuthering Heights, Open Guides to Literature Series, New Delhi: Viva Books Private Ltd, 2003: 85.

18 E. Showalter, A Literature o f their Own: Woman Writers from Bronte to Lessing, New Jersey: Priceton University Press, 1977: 228.

19 S. Gilbert, & S. Gubar, The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1979: 47- 48.

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readings based on psycholinguistic myth of language, that she derives from Jacques Lacan and Nancy Chodorow. She argues that within a masculine culture, the woman writer can hardly avoid bearing the word for patriarchy. A number of feminist critics laid focus on the narrative technique. Naomi Jacobs in her essay “Gender and the Layered Narrative in Wuthering Heights” gives a social dimension to the question of narrative frame, suggesting like Homans, that the process of exposing the real constraints of women’s lives represents at least a partial loosening of those constraints. Jacobs proceeds to document the prevalence of nineteenth century wife- abuse and the reluctance of reviewers to accept its existence “a context which reveals the Bronte sisters as writing what was regarded as un-writable in contemporary terms.”20 In another essay “Gender and Genre in Wuthering Heights”, Lyn Pykett analyses the connections between gender, class culture, literature, society and politics and portrays “the family as a site of primitive passions, violence, struggle and control.”21 Davis in her two books on Emily Bronte argues that Emily was a free woman. Like Juliet Mitchell, Davis sees Wuthering Heights preoccupied with childhood and the family. Helene Moglen’s critical biography Charlotte Bronte: The Self- Conceived (1976) argues that Charlotte Bronte transcends the limitations of the personal in her fiction, dramatizing the conflict of social and psychological forces and offers visionary insight into psycho- sexual relationships. In Monsters of Affection: Dickens, Eliot and Bronte on Fatherhood (1982), Diana F. Sadoff argues that Charlotte Bronte desires to question dominant ideologies of masculine and feminine, but fears the consequences. She seeks to redefine terms of mastery to invent male and female, always finding insecure subversion for completion. In her influential essay “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” published in 1985, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak uses the figure of Bertha Rochester, to argue that the construction of feminist individualism in an age of imperialism entails the exclusion of the native female.

20 N. Jacobs, “Gender and the Layered Narrative in Wuthering Heights.” Wuthering Heights: New Casebooks. Ed. Patsy Stoneman, London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1998: 173.

21 L. Pykett, “Gender and Genre in Wuthering Heights.” Wuthering Heights: New Casebooks, Ed. Patsy Stoneman, London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1993: 97.

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A lot of emphasis has been given to the two elder sisters and Anne Bronte the youngest sibling, has been shadowed by her more powerful sisters. But recent studies like Elizabeth Langland’s Anne Bronte: The Other One (1989) reiterates Anne’s position as a novelist. Langland remarks that Anne’s novels herald the arrival of a new heroine to fiction. Arnold Craig Bell in his book Novels of Anne Bronte (1992) points out, that Anne is not a mere shadow of her sisters, but wit h a niche of her own. Susan Meyer’s essay “Words on Vulgar sheets: Writing and Social Resistance in Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey", reads the novel as a vehement protest against the silencing and devaluing of both women and the working class. Family relationships are analyzed in Tess O’ Toole’s essay “Siblings and Suitors in the Narrative Architecture of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ”, drawing attention to the asymmetry of Helen Huntingdon’s relationship with her first and second husband, which brings to light the prominence Anne Bronte gives to family relationships. This diversity of readings indicates the richness of Bronte’s text and state of Bronte criticism.

Contemporary criticism has aroused interest in the Bronte novels as they reveal forbidden desires, which is generally considered the more likely key to the novels. It is this desire that finally allows Jam Eyre, Withering Heights and Agnes Grey to end with satisfactory marriages. Nancy Armstrong remarks that it is because the Brontes have encouraged readers to seek the meaning of fiction in a modem consciousness, that their novels play an important part in English literature. The value of regarding the family as a system evolved a new kind of theory the Family – Systems theory. This theory is particularly applicable to the Bronte sisters who were reacting to their sibling Branwell Bronte, an alcoholic and drag addict. Jerome Bump in his study “Family Systems Theoiy, Addiction and the Novels o f the Brontes” remarks that the immense need to temper their love for Branwell led to a new representation of the family in their fiction. A book of literary criticism has finally been devoted to using family dynamics in the services of literary criticism. Jerome Bump places the novels of the Bronte sisters in the context of this family system theory. The family as a theme occupies an important place in the novels of the Bronte sisters.

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