Brontë’s revolution (Charlotte was born 200 years ago yesterday)

Financial times ^ | 4/21/2016 | Claire Harman

[Borges]

The classic status of ‘Jane Eyre’ can obscure just how shocking its radical ideas were at the time.

No one would be celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth on April 21 were it not for her first and most famous novel, Jane Eyre, which has never been out of print since it was published in 1847 and is now a cornerstone of our literary culture. It’s easy to see how it got there. Brontë’s skilful telling of a Cinderella love story between a poor plain governess and her surly master has an irresistible power and many elements of ripsnorting Gothic romance, with its creepy mansion, incarcerated madwoman, cruel aunt, storms, destitution, fire. It happens to be brilliantly well-written, too: Jane Eyre ticks every box. But there’s a downside to classic status; fame acts like a sort of clingfilm over a work of art, keeping it “nice”, but also inert. “Knowing about” Jane Eyre is almost unavoidable, given the large number of retellings, spin-offs, sequels, prequels, films and dramatisations the story has spawned over the years, and reading the text itself might seem somewhat superfluous, even distracting, in the circumstances. Among the hundreds of thousands who have read it, people are more likely to remember scenes such as Jane standing up to her bullying aunt and the teachers at Lowood School, or proudly refusing Rochester’s plan to keep her as his mistress, without remembering the stringent principles underlying the drama. The book has become beloved and irreplaceable, but has lost a lot of its power to shock.

In 1847 it shocked people considerably: the author, known only by the name that appeared on the title page, “Currer Bell”, seemed like a dangerous revolutionary, challenging social and sexual norms with his story of the servant who claims to be the spiritual equal of her master. For “Currer Bell” had to be a man, surely? No woman would have the worldly knowledge that the plot implied, or the shamelessness to express it. Alarm bells rang in the ears of critics who read Jane’s cries of “Unjust! Unjust!”, like those of “any other rebel slave”. What was all this about equality, insubordination, this denunciation of clerics as hypocrites and authority figures as questionable? “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will”, was a statement as incendiary as any to be found in the subversive socialist pamphlets of the day (or in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, published the year after Jane Eyre); Currer Bell’s girl-rebel seemed to be encouraging all oppressed people to join her when she extolled “the strangest sense of freedom” that comes from making a stand — “it seemed as if an invisible bond had burst”. Published just months before the outbreak of bloody revolutions in Italy, Hungary, France and Germany, the novel could hardly be read as politically innocent, despite the fact that it was ostensibly just a love story, and about a girl. “There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor,” the Quarterly warned, “which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God’s appointment — there is a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority either in God’s word or in God’s providence. We do not hesitate to say that the tone of the mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.” The critic in the Quarterly felt obliged to add that the book was doubly dangerous because it was well-written and attractive, thus a sort of moral Trojan Horse. The public might absorb Currer Bell’s obnoxious views without noticing, blinded by the charm of the story and characters, which combined “genuine power with [ . . . ] horrid taste”. “Mr Rochester is a man who deliberately and secretly seeks to violate the laws both of God and man”, they concluded, “and yet we will be bound half our lady readers are enchanted with him for a model of generosity and honour.” Brontë (still incognito behind her pseudonym) found such criticisms of Jane Eyre so agitating that she wrote a preface to a later edition protesting that “conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.” But there’s a certain disingenuousness here, or at least an intransigence about her own intentions. In the same preface, she praised her hero William Makepeace Thackeray lavishly and went on to describe him as “the first social regenerator of the day — the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things” — not a phrase to stop people gossiping about her politics. She soon regretted the warmth of that statement as events in France in the spring of 1848 unfolded. “I wrote it when I was a little enthusiastic . . . about the French Revolution”, she told her editor. In a cooler moment “I should have said the same things, but in a different manner.”

Charlotte’s private retractions remained unknown to readers, of course, and in print Currer Bell continued to look unusually progressive. He received some extraordinary requests, one to become a regular contributor to the New York Tribune, an influential pro-reform journal, and one from a Peace Congress Committee to join a platform in London that also included the radical MP Richard Cobden, some leading Quakers, the president of Oberlin College and the utopian philanthropist Robert Owen. Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine and the Archbishop of Paris were also invited and the meeting, which took place in October 1849, was “crowded to the door”. Charlotte received the invitation after the event and treated it as something of a joke, but though it is true of course that the Peace Committee would never have written to her if they’d known Currer Bell was a woman, what an interesting tribute it is to the radical tone of her works that the author of Jane Eyre fitted so well in their otherwise freethinking and forward-looking line-up. Currer Bell’s concern with truth-telling in art appealed to the radicals, though it wasn’t a comfortable trait. Brontë’s novels are all emotionally raw; it was what made her last, Villette, so searing to read, and what prompted Matthew Arnold to turn from that novel in disgust, saying that there was nothing but “hunger, rebellion and rage” in it. Brontë’s sporadic outbursts remain the most interesting and peculiar parts of her books — ardent, urgent messages, sometimes quite jarring in context.

In The Professor, written before Jane Eyre but unpublished in her lifetime, Brontë included short eruptions about equal pay, moral depravity and working conditions: in Shirley, there were asides about clerical hypocrisy, inherited wealth and female powerlessness: “ask no questions; utter no remonstrances; it is your best wisdom. You expected bread, and you have got a stone; break your teeth on it, and don’t shriek because the nerves are martyrised . . . You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind: in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learnt the great lesson how to endure without a sob.”

It’s an extraordinarily harsh and sardonic passage, leaving the author’s feelings in no doubt, even though she immediately turns round and gets back to the telling of a story.

Another of these flashes of anger happens in Jane Eyre, one that has never, to my knowledge, found its way into any screenplay or on to a heritage memento. It’s when Rochester takes Jane on a shopping trip halfway through the novel (in the brief idyll between his first proposal to her and her discovery that he is in fact already married). But this is no Pretty Woman moment: the whole expedition mortifies the bride-to-be, who resolves inwardly to pay back every penny through her own labour. “The more he bought me, the more my cheek burnt with annoyance and degradation”, she says.

What a word to bring you up short — degradation! It is completely right, and yet more stringent and unsparing an analysis than many contemporary feminists would dare make, and echoes something that Brontë wrote to her friend Ellen Nussey about spousal inequality just two weeks before she started writing her novel: “Who holds the purse will wish to be Master, Ellen; depend on it whether Man or Woman — who provides the cash will now and then value himself (or herself) upon it — and even in the case of ordinary Minds, reproach the less wealthy partner.”

Brontë was painfully aware of the inhibiting effect fame had on her, even in her earliest years as a published author, and even with that masculine pseudonym standing guard between her and the public. The fact was that Currer Bell himself had quickly become a sort of brand, and when she was writing Villette she told her publisher that she “dreaded” the novel being read primarily as a work “by the author of Jane Eyre”: could she not publish entirely anonymously? Not surprisingly, George Smith refused. And only four years later, after the author’s early death during pregnancy in 1855, all privacy and subterfuge came to an end with fellow novelist Elizabeth Gaskell’s bestselling, heartbreaking and tear-jerking Life of Charlotte Brontë rivalling even Jane Eyre in sales and notoriety.

Gaskell broadcast for the first time the real name — and gender — of Currer Bell, along with the riveting story of her upbringing in a windswept Yorkshire parsonage, the deprivations of her childhood, the bereavements, the struggle to become “forever known”, and, not least, the weird, isolated and feverishly inventive society that the Brontë siblings enjoyed together.

Gaskell’s book remains a knockout, but came so fast on the heels of Charlotte’s Brontë’s death that it might have intensified the effect, over the years, of muffling what the author was trying to say. It’s a process that goes on and on. I am as partial as the next fan to a nice bit of Brontë merchandising, but it does seem a strange fate to have phrases such as “I am no bird and no net ensnares me” printed on pink T-shirts or images of the famously self-conscious and reclusive author emblazoned on mugs and key fobs.

As we celebrate the secure place Charlotte Brontë has in our hearts and our literary heritage, it might be as well to remind ourselves who we’re remembering. The realisation that it’s someone who might not just want to surprise you with the power of her writing, but shake you by the shoulders with her ideas, is perhaps more peculiar than pleasing.

[BlackVeil]

Interesting quotation. Charlotte’s description of the hypocritical clergyman at the girls’ school is especially sharp. The worst thing about it, is that it was drawn from life, and Charlotte maintained that there was no exaggeration, but rather the opposite.