How To Be A Heroine

by Samantha Ellis

  Wow, just wow. It’s quite a speech. No wonder Rochester proposes. I wish she hadn’t let him dress her like a doll and load her with jewels and I wish she’d insisted on knowing why he doesn’t fire the weird, laughing, apparently homicidal servant. But she becomes a proper heroine when, her marriage ruined by the discovery of Rochester’s mad wife in the attic, she refuses to stay and be his mistress.

  This didn’t always strike me as heroic. I used to think she was cowardly and skittish, a prude without the guts to flout convention. I thought she was the one betraying her heart. Why bang on about passion if you’re not going to defy society? He’s offering her a love nest – and it sounds brilliant: a whitewashed villa in the south of France, on the shores of the Mediterranean. I’d join him there in a heartbeat. And they love each other. Why can’t she go? I thought it was because she was still trapped in the self-abnegating faith she’d learned at school.

  Plus, my allegiance was to the anti-heroine. With her wild hair, her passion and her justifiable rage at the husband-stealing governess, Bertha seemed a lot more interesting than Jane. I liked the way she ripped up Jane’s wedding veil like a Fury out of Greek tragedy. I’ll never forget the image of her at the end, on the battlements of Thornfield, black hair streaming against the flames, leaping out of her prison. My favourite literary critics Gilbert and Gubar made me think any right-thinking feminist had to prefer Bertha because she embodies everything Victorian society makes Jane suppress. Jane isn’t keen on the fancy wedding veil – so Bertha rips it up. Tiny Jane wants to be Rochester’s equal though he’s always saying he could crush her – but Bertha is tall and strong enough to wrestle with him. And Jane doesn’t exactly say it but she wants to be wanton, and Bertha just is. In Shared Experience’s Gilbert-and-Gubar-tastic stage adaptation, bawdy Bertha is constantly on stage, trying to shove plain, sober Jane aside as she moans, writhes and grabs at Rochester. She’s got my hair – dark, curly, unmanageable: curly hair is so often a shorthand for unruliness and this just gave me another reason to like her.

  I’d got more ammunition against Jane from Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, her intoxicating 1966 prequel to Jane Eyre. Rhys’s heroine – basically Bertha, but called Antoinette – grows up in a Jamaica evoked in hot, sensuous, longing prose. The novel is scented with cinnamon, vetiver, lime and frangipani. But it is no romance. Antoinette is forced to marry a cold, uptight Englishman; Rochester reimagined as a racist, misogynist coloniser of women who changes his wife’s name, curbs her rebelliousness and represses her sensuality. He makes her feel foreign, exotic, wrong. She is driven mad by the pressure to conform to his white, male, English world. I’ve felt that pressure myself. I still love Wide Sargasso Sea but now that I’m rethinking Jane, it no longer feels like a threat to Jane Eyre. It is its own book, and wonderful. I like it separately.

  Now, Jane seems so bold that I have to completely reconsider my feelings about her decision to leave Rochester. These pages are so gripping; Charlotte gives us a blow-by-blow account of a heroine making the decision of her life. In the hours after she’s dragged from church, up to the attic to face her nemesis, Jane is alive to every feeling, and her mind is racing. She finds the compassion to tell Rochester to be kinder to Bertha, who can’t help being mad. She finds both pity and forgiveness for Rochester – and the dynamic here is fascinating because for all his wealth, and for all that he’s a man, she is freer. He was sold on the marriage market and is still chained to a wife he doesn’t love, but Jane can choose whether to marry or not. In itself, this is subversive. Jane won’t listen to any sophistry from Rochester, and when she has the weaselly thought that she could throw away her reputation because no one would care, her heart sings out: ‘I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.’ It’s a pretty fearless manifesto. And it sustains her once her decision is made. She knows she will have to be the strong one; Rochester can’t resist her. She’s already had to push away his caresses. She is tempted, too – she frankly admits it would be ‘rapture’ to stay – but she’s made up her mind. She doesn’t waver when he threatens to crush her and tear her. (This is terrifying in the 1943 Orson Welles film. He’s so bear-like and hulking that when he towers menacingly over doe-eyed Joan Fontaine, he really does look as if he could rip her in two.) Finally, Jane copes with his sadness, which is worst of all: ‘I had dared and baffled his fury; I must elude his sorrow.’ She steals away in the night without asking him for money for the journey (not even the wages he owes her), resourcefully oiling the key and lock so that no one will hear her leave. And she’s not remotely smug about her decision: ‘I abhorred myself. I had no solace from self-approbation: none even from self-respect. I had injured – wounded – left my master. I was hateful in my own eyes.’

  She goes on to do other brave and brilliant things: sharing her inheritance with her new-found cousins, not letting St John tell her how to believe in God (‘God did not give me my life to throw away’) and refusing to marry without passion, snapping ‘I scorn your idea of love.’ I thought Jane was cold, but she’s not; she says she’s terrified of ‘those cold people’ who stifle their feelings.

  Charlotte rewards her heroine with a marriage that is sanctioned by God and also equal. Rochester has changed. He doesn’t want to be just a ‘giver and protector’ but will let Jane help him. And he doesn’t care about jewels and dresses any more. As an orphan girl, years before, Jane demanded a voice (‘Speak, I must’); now she sums up ten years of marriage with ‘We talk, I believe, all day long’. It’s a charming picture of companionship. It’s very far from Cathy and Heathcliff’s thwarted, afflicted love. I believe Jane and Rochester are happy.

  As I finish Jane Eyre, I text Emma saying she was right. She is thrilled. Compared to Jane’s strong decision to leave Rochester, Cathy’s decision to marry Edgar feels ignoble. She seems the conventional one, marrying Edgar because ‘he will be rich, and I shall like to be the greatest woman of the neighbourhood, and I shall be proud of having such a husband’. Cathy is a snob, refusing to marry Heathcliff because he has been denied education and status and ‘brought low’. Later, when her daughter Catherine is faced with a similar dilemma when she falls for illiterate Hareton, she doesn’t reject him; instead she teaches him to read. (You can argue, and people do, that Cathy and Heathcliff’s histrionic love resolves into the quieter romance between Catherine and Hareton, but Catherine’s not the heroine of Wuthering Heights and never will be. Her father’s milk-blood runs in her veins.)

  Hardly anyone likes both novels. In the battle of the Brontës, it’s not just ‘wild, wick slip’ Cathy versus ‘poor, obscure, plain and little’ Jane, it’s also Emily versus Charlotte. I’d always thought Emily was the tempestuous genius, and Charlotte was her try-hard, mumsy sister. In her dazzling poem, ‘The Glass Essay’, Anne Carson casts them just this way, imagining:

  . . . Emily Brontë’s little merlin hawk Hero

  that she fed bits of bacon at the kitchen table when

  Charlotte wasn’t around.

  I resented Charlotte for what she said about Wuthering Heights after Emily died. Her preface to the posthumous edition is full of barbs like, ‘Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know; I scarcely think it is’. Some Emily fans even think she wrote a second novel which Charlotte burned! I really, really hope this isn’t true.

  But equally, if Charlotte hadn’t talked her odd, reclusive sister into publishing, and done all the hard work of making it happen, we wouldn’t even have Wuthering Heights.

  Once the novel was out there, and Emily gone, and all the critics calling it coarse and unwomanly, it must have been hard for Charlotte to know what to tell people about it. No wonder she sometimes said Emily was an unsophisticated country lass who had no idea what she was writing, and sometimes said she was a crazed mystic. At least she didn’t claim their brother Branwell wrote Wuthering Heights. This rumour, started by Branwell’s drinking pals,
is surprisingly tenacious. It supposedly answers the question of how a woman who died a spinster at thirty, having never been in love, could have written one of the greatest love stories of all time.

  This, of course, assumes that Wuthering Heights really is one of the greatest love stories of all time. I certainly read it that way, and I wasn’t the only one. The 1939 Hollywood swoonfest is partly to blame, hacking off the second half of the story so that it ends with Cathy’s death – and we never have to cope with seeing luminous Olivier go from hopeless romantic to wife-beating, grave-digging, dog-hanging psychopath. But is the love in Wuthering Heights really that great? It obliterates the people who experience it. Cathy says it best: ‘I am Heathcliff.’

  And their love is impossible. Even if miscommunication, heinousness and bad luck hadn’t kept them apart, the idea of Heathcliff and Cathy getting married and settling down in some cosy cottage, growing old together, does not compute. This is not one of those romance novels where a kind, daring heroine sees the kernel of good in an edgy, dark-hearted hero and redeems him (for which read most of Mills and Boon and, oh, about half of nineteenth-century fiction). Cathy is as moody and savage as Heathcliff, and she couldn’t save him if she tried. She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to be kind and sweet and good: she dreams that she goes to heaven and hates it so much that she cries until the angels throw her down to the moors where she belongs. Cathy and Heathcliff’s love is too raw and rarefied to exist in the real world, and they know it; they can only be together as restless ghosts. Wuthering Heights fan fiction is obsessed by casting Cathy and Heathcliff as vampires, but even without making them undead (and usually in such deathless prose), their love is just not realistic. It is the kind of love, in fact, that could only be written by someone who had never been in love. Which makes me certain Branwell never wrote a word of it – and also means that Wuthering Heights is a terrible template for actually conducting a love affair. The longer the oud player and I went on, the less myself I felt. Like Cathy, I lost myself. I can’t help thinking that a heroine should be able to love without being erased. But, then, I didn’t know how.

  I don’t know if Jane Eyre would have given me the answers either. Charlotte knew love, it’s true. She had her crush (not wholly unrequited) on her professor, a flirtation with her publisher and eventually she married her father’s curate. Apparently they were happy. I hope they were, but I worry. I read that he campaigned to stop the impious housewives of Haworth hanging up their washing in the graveyard. There’s something ridiculous about a curate ranting and raving at women laden with wet petticoats. I think he might have been a bit of a prig.

  And for all that Jane and Rochester’s love is based on experience, the more I think about it, the less I like it. Rochester is twice Jane’s age, he’s domineering and he has behaved very peculiarly. He apologises for lying, but he doesn’t apologise for flirting with Blanche to make Jane jealous. And there’s something very troubling about equality coming because he’s lost a hand and one of his eyes. Can a woman not be equal to her husband unless he’s wounded? And while Wuthering Heights doesn’t shrink from the horrible truth that Cathy is dead and Heathcliff has to live and struggle on alone, Charlotte has to bring on the Gothic in a big way to give Jane her happy ending – with the fire, madness and even supernatural voices, is the ending of Jane Eyre really more realistic than the ending of Wuthering Heights?

  Even Jane, lovely Jane, can’t entirely hold my affections. She’s a heroine who does everything right – but what’s interesting about a heroine who never makes mistakes? There’s a perverse pleasure in loving Cathy. The more holes I pick in Wuthering Heights, the more my stubborn heart clings to it. And struggling with it is, of course, a pleasure in itself.

  I do wish, though, that Emily had experienced love. Imagine what she might have written then! She might have given her heroine more of a chance at happiness. She might, in fact, have written Jamaica Inn. Daphne du Maurier’s 1936 novel plays with both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, with its moorland setting (in Cornwall, not Yorkshire) and its heroine drawn to darkness. But du Maurier gives Mary Yellan a better choice of men. Cathy’s only alternative to Heathcliff is bland Edgar, and Jane’s only alternative to Rochester is severe St John. But Mary can acknowledge her attraction to her aunt’s drunk wrecker husband, Joss Merlyn, and deflect it by going off instead with his brother, Jem, who is just lawless and wild enough, but not black-hearted; and not embittered either. If only Cathy had had a sexy horse-thief to whisk her away. If only Emily had.

  If I were playing Snog, Marry, Avoid (let’s face it, I sort of am), I’d still snog Heathcliff but I’d never try to marry him. I’d still avoid Rochester, because I don’t think he’d make me happy. And maybe (thank you, Ms du Maurier!) I’d marry Jem.

  I don’t really want to have to choose between Rochester and Heathcliff, or Cathy and Jane, or Emily and Charlotte. At Haworth I get worked up over Charlotte’s darned stockings and when I see a closed-down wedding shop on the high street, the white dresses hanging ghost-like on the rails, refracted in the rain spattering the glass, the Cathy in me sees it as a forlorn image of both sisters never really finding the love they wrote about. But the Jane in me knows it’s probably a casualty of the recession. And while my inner Cathy thinks I recognise Haworth because of my subliminal connection to the Brontës, my inner Jane points out it’s actually because of the Hovis advert. The charming olde apothecary where I browse rose petal lip balm and bath salts shaped like cupcakes is where Branwell got the laudanum that killed him. It’s probably unwise to romanticise everything – and I’ll probably always do it.

  Back then, though, tempestuous love was making me unhappy. A dear friend broke up his relationship and came to stay, filling my flat with sadness and rage. Writing lost its savour – though I kept plugging away, and my drawer started to fill up with unproduced plays. I sent off for prospectuses for law school, thinking that if I was going to be miserable I might as well be miserable doing something lucrative.

  And then I got a fellowship at an artists’ colony in New Hampshire.

  10

  FLORA POSTE

  THE SNOW WAS deep and thick in New Hampshire, and there was always a fire lit in my log cabin, and woodsmoke in my hair. In the evenings, reading in the rocking chair, it all felt very Little House in the Big Woods, and for all that I was 32, I still held a candle for Laura Ingalls Wilder. I’d first read her autobiographical novels about her pioneer childhood years ago, so when I heard howling at night, I’d remember Pa carrying an excited, tiny Laura to the window to see wolves, and how later, at twelve, sliding on a frozen lake, following a moonpath, she encounters a wolf in the flesh, gleaming in the moonlight, wind rippling through his fur. The other artists said the howls were coyotes, not wolves, but they did teach me a mnemonic for when the bears woke up, in case any should venture this way. It went, ‘Bear brown, lie down. Bear black, fight back.’

  I’d never seen so much snow. I had a shovel for the mornings when I’d find it banked up against the door and have to clear a path. It made me think of Laura’s baths of melted snow, and the candy she’d make by pouring maple syrup on to plates of snow. Walking in the woods, everything froze: my eyelashes, my hair into stiff little ringlets. The snow fell fresh every night, a clean white canvas for the black-and-white birches. When the photographer Francesca Woodman was at the artists’ colony in 1980, she peeled off strips of birch bark and wrapped them around her wrists like manacles or bandages, to make portraits of herself as Diana perpetually turning into a tree. I made photocopies and pinned them up above my desk for inspiration.

  It wasn’t just the snow; I also kept thinking about how the Little House books are all about self-sufficiency. I wasn’t particularly interested in hunting, trapping and fishing, still less in making my own fishing rods and bullets, I didn’t want to salt or smoke, or churn butter, or braid straw, or sew endless calico dresses. I’ve never really wanted to pack up my life in a covered wagon and take off for the
unknown, as Laura does over and over as a child, and then again as a young bride, embarking on her own pioneer adventure. But I did want a different kind of self-sufficiency. I didn’t know if my relationship with the oud player would still be there when I got back, and I had started to think it might not be disastrous if it wasn’t.

  Two artists got married in a snowfield. We all held sparklers, the groom played his guitar and the bride wore a mermaid dress covered in sequins and peacock feathers. They didn’t seem erased by love; instead, they seemed to be making something together; their love seemed a collaboration.

  I was researching a play about Gertrude Bell, the British bluestocking, traveller and diplomat who played a major role in the creation of the state of Iraq. My grandfather had seen her ride along the banks of the Tigris at dawn, dressed in white. He’d said that she fell in love with Iraq’s first king, but as a child I’d been much more interested in her career. Yet now I was finally writing about her, I became fascinated by the idea that Bell, thwarted in romance, had thrown her love at Iraq – not the king but the country. It was a deeply unconventional love, but for much of her life it sustained her. In her pearls and long Edwardian lace dresses, Bell was very different from the artists in the snowfield, and she also made me think that there were different ways of being in love.

  Or not being in love. I’d stashed Stella Gibbons’s 1932 classic Cold Comfort Farm, in my suitcase as a salve for homesickness. I’d heard it was the most quintessentially English novel ever. What I didn’t know was how much it would help me with my questions about the possibility of living without love. I’d waited so long to read it because, as a rule, I don’t like parodies. I worry they’ll be cruel and that the jokes will get in the way of any empathy I might have. But Cold Comfort Farm is more gleeful pastiche than savage take-down. As I got stuck in, it became clear that it was too good a novel to dismiss. Its sparkling heroine Flora Poste was my first comic heroine since Lizzy Bennet. I hadn’t realised how much I’d been longing for a funny leading lady. From the moment she arrived on the page, orphaned but not heart-warming, I knew I’d found a cooler, tougher Anne Shirley.