Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  Branwell was in an optimistic mood that year. Royal Academy or no, he was pursuing his plan to become a portrait painter; indeed he was described as such by two local Freemasons, John Brown the sexton and Joseph Redman the parish clerk, when they sponsored him to join the Haworth Lodge the following spring. His hope was to travel abroad in 1836 “for the purpose of acquiring information or instruction,” using the Masons as a networking aid. Quite how the family expected to fund his tour is not clear: perhaps that’s why it never happened.

  It must have been strange for Charlotte, returning home at Christmas with Anne, to find the household so absorbed in its own affairs, Branwell virtually having taken over Angria and Emily so happily tailoring her days to her own taste, writing and reading and taking long walks. Their father too was preoccupied, though in a less contented vein, being the object of a campaign against the church rate that had Haworth in an uproar, with the Dissenters challenging their obligation to pay anything towards the upkeep of a church that none of them attended.

  Branwell’s buoyancy about his prospects accentuated how poor Charlotte’s own had become. When news reached them during the holiday of the death of James Hogg, the poet and essayist famous as “The Ettrick Shepherd,” Branwell became particularly animated. Hogg, the author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), had been a star contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine since its inception in the 1810s and his public profile—that of a self-taught “natural” poet in the Burnsian (and Patrick Brontë) mould—was exactly as Branwell wished to present himself. Indeed Branwell was so struck by the similarities that he wrote to the magazine to point them out. That no one answered did not put Branwell off, and four months later he sent the editor some poetry, with the promise that he could also send prose, and would change either to order, so much in Blackwood’s best interests it would be to take him on. He kept the letter relatively short, with “Read now at least” along the top and “CONDEMN NOT UNHEARD” at the bottom. That would surely do it. Branwell was nothing if not convinced of his own charm, and it certainly worked on friends such as John Brown, and the regulars at the Black Bull, who thought him one of the cleverest fellows alive.

  —

  NONE OF CHARLOTTE’S LETTERS survives from July 1835 to May 1836, but many must have been written to Ellen Nussey in that time, later lost or destroyed. From the sadly nervous, over-anxious tone of the correspondence when it picks up in 1836, nine months into Charlotte’s hated new life, one can guess that Charlotte expressed a rawness and vulnerability in the intervening period that Ellen may have chosen to suppress. It certainly came out in Charlotte’s private writing, especially her poetry, which became her main solace.

  In the Christmas holidays Charlotte finished writing a strange poem, known by its first line, “We wove a web in childhood,” which alludes to the secret growth of the siblings’ sustaining fantasy, a process both surprising and subversive, in which a tiny spring has become “An ocean with a thousand Isles/And scarce a glimpse of shore.” There are 185 lines of this poem, veering around formally, stylistically and conceptually in a way that is typical of Charlotte’s writing in these years, when she releases herself into expression in a greedy, desperate manner. There is no time, no leisure, it seems, to refine her medium; it needs an outlet and must simply flow—which this poem does at length. It returns obsessively to images of imprisonment, desolation, exile and persecution, and there are abrupt changes of tempo and subject—a self-indulgence, a sort of bingeing, which was clearly the only way she felt she could proceed. She passes into the “bright darling dream” herself and is transported to a former battlefield at night, where the poetry suddenly gives way to prose, as if what she had to relate was too urgent and had to be got down immediately:

  I now heard the far clatter of hoofs on the hard & milk-white road, the great highway that turns in a bend from Free-Town and stretches on to the West. two horsemen rode slowly up in the moonlight & leaving the path struck deep into the moor, galloping through heather to their Chargers breasts.

  It was Zamorna, more real than life. The last paragraph is no longer poem or prose-poem, but diary, and the writer is setting it all down as she sits, apparently working, in front of a classful of students:

  Never shall I Charlotte Brontë forget what a voice of wild & wailing music now came thrillingly to my mind’s almost to my body’s ear, nor how distinctly I sitting in the school-room at Roe-head saw the Duke of Zamorna leaning against that obelisk with the mute marble Victory above him the fern waving at his feet his black horse turned loose grazing among the heather, the moonlight so mild & so exquisitely tranquil sleeping upon that vast & vacant road & the African sky quivering & shaking with stars expanded above all, I was quite gone I had really utterly forgot where I was and all the gloom & cheerlessness of my situation I felt myself breathing quick & short as I beheld the Duke lifting up his sable crest which undulated as the plume of a hearse waves to the wind & knew that that music which seems as mournfully triumphant as the scriptural verse

  “Oh Grave where is thy sting;

  Oh Death where is thy victory”

  was exciting him & quickening his ever rapid pulse “Miss Brontë what are you thinking about?” said a voice that dissipated all the charm & Miss Lister thrust her little rough black head into my face, “Sic transit” &c.

  Charlotte had been the girl who never misbehaved, who bore off the prizes and complied with every rule, but now, as a teacher, she was intransigent and uncooperative. She found herself prey to sudden, violent rages; fashionable young ladies irritated her and drew waspish remarks; her scorn for her “oafish” pupils was obvious, “boring me with their vulgar familiar trash all the time we were out. If those girls knew how I loathe their company, they would not seek mine so much as they do.” Even Miss Wooler had got on her wrong side, and must have been exercising great patience with her young colleague. An indication of how uncontrolled she must have been at this date comes from her comparison of a calmer period seven years later when she merely got “red-in-the face with impatience” with her pupils, “but don’t think I ever scold or fly into a passion—if I spoke warmly, as warmly as I sometimes used to do at Roe-Head they would think me mad.” She knew it was irrational, that the things that rankled “like venom” were “things that nobody else cares for,” but she felt powerless to control her feelings: “I strive to conceal and suppress them as much as I can. but they burst out sometimes.”

  Six partly autobiographical pieces of writing, now known as “The Roe Head Journal,” amply illustrate Charlotte’s sense of alienation in these years. She fulfilled her duties with exceptionally bad grace and returned as frequently as possible to her “ark” of make-believe. The recurring theme of the journal is the superior reality of her imagined world, and the pain of re-entering ordinary life at the end of each flight. Miss Wooler will come in with some butter, or Miss Lister will ask what she’s thinking about, and their interruptions set Charlotte’s nerves on edge and keep her not just from absorbing dreams (some distinctly erotic) but from what she imagines is a vital source of inspiration, rather like Samuel Taylor Coleridge being robbed of Kubla Khan by the oafish Person from Porlock. “I felt as if I could have written gloriously—I longed to write,” she wrote one Friday in August, stuck in the classroom. “The spirit of all Verdopolis, of all the mountainous North, of all the woodland West, of all the river-watered East came crowding into my mind. If I had had time to indulge it, I felt that the vague sensations of that moment would have settled down into some narrative better at least than any thing I ever produced before. But just then a dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited.”

  That class had not started well. Charlotte had spent nearly an hour trying to drum into three of her pupils the difference between an article and a substantive and sank “into a kind of lethargy…from irritation & weariness.” Irritation seemed to predominate:

  The thought came over me: am I to spend all the best part of my life i
n this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolical & most asinine stupidity of those fat-headed oafs, and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience & assiduity? Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair, prisoned with in these four bare walls, while these glorious summer suns are burning in heaven & the year is revolving in its richest glow & declaring at the close of every summer day [that] the time I am losing will never come again?

  She threw up the sash window on the glorious morning that was being sacrificed to fat-headed oafdom and heard the bells of Huddersfield Church “full & liquid” in the distance: “Huddersfield & the hills beyond it were all veiled in blue mist; the woods of Hopton & Heaton Lodge were clouding the water’s-edge; & the Calder, silent but bright, was shooting among them like a silver arrow.” She shut the window on this idyllic scene—one imagines rather sharply—and went back to her seat.

  Charlotte could dramatise and satirise the condition of living in two realities, but it became impossible to sustain. Her resentment and non-cooperation were glaringly obvious. Several of the Roe Head fragments were written during class, one while Miss Wooler was in the room and two pupils either side of Charlotte were silently “staring, gaping” because their teacher was apparently writing something—in minuscule characters—with her eyes shut. “Hang their astonishment!” Miss Brontë wrote, triumphant over circumstances she hated so much, and pleased to consternate the despised “asses” around her: “What in all this is there to remind me of the divine, silent, unseen land of thought, dim now & indefinite as the dream of a dream, the shadow of a shade?” The scene is peculiar, to say the least: the young teacher writing to herself in an unreadably tiny script, with her eyes closed, about an “unseen land”—enough to make the girls gape indeed, as if she were hypnotised, or receiving spirit messages. The other fragments have the same wobbly and sometimes over-written lines, suggesting that she wrote them all with her eyes shut, a decisive removal from the distracting sight of Miss Lister and Miss Cook.

  Charlotte’s rage against her occupation, and the lifetime of drudgery it symbolised, might have blinded her to the ill-effects of retreating so often and so completely into the alternative reality of her Angrian fantasies. “Phantasms” might be the better word, being the one that was commonly used to describe opium-induced reveries, so alluringly evoked by Thomas De Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, a book that had fascinated all the young Brontës. Charlotte’s Angrian writing, and her journal fragments of these years, are predominantly about “altered states” of mind—but how had she got there? Opiates, usually in the form of laudanum drops, were a common tranquilliser in the Brontës’ time, easily available over the druggist’s counter. Alethea Hayter’s description of the mental traits that predispose people to opium addiction fit Charlotte Brontë’s condition at Roe Head with uncanny closeness: “Men and women who feel all kinds of suffering keenly…who are unable to face and cope with painful situations, who are conscious of their own inadequacy and who resent the difficulties which have revealed it; who long for relief from tension, from the failures and disappointments of their everyday life, who yearn for something which will annihilate the gap between their idea of themselves and their actual selves.” Branwell, who also fits this description closely, later told a friend that he had experimented with “opium-eating” after reading De Quincey. “Opium-eating” was a practice that involved taking a lot more of the drug than was contained in ordinary analgesics, and, in Branwell’s case, led to addiction in the 1840s, but it began at the time when he and Charlotte were still very close, and mutually engrossed by the “world below” that they had created. It seems unlikely that, given the opportunity, Charlotte would not have joined him in some testing of the magical drug.*1

  But it remains that Charlotte denied using opium when Elizabeth Gaskell asked her outright, in 1853, about the very striking scenes in Villette where the streets of Brussels are seen through the drugged eyes of Lucy Snowe, under the influence of “a strong opiate” administered surreptitiously to sedate her (but which has the opposite effect). Mrs. Gaskell wanted to know if this was based on personal experience and was told that the author “had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape.” Was Charlotte being evasive, making a rather specious distinction about the size of a dose, and, if so, why? It’s hard to believe that she could have entirely avoided opiates in an age where laudanum was so widely used by children and adults alike. Mrs. Gaskell had no reason to withhold her own usage of opium from the 1850s readers of her Life of Charlotte Brontë, describing the scenes in Villette as “so exactly” like what she had experienced herself. Charlotte’s denial leads, in the biography, to an explanation of how she writes about things she has not experienced: she would “[think] intently on it for many and many a night before falling to sleep,—wondering what it was like, or how it would be,—till at length, sometimes after the progress of her story had been arrested at this one point for weeks, she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through the experience.” Mrs. Gaskell clearly found this a strange claim, but, however Charlotte arrived at her visions, her “world beneath” had much in common with what other people needed drugs to reach.

  Mrs. Gaskell had not at that date seen “The Roe Head Journal,” with its much more protracted and explicit reveries. In one, Charlotte describes an August afternoon when she retreats to the dormitory alone at dusk and gives herself over to the bliss of solitude. “The stream of thought, checked all day, came flowing free & calm along its channel…detached thoughts soothingly flitted round me, & unconnected scenes occurred and then vanished, producing an effect certainly strange but, to me, very pleasing.” The change “acted on me like opium” and grew “morbidly vivid.” “I remember I quite seemed to see, with my bodily eyes, a lady standing in the hall of a gentleman’s house.” The scene unfolded, with many sophistications; Charlotte knew that “a thousand things” were connected to this vision that she did not have time to analyse, but meanwhile the sight of the doctor washing his bloody hands in the basin (she knew who he was—she had invented him—Dr. Charles Brandon) and the woman (whom Charlotte did not recognise) holding the taper had acquired a solidity that Charlotte found disturbing and couldn’t switch off: “I grew frightened at the vivid glow of the candle, at the reality of the lady’s erect & symmetrical figure, of her spirited & handsome face, of her anxious eye watching Brandon’s & seeking out its meaning.”

  The removal into this dream was so complete that she only gradually became aware of her real circumstances: “a feeling like a heavy weight laid across me. I knew I was wide awake & that it was dark, & that, moreover, the ladies were now come into the room to get their curl-papers. They perceived me lying on the bed & I heard them talking about me. I wanted to speak, to rise—it was impossible. I felt that this was a frightful predicament—that it would not do. The weight pressed me as if some huge animal had flung itself across me. A horrid apprehension quickened every pulse I had. ‘I must get up,’ I thought, & I did so with a start…Tea’s read[y]. Miss Wooler is impatient.”

  So the banal world of Miss Wooler and tea again drew her back into the land of the living, but Charlotte became increasingly aware that “It would not do.”

  Feelings of guilt as well as deep pleasure attached to the ecstatic release of her visions, fantasies that made her pant and that were painful to have interrupted. Everything about Charlotte’s willed removals into the “bright dream” seems to have a sexual semblance, a masturbatory character and the ecstatic quality often associated with sexual or mystical experiences.

  The pain of returning to ordinary life from the “dream” found strikingly similar expression in a Gondal poem written by Emily a few years later:

  Oh, dreadful is the check—intense the agony—

  When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;

  When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again,

>   The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

  Had these lines been known to Charlotte at Roe Head, she might have clung to her alternative world for much longer, but, as it was, experiences such as the “frightful” incapacitation she felt in the dormitory had begun to alarm her. “I have had enough of morbidly vivid realizations,” she wrote. “Every advantage has its corresponding disadvantage.”

  —

  ELLEN, stolidly reliable and consistent, unimpeachably unimaginative, became the person Charlotte fixed on as helpmeet in this crisis, but what started, in Charlotte’s letters, as expressions of religious frailty kept reconstituting themselves quite differently. The widening gulf in their experience (and Ellen’s limited understanding of what Charlotte suffered at this or at any other time) made Charlotte address her in an odd, pleading tone, in terms more appropriate for a doting lover than a spiritual companion:

  Don’t deceive yourself by imagining that I have a bit of real goodness about me. My Darling if I were like you I should have my face Zion-ward…but I am not like you. If you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up and makes me feel Society as it is, wretchedly insipid you would pity and I dare say despise me.

  Charlotte hinted darkly at what her faults might be: “I have some qualities that make me very miserable some feelings that you can have no participation in—that few very few people in the world can at all understand,” but there was no need for Ellen’s mind to be contaminated with details: Ellen’s presence and example, she felt sure, would be enough to effect a cure: