OBSTINATE FASTING
The sisters would have looked blankly at the term ‘anorexia nervosa’. But they knew what it was, in the flesh, better than most. They were themselves ‘hunger artists’. And, when needed, pioneers of the pre-Ghandian political fast unto death.
When their beloved Tabitha Aykroyd (a ‘stout’ woman who outlived them all), mistress of the kitchen, faced dismissal the sisters went on hunger strike to keep her. Emily, by refusing food, got herself sent home from her school, Roe Head. Yorkshire schools always had enough starved pupils to be getting on with.
Self-denial – even to the verge of self-destruction and beyond – was one of the readiest weapons the sisters had, domestically. There are few scenes of enjoyable eating in the sisters’ fiction. One’s saliva glands are untroubled. In Charlotte’s fiction, the act of ingestion is, as described in the gluttony of the curates in Shirley, as ugly as the rumbling act of digestion and the wholly disgusting act of defecation.
And gluttony, like lechery, is what men do. Consider the following, from Shirley:
‘You have your household in proper order,’ observed Malone approvingly, as, with his fine face ruddy as the embers over which he bent, he assiduously turned the mutton chops. ‘You are not under petticoat government, like poor Sweeting, a man – whew! how the fat spits! it has burnt my hand – destined to be ruled by women. Now you and I, Moore – there’s a fine brown one for you, and full of gravy – you and I will have no grey mares in our stables when we marry.’
(The reference is to the proverb ‘the grey mare is the better horse’ – i.e. the woman rules the man.)
Starvation, total or partial, cut back on horrific trips to that awful three-seater bog at the back of the parsonage, queuing up behind servants or making way for the master of the house. My surmise is that Emily’s long solitary walks on the moor were, at least partly, for matters of solitary relief.
Katherine Frank has written a book arguing that each of the three writing sisters would today ‘almost certainly be diagnosed as suffering from Anorexia Nervosa’.1 But of all of the sisters Emily used hunger most aggressively. She evidently gave it thought and refined those thoughts into what amounted to an idiosyncratic theology.
One suspects Emily was a devotee of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ and its grim instruction:
Jesus has many who love His Kingdom in Heaven, but few who bear His Cross (Luke 14:27). He has many who desire comfort, but few who desire suffering. He finds many to share His feast, but few His fasting.
Hunger was the royal road to spiritual purity. It was always Lenten fare with Emily Brontë.
The two principal characters in Wuthering Heights, the elder Cathy and Heathcliff, starve themselves to death. Their self-starving is stressed in two key scenes. The first is that between Ellen (a ‘stout’ woman) and Cathy. Her suicidal tendencies have already been put on record. Mr Kenneth (surely one of the least effective physicians in Victorian fiction) diagnoses her as dangerously self-harming: take care, he warns, ‘that she not throw herself down stairs or out of the window’. Cathy would never do that. She wants a death which does not violate the purity of her body, or her corpse.
She embarks on her self-starvation with that peculiar egotism which all the principal characters in the novel exhibit. She is in the final weeks of pregnancy and, to borrow a phrase, not-eating for two. Little she cares if young Cathy is born brain-damaged.
Heathcliff chooses the same death by inanition. He denies himself all food and water, tormented as he is by the spectral image of malevolent Cathy outside the window, luring him to eternal togetherness beyond life. It takes three days for him to extinguish himself: not entirely plausible with a robust Yorkshire farmer. Again the stout Nelly, as she earlier did with Cathy, vainly attempts to talk sense into him.
Although she suffered from the occupational hazard of the Haworth household, there is no question that the proximate cause of Emily’s death was self-starvation. As with Heathcliff, expiry was a rush job. She was always impatient, observed Charlotte, with a morbid jest – ‘She made haste to leave us’.
Starvation takes – even with a frail bodily frame – weeks. Charlotte used the term ‘wasted’ twice: to describe Emily’s aspect in her last days, and to describe her corpse, which she helped prepare for interment. In Charlotte’s account there is a tinge of admiration – envy, almost – for the sheer purity of Emily’s final act:
Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit was inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hands, the unnerved limbs, the fading eyes, the same service was exacted as they had rendered in health.
Emily fiercely denied she was ill. Her death should be her own – not put down to some external disease. She refused the family doctor any access to her body. It was hers. Inviolable. Noli me tangere.
Emily’s ‘obstinate fast’ touches on what is the burning question with anorexia. Is it a ‘condition’ (as the attachment ‘nervosa’ suggests)? Something to be treated? Or is it an act of will, and of self-expression. Something to be respected? In Emily’s case, one is led to the latter interpretation.
There are persistent legends (some promulgated by the Haworth ‘tat’ industry2 that Emily ‘walks’. Ghosts do not eat. They are fleshless. Incorporeal as well as unreal. Whatever the spectral Cathy is banging on her bedroom window for, it is not porridge (interestingly, though, she has blood, as Lockwood discovers when he scrapes her wrist across the jagged broken glass). Nor, Christian doctrine supposes (Milton goes on about it at some length in Book 5 of Paradise Lost), do angels eat. Eating creates rectal filth – there is no sanitation needed in heaven. The damned will not themselves feast in their infernal region, but they can expect to be forever eaten and excreted themselves by the worm.
Reading Wuthering Heights, and thinking about its creator, is enough to put you off your food. Or, at least, make you cogitate as you masticate.
Footnotes
1. Katherine Frank, A Chainless Soul: A Life of Emily Brontë (1991).
2. Juliet Barker’s contemptuous term (see below, ‘Tat’, page 156).
OPIUM (1)
Few observations of Marx’s are more quoted, and few less understood, than ‘Religion is the opium of the people’. It is, in context, a faute de mieux, approving comment. Religion is the only painkiller available to the oppressed proletariat. Until revolution. The mieux.
Marx made his comment in 1844, around the time that Branwell is first recorded as taking opium. In 1839 he began to eat it (or drink it, as laudanum). He was sometimes bothered by a facial tic, and probably also suffered from epilepsy, and the opium brought some relief. At this period the drug had romantic associations. De Quincey, the famous opium ‘eater’, and Coleridge, author of ‘Kubla Khan’, were among Branwell’s idols. It was the vice of poets, as TB was the poets’ disease. No one could have written ‘Kubla Khan’ on a bellyful of beer, or ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ with sound lungs (or, come to that, Wuthering Heights). Or so the mythology went.
The young Brontës all devoured the Confessions of an English Opium Eater. In various forms opium was available, legally and cheaply, at every corner apothecary and public house. Some book-shops even sold it for their browsing patrons. You could read Mr Coleridge’s latest work as high as he was when he wrote it. Consumption, nationwide, was enormous. Opium was given to babies as soothing medicine and to the dying as painkiller and euphoriant. Opium was the opium of the people.
India flooded the English market with the drug as efficiently as (with the aid of British gunboats) it flooded the Chinese market. Its overall effect was tranquillising – it was Prozac, avant la lettre, for troubled times. In excess, alcohol provoked ugly violence. No husband beat his wife or children as the result of a lump or two of opium. No child went on a rampage, tearing up the nursery, as the result of a teaspoonful too many of Godfrey’s Cordial (the best-known of the narcotic preparations g
iven to infants and children).
The word ‘lump’, and De Quincey’s ‘eating’ are, however, crucial. Laudanum, one of the favourite means by which opium was ingested, mixed opium and alcohol, in a 90/10 mixture. As Charlotte Brontë astutely observed in Villette, too much alcohol, and the multiplier effect of multi-drug intake could be very bad.
Branwell, like many alcoholics, began as a social drinker who, as he became steeped in the stuff, drank over-socially. The old story. What little evidence there is suggests he had a poor head for liquor.
On the rebound from the Robinson imbroglio (see above, ‘Branwell’s Robinsoniad’, page 22) he ran up bills in public houses. In 1846 his drinking debts brought a sheriff ’s officer to Haworth. Branwell had given his father’s name. Either the family paid up, or Branwell would be hauled up in York for debt. Shame all round. The rows which followed are unrecorded. They surely followed.
About the same time he is recorded as using opium, together with alcohol, to ease his suffering, having been shunned by the widowed Mrs Robinson. By 1848, in the months leading up to his death, his intake was, it is suggested, self-destructive, and was aimed to be.
His use of alcohol was always, for the brilliant son of a clergyman (and a thoroughly decent human being), socially degrading. He was letting the family down. How could his father preach temperance, as did his evangelical brethren?
All one needs to know about the later stages of Branwell’s drinking career is evident in a letter he wrote to his ally in booze, John Brown, clearly in a state of agonising withdrawal. The note was written on a Sunday, at noon:
Dear John
I shall feel very much obliged to you if you can contrive to get me Five pence worth of Gin in a proper measure.
Should it be speedily got I could perhaps take it from you or Billy at the lane top.
Brown, one assumes, was being asked to send a boy to the Black Bull, bring back a bottle, and keep a penny for himself.
It’s sordid, as is the late career of most drinkers. Branwell could not have it delivered to the house because he was watched there. At night his father slept with him. If one trusts Mrs Gaskell, Branwell would turn in with a knife, his father with his trusty pistol (see below, ‘Pistol-Packing Parson’, page 131) – albeit one rather disbelieves this nocturnal standoff. One suspects this arrangement may have been for fear that Branwell would choke on his vomit during the night. After one night, he is reported as saying, blurrily, ‘The poor old man and I have had a terrible night of it; he does his best – the poor old man! but it’s all over with me.’
He probably stole his sixpence for his flagon of mother’s ruin (time had passed from the Hogarthian days when it was ‘drunk for 1d, dead drunk for 2d, clean straw for nothing’). Branwell, if he got his bottle, would neck the five pennies’ worth of gin, splutteringly, in the lane, and stagger back to collapse before the family returned from evensong.
According to the standard account subscribed to by most biographers, Branwell was all this time masking, by inebriation, the TB that actually killed him. Mrs Gaskell, drawing on the scenario relayed to her by Charlotte, writes a gothic account of self-destruction. She had no time for him. He drank alcohol because he was an alcoholic and (as was medical orthodoxy at the time) morally diseased, like all inebriates. But opium, Gaskell suggests, he swallowed massively in his last three years to ‘stun his conscience’.
Most addicts (I’m an alcoholic myself)1 will wonder about the sketchy outline one has of Branwell Brontë’s drinking and drugging, and what look like clear improbabilities in Charlotte’s account, which is all the world now has by way of biographical narrative.
Alcoholic self-destruction takes time, access to money, and good supply systems. Incarcerated as he was at Haworth, Branwell would have as much difficulty pickling himself in drink as Dantès in Château d’If (in The Count of Monte Cristo – a late 1840s bestseller Branwell might well have looked at, blearily).
‘He drank,’ says Mrs Gaskell, ‘whenever he could get the opportunity.’ The opportunities at Haworth parsonage would have been chronically few and far between. Opium presented fewer problems to the abuser because its lumps were ‘portable’. Unlike a bottle of gin, they could be secreted – in apertures of the body, if necessary. And the effect was less florid. Given his family name, Branwell could ‘cajole’ (Gaskell’s word) the local apothecary to supply him on credit. He displayed, observes Gaskell, ‘all the cunning of the opium-eater’ in procuring what he needed.
Branwell’s death certificate gives as the cause of death ‘chronic bronchitis and marasmus [wasting of the body]’. It’s not true. It was a combination of drugs and TB that killed him. But, having said that, the accounts left us by Charlotte of his last hours do not ring true.
Two days before his death, Branwell was able to take a walk in the village – an act which does not invoke death throes. The next day he was confined to bed. He answered, obediently and articulately, we are told, to his father’s advice on seeking, even at this terminal moment, salvation by true repentance.
On his last evening on earth, in conversation with his gin provider, John Brown, he is reported as crying out: ‘In all my past life I have done nothing either great or good. Oh John, I am dying!’
At nine the next morning (a Sunday), we are told, the family (what was left of them) gathered round Branwell’s bed. He remained ‘perfectly conscious to the end’, praying all the while. As he left this life, his last word, as his father prayed, was ‘amen’.
There is no doubt he died at Haworth in bed; but anyone who has witnessed a drink-and-drugs death will be suspicious. Nor, in the condition of final collapse, do the terminally tubercular go for country walks 48 hours before expiring. My hunch is that it was, one way or another, suicide – perhaps by self-stored medicine and opium. It would have been a calculated kindness to his family to have eased their misery with a ‘good’ death.
It takes a lot to make that most level-headed of biographers, Juliet Barker, angry. But in the last paragraph in her great work she turns to denounce Mrs Gaskell for her wilful inconsideration of the son of Haworth:
The Branwell who was his family’s pride and joy, the leader and innovator, artist, poet, musician and writer, is barely touched upon, despite the fact that without him, there would probably have been no Currer, Ellis, or Acton Bell.
Footnote
1. Non-practising for thirty years.
Branwell’s last walk?
The main street in Haworth, at the period the Brontës lived there.
OPIUM (2)
Mrs Gaskell knew all about opium. The working-class hero of her first novel, Mary Barton, is an addict. Indeed the whole of working-class Manchester was addicted. As Mrs Gaskell wrote:
Many a penny that would have gone little way enough in oatmeal or potatoes, bought opium to still the hungry little ones, and make them forget their uneasiness in heavy troubled sleep. It was mother’s mercy.
As gin was mother’s ruin.
A Punch cartoon illustrating the uses of opium around this time.
Anyone who has read Villette will remember Chapter 38, ‘Cloud’. The heroine, Lucy Snowe, is given a medicinal dose of laudanum, to help her sleep through a terrible headache. But too much alcohol has been put in the potion (perhaps deliberately, by her rival, Mme Beck). The mixture renders Lucy high as a kite, and, somnambulistically, she goes wandering, entranced, through the night-time streets of Brussels.
A fairground Lucy wanders into is a surreal sensory experience:
a land of enchantment, a garden most gorgeous, a plain sprinkled with coloured meteors, a forest with sparks of purple and ruby and golden fire gemming the foliage; a region, not of trees and shadow, but of strangest architectural wealth – of altar and of temple, of pyramid, obelisk, and sphinx: incredible to say, the wonders and the symbols of Egypt teemed throughout the park of Villette.
A freak-out, as we used to call it in the sixties. Miss Snowe is tripping. Arguably this is the most accurate, an
d sympathetic, description of opiate intoxication in Victorian fiction, until the degenerates of the fin de siècle came along with their rhapsodies to hemp, opium, and cocaine. And devoting a chapter to it suggests a more than passing interest on Miss Brontë’s part.
Mrs Gaskell, who confessed to having used the stuff herself, was curious.
I asked her whether she had ever taken opium, as the description given of its effects in Villette was so exactly like what I had experienced, – vivid and exaggerated presence of objects, of which the outlines were indistinct, or lost in golden mist, etc. She replied, that she had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it.
She had merely ‘wondered’, Charlotte claimed, about the experience, in bed, before going to sleep. And then dreamed the details. Very realistically, as Mrs G. confirmed.
One is tempted to take it with a grain of something stronger than salt. But the jury is out. And we’ll never know and always wonder. The usual situation with the Brontës.
PILLAR
Branwell it was who painted the famous group portrait of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. As a work of art it does not confirm the touching family belief that he was a born genius with the brush. But it demonstrates promise and high teenage competence.
Mrs Gaskell, who saw the painting, declared it ‘admirable’. But the picture was marred, as she observed, ‘almost in the middle, by a great pillar’.
Gaskell was shown the portrait in 1853. Thereafter it disappeared, and was thought lost. The National Portrait Gallery’s notes record that it was found, folded up in quarters on top of a cupboard ‘by the second wife of Charlotte Brontë’s husband, the Reverend A.B. Nicholls, in 1906’. Why, one wonders, was it put (one might almost say ‘thrown’) away? Why scrunched up?
The Brontesaurus Page 11
