In the same preface Charlotte’s comments seem to misread, caricature even, what Emily achieved. The novel was, she wrote: ‘hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials’, ‘moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath’.
The ‘wild workshop’ comment (implying she humped her escritoire, pen and ink with her on long moorland walks) echoes Victor Frankenstein, creating his monster:
I collected bones from charnel-houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation. [my italics]
Her sister, too, Charlotte said, had created a monster: ‘Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is.’ The appended clause has a scorpion sting to it.
Smith, Elder requested portraits of Anne and Emily, to be included in the volume. It would be clinching proof of the ‘Bell’ sisters’ existence, in the (female) flesh. The family had, Charlotte ‘grieved’ to say, by way of reply, ‘no portrait of either of my sisters’. The editor of her letters, Margaret Smith, notes that there were portraits aplenty. Charlotte wanted only one available to the world: the flattering picture (below) that George Smith had commissioned from George Richmond, in the same year, 1850.
This picture was important to her. George Smith, who paid for it, observed that no woman wanted more to be pretty than Charlotte – who wasn’t. The picture is, undeniably, of a pretty woman. One recalls Mrs Gaskell’s description of her first meeting with Charlotte:
Presently the door opened, and in came a superannuated mastiff, followed by an old gentleman very like Miss Brontë, who shook hands with us, and then went to call his daughter. A long interval, during which we coaxed the old dog, and looked at a picture of Miss Brontë, by Richmond, the solitary ornament of the room, looking strangely out of place on the bare walls, and at the books on the little shelves, most of them evidently the gift of the authors since Miss Brontë’s celebrity.
George Richmond’s portrait of Charlotte Brontë.
Commissioned by George Smith, it was, one may surmise, the finest compliment ever paid Charlotte.
One could see Charlotte’s handling of the introduction of her sisters to the world as intended to generate a kind of protective mystique. A dry ice effect. Or something intended to background them in the general enterprise of their joint creation. It’s a question which continues to perplex Brontë scholars. How ‘nice’ a sister was Charlotte?
TAT
That three-letter word is what Juliet Barker calls Haworth’s commercial homage to the Brontës, the family who have made their little town (now without the industry that it once had) world-famous. On the same theme, John Barlow makes merry with the town’s wholesale Brontëfication:
In the small Yorkshire village of Haworth, where the Brontë sisters lived quietly with their clergyman father while penning some of the greatest novels in the English language, there are road signs in Japanese. Walk down the stone-cobbled main street, which looks much as it did two centuries ago (minus the blood-stained phlegm of the consumptives) and you can buy Brontë biscuits and gingerbread, Brontë fleeces, and Brontë flagstones (for your literary-themed driveway). You might then want to take refreshment at the Villette Coffee House (Villette, the novel by Charlotte they don’t even force you to read at school), before stocking up on Brontë tea-towels – just impossible to get in Osaka. The Brontë Hairdressing Salon salvages some local pride by refusing to call itself Jane Hair (at least two salons in neighbouring towns, though, are guilty), and the Brontë Balti House is there for all your literary-themed curry needs.1
Haworth before the arrival of the tat industry.
It’s scornful. And funny. But one could – tongue in cheek – mount a perverse defence arguing for the worthwhileness of tat. Personally I find ‘Jane Hair’ no more offensive than the 1980 ‘Famous Authoress’ series of postage stamps, in which Charlotte Brontë looked like Charlotte Brontë as reconstructed long after the decompositions of death by an Egyptian embalmer who hadn’t quite learned his trade. Her fellow authoresses looked no better. But licking the back-side of those ladies’ images meant some apology for all the male tongues which had disrespected them over the years.
And there are, of course, those purists who think the TV and film adaptations of the Brontës’ works are a kind of impurification. Myself, I have always had a soft spot for the ghostly Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier) and Cathy (Merle Oberon) skipping over Penistone Crags (recognisably the San Gabriels, a conveniently short drive from the Hollywood Goldwyn Studio – I’ve skipped those hills myself). I can keep the images separate from the novel.
I personally have always enjoyed, when in the US, Lorna Doone biscuits, munching away with thoughts of Jan and Carver doing battle. I love the literary-themed hotels which advertised their comforts around the old British Library, in Victorian Bloomsbury. There was the homage-to-Thackeray Esmond Hotel (Charlotte would have stayed there). The Kingsley (named after the author of Westward Ho!) is still there, but has recently been renamed The Thistle. The Kenilworth is still there under its 150-year-old name. Few, alas, read Scott’s novel any more. But Emily was a great lover of the Wizard of the North. His The Black Dwarf is one of Wuthering Heights’ source-novels.
Three Castles cigarettes were promoted as a Thackerayendorsed product, with a quotation from The Virginians on every packet. Dickens, known to be prone to the pesky things, has had his picture on a piles (haemorrhoids) ointment advertisement. That may be, I grant, a commercial exploitation too far.
One could go on. There are, as John Barlow notes, any number of Brontë themed shelf-wares nowadays. My favourite is a ‘Wuthering Heights Soy Candle’ by bookish candle maker The Melting Library. I think I can pick out ‘Heather and Fresh Rain’ on the label. The nostrils quiver, approvingly.
Charlotte’s signature novel has always been attractive to soft-pornographers. There is a Jane Eyrotica, a Jane Eyre Laid Bare … a ‘Clandestine Classics’ version of Jane Eyre, adapted by one Sierra Cartwright, also contains departures from Charlotte’s text: the advertisement recounts how ‘Jane has passionate sex with Mr Rochester before leaving him’. Ho hum.
There is no fate worse for fiction than to come and go into Shakespeare’s ‘wallet for oblivion’. Everything from ‘Jane Hair’ salons to Jane Eyrotica confirms that will never happen to the Brontës’ fiction. Their novels will last for as long as there is money to be made from the novels, which are wholly uncontaminated. Long live ‘tat’: it bears witness to long life.
Footnote
1. John Barlow, Everything but the Squeal (2008).
TEETHING
Judged purely by his actions, Heathcliff is an utter swine: a wife-beater, child-abuser, card-sharp and, I maintain, a murderer.1 Why, then do we forgive his crimes and demonic cruelty and admire him, and concur when Laurence Olivier (and, my God, Cliff Richard) plays him as a heroic figure?
An explanation for the ‘sympathy for the devil’ paradox (‘devil daddy’, mini-Heathcliff calls him) is to be found, I suggest, in a muttered ejaculation overheard by Nelly, Wuthering Heights’ ever-ready Keyhole Kate, in the extremity of Heathcliff ’s grief and sexual frustration after Cathy’s death:
I have no pity! I have no pity! The [more the] worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething, and I grind with greater energy, in proportion to the increase of pain. [my italics]
The reason for our (perverse) sympathy for Heathcliff, I suggest, is to be found in that arresting phrase, ‘moral teething’ and what it implies to any parent or other observer of babies who has seen them undergo their first dentition: the arrival of their ‘milk teeth’.
When a baby savagely bites its teething ring (or some other handy object – a parent’s finger?) it is because baby is experiencing excruciating pain from the teeth tearing t
heir way through the gums. So Heathcliff may be seen to inflict pain on others (blacking his wife’s eyes, striking young Catherine, lashing his horses and dogs) only because he feels greater pain himself. He suffers more than he inflicts. Pity the poor fellow. But keep out of the demon’s way.
Footnote
1. See Is Heathcliff a Murderer? (1996)
THAT NAME
The most resonant surname in women’s fiction of the mid-19th century is also the strangest. It originates with a remarkable father: a man whose life achievements are, unfairly, one might think, eclipsed by the brilliance of his children.
One of ten children of a farming family, he had been born Patrick Prunty. The name is common to this day in Co. Down, Northern Ireland, where it is sometimes given the chauvinistic Celtic spelling, O’Pronteaigh. As a child he was probably called ‘Paddy’.
Patrick was born in the region, on St Patrick’s Day, 1777, of mixed Protestant and Catholic parentage. He gave early evidence of an exceptionally quick mind. It led, by the hardest of educational routes, to the young Irishman’s registering in 1802 at Cambridge University with a view to ordination in the Church of England. Pruntys were not common in that institution. A different throw of the dice, following his other parent (his mother, one assumes), and he might have become a Catholic priest.
There were historical problems with the name ‘Patrick Prunty’ – a name which had the same sinister resonances with English congregations as, say, ‘Gerry Adams’, or ‘Martin McGuinness’ would have (before they went respectable) 200 years later. In 1798 there had been a bloody uprising in Ireland led by the ‘Society of United Irishmen’, egged on by France (currently at war with England). Ireland and the Irish were not trusted, or liked, by the English middle classes in 1802. At this period, Patrick prudently (given his future career in the Church of England) renamed himself ‘Brontë’.
The diaeresis, or umlaut, provided further distance from his Hibernian origins. It was, and is, a mark associated with Germany, not Ireland, a country where umlauts are as rare as the venomous snakes which St Patrick banished from the island. The name is sometimes given a terminal French acute accent – but, as has been said, that nation was not universally loved in England during the Napoleonic Wars.
There are two suggested reasons for the Revd Brontë’s choice of his new name. The word is an anglicisation of the ancient Greek for ‘thunder’, which, with his newly acquired classical learning, may have tickled the young Cantab’s scholarly amour-propre. The more plausibly suggested reason is patriotism – to England, that is, not Ireland. Admiral Lord Nelson had been appointed Duke of Brontë in 1799 by Ferdinand, King of the Two Sicilies and Infante of Spain, grateful for the nautical hero’s exploits against Napoleon. Short of renaming himself ‘the Revd John Bull’, Patrick could not have decontaminated himself more effectively from any disloyal Hibernian affiliation.
One should, in conscience, note Juliet Barker’s less florid explanation, originating in Patrick’s registration, in October 1802, at St John’s College, Cambridge:
He had an inauspicious start to his new life. Defeated by his Irish accent the registrar attempted a phonetic spelling of the name he gave, entering ‘Patrick Branty’ in the admissions book … two days later … he did not allow it to go unchallenged and the entry was altered from ‘Branty’ to the now famous ‘Brontë’.
I prefer the Greek explanation. It is, somehow, more ‘Brontëan’.
THREE-DECKER
The cable channel Netflix, it was suggested in 2016, has created new modes and habits of TV-narrative viewing. The assertion revolves around a regular controversy: particle issue versus whole story consumption.
Long narratives, such as, pre-eminently, Breaking Bad and The Wire, were delivered to cable-subscribing viewers as weekly serial parts. Netflix then introduced long narratives, such as House of Cards (or, on Amazon Prime, The Man in the High Castle) whose dozen or so instalments could be ‘binge watched’: non-stop, hour after hour.
Which form worked best? The ‘make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait’ serial issue, advocated by Wilkie Collins (Victorian master of the fragmented narrative and delayed revelation)? Or the ‘single lump’ narrative, swallowed whole, as a boa constrictor swallows a living goat?
As regards Victorian fiction there were the monthly/weekly serialists (predominantly Dickens) and those who produced their works entire, in volume form. George Eliot serialised masterfully. If one can discipline oneself, it is worth reading Middlemarch, with monthly breaks, over three-quarters of a year. Reading, that is, like a Victorian of 1871–2.
Charlotte Brontë was very much of the boa constrictor party. The wisest words ever spoken to her, as regards the marketing of her fiction, were George Smith’s writing (in the letter rejecting The Professor) that his firm would be very interested in receiving a three-volume novel from her. The fact that The Professor could only be stretched to two volumes was one of the reasons for not wanting it.
Overlong (up to 250,000 words at its most bloated), over-priced (at a guinea-and-a-half), and almost from the first overdue for extinction, the ‘three-decker’ began with Walter Scott in 1819 and saw out Thomas Hardy’s novel-writing career in the 1890s. Every one of the Brontë sisters’ novels, when first published in their lifetimes, came out in three volumes.1
The reason the three-decker lasted so long was that it coincided with the circulating library system. During the 1840s there emerged two ‘leviathans’: Mudie’s, based in London, and W.H. Smith, operating via the arterial railway system. Three-deckers meant that Mudie’s talismanic subscription model, where a guinea entitled you to unlimited loans for a year – but only one volume at a time – could satisfy three different customers simultaneously.
It involved the suspenseful ‘waiting’ Collins described. If a family shared a single subscription – as they often did – a reader might have to wait for several family members to finish with the coveted next volume before getting their turn. There were, doubtless, spoiler alerts over the breakfast table.
One of the remarkable things about Charlotte was not that she produced Jane Eyre fast – although she did: in months – but that she grasped, intuitively, the ideal internal architecture of the three-decker.
Handling the form well entailed three climaxes – hitting the reader like cresting, crashing waves. The first volume of Jane Eyre ends with one of its most dramatic scenes. Jane cannot sleep. She hears a strange laugh and smells smoke. She goes to Rochester’s bedroom (normally an inviolable space for a maiden). His bed hangings are on fire. She takes the ewer and basin, put out for his morning’s ablutions, and douses the flames. He wakes and thanks his ‘cherished’ preserver. She returns to her virginal couch:
but never thought of sleep. Till morning dawned I was tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea, where billows of trouble rolled under surges of joy. I thought sometimes I saw beyond its wild waters a shore, sweet as the hills of Beulah; and now and then a freshening gale, wakened by hope, bore my spirit triumphantly towards the bourne: but I could not reach it, even in fancy – a counteracting breeze blew off land, and continually drove me back. Sense would resist delirium: judgment would warn passion. Too feverish to rest, I rose as soon as day dawned.
Who did it? What is going on at Thornfield? The reader’s mind runs wild.
The second volume’s last chapter begins with the happy peal of wedding bells. It ends, after the discovery of Bertha, with another great question: will Jane remain as Rochester’s mistress? Or leave – where, to do what? Hands twitch to get hold of the third volume, in which everything will be revealed. And the third climax? Reader, I married him.
The narrative dynamism of the three-decker is something we have lost. Sadly, in my view.
Footnote
1. Emily’s and Anne’s publisher Thomas Newby concocted a faux three-decker by bundling Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey together as a chalk-and-cheese package (see ‘Publishers’, page 137).
TOOTHSOME
Teeth glint (or not) from time to time in the fiction – usually with significant stress. Young Martin’s saucy comments to Caroline Helstone in Shirley, for example (there is evidence that Caroline is a fictional depiction of Anne), is pure Colgate advertisement:
‘You may laugh: I have no objection to see you laugh: your teeth – I hate ugly teeth; but yours are as pretty as a pearl necklace, and a necklace, of which the pearls are very fair, even, and well matched too.’
We don’t know about Miss Eyre’s teeth. But the grand ladies clustered around la belle Ingram, her rival, attract the following comment:
They were all three of the loftiest stature of women. The Dowager might be between forty and fifty: her shape was still fine; her hair (by candle-light at least) still black; her teeth, too, were still apparently perfect.
‘Apparently’? Are they false? We are led to be suspicious. Who has white teeth at fifty?
Joseph, that age, presumably, is as toothless as the hens clucking in the coops outside Wuthering Heights. Or, at least, so we may assume from the old bigot’s mumbling, his dyspepsia and his invariable diet of porridge. But Heathcliff ’s teeth are manifestly in extraordinarily good shape for someone of his age (39 when we first meet him) and class background. A ‘slovenly squire’, Lockwood calls him. In his youth he was a stable boy – munching porridge from the same pot as Joseph. Heathcliff is routinely described during the course of the narrative as grinding, clenching and gnashing his teeth. They are, clearly, in excellent gnashing fettle. The fact could be thought strange.
The Brontesaurus Page 14
