riding the echo down

A day early, because I'll be on the road tomorrow for most of the day, and thus without internet access.


Personal backstory: Previous Bronte-related musings by yours truly can be found under this tag. The short version is that I care a lot, both about their works and the family. And one thing that has become increasingly obvious in the last twenty years or so is the increasing villainization of Charlotte Bronte. Now, Charlotte isn't my favourite, and of course there's a lot you can critique about her, as a writer (cue Bertha Mason) and as a human being, definitey including her treatment of Anne's second novel, The Tennant of Wildfell Hall (i.e. ensuring it would not be republished after Anne's death), and general underestimation of Anne. But the way fictional treatments of the Bronte sisters have made her into the villain or at least antagonist definitely has become a trend.

Part of it is, I think, because Charlotte is the sibling we know about most (she lived the longest, she had the most connections to people outside the family, there is therefore the most material from and about her available, and inevitably it also means she is the one through whose glasses we see the family initially). While it's not true you could put the reliable primary biographical material from Emily and Anne (i.e. written by them, not by someone else about them) directly on a post card, it really isn't much, not just by comparison to Charlotte but also to father Patrick and brother Branwell, both of whom left far more direct material. There are the two "our lives right now" diary entries from Anne and Emily separated by several years which offer a snapshot of not just how they saw their lives right then but also the intermingling of the fictional and the real, i.e. they both report of what's going in their lives and what's going on in Gondal and in Angria, the two fictional realms created by the siblings (and btw, the fact Emily and Anne know about Angrian developments years after stopping to write for Angria and creating their own realm of Gondal prove that they kept reading it). Emily's entries (very cheerful and matter of factly in tone) also counteract her image as the wild child barely able to interact with civiilisation. But that's pretty much it. And that means you can project far, far more easily on Emily and Anne than on Charlotte. Can form them how you want them to be. It's much more difficult with Charlotte, whose opinions on pretty much anything, from Jane Austen (boo, hiss) to politics (hooray for the Tories, down with the Whigs!) to religion (Catholics are benighted and/or scheming, but in a pinch a Catholic priest can be oddly comforting) is documented to the letter.

(Along with the projecting, editing also is easier with Emily and Anne. For example: Anne's rediscovery as a feminist writer due to Wildfell Hall rising in critical estimation these last decades, is well desesrved, but I haven't seen either fictional or non-fictional renderings focusing on her intense religiosity, and I suspect that's because it makes current day people cheering on her heroine Helen Huntington leaving her husband uncomfortable.)

There is also the matter of long term backlash. After Charlotte died, one of the things Elizabeth Gaskell tried to accomplish with her biography of Charlotte was the counteract the image of all three Bronte sisters as a scandalous lot - see their original reviews - by presenting the image of Charlotte as a faultless long suffering Victorian heroine, with her siblings living at a remote isolated place barely within civilisation. creating art of such unpromising material solely because they had nothing else. Now as well intended as that was, and as long enduring as the image proved to be, it's also hugely misleading in many ways. Juliet Barker in her epic Bronte family biography devotes literally hundred of pages on how Haworth wasn't Siberia but had lively political struggles, how the Brontes could and did go to cultural events such as concerts by a world class pianist like Franz Liszt or grand exhibitions in Leeds, and most importantly, how the "long suffering faultless Victorian heroine" image leaves out all of Charlotte's sarcastic humour and wit, her (unrequited but fervent) passion for a married man, her bossiness etc.; I won't try to reduce all of that into a few quotes. Though let me re-emphasize that the removal of humor via Gaskell proved to be really long term and fatally connected to Bronte depictions, not just of Charlotte. And it's a shame, because they were a witty family. Charlotte's youthful alter ego Charles Wellesly in the Angrian chronicles is making fun of pretty much everything, including Charlotte herself and her siblings, and most definitely of her hero Zamorna. (Proving that Charlotte the Byron reader didn't just go for the Childe Harold brooding but the Don Juan wit and Last Judgment parody.) In all the adaptations of Emily's Wuthering Height, I am always missing the scene which to me epitomizes Emily's own black humour and self awareness of the danger of going over the top with melodrama - it's the bit where a drunken Hindley Earnshaw threatens Nelly Dean with a knife and Nelly wryly asks him to use something else because that knife has just been used to carve up the fish with, ew. (Wuthering Heights adaptations also suffer from the fact that it's hard to convey in a visual medium the sarcastic treatment our first personal narrator Lockwood gets from his author, because he's consistently wrong about every single first impression he has of the people he meets and their relationships with each other, and if the adaptation includes the scene where child!Cathy and child!Heathcliff throw the religious books they don't want to read into the fire, they're missing out the titles which are Emily parodying the insufferable titles of many a religious Victorian pamphlet.) And Patrick, in direct contradiction of his image as a grim reclusive patriarch, for example wrote a witty and wryly affectionate (for all sides) poem documenting the grand battle between his curate (Charlotte's later husband Arthur Nicholls) and the washer women of Haworth who were used to drying their laundry on the tombstones which Nichols tried to stop them doing). Etc.

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that once research went beyond the Gaskell biography, I suspect a lot of people subconsciously felt cheated and blamed Charlotte for it, casting her as a hypocrite instead of a Victorian saint. (And more recently as a BAD SISTER, jealous of Emilly, Anne or both.) But Charlotte herself had never claimed to be the later. And honestly, I doubt that her postumous editing of her sisters' works came from anything more sinister than remembering all those early negative reviews casting the "Ellis brothers" as immoral and wanting to change these opinions. Not to say that Charlotte couldn't be jealous, of course she could be - I'm not just thinking of her depiction of her unrequited crush's wife but of her bitter remark re: Patrick's grief for Branwell directly after Branwell's death that betrays her anger about Patrick having loved Branwell better than her, for example -, and given Charlotte and Branwell, so close as children and adolescents, lost each other as writing partners once they became adults, I can also see her being somewhata envious about Emily's and Anne's continuing collabaration, though here I venture into speculation, because there isn't a quote to back this up. But it was also Charlotte who insisted they all pubilsh to begin with - not just herself - who, as oldest surviving sister, felt herself responsible for her younger siblings, and who was keenly aware that the moment Patrick died - and none of them could have foreseen he'd outlive all of his children - they could depend only on themselves for an income. It was Charlotte who despite hating (and failing at) being a teacher and a governess tried her best to improve nost just her but Emily's chances in that profession (basically the only one available for a woman without a husband and in need of an income) - and cajoled Emily into joining her in that year in Brussels, who did all the corresponding with publishers who initially kept sending back their manuscripts. Who had that rejection experience years earlier already when as a young girl she sent her poetry to Southey (today only known because Byron lampooned him in Don Juan and The Last Judgment) only to hear that she should turn her mind to only feminine pursuits and leave the writing to men. Who not only had survived the hell of charity school where she saw her older two sisters sicken (not die, the girls were sent home to do that) after abuse but went on to see all her remaining siblings die years later. Who kept writing and hoping and never stopped opening herself to new friendships instead of becoming bitter and grim. Charlotte had an inner strength enabling her to do all this, and she had it from childhood onwards. It's a big reason why Charlotte survived and became better as a writer and Branwell fell apart. Charlotte wasn't any less addicted to their fantasy realm of Angria than he was, well into adulthood. But she didn't react to rejection and crashes with reality by completely withdrawing into fantasy, she couldn't afford to, and it let her grow.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: given her allergic reaction to Jane Austen (which strikes me as having been mostly caused by her publisher's well intentioned but fatally patronizing - "go read Jane and take her as a role model for female writerdom" advice), it's highly ironic, but Charlotte of all the Bronte siblings strikes me as the one most like an Austen and not a Bronte character. (Especially, but not only because of how her marriage came to be.) Both in her flaws and in her strengths. And I wish current day authors would regard her in that spirit instead of making her the bad guy in their adoration of her sisters.

The other days