Free Charlotte Bronte!

A fantastic article about what Mrs. Gaskell’s biography The Life of Charlotte Bronte (which I have read – many times) has done to the legacy of Charlotte Bronte.

Elizabeth Gaskell was a contemporary of Charlotte Bronte, and knew her personally. 2 years after Charlotte’s death in 1855, Gaskell published the biography, The Life of Charlotte Bronte , and hijacked the entire discussion (and she STILL DOES.) She immediately created the myth of “Charlotte Bronte” – Nobody else can come in with a different view, or re-look at her – because Mrs. Gaskell so dominated the conversation. (In a similar way that A. Alvarez’s essay on Sylvia Plath and his encounters with her during the fall before she committed suicide also dominated the discussion – and created the myth. Everyone after Alvarez needed to contend with the myth.)

Tanya Gold, author of the article I link to, starts off with:

Elizabeth Gaskell is a literary criminal, who, in 1857, perpetrated a heinous act of grave-robbing. Gaskell took Charlotte Brontë, the author of Jane Eyre, the dirtiest, darkest, most depraved fantasy of all time, and, like an angel murdering a succubus, trod on her. In a “biography” called The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published just two years after the author’s death, Gaskell stripped Charlotte of her genius and transformed her into a sexless, death-stalked saint.

Now here’s what’s incredible, though: biographies go out of fashion very quickly. One generation has a “definitive” biography of, say, Abraham Lincoln. The next generation uncovers a treasure trove of his personal writing, and the biography that was once definitive is now sorely out of date. We see this happen all the time.

But what is incredible is that Mrs. Gaskell’s book (and it’s good, by the way, it’s really interesting – but definitely a myth-making venture, you can sense it in the overwrought prose) has never gone out of print. This is extraordinary. And every biography of the Bronte sisters, to this day, has to contend with the myth-making story Mrs. Gaskell paints of Haworth Parsonage. That was Juliet Barker’s main deal with The Brontes, her MASSIVE biography on the Bronte’s, published in the 90s and hailed as a high-water-mark in the genre. Point by point, using documentation that makes the footnotes almost longer than the book, Barker refutes many of Mrs. Gaskell’s claims (that Haworth was in the middle of nowhere, for example). But still – we gotta give Mrs. Gaskell some props. It is rare that a book stays in print for that long EVER, but it is almost unheard of when it comes to biography.

If someone says to you “Charlotte Bronte – what comes into your head?” – probably a lot of your first images (the lonely woman scribbling out in the middle of the moors, depressive, losing her teeth, surrounded by tragedy) come from Mrs. Gaskell’s biography.

Charlotte Bronte sensed, in her personal meetings with Elizabeth Gaskell, that Gaskell was romanticizing her, or making her up, or trying to mythologize her while she was still alive. Bronte wrote a complaining letter to her publisher about Mrs. Gaskell: “She seems determined that I shall be a sort of invalid. Why may I not be well like other people?”

Fascinating. Bronte picked up on Mrs. Gaskell’s myth-making propensities during her own life … and the “Gaskell myth of Charlotte Bronte” has held on with astonishing tenacity.

Now this is not to say that I find it completely unbelievable that an unhappy toothless spinster could have written the swirlingly passionate melodrama that is Jane Eyre. No. We all have our escapes, writers too. It is just that Mrs. Gaskell could only see ONE side of Charlotte Bronte, and so her entire book uses that one thing as the starting-point, and everything that follows is used to support her thesis. (This is a common thing of biographies, obviously. Most biographies start with some point of view about their subject and I have to say I like the biographies that resist taking that common path. People’s lives aren’t NEAT, you know. We don’t all live according to some NEAT THEME. I have done things in my life which would seem completely out of character to those of you who read this blog. I have done things which would blow your mind, because you only see one side of me, the side I choose to show. This is the same for most of us. I prefer the biographies that pretty much take as their theme: “Okay, this person is really interesting. Let’s find out all about them.”) Mrs. Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte is very very subjective – obviously because she knew Charlotte, but also because she was invested, for whatever reason, in creating this myth.

I’ll quote from the article now:

Gaskell portrays Charlotte as Victim Supreme. She begins to sew her shroud from her first chapter, when she copies out the Brontë grave tablet in Haworth church, voluptuously listing those who died of consumption: Charlotte’s mother, Maria, her sisters Maria, Elizabeth, Anne and Emily, and her brother Branwell. Charlotte, Anne and Emily were “shy of meeting even familiar faces”. They “never faced their kind voluntarily”. The Brontës are shown, with understated relish, as lonely, half-mad spinsters, surrounded by insufferable yokels and the unmentionable stench of death. Under Gaskell’s pen, they become the three witches of Haworth and she hurls on the Gothic gloom, ravaging the moorlands and the town for appropriate props. She has a particular fondness for the graveyard outside their front door: “It is,” she notes, “terribly full of upright tombstones.” She is bewildered by the Brontës. She could never accept they were, quite simply, talented. There had to be a magical mystery at work on those moors …

Interesting. “She could never accept they were, quite simply, talented.” Mrs. Gaskell was a popular novelist at the time herself. Her novels are still in print as well. But I found that observation really interesting. Mrs. Gaskell’s Bronte biography is the first “victim/martyr as genius” book – the type of book that now GLUTS the marketplace. “Oooh, her mother didn’t love her, and THAT’S why she wrote great books.” Uhm … how about her mother didn’t love her AND she wrote great books? It doesn’t necessarily follow that just because you’re a victim of something that you’re going to be amazingly talented.

Perhaps Mrs. Gaskell was trying to explain away her own lack of genius.

More along these lines:

Gaskell carefully fillets the letters to match her agenda. Any hint of Charlotte as a sexual being is tossed on to the historical furnace. Charlotte’s correspondence with the (married) love of her life, Monsieur Heger of Brussels, is ignored, as is her thwarted romance with George Smith. Gaskell could hardly leave out Charlotte’s marriage to Arthur Nicholls – but no doubt she would have liked to. Her biography is the ultimate piece of feminine passive-aggression, a mediocre writer’s attempt to reduce the brilliant Miss Brontë to poor, pitiful Miss Brontë. Gaskell wrote the Life as a tragedy, not a triumph. But if Charlotte Brontë’s life is a tragedy, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Jane Eyre isn’t just a sexy book. It’s an erotic book. It’s disturbing. It surges with passion. And … uhm … can you say: brief cross-dressing incident?? It’s a weird weird book, man.

Of course not looking into people’s sex lives was par for the course in those days, but I think Tanya Gold is making a deeper point here, and one that I echo. It is somehow more attractive to the “we love victims/martyrs” crowd to see Charlotte Bronte as a tragedy-struck spinster-ish victim, strolling through the moors by herself, communing with her demons, ruining her eyesight by scribbling in the candlelight, and having ONLY unrequited love affairs. Even though this view is not based on reality. She did, after all, marry. And she did have quite a passionate love affair with someone else before she got married – which she based her book Villette on.

Tanya Gold rocks the HOUSE with her debunking of the long-standing Gaskell myth. I find it quite energizing. Listen to this. Listen to her interpretation of Charlotte Bronte as a writer (all of it based on actual letters written by Bronte, things that were available at the time to Mrs. Gaskell – only they didn’t fit into Gaskell’s neat little theme):

Let me introduce you to the real Charlotte Brontë. She was not a wallflower in mourning. She always wanted to be famous; she pined to be “forever known”. Aged 20, she wrote boldly to the Poet Laureate Robert Southey, asking for his opinion of her talents. He replied: “You evidently possess and in no inconsiderable degree what Wordsworth calls ‘the faculty of verse’.” Then he chides her: “There is a danger of which I would … warn you. The daydreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind. Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life and it ought not to be.” Charlotte ignored Southey but Gaskell couldn’t believe it. She concluded the correspondence “made her put aside, for a time, all idea of literary enterprise”.

See how Gaskell spins this? Charlotte Bronte rejected the advice of Southey, realizing: Hm, I am going to be a writer ANYway. But that wasn’t really victim-ish enough for Mrs. Gaskell. (I’m being hard on Mrs. Gaskell and I don’t mean to be. Her book is filled with great stuff, most of which are lengthy excerpts from Charlotte Bronte’s voluminous correspondence – I’ve posted a lot of that stuff on my blog.

More on the erotic imagination of Charlotte Bronte, and how Mrs. Gaskell had to somehow view it as coming from a place of tragedy:

Charlotte did not only feel passionate hatred for small children; she felt passionate love for men. Unlike the female eunuch created by Gaskell, she was obsessed with her sensuality. She wrote to a friend: “If you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up … you would pity and I daresay despise me.” The thwarted lust of a parson’s daughter? Gaskell dismisses it as “traces of despondency”.

Ha.

Anyway, the 150th anniversary of Charlotte Bronte’s death is this March 31 … and so, in honor of that great author (one of my favorites), I say to Charlotte Bronte: You can be whoever you want to be, Charlotte. I don’t mind if you contradict my ideas of you. I don’t mind if parts of you don’t “fit in” with my image of you. There’s a reason why people still read Jane Eyre. There’s a reason why your legacy will last.

Here’s the rest of the great article I keep excerpting from. Charlotte Bronte fans, you won’t want to miss it.