| 1 The Brontës
and their Public |
| WITHIN a very few
years of the deaths of the Brontë sisters, the Brontë
'industry' as we know it today, had begun its work. Indeed,
it can be seen to have been given its initial impetus by Mrs
Gaskell's biography of Charlotte, which was published in 1857,
only two years after Charlotte died. The book was a remarkable
achievement and is still indispensable to an understanding of
the ethos in which the Brontë sisters lived and worked
But it was also immediately 'controversial'. It had apparently
traduced the character of Mrs Robinson, the married woman with
whom Branwell Brontë had conducted an affair while tutoring
her children, some years before. Under the threat of a libel
suit from the lady (who had by then achieved respectability
in a second marriage), the first edition had to be withdrawn
and parts of it rewritten. Thus, the stage was set, from the
very inauguration of Brontë studies, for an interest (frequently
mounting to obsession) in the characters of individual members
of the Brontë family which has ever since contended with
- and often triumphed over - the desire calmly to estimate their
literary merits. |
| Like Stratford upon
Avon, Haworth, where the Brontës lived and worked, has
become a place of pilgrimage for a host of enthusiasts, as if
what remained today of this unattractive West Riding town could
possibly yield any clue to the sources of that remarkable creativity.
Over the past century and more, there has been an immense production
of 'Brontëana' which extend their field of interest far
outside the immediate members of the family, to include anyone
who knew, or might have been known to them. This desire to dig
for personal details has led to a frantic search for clues in
their lives to account for the attitudes of their books, and
vice versa. |
| Even if we grant
that such exercises must always have a shred of legitimacy in
them, in the Brontës' case they are almost always unhelpful.
They have created a miasma of homage over their subject which
only serves to obscure it. All that needs to be borne steadily
in mind is that in the twenty-four months from May 1846, when
their poems appeared, to May 1848 when Anne Brontë published
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, three, until then unknown, sisters
impressed an ineradicable stamp on English literature. Though
Charlotte continued to publish after her sisters' deaths, what
she gave us in addition does not, I think, radically alter an
assessment of the Brontë achievement. |
| Mrs Gaskell gave
us what one might term the Romantic view of the Brontë
lives: gloomy father, gaunt parsonage, religious dread, the
sisters succumbing by inches to consumption. As such she has
been accused of purveying the 'Charlotte version' of the Brontë
story. There have been many attempts to prove this version tendentious,
none more persuasive than that of Juliet Barker in her biography,
The Brontës, of 1994. Barker set out to bury, once and
for all, the Brontë myth by seeking to demonstrate that
much of what we would regard as bleak, austere, uncomfortable,
disease ridden and, above all, death accompanied was normality
for such times as those, and is therefore scarcely worthy of
remark. |
| On its appearance,
her book was hailed as having revised the map of Brontë
studies for good. Indeed, she is knowledgeable and compendious,
and doubtless does well to make the attempt to demystify the
subject. But for all its thousand pages, there is something
important missing in such an account. Merely because people
often died before their time, it does not follow that their
survivors did not therefore grieve inconsolably. Sorrow and
agony of mind, which in our culture have almost entirely been
replaced with depression and other psychological disorders,
are absent here. The impressive research work notwithstanding,
we are left with a version of the Brontë story that is
strangely lacking in imaginative sympathy with the passionate
temper of that age. |
|
