Seduction and Betrayal (2 page)

One story has poor Branwell visiting the National Gallery and, in the presence of the great paintings there, despairing of his own talents. This is hard to credit, since the example of the great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre. In any case, nothing leads us to think Branwell lacked vanity or expansive ideas of his own importance. Also, the deterrent of Branwell's own nature made any further impediments unnecessary. His nature was hysterical, addictive, self-indulgent. Very early he fell under the spell of alcohol and opium; his ravings and miseries destroyed the family peace, absorbed their energies, and depressed their spirits. He had to be talked to, watched over, soothed, and protected — and nothing really availed. Branwell destroyed his life with drugs and drink, and died of a bronchial infection at the age of thirty-one.

Perhaps the true legacy Branwell left the world is to be found in the extraordinary violence of feeling, the elaborate language of bitterness and frustration in
Wuthering Heights
. It is not unreasonable to see the origin of some of Heathcliff's raging disappointment and disgust in Branwell's own excited sense of injury and betrayal. Emily Brontë took toward her brother an attitude of stoical pity and protectiveness. Charlotte was, on the other hand, in despair at his deterioration, troubled by his weaknesses, and condemning of the pain he brought to the household. It is significant that Charlotte insisted Branwell did not know of the publication of his sisters' poems, nor of the composition of
Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre
, and
Agnes Grey
. She wrote: “My unhappy brother never knew what his sisters had done in literature — he was not aware that they had ever published a line. We could not tell him of our efforts for fear of causing him too deep a pang of remorse for his own time misspent, and talents misapplied.”

Still, in spite of every failure and vice, Branwell always interested people. The news of his promise and default seemed to have spread around quite early. Matthew Arnold included him in his poem “Haworth Churchyard,” written in 1855, the year of Charlotte Brontë's death and two years before Mrs. Gaskell's biography. About Branwell, Arnold wrote:

The emergence of the Brontë sisters is altogether a lucky circumstance and nothing is easier than to imagine all of them dying unknown, their works lost. The father lived to be eighty-four, but, of the children, Charlotte's survival to thirty-nine seemed almost a miracle. Not even she, and certainly not the other two sisters, had the chance to do what they might have. This is especially distressing in the case of Emily.
Wuthering Heights
has a sustained brilliance and originality we hardly know how to account for. It is on a different level of inspiration from her poetry; the grandeur and complication of it always remind one of the leap she might have taken had she lived.

They are an odd group, the Brontës, beaten down by a steady experience of the catastrophic. The success of
Jane Eyre
, the fame that came to Charlotte, were fiercely, doggedly earned. She had struggled for independence not as an exhilaration dreamed of but as a necessity, a sort of grocery to sustain the everyday body and soul. Literary work and the presence of each other were the consolations at Haworth parsonage. There was certainly a family closeness because of the dangers they had passed through in the deaths of their mother and two older sisters. Haworth was a retreat; but part of its hold upon them was a kind of negative benevolence: it was at least better to have the freedom and familiarity of the family than the oppression of the life society offered to penniless, intellectual girls.

A study of the Brontë lives leaves one with a disorienting sense of the unexpected and the paradoxical in their existence. In them are combined simplicities and exaggerations, isolation and an attraction to scandalous situations. They are very serious, wounded, longing women, conscious of all the romance of literature and of their own fragility and suffering. They were serious about the threatening character of real life. Romance and deprivation go hand in hand in their novels. Quiet and repressed the sisters may have been, but their readers were immediately aware of a disturbing undercurrent of intense sexual fantasy. Loneliness and melancholy seemed to alternate in their feelings with an unusual energy and ambition.

In the novels of Charlotte and Anne there is a firm grasp of social pressures and forces; they understand from their own experience that opportunities for independence were likely to be crushing in other ways to the essential spirit and the sense of self. In
Wuthering Heights
the characters are struggling with an inner tyranny, a psychic trap more terrible than the cruelty of society. The characters feed upon themselves and each other. They are set apart, without relation to anything beyond. The young people of the two families have only the trap of each other and the tyranny of the past. The sweep of existence is stripped of the environmental and the particular. In the same manner, the sense of place, the moors, the houses, are spiritual locations. There is a scarcity of scene painting, even though the sense of place is very strong, as a cell or a dungeon would be. The moors provide the isolation, the loneliness, and the removal that are essential to the story. So even nature is negative, serving to relieve the characters of the expectations of a usual society, of interdependence. It is a created, imagined world, as removed from the governess-novels of the other sisters as any world could be.

Catherine, in
Wuthering Heights
, is nihilistic, self-indulgent, bored, restless, nostalgic for childhood, unmanageable. She has the charm of a wayward, schizophrenic girl, but she has little to give, since she is self-absorbed, haughty, destructive. What is interesting and contemporary for us is that Emily Brontë should have given Catherine the center of the stage, to share it along with the rough, brutal Heathcliff. In a novel by Charlotte or Anne, Cathy would be a shallow beauty, analyzed and despaired of by a reasonable, clever and deprived heroine. She would be fit only for the subplot. There is also an unromantic driven egotism in the characters, a lack of moral longings, odd in the work of a daughter of a clergyman.

Emily Brontë's poetry is constricted by its hymn-tune rhythms and a rather narrow and provincial idea of the way to use her own peculiar visions. The novel form released in her a new and explosive spirit. The demands of the form, the setting, the multiplication of incidents, the need to surround the Byronic principals, Cathy and Heathcliff, with the prosaic — the dogs, the husbands, the family servants, sisters, houses — the elements of fact lift up the dreamlike, compulsive figures, give them life. The plot of
Wuthering Heights
is immensely complicated and yet there is the most felicitous union of author and subject. There is nothing quite like this novel with its rage and ragings, its discontent and angry restlessness.

Wuthering Heights
is a virgin's story. The peculiarity of it lies in the harshness of the characters. Cathy is as hard, careless, and destructive as Heathcliff. She too has a sadistic nature. The love the two feel for each other is a longing for an impossible completion. Consolations do not appear; nothing in the domestic or even in the sexual life seems to the point in this book. Emily Brontë appears in every way indifferent to the need for love and companionship that tortured the lives of her sisters. We do not, in her biography, even look for a lover as we do with Emily Dickinson because it is impossible to join her with a man, with a secret, aching passion for a young curate or a schoolmaster. There is a spare, inviolate center, a harder resignation amounting finally to withdrawal.

The Brontë sisters had the concentration and energy that marked the great nineteenth-century literary careers. When
The Professor
was going the rounds of publishers, Charlotte was finishing
Jane Eyre
. The publication of the
Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell
was just barely a publication. A year later only two copies had been sold and the book received merely a few scattered, unimportant notices. Still, it was an emergence, an event, an excitement. Emily had at first resisted publication and was so guarded about the failure of the book that we cannot judge her true feelings. No discouragement prevented the sisters from starting to work, each one, on a novel. The practical side of publication, the proofs, the letters to editors, the seriousness of public authorship were an immensely significant break in the isolation and uncertainty of their lives.

The Brontës had always had a sense of performance, of home performance in their Angria and Gondal plots and characters. And some of them quite early felt their gifts could reasonably claim the attention of the world. Branwell wrote high-handed letters to the editor of
Blackwood's Magazine
saying, “Do you think your magazine so perfect that no additions to its power would be either possible or desirable?” He sent off a note to Wordsworth suggesting, “Surely, in this day when there is not a writing poet worth a sixpence, the field must be open, if a better man can step forward.” Wordsworth noted the mixture of “gross flattery” and “plenty of abuse” and did not reply.

Charlotte posted a few poems to Southey. He was not discourteous but delivered the opinion, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation.”

Absolute need drove the Brontë sisters. They were poor, completely dependent upon their father's continuation in his post, and without hopes of anything were he to die. They did receive a small legacy upon the death of Aunt Branwell and they looked upon the income with awe and intense gratitude. But it was not in any sense a living. The sisters were not beautiful, yet their appearance can hardly be thought a gross liability. Their natures, the scars of the deaths of their mother and sisters, their intellectuality, and their poverty were the obstacles to marriage.

There was also perhaps some disappointment in their father and brother that weighed on their spirits. Branwell's imperfections were large and memorable; the father's were less palpable. He was not a rock — at least not of the right kind. When Charlotte finally married his curate he refused to perform the ceremony and indeed gave up altogether the duty of marrying persons. The Brontë household was in fact a household of women, women living and dead. The sense of being on their own came very early. Each sister felt the weight of responsibility in an acute and thorough way.

The worries that afflicted genteel, impoverished women in the nineteenth century can scarcely be exaggerated. They were cut off from the natural community of the peasant classes. The world of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, for all its sorrow and injustice, is more open and warm and fresh than the cramped, anxious, fireside-sewing days of the respectable. Chaperones, fatuous rules of deportment and occupation drained the energy of intelligent, needy women. Worst of all was society's contempt for the prodigious efforts they made to survive. Their condition was dishonorable, but no approval attached to their efforts to cope with it. The humiliations endured in their work of survival are a great part of the actual material in the fiction of Charlotte and Anne Brontë.

It seems likely that there was a steady downward plunge by alliances with the poorer classes on the part of the desperate daughters of impecunious gentlefolk. And some resolved to move upward, like Becky Sharp, the daughter of a dissolute painter and an opera-singer mother. Becky Sharp had “the dismal precocity of poverty” and the heedless shrewdness of the bohemian world. She spoke of herself as never having been a girl: “...she had been a woman since she was eight years old.” Becky Sharp is the perfect contrast to Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, the heroine of Charlotte Brontë's
Villette
, two girls with an almost extinguishing sense of determination and accountability. In the Brontë sisters there is a distinctly high tone and low spirit; they retained something of the Methodism of their mother and of the aunt who raised them. Even Branwell, with his flaming indulgences, is a sort of prototypical parson's son who exchanged every prohibition for a license.

Charlotte Brontë wrote: “None but those who had been in a position of a governess could ever realize the dark side of respectable human nature; under no great temptation to crime, but daily giving way to selfishness and ill-temper, till its conduct toward those dependent on it sometimes amounts to a tyranny of which one would rather be the victim than the inflicter.” To be a lady's companion was even worse for a young woman; the caprice and idleness of the old fell down like a shroud upon the young.

Schools had always been traumatic and even murderous for the Brontë children. The two older daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, were sent to the Clergy Daughters' School, an institution especially endowed for girls like themselves who could expect to have to make their own way. It was sponsored by such well-known people of the day as Wilberforce and Hannah More. But the school was, nevertheless, a cruel place — cold, with inadequate, dirty food, and overworked, tyrannical teachers. The children took long freezing walks to church and sat in their cold, damp clothes all day. There was tuberculosis throughout the school, and the condition led to the death of Maria when she was twelve and Elizabeth when she was eleven. Emily and Charlotte were only six and a half and eight years old when they joined their older sisters at the school. They watched with horror and the deepest resentment as the older girls fell ill and were sent home to die.

The mother of the Brontës had died of cancer after bearing six children in seven years. All of these griefs and losses formed the character of the survivors: the religious earnestness of Anne; the withdrawn, peculiar nature of Emily; the stoical determination of Charlotte.