The sex-starved spinsters vs. the virgin priestesses of art

Lucasta Miller has been very busy of late and today we find another very interesting article by her in The Sunday Herald. In it she explores the influence of sex (or lack thereof) in the siblings' writing in particular and lives in general.

But the article is not only about sex but also about the perception the Victorians had of their novels and lives. It reminds us that Patrick Brontë allowed her children total freedom when it came to reading or writing - never censoring them certain plays by Shakespeare or Byron's controversial Don Juan. In the midst of an ever more puritanical society, the Brontës were allowed to judge and act as they thought best. And thus their novels came as a shock and were termed "unfeminine" and "coarse".

We encourage you to read the whole - though lengthy - article, but let us highlight a few sentences from it:

Back in 1853, the novelist William Thackeray patronisingly surmised that Charlotte was a “naive” woman so eaten up with frustration that she would have preferred sex to literary success, only she was too ugly to get a man. “Rather than have fame,” he wrote, “she wants some Tomkins or another to love her and be in love with. But you see she is a little bit of a creature without a penny worth of good looks, 30 years old I should think, buried in the country, and eating her own heart up there, and no Tomkins will come.”

This belongs to a letter from Thackeray to Lucy Baxter (March 11, 1853) where he condescendingly commented on Villette and its author.The extent of him being right or wrong is for you to decide. For what is worth it he also calls Charlotte Brontë a "genius" a few sentences later. This would be the similar impression George Smith had when he said that he thought Charlotte would have given all her fame and genius for good looks.

In life as well as in art, the Brontes had examples of unbridled sexual activity to draw on. Their brother Branwell fathered an illegitimate child and also had a destructive extramarital affair with Mrs Robinson, the mother of a boy he was supposed to be teaching.

We are a little surprised as finding Branwell's "illegitimate child" being talked about so matter-of-factly. Of course, Phyllis Cheney would wholeheartedly agree to that.

The book has been adapted so often – notably in the classic Hollywood version with Laurence Olivier – and has become so seemingly familiar that it is easy to be shocked by the strangeness of the original on rereading it. Hollywood makes it a conventional romance in which a poor lad is rejected by his sweetheart for another, richer man. Yet Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff is actually a sadistic psychopath, and his relationship with Cathy is a weird, semi-incestuous obsession which remains forever unconsummated. When it first came out, Wuthering Heights was, like Charlotte’s novels, attacked for its unladylike “coarseness”. But this referred less to its actually rather bloodless portrayal of erotic love than its “revolting” scenes of violence (the hero enjoys beating up the wife he has married merely as a tool of his own vengeance).

There's the real Wuthering Heights for those who consider it the epitome of romance. We love the novel but we'd encourage all those who think it's a lovey-dovey kind of book to read it again and reconsider.

Anne’s novel does not have the melodrama of her sisters’ more famous works, and is in many ways an anti-romantic story. But it is far more explicitly feminist, arguing, for example, against the misogynistic injustice of the divorce laws of the period, under which women had no rights even in regard to their children. In some ways, despite its strong moral tone, it shocked Victorian readers even more than Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights because of its uncompromisingly naturalistic portrayal of “vice”.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is such an extraordinary novel that it saddens us that to this day it remains so obscure.

Where Thackeray looked down on Charlotte as a sex-starved spinster , the feminist writer May Sinclair worshipped her as a “virgin priestess of art”, and was devastated to discover that her idol had fallen, all too humanly, in love with a married man.

Rather than demean or idealise the sisters’ lack of experience, though, it is perhaps more helpful to look at its practical consequences. The fact that the Brontes did not spend their 20s in endless childbearing did of course give them the time and mental space to develop their talents as writers, something which few married women of their generation would have had. It is this, perhaps, rather than any simplistic Freudian need to redirect their sex drives, which enabled them to produce their great novels.

And we will agree 100% to that. Although we would like to remind our readers that child-bearing and writing weren't so self-excluding since - for example - Elizabeth Gaskell managed it.

Categories: In_the_News, Charlotte_Brontë, Emily_Brontë, Anne_Brontë, Jane_Eyre, Villette, Wuthering_Heights, The_Tenant_of_Wildfell_Hall