Branwell, the pornographer

The current exhibition about Branwell Brontë in the Brontë Parsonage Museum is attracting interest from the media. However, some of the journalists take Branwell's blacksheepism too seriously. Calling Branwell a pornographer or comparing his work to Tracey Emin's one is certainly too much. Today in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner:

WHILE I’m getting ready for work in the morning I listen to the TV news.
This week I tuned in just in time to hear the words ‘lewd’ and ‘Brontë’ in the same sentence which made me pause, mascara brush in hand.
But the item was about Branwell Brontë, the man frequently portrayed as the ‘black sheep’ of the literary family.
It made me think about how much the world has changed because if poor Branwell – who was seriously overshadowed by his more famous and conventional sisters – had lived today he would have found the world much more accepting of his art, drug addiction, sexual adventuring and alcoholism. One generation’s black sheep is another’s celebrity.
His ‘lewd’ drawings and poems which have, until now, remained under wraps at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, would have been the stuff of Victorian scandal, but barely worthy of a raised eyebrow in the 21st Century. It is thought that he produced many more, shall we say, ‘naughty’ sketches, but they were probably destroyed by someone who, most likely, needed a hefty snort of sal volatile after discovering them.
The personal life of the least well-known Brontë is currently being explored in an exhibition, Sex, Drugs and Literature: The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë at the newly-refurbished Brontë Parsonage in Haworth. It reveals a tortured genius who bore the brunt of his father’s expectations – being the only boy – and was a published writer long before Charlotte or Emily. He died from tuberculosis at the age of just 31 after a decline into alcoholism and opium addiction.
His sisters might have been shocked to learn that their brother was a pornographer but today he would have been embraced by an art community that can’t get enough of people like Tracey Emin whose latest exhibition, Those Who Suffer Love, includes a film animation of a sexual act.
The careers of Branwell and our Tracey illustrate quite nicely just how much the moral pendulum of society has swung in a century and a half. It’s not that the Victorians knew nothing about pornography or sexual titillation, it’s just that such interests remained underground and frowned upon. Prostitution was probably more widespread then than it is now, but no-one was given thousands of pounds for unmade beds with condoms or scratchy drawings of private parts.
We have become tolerant of, even immune to, the decadent art world; so much so that artists continually strive to find something new, something different or something shocking in order to become famous.
Tracey’s work seeks to bust the last of society’s taboos which is not necessarily a bad thing except that she appears to be something of a one-subject wonder. She uses art as a confessional, revealing the sort of things that most of us would be too embarrassed to admit. She says that until fairly recently sex was a major driving force and an obsessional theme for her work.
No-one wants to go back to the hypocritical era of the Brontës – whose surname was actually Brunty and changed by their Irish father to the more impressive umlauted version – but I can’t help thinking that just maybe we’ve taken a step too far in the opposite direction. Having pushed the boundaries of art and decency to their absolute limit, it certainly begs the question of what will come next. Or will the jaded public simply be subjected to the same tired old themes in an endless loop, like an Emin animation? (Hilarie Stelfox)

Michelle Cannon in the West Palm Beach Literary Examiner doesn't mention the exhibition but taking into account the title of her article (Pain, sado-masochism and sex in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre) we are pretty sure she would love it.

While many people consider the Victorian era a time of prudish behavior that revolved around following decorum, Charlotte Brontë stepped outside of this stereotype in her writing with her beloved classic, Jane Eyre. The novel is filled with subtle sexual nuances as it focuses on the relationship between Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester.
Jane, a poor orphan governess, comes to work for the wealthy bachelor Mr. Rochester as a teacher to his young charge, Adele. Mystery and secrets surround their budding, sado-masochistic romance. Elements of the gothic infiltrate the plot, which is narrated in first person by Jane. Rochester is a complex, seemingly cruel character who thrives on causing Jane emotional pain by threatening to marry the beautiful Miss Ingram and constantly battering her self-esteem. Jane responds to these cruel actions by threatening to leave Rochester’s home, creating an intense, tension-filled power struggle between these two beautifully-written characters. She is torn between her physical desire to remain close to Rochester and her psychological need for distance from him.
The Bronte's home in Haworth, England
Jane’s need for distance tends to dominate her desire for closeness, and this internal conflict is reproduced externally in her relationship with Rochester, with Rochester’s desire for physical proximity conflicting with Jane’s desire for distance. These internal and external power struggles create a healthy sense of tension necessary both to Jane and to her relationship with Rochester because it prevents either of them from being fully satisfied, and ensures that both remain in a perpetual state of self-inflicted suffering.
The suffering these characters impose on themselves and each other is necessary for the preservation of desires, which would be destroyed by fulfillment. The novel allows readers to gain a greater understanding of how the pain of unfulfilled desires becomes synonymous with pleasure, and the beneficial role pain, tension and unfulfilled desires plays for these characters.

Tabish Kair writes in Mint (India) about rediscovering Wuthering Heights:

When I first read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in high school, I found Heathcliff and Catherine nauseating: Their great love was too close to the romanticism I was then growing out of, and the “metaphysics” of the novel irked the rationalist and teenage agnostic in me. Rereading the novel some years ago, I discovered a new world (and text) altogether. I discovered a work of undoubted genius and immense complexity. Since then I have gone back to the novel once again (in the process of writing a forthcoming book on the Gothic and post-colonialism), and I have come away with my admiration doubled.
What is it that makes Wuthering Heights so exceptional?
There are many reasons. But for me, Wuthering Heights is essentially about terror, arising from fear of the other. Remember the scene where Lockwood has a nightmare about the dead Catherine, a “waif-ghost”, trying to enter his room from a window unlatched by the storm? Lockwood writes that “terror made me cruel”: He rubs the “creature’s” wrist on the broken glass pane until it bleeds. But still the “ghost” maintains its “tenacious grip”, maddening him with fear.
The terror of this scene is intricately connected with displacement. Lockwood is a traveller; Catherine is displaced, banished from her family house and love. Heathcliff, the house’s current owner, is displaced, having usurped the house but only by using the legal and social rules that left him (and Catherine) on the margins. Significantly, Heathcliff’s terrorizing route out of the margins and into brutal power leaves him displaced more deeply—estranged from his “true self”, Catherine, whose “waif-ghost” doesn’t respond to his entreaties.
This narrative of terror and otherness is not explicit in the novel; it has to be read between the lines. This is inevitable, given the nature of otherness. In the last count, it is not the narrative power or even the structure of Wuthering Heights that fascinates me, but its tendency to narrate at a tangent. This tendency is lacking in many acclaimed novels, which are premised on excessive transparency, an easy consumption of “stories” floating like dead fish on the surface of the text.

The SF GLBT Examiner interviews author Alex Jeffers, another Brontëite:

Q: Who are the authors who most influence you, both in your early career and now?
A: The strongest early influences, still marking my prose and approach to the work, would probably be science-fiction writers Samuel R Delany and Joanna Russ—I only found out years later both were gay. I read the Alexandria Quartet at an impressionable age and am aware of the heavy shadow of Lawrence Durrell on a lot of my work. I can only hope to have been benignly influenced by Charlotte and Anne Brontë (Emily not so much), Samuel Richardson, Elizabeth Bowen, Alice Munro, William Trevor, Robert Ferro, Orhan Pamuk, among many. (Alan Chin)

More Brontëites are to be found in the list of valedictorians and salutatorians of local NC public high schools as published in The Robesonian.

La Nación Dominicana (Dominican Republic) talks with the Honduran writer León Leiva Gallardo about his latest novel, La casa del cementerio. It seems that the novel contains some Wuthering Heights references:

Ismael tiene un lado oscuro y es ahí donde yo puyo. Así mismo, te diré que La casa del cementerio tiene todos los elementos de la novela confesión; como tal, los cinco años de ausencia de Ismael son un préstamo a Cumbres borrascosas (Emily Bronte): tal como ignoramos de dónde llega Heathcliff y dónde está cuando desaparece, yo presento a ese Ismael desaparecido que regresa "convertido", y yo no quise contar cómo había cambiado. (Jochy Herrera) (Google translation)

It's not usual to quote the Brontës not only as writers but as writers and artists. Novelist and poet Fernando del Paso does it in El Occidental (Mexico):

En la exposición se reúne una serie de dibujos en los que prevalece la técnica mixta (tinta china, tintas de colores y wash) todos son sobre papel (cartulina Bristol). Después añadió que en la historia ha habido escritores que pintaron o dibujaron "el caso clásico sería William Blake, tenemos a Edgar Allan Poe, un retratista magnífico, a las hermanas Brönte (sic), a Jean Cocteau, Federico García Lorca, Henry Miller, William Faulkner... no cabe duda que del escritor, la materia prima es el papel". (Blanca Eunice Castillo) (Google translation)

A usual confusion concerning the birthplace of the Brontës is to assume that they were born in Haworth forgetting that the actual birthplace was Thornton. Nevertheless this is the first time we read that someone says that the Brontës were born... at Saltaire (!). In easier.com:

Or even visit the set of TV’s ‘Last of the Summer Wine’ and what’s more, Pennine Yorkshire boasts the World Heritage site of Saltaire and is the birthplace of the acclaimed Brontë sisters.

An Unlikely Heroine reviews Tamasha's Wuthering Heights performances in Coventry, Mark Binmore posts a writing inspired by Wuthering Heights and Tickle Juice is posting her very own Jane Eyre comic adaptation (here you can find Chapter 1 and Chapter 2).

Categories: Branwell Brontë, Brontëites, Comics, Jane Eyre, Music, Theatre, Wuthering Heights