Forgiving Charlotte

Newbury Today reviews Inspector Sands' production of Wuthering Heights.

The Gothic horror elements of the narrative are heightened by these disembodied voices, spirits that haunt Nelly as she attempts to hold together two dysfunctional households. The play text initially quotes Nelly describing Heathcliff (Ike Bennett) as a ghoul and a vampire although in Eisler and Lewis’s version, his monstrous intentions lie in his ability to become a controlling figure motivated by acquiring through inheritance Wuthering Heights and the larger Thrushcross Grange. However, Nelly and Catherine’s fear of Heathcliff may also reflect their insular white privilege being subjugated by a homeless orphaned black immigrant from the port city of Liverpool made good.

The back wall of the set features a family tree on which photographs of the novel’s characters are pinned, somewhat like a police incident board. Each time a character dies, their photo is removed from the wall until only two images remain. Both families are infused with weak characters prone to illness and early death, and more inarticulate, earthy figures whose cruelty hides a desire to be loved. The drama becomes a Darwinian fight for survival among the windswept Yorkshire hills with no sentimentality shown to characters who fall by the wayside.

The inescapable truth is that society needs the changeling qualities that Heathcliff brings to Wuthering Heights. The pathetic, reactive characters of Earnshaw, Edgar and Linton (Leander Deeny) who sprawl in their armchairs, have no place in a changing world. It is a bleak vision with limited optimism. (Jon Lewis)

A contributor to Book Riot writes about her grudge with Charlotte Brontë and how she finally let it go.

Then I found out why Anne was so underrated, and under-read: although The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was an instant success, Charlotte blocked it from being reprinted after Anne’s death. She disagreed with the topic (spousal abuse, substance abuse, child abuse), and thought that it was incongruent with Anne’s personality. [...]

When I first read this, I became angry. I already knew that writing a heroine who wasn’t beautiful, something that wasn’t common at the time and for which Charlotte gets all the innovation points, Anne had done first in Agnes Grey. That was only an irritant: after all, it’s hardly Charlotte’s fault that Anne’s publisher didn’t publish Agnes Grey until after Charlotte had sold and published Jane Eyre. But this? This was Charlotte’s fault. And Anne was considered the lesser Brontë sister for over a century because of it.

You might be thinking that I sound overly invested in this. To which I say: I absolutely was. I’m more than a little embarrassed now typing this out. But at the time, I was depressed, lonely, and looking for purpose. This cause gave me that, with the convenient bonus of lacking any and all personal stakes.

Soon enough, as I began to heal, the intensity of my feelings abated: I was no longer angry at Charlotte, but I still took any and all opportunity to point out her flaws. For years.

For several years, every new thing I learned about Charlotte kept my disdain setting on high: the letter she wrote to Smith Williams saying that, although she had accepted Anne’s death, she couldn’t accept Emily’s; her editing Anne’s poems in her own style, thus changing Anne’s intended words (see Juliet Barker’s The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors); her — by all accounts unwelcome — love letters to a married man, and using his wife as the model for the antagonist in two of her books (the headmistress in The Professor and Madame Beck in Villette); calling her students stupid; and, most crucially, refusing to take a consumptive Anne to Scarborough for months. Oh, and saying that Anne was glad to die and had “laid [her life] down as a burden” when, in fact, Anne wrote herself that she wanted to live.

Some of these things are worthy of disdain. But her own feelings about her own sisters and their deaths? Not knowing Anne enough to avoid confusing forbearance with a desire for death? Those are simply Charlotte being her own person with her own feelings, and (like all of us) being closer to some family members than to others.

Once I accepted that I was wrong about some of these things, how could I not reexamine the others?

Charlotte blocked the reprinting of Tenant. The very controversial Tenant, which Anne herself said had been met by many with unexpected hostility. They had lambasted her for “a love for the coarse and the brutal.” They had lambasted Emily and Charlotte, too, for doing the same thing in their own books.

I had to wonder: how would I feel if I were Charlotte? If I had lost my mother and two elder sisters during childhood, and then gone on to lose my three remaining siblings within a year? If I had to do my grieving while knowing that people out there were accusing those dead siblings of enjoying brutality?

All of a sudden, Charlotte’s choices started to make a lot more sense. I still didn’t agree with them, but I could no longer find it in me to judge her for it. [...]

Looking back, I can’t believe I ever wasted my time resenting Charlotte Brontë. Anne was long dead, so who exactly was I helping by harbouring this grudge? Even if Anne had been alive, I rather suspect she’d resent me for resenting her sister. After all, Anne Brontë’s last words, spoken while holding Charlotte’s hand, were “Take courage, dear Charlotte, take courage.”

I talked a big game about empathy — and yet I refused to exercise enough empathy to understand that a) somebody’s personal feelings about their own family are none of my business, b) I was ignoring the debilitating amount of loss and grief in Charlotte’s life, as well as the enormous strength it must have taken to keep going and continue opening her heart to other people, and c) she’s been dead for almost 150 years. This woman didn’t kick puppies or steal from the elderly, she didn’t do anything so terribly wrong that strangers should be judging her even a year after her death, let alone 150.

I have since read and enjoyed Shirley. Charlotte really hit her stride as an author in this novel, and I look forward to seeing what she did with Villette. (Carolina Ciucci)

Despite the happy ending, we must say that this is a trend that we are increasingly seeing on social media. People reading Juliet Barker's The Brontës or Samantha Ellis's Take Courage and happily passing judgement on, and condemning, a real person they didn't know whose circumstances were very different to anything we can imagine. While for us it's really very easy to see that Charlotte's intentions were the best towards her sisters as her siblings in the Victorian era and not as authors, others have also looked into the matter of the so-called 'suppresion' of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and concluded that it's a myth. To think that a woman in Victorian times held such power even after her own death! The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was, for obvious reasons, unpalatable for Victorian tastes and so it wasn't in anyone's interest that the book be republished. The fact that when it was finally reprinted it was a mutilated text (which is still being printed today) didn't help matters much. 

CrimeReads discusses the monsters in Jane Eyre.

Recently, I re-read Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is a dark, bewitching book, and this time, I hunted for monsters in it.

I found four—four specific usages of the word “monster”—amid a glut of spooky things (ghoulish motifs, metaphors and pathetic fallacy, and sinister pet-names, to name a few types). As a seminal Gothic text, which both plays up and subverts stylistic hallmarks of the genre, Charlotte Brontë‘s 1847 novel Jane Eyre is obviously associated with beasts and phantoms—and many such examples are highlighted in a chapter called “A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane’s Progress” from perhaps the most influential work of feminist Victorian scholarship written in the twentieth century, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. (Read more) (Olivia Rutigliano)

Camden New Journal features Kate Griffin's latest book Fyneshade.

The synopsis above, of course, will inevitably conjure reminiscences of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, but this is no mere rejigging of familiar tropes – Kate, working within territory that we think we know, has a variety of provocative surprises up her sleeve.

And the Gothic sensibility that the reader may have detected in her earlier books is given full, sinister rein here. Marta is a protagonist who has had strange gifts given to her by her grandmother, and in her interactions with the duplicitous Pritchard family, she proves to be quite as doughty a fighter as Jane Eyre.

“I’m a fan of the Gothic… it’s my happy place,” Kate says. “I studied English literature at university and it was a privilege and pleasure to spend three years in the dark and stormy company of the Brontës, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe and a host of others whose tortured souls sent shivers of delight down my spine.

“Those familiar with Lady Ginger in the Kitty Peck books will recognise the debt I owe to Miss Havisham, one of the most gloriously Gothic characters in literature.” (Barry Forshaw)

The Critic reviews the 1994 novel Rent Boy by Gary Indiana.

Best of all, there’s Sandy Miller, a writer of pornographic novels such as The Devil’s Panties, “but literary, you know. One minute Sandy’s getting banged by an Arab Negro and the next minute she’s a sixteenth-century pirate on the high seas, or Emily Brontë or something.” (John Self)