So weary
Jeremy Trafford _
Unquiet Soul — A Biography of Charlotte Bronte Margot Peters (Hodder and Stoughton £5.95)
"Hunger, rage and rebellion," in Matthew Arnold's view, were the whole contents of Charlotte Bronte's mind, and Charlotte herself once described her own feelings as "hard, rebellious and intractable." Paradoxically she also was to claim that it was "natural in me to submit and very unnatural to command"; and her obedience to her stubborn, selfish father and her self-abasement before the wilful and irascible Monsieur Heger are the prime examples of this other, equal truth about her. Contradiction and ambivalence of this sort characterised her entire personality, as they did her novels, and to read once more the story of her short, angry, desperate and intense existence in this fine biography is both moving and revealing. It is devoid of that pious sentimentalising that insists hers was a tragedy of circumstance alone rather than equally a tragedy of her own warring and opposed compulsions. An unquiet soul she had indeed, because it was so divided and equivocal.
In the fragment `Emma,' and in the early chapters of Villette, a little girl is abandoned by her father. Incidents of a young girl abandoned or destitute, of her own doing or otherwise, occur three times each in both Jane Eyre and Villette. Charlotte's own abandonment at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, at the age of eight, occurred shortly after the death of her mother, and was followed by the deaths of her two elder sisters as a direct result of the appalling circumstances there. The description in Jane Eyre of Lowood School and its vicious discipline, and the portrait of the tyrannical clergyman Brocklehurst, cropping the girls' heads of their wicked curls, reflect the intense rebellion against authority, in this case actually mortal in consequence, that was later so to dominate and confuse Charlotte's adult emotional life. It also spurred her to a desire for vindication in the world's eyes that no usual sense of Victorian oppression, male or otherwise, could have ever conceived in her. Three sisters suffered these same experiences: a young mother dead; abandonment by an indifferent father doting on his only son; the terrifying occurrences at Cowan Bridge; then an isolated upbringing in a bleak parsonage, weaving their fantasies of power, passion and destiny. These were the constituents of that hard soil which nourished the phenomenal Brontë genius — whose greatest novels were obsessively concerned with woman's passionate love of masterful men.
This biography admirably traces the sources of Charlotte's fictional inspirations. The life illuminates the art, the art the life, in a coherent and compelling narrative, never marred with indiscriminate sympathising. "Strange is it not," commented Mrs Gaskell, "that people's lives apparently suit them so little": and the powerful self-denying and self-punitive forces within Charlotte made emotional fulfillment something only possible within the infrequent safety of imaginative fiction, and only then
upon proviso. In life she loved two forbidden men: one married, the other her young and handsome publisher; both appalled by the feelings they aroused in her. The men who did love her left her cold and fearful, James Taylor, a man sufficiently brusque and ferocious to serve as half the model for a fictional lover at least — Paul Emmanuel in Villette — she only warmed to when he grew cool, and only mourned when he was safely gone to India. "Now that he is away," she wrote, "I feel far more gently towards him — it is only close by that I grow rigid, stiffening with a strange mixture of apprehension and anger which nothing softens but his retreat and perfect subduing of manner." Arthur Bell Nicholls wae to love her with a hopeless but violent passion not so dissimilar to that Mr Rochester eventually conceived for Jane; yet she only entered into marriage with him after her father's opposition, and then it seemed to her "a solemn, strange and perilous thing." In her art love was allowed its triumph in Jane Eyre, but only when Mr Rochester was first subdued, Jane enriched by a stray legacy, and the stern proud master image finally blinded and disfigured. In Villette a happy ending is averted by Paul Emmanuel's most arbitrary drowning. Jane Eyre rightly celebrates the marriage of true minds on equal terms, and the , fiction is transcendentally successful. In life Charlotte was to find the success she had always craved for, emotional or otherwise, a disintegrative experience.
The story is very moving while it records the early struggles in adversity, the unrequited love for Monsieur Heger, Charlotte's vindication in Jane Eyre of the intense indomitable spirit, and the tragic deaths of Branwell, Emily and Anne. After that Charlotte had to cOntend with circumstances she could fight less valiantly — fame and triumph. An early poem, uneasily self-knowing, prophecies the consequence: "The strong arm of Ambition struck/1n every vein I owned/At the same instant bleeding broke/A secret inward wound." It was this wound perhaps, rather than those three tragic deaths, that made her pathologically ill confronting the distinguished company she now occasionally frequented. It was this inward injury that caused her to be so sensitive to criticism, so bitterly critical herself, so prejudiced, so aggressively shy, so fascinated by the scenes of her earlier unhappiness, and so incapable still of loving children. "And to what child am I not a stranger?" she cried after so many years devoted to their care and instruction.
Charlotte's end, which is most excellently told in this book, revives one's full compassion. Once married, her father's hold broken, Charlotte seems almost to reach a certain happiness with her narrow, jealous yet devoted curate. Then she conceives a child. One is reminded of Jane Eyre's dream, on the eve of her wedding, of herself burdened with the charge of a little piteous child, her movements fettered, her voice failing, Rochester withdrawing further and further off on the long road before her. Charlotte falls ill. "Think of the baby," she is , told. "I daresay I shall be glad some day," she whispers back, "but I am so ill, so weary." She dies a few days later of pernicious morning sickness, which some doctors now believe is caused by the mother's unconscious rejection of the baby. Was this child that burdened her that same horribly wounded, stunted little girl she had carried within her all her life? A child once vindicated, once triumphant, yet always fatally subject to the instant bleeding of that injury.
Previous page
