Margot Peters
Haworth Today
A few steps from the hub of the village and one enters Brontë territory proper. Here stands Haworth parish church, rebuilt since Patrick Brontë, father of the famous family, preached his sermons from its pulpit, yet retaining its original tower and, inside, the communion table and baptismal font the Brontës knew.
Its most recent addition is a Brontë memorial chapel occupying the southeast corner, a gift of Sir Tresham Lever, dedicated in 1964. A machine on the wall dispenses slides of the chapel. The “American window,” another gift, is inscribed “To the glory of God in pleasant memory of Charlotte Brontë by an American citizen.”
Under the floor in the family vault all the Brontës except Anne lie buried. A tablet marks the toll: Maria, wife of Patrick Brontë; Maria, Elizabeth, Patrick Branwell, Emily Jane, Charlotte; Patrick Brontë.
A churchyard surrounds St. Michael and All Angels on three sides. More than 40,000 villagers are buried there under pitching, moss-green sarcophagi or ranks of thin, high-shouldered slabs. It was a cold, windy, bare yard when the Bronte children played there among the tombstones. Mr. Wade, Mr. Bronte’s successor, planted trees, and now the churchyard is shrouded in a green, leafy gloom.
The parsonage where the Brontës lived stands adjacent to the churchyard and can be reached down a short cobbled lane. The house is now a museum. The many personal effects of the Brontës preserved there are undoubtedly the main attraction – Charlotte’s dresses and bonnets and rings, Emily’s writing desk, the huge brass collar of her favorite dog, Keeper, a lock of Charlotte’s hair, the minutely stitched samplers worked by all the girls, Mr. Bronte’s spectacles, pipe, and Bible – but the museum also houses the fine Bonnell collection of manuscripts, editions, and scholarly works.
The north and west wings of the present building were added by the indefatigable Mr. Wade, but much of the parsonage remains as the Brontës knew it: the dining room to the left of the entrance hall where the sisters gathered in the evenings to write or to pace the floor arm in arm in deep dis-cussion; the parlor opposite where Mr. Brontë took his solitary meals, read, and composed his Sunday sermons. Upstairs, the servant Tabby’s humble quarters remain, and Emily’s room, formerly the nursery where the small Brontës acted out their imaginary adventures. Their tiny childish drawings are still visible on the nursery walls.
The moors are not the wild, vast, uninhabited stretches of heather and rolling hill and dale that many readers of Wuthering Heights imagine them. Farms, houses, neighboring villages, smoking industrial chimneys crowd in upon them.
The old footpath to the Brontë waterfalls, a spot well loved by the young Brontës and the destination of Charlotte’s last walk before her death, has been paved so that the sluggish modern tourist need not follow the Brontë trail on foot but can drive to within a mile of the falls.
If the pilgrim journeys to Top Withins, the house and site most frequently associated with Wuthering Heights, he will find not the grim, imposing front of Heathcliff’s dwelling – but a small sheep farm like many others that dot the moors, now quite in ruins.
It is perhaps a comfort to know that the quarry and the smoking chimneys down the valley are not twentieth-century corruptions but formed a part of the landscape in the Brontë’s time.
Why do so many people – 153,000 in one year, according to the museum staff-seck out this village where the Brontes lived and died?
One cynic suggests that there is simply nothing else to do in Yorkshire on a dull rainy Sunday – and there is probably more than one grain of truth to this suggestion. But the gigantic wave of tourists that surges across the Atlantic every summer and breaks on England’s shores accounts for much of the crowd: even the humblest tourist attraction receives some of the overflow.
Many of these wanderers are in search of a better world – in the poet Shelley’s words, “something apart from the sphere of our sorrow,” and England, a country that still preserves the past, seems to offer it.
As much as the effigies in Westminster Abbey, the gray, notched towers of Windsor, or the absurdly elaborate ritual of the changing of the guard, England’s writers are linked with this past, for they have preserved it permanently in the written word.
For, unlike the author of Paradise Lost and unlike many of their Victorian contemporaries, the Brontës are still widely read.
Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights exude a glamor that captivates readers even in our non-reading audiovisual age.
And the lives of the Brontës are surrounded with a similar glamor. Strange word: one imagines love affairs, intrigue, brilliant salons, beauty, wealth. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Brontë glamor is the glamor of fame deified by suffering. They are canonized, these sisters, by the tragedy of their lives.
The tragedy itself has all the appeal of the romantic past. What twentieth-century city dweller would not like to undergo the torments of solitude in a moorland village? In an age where sexual gratification has become as casual as picking one’s teeth, does not the frustration of unrequited love possess a peculiar charm? And what antisepticized, tube-drawn patient dying in the sterile whiteness of a modern hospital would not rather expire quickly at home on a couch of a picturesque, wracking, consumptive cough? Sentimentality – the luxury of thinking about emotion without feeling it – draws people to the Brontës as flowers draw bees.
The suffering, of course, was real enough. Mrs. Gaskell’s classic 1857 biography of Charlotte is at times almost too painful to read yet, according to Charlotte’s lifelong friend Mary Taylor, still minimizes the tragedy of her life. “The book is a perfect success, in giving a true picture of a melancholy life,” she wrote Mrs. Gaskell. “Though not so gloomy as the truth, it is perhaps as much as people will accept without calling it exaggerated, and feeling the desire to doubt and contradict it”
Most biographers of the Brontës emphasize only the external tragedy of their lives: the privation, the illness, the solitude, the early deaths. But Emily, Anne, and Mr. Bronte lived comparatively serene lives even in the face of these hardships. Charlotte’s unhappiness must then have stemmed largely from internal conflicts, ambivalent drives that warred within her, never allowing her rest. Some of these conflicts were personal. Many were created by her position as a woman in a society that oppressed women and as a writer and thought “female authors” neither legitimate artists nor ornaments of their sex.
“Hunger, rage, and rebellion” – this in the opinion of Victorian essayist and poet Matthew Arnold was the whole contents of Charlotte Brontë’s mind. It was a repellent mind to Arnold, for the Victorian woman was supposed to feel only complacency, love, and subservience. Arnold was of course only half right; he did not know or perhaps did not care that Charlotte struggled all her life to subdue the rage and suppress the rebellion.
Mrs. Gaskell and the Victorians admired the suppression, canonizing Charlotte for her submission to duty and necessity. Today we are more apt to sympathize with Charlotte’s rage. She was, of course, not officially a feminist: she did not directly engage in the legal struggle for women’s rights. In fact the “cant” preached on the woman ques-tion, as the Victorians called it, often irritated her.
But then most of the outstanding women of the period – Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Florence Nightingale, Jane Carlyle, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot, Queen Victoria – were not officially feminists either. Their apparent indifference to the women’s rights issue seems surprising, but can be explained by the fact that they achieved the success and power their less fortunate sisters still cry for. They won the game.
Charlotte Brontë had little motivation to fight for legal equality because as Currer Bell she found artistic and professional fulfillment. Unfortunately, but perhaps understandably, successful women often cannot believe that what they have done other women cannot do.
Clearly, however, the definition of a feminist needs to be expanded. Too often the word is limited to women involved exclusively in rights issues. Less happily, it is also limited to women who merely mouth the jargon of liberation (the “cant” Brontë hated), who exploit the movement for personal gain, or who hate men.
The concept of “feminist” should include all women who have broken the mold to fulfill their creative, intellectual impetus.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Madame Curie, Abigail Adams, Mrs. Gaskell, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Charlotte Brontë did not preach feminist doctrine but were feministic in the deepest sense.
Charlotte Bronte’s life and art were both an cloquent protest against the cruel and frustrating limitations imposed upon women and a triumph over them. Seen from this angle, the facts of her life fall into a new pattern, and it is this pattern that these pages propose to explore.
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