Charlotte Brontë wrote: “None but those who had been in a position of a governess could ever realize the dark side of respectable human nature; under no great temptation to crime, but daily giving way to selfishness and ill-temper, till its conduct toward those dependent on it sometimes amounts to a tyranny of which one would rather be the victim than the inflicter.”
To be a lady’s companion was even worse for a young woman; the caprice and idleness of the old fell down like a shroud upon the young.
Schools had always been traumatic and even murderous for the Brontë children.
The two older daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, were sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School, an institution especially endowed for girls like themselves who could expect to have to make their own way. It was sponsored by such well-known people of the day as Wilberforce and Hannah More. But the school was, nevertheless, a cruel place — cold, with inadequate, dirty food, and overworked, tyrannical teachers. The children took long freezing walks to church and sat in their cold, damp clothes all day. There was tuberculosis throughout the school, and the condition led to the death of Maria when she was twelve and Elizabeth when she was eleven.
Emily and Charlotte were only six and a half and eight years old when they joined their older sisters at the school. They watched with horror and the deepest resentment as the older girls fell ill and were sent home to die.
The mother of the Brontes had died of cancer after bearing six children in seven years. All of these griefs and losses formed the character of the survivors: the religious earnestness of Anne; the withdrawn, peculiar nature of Emily; the stoical determination of Charlotte.
For the sisters, and even for Branwell after his failure as a painter, life seemed to offer nothing except the position of governess or tutor in a private family. This was a hard destiny. The children exploit and torment; the parents exploit and ignore. The social and family position of a governess was ambiguous and led to painful feelings of resentment, envy, or bitter acceptance.
The young women who went to work in the houses of the well-to-do were clever and unprotected; one quality seemed to vex their charges and employers as much as the other.
The teacher-governess in fiction is likely, because of the intimate family setting in which she is living her lonely life, to fall into an almost hysterical, repressed eroticism.
Henry James noticed the tendency of the governess to be “easily carried away.”
Both Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe are superior, gifted girls, very much like Charlotte Bronte herself. They are bookish, forthright, skeptical, inclined to moralizing and to making wearisome, patient efforts to maintain self-esteem and independence. They are defenseless, cast adrift, and yet of an obviously fine quality that shows itself in a tart talent for down-putting retorts. Under the correcting surface they are deeply romantic, full of dreams, and visited by nightmares.
They feel a pressing, hurting need for love and yet they work hard to build up resignation to the likelihood that they will have to live bereft of the affections so much wanted. Need and sublimation play back and forth like a wavering light over their troubled consciousness. By these pains they grew into sharp observers, ever anxious to control and manage a threatening despair.
From being a lowly governess in a private house one could hope to rise to the position of a teacher in a boarding school. And beyond that there was the wish to have a school of one’s own – that was the hope of the Brontës as they faced their lack of money and the scarcity of possible husbands.
Emily hated everything to do with women’s education as she knew it in her own day and looked upon her home with its freedom and familiarity as an escape from school.
Even for Charlotte, the idea of her own school was a goal but it was not her heart’s desire. Instead it was a heavy charge to be thought of as propitious only by comparison with other possibilities.
Governesses were expected to give a shallow training to the young but were not ordinarily allowed the authority or respect that would make the training possible.
In Anne Bronte’s novel, Agnes Grey, the young pupils are so cruel and selfish the book was thought to be an exaggeration. In almost the first meeting with her charges the governess is taken to see a trap set for birds.
When she remonstrates with a young pupil about this cruelty he is indifferent; she calls upon the authority of the parents and the boy says:
“Papa knows how I treat them [the birds] and he never blames me for it; he says it is just what he used to do when he was a boy. Last summer he gave me a nest full of young sparrows, and he saw me pulling off their legs and heads and never said anything; except that they were nasty things and I must not let them spoil my trousers….”
Writing was an escape from this kind of servitude. In addition to their unusual gifts, the perils of their future created in the sisters a remarkable professionalism.
The romantic aspects of their achieving anything at all have been inordinately insisted upon and the practical, industrious, ambitious cast of mind too little stressed.
Necessity, dependence, discipline drove them hard; being a writer was a way of living, surviving, literally keeping alive.
They worked to get their books published; they worried about contracts, knew the chagrins and misunderstandings of authorship.
Emily was disappointed in the inane reception of Wuthering Heights; Charlotte’s first novel, The Professor, was turned down everywhere. (In fact, the crossed-out publishers’ addresses on the manuscript showed her perseverance even if they were somewhat dampening to the receiver.)
In addition to the professionalism of the sisters, there was an unexpected inclination in the family to create scandal.
Charlotte’s books aroused a sense of unease in the reader and outrage in those people and institutions from real life she used in her stories. There was an oddly rebellious and erotic tone to the imaginings and plot developments of the little governesses.
hexafu 