When Mrs. Gaskell was preparing her life of Charlotte Brontë she went to Brussels to call on the Heger family.
Mme. Heger refused to see her but she spoke with M. Heger and, so it is thought, saw the love letters Charlotte had written him.
She did not record either the feelings or the letters in her account of Charlotte, even though the falling in love, the extreme suffering endured because of this love were central experiences in Charlotte Brontë’s life and in her work.
Perhaps Mrs. Gaskell had given her word not to reveal the contents of the letters; more likely it was her own feeling of respect for Charlotte, solicitude for the “image” that made her wish to glide over the whole thing softly and swiftly. This left room for later diggers, and the love affair gets all the attention from them that it failed to receive from Mrs. Gaskell.
Winifred Gérin’s biography gives the fullest account we have of the years at the school in Brussels. The suppressed and then recovered letters are interesting above all as a picture of the pitiable emotional strain endured by a young, inexperienced girl in her efforts to make a life for herself.
For the rest, the story of Charlotte Brontë’s letters is like some unfortunate, fantastical turn in one of her own plots. They are very earnest, agonizing documents, overheated, despairing, and intensely felt.
The existence of the letters is itself strange. We are told that M. Heger, supposedly entirely without fault or investment in Charlotte’s passion, tore them up and threw them in the wastebasket.
His wife, very brisk and firm in dispatching Charlotte when she sensed her infatuation, for some reason reclaimed the poor letters, thriftily pasted and gummed them together again.
Mrs. Gérin has the odd notion that this was done for “evidence,” but it is impossible to see the need for evidence in a case always presented as unilateral — that is, a deep, passionate crush on Charlotte’s part for a man who had no interest whatsoever in her and gave her no reason to hope. In any case, in 1913 M. Heger’s son presented the documents to the British Museum.
Charlotte and Emily Brontë went to Belgium to study French and other subjects in order to prepare themselves for their destiny as teachers.
Emily stayed only one year, and when their aunt died, went home gladly in order to run the house for her father.
Charlotte returned for a second year to the Pensionnat Heger, where they were studying — going this time as a teacher of English rather than as a pupil.
In her decision to return, an anxious fascination with M. Heger certainly played a part, perhaps even the whole part.
She wrote about it: “I returned to Brussels after Aunt’s death, against my conscience, prompted by what then seemed an irresistible impulse. I was punished for my selfish folly by a total withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of mind.”
Falling in love with M. Heger laid the ground for the emotional intensity and recklessness in Charlotte Bronte’s novels. She experienced to the fullest a deep, scalding frustration. The uselessness of her love, the dreadful inappropriateness and unavailability of its object, turned out to be one of those sources of pain that are also the springs of knowledge.
Her misery caused her to examine her whole life, to face what lay ahead; and if she found little to be optimistic about, at least she knew how to think deeply, and in a new way, on the condition of loneliness and deprivation. This was important because the condition was then and is always shared by so many. Her familiarity with it was awful.
Reprieve came with the success of Jane Eyre and her other books. This novel and the later one, Villette, are powerful images of nineteenth-century female feeling.
Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre encourage at every point an identification with Charlotte Brontë herself. The two governesses are orphans, a prudent way of establishing the depth of their desolation.
Anne Brontë’s novel Agnes Grey is somewhat unusual among governess stories in that the girl has both her parents and sets out on her work to help deteriorating family finances.
Most governesses in fiction are strangely alone, like sturdy little female figures in a fairy tale. They walk the roads alone, with hardly a coin in their pockets; they undergo severe trials in unfamiliar, menacing places and are rescued by kind strangers. Shadows, desperation, and fears are their reality, even if they go in for a litany of assurances of their own worth and sighs of hope that their virtues will somehow, in some manner, stand them in good stead.
At the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels, Charlotte Brontë – alone, proud, disturbed in mind – was thrown into the middle of an unbalancing family life. She could no more have resisted falling in love with the husband than Branwell could have denied the presence of Mrs. Robinson.
At the Heger establishment life was heightened by the fullness and diversity of the responsibilities the couple had undertaken. There were children, domestic engagements, pupils, a school to be run; serious work for both husband and wife as teachers and managers; an important role in the life of the town; relatives, roots, bustle, worries, newness.
Charlotte entered this life as if she had suddenly walked upon a stage and begun acting out a part whose limits and privileges had not been decided. One moment she was a family member; the next she was an excluded, ignored employee, a visitor from a foreign country.
In Villette, Lucy Snowe suffers a nervous breakdown when she is left alone in the large, empty school at vacation time — an insensitivity perhaps on the part of the family, but one not always easy to avoid.
In real life, during the second year at the school, Charlotte Brontë seemed to have suffered the same lonely anguish and frustration as her heroine, the same sense of abandonment. In the book and in life, the undertow of hysteria and threat was very real.
When she returned to Brussels as a teacher in the school, Charlotte Brontë felt the improvement in her position as a pleasure. Her advancement was further enhanced by the beginning of English lessons in the evening for M. Heger and his brother-in-law.
There is no question that the teacher greatly liked this new sense of power and accomplishment — and she cherished the pupil as much as the trust. The wife soon sensed, in the way of wives and headmistresses, the disturbances and storms of an infatuation.
The lessons were stopped. This enraged Charlotte Bronte for every possible reason. First it underscored her powerlessness: that no amount of intelligence, skill, or hard work seemed to alter. The lessons represented self-esteem, competence, and a chance to be near M. Heger.
In the situation at the Pensionnat, Charlotte is very much like one of her heroines: a poor, clever teacher, rushing to fall in love with the master.
The world the governesses inhabit, in the novels and in lite, is a place of exclusion. These observant, high-minded, emotional women are desperate in the midst of a worldly social comedy that does not for a moment take them into account.
Anne Brontë is thought to have fallen in love with a gay, flirtatious young curate, William Weightman, but this love was a secret suffering, a mute, hidden torment.
Poverty is the deforming condition in love, as the Brontës see it. Poverty makes you unable even to admit your love; in Villette poverty turns Lucy Snowe into Dr. John’s confidante and pseudo-sister; it is unthinkable that he should have romantic interest in her even though he obviously values her highly, but merely in a restricted, excluding manner.
During Mr. Rochester’s flirtation with the shallow Miss Ingram, Jane Eyre assesses her own values and yet can only express them in a negative evaluation of her rival. About Miss Ingram she thinks:
She was showy; but she was not genuine; she had a fine person, many attainments, but her mind was poor…. She was not good; she was not original. She advocated a high tone of sentiment; but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity….
Sympathy, pity, intelligence, goodness, genuineness — these are the charms Charlotte Brontë wishes to impose. There is something a little overblown in the heroine’s hope to press virtues upon men who are conventional, and even somewhat corrupt, in their taste in women.
The heroine’s moral superiority is accompanied by a superiority of passion, a devotion that is highly sexual, more so we feel than that of the self-centered and worldly girls the men prefer. (This same sense of a passionate nature is found in George Eliot’s writing.)
Charlotte Bronte’s heroines have the idea of loving and protecting the best sides of the men they are infatuated with: they feel a sort of demanding reverence for brains, honor, uniqueness.
Mr. Rochester, M. Paul, and Dr. John in Villette are superior men and also intensely attractive and masculine.
Girls with more fortunate prospects need not value these qualities but instead may look for others, money in particular. That is the way things are set up in the novels.
When she arrived in Brussels, Charlotte Brontë was twenty-six and M. Heger was thirty-three. His wife was a few years older.
The school, from the evidence of Villette, was a battleground of sexual conflict, intellectual teasing, international and religious contraries, and feminine competition. It was a stimulating and unnerving scene. Unconscious wishes drifted through the halls.
Anything irregular in men fascinated Charlotte Brontë. Leslie Stephen may say that “Mr. Rochester has imposed himself on many,” but the fact is that Rochester is a creation of great originality and considerable immoral charm. He is a frank and sensuous man for whom the author feels a helpless admiration. He has had a daughter by a mistress and many other affairs. He has an insane wife up in the attic and yet he proposes marriage, or rather marriages, once to a selfish and ridiculous creature and then to Jane Eyre.
Of course the idea of a bigamous alliance must be forsworn and Jane flees; still the notion is a beguiling one and has pressed up through the dream life of the author. She had thought of every maneuver for circumventing those stony obstructions of wives who would not remove themselves.
At the Pensionnat Heger, the lessons stopped, trouble grew between Charlotte and Mme. Heger. Mrs. Gérin believes the wife, according to the convention of Europeans, cleverly, quietly worked to isolate Charlotte and to contain, without scandal or disruption, her overwrought emotions.
If we can project the actual wife into the fictional creation of Mme. Beck, the headmistress in Villette, we can see that Charlotte had thrust herself against a powerful, interesting woman:
…looking up at Madame, I saw in her countenance a something that made me think twice ere I decided. At that instant she did not wear a woman’s aspect, but rather a man’s. Power of a particular kind strongly limned itself in all her traits, and that power was not my kind of power; neither sympathy, nor congeniality, nor submission, were the emotions it awakened. I stood — not soothed, nor won, nor overwhelmed. It seemed as if a challenge of strength between opposing gifts was given, and I suddenly felt all the dishonor of my diffidence, all the pusillanimity of my slackness to aspire.
The two women had some sort of quarrel. (Mrs. Gaskell offers religious difference; Mrs. Gérin insists that it was love for the schoolmaster.)
Charlotte gave notice, which was, to her surprise, accepted even though M. Heger intervened and she finished out the term. Then she returned to Haworth and to a long frenzy of love and yearning. The suffering seemed to mount.
She wrote letters and pitifully waited for answers. There were answers, supposedly merely advice on starting schools; when she later married, Charlotte destroyed the replies.
The mood of the correspondence on her side is painful. “To forbid me to write to you, to refuse to answer me, would be to tear from me my only joy on earth.”
The last appeal went out, delivered by the hand of a friend going to Brussels. Charlotte Brontë waited six months for a reply that never came.
She had written:
…I tell you frankly that I have tried meanwhile to forget you, for the remembrance of a person whom one thinks never to see again and whom, nevertheless, one greatly esteems, frets too much the mind; and when one has suffered that kind of anxiety for a year or two, one is ready to do anything to find peace once more. I have done everything; I have sought occupations…. That, indeed, is humiliating— to be unable to control one’s own thoughts, to be the slave of a regret, of a memory, the slave of a fixed and dominant idea, which Lords it over the mind. Why cannot I have just as much friendship as you, as you for me — neither more nor less? Then should I be tranquil, so free — I could keep silence then for ten years without an effort.
Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe are plain girls. They are touched by every disadvantage and must rely upon intelligence and a measure of ironical self-assertiveness to make an impression upon the world. They have dignity and make a trembling effort to hang on, even to win out. But how are they to do this?
Both Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot are hard on the whims of beautiful women; it seems such a pity only pretty girls are able to win that fine, complicated hero the heroines and the authors would like for themselves.
But women of intelligence learn resignation. Deprivation and renunciation are sisters. Susceptibility, emotionalism flare up, but duty and common sense and practicality finally keep disaster in check.
In Charlotte Brontë’s novels a curious sophistication seems to be the property of the heroines without their even being entirely conscious of it.
They understand certain worldly matters, especially those of a crypto-sexual nature. Lucy Snowe’s thoughts on a painting in the Brussels museum shocked the novel’s hero:
It represented a woman, considerably larger I thought, than the life….She was, indeed, very well fed; very much butcher’s meat – to say nothing of bread, vegetables and liquids…. She lay half-reclined on a couch — why it would be difficult to say; broad daylight blazed around her; she could not plead a weak spine; she ought to have been standing or at least sitting bolt upright. She had no business to lounge away the noon on a sofa…. Then for the wretched untidiness surrounding her, there could be no excuse. Pots and pans — perhaps I ought to say vases and goblets – were rolled here and there on the foreground; a perfect rubbish of flowers was mixed amongst them, and an absurd and disorderly mass of curtain upholstery smothered the couch and cumbered the floor. On referring to the catalogue I found that the reproduction bore the name, Cleopatra.
Humiliation is the companion of Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre. The humiliation has to do with the insupportable greatness of their own responsiveness and the tendency of others simply to forget that these prying, analyzing recorders are just as alive and full of claims as they are themselves.
For this reason there is a double-edged quality to the characters and this is part of the hold they have on our interest. Something about them is unexplained; they do not entirely understand themselves and they are, for all their brightness and energy, on the edge of nervous collapse.
Independence is an unwanted necessity, but a condition much thought about. All of one’s strength will be needed to maintain it; it is fate, a destiny to be confronted if not enjoyed.
Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley addresses itself to the regrets and consolations of lonely women, to the stoicism and patience they try to command. In her life and in her novels you are always dealing with a nettled complication of moods and traits, resolutions and lacks, ambitions and insecurities. The weight of family losses bore down upon her and there is actually something in her of an orphan, the condition she chose for her heroines.
Yet she was enormously energetic and her life was rich with friendships.
She went back to Brussels and it was Emily who was pleased to stay at home.
Charlotte’s fictional characters are a defense of herself, of her qualities, and an embodiment of her fantasies. In life, at thirty-nine, she married her father’s curate, a nice and devoted man for whom she felt little of the passion experienced long ago in the case of M. Heger. However, familiarity seemed to increase her husband’s charms; she liked him better when she saw him in his youthful environment, with those he had grown up among and who cared about him.
Then Charlotte Brontë came down with tuberculosis and the complications of pregnancy. She died, on the brink of domestic contentment if not romantic fulfillment.
The Brontë sisters have a renewed hold upon our imagination. They were gifted, well-educated, especially self-educated, and desperate.
Their seriousness and poverty separated them forever from the interests and follies of respectable young girls.
It was Charlotte’s goal to represent the plight of plain, poor, high-minded young women. Sometimes she gave them more rectitude and right thinking than we can easily endure, but she knew their vulnerability, the neglect they expected and received, the spiritual and psychological scars inflicted upon them, the way their frantic efforts were scarcely noticed, much less admired or condoned.
How to live without love, without security? Hardly any other Victorian woman had thought as much about this as Charlotte Brontë. The large, gaping flaws in the construction of the stories — mad wives in the attic, strange apparitions in Belgium — are a representation of the life she could not face; these gothic subterfuges represent the mind at a breaking point, frantic to find any way out.
If the flaws are only to be attributed to the practice of popular fiction of the time, we cannot then explain the large amount of genuine feeling that goes into them. They stand for the hidden wishes of an intolerable life.
Wuthering Heights is free of these failures because Emily Brontë did not think of the lovers in any usual domestic terms. Their feeling can never be consummated and brought down to routine and security. The novel is on a plane higher than those of the other sisters, since it is not bound by the daily, the ordinary — a thirst for the usual arrangements of life without the possibility of achieving them except as the result of outlandish interventions and accidents.
Jane Eyre is always saving Mr. Rochester — when he falls from his horse, when there is a fire, when he is stricken with blindness. This is the circuitous path to dominance imagined by a luckless girl.
Wuthering Heights is close to the regressive, to the anarchy of instinct; but Charlotte’s books understand the need sometimes to fall back upon a dour superiority of mind and will.
All of the Brontë sisters carried about with them the despondency of their class and situation. We are astonished by what they would not endure.
They rejected the servitude of fixed attitudes and careers, the slavery of poorly paid work; they resented the insufferable indifference of shallow people to the effort and exigency of those less fortunately placed. The sisters seized upon the development of their talents as an honorable way of life and in this they were heroic.
hexafu 