The Life of Charlotte Bronte (6 page)

As their friendship deepened, Brontë was more authentic and unguarded with Nussey than with any other correspondent. “ ‘I write to you freely,’ ” Brontë explained in the difficult summer following her sisters’ deaths, “ ‘because I believe you will hear me with moderation’ ” (p. 314). While it is true that letters to Nussey are evidence that Brontë “was one to study the path of duty well,” as Gaskell says
(The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell,
letter 267), we can also understand why Brontë’s husband deemed her letters to this friend “lucifer matches” (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, October 24, 1854; in
The Letters of Charlotte
Brontë, vol. 3, p. 295). Nicholls understood that Brontë’s publicity would make these expressive letters of interest to a wider audience, and consequently made it a condition of their correspondence that Nussey burn them. The purportedly conventional Nussey, notably, did not comply with Nicholls’s request. This correspondence, which captures Brontë under the stress of self-development, provides a natural character arc for Brontë as heroine of Gaskell’s novelistic
Life.

Brontë did prefer teaching in a school to submitting to the “ ‘slavery’ ” of being a governess in a private family (p. 115). Gaskell captures with vivid intensity the painful alienation Brontë felt during her years as a governess. The liminal position of governesses, who were suspended between classes, being neither equal to their masters nor truly servants, had the effect of negating both the value and the difficulty of their work. Brontë’s remarks that she would rather be a “ ‘housemaid’ ” than a governess, and that she “ ‘could like to work in a mill,’ ” may show signs of class insensitivity, but her hyperbole constitutes a critique of the value structure of genteel employment (pp. 134, 138). To make employment suitable for young ladies, the issue of labor had to be politely elided, the compensation nominal.

As much as she detested working at Margaret Wooler’s school, Brontë looked up to Wooler because she managed to contrive an independent life by running a school. “ ‘There is no more respectable character on this earth than an unmarried woman, who makes her way through life,’ ” Brontë told her (p. 232). When Williams asked Brontë’s advice about educating his daughters, Brontë urged him to “give their existence some object” in case they did not marry. “An education secured is an advantage gained—a priceless advantage. Come what may—it is a step towards independency—and one great curse of a single female life is its dependency,” she cautions:

When Brontë speaks generally about the lot of single women, she names economic dependency as their “great curse,” but in atomizing her own condition, she places emphasis not on her material condition, but on her intellectual and psychological needs.

Gaskell, too, was sensitive to “the trials of many single women, who waken up some morning to the sudden feeling of the purposelessness (is there such a word) of their lives.” “I think I see everyday how women, deprived of their natural duties as wives & mothers, must look out for other duties if they wish to be at peace,” Gaskell explains to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth
(The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell,
letter 72). Gaskell’s formulation of the problem, that women are appointed by natural order to perform specific duties, differs only marginally from Brontë’s more practical view that a career would be a superfluity for a married woman: “When a woman has a little family to rear and educate and a household to conduct, her hands are full, her vocation is evident—when her destiny isolates her—I suppose she must do what she can—live as she can” (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, May 12, 1848; in
The Letters of Charlotte
Brontë, vol. 2, p. 66).

Gaskell refines her position in a letter to her friend Eliza Fox, an artist. “One thing is clear, Women, must give up living an artist’s life, if home duties are to be paramount. It is different with men, whose home duties are so small a part of their life,” Gaskell muses, coming to the conclusion that “assuredly a blending of the two is desirable. (Home duties and the development of the Individual I mean), which you will say it takes no Solomon to tell you but the difficulty is where and when to make one set of duties subserve and give place to the other”
(The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell,
letter 68). Gaskell’s awkward answer in the Life is to divide Brontë’s existence into “two parallel currents—her life as Currer Bell, the author; her life as Charlotte Brontë, the woman. There were separate duties belonging to each character—not opposing each other; not impossible, but difficult to be reconciled” (p. 272). While Gaskell’s ambivalence about female duty certainly registers here, the fact that she labels the currents “parallel” suggests that she saw the division not as a subordination of one role to the other, but rather as an uneasy coexistence of the two. In addition, Gaskell’s careful delineation between Brontë’s public and private personae has the effect of preserving her professionalism. Thackeray angered Brontë by referring to her publicly as “Jane Eyre,” a conflation that she felt effaced her artistry. She was not Jane Eyre; she had created Jane Eyre.

Gaskell conducted her own literary career with uncompromising professionalism, famously locking horns with Charles Dickens over creative differences when she wrote for his periodical
Household Words.
But her ambivalence about Brontë’s work persisted well into their friendship. “The difference between Miss Brontë and me,” Gaskell explained to a friend, “is that she puts all her naughtiness into her books, and I put all my goodness. I am sure she works off a great deal that is morbid into her writing, and out of her life; and my books are so far better than I am that I often feel... as if I were a hypocrite”
(The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell,
letter 154). Both Brontë and Gaskell saw their work as therapeutic. Gaskell wrote her first novel,
Mary Barton,
in an attempt to exorcize her grief over the death of an infant son. Brontë found relief from loneliness in the life of her imagination after the deaths of her sisters. “ ‘The faculty of imagination lifted me when I was sinking... its active exercise has kept my head above water since; its results cheer me now, for I feel they have enabled me to give pleasure to others. I am thankful to God, who gave me the faculty; and it is for me a part of my religion to defend this gift, and to profit by its possession,’ ” Brontë told Williams (p. 320).

Where Brontë sees writing as a form of solace and pleasure, Gaskell loads it with the corrective function of “normalizing” the self by working out unhealthy energy. Women’s participation in the “hidden world of art” is beneficial if it “keeps them from being morbid,” Gaskell believes, but if “Self is to be the end of exertions, those exertions are unholy, there is not doubt of that—and that is part of the danger in cultivating the Individual Life”
(The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell,
letter 68).

Gaskell feared that Brontë’s desire to write and to be heard was a self-indulgence that was abnormal and not strictly womanly. As Gaskell described it in a letter to a friend, Brontë had a “ ‘desire (almost amounting to illness) of expressing herself in some way’ ” (p. 436).

So desirous was Brontë of recognition, that she sent samples of her work to Robert Southey, England’s poet laureate, just before her twenty-first birthday. Southey recognized her talent, but discouraged her from pursuing a literary career, saying that “ ‘literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be,’ ” and promising that the woman who is “ ‘engaged in her proper duties’ ” . . . is “ ‘less eager for celebrity’ ” (p. 123). Brontë’s response seemed a model of contrition, and it pleased Southey as such, but it was carefully veiled rebellion (p. 125). Her letter fairly drips with sarcasm in the guise of naive acceptance: “ ‘You only warn me against the folly of neglecting real duties, for the sake of imaginative pleasures... You kindly allow me to write... provided I leave undone nothing which I ought to do ... I am afraid, sir, you think me very foolish. I know the first letter I wrote to you was all senseless trash from beginning to end; but I am not altogether the idle dreaming being it would seem to denote’ ” (p. 124).

Brontë’s original letter is not extant, but judging from her response it sounds as if she first approached Southey in an inauthentic voice that she here disowns. Brontë smartly assures Southey that she knows and does her duty She explains that as the daughter of a clergyman of limited income she has been forced out into the world as governess. “ ‘In that capacity,’ ” Brontë affirms, “ ‘I find enough to occupy my thoughts all day long, and my head and hands too, without having a moment’s time for one dream’ ” (p. 124).

Brontë’s avowal of domestic responsibility appeased Southey and was reassuring to Gaskell as well. Throughout the Life Gaskell anxiously repeats that Brontë did not cultivate the literary arts at the expense of the domestic ones. “Never was the claim of any duty, never was the call of another for help, neglected for an instant,” Gaskell protests (p. 246). She often counterweights discussions of Brontë’s professional engagement with examples of her fulfilling her duty to her father and other dependents. “ ‘The right path is that which necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest—which implies the greatest good to others,’ ” Brontë counseled Nussey when she was torn between staying at home to care for her aging mother and going out to “ ‘governess drudgery,’ ” as Brontë called it. “ ‘I recommend you to do what I am trying to do myself,’ ” Brontë adds, showing signs of a character in conflict, a struggle to be dutiful (p. 237).

In Gaskell’s discussion of
Jane Eyre’s
composition history, she relates the anecdote of Brontë’s “breaking off in the full flow of interest and inspiration in her writing,” to “carefully cut out the specks in the potatoes” that had been missed by the aging and nearly blind Tabby (p. 246). Rather than diminishing Brontë’s stature as a professional, as some contend, these details make the reader appreciate the divided nature of her labor. Examples such as this may have won Brontë a belated place in the hearts of Victorians who saw in her sacrifice “the martyr’s pang, and the saint’s victory,” but they impress today’s reader instead with the constraints under which she produced enduring literary classics (Easson, p. 381).

Gaskell, who had to meet the needs of four growing daughters, the manifold responsibilities of a minister’s wife, and the demands of her rescue work, complained to her friend Charles Eliot Norton of the household mundanities that harassed her away from writing:

Although she couches it in the neutral wish for a private library, Gaskell’s point is that if she were a man, and thereby liberated from the domestic responsibilities that divide her focus, she would be a better, or at least a more prolific, writer.

The Brontë—Gaskell correspondence evidences an ongoing conversation about women’s changing role. “ ‘Men begin to regard the position of woman in another light than they used to do,’ ” Brontë observed in her first letter to Gaskell. “ ‘They say... that the amelioration of our condition depends on ourselves. Certainly there are evils which our own efforts will best reach; but as certainly there are other evils—deep-rooted in the foundations of the social system—which no efforts of ours can touch’ ” (pp. 356—357). A letter written a month later suggests that the friends shared what was, for their day, quite a progressive position on women’s labor: “ ‘Why are you and I to think (perhaps I should rather say to feel) so exactly alike on some points that there can be no discussion between us?’ ” Brontë wrote to her future biographer. “ ‘Your words on this paper express my thoughts.’ ” The subject under discussion was Harriet Taylor’s article “The Enfranchisement of Women,” which appeared in the Westminster Review in 1851 and was attributed to J. S. Mill. Brontë opposed many aspects of it, but she embraced its treatment of the question of women’s employment, “ ‘especially’ ” the contention “ ‘that if there be a natural unfitness in women for men’s employment, there is no need to make laws on the subject; leave all careers open; let them try’ ” (p. 391). Oddly, although Brontë’s letter suggests that Gaskell expressed her absolute agreement (in a letter that is now lost), in a letter to J. S. Mill, written after the publication of the Life, Gaskell denies having read the article at all
(The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell,
letter 435).

Whatever general beliefs Gaskell held about the fitness of women’s employment, she justifies Brontë’s literary career by characterizing it as a duty, an “extra responsibility implied by the very fact of her possessing such talents” (p. 273). In so doing, Gaskell uses conventional terminology about women’s place to a radical end. If entering into public discourse can be termed a feminine duty, then it is acceptable, even incumbent upon women to exercise their talents in this arena. Gaskell’s model is an extension of the Victorian ideology of the “angel in the house,” which held that women were to provide a global moral compass by exerting domestic influence. Similarly, to excuse women’s foray into print, Gaskell believes their work should be a vehicle for social improvement.