Fatherhood, Authority, and British Reading Culture, 1831-1907

Melissa Shields Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317136293
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Publishing
• Index: Literature

During a period when the idea of fatherhood was in flux and individual fathers sought to regain a cohesive collective identity, debates related to a father's authority were negotiated and resolved through competing documents. Melissa Shields Jenkins analyzes the evolution of patriarchal authority in nineteenth-century culture, drawing from extra-literary and non-narrative source material as well as from novels. Arguing that Victorian novelists reinvent patriarchy by recourse to conduct books, biography, religious manuals, political speeches, and professional writing in the fields of history and science, Jenkins offers interdisciplinary case studies of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Meredith, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Samuel Butler, and Thomas Hardy. Jenkins's book contributes to our understanding of the part played by fathers in the Victorian cultural imagination, and sheds new light on the structures underlying the Victorian novel.

PART ITraditional Authority

“eminent wisdom or virtue, real or supposed …”

1 Elizabeth Gaskell Writes a Father’s Life

DOI: 10.4324/9781315582016-2

Although many scenes in Elizabeth Gaskell’s works resemble moments in Patrick Brontë’s writing, I begin with one key scene that illustrates the crucial distinctions between the two writers’ views on patriarchal power. In The Maid of Killarney (1818), Patrick Brontë’s patriarch fires a pistol into the Irish moors for romantic emphasis, to impress upon his visitors the sublime effects of the echoing hills in his native land (84). His guns come in handy later, as the Captain defends his home from a band of robbers at the novel’s climax (107). Patrick Brontë’s armed patriarch protects his family and conveys the glory of his country. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s hands, the armed father symbolizes more sinister forces. The father figure who shot his pistol for romantic effect becomes an image of uncontrolled, nonverbal wrath. In her biography of his daughter, Charlotte, Gaskell argues that Patrick Brontë “did not speak when he was annoyed or displeased, but worked off his volcanic wrath by firing pistols out the back door in rapid succession.” She portrays a father whose anger is so primal and pre-verbal that, regardless of how it is manifested—in breaking furniture, cutting dresses, or shooting pistols—it “still was speechless” (Life of Charlotte Brontë 42).

Gaskell’s presentation is ideologically charged, and inflected by her approach to novel-writing. The libel accusations Gaskell faced after the first edition of the biography left her stunned and chastised (L. Miller 85–6). Servants in the Brontë household felt they had been improperly characterized, and the married Lady Scott objected to Gaskell’s unflinching portrayal of Branwell Brontë’s indiscretions while working in her household. After Lady Scott’s objections, the Athenaeum retracted early praise of the biography. Gaskell complained to George Smith in early August 1857, “Every one who has been harmed in this unlucky book complains of something” (Gaskell, Letters 463). On the worst of the charges, Patrick Brontë defended Gaskell (J. Barker, Brontës 804–5). As a nod to this favor, she wrote to George Smith to “take out the pistol shooting” (Letters 467–8) in the subsequent edition, to remove the story of Patrick Brontë firing his pistol to work “off his volcanic wrath” (Life 42).

Some accounts of Elizabeth Gaskell’s composition process declare that Ellen Nussey commissioned the work, while others focus on Elizabeth Gaskell’s personal determination to compose the biography (Hughes and Lund, Victorian Publishing 125; Peterson, Becoming 134). Christine Krueger’s feminist reading suggests that Gaskell hatched the plan herself, “fearing only the wrath of Patrick Brontë” (Krueger 221). In fact, Charlotte Brontë’s father was an essential part of the conception and execution of the biography. He shared materials with Gaskell, and offered editorial advice—some solicited, some unwelcome. So far, however, critics have overlooked his influence on Gaskell, and thus overlooked an aspect of her responses, across her career, to patriarchal authority.

Spooked by a pamphlet that sensationalized his daughter’s home life, Patrick Brontë had a specific request for Gaskell as she wrote. In an anxious letter written to Gaskell in November 1856, he wrote that he had “no great objection” to “[t]he book-making gentry” who made him into a “somewhat extraordinary and eccentrick personage … admitting they can make a penny by it” (Lock and Dixon 503). Here, he argues that “book-makers” of all kinds borrow from the conventions of fiction. Pamphleteers, like novelists, know which “characters” sell books. In describing hopes of a more sympathetic characterization from Gaskell, Patrick Brontë shows his awareness of Gaskell’s novels:

But the truth of the matter is—that I am, in some respects, a kindred likeness to the father of Margaret, in “North and South”—peaceable, feeling, sometimes thoughtful—and generally well-meaning. Yet unlike him in one thing—by occasionally getting into a satirical vein—when I am disposed to dissect, and analyze, human character, and human nature, studying closely its simples and compounds, like a curious surgeon—And being in early life thrown on my own resources … I may not be so ready as some are, to be a follower of any man, or a worshipper of conventualities or forms, which may possibly to superficial observers, acquire me the character, of a little eccentricity. (P. Brontë, Letters 249)

Patrick Brontë requests a formal intervention. He feels misrepresented by pamphleteers who profess to write fact, and appeals to a fiction writer for a more accurate representation. He asks Gaskell to recast him as one of her characters. He feels an affinity to her literary father figures, men who are invariably misunderstood and ostracized within her novels.

One objective of this chapter is to track Gaskell’s response to his request, as she creates a pivotal role for the fiery Irishman in her biography, and re-creates him again in her final, unfinished novel Wives and Daughters (1865), which features a surgeon of Scottish heritage as the father of her motherless heroine. The first portrayal is a replica of the pamphleteer’s slander; the second portrayal is a recuperation. Another objective of the chapter is to understand one of Gaskell’s most pervasive responses to a father’s traditional authority. Despite calling himself no “worshipper of conventualities or forms” (P. Brontë, Letters 249), Patrick Brontë approached Elizabeth Gaskell in hopes of imposing system and order. He wanted her to create a coherent story out of the letters, clippings, and scraps of juvenilia he had collected. Gaskell could not comply with his request for a seamless story, however, without playing against her narrative tendencies. What Patrick Brontë sought to pull together, Gaskell sought to break apart. Patsy Stoneman argues that Gaskell’s works “show in sensational terms the devastating effects of fathers who try to control their sons without cultivating personal bonds” (Stoneman, “Gaskell” 137). Similarly, Jenny Uglow calls Gaskell’s fathers “ambivalent figures, whose strength conceals weakness and who are viewed by their children—especially their daughters—with mingled tenderness and resentment, longing and anger” (54). In Stoneman’s response, we see Gaskell’s enduring interest in the father as villain. In Uglow’s recourse to paradoxical phrases (“tenderness and resentment, longing and anger”), she registers Gaskell’s creation of fictional fathers who are in themselves fragmentary.

The fragmentation of Gaskell’s father figures is intimately connected with the most common subject within her works—the relationship between a daughter’s life narrative and a father’s intervention in it. One would be hard-pressed to find a text by Gaskell in which the patriarch is not a narrative problem that needs to be solved—an incomplete personage who fuels narrative by his very incompleteness. Gaskell’s pervasive technique is not unchanging, however. Writing The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), and dealing with its generic challenges, and its legal ones, forced Gaskell to reconsider the nature of her own narrative authority. The biography becomes an important hinge on which an entire career turns.¹ She reconsiders the relationship between fact and fiction within literary culture, and reconsiders how the child’s story should respond to paternal demands for “system.” Across her oeuvre, Gaskell makes new decisions about how a father’s life (or Life) should be arranged.

¹ Aina Rubenius’s The Woman Question in Mrs. Gaskell’s Life and Works (Harvard, 1950) was one of the first works to claim The Life of Charlotte Brontë as a turning point in Gaskell’s career. The tendency, writes Christine Krueger, is to claim that Gaskell’s “newly awakened feminist consciousness released her from the obligation to write social problem novels … and write art for art’s sake” (Krueger 227). I join Krueger in defining the shift differently. Krueger claims that Gaskell is still writing against patriarchal authority, in books that “fracture or deny the recuperative closures by which challenges to patriarchal authority could be domesticated” (228). I argue instead Gaskell is attempting reconciliation and closure, both in her past treatments of patriarchs, and in her treatment of the limitations of past narrative approaches.

The first two chapters in this book, united under the header “traditional authority,” tackle a father’s presence as character, but also as author and editor. Max Weber’s category of “traditional authority”—as distinguished from charismatic authority and legal-rational authority—discusses allegiance and obedience to “the person of the chief who occupies the traditionally sanctioned position of authority and who is (within its sphere) bound by tradition” (Weber 1.216). One element that renders such authority tenuous is that “the obligation of obedience is a matter of personal loyalty” (1.216), and this personal loyalty is a result of “a common upbringing” (1.227). In Weber’s three categories of “pure types of authority,” then, traditional authority is the most straightforwardly patriarchal. This form of domination is often embodied in “gerontocracy” and “patriarchalism” (1.231), or power based in age and lineage.

As I outlined in the book’s introduction, John Stuart Mill writes in “Spirit of the Age” (1831) that in a time of stability all tend to “bow down, with a submission more or less implicit, to the authority of superior minds, the interpreters of divine will, or of their superiors in rank and station” (27). As with Weber, Mill connects his first category with age, his second with charisma, and his third with wealth and office. The latter two categories are the subjects of parts II and III of this book. In Part I, I interrogate what Mill means by “the authority of superior minds,” alongside Weber’s category of traditional authority.² Stable societies revere ancestors and bow to the wisdom derived from experience on earth; an age of transition shows “disregard of the authority of ancestors” (29). Mill looks to the Victorian era to come as an important period of transition in which “Mankind will not be led by their old maxims, nor by their old guides; and they will not choose either their opinions or their guides as they have done before” (Mill 5).

² Patrick Brontë was an “interpreter of divine will” in his office as Anglican minister. However, in this chapter I am most interested in the tools he used to assert his influence over his daughters and over Gaskell, as opposed to over his congregation; those tools were secular as much as spiritual. The categories, of course, overlap and affect each other, as I will discuss in detail in the book’s conclusion. Mill’s categories reinforce or undercut each other: “When an opinion is sanctioned by all these authorities, or by any one of them, the others not opposing, it becomes the received opinion” (Mill, “Spirit” 27).

Books, Mill writes, are the greatest threat to authority based on age and generation, since the knowledge within books is “open to the young man as to the old” (Mill, Spirit 31). Gaskell unmasks the role of tradition in the perpetuation of literary conventions as well as domestic ones. Gaskell does so by refiguring fiction and biography.

Patrick Brontë's Plotting, and Gaskell’s Plots

The last decades have led critics to reconsider Gaskell’s version of Patrick Brontë. John Lock and W.T. Dixon’s A Man of Sorrow (1965) was the first work in a series of attempted recuperations.³ For example, Frances Beer describes Juliet Barker’s 1994 biography as the opposite of Gaskell’s biography, claiming that the former idealizes the patriarch while the latter vilifies him (77). Others reinsert Patrick Brontë into the story of his daughters via a focus on his writing life. His first purchase after taking the A.B. degree, Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), is mentioned by every modern critic who wants to find traces of the father’s imagination in the daughters (Barker, Brontës 13). Robert Polhemus argues in Lot’s Daughters (2005), for example, that “the key to understanding the soul that generated his daughters’ genius is to see that he loved the world of secular education, politics, and military power; loved the flesh of erotic life, and loved the dazzling, dangerous words of profane literature” (143). This vision of Patrick Brontë startles when contrasted with the comparatively staid content of his writing. Patrick Brontë left a handful of poems, two novels—The Maid of Killarney (1818) and The Cottage in the Wood (1815)—and many religious writings. Since all of these works were in the family library (“Haworth” 24), they are occasionally connected to specific works by the Brontë sisters. Polhemus calls The Cottage in the Wood “virtually unreadable” and “banal,” but says that it is “a key source for Jane Eyre” (144). His 1818 novel The Maid of Killarney is widely discussed as an influence on Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Barker, Brontës 78; Barker, “Haworth” 24–5; Chitham 118, 122).

³ Other pivotal continuations that I will discuss in this chapter include Juliet Barker’s The Brontës (1994), Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth (2003), and Robert Polhemus’s chapter on the Brontës in Lot’s Daughters (2005).

Patrick Brontë’s works are rarely studied today, but they provide insight into Gaskell’s particular challenges when writing his daughter’s biography. Warnings about the fantastical novel—the novel that entertains more than instructs, and has grounding in the world of the imagination more than the world of the real—fill his volumes of poetry and fiction. Most of his comments about writing support assumptions about his aversion to the sensational, romantic, or improbable. The prefatory notes of The Cottage in the Wood: Or, The Art of Becoming Rich and Happy (1815) criticize the “sensual novelist” for replacing “probability” with the “miraculous” (102). He calls these novelists, and their readers, “beings of depraved appetites and sickly imaginations” who “are diligently and zealously employed in creating an imaginary world, which they can never inhabit, only to make the real world, with which they must necessarily be conversant, gloomy and insupportable” (104). His various commentaries about writing emphasize order. He calls for a simple moral message, a clear and accessible style, and minimal rhetorical flourishes. His preface to Cottage Poems (1811) characterizes them as “not above the comprehension of the meanest capacities” (vii). He claims to have “aimed at simplicity, plainness, and perspicuity, both in manner and style” (viii). His stance in the prefatory materials extends to the works themselves. “The Happy Cottagers” describes the relationship he sees between fact and the novelist’s art:

I sing of real life;

All else, is empty show:

To those who read, a source

Of much unreal woe:

Pollution, too,

Through novel-veins,

Oft fills the mind,

With guilty stains. (21)

Brontë presents the epic “I sing” only to deflate it. He sings not of “a man,” “wrath,” or of “arms,” but of “real life.” His speaker fears fanciful writing because “empty show” can be dangerous. The reader of immoral novels absorbs their taint passively and unconsciously, as she takes in polluted air or acquires an infection of the blood. Brontë imagines a coven of melancholy readers washing imaginary spots off of soiled hands. He sees his own writing as a corrective and a warning.

Gaskell reinforces this image of caution crushing creativity. The father of writers seems, to Gaskell, unimpressive as a writer and unaware of his children’s talents. Patrick Brontë’s admiration for Gaskell’s writing was not matched by her feelings about his use of words. Of his failure to penetrate his children’s inner lives, Gaskell says, “He says now that he suspected it all along, but his suspicions could take no exact form, as all he was certain of was, that his children were perpetually writing—and not writing letters” (Gask...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Forms of Paternal Authority
• PART I TRADITIONAL AUTHORITY
• 1 Elizabeth Gaskell Writes a Father’s Life
• 2 A Father’s Conduct: George Meredith and the Book-within-a-Book
• PART II CHARISMATIC AUTHORITY
• 3 “An Attitude of Decent Reverence”: Thackeray and the Father at Prayer
• 4 “Lay Hold of Them by Their Fatherhood”: George Eliot, Persuasion, and Abstraction
• PART III LEGAL-RATIONAL AUTHORITY
• 5 Samuel Butler at the Museum
• 6 “Preserve the Shadow of the Form”: Hardy’s Palimpsests
• Conclusion: The Father as “Type”
• Bibliography
• Index