A Companion to the Brontës

Diane Long Hoeveler, Deborah Denenholz Morse

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781119234678, 9781118404942
• eBook ISBN: 9781118405475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A Companion to the Brontës brings the latest literary research and theory to bear on the life, work, and legacy of the Brontë family.

• Includes sections on literary and critical contexts, individual texts, historical and cultural contexts, reception studies, and the family's continuing influence
• Features in-depth articles written by well-known and emerging scholars from around the world
• Addresses topics such as the Gothic tradition, film and dramatic adaptation, psychoanalytic approaches, the influence of religion, and political and legal questions of the day – from divorce and female disinheritance, to worker reform
• Incorporates recent work in Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, and race and gender studies

Part I
Imaginative Forms and Literary/Critical Contexts

1
Experimentation and the Early Writings

Christine Alexander

Juvenilia, or youthful writings, are by their nature experimental. They represent a creative intervention whereby a novice explores habits of thought and behavior, ideas about society and personal space, and modes of literary expression. It is a truism to say that youth is a time of exploration and testing. Any child psychologist will tell you that the teenage years in particular are a time of trial and error, a time when limits are tested in order to push boundaries and gain new adult freedoms. Juvenilia embody this same journey toward so-called maturity, involving the imitation and examination of the adult world. And because early writing is generally a private occupation, practiced without fear of parental interference or the constraints of literary censorship, the young writer is free to interrogate current political, social, and personal discourses. As writing that embraces this creative and intellectual freedom, Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia are a valuable source for investigating the literary experimentation of an emerging author seeking to establish a writing self.

This chapter will examine the ways that Charlotte Brontë used her authorial role to engage with the world around her and to test her agency in life and literature. The first focus will be on the importance of a self-contained, paracosmic, or imaginary world for facilitating experiment and engagement with political, social, and historical events. The second will be on the way Brontë experimented with print culture and narrative to construct a self-reflexive, dialectic method that allowed her to interrogate both the “real” world and her paracosmic world. Her intense initial collaboration with her brother Branwell—“rivalry” is perhaps more appropriate to describe the competitive tone of their writing—laid the foundations for Charlotte’s conversational method; but she soon experimented in early adolescence with multiple dialogues among her own characters and authorial personas that led to a habit of discourse that is both self-reflexive and inter-textual. Finally, the chapter will explore dialogic experimentation in Brontë’s later novelettes, where she is testing not only her heroines’ moral identities but also her own emotional, intellectual, and social parameters. Her writing interrogates the self and enacts elements of the bildungsroman in an effort to gain greater psychological realism.

Paracosmic Experimentation and Colonial Expansion

Crucial to Brontë’s experimentation as a young author is her creation of an autonomous imaginary world or paracosm¹ as a distinctive representation of adult or Other experience. Paracosms constitute alternative universes in miniature of the real literary, social, and political world: “spaces for construing and ‘playing out’ selective real and fantastic events and ideas circulating in the contemporary British consciousness” (Cohen and MacKeith 22). They are a particular feature of play in literary culture, usually practiced in youth. Brontë herself called the process “making out” (Stevens 160), and together with her siblings² she created the imaginary world of Glass Town, a federation of kingdoms that later included the new kingdom of Angria. Over a period of some twenty years, Brontë participated in and developed a complex world of interrelated characters and events that both mirror and imaginatively reorder knowledge of the “real” world she had gleaned from books, magazines, newspapers, and her limited experience of life. This imaginary world was readily committed to paper, and the resulting manuscripts document Charlotte Brontë’s intense intellectual engagement with life beyond her parsonage home. The paracosm allowed her to participate in events not normally encountered in childhood. As a self-contained world, it also afforded her the space to experiment with initiative and power she was otherwise denied as an adolescent girl. In a private world shared only with siblings, she could become author and creator: she called herself “Chief Genius Tallii,” one of four Brontë Chief Genii (modeled on the Arabian Nights and the Greek gods), who presided over a virtual world by protecting heroes, directing mortal affairs, and intervening in the plot of their imaginary world for fun. As author, she could “play” with power and direct social and political events.³

The 1830s, when the bulk of her early manuscripts were written, were years of enormous social and intellectual ferment in Britain. Brontë’s paracosmic world expresses the tremendous energy of this post-revolutionary period of empire building and expansion by land and sea. It also allowed her to enact in her writing the excitement of the growing periodical press, especially Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the personality cults it fueled. As an all-powerful narrative “Genius,” she could appropriate current events and create with immunity conversations that can be seen to function “as an index to historical culture” (Chandler 282). The genesis of this engagement with political, social, and literary culture of the period was the “Young Men’s Play” and several other plays that the Brontë children acted out physically, before committing the results to paper several years later. Eventually these plays coalesced into the paracosmic worlds of Glass Town and Angria.

Together with her siblings, and chiefly in partnership with Branwell, Brontë experimented with exploration and territorial expansion, testing her own version of military and mercantile enterprise. The catalyst for the Young Men’s Play was the purchase of twelve toy soldiers for Branwell’s twelfth birthday in June 1826 (Charlotte was thirteen). Inspired by their father’s interest in the Peninsular Wars (1807–1814) and guided by newspaper reports and journal articles on exploration and colonialism, the Brontë children sent the “Twelves” (as they called the soldiers) to discover new territory and establish a British colony in an imaginary Africa. On the basis of an article in Blackwoods, with an accompanying map (Brontë 1991, 2[1]: frontispiece), they settled their soldiers around the delta of the Niger in West Africa. Their well-used Grammar of General Geography by Revd. J. Goldsmith reinforced European attitudes to territorial expansion and the need to civilize the “many blank spaces on the earth,” as Joseph Conrad’s Marlow puts it in Heart of Darkness.⁴ Thus, the four leaders of the Twelves, sponsored by each of the four Brontë creators, become rulers of a federation of lands centered on the city of Great Glass Town (later called Verdopolis). As colonizers, they encounter the indigenous Ashanti and war ensues, inspired by reports of the Ashantee Wars of the 1820s. Complex private lives are invented for the “chief men”: the Duke of Wellington (Charlotte); Napoleon, later Sneaky (Branwell); Parry (Emily), and Ross (Anne), characters modeled on the two greatest antagonists of recent history in Europe and two famous Arctic explorers. As soon as their heroes had been given identities, it was fitting that they should be provided with books, both to entertain them and to record their progress. A written culture replaced the children’s physical play. Miniature booklets to match the size of the wooden toy soldiers were produced, beginning the richest record we have of youthful literary activity.

What can be seen at first as a paracosmic exercise in colonial aggression and European expansion gradually becomes a critique of Europe itself and in particular of France and the various “kingdoms” of the British Isles. In landscape, social custom, and culture, Wellingtonsland is Charlotte’s Tory stronghold in the south of England; Parrysland represents the north with its Yorkshire puddings, stone walls, and dull landscapes;⁵ Sneakysland is the equivalent of Scotland; and Rossesland is Wales. There is also Frenchyland with its capital Paris, an island to the south and the political base of the Glass Town Republican Party. Paris with its “dark Revolutionary Coteries” is Branwell’s domain, constantly satirized by Charlotte for its “wickedness, rioting, idleness and grandeur,” opinions she has gleaned from the Tory Blackwoods (Alexander and Smith 2003, 316). The sadistic French character “Pigtail” is typical of the “low villains” who terrorize Paris and prey on orphan children; and the foppish narrator of Charlotte’s “Journal of a Frenchman”⁶ is ridiculed for his vanity: “I first washed myself in rose-water with transparent soap, then got myself shaved till my chin was smoother than satin: next my cheeks received a fresh bloom by the addition of a little rouge.” Etiquette at the Tuileries Palace is critiqued with considerable aplomb, and Charlotte amusingly adopts a pro-republican stance, mocking Branwell’s republican enthusiasm following his reading of Sir Walter Scott’s sympathetic Life of Napoleon:

I found that the greater part of the company were of the ancien regime & that Bonaparte was almost universally detested. this a little disconcerted me for I had almost adored him but nevertheless I heard all with complaisance & said nothing. Wine however soon heated my head & loosened my tongue. it waged glibely about the glory of the French arms, old womeish Boubons—&c. &c &c with many other things that I should now be glad to recall. Some old Prigs laughed at me as a young enthusiast & anger having gained ascendency over Reason.

The fourteen-year-old creator of this “young enthusiast,” as Brontë calls her Frenchman, was later to address the conflict between passion and reason in Jane Eyre.

As Carol Bock (2002, 34) argues, a “striking feature of the Brontës’ early writing is its stunning representation of the culture of their times.” Action is centered in Verdopolis, the great capital city of the Glass Town Federation, an imaginary London based on the theatrical architectural paintings of John Martin, whose engravings hung on the walls of the Brontës’ home. Its name suggests a city of glass, insubstantial, and translucent (originally derived from “Verreopolis … being compounded of A Greek & French word to that effect”: Brontë 1987, 1: 298). However, we are assured it is not simply a dream world but “the commercial metropolis of the world,” a working city where “lofty mills and warehouses piled up storey above storey to the very clouds, surmounted by high tower-like chimneys vomiting forth the huge columns of thick black smoke” (Brontë 1987, 1: 139). Visions of glittering aristocrats and their entourages amidst public buildings “resplendent with grace, symmetry, majesty and proportion” are juxtaposed beside vignettes of strike action by disgruntled workers, protesting against one of “those vile rumbling mills,” its master, and “the incessant crash of its internal machinery” (Brontë 1987, 2[1]: 26–27). Such scenes are depicted in terms reminiscent of the attack on Rawfolds Mill in Liversedge (11 April 1812) during the Luddite Riots; they foreshadow the raid on Robert Moore’s mill in Shirley. The central incident of another story reenacts the “Peterloo” massacre of 1819 (Alexander and Smith 2003, 366–367). Characters and incidents from the Peninsula Wars, assassination attempts, Chartist and other insurrections, the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, concerns over the price of cotton on either side of the Atlantic, and debates between the Americans John Quincy Adams and General Andrew Jackson, questi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Imaginative Forms and Literary/Critical Contexts
• Part II: Texts
• Part III: Reception Studies
• Part IV: Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Contexts
• Part V: Afterlives of the Brontës
• Index
• End User License Agreement