Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and Virginia Woolf — these are the few women writers the still-patriarchal canons of English literature deign to include in their fold. Of these, the Brontë sisters are perceived to be the most ‘interesting’ figures, in part because of the eccentricities of their personal lives and temperament, and in part because of the searing originality of their literary productions. Although, the sisters are often mentioned together, both public perception and critical estimation have tended to discern a hierarchy among them, with Emily at the top, Charlotte in the middle, and Anne, the poor ‘also-ran’. Whatever their relative literary worth might be, in their lifetime, Charlotte was by far the most successful and well-known, her debut Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847) being a sensational hit with the reading public of the day. April 21, 2016, marked the bicentenary of her birth, an occasion overshadowed by the 400th death anniversary of Shakespeare on April 23.
The public perception of Charlotte has for long been that of the typical Victorian spinster, unassuming in looks and conventional in demeanour, thoughts and feelings. This image of the mousy, unhappy spinster — she married just a year before her death — was created partly by the perceived thematic conventionality of Jane Eyre and partly by the incompetent biography of hers written by Elizabeth Gaskel, a writer who was quite unable to fathom the richness of Charlotte’s nature and genius. In a rebound, recent reappraisals of Charlotte’s life and personality have tended to paint a contrasting picture — that of a wildly passionate, though repressed, woman who was possibly bisexual and whose love for men, requited and otherwise, was shocking in its intensity.
This too is unfortunate because Charlotte, judged solely on the basis of her writings, richly deserves to be revered and remembered for her work. By harping on the unconventional intensities of her personal life, we perpetuate the mistake committed by earlier critics, that of emphasising her life and gender at the cost of her writerly genius. Moreover, the irony implicit in these contrary estimations of Charlotte’s life and personality is that by foregrounding her gender, critics of both camps do grave injustice to the fact that Charlotte, after Austen, proved that women could make fine writers and that women’s experience, authentically told, could form the subject matter of serious literature.
That brings one to another abiding theme in Charlotte Brontë studies — her similarity to or difference from her great predecessor Austen. While Charlotte herself was intolerant of such comparisons and openly critical of Austen’s perceived ‘coldness’, critics have often been at pains to find streaks of Austen in Charlotte. In fact, the latter was advised by G.H. Lewes to be less ‘sentimental’ and referred to Austen as the ideal. This tendency to perceive Charlotte in the light of Austen, arguably the first great woman novelist in English literature, is symptomatic not only of a critical failure to understand the distinctiveness of both authors, it also reflects the lamentable critical proclivity to lump together women’s writings as a separate sub-genre of literature, thereby denying women writers full citizenship in the republic of letters. It is difficult to conceive of two novelists more different from each other than Austen and Charlotte.
While Austen’s main concern was social criticism, Charlotte was engaged primarily in sounding the depths of the mind and its emotions.
Social critique did feature in Charlotte too, admittedly, but only as a by-product of her main job, which was to delineate the passions of the woman’s heart.
Jane Eyre , Charlotte’s masterpiece, is one of the finest examples in English literature of a novelistic rendition of an intelligent, ardent woman’s struggles with her own passions, in conflict with social mores and with her own moral nature. The fiery conviction and lyrical intensity with which Charlotte presented the material — the story of a thinking and feeling woman’s struggles to realise her passionate, honest nature within the straits of her womanly destiny — were utterly new to English literature, and the novel remains, to this day, the benchmark of perfection in the representation of female subjectivity.
Jane, the “plain” and “obscure” governess, falls for her rich and eccentric employer, Mr. Rochester, who comes to return her affection. Jane, however, refuses his offer of marriage when she learns that he is a married man who keeps his insane wife locked up in the attic. The way the impoverished and yearning Jane struggles against her own heart and rejects Rochester’s suit brings out her impassioned sense of self-respect and great moral rectitude. In so doing, her inner conflicts establish Charlotte’s prime achievement — that of presenting women as subjects fully capable as both moral and emotional agents and, therefore, fully human. In Victorian England, still accustomed to perceiving women as a sub-species, this was no mean feat. Charlotte’s other two published novels — Shirley and Villette — continued the vogue of fiction dealing truthfully with women’s inner experiences.
Despite writing candid novels about women’s psycho-erotic lives, however, Charlotte did not write what some critics now are calling precursors to ‘chick-lit’. Indeed, her achievement as a writer consists in doing precisely the opposite — in lending moral respectability and literary gravitas to fictional renditions of women’s subjectivity. Her novels are nothing if not lofty literature: there is nothing prurient or immature about them. Currer Bell —the pseudonym Charlotte adopted while publishing Jane Eyre — should be remembered not as a woman writer, nor indeed as a woman writer who failed to be an Austen, but simply as a novelist with great and original gifts for storytelling, emotional realism, and moral searchings. Her greatness consists in being a novelist with a poetic spirit, a storyteller who was a lyricist of the female heart.
Suparna Banerjee teaches English at Krishnath College, Berhampore.
