‘And how do you feel about this character that is happy to lock his wife up?’ I ask Claire.
‘Well, what he was doing was legal then.’
‘Was it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I didn’t know that. So, a husband could lock his wife up?’
‘Yeah, private incarceration was permitted. You could be locked up in an asylum or locked up at home.’
‘Didn’t it require a doctor’s certificate or some legal process?’
‘Only if you wanted to certify them as insane.’
‘But you wouldn’t need to do that to legally incarcerate them?’
Claire explains that Bertha was Rochester’s legal property at that point. And therefore she was his in every way, and he could do what he wanted to her. It is one of the interesting aspects of the book, that we only ever get his account. Claire talks about Rochester’s long monologue where he explains who and what Bertha is.
‘When I’ve taught that in the past, I get students to look at it critically and ask, how reliable is this? We only have his word, and he wants Jane to pity him.’
‘And it works.’
‘Yeah. But to what extent do we believe that Bertha is mad in a way that warrants his treatment, such that his actions have a bizarre kindness to them by not putting her into an asylum? Or to what extent do we think she has been driven mad by the circumstances of their life together, having been removed from her home and brought to England from abroad?’
‘Because if you were incarcerated in that way, and you weren’t mad to begin with, you would, understandably, start to exhibit signs of mental illness.’
We stare up at the tower. It’s quite hard on a beautiful summer’s day like today, when the lattice windows reflect the cerulean sky above, and the sun makes everything shine, to imagine the hall as a place of incarceration, but on a cold winter’s day the isolation of the tower would be haunting.
In her review, Rigby wrote that ‘the popularity of Jane Eyre is a proof how deeply the love for illegitimate romance is implanted in our nature’. I ask Claire if she thinks that there is something transgressive in the very act of love. She shrugs.
‘I mean in the sense that it disrupts the status quo. It is a force of disorder. If you like, the ordered, rational Apollonian world is competing with this darker side of desire and passion and irrationality. It’s a dark force in a way, isn’t it?’
‘I guess it is. But I’m not sure I’d characterise Jane and Rochester’s love for each other in that way. I mean, she’s not obsessing about him all the time. She’s fond and respectful of him.’
‘And her feelings grow over time. It’s a gradual process.’
‘And it’s also to do with the fact that she speaks freely to him in a way that she doesn’t with other people. There is a mutual respect.’
‘Yeah, he respects her and in fact is influenced by her.’
‘I guess the other thing about illegitimate love here, and what Rigby is gesturing towards, is the idea of the class difference between them. This overstepping of boundaries. Not only does she fall in love with her employer, but they are from very different classes. They should not be together – that crossing of class parameters – and that unsettles Victorian boundaries.’
‘But unlike Cathy, Rochester doesn’t feel like it would degrade him to marry Jane.’
‘I think Rochester is playfully deviant. He is part of an aristocratic world but doesn’t have the same airs and graces. Also, part of his narrative is that he loves Jane and that trumps the issues of class.’
I met Claire at the Emily Brontë conference the previous year when she presented a paper that discussed queer theory, and it was interesting to see quite a few people misunderstand it, thinking it meant specifically theory related to queer sexuality.
‘Which was weird because I said at the time, I’m not saying that.’
‘As a theory, it’s intentionally provocative isn’t it?’
‘Yes, and I’m being provocative with it. And I’m addressing a section of Brontë fans and scholars who see Rochester in very straight heterosexual terms.’
In the essay, Claire says that the book includes ‘narratives of homosexual and the homoerotic, tourist masculinities, expressions of feminine fatherhood, tender expressions of manliness and male nursing, queer heterosexual courtship and feminine masculinities’. Which is quite a list. It made me wonder to what extent this was Charlotte’s intention? When I first started reading the essay, I was rather sceptical, but by the end of it I was completely convinced. One of the things that really persuaded me was Byron and the obvious connections between Rochester and Byron, and Charlotte’s fandom and interest in Byron. Which makes, perhaps, Charlotte a much more radical thinker than what we often give her credit for. If her interest in Byron goes beyond the texts to the cult of Byron, then she is attracted to someone who is a political radical and who supported the Luddites, who is openly bisexual, and who deliberately defies the conventions of his day.
‘It’s all there in the text. He does dress up as a woman, he does identify as a bachelor, he does nurse Mason, he is doing all of those things, but I didn’t come to those ideas thinking about Charlotte and her love of Bryon. Byron came later, when I was working up my ideas writing it.’
Claire goes on to say that ‘Rochester’s “identity crisis” is evident through the complex gender and sexual politics at play: here is an aristocratic, patriarchal man misrepresenting himself as a bachelor and dressed in women’s clothes, passing himself off as an older woman in an attempt to seduce a younger female’. And when you put it like that, the strangeness of what’s going on in the book really comes across.
‘Have you looked back at that scene when he is dressed as a gypsy?’ Claire says.
‘Yes, very recently in fact. Jane is seduced by the performance, isn’t she?’
‘Yeah, she’s completely seduced. There is something uncanny going on there.’
‘It’s like she’s under a spell. Because he doesn’t speak like a gypsy. He speaks like Mr Rochester,’ I say.
‘Exactly.’
‘And what’s interesting about that performance is that he is dressed like a gypsy but not acting like a gypsy. Why do you think he does that? Why doesn’t he attempt to complete the performance?’
‘I think he’s being playful,’ Claire says.
‘Does he want her to know it is him?’
‘I think he does ultimately. I think he’s trying to get information off her. He is testing the water. He is seducing her, but it is a very unconventional approach.’
‘Is it fair to say that it is one of the most unconventional seduction scenes in Victorian literature?’ I say.
‘I think so, yes. And with one or two exceptions, it is always missed out. And if you look at the way Rochester is portrayed in those adaptations, he has a bigger house, and they make him more conventional and traditional, a romantic hero.’
‘If you leave that cross-dressing scene out, you lose some of the peculiarity.’
‘Yes, and then you locate the seduction scenes in more conventional places,’ Claire says.
It’s interesting to think how film and TV adaptations perhaps change how we approach a literary text. How our original conception of it may be altered by what we see on the screen.
In the scene that immediately follows the cross-dressing gypsy one, Mason is attacked by Bertha. Rochester describes Mason as an ‘intimate’ friend. And Jane concludes that theirs must have been a ‘curious friendship’. The scene where Rochester nurses Mason and attends to his wounds is very intimate and homoerotically charged. He unbuttons his shirt and tends to him, taking on a conventionally feminine role, and Claire talks about how nursing was an intensely eroticised practice. Which is an idea that is still around today, albeit confined to amateur porn sites.
The other thing to note is that all this takes place in Mr Rochester’s bedroom, and one of the most taboo things that Charlotte does is put her governess in the mas
ter’s bedroom very early on. They are both there in their nighties. Bedrooms have a permissive, suggestive element. At this point, Rochester stops attending to Mason’s wounds and goes off to fetch the doctor. Jane then takes on Rochester’s role. She immediately becomes his surrogate, almost like they are functioning in the same way. Claire goes on to say that ‘his compassionate actions are healing and the physical attentiveness creates a homoerotic effect that deepens the bonds between the men, something gestured to when Rochester opens Mason’s shirt’.
‘Once I read that, it became impossible for me not to think of that scene as homoerotic.’
‘I’ve totally queered it for you,’ Claire says.
‘You have.’
We sit and drink more water. I suggest, despite the sweltering heat, that we carry on with our journey. We walk up through the woods where North Lees campsite is situated, and then climb the moors below the escarpment. We pass boulders, some of which have been carved for grindstones and millstones but abandoned half-finished. We reach the trig point at High Neb, which marks the highest point in the area, and walk along the edge. The ridge sweeps and curves across the moor, forming a rugged edge of granite that acts as a step and barrier between lower and upper moor.
The sky is watercoloured with a few pillowy clouds that the sun is burning through, but most of it is clear. Loose rocks sit on top of the edge, like leftovers, tossed-up flotsam. Little pools of water glisten in the undulations of the stones. Claire bends down and scoops up some of the water in her open palm, dousing her back and head in an attempt to cool down. Rock stacks lean improbably, threatening to tumble over. If they fell, the weight of any one of these stones would pulverise a passer-by. Verdant fern and moss fret the edges of the rocks. This is the Hope Valley. The air is blustery but peaceful, which we are grateful for as we stand in its flow, enjoying the feeling of the breeze as it cools and soothes.
I did a similar walk a few months before with another Victorian scholar, Dr Merrick Burrow, who specialises in the late Victorian era, only in the opposite direction, walking along Fiddler’s Elbow, joining a path that goes past the Cowper Stone and a trig point before arriving at the impressive ridge of Stanage Edge proper. And on that day, it was a Sunday, there were climbers everywhere, dressed in red and blue and yellow. Hang-gliders gyred in the air above us, soaring like buzzards, their legs and bodies cocooned in pods so that they looked like maggots glued to the underside of butterflies. But today there are hardly any other walkers here, and we have the edge to ourselves. It is uncannily quiet, the escarpment creating a soundproof ridge between us and post-industrial Sheffield. We find a cool rock to perch on and take in the scene.
We can see for miles around. The view, of green moorland and darker wooded areas lower down in the valley, encompasses Mam Tor and Kinder Scout, overlooking Derwent, Moscar and Strines Moors. We can see Win Hill and Lose Hill, supposedly named after a seventh-century battle for which there isn’t any historical basis. Sheffield is only a few miles to our east, but there is no indication of it up here. The rock tops are white-grey and sparkle with quartz crystals in the blazing sun.
It feels almost rude to break the silence, but I say, ‘You talk about the way Rochester is with Adele.’ Adele is a French child to whom Jane is a governess at Thornfield Hall. Mr Rochester refuses to accept that he is Adele’s biological father but adopts her anyway.
‘Because, again, it is so unconventional. Particularly when he says that she’s not my child.’
‘And if that’s true, that she’s not his child, and his only evidence is that she doesn’t look like him, which isn’t necessarily proof, that he would voluntarily take on this role …’
‘It’s incredibly compassionate, isn’t it? He’s a man of feeling.’
‘You say, “Jane Eyre gestures to a range of queer masculinities in varied forms and guises, ranging from the overt (Rochester’s feminine masculinity when cross-dressing or his adoptive parenting) to the indirect and suggestive (his touristic masculinity and homosocial friendships).” All of those things … I mean, that’s a list of positive attributes.’
‘And that’s what I was trying to do. I think they are, and we should see them in that way. They are all positive, and this book is far more radical than previously acknowledged.’
We sit in silence for a little longer, before continuing on our way. As we approach Higger Tor, we disturb lapwing and curlew. A stack of rocks is piled up like loaves of fresh baked bread. Further on, another stack resembles a turtle as it climbs out of the water, its head resting on a rock pillow. The stones are striped with layers of sediment, accumulated over geological time, and patched with grey-green badges of lichen. The sun silvers the cloud edges.
‘Do you think Charlotte and Ellen would have walked up here?’ I ask Claire.
‘Why wouldn’t they? We know that Charlotte was here for three weeks. And that she loved walking. I’d be surprised if they didn’t.’
I agree. Certainly, from the description in chapter twenty-eight, it does appear as if Charlotte walked Stanage Edge: ‘dusk with moorland, ridged with mountain … there are great moors behind and … waves of mountains far beyond that deep valley at my feet’. She also describes a stone feature that resembles nearby Moscar Cross, a stone pillar that acts as a waymarker. In fact, chapters twenty-eight to thirty-five offer accurate descriptions of the Peak District: ‘A north-midland shire, dusk with moorland, ridged with mountain: this I see. There are great moors behind and on each hand of me; there are waves of mountains far beyond that deep valley at my feet.’ And much of this landscape is unchanged. The ashen and russet-coloured rocks we walk on, the drab crags that cast black shadows and hide the bones of dead sheep, the blooming heather, the thick carpets of fern, and the rolling moors in the distance. The dense wooded areas that patch the landscape, some of which the Eyres owned, right up to the ridge of Stanage itself, would perhaps have been more extensive. A lizard crosses our path, and I think of the lizard that Jane sees running over a crag.
As we make our way down, we encounter more of the grindstones carved in situ and cut from these rocks that were abandoned when the labour was outsourced to cheaper suppliers. There is something poignant about their appearance here, scattered among the fern and tussock grass, like they are growing out of the earth.
As the path leads us back down to the village, Claire turns to me and says, ‘If there was a lake here, I’d jump straight in it.’ I nod my head. The idea is suddenly compelling. I look for a lake, but there isn’t even a puddle. There is no escape from the blazing sun, and all I can think about is the ice-cold lager that waits for us at the end of our journey. I feel like John Mills in Ice Cold in Alex. My forehead prickles with sweat, and I imagine the glass on the bar, all steamed up, a condensing drop of liquid trickling down it. I’m almost certain that Charlotte Brontë never craved an ice-cold glass of lager.
As we walk, I realise I’ve been a bit down on Charlotte for some time, ever since I learnt the extent of her posthumous meddling with both Anne and Emily’s writing and literary legacies. I’d written her off as the more conservative, conventional sister, with a bit of a chip on her shoulder. Talking to Claire, I’ve repositioned Charlotte again and now believe that in her own, very different, way, she was just as radical as Emily and Anne.
11
Boiled Milk – Anne’s Final Journey
In Scarborough on Friday, 25 May 1849, some time in the afternoon, a train pulled up at the station. It had come from York. The doors opened and Anne Brontë alighted. Beside her were her eldest and only surviving sister Charlotte and their friend Ellen Nussey. In three days’ time, Anne would be dead, and Charlotte would be the only remaining Brontë sibling.
Charlotte had fought hard to stop Anne’s plan of returning to Scarborough, a holiday resort Anne had visited many times with the Robinsons, but in the end she had lost the fight. It was their father Patrick who had intervened and insisted that she go. Charlotte had only recently seen first her brother Branw
ell, on 24 September 1848, then her sister Emily, on 19 December 1848, taken to their graves.
They made their way to Wood’s Lodgings at No. 2 The Cliff, where Anne had previously stayed with Lydia and the rest of the Robinson family. The view overlooked the sea. The lodgings are no longer here. They were replaced by the Grand Hotel in 1867, the ‘largest and most handsomest hotel in Europe’. Anne’s ghost is said to haunt its corridors.
The Scarborough they saw as they walked from the station to their lodgings would have been much smaller than the town that exists today. Anne would have seen the Town Hall in St Nicholas Street and the Borough Gaol at the top of St Thomas Street, which was opposite the Seaman’s Hospital. There was also the theatre close by, ‘the only place of amusement in town’, according to a general directory published at the time. The Customs House was situated between the piers. Scarborough exported corn, butter, hams, bacon and saltfish. It imported coal from Newcastle and Sunderland; timber, deal, hemp and flax from the Baltic; and groceries from London. There were fifteen beer houses, one billiard room and sixty-six public houses; twenty dressmakers, seven hatters, five stay and corset makers, and one gunmaker. Three boat builders, two fossil dealers and one bone crusher.
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