Charlotte Bronte

by Jessica Cox

  The thought came over me am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness the apathy and the hyperbolical & most asinine stupidity of these fat headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience & assiduity?

  The six fragmentary papers that survive from this time speak of the excessive emotion of the writer, forced to repress her rage and frustration and adopt the mask of willing teacher. Referring to a particularly frustrating encounter with a pupil, she writes, ‘She nearly killed me between the violence of the irritation her horrid wilfulness excited and the labour it took to subdue it to a moderate appearance of calmness.’ It is hardly surprising that Charlotte does not reveal her true emotions in her letters from this period, at a time when excessive emotion, in women in particular, was frequently linked to notions of madness. The contrast between the image of Charlotte the respectable teacher and Charlotte the deeply frustrated, sometimes enraged writer seems to anticipate much later critical readings of Jane Eyre, which posit the character of the madwoman, Bertha Mason, as a representation of Jane’s ‘secret self’, succumbing to the passion and rage that Jane herself must learn to suppress in order to survive.

  In the moments she spent alone at Roe Head, Charlotte was sometimes overwhelmed by the desire to write, but was seemingly inevitably interrupted by one of her pupils, whom she scathingly refers to in her diary papers as ‘dolts’ and ‘asses’: her duties as a teacher seemed irreconcilable with her desire to become a writer, and she was almost tortured by ‘a feeling that I cannot satisfy’, a desire to escape the mundane drudgery of her life, and to return to the inspiring moors of Haworth where she might pursue her literary ambitions. She had, up until this point in her life, experienced an unusual degree of freedom -largely the result of her liberal home education, which enabled her and her siblings both the creative freedom to write and invent stories and plays, and the physical freedom to roam the moors behind the parsonage. On arriving to take up her position as teacher at Roe Head, she found this freedom suddenly and brutally curtailed by the demands that were now placed upon her. Teaching failed to provide the intellectual stimulation to which she had become accustomed, yet she was compelled to try and earn a living. In this respect, her situation mirrored that of numerous nineteenth-century women (though Charlotte was perhaps better educated and more intellectually inclined than many), for whom opportunities were few, and who frequently had little choice but to take up a career as governess or teacher. Charlotte’s response to the intellectual stagnation that threatened to overwhelm her was to retreat further into the world of her imagination, as the Roe Head journals testify.

  Charlotte’s time at Roe Head proved tumultuous not only because she was struggling to reconcile her occupation as a teacher with her literary ambitions, but also because she suffered increasingly from a crisis of identity linked to her religious beliefs, which fed in to her increasing sense of isolation and depression. With her father an Anglican clergyman, Charlotte had been raised a devout Christian, and her faith in God appears to have remained constant throughout her life. However, she struggled with the doctrines of the Church, and appears, at various points in her life, to have considered the implications of both Calvinist and Catholic doctrine: the former, in particular, caused her considerable anxiety at this time. Attempting to articulate her sense of religious melancholy, she wrote to Ellen, ‘I know the treasures of the Bible I love and adore them. I can see the Well of Life in all its clearness and brightness; but when I stoop down to drink of the pure waters they fly from my lips as if I were Tantalus.’ It is unclear what provoked this apparent religious crisis, but it was linked (whether as cause or effect) to an increasing sense of self-loathing. She dwelt extensively on the doctrines of predestination prescribed by Calvinism, and convinced herself that, ‘If Christian perfection be necessary to Salvation I shall never be saved.’ Significantly, Anne too suffered from a religious crisis during her time at Roe Head, and, as with Charlotte, appears to have reflected painfully on the possible implications of Calvinist doctrine. It seems clear with hindsight that Charlotte suffered from extensive bouts of depression throughout her life. These were often linked to external events, such as the deaths of her sisters, but her increasing sense of isolation and the inner conflict between teacher and would-be writer clearly prompted the sense of despair that appears to have enveloped her during her time at Roe Head.

  Employment

  Charlotte’s source of comfort while she struggled with her religious beliefs and sense of identity at Roe Head was her imagination. Both Charlotte and Branwell continued to harbour literary ambitions and in 1837 they wrote to two of the greatest poets of the day with samples of their poetry: Branwell to William Wordsworth and Charlotte to Robert Southey, in response to which she received his discouraging reply and appears, for a time at least, to have resolved to abandon her poetic ambitions. However, while she may have resolved not to seek fame and fortune as a poet, she continued to write, producing a large number of poems during her time at Roe Head.

  Towards the close of 1837, an incident occurred at the school that must have recalled to Charlotte’s mind her time at Cowan Bridge and her elder sisters’ illnesses and subsequent deaths. Since that period, Charlotte had experienced a feeling of dread whenever anyone of her acquaintance suffered from those symptoms that might be associated with consumption (a dread that was to afflict her for the rest of her life). She must, therefore, have been overtaken by a sense of panic when her sister, Anne, fell ill, losing her voice and apparently experiencing trouble breathing. Inevitably, Charlotte recalled the final illnesses of her two elder sisters, and was therefore deeply distressed when Miss Wooler appeared to dismiss Anne’s symptoms as nothing of concern. The event led to a dispute between Charlotte and her employer, and the two sisters returned to Haworth, where Anne recovered. Though she had severely reprimanded Miss Wooler for her attitude towards her sister’s illness, and resolved not to return to Roe Head, the two were reconciled somewhat before Charlotte’s departure, and in January 1838, she agreed to return to her position as teacher.

  Charlotte remained an employee of Roe Head school for much of the year that followed, but she continued to suffer with extensive bouts of depression, accompanied by hypochondria -possibly exacerbated by the fact that Anne, following her bout of illness, had not returned to Miss Wooler’s school, and Ellen, who lived within visiting distance of the school, was then away from home; hence Charlotte must have felt even more isolated. She refers in a letter to Ellen to the ‘weeks of mental and bodily anguish’ she suffered, and eventually, following medical advice, she returned to Haworth in order to try and recover her spirits. The time she spent at the parsonage in Haworth appears to have had the desired effect, and she subsequently returned to Miss Wooler’s school, which had now moved to Dewsbury Moor, a few miles from its original location. Eventually, however, Charlotte felt that she could no longer endure her life as a teacher, and, before departing for Haworth for the Christmas vacation in 1838, she informed Miss Wooler that she would not be returning.

  Though she was deeply unhappy for much of her time at Roe Head, her experiences there exerted a powerful influence on her later fiction. Governesses and teachers feature in all of Charlotte’s novels – a motif for which she drew on her own personal experiences. As well as teaching at Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, she also worked as a governess for two families: in 1839 for three months for the Sidgwicks at Stonegappe in Lothersdale, and in 1841 for the White family in Rawdon. The position of governess was one of the only ways in which a woman of Charlotte’s class could hope to earn a living in the nineteenth century, but it was often arduous and poorly paid work. Charlotte struggled to adapt to the role of governess and the hardships it frequently entailed. The life of the governess was a lonely one: governesses ranked above the household servants, yet were not considered part of the family, nor likely to be treated as such. Such was Charlotte’s experience with the Sidgwic
k family, as she detailed in a letter to her sister, Emily, concluding that a governess’s lot is indeed a hard one: ‘I see now more clearly than I have ever done before that a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living and rational being except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil.’ Mrs Sidgwick made no effort to befriend Charlotte, and was defensive when Charlotte complained of the children’s behaviour. This attitude is replicated by the Ingram family in Jane Eyre. Blanche Ingram, Jane’s rival for Rochester’s affections, describes the governesses of her own childhood thus: ‘half of them detestable and the rest ridiculous, and all incubi’, while her mother declares, ‘I have suffered a martyrdom from their incompetency and caprice.’

  Blanche Ingram describes the tricks that she and her sister used to play on their governesses, and indeed in her own experience, Charlotte found the children to be as unwelcoming as their mother, referring to them in her letter to Emily as ‘riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs’ and in a letter to Ellen as ‘a set of pampered, spoilt, turbulent children, whom I was expected constantly to amuse, as well as to instruct’. It is here we find the originals of the spoilt and precocious children of Brontë’s fiction – John Reed and his sisters, Adèle Varens (although the endearing Polly in Villette is probably a representation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s daughter, Julia, to whom Charlotte became particularly attached on a visit to Gaskell and her family). Contemplating her future at the close of 1839, it is hardly surprising that she declares, ‘I hate and abhor the very thoughts of governess-ship.’ In a later letter to her publisher, she expounded on the difficulties of a governess’s existence. She refers to ‘a life of inexpressible misery’ in which the governess was ‘tyrannized over, finding her efforts to please and teach utterly vain, chagrined, distressed, worried – so badgered so trodden-on, that she ceased almost at last to know herself, and wondered in what despicable, trembling frame her oppressed mind was prisoned’. The letter is suggestive of the extent to which Charlotte felt she had lost her identity whilst working as a governess: once again, she had been forced to adopt a mask, to perform a role against which she inwardly railed.

  Shortly after her return to Haworth following the conclusion of her employment with the Sidgwick family, Charlotte received a marriage proposal from Ellen Nussey’s brother, Henry. Responding to his proposal, she writes: ‘I have no personal repugnance to the idea of a union with you – but I feel convinced that mine is not the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness of a man like you,’ concluding, ‘I will never for the sake of attaining the distinction of matrimony and escaping the stigma of an old maid take a worthy man whom I am conscious that I cannot render happy.’ To Ellen, she confessed, ‘I […] never could have that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him – and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my Husband.’ Charlotte was almost twenty-three when she received Henry’s proposal of marriage: old enough to consider spinsterhood a distinct possibility in the nineteenth century. A few months later, she rejected another proposal of marriage, this time from the Reverend David Pryce, who, after meeting her once, wrote to her declaring his attachment and asking for her hand. It was hardly surprising, given their brief acquaintance, that she rejected his offer. Her account of this event to Ellen Nussey, however, suggests that she was resigned to, indeed even welcomed, the possibility of spinster-hood: ‘I am certainly doomed to be an old maid,’ she declared, continuing, ‘Never mind. I made up my mind to that fate ever since I was twelve years old.’ Her attitude towards marriage is reinforced in a later letter to Ellen Nussey, in which she declares,

  Not that it is a crime to marry – or a crime to wish to be married – but it is an imbecility which I reject with contempt – for women [who] have neither fortune nor beauty – to make marriage the principal object of their wishes & hopes & the aim of all their actions – not to be able to convince themselves that they are unattractive – and that they had better be quiet and think of other things than wedlock.

  Marriage was undoubtedly a problematic institution in the nineteenth century: for much of the period women retained barely any legal rights once married, effectively becoming the property of their husbands. Nevertheless, marriage offered the possibility of financial security and an escape from the drudgery of the life of a governess. Indeed, marriage, for many Victorian women, was not only desirable but essential: few women had the privilege of an independent income, and employment opportunities, for middle- and upper-class women in particular, were extremely limited. Romantic love was therefore frequently less of a consideration in the decision to marry than in today’s world. Unmarried daughters were frequently perceived as a burden on their family, and would often be left to make their own way in the world in the event of their father’s death (any inheritance generally passing to the eldest son). Cases of respectable, middle-class unmarried women finding themselves in the workhouse were not uncommon. When Charlotte rejected Henry Nussey, Patrick Brontë was already in his sixties, and she must have anticipated a time when she would not only be obliged to earn her own living, but to provide a roof over her head as well. Despite this, she appears at this period at least to have subscribed to a wholly romantic view of marriage, and to have dismissed the practical implications of spinsterhood, believing fervently that to marry without love would be inherently wrong (an attitude that anticipates the heroine’s rejection of St John Rivers in Jane Eyre).

  In a letter to Ellen Nussey from 1840, Charlotte clarified her views on marriage:

  Do not be over-persuaded to marry a man you can never respect – I do not say love, because I think, if you can respect a person before marriage, moderate love at least will come after; and as to intense passion, I am convinced that that is no desirable feeling. In the first place, it seldom or never meets with a requital; and, in the second place, if it did, the feeling would only be temporary: it would last the honeymoon, and then, perhaps, give place to disgust, or indifference, worse perhaps than disgust. Certainly this would be the case on the man’s part; and on the woman’s – God help her, if she is left to love passionately and alone […] I am tolerably well convinced that I shall never marry at all.

  The letter demonstrates an awareness of the potential dangers of marriage, particularly for a woman: divorce was all but impossible to obtain, and in any case was widely perceived, in accordance with the teachings of the Bible, as contrary to God’s will ( What […] God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.’)7 For Charlotte, it seems, the danger was hardly worth the risk, and she appeared resolved to remain, as she termed it, an old maid’. In The Professor, Frances Crimsworth declares, An old maid’s life must doubtless be void and vapid,’ yet despite the frustration Charlotte evidently felt with the life of a teacher or governess, she evidently preferred these options to the possibility of marriage to a man whom she did not love.

  Charlotte’s second stint as a governess began in March 1841, when she was aged twenty-four, and was hardly more successful than her first. Again she was made to feel like an outsider among both the servants of the house and her employers, complaining to Ellen, ‘I find it so difficult to ask either servants or mistress for anything I want.’ The children, too, were proving difficult for Charlotte to manage – at once over-indulged and over-familiar. Homesickness added to Charlotte’s woes, though her employers at least allowed, indeed encouraged visits from Charlotte’s friends and family. The homesickness and troublesome children rendered the position of governess highly distasteful to Charlotte, while the long working hours left her with barely enough time to correspond with friends and family, let alone indulge her creative instincts and the literary ambitions that she still harboured. Charlotte’s dislike of her work, but the compulsion she felt to undertake it, are indicative of the limited choices available to women seeking respectable work in the mid-nineteenth century. ‘I have no natural knack for my vocation,’ she wrote to Ellen Nussey. ‘If teaching only – were requisite it wo
uld be smooth and easy – but it is the living in other people’s houses – the estrangement from one’s real character – the adoption of a cold, frigid – apathetic exterior that is painful.’ As a governess, Charlotte was again required to play a role, to disguise her true self behind a mask; while she welcomed the mask she would later adopt to disguise her identity as writer, the mask of governess, like that of teacher, was intolerable to her.

  In response to the deep frustration and unhappiness she felt in her post as governess, Charlotte began seriously to consider the possibility of opening a school with her sisters. She left her position with the White family at the end of 1841 intending to pursue this plan, which would potentially offer a means of making money that was infinitely preferable to the work of a governess, and which would enable the family to remain together. As part of this scheme, Charlotte resolved to improve the planned school’s chances of success by spending some time on the continent, in order to develop her language skills. She decided on Brussels, and secured positions for herself and Emily as pupils at Madame Heger’s pensionnat. Her experiences in Brussels, and in particular her relationship with Mme Heger’s husband, Constantin, marked a pivotal period in her life, and one that was to exert a considerable influence on her fiction.

  Charlotte and Emily arrived in Brussels in February 1842 and took up residence as pupils at the pensionnat – Charlotte returning to formal schooling at the age of twenty-five. A few months later, in a letter to Ellen Nussey, she detailed her first impressions of the school and its staff, revealing that she was vastly happier as a school pupil than she had been as a governess, despite being far from home and somewhat isolated as a Protestant amongst Catholics. Charlotte was somewhat suspicious of Catholicism, and a number of her letters are suggestive of distinctly anti-Catholic feelings (in a later letter to Ellen, she scathingly refers to Catholicism as ‘a most feeble childish piece of humbug’). She also reveals in her letter to Ellen her first impressions of Constantin Heger. Though her description of him is far from suggestive of a romantic infatuation, his characteristics as described by Charlotte bear a resemblance to those of her later fictional heroes-Jane Eyre’s Rochester and Villette’s Paul Emanuel – and her lengthy discussion of his character is clearly suggestive of her developing feelings for him: