‘What is the matter, my little man?’ I asked.
‘There’s Heathcliff and a woman yonder, under t’ nab,’ he blubbered, ‘un’ I darnut pass ’em.’
I saw nothing; but neither the sheep nor he would go on so I bid him take the road lower down. He probably raised the phantoms from thinking, as he traversed the moors alone, on the nonsense he had heard his parents and companions repeat. Yet, still, I don’t like being out in the dark now; and I don’t like being left by myself in this grim house: I cannot help it.
The nervous sheep are a fine touch. They know. Baa!
Lockwood goes himself to look at the graves, in the now decayed churchyard. Are they sleeping? Or are they – horrible thought – still writhingly alive? One recalls (fancifully, I grant) three-year-old Emily looking at her mother. Alive, or dead, or something in between?
GRACE
In defence of Mrs Poole, drunken gaoler
Grace Poole is an ‘upper servant’ – a ‘keeper of the keys’, like Esther Summerson in Bleak House. The upperness is indicated by the fact she has a surname. Lower servants were so many Abigails and Jameses.
But unlike Dickens’s incomparable Esther, Grace is a catastrophically incompetent keeper of the keys, allowing her charge, the demented Bertha, to break out and commit arson – not just once, but twice. The second time the first Mrs Rochester falls on the household like a plague of Egypt. She plunges (or is thrown – see below, ‘Murder?’, page 105) to her death exulting in the destruction of Thornfield Hall, Rochester’s eyeballs, and one of his arms.
Some have assumed Mrs Poole is based on Martha Wright, the servant who attended Patrick’s wife Maria in her last illness. The family, for unspecified reasons, felt obliged to dismiss her. She got her own back by recounting some juicy stories to Mrs Gaskell. Juliet Barker shrewdly guesses that, like Grace Poole, Martha had a weakness for the bottle. It could also have been that, as a trained nurse not a skivvy, her wages were too high for her to be kept on (although there was always some sick person to nurse at the parsonage). One of the few things one is told about Mrs Poole is that her wages are strangely high. Jane wonders about that.
There’s no Black Bull in the vicinity of Thornfield (as there was for Branwell’s convenience at the parsonage) and the assumption is that her gin bottle is replenished by her son, her assistant in the round-the-clock attendance Bertha requires.
Grace Poole inspires some interesting speculations about ‘care’. The Brontës were interested in lunacy and madness. They were not, Mrs Gaskell’s version of the family history reminds us, ignorant of what it was to have deranged relatives in the house. Patrick was eccentric and in less loving families Branwell might well have found himself institutionalised when out of his mind.
The hothouse decade in which the sisters were writing their six mature novels saw huge reforms in the treatment of the mentally infirm. The madhouse was transforming itself into the modern lunatic asylum (the word comes from the Greek for ‘shelter’).
The pioneer physician in this transformation was John Conolly (1794–1866). Conolly advocated radical change in the restraint of lunatics, drawing on the example of the Quaker retreats, where the mad were treated with gentleness. It was, these retreats demonstrated, therapy more successful than the whip.
In 1839 Conolly was appointed governor at Hanwell, the leading asylum in the country, serving greater London. With maximum publicity (he was an inveterate self-advertiser) he inaugurated a policy of humane reform. He abolished the panoply of straitjackets, manacles and whips by which the inmates had traditionally been regulated. Institutionalisation was a necessary evil. But Conolly believed the best care of the deranged was in ‘home care’.
Dickens was an early admirer of Conolly. Mr Dick, in David Copperfield, and Betsey Trotwood’s indulgent care for him at home is a florid Dickensian tribute to Conolly’s non-restraint system. Miss Trotwood rescued Mr Dick from a madhouse, whose gothic horrors are hinted at. He blooms, under her kindness, into the most amiable of maniacs, in his kite flying and obsession with King Charles’s head.
Jane Eyre suggests that Charlotte had, like Dickens, thought about the proper treatment of the insane – more particularly the question of restraint versus non-restraint. In describing to Jane his decision to keep Bertha at home (he could very easily have found some amenable madhouse to incarcerate her) Rochester, rather surprisingly, reveals himself to be a strong proponent of the non-restraint doctrine.
He recruited, he divulges, Mrs Poole and her son, at considerable expense, from the ‘Grimsby Retreat’ where both previously worked and Poole Jnr occupied a senior position as keeper. The term ‘retreat’ makes clear that Rochester adheres to the system successfully pioneered by the Quakers at their famous ‘York Retreat’ (headed by the heroic Henry Tuke) in the late 18th century. It inspired Conolly’s reforms. It is equally clear that, in her attic, Bertha is held in a minimum-security environment except when she is, as Mrs Poole puts it, ‘rageous’. Or, alas, when Mrs Poole is pissed out of her mind.
GUADELOUPE
Villette has a famously teasing double ending: Paul Emanuel, the ‘master’, may come back from distant parts to make Lucy his bride, enriched, and able to set up their own school. Happy ever after. Or Paul may drown in one of the storms, on whose gusts banshees ride. Lucy Snowe is eloquent on the subject of banshees – Irish ghouls. She fears them when the wind rises.
Her maître has gone to the French West Indies, specifically the protectorate Guadeloupe, for a three-year tour. As Lucy informs us, bluntly, ‘Its alpha is Mammon and its omega Interest’. Money, sucked out of the plantations, via slave labour, she means. Mme Walravens has a large estate in Basseterre: sugar (for rum) would be its main crop. Black slaves are Guadeloupe’s workforce. The owner has asked Paul Emanuel to be her ‘competent’ agent. If ‘duly looked after’ the estate will be ‘largely productive’. Paul will, himself, profit handsomely. Mammon, Mammon, Mammon.
Ostensibly (and unconvincingly) he goes to the West Indies (leaving Lucy behind) from a sense of duty. ‘No living being,’ says Lucy, loyally, ‘ever humbly laid his advantage at M. Emanuel’s feet, or confidingly put it into his hands, that he spurned the trust, or repulsed the repository.’
Whatever might be Paul’s ‘private pain or inward reluctance to leave Europe’, he accedes to Mme Walravens’s request. It is, one might think, strange that Paul should accede. The claims of Lucy and his own happiness would seem to be stronger than the financial convenience of Madame Walravens.
Even more oddly, Paul Emanuel is not a businessman, but a schoolteacher. Of girls. The professor is, however, notorious for ‘discipline’. It is not hard to deduce what duties are required from a ‘competent’ agent in Guadeloupe at this period. Simon Legree, the villainous overseer in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, would fit the bill.
The date of Villette’s action is the early 1840s: more or less the period of Charlotte’s own fraught residence in Brussels and tutelage there by her own maître, Constantin Héger (see below, ‘Letters’, page 75). Slavery had finally been abolished in the British West Indies in 1833, precipitating a disastrous slump in the islands’ sugar industry, with the widespread defection of pressed (enslaved) labour from the plantations into idle destitution. Hard days for absentee owners.
In colonial Guadeloupe, under the unenlightened French imperial regime, the institution of slavery (and the profitability of the sugar plantations) was to limp along until its long overdue abolition in 1848.
The stern and dictatorial Professor Paul Emanuel – the Napoleon of Mme Beck’s classroom – has clearly been recruited to rally the increasingly dissident labourers of Madame Walraverns’ estate, with whips and scorpions if necessary. They will have picked up rumours about emancipation and will be a surly and rebellious crew.
For ‘competent’, then, read ‘brutal’. For ‘Paul Emanuel’ read ‘Kurtz’ (another Belgian, as it happens). For ‘Guadeloupe’ read ‘Heart of Darkness’.
There is anothe
r putative factor in the virtuous Mme Walravens choosing Paul Emanuel as her overseer. He has shown himself, in his attendance at Mme Beck’s establishment, remarkably capable of restraining himself, sexually, in the presence of nubile young women (and, of course, Mme Beck herself). Even Lucy, who would give herself as willingly as, we surmise, Charlotte would have given herself to Héger, is safe. Jezebel and Salome would fail with Paul Emanuel. He could resist even the fall of the seventh veil.
Sexual restraint will be imperative when Paul takes up his new post. All 19th-century accounts of Guadeloupe stress that it is a place of irresistible temptation for European males. As the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica coyly records:
Guadeloupe has a few white officials and planters, a few East Indian immigrants from the French possessions in India, and the rest negroes and mulattoes. These are famous for their grace and beauty of both form and feature. Women greatly outnumber men and illegitimate births are very numerous.
Many of those births, one can suspect, are of mixed race. Clearly only a man of iron self-discipline can be trusted to remain celibate three hot years in such a Sodom, keeping himself pure for his true love across the seas. A man, that is, such as Paul Emanuel. The maître.
HANDS
Recently the admirable novelist, and Brontë lover, Polly Samson texted to ask about the following puzzle she had noted in Jane Eyre. We are told when Jane and Edward are happily settled that his ‘left arm, the mutilated one, he kept hidden in his bosom’. Like Nelson and his mutilated right arm.
But, later on, Jane Rochester (as she now is) informs us:
Mr. Rochester continued blind the first two years of our union: perhaps it was that circumstance that drew us so very near – that knit us so very close! for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand.
So which of his hands did he lose, on the night he was rid (one way or another – see below, ‘Murder?’, page 105) of the first Mrs Rochester? It’s a teasing conundrum. It could, of course, be a simple error. But the book was proofed carefully in Smith, Elder’s office and such an obvious mistake would have been picked up. There must be a subtler explanation.
The best answer I could come up with for Polly Samson was as follows. I think the ‘right hand’ reference is not physiological but religiously metaphorical, and not to be taken literally. Charlotte was saturated in the Bible. The daughter of a clergyman, later the wife of a clergyman, she attended church, listened to morning and evening home prayers, all her life. She probably dreamed in KJV English.
As the Bible tells us, God is right-handed. There are many references: viz, the following from Ephesians 1:19–21.
19And what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power, 20Which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, [my italics] 21Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come.
I suspect what the left/right-hand switch means is that, in marriage, Charlotte supplies – or, at least shares – her master’s lost male power. No error, but something of a complacent wifely boast. Nothing sinister in the Rochesters’ (second) marriage. The first? Don’t ask.
THE HOUND OF HAWORTH
One of the few things we know Emily to have said in her short life was to her class in Belgium. She informed her charges, contemptuously, that when it came to animals, she loved her dog more than she loved beastly them.
Love her dog she certainly did – in fact more, perhaps, than the whole human race. But Emily Brontë would not be an automatic candidate for the Paul O’Grady Prize for Kindness to Our Four-legged Friends. Of the few acts we know her to have committed in life, other than writing a wonderful novel, many of them centre on dogs and her sometimes questionable treatment of them.
All the sisters seem to have been fond of domestic animals. With Emily, it went further. As Mrs Gaskell records:
Some one speaking of her to me … said, ‘she never showed regard to any human creature; all her love was reserved for animals.’
‘All’? It seems, somehow, ‘inhuman’. Gaskell goes on to moralise:
The helplessness of an animal was its passport to Charlotte’s heart; the fierce, wild intractability of its nature was what often recommended it to Emily.
There is subliminal hint of quasi-sexual relationship lurking in Gaskell’s description. Emily’s ‘love’, one notes, was reserved, exclusively, for the male of the canine species. Charlotte Brontë reproduced in Shirley, ‘Emily’s way of sitting on the rug reading, with her arm round her rough bull-dog’s neck’. The bulldog in the novel, ‘Tartar’, is a mirror image of Emily’s dog, Keeper. The intercourse on the floor is given with the full blast of Charlottian floridity, veering just on the edge of eroticism:
The tawny and lionlike bulk of Tartar is ever stretched beside her, his negro muzzle laid on his fore paws – straight, strong, and shapely as the limbs of an Alpine wolf. One hand of the mistress generally reposes on the loving serf ’s rude head, because if she takes it away he groans and is discontented.
Mrs Gaskell (having heard it from Charlotte) retails an extraordinary anecdote, testifying to Emily’s near-psychotic intrapunitiveness. A strange dog ran past the parsonage, ‘with hanging head and lolling tongue’. Emily gave it ‘a merciful draught of water’. It gave her in return, a ‘maddened snap’. Rabid! Rushing downstairs into the kitchen Emily took up one of Tabby’s red-hot ‘Italian irons’ and ‘seared’ the wound. She told no one, until much later, to forestall ‘the terrors that might beset their weaker minds’.
That event, too, is reproduced in Shirley. It’s odd. It would have been more prosocial to put out a warning to the community: ‘Beware! Rabid dog on loose’. Or to have called on the Revd Brontë to dispatch the diseased beast with his trusty pistol (as does Atticus Finch, pro bono publico, in To Kill a Mockingbird).
Emily’s was the usual remedy for being bitten by a rabid animal – usually canine. And Yorkshire was where, in England, it most often happened. Neil Pemberton, in the delightfully titled Mad Dogs and Englishmen, tells us:
The idea of being bitten, the fear of being bitten or being approached by a stray dog was pretty much present and persistent, and it was particularly potent in a place like Bradford. Rabies was seen as a disease of the North: Lancashire and the West Riding were seen as the rabies capitals.
Until Pasteur’s vaccine, late in the century, immediate cauterisation was the only remedy (it did not bring immediate relief: the horrific disease could wait a year to present itself).
Emily’s ‘love’ of dogs went along with a fascinated respect for the violence and danger they embodied. One recalls, in Wuthering Heights, Catherine’s being mauled by one of the four-legged keepers at Thrushcross Grange. It imbues in Heathcliff a lifelong hatred of dogs. He pauses, in eloping with Isabella, to strangle her pet. ‘I wink to see my father strike a dog,’ says his son, ‘he does it so hard.’
Emily, from an incomplete painting by Branwell.
Emily’s Keeper was given as a gift – from whom is not known – and was not a friendly beast. Keeper, we are told:
was faithful to the depths of his nature as long as he was with friends; but he who struck him with a stick or whip, roused the relentless nature of the brute, who flew at his throat forthwith, and held him there till one or the other was at the point of death.
Again via Charlotte, Mrs Gaskell puts on record a vivid anecdote. Keeper loved to lie on his mistress’s bed ‘in drowsy voluptuousness’, soiling its cleanliness. In the ‘gathering dusk of an autumn evening’, Emily was informed by Tabby that, despite numerous prohibitions and beatings, he had done it again.
Charlotte saw Emily’s whitening face, and set mouth, but dared not speak to interfere; no one dared when Emily’s eyes glowed in that manner out of the paleness of her face, and when her lips were so compressed int
o stone.
As the shadows of night fell, she dragged the growling beast downstairs by the ‘scuft of his neck’. If she let him go, he might go for her throat. She had no hand free to get a stick. Instead, she punched Keeper mercilessly in his ‘red fierce eyes’ until he was half-blind, and thoroughly ‘mastered’. The generous dog, Gaskell tells us ‘owed her no grudge; he loved her dearly ever after; he walked first among the mourners to her funeral; he slept moaning for nights at the door of her empty room.’ Her demon lover.
IDIOT CHILD
Such was Charlotte’s rueful name for her first novel, The Professor (originally The Master). It suffered nine rejections, six under the authorial name ‘Currer Bell’. Even the bestselling author of Jane Eyre could not prevail on the friendliest of publishers, George Smith, to put The Professor into print, in the years of her fame.
The story is easily summarised, as are its springs of creation. The Professor was written (most likely) in autumn 1844, after Charlotte’s return from Brussels and in the furnace-like emotions her stay there had kindled. This was the city where she found love, in her hopeless infatuation with her professor (or maître/master), the unassailably virtuous (and married) M. Héger. A man who could have changed the whole course of Victorian fiction with a marital slip.
In terms of her artistic development, The Professor represents Charlotte’s departure from the fantasy world of Gondal/Angria for the real world – a world as real ‘as Monday morning’.
The Brontesaurus Page 6