The Brontesaurus

by John Sutherland

  The pensionnat Héger

  Charlotte was at Mme Héger’s establishment for two extended spells, Emily (who did not take to Brussels, missing her dog and the moors) for one year only. Héger was 33 years old when the Brontës arrived in 1842, eight years younger than his wife and six years older than Charlotte. According to Macdonald, ‘Madame Héger [was] a much more attractive woman than Charlotte Brontë in so far as her personal appearance was concerned’. There are no pictures to verify this.

  In Villette Mme Beck’s ‘advanced’ age, is made much of:

  When he was gone, Madame dropped into the chair he had just left; she rested her chin in her hand; all that was animated and amiable vanished from her face: she looked stony and stern, almost mortified and morose.

  She sighed; a single, but a deep sigh. A loud bell rang for morning-school. She got up; as she passed a dressing-table with a glass upon it, she looked at her reflected image. One single white hair streaked her nut-brown tresses; she plucked it out with a shudder. In the full summer daylight, her face, though it still had the colour, could plainly be seen to have lost the texture of youth; and then, where were youth’s contours? Ah, Madame! wise as you were, even you knew weakness.

  Never had I pitied Madame before, but my heart softened towards her, when she turned darkly from the glass. A calamity had come upon her. That hag Disappointment was greeting her with a grisly ‘All-hail,’ and her soul rejected the intimacy.

  ‘Hag’ is hard.

  A hero of the nationalist Belgian uprising of 1830 (he had fought at the barricades) Héger was, all the evidence suggests, an inspired teacher. His emotionally intense one-on-one tutorial technique anticipates what is now called ‘creative writing’ instruction. His two English pupils, he ordained, must copy the styles of literary masters, so as ultimately to work their way to their own style. His copyist exercises went down better with Charlotte than with Emily.

  The surviving letters (all from Charlotte) were written to Héger after she left Mme Héger’s pensionnat on New Year’s Day 1844. Her stay in Brussels, and her relationship with Constantin, had been, she told her bosom friend Ellen Nussey, the biggest experience of her life.

  After leaving she wrote fortnightly. Then, at Mme Héger’s insistence (she evidently read the letters, with or without permission, presumably in high wifely dudgeon) it was allowed only at six-month intervals. No one knows how often Charlotte despite the prohibition wrote, what Constantin wrote (if anything) in return and how far Charlotte allowed her clearly passionate feelings to take over in letters that have not survived.

  Charlotte’s letters were in French: she may have felt freer to emote in that language. ‘I love French for your sake with all my heart and soul,’ she wrote. She only, on the evidence of her surviving correspondence, used it consistently with Constantin Héger.

  The letters verge at times on the erotic – well beyond what might be expected from a grateful pupil expressing formal thanks for instruction: for example:

  Day or night I find neither rest nor peace. If I sleep I have tortured dreams in which I see you always severe, always gloomy and annoyed with me. I do not seek to justify myself, I submit to every kind of reproach – all that I know – is that I cannot – that I will not resign myself to losing the friendship of my master completely – I would rather undergo the greatest physical sufferings. If my master withdraws his friendship entirely from me I will be completely without hope … I cling on to preserving that little interest – I cling on to it as I cling on to life.

  Clement Shorter’s riposte on reading the letters is gallant but feeble:

  There is nothing in those letters of hers, published now for the first time, that any enthusiastic woman might not write to a man double her age, who was a married man with a family, and who had been her teacher.

  The letters placed her, he nonsensically insisted, ‘on a higher pedestal than ever’. Mme Héger did not perceive any pedestal. That was not why she sewed the letters up and put them in her jewel box.

  Was she in love? Charlotte’s pen-picture of M. Héger (in a letter to Nussey) as he first struck her in 1842 is vivid:

  He is professor of rhetoric, a man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable in temperament; a little black being, with a face that varies in expression. Sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane tom-cat, sometimes those of a delirious hyena.

  The wild zoology is carried over into the first description of Paul Emanuel in Villette. He has, Lucy tells us, tremblingly, ‘a close and picturesque resemblance to that of a black and sallow tiger’.

  ‘Tom cat’ brings with it certain implications. As does ‘tiger’.1 The critic Linda S. Kauffman sees in the broken flow of the surviving letters a clear-cut narrative and, possibly, the reflection of an exploitative side to Héger’s pedagogy.2

  The eminently level-headed Juliet Barker, having weighed all the evidence (including Héger’s well-recorded ‘charismatic’ teaching techniques and the dangers they might represent to susceptible pupils) concludes, judiciously:

  One cannot but feel sorry for Monsieur Héger, a married man whose character and morals were above reproach. If he replied to his highly strung former pupil, it merely encouraged her to write again. If he did not reply, in the hope that she might forget him, she brooded on his supposed neglect and became even more hysterical and obsessive.

  Constantin Héger in later life, but still very much the maître who won Charlotte’s heart.

  To his credit Héger gallantly kept the embarrassing letters from public knowledge or view during his life. But he did show them to Mrs Gaskell, who could have publicised their content. Héger could have burnt them. Did he really not know his wife was fishing them out of the wastepaper basket and laboriously reassembling them to put in a safe place? The imagination strains to believe that.

  One’s conclusion is that Charlotte, whose experience of men was limited mainly to unattractive curates, had a ‘crush’ on her teacher. He may, initially, not have damped it down as a conscientious maître ought to have done. What flared up had a consequence that was anything but banal. Charlotte Brontë’s finest novel, Villette, was born out of the flames of a love which could never be.

  Postscript

  Lyndall Gordon, a critic who has written sensitively about l’affaire Héger, adds a tiny (literally) additional observation to the much trawled-over manuscripts. What letters Charlotte was allowed (by Mme Héger) to write (there were surely more, outside the rules) were written in French. The language Constantin taught her, Gordon persuasively suggests, released passion the English language locked up. Nonetheless the last sentence in the batch of surviving letters is in English: ‘Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaketh’.3

  Gordon elaborates:

  To bare her feelings in her own language, rooted in the eloquence of the King James Bible, touches her so strongly that she adds something which no naked eye noticed until it was blown up by a cameraman filming the letters in a small dark room at the British Library two years ago. I was reading the [English] postscript aloud and the cameraman was filming over my shoulder when suddenly he exclaimed, ‘What’s this?’ Blown up on screen, what looked like the full stop at the end of this leave-taking turned out to be a minute heart.

  This invisible message to Héger is tantamount to Mr Rochester calling to Jane across an impossible space.

  In order to keep their Gondal/Angria writings from prying eyes (their disliked aunt and loved, but severe, father, specifically) the Brontë children inscribed them in microscript. This microscopy, in 1846, was drawn on as the channel for Charlotte’s language of love. An emoticon, no less. A code the prying eye of needle-wielding Mme Héger could never crack.

  Footnotes

  1. In Haworth the family had two cats at the period, one called ‘Tom Cat’ the other ‘Tiger’ – neither, one guesses, judging by the names, sexually continent beasts.

  2. Kauffman, L. 1986, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre and Epistolary Ficti
ons.

  3. Luke 6:45: ‘A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh.’

  LIVERPOOL

  Mr Earnshaw’s long walk

  We are given a detailed description of how Heathcliff arrives at Wuthering Heights – the property which he will ‘come into’ (rather as a wolf comes into a herd of sheep).

  Mr Earnshaw, a Yorkshire farmer, out of the blue announces in August 1771 that he intends to make a journey to Liverpool. The seaport lies 60 miles away (as Haworth is, by the M65, today). He will go by foot, he tells his family. He gives no explanation and it is, as far as they are aware, a spur-of-the-moment thing. There is no evidence of any letter summoning him to Liverpool.

  It’s very odd – and the first of a string of oddities in this primal episode in the novel. Everything thereafter will hinge on that trip to Liverpool. The first oddity is that it is ‘harvest time’ and good weather; no conscientious farmer would leave his crops over these days.

  Mr Earnshaw says he will bring back the children presents. They will prove appropriate gifts given how their lives will turn out. Hindley demands a fiddle (he will later dissipate himself to early death); Catherine ‘could ride any horse in the stable, and she chose a whip’.

  Why is Mr Earnshaw making his expedition by foot? There are, as Catherine’s wished-for whip indicates, horses in the stable. And there was, even at this early date, coach travel between Bradford and Liverpool. And, the biggest oddity of all, why would a Yorkshire farmer, of modest means, have to go to Liverpool in the first place? It’s not a market town.

  Nonetheless, Mr Earnshaw sets off in the morning, leaving Joseph, his trusty servant, to superintend the business of the farm. He returns, three days later, at eleven o’clock at night. He is ‘fatigued’. I once walked 120 miles non-stop.1 It is, indeed, ‘fatiguing’. Mr Earnshaw is not a young man nor, we may suspect, hale. He dies six years later.

  Hindley’s fiddle is broken; the whip is, apparently, lost somewhere. But Earnshaw has brought a six-year-old child, dark-skinned, who speaks no English – just ‘gibberish’. Carrying him would have made a 60-mile walk that much more burdensome.

  Mrs Earnshaw promptly demands the ‘gipsy brat’ be thrown out. But her husband, now and later, is fond of the waif. Another oddness. He explains the child was starving, homeless, alone and that no ‘owner’ (not ‘parent’; Liverpool is a slave trading port) could be found.

  If Earnshaw has been away three days, a 60-mile bash in either direction (at a gruelling three miles an hour, across rough country and hills) would mean two 20-hour stints – assuming he did not stop to eat or sleep. Can one believe he wouldn’t have to? Emily was the great walker in the family and would, presumably, have worked all this out.

  So the questions are these: (1) Why go to far-off Liverpool, for a day visit, without any stated reason, at the least convenient time of year?; (2) Why walk, not ride?; (3) What could Earnshaw possibly achieve, in an advanced state of fatigue, in the few hours intervening between his epic walks to and fro?

  Mrs Earnshaw’s rage is a telling detail. She perhaps suspects that Mr Earnshaw has not been to Liverpool at all, but to some nearby gipsy encampments. Gipsies were famous for offering sexual services – brothels in caravans. Tolstoy was forever spending wild nights with gipsies, and infecting himself with unmentionable diseases in the process. The most famous burlesque artiste in history, Gipsy Rose Lee, embodies the allure of Romany. A fiddle would easily be picked up: gipsies were musical. And they had their own language, incomprehensible to English folk.

  I lean, moderately, towards this speculative answer to the above questions. But I lean more heavily towards another, equally speculative. The 1770s were a boom period for the slave trade in Liverpool. Two vessels, with their forlorn cargo, would dock every week, traversing the golden triangle (Africa to England, to the West Indies; back, with sugar, to England, and Africa).

  Mr Earnshaw is short-handed at Wuthering Heights; so much we may deduce. He needs hands. Apprentice hands if necessary. He already has doubts about Hindley. He will acquire, or buy, someone. Heathcliff comes attractively cheap. And he’s not coal black, although, dark as he is, may be mixed race.

  There are other genealogies. The Irish Marxist, Terry Eagleton, argues that Heathcliff has been dumped in the Liverpool streets by Irish migrants, fleeing the Great Hunger. The boy speaks Gaelic. There were millions fleeing Ireland in the mid-1840s, famine years, when Wuthering Heights was being written. But Heathcliff ’s arrival is dated 70 years earlier.

  The suggestion that Heathcliff is Earnshaw’s bastard child is rather less improbable than that he is demon spawn, dropped on the cursed house, by a wicked, fairy, stepmother. Or that the previous Heathcliff (see ‘Mononymity’, page 92) was beaten to death, and this later Heathcliff is his supernatural revenge. Speculation about Mr Earnshaw’s walk, one can be sure, will continue to rage.

  Footnote

  1. See The Boy Who Loved Books, pp. 202–7. It was in the army and, in hospital for two weeks thereafter, I was threatened with being charged for damaging army property. Myself. My legs still twinge a bit reading this episode in Wuthering Heights.

  MASCULINITIES

  There is a feminist lobby which claims Emily Brontë as a rebel against rigidly binary Victorian sexuality – a free, self-identifying woman before her time. The claim is helped by the near-total absence of hard detail around Emily’s life. Nature may hate a vacuum: literary biography loves them.

  A full-blooded assertion of the thesis is Emily Brontë: Heretic (1997), a novel by Stevie Davies, under the imprint of the Women’s Press. It is, Davies says, her ‘intuition’ that Emily was a lesbian (though not enabled, by the times, to be a practising one). Intuitions are, arguably, as much an act of faith as crediting Emily ‘channelling’ Wuthering Heights II from beyond the veil (see below, ‘Spirit-Written’, page 144).

  The first book to argue the lesbian case at length was Virginia Moore’s passionate The Life and Eager Death of Emily Brontë (1936). ‘Eager’ because Emily lived in a world which denied her any opportunity to be herself. Self-mortification and, ultimately, self-destruction was the only way out. That and silence.

  As regards evidence which, as lawyers say, ‘stands up’ we have only straws to clutch at. The sisters’ use of male pseudonyms could have been something more than tactical. ‘Ellis Bell’ would, they claimed to believe, get more attention in the man’s world of publishing than, say, ‘Alice Bell’. George Eliot thought the same. True enough. But perhaps the sisters, Emily particularly, liked the idea of male masquerade. It was a kind of authorial Bloomerism.1 Trying on the trousers that ruled.

  Women shared (small) beds in the 19th century, for the good reason that there was no space for separate rooms. For women it was a sardine-tin world. Their bodies, in flimsy night-dresses, touched. Bodily warmth entailed intimate contact. Emily held a school teaching position at Law Hill, Halifax (September 1838–March 1839; the boarding school building, and its history, may have contributed something to Wuthering Heights – not least its high hillside position which ‘wuthered’ noisily). Perhaps, it’s speculated, the late-teenaged, post-pubescent, Emily formed briefly intimate relationships. There’s a lot of ‘perhaps’ on this topic.

  Charlotte judged Emily to be ‘stronger than a man’. The two sisters’ professor in Belgium, M. Héger, went so far as to assert Emily ‘should have been a man’. She was nicknamed ‘Major’ in the family. The publisher George Smith (who took over the copyright of Wuthering Heights after her death) detected in Emily a ‘singularly masculine bent of intellect’. Singularly? Masculine? Haworth villagers are reported of thinking her ‘more like a boy than a girl’. Ellen Nussey noted that she whistled to her dogs in ‘masculine fashion’. Her taste in four-legged companions (see above, ‘The Hound of Haworth’, page 62) was distinctly other than a ladi
es’ lap-dog.

  Charlotte tells us that Shirley Keeldar is a portrait of her sister. The heroine was called ‘Shirley’ (a male/female name) because her parents had, for years before her belated birth, wanted a son. Shirley plays the part, assuming male privilege in her business affairs, as an ‘of-age’ heir(ess):

  Business! Really the word makes me conscious I am indeed no longer a girl, but quite a woman and something more. I am an esquire! Shirley Keeldar, Esquire, ought to be my style and title. They gave me a man’s name; I hold a man’s position. It is enough to inspire me with a touch of manhood; and when I see such people as that stately Anglo-Belgian – that Gérard Moore – before me, gravely talking to me of business, really I feel quite gentlemanlike. You must choose me for your church-warden, Mr. Helstone, the next time you elect new ones. They ought to make me a magistrate and a captain of yeomanry. Tony Lumpkin’s mother was a colonel, and his aunt a justice of the peace. Why shouldn’t I be?

  If this masculinised portrait is a covert hint, it would fit into the dominant 19th-century theory that homosexuality was ‘inverted’ sexuality. Unlucky men discovered themselves, by the perverse throw of the genetic dice, trapped inside a female body, and vice versa. Sexual inversion was theorised ‘scientifically’ by the psychologist Havelock Ellis and romanticised for a later generation by ‘John’ Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness and its hero/heroine ‘Stephen’. It’s no longer regarded as valid sexology. Nonetheless, Catherine’s exclamation, ‘I am Heathcliff’, and the strange asexuality of their relationship has been built on to make the case that Wuthering Heights is, for the informed reader, ‘a lesbian text’.