The Golden Fleece: Essays

by Muriel Spark

  Branwell ends by saying that as he writes one of the Postlethwaites’ daughters is sitting close by… ‘She little thinks the Devil is as near her…’

  Branwell’s attitude to these folk, whatever else it amounts to, does make a welcome contrast with that expressed by his sisters in similar circumstances. The sons of the family he describes as ‘fine spirited lads’ – these being, no doubt, merely Charlotte’s ‘riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs’ in a lighter aspect. And Branwell depicts Mr Postlethwaite as ‘of a right hearty, generous disposition’ and his wife as ‘a quiet, silent, amiable woman’. But within a few months Branwell’s restless ambitions tore him from the Postlethwaites to visit Hartley Coleridge, and thence back to Haworth.

  His next and last post as tutor came three years later. Anne introduced him into the household where she was employed as a governess. He was to teach the son of the house. His employer, Mr Robinson, was an aging invalid; Mrs Robinson was much younger. Branwell preferred Mrs Robinson. ‘This lady,’ he wrote later, ‘(though her husband detested me) showed me a degree of kindness which, when I was deeply grieved one day at her husband’s conduct, ripened into declarations of more than ordinary feeling.’ It took Mr Robinson two-and-a-half years to confirm his suspicions, whereupon he wrote to Branwell, then on holiday, ‘intimating’ as Charlotte reported, ‘that he had discovered his proceedings … and charging him on pain of exposure to break off instantly and forever all communication with every member of his family’. Branwell insisted that Mrs Robinson returned his passion. Years afterwards, when Brontë biography began its voluminous course, she took occasion to deny it.

  Anne’s post with the Robinsons was her second. The youngest Brontë proved the most patient of the four, and though by no means devoid of talent and the will to write, endured her teaching career for a longer period than the others. However, in proportion as she exercised restraint, so did her novels reveal exactly what she had restrained in the way of spleen. At the age of nineteen Anne took charge of the two eldest children of a Mrs Ingham. Before long, Charlotte was busy passing on Anne’s news: her pupils were ‘desperate little dunces’, ‘excessively indulged’, ‘violent’ and ‘modern’. Anne left this family after eighteen months’ attempt to cope with them; she was somewhat the worse for the experience.

  Anne was twenty-one when she went to the Robinsons. Charlotte, who exaggerated most things, gave out that Anne was ‘a patient, persecuted stranger’ amongst ‘grossly insolent, proud and tyrannical’ people. Direct evidence from Anne has not survived beyond two diary fragments, the first of which commits her no further than ‘I dislike the situation and wish to change it for another.’ (Her novels provide the usual terrible children.) She remained four years, during which time her pupils had become very fond of her. In fact, the Robinson girls continued to visit and write to Anne, long after she had left the family and her brother had been dismissed in disgrace from it. Anne’s only other direct comment on the job refers to her earlier dislike of it. ‘I was wishing to leave it then, and if I had known that I had four years longer to stay, how wretched I should have been; but during my stay I have had some very unpleasant and undreamt-of experience of human nature.’ This last lament is taken to refer to Branwell’s intrigue with Mrs Robinson and can be found precisely stated in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

  Emily, like her sisters, was nineteen when she set off to be a teacher at Law Hill School and it seems fairly certain that Emily was still nineteen when she did the sensible thing and returned. All we know of her stay at Law Hill is that she wrote a letter which, according to Charlotte, ‘gives an appalling account of her duties – hard labour from six in the morning until near eleven at night, with only one half-hour exercise between. This is slavery.’ ‘I fear,’ Charlotte adds, ‘she will never stand it.’ Emily did not stand it. But the curious thing is, that during this period Emily’s poetic output was higher than at any other time, which seems to indicate that she was not entirely starved of leisure.

  Emily did not long endure her job as a music-teacher at the Héger establishment. When she was called back to Haworth with Charlotte on the death of her aunt, Emily showed no desire to return with her sister to Brussels. Much has been made of the fact that M. Héger expressed approval of Emily (after she was dead and famous) declaring, somewhat ambiguously I have always thought, that she should have been a navigator. He also gave the opinions that she might have been a great historian and she should have been a man. Nowhere does he say that she should have been a music-teacher. And at the time, M. Héger felt moved only to inform Emily’s father, ‘She was losing whatever remained of her ignorance, and also of what was worse – timidity.’

  For the three sisters it was torture while it lasted. For Branwell, fun while it lasted. Their frail constitutions were damaged and much of their creative energy dissipated in the uncongenial schoolroom. They did their best to earn a living in the only way open to them. But from the point of view which it has been my purpose to adopt, it might also be thought that genius, if thwarted, resolves itself in an infinite capacity for inflicting trouble, or at least for finding fault. It is asking too much of genius to ask it to keep its personality out of anything; even the lesser talent can seldom do so.

  Branwell’s conduct was unprofessional, to say the least. Charlotte was not, to say the least, proof against those states of mind which the most protected upbringing will not protect. Anne’s reaction was to hoard her resentment. Emily’s way, by far the most successful, was to get out of the predicament with all speed (and note: she shows no obsession in her work with the governess theme). The Brontës, however, gained ample revenge for all injustices real or imagined.

  So one might, therefore, without compunction enquire whether their employers – the Sidgwicks and Inghams and Whites – did in fact fail in their duty to their employees; or were they merely unfortunate in crossing the Brontës’ path? I should say that if their sense of duty were wanting, it was to their children. And along with this thought comes the realisation, supported from other sources besides the Brontës, that the wealthy middle class of England during the last century were willing to hand over their children to any young woman who came out of a clergyman’s home, neurotic or ailing as she might be.

  The Brontës once planned to start a school of their own. The project, as mercifully for others as for themselves, came to nothing. Branwell’s wasted life gave a warning signal to his sisters, and miraculously they asserted their creative powers.

  I have not depended on their novels to support this essay, since I believe that fiction is a suspect witness; (and if it is not stranger than truth, it ought to be). But, of course, unmistakable versions of Brontë pupils and employers are to be found in the novels of Charlotte and Anne.

  Perhaps the lesson to be drawn, for any writer with the necessary will of iron, who lacks only the opportunity to write, is that he should prove himself no good at anything else.

  [1966]

  My Favourite Villain: Heathcliff

  Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights is quite the most fascinating villain I have encountered in fiction. He’s an arch-villain – there’s no doubt at all about his evil nature. And yet he is not repulsive; everything he does is on a scale larger than life; if he lies it is not a petty lie, it is the sort of lie that brings ruin on someone’s head; if he steals, it is a whole family heritage that he steals – you couldn’t imagine Heathcliff as a shoplifter. In a modern novel such a character would be depicted as at least partially mad. Emily Brontë succeeds in making him perfectly sane and utterly bad.

  To me, most villains of nineteenth-century literature are slightly ridiculous, and I think that is because they are little, mean men. Heathcliff is a big bad man, he is never ridiculous, he is terrible, a real Prince of Darkness. He is not only the villain, he is the hero of the book in the grand Homeric sense.

  The action, already noted, which according to Rossetti’s famous comment is laid in Hell, is in fact laid very much in Yorkshire, in two rem
ote mansions of the moors. It is a small rustic world in which the scene is set, a world of secluded landed gentry whose occupations are shooting and riding and farming. It is Heathcliff who dominates and colours the world of Wuthering Heights and who gives it all its fiendish magnitude. He carries hell about with him, so that one feels as the novel progresses, that the familiar moorlands have somehow become dislocated from their natural time and place; the inhabitants are outside of the ordinary law of the land: there are no magistrates to appeal to. An ordinary love affair becomes a blood pact lasting beyond the grave.

  Heathcliff comes on the scene as a foundling child – in Emily Brontë’s words, ‘a little black-haired swarthy thing, as dark as if it came from the Devil’, and from that moment he radiates an influence on all the other characters, at first attracting hatred and violence and then exerting them.

  One thing I find curious is the fact that the mere physical action of the novel is not sufficient to explain Heathcliff’s influence and power over the other characters. Sometimes he captures them physically, of course – Isabella Linton, the young Catherine, and even the solid Ellen Dean are at one point or another made prisoners behind locked doors at Wuthering Heights. But sooner or later they find some means of escape – and one has the impression that with their wits about them, they might have escaped sooner. Certainly, they walk very easily into the traps Heathcliff prepares for them.

  But it is obvious that in Heathcliff’s presence, they haven’t really got their wits about them. His real power goes far beyond that of property and physical possession: he is a kind of moral hypnotist, and it is in some deep hidden way that he is able to manoeuvre his victims. Even those who find his appearance repulsive, and who, like Edgar Linton, have every reason to detest him, unfailingly permit themselves to fall in with his huge plan for vengeance, they seem almost to collaborate unwillingly with him. And these are not weak characters. Ellen Dean, the housekeeper, and the older Catherine are each in their own way as strong and spirited as Heathcliff. And yet they find him finally irresistible.

  Of course, it was brilliant of Emily Brontë to conceive Heathcliff’s physical appearance in the way she did. The flesh-and-blood Heathcliff is tremendously endowed with male attractiveness of the dark brooding order. Even Mr Lockwood, whose reactions are so invariably sane and normal, reveals a definite admiration for him: ‘He is a dark skinned gipsy, in aspect,’ he reports, ‘in dress, and manners a gentleman, that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire: rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure, and rather morose…’

  And we see the well-bred, dainty Isabella Linton simply throwing herself at him. ‘Is Mr. Heathcliff a man?’ she asks after their marriage, ‘If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?’ That he is, for the most part, a devil seems to be recognised only by two people in the novel, the older Catherine and Ellen Dean. Catherine puts up a fight before she accepts the destiny of this demon-lover. Ellen Dean’s response is a peculiar mixture of homeliness and deep fear. She has been Heathcliff’s childhood nurse, and when she finds him on his deathbed she can hardly keep away from him, terrified as she is. ‘I combed his black long hair from his forehead,’ she says, ‘I tried to close his eyes – to extinguish, if possible, that frightful life-like gaze of exultation, before anyone else beheld it. They would not shut – they seemed to sneer at my attempts, and his parted lips, and sharp, white teeth sneered too!’

  From first to last Heathcliff reveals this power of drawing strange, uncharacteristic passions out of the people of his environment; whenever he appears there is not only trouble, but wild agitation, frantic behaviour and violence. Emily Brontë’s sister, Charlotte, wrote of Wuthering Heights, ‘Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know; I scarcely think it is.’

  This seems to me an irrelevant statement, because the invention of a being so elemental as Heathcliff doesn’t seem to come within the scope of things that are right or advisable. He is what he is: a giant character of high fiction. It is true that one is not likely to meet a full-scale Heathcliff in ordinary life, but that is because most of the Heathcliffs of the civilised world are subject to the restraints of society. In fact, I think we do occasionally come across the type of person Heathcliff represents – the obsessed spirit which infects everyone around it, the moral blackmailer, people of terrifying psychological influence; and of course, in ordinary life, one is best out of their way.

  But Emily Brontë was not dealing with ordinary life and society. It is not the plain truth of realism, but the paradoxical truth of imaginative fiction which draws us to the immortal Wuthering Heights and its nightmare hero.

  [1960]

  Mrs Gaskell

  Despite the devoted tone of this long and laboured biography, Mrs Gaskell emerges as a provincial, materialistic, self-satisfied humbug.

  As an author she has surely had her due; she never wrote ‘a great, a profoundly moving scene’ in her life, far less in the passage so designated by Miss Hopkins. Mrs Gaskell possessed an interesting minor talent. She wrote badly most of the time. In spite of her social zeal it is impossible to take her altogether seriously. These are facts to which Miss Hopkins, in her solemn and burning faith, is blind.

  Mrs Gaskell was transported by signs of affluence in people: ‘My word! authorship must bring them in a pretty penny’ was her response to seeing someone’s art collection. At a dinner party, while smiling until her face ached, Mrs Gaskell’s inward eye would be weighing and pricing the beef: ‘More than 40 lb. we had at the bottom of the table and 2 turkeys at the top.’ She wrote endless letters about food. Not a green pea went uncounted by her.

  And what a scandalmonger she was!

  About George Eliot she wrote: ‘I shut my eyes to the awkward blot in her life’ and ‘Mrs. Lewes… (what do people call her?)’.

  About Mrs Robinson (Branwell Brontë’s employer): ‘mature and wicked woman’, ‘profligate woman’, ‘depraved woman’.

  But not everyone adored Mrs Gaskell.

  Mary Shelley said of her: ‘…the Beau ideal of a Country Blue grafted on a sort of Lady Bountiful… pretension animates her to perpetual talk’; and Jane Carlyle: ‘…there was an air of moral dullness about her’.

  Ladies! Ladies!

  [1953]

  Mary Shelley

  Author’s Note

  The following, which I wrote in 1950, is a scheme of work on Mary Shelley which I offered to publishers with a book in mind for the 100th anniversary of her death in 1851.

  Whether my subsequent book Child of Light (1951) – later revised as Mary Shelley (1987)* – fulfils the ambitious aims that I set forth in this outline, or not, it does now seem to me to fully incorporate and summarise my past and present opinions on the subject.

  Proposal for a Critical Biography of Mary Shelley (1797–1851)

  The centenary of the death of Mary Shelley will be 1st February, 1951, and this might be a suitable occasion on which to publish a definitive biography which is, I feel, long overdue.

  So far, there have been only three studies of this writer. The first appeared in 1890, by Lucy Madox Rossetti; the second (a very brief outline of her life numbering 80 pages) by Richard Church was published in 1928; and the third, by R. Glynn Grylls appeared in 1938. All of these biographies have dwelt upon the outward circumstances of Mary Shelley’s life – she has been portrayed rather as the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and as the wife of Shelley, than as an important nineteenth-century literary figure in her own right. The first of the works mentioned above has been superseded by the discovery of fresh material; the second is perhaps too short to have allowed sufficient scope to the biographer; and the third, whilst providing footnotes and appendices useful to the student, does not seem to me to offer a fluent and convincing study of the inner and outward life of its subject, hampered as it is by frequent quotations and notes. Added to this, the two latter volumes do not inc
orporate material made available since their publication, which reveals new aspects of Mary Shelley’s character during and after Shelley’s lifetime.

  The biography I now propose would take into account all the known facts of Mary Shelley’s life, interpreting her character in the light of this new material, and also considering her work as an indispensable source of illumination. So far, her autobiographical novel Lodore, which reflects the characters of her circle and many events of her life, has not been incorporated into biographical studies of Mary Shelley. And, apart from her best-known novel, Frankenstein, her other powerful and imaginative novels and stories have been neglected. In the critical-biography I have in mind, I would propose to examine all her works in assessing the personality that motivated them; and would compare her life and works with those of other women writers of the nineteenth century. This is not to suggest that I would give her a place in English literature superior to that which she deserves; she had not the craftsmanship, for instance, of Jane Austen, nor the emotional force of the Brontës; but a comparative study such as I have in view would bring to light those qualities in her work which have been overlooked, and which other women writers do not possess. Her novels Frankenstein and The Last Man, for example, are almost entirely without their counterpart in feminine literature, being the prototypes of the scientific extravaganza popularised by H.G. Wells, and recently reflected in the novels of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.