Patrick Brontë—who’ll end up surviving his whole family and, octogenarian, profiting and benefitting off their legends—buys his daughters all the books they ask for and is in possession of a well-stocked but somewhat antiquated though exceedingly classic library. William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Lord Byron, John Milton, Walter Scott, John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, the Bible and collections of condemnatory sermons, One Thousand and One Nights, a variety of gothic fantasies, and folders with illustrations of the imaginary architectures of John Martin. And he has subscriptions to all the weekly and monthly publications of the day, which his daughters and son devour with an insatiable hunger for everything that happens outside and far away. So, a curious mix of the vintage and the contemporary. Lost ancient mythologies melting into the modern news of the latest discoveries of explorers of the Empire in exotic lands, immediately annexable in the name of Queen Victoria. Back then, you read to know you were alive, to live more. Long dresses, heavy cloths, the light of candles, which is the light of the happily awake who make letters dance across pages, as if they were alive and exhaling their breath in the faces of those who inhale them and read them. Is that a happy childhood or a terrible childhood? It depends on the eyes with which you look at and read it. Penelope, she’s certain, would have lived it in a levitating ecstasy while any Karma girl would’ve asked to be sacrificed to save herself from further suffering. Sisters are, for the Karmas, figures to train with in preparation for the inevitable combat and competition against female cousins and friends and girlfriends and wives of brothers and male cousins. Sisters aren’t allies, they’re rivals. Sisters aren’t playmates. Sisters are toys to be broken.
And, returning from a trip, on the 5th of June of 1826 (historic day duly recorded, the day of the Big Bang, the day of let there be light and let there be darkness), Patrick Brontë brings his son Branwell the gift of twelve toy soldiers. Little wooden soldiers. Little soldiers made of wood and not of lead; and this material detail seems more than pertinent to Penelope: little soldiers made not of the lead from which bullets are fabricated and the dead made, but of the wood from which books are assembled and lives created. Little wooden soldiers Branwell distributes without hesitation among his sisters. Three for each of them and three for him. At first, those little soldiers are Napoleon Bonaparte or the Duke of Wellington and his deputies and troops. But then they get bored of real history and, playing with them, setting off sparks, is no longer enough for the small yet immense Brontës and their imaginary friends. Because it can’t contain them: they need imaginary planets. And so it is that the flames of their invented yet ever so real worlds are ignited: the African kingdom of Glass Town, The Angria Empire, the island of Gondal, located in a secret fold in the Pacific Ocean, to the north of the island of Gaaldine and sheltering in turn the kingdoms Gondal and Angora and Exina and Alcona. One kingdom for each sibling. Imaginary lives, role-playing games. Names and personalities like those of Julius Brenzaida, of the Duke of Zamorna, of Geraldine Sidonia, of Augusta Almeda, of Rosno, of Alexander de Elbë. Also, the radical reformulation of the characters of others recreated at will. Rob Roy is no longer Rob Roy when he wakes up on the shores of Verdopolis.
Then, the need for what’s told to be written, for the voice to become letters and, so, they turn into writing machines. And, thus, minuscule books, the size of a matchbox, bound with string. “Bed-plays,” the Brontës call them, because they write them in bed, at night. There inside, primitive science fiction, fan fiction, anything goes, in microscopic uppercase script without clear punctuation, accompanied by maps, landscapes, drawings. The idea, they say, is that the books be just the right size and weight to be enjoyed by those little wooden soldiers to whom they owe so much, to whom they owe everything. So they write and write. They write much more then than they’ll write as adults.
And soon—playtime is over—the sisters go out into the world.
To work as teachers in schools or as governesses for families, jobs where they often experience romantic passions for the master of the house or the smartest teacher at the school, passions that never amount to anything, but find a way into their most important novels. But it doesn’t take long for all three to return home, to Haworth and to Glass Town and to Gondal and to Angria. Homes, sweet homes where all rational bitterness is reprocessed as delirious fiction. Better like that. Back in Haworth, Aunt Elizabeth has died and Father Patrick is going blind, and Brother Branwell howls in streets and in pubs, and his bad reputation sinks a local school project to be directed by the madman’s three sisters.
And they have no option but to become professional writers.
The idea is to always stay together, to publish as a trio.
They don’t say anything to their dearest Branwell—who makes them feel something unconfessable yet closely akin to vicarious shame—so he won’t feel left out. Though Branwell is already far away, in his own realm, drifting through the opium vapors. And one night in 1848 he falls into bed and closes his eyes never to rise again; though there are witnesses who claim that, in a final demonstration of stoicism, Branwell gets to his feet and dies standing up and “chronic bronchitis-marasmus,” concludes his death certificate, diagnosing something that seems to his three sisters like a tropical and Gondalian malady that, in truth, is nothing but a broken heart.
And the self-publication of a first volume of melancholic poems from three sisters transformed into three brothers goes unnoticed (they sell just two copies; a critic highlights the poems of Ellis, of Emily) and their first manuscripts are rejected by editors who don’t even feel the slightest curiosity about finding out who’s hiding behind those strange aliases (more than one thinks they’re all the same person) that change sex as if it were a mask, but underneath retain the initials of their feminine faces.
But in 1847, with the success of Jane Eyre by Currer Bell, everything changes. The manuscript arrives to its editor with a letter in which its author claims he’ll be “remembered forever.”
And so it will be and so it is and, for the time being, nobody can forget that heroine, forever in distress yet forever overcoming all adversity. Jane Eyre is followed by—in a single volume, after many rejections, but its publication justified now because of the success of the eldest sister—the publication of the, at the time, less successful Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell and Agnes Grey by Acton Bell.
Currer Bell’s novel is celebrated for its structure and its reformulation of classic motifs.
Ellis Bell’s novel, on the other hand, frightens the people who read it; some condemn its pages as giving off a whiff of sulfur, others enjoy it almost in secret.
Acton Bell’s novel is considered lesser (like Anne herself, its author, less attractive and less spectacular, with a stutter and a desire to never inconvenience anyone; to the extent that her not-so-far-off tombstone gets her age wrong, and her ghost never returned to demand the error be corrected). But, like her subsequent The Tenant of Wildfell Hall—also not appreciated by critics upon publication—it’s now understood as a proto-feminist text, denouncing the injustices suffered by working women or the enslaved housewives of despotic husbands. Beings in whose face—as can be read and heard there for the first time, with the force of a slap—the bedroom door can be slammed and locked. Charlotte Brontë, always judgmental of her sisters, does not—the same, of course, goes for Wuthering Heights—like it. And “At this I cannot wonder. The choice of subject was an entire mistake. Nothing less congruous with the writer’s nature could be conceived. The motives which dictated this choice were pure, but, I think, slightly morbid. She had, in the course of her life, been called on to contemplate, near at hand, and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused: hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved, and dejected nature; what she saw sank very deeply into her mind; it did her harm. She brooded over it till she believed it to be a duty to reproduce every detail (of course with fictitious characters, incidents, and situations) as a warning to others. She hated her w
ork, but would pursue it.”
(The Karma women and girls don’t like it either. They don’t like anything to do with the Brontës; except Charlotte Brontë, in Jane Eyre. They find that ending with the tamed man moving. And it’s not like they read the novels, rather that Penelope tells them about them. Upon request yet obligatorily. It occurs to one of the Karmas—whichever, it doesn’t matter—that “Penita should do a literary workshop for us, like one of those book clubs, like the one that one black millionaire has.” Really, what the Karmas actually want is for Penelope to spend less time reading alone—which makes them very nervous; nothing unnerves a Karma more than solitude, not being seen by and not seeing everyone else—and for her to be with them all the time and talking more. Nothing upsets or unsettles someone who doesn’t read more than the happiness of someone reading. Also, of course, as always: the gratifying feeling of having someone, someone else, at their service. That there be someone for them. So Penelope—with all the enthusiasm she can muster, as if describing colors to someone blind from birth—tells them the plots of the novels. And the Karmas, immediately, yawn and deem Anne Brontë’s heroines “dummies” and, more than precursors, “really old school.” Because, for the Karmas, the truest and most triumphal feminism is not to go on the attack, rather to pretend to be obedient, but actually to do whatever they want, to get their way. When it comes to the shivers and fevers of Catherine Earnshaw, they judge them too complicated and arduous and counterproductive. Besides, Wuthering Heights is the great family-unplanning—tribal-deconstruction—novel. And that, for all of them, inseparable at any cost, is like an incomprehensible language and, “of course, Penita must like all of that so much because she doesn’t have any family except for that writer brother and that crazy uncle and those dead parents and …” And some Karmas are indignant because “that book is a rip-off of that telenovela I saw a long time ago.” Why such public scandal, why go around switching houses, when you can always have a hysteric and never-consummated and vacuum-sealed and fantasy tryst with your tennis or riding or hip new jazzercise coach? they wonder. For the Karmas—supreme queens in the art of mental masturbation—there’s no sense or benefit in being on everyone’s lips. The important thing, on Mount Karma, is to not have people talking about you and to fill that silence talking about someone else, about what this or that so-and-so did, about what they really wanted to say when they said nothing, about what is behind the secret of a secret of a secret that everybody knows because it is a secret. And secrets do not exist if they are not told and cease to be skeletons in the closet in order to become incorruptible living dead or hairy monsters of the kind that feed off the fear of childish adults, hanging in the darkness like genuine fur coats; coats they can’t display as trophies out of discourtesy to the tropical climate of Abracadabra, and so they languish there, addicted to naphthalene, and are taken out only every so often to be worn with a sweaty forehead and profile.)
Soon, the secret is recognized as such—look: there goes a secret—because the secret of the true names and sexes of the shadowy sisters Brontë comes to light. And the sisters are a topic of conversation and curiosity in London. The three become fascinating, like everything that comes in trios: The Holy Trinity and The Three Graces and the Three Furies and the three fairies and the three witches of Macbeth and the three daughters of Lear and the Three Stooges and the three knocks of the ghosts on the table of the medium and the three verbal tenses and three possible answers to the same question and three wishes to be granted.
Everyone wants to meet them and some (like William Makepeace Thackeray) achieve it and get past the walls of their almost-autistic shyness. Charlotte Brontë is, of the three, the most sociable (and spends a good part of her Jane Eyre royalties fixing her teeth). Anne Brontë ventures out occasionally just so she can come back in. But they can’t rely on Emily Brontë for anything or anyone and she feels betrayed by her sisters’ public personalities’ betrayal of their private personas.
And Charlotte Brontë will end up getting married against the wishes of her father, who refuses to preside over the nuptial mass (and Charlotte Brontë will die before giving birth, beset by nausea and dehydrated from incessant vomiting). And her sisters die first (they die young, but all surpassing 28.5 years, the average life expectancy of the time, in harsh Haworth, where 42 percent of children don’t make it past six years). But first, Currer and Ellis and Acton Bell die.
And it’s here that Penelope begins to hate Charlotte Brontë (despite admiring her Villette far and away above Jane Eyre) and the way in which—with prefaces and postscripts—she manipulates and administers and manages her sisters’ ghosts at her pleasure and convenience.
Charlotte Brontë has the forethought to become friends with the writer Elizabeth Gaskell, who later the Brontës’ father entrusts to write a posthumous biography, which turned out masterful (and which they publish to great and already-fetishistic-and-freak-fan success, two years after the death of the author of Jane Eyre), but not especially reliable. A biography—maybe the first in which someone writes about someone who writes—in which the parameters of the imminent myth of the sisters had already been demarcated in long conversations by the very selective memory of Charlotte Brontë.
There, first Charlotte Brontë invents her sisters and then Elizabeth Gaskell invents Charlotte Brontë in what turns out to be, barely subliminally, a/another—the first of many—novel about the sisters Brontë, written by one of their fans. Starting with Elizabeth Gaskell, the sisters Brontë are perceived by their increasingly numerous readers and critics as literature’s first writer-characters, the sisters Brontë as characters who write, immersed in the atmosphere of the life of a novel.
There, oppressive moors and closed environments and houses taken over and all of that with three girls holding candelabras and speaking in whispers when, really, they had a great time, laughing nonstop, somewhat mad laughter, but laughter all the same. And for Elizabeth Gaskell’s book—as well as for postmortem editions of Wuthering Heights—Charlotte Brontë has specially devoted herself to the customized (to suit her own ends) re-creation of Emily Brontë and her Wuthering Heights. A book that—you don’t need to be a Sherlock Holmes or a Sigmund Freud to realize—Charlotte Brontë admires and hates and praises and condemns in supposedly clarifying yet murky “biographical notes,” masterpieces of passive aggression, penned by “the editor Currer Bell.”
There—with manners resembling those of Ernest Hemingway when, some time later, he conveniently “adapted” the figure more than the genius of Francis Scott Fitzgerald—she judges Wuthering Heights with malicious innocence as “rustic, wild, and crude” and “hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials.” Something like the fascinating offspring of a savant and self-destructive creature and—shamelessly lying—little read and not at all refined. Someone—and Penelope read between the lines—“Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was that while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit was inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hands, the unnerved limbs, the fading eyes, the same service was exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was a pain no words can render … In Emily’s nature the extremes of vigour and simplicity seemed to meet. Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial tastes, and an unpretending outside, lay a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of the hero; but she had no worldly wisdom; her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life: she would fail to defend her most manifest rights, to consult her most legitimate advantage. An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world.”
Emily Brontë, for Charlotte Brontë, like someone who, almost blindfolded, steps up and hits the bull’s-eye, but who—give it a rest, already, right? Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice and the next time an arrow fired by that archer, lucky in the first place, good or ill, might end up killing
someone.
Which, before dying, didn’t keep Charlotte Brontë—who, as if in passing, happily mentioned that there were critics who, at first, thought Wuthering Heights was a juvenile and immature manuscript of hers and not her sister’s—from concerning herself with sweetening her sister’s nature into the heroine of her novel Shirley (her worst book) and even imitating Emily Brontë in a final inconclusive fragment entitled Emma (“The Story of Willie Ellin,” featuring an exceedingly mistreated boy à la Heathcliff).
Or even from being accused of throwing an endless continuation to Wuthering Heights into the fire, because she considered it too bestial (though Wuthering Heights, like the Bible, has the great audacity of including its own sequel/deforming mirror; the first section of Wuthering Heights can be understood as the book of a writer and the second section as the book of a reader, Penelope says to herself).
“Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is,” the surviving older sister advised. And, true, hers is the great foundational idea of the madwoman in the attic and the thenceforth cliché of the seduced servant seducing her lord and master. Hers was also, in Jane Eyre, to end up offering and delivering that revolutionary line, looking the reader in the eyes, “Reader, I married him” (and not “Reader, he married me” or “Reader, we got married”). There, headed for a horrifying altar, Rochester blind and invalid and dependent on the heroine has learned to wait, patient and complaisant and humiliated, for the hero’s inevitable fall. Perfect. Formidable. Congratulations.
But, for Penelope (no matter that almost all contemporary writers rate the formal perfection and subtlety of Jane Eyre above the volcanic chaos of Wuthering Heights), Emily Brontë went much further. Emily Brontë, unlike her sister, didn’t limit herself to locking the mad and flaming Bertha Mason in the flammable heights of Thornfield Hall. Emily Brontë opted to create the heights of a world where everyone is mad and running wild. Yes, a mad world where Penelope feels she can live not happily (because she’ll never be happy, except when she thinks and recites select sections of Wuthering Heights) but, yes, madly. A world where—unlike what happens in the majority of books—nobody felt obligated to justify their actions.
The Dreamed Part Page 21