The Brontë Cabinet

by Deborah Lutz

  Charlotte’s mixing of bones with letters reminds us of mail holding bits of the body (like hair). Her letters to Heger feel this way—as if she has sacrificed some part of herself to write them, has posted a pound of flesh. What ultimately happened to the letters has a flavor of Victor Frankenstein sewing together his creature out of corpse parts, a scenario envisioned by Mary Shelley just twenty-seven years earlier. Yet, even more than Charlotte’s letters to Heger, those many messages sent to Ellen evoke the intimacy of personality, gesture, and the fingers and countenance. In fact, this set of letters spanning almost a lifetime could be equally passionate. After Charlotte’s ceremoniousness wore off in her early letters to Ellen, she became affectionate and then positively ardent. Receiving a crisply sealed letter from Ellen could bring Charlotte a “thrill of delight.” She read some of Ellen’s letters “trembling all over with excitement,” a visceral bliss she gives to the forlorn Lucy when a letter arrives from Dr. Bretton. Her salutation changed from “Dear Ellen” to “My dearest Ellen,” then to “My own Dear Ellen,” and her signature from “Believe me to remain / Your affect. friend” to “’Farewell my dear dear dear Ellen,” and then “Adieu my Sweetest Ellen / I am Ever yours.” Charlotte laments when they must be physically separated for too long, wishing she could have “my darling,” “my Comforter beside me.” She proposes they set up house together permanently, so they would never have to part: “Ellen I wish I could live with you always . . . If we had but a cottage and a competency of our own I do think we might live and love on till Death without being dependent on any third person for happiness.” Charlotte courts Ellen, as if they were on their way to becoming lovers, using the kind of language a Victorian man would use in wooing a woman: “My darling, I have lavished the warmest affections of a very hot, tenacious heart upon you—if you grow cold—it’s over.” When Vita Sackville-West, herself bisexual and having an affair with Virginia Woolf, read Charlotte’s letters to Ellen in 1926, she said they “leave very little doubt in one’s mind as to what Charlotte’s tendencies really were. Whether she knew it herself is another matter. But they are love letters pure and simple.” 36

  Charlotte and Ellen enjoyed sharing a bed, like so many girls of the time, a practice started when at Roe Head School. Charlotte’s rest had an especially deep quality with Ellen by her side. “I do miss my dear bed-fellow. No more of that calm sleep,” Charlotte adds in a postscript to a letter to Ellen where she admits, “I am afraid of caring too much for you.” Delicate matters were best discussed between the sheets or while they were curling their hair before the fire. Just about the time Charlotte was falling in love with Heger in Brussels, she wrote to Ellen wishing she could talk with her, face to face, on a thorny topic not specified in the letter. She hoped that “one day perhaps or rather one evening—if ever we should find ourselves again by the fireside at Haworth or Brookroyd with our feet on the fender—curling our hair—I may communicate [it] to you.” Conversation over difficult matters and curling of hair became so synonymous, the latter was a shorthand version for the former. Charlotte entices a friend to visit by promising “a series of quiet ‘curling-hair times.’ ” Later, after her sisters died, Charlotte would have Ellen at Haworth to comfort her. The two would talk, and Charlotte would stroke Ellen’s head and lean over her, once saying, “If I had but been a man, thou would have been the very ticket for me as a wife.” 37

  We can never know if Charlotte and Ellen had a sexual relationship—there is certainly no proof that they did—and perhaps it doesn’t matter. Their correspondence attests to a fervent love that included romantic, and perhaps even erotic, feelings. It’s likely that Charlotte had heard of women who took women as lovers or “wives,” such as fellow Yorkshirewoman Anne Lister, or perhaps even knew some. 38

  However it might be characterized in the twentieth or twenty-first century, Charlotte and Ellen’s ardor, although heartfelt and true, followed conventions of the time. Victorian women were expected to have devoted female friends. These attachments showed their mastery of what the Victorians felt were the virtues of their gender: their openness to emotion and deep sentiment. In her history of Victorian female friendship, Sharon Marcus explains that it wasn’t until the twentieth century that a fear of the homosexual developed. In the nineteenth century a larger range of acceptable ways flourished for women to be with other women. Women kissing each other on the lips, walking with their arms around each other’s waists, sleeping curled up together in the same bed, and forming lifelong partnerships, sometimes described by contemporaries as “marriages,” were all viewed as “natural” expressions of femininity. Some women did, of course, develop erotic and sexual liaisons with other women—what we would today call lesbian relationships. Yet the majority of these meaningful bonds between women wouldn’t fit into our category of “lesbian,” although none of our categories really fit. Marcus charts, through studying hundreds of diaries and letters, the freedom Victorian women felt to be passionately attached to other women, to be competitive with other women for the affections of especially attractive female friends, and to be appreciative of the physical beauty of other women. Women could practice with their female friends an amorous freedom condemned in their relations with men to whom they were not married, which were carefully monitored and circumscribed. 39

  Charlotte’s novel Shirley is more about women smitten with each other than anything else, even though her two heroines ultimately marry men. Charlotte manages to fit two highly charged same-sex connections into the novel. The tender adoration Shirley’s governess, Mrs. Pryor, showers on Caroline, Shirley’s best friend, bears the guise of an obsessive infatuation since neither the characters nor the reader are informed until the last quarter of the book that the older woman is actually Caroline’s long-absent mother. Mrs. Pryor goes so far as to suggest that they set up their life together, in a passage that almost mimics heterosexual marriage proposals in many a Victorian novel. “With you I am happier than I have ever been with any living thing . . . your society I should esteem a very dear privilege—an inestimable privilege, a comfort, a blessing . . . I hope you can love me?” Her dearest wish is to take a house of her own, hoping Caroline will “come to me then.” When Caroline falls ill, her confinement in bed means Mrs. Pryor can encircle Caroline in her arms and draw her to her heart. “I shall hardly wish to get well,” Caroline remarks, “that I may keep you always.”

  Shirley, in turn, has a fellowship with Caroline that fuels the plot with a vitality missing from the heterosexual romances. Charlotte builds Shirley (usually a man’s name at that time) into a “masculine” character, based on the Emily that would have been if “placed in health and prosperity.” Shirley thinks of herself as an “esquire” and “Captain Keeldar,” because her parents “gave me a man’s name; I hold a man’s position,” she explains. “It is enough to inspire me with a touch of manhood . . . I feel quite gentlemanlike.” Her governess fears that when Shirley disdains needlework and whistles, people will feel “you affected masculine manners.” Shirley tells Caroline of her pleasure in knowing “that my quiet, shrewd, thoughtful companion and monitress [Caroline] is coming back to me: that I shall have her sitting in the room to look at, to talk to, or to let alone, as she and I please.” Caroline feels “twined” with Shirley, a “sustenance and balm” too rooted to be shaken by quarrels or passions for others. “I am supported and soothed when you—that is, you only—are near, Shirley.” 40

  When the two women spend the night in the same bed together, Caroline discovers that the man she loves has asked Shirley to marry him. In staying awake and talking “the whole night through,” they work loose the knot: Caroline then knows that there is no love between Shirley and Caroline’s beloved. The consolation and ease of girls occupying the same bed is a theme Charlotte returned to throughout her writing life. There is the scene in Jane Eyre of Helen dying in Jane’s arms at Lowood school. In a final, unfinished novel called Emma, a student’s reward for studiousness is sharing a bed with the
headmistress.

  What results from the nocturnal conversation in Shirley are the marriages of these two friends to two brothers, thus linking them forever as family. Charlotte probably drew on her closeness with Ellen for this plot twist; Ellen’s brother Henry actually proposed to Charlotte. Not being in love with him, Charlotte said no, but one thing made her want to accept. “Now my dear Ellen there were in this proposal some things that might have proved a strong temptation—I thought if I were to marry so, Ellen could live with me and how happy I should be.” In these cases, marriage happened or almost happened as exchanges between women, with their bond more essential than the heterosexual couple’s. 41

  When it came to gender manipulation and play as in Shirley, Charlotte stood on home ground. In her early stories, she almost always wrote from the point of view of Charles Wellesley, continuing to speak as a man in her first novel, The Professor. She savored stepping into masculine identities and names in letters, and when visiting Ellen, she liked to be called “Charles” by the household. She used the ambiguously gendered pseudo­nym Currer Bell for all her novels. Even when she brought women into the center of her stories, as with Jane Eyre, she continued toying with gender. Rochester turns into something more interesting than merely an impenetrable, privileged man when he dons the clothes and character of an elderly gypsy woman. In Villette, Lucy Snowe performs as a male dandy in school theatricals, flirting with Ginevra Fanshawe with a real zest. 42

  Taken as a whole, Charlotte’s eye on exchanges between women in her fiction ranged far and wide. Rivals for men’s affection are a standby, as in Jane Eyre, where the snobbish Blanche Ingram courts Rochester, who, it turns out, is already married to Bertha Mason. Jane’s connection to Rochester’s wife, the “madwoman in the attic,” has been brilliantly decoded by the feminist scholars Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. They see the women as psychological doubles or alter egos, with Bertha as the angry, sexualized, rebellious side of Jane, acting with a rage not available to a governess, forced to suppress such feelings. Women in Charlotte’s novels speak and act for other women.43

  Not surprisingly, it was an engagement with a man that caused one of the few gaps in Ellen and Charlotte’s correspondence. When Charlotte decided she would marry Arthur Nicholls, Ellen became so jealous, it almost ended their friendship. Ellen, who never married, managed to overcome her sorrow at losing first place in Charlotte’s affections, but their correspondence never fully recovered. Arthur found their letters “dangerous as lucifer matches” because of their wealth of personal detail. Fearing they might fall into the hands of strangers, he insisted that Ellen must “distinctly promise to burn my [Charlotte’s] letters as you receive them”; otherwise he will “read every line I write and elect himself censor of our correspondence.” This shocking threat—that Arthur would read and alter Charlotte’s letters to her best friend—feels like a violation. Ellen sent a promise to Arthur to “pledge herself to the destruction of Charlotte’s epistles” if he promised to leave their letters uncensored. Ellen didn’t keep her promise because he continued to curtail the intimacy of their correspondence. Ellen knew Arthur looked over Charlotte’s shoulder as she wrote to her, because Charlotte would add that information to the letter. Ellen must have felt a little like Charlotte did when she tried to send those letters directly to her professor, circumventing spousal prying eyes. Charlotte submitted to Arthur’s domineering behavior with a surprising passivity. Possibly she found some frisson in this “manly” pushiness, a style her heroines admired. The independent Shirley prefers her husband to be “a master”: “One whose control my impatient temper must acknowledge . . . A man I shall find impossible not to love, and very possible to fear.” This she finds in her former teacher, who vanquishes and restricts her, turning her into a “chained denizen of deserts.”44

  Ellen claimed that the hundreds of letters Charlotte had received from Ellen, stretching over the many years of their attachment, were burned by Charlotte at Arthur’s request and that he destroyed any left after her death. But since he maintained that he never saw any of the older letters, it’s impossible to know what happened to them. Ellen mutilated some of Charlotte’s letters herself. She cut Charlotte’s signature off some to send to fans requesting autographs, sometimes taking lines of text along with it. She blacked out names and censored some of the ardent words and phrases when she contemplated their publication. Patrick also cut up Charlotte’s letters to satisfy relic hunters. Some he snipped apart completely, sending their fragments all over the globe. The Brontë scholar Margaret Smith, who painstakingly researched her three-volume collection of Charlotte’s letters, reconstituted some of these sheets. A June 9, 1849, letter, for instance, was scissored into many pieces. Smith located five fragments of the letter in as many places: the Morgan Library in New York; the private collection of Mrs. Karen Bicknell; the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas; Trinity College, Dublin; and the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Yorkshire. Smith’s painstaking work, one might say, was another act of fellowship between women, faithful and sealed with meticulousness.45

  Some of Charlotte’s letters to Ellen will probably always retain a sense of mystery. On one envelope to Ellen sent on August 28, 1847, Charlotte sealed the back flap with a wafer that says, “Look Within.” She then took her pen and put a line through “Look,” adding two dots over the “L.” She wrote an “S” before “Within,” making it “Swithin,” underlined it, and added three dots underneath the “Swi.” The letter contained in this envelope has gone missing, and what she meant by the altered wafer remains obscure. Perhaps it is a reference to Saint Swithin’s Day, which falls on July 15? Traditionally, that day’s weather will hold steady for the next forty days. July 15 came on clear and warm, and while some of the days in the next forty had occasional rain and thunder, they were mostly fine. Ellen visited Haworth at the end of that July, and all four women—the “Quartette,” Ellen liked to call them—spent long hours on the moors. They saw a parhelion (an optical phenomenon that makes the sun appear multiplied) while on a stroll on July 21. Perhaps the strange sun led them to talk of forecasts and superstitions about reading the future weather. August 24 would have ended the Saint Swithin’s Day period, and Charlotte sent the note with the altered wafer a few days later.46

  Yet August 24 was momentous for Charlotte for altogether different reasons. She put a package on a train containing the manuscript of Jane Eyre, posting it to the publishers Smith, Elder and Co. She added stamps to offset the cost of carriage, not being able to prepay at the rail station. Despite Ellen’s dearness to her, Charlotte did not share her writing life with her. She did not tell Ellen she wrote books until after Shirley had been published, long after Ellen had guessed its and Jane Eyre’s authorship. Perhaps Charlotte’s demand on her letter seal that Ellen not “look within” had a subtle hint of her undisclosed secret. This part of her life she only truly shared with those other important women, with whom she had thorny, yet essential relationships: her sisters.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Alchemy of Desks

  Graham would endeavor to seduce her attention by opening his

  desk and displaying its multifarious contents: seals, bright

  sticks of wax, pen-knives, with a miscellany of engravings . . .

  —CHARLOTTE BRONTË, Villette

  IT WAS CHARLOTTE’S poking around in Emily’s private writing space, in the autumn of 1845, that led to the sisters’ first appearance in print. While Charlotte practiced being out in the world with her writing, taking risks by unbending in letters, Emily penned poetry for herself alone, not sharing it with Anne either, even though the two still wrote Gondal stories together. Emily, now twenty-seven, and Anne, twenty-five, even pretended to be characters from their fantasyland, “escaping from the palace of instruction” while on a train to York at the end of June. Yet Anne notes in her diary paper, written a few weeks after this trip (dated July 31, 1845), that Emily is “writing some poetry.” “I wonder,” Anne goes on, “what i
t is about?”1

  Based on the manuscripts of Emily’s poetry that still exist, her writing process went like this: she composed poems on scraps of paper, some of them scratched on corners torn from letters, handwritten essays, or snippets of light-brown cardboard. Many of the odd bits of paper came from notebook pages divided into halves, quarters, or smaller portions. With some of these leaves, it appears she tore down the page to fit snugly around the already penned poem, leaving no margins. She drafted verse in the tiny script Charlotte and Branwell used for their magazines, often loading numerous short poems onto minuscule fragments, in one case crowding eight separate poems onto a sheet measuring just three by two and a quarter inches. She seemed to pack her crabbed words onto a sheet too small for her purposes, cramming in more until her verse fell off the edge. She composed one 1844 poem about death titled “At Castlewood,” and with a Gondal setting, on part of a sheet of black-edged mourning stationery, in use from their Aunt Branwell’s recent death. After its last line she wrote, “My task is done.”2

  Emily sometimes illustrated her poems with landscapes spouting volcanoes, furry or springy creatures that look like extraterrestrials, snakes with wings, and birds in flight. On one she drew a picture of a person sitting in a chair, looking out a window onto some moors, probably a self-portrait. Others have various symbols, like diamonds and horseshoes, that comprise a private language, its meaning now obscure.