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Feminist criticism in biography:

Elisabeth Gaskell´s Life of Charlotte Brontë

Trinidad Jerez Montoya

1. INTRODUCTION

This study aims at analyzing the factual and fictional traces of Charlotte Brontë´s life – as collected by the biographer Elisabeth Gaskell - in the light of Elaine Showalter´s feminist critique.

Biographers of Charlotte Brontë from Gaskell (1857) to Gérin (1967) through the so-called purple heather school, have shown different responses to the influence of feminism. Along the century that separates both biographies the proto-feminist aspects of Gaskell´s work were underplayed.

According to Elaine Showalter (1977) Elisabeth Gaskell´s writings criticize androcentric nature of male literary world and sexist and exclusive values. This is the advice that Robert Southey gives to Charlotte as an answer to her letter requiring literary support:

“Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation”. Ch. VIII, pp 97.

Elisabeth Gaskell reports Southey´s words and makes the following commentary on them, striking Charlotte´s acceptance of her fate as a woman, which makes her unhappy. Gaskell draws a subtle correlation between Charlotte´s degree of happiness and health, depicting her as a sufferer.

This ”stringent” letter made her put aside, for a time, all idea of literary enterprise. She bent her whole energy towards the fulfilment of the duties in hand; but her occupation was not sufficient food for her great forces of intellect, and they cried out perpetually. So Charlotte had quietly to take up her burden of teaching again, and return to her previous monotonous life. Brave heart, ready to die in harness! She went back to her work, and made no complaint, hoping to subdue the weakness that was gaining ground upon her.Ch. VIII, pp 104.

An understanding of the social expectations and everyday lives of Victorian women was essential for understanding Currer Bell (pseudonym under which Charlotte hid her identity in her writings). In 1929 Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One´s Own, had made the connection between what she saw as Charlotte´s “ rage “ and the fact that she had been “ cramped and thwarted “ in a patriarchal world.

Gaskell´s works are to be considered within the Feminist phase (1880- 1920), in which women concentrated on criticizing the dominant male-centred literary culture as a form of protest against the exclusive androcentric nature of this culture. Feminist critique is literary analysis from a woman‟s perspective, but still working within androcentric assumptions.

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Along the next few pages we are going to find evidence in the text Life of Charlotte Brontë, Volume I (LCB, from now onwards ) as for:

1. Gaskell´s stance as a novelist biographer.

2. Gaskell´s portrait of Charlotte´s life out of fiction.

3. Gaskell´s portrait of Charlotte within the framework of gender issues: criticism of sexist and exclusive values.

When Elaine Showalter began to do research for her Ph.D. dissertation on Victorian women writers in 1965, scholars still called Elisabeth Gaskell “ Mrs “. This proves that Elisabeth Gaskell has been for a time undervalued as an early representative of feminist stances in women´s writing. She offered an accurate portrait of Charlotte as a woman of her time away from simple assimilations to her characters´ feelings and attitudes, which was common about readers and critics at that time. In reaction to the subversive image which Jane Eyre soon acquired, Elisabeth Gaskell wanted to detach its author from the cliché of the strong-minded emancipated woman.

However, the vision of Charlotte regarding feminism changed as new biographies were edited. There were similar to hagiobiographies which referred to Charlotte an example of domestic femininity. Later campaigners for women´s rights had tried to rewrite Charlotte as a feminist pioneer, but it was not until the woman´s movement of the 1960s and 1970s that gender would reemerge as the focal issue it had been at the time of Jane Eyre´s initial reception. It was outstandingly acknowledged as a proto-feminist novel and Charlotte´s feelings and attitudes again have carelessly assimilated to hers. In this study we are delving into the truth of some of these assertions and ckecking to what extent Elisabeth Gaskell contributed to its transmission in Charlotte´s biography.

2. GASKELL´S VOICE AND STYLE IN BIOGRAPHY.

After Charlotte´s death in March 1855, Patrick Brontë chose his daughter´s friend and fellow novelist to write The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). Apart from friendship, the reason for the choice was that Charlotte had had in Mrs. Gaskell a role model as a successful author who was both married and female. The key for the success of Gaskell´s biography may lie in the similar stance on life issues which both women writers had shared. They enjoyed a common living context and exchanged opinions about it in several letters, the staple most of this biography is made up of.

She is a great story teller with a particular talent for noticing the detail that characterises the particular situation she is describing. The detail of description of the important places, persons and events in Charlotte´s life is remarkable. It is also her intent on being as objective as possible in her telling:

I do not doubt the general accuracy of my informants,–of those who have given, and solemnly repeated, the details that follow,– but it is only just to Miss Bronte to say that I have stated above pretty nearly all that I ever heard on the subject from her. Ch. IV, pp. 38.

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Gaskell enjoyed collecting and using anecdotes both in her letters and in her books:

I have been permitted to look over a series of nine letters. I shall make one or two extracts from them, to show what sort of a person was the mother of Charlotte Brontë…Ch. III, pp 26.

Gaskell´s use of the first-person narrative in LCB did not escape notice. In a rather sexist commentary, Eneas Sweetland Dallas (1857, pp.77-94), a contemporary literary critic, noted that women´s talent for “personal discourse and familiar narrative” predisposed them to be good. He simultaneously objected to the self-important way Gaskell tried to conceal her own status, as Charlotte´s friend, upon the reader:

I have been given this extract because I conceive it bears some reference to the life of Miss Brontë… Ch. III, pp 25.

This systematic account might iundervalue the literary character of this biography. However, it is not Gaskell's writing which is in any way devoid of value in the way some critics might suggest, but the subject about which she writes. Indeed, it is her wish to display this shallowness which is apparent in her writing. She writes down the biography in a socially acceptable way to the audience of her day. However, she challenges the role of women, and the divisions of classes as she had done in her novels. Her ability and willingness to do this is a credit to her writing skills, and should not be used to undervalue her work.

3. GASKELL´S BIOGRAPHY: FACT AND FICTION IN CHARLOTTE´S PORTRAIT.

Virginia Woolf (1929, pp. 67) was aware of the intellectual problems of biography and she even called it a “ bastard,…impure art”. Unable to see how the biographer could chronicle the external facts of a life while simultaneously doing justice to the subjective truth of it, she even wondered whether “ the best method would be to separate the two kinds of truth”. She used to say: “Let the biographer print fully, completely, accurately, the known facts without comment; then let him write the life as fiction”.

According to Derek Attridge (2004) the process of creation is the result of a profound awareness of the resources of the English language, the norms of individual morality and social interaction and the sense of psychological and biographical accuracy. Gaskell´s biography is a result of this mixture. Biographical truth may be an ideal that is only provisionally achieved, and there may be a close aesthetic kinship between biography and the novel.

In this sense, the development of fictional Brontë biography was inevitable. Gaskell´s novelistic treatment had set a precedent, and many of the biographers who came after her were novelists. The distinction between history and fiction was not always clearly marked. Charlotte herself had used personal experience as the raw material for creative writing. Once this became widely recognized, the consequent attempts of enthusiasts to trace real-life models for

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every character and place were frequent. Gaskell acknowledged this when referring to Cowan´s Bridge school :

Miss Brontë more than once said to me, that she should not have written what she did of Lowood in “ Jane Eyre “, if she had thought the place would have been so immediately identified with Cowan´s Bridge, although there was not a word in her account of the institution but what was true at the time when she knew it; she also said that she had not considered it necessary, in a work of fiction, to state every particular with the impartiality that might be required in a court of justice…” V. I, Ch. IV, pp.51.

Literary biography will continue to raise questions about the relationship between fact and truth, and between information and interpretation, as well as the nature of personality and the relationship between writers and their writings. We should not see biography as a failed empirical science striving to produce definitive, objective results. Nor should we take the extreme postmodernist line which makes no distinction between biography and fiction, regarding both an undifferentiated “textual constructs“. Instead, we should regard it as a mixed art form, which ideally has both to obey the details of evidence and to respond creatively to the challenge of telling a life.

By the time Henry James complained about popular romanticisation of the Brontë´s biography in 1904, the account of their lives was already between fact and fiction. In the half century which followed Gaskell´s LCB, the Brontë story had been retold so many times and in so many forms that through sheer force of repetition it had shifted from the level of history to that of myth.

4. GENDER ISSUES IN LCB: FEMINIST CRITIQUE.

LCB was an attempt by Gaskell to prove that literary critics´ attacks on Charlotte´s “coarseness” was a product of the circumstances surrounding her life, from family to work relationships including love issues. The adjective ”coarse” is a key-word to understand Charlotte´s feminist stance. Gaskell comments upon Patrick´s male role in the family:

There are always peculiar trials in the life of an only boy in a family of girls. He is expected to act a part in life; to DO, while they are only to BE; and the necessity of their giving way to him in some things, is too often exaggerated into their giving way to him in all, and thus rendering him utterly selfish. In the family about whom I am writing, while the rest were almost ascetic in their habits, Branwell was allowed to grow up self-indulgent (…). Of course, he was careful enough not to reveal anything before his father and sisters of the pleasures he indulged in; but his tone of thought and conversation became gradually coarser, and, for a time, his sisters tried to persuade themselves that such coarseness was a part of manliness, and to blind themselves by love to the fact that Branwell was worse than other young men. Ch. IX, pp 115.

It was in reaction to attacks and accusations of coarseness that Charlotte , and later Mrs Gaskell, began to build up the public image of the Brontës. They definitely changed this strand of opinion. They had a definite outlook on the woman question at the time. Charlotte would see herself as a female version of the exceptional man of genius rather than identifying herself with common womankind.

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Elisabeth Gaskell created a climate in which Charlotte was hailed as the woman made perfect by sufferings. Ironically, the sort of feminist reading which stressed Charlotte´s victimhood reproduced the visions of women martyrs of the Victorians. Whether or not the women´s movement of the 1970s genuinely liberated Charlotte from being trapped in a narrative of “ devotion to male destiny “ seems unlike when one reads of her being so oppressed by the men in her life.

Showalter (1977) contrasts gynocritics with what she terms “feminist critique”, which sets women‟s perspectives outside the dominant culture rather than as participating through imitation as in the Feminine phase (1840-1880), or working within a female perspective as in the Female phase (1920-). However, Showalter does point out that feminist critique also occurred in the Feminine period. This critique was, however, not overt, but disguised much like the author‟s identity. Showalter says, “one has to read it between the lines” to get a grasp of the feminist critique in this period.

Gynocritics is, in fact, a term that Elaine Showalter invented. Showalter describes gynocriticism as literary criticism from a gynocentric perspective, that is, a perspective that consciously places women at the centre, assuming a female point of view. Therefore, women‟s writing in the Feminine and Feminist phases is characterized by androcentric view points; that is, women were trying to participate in the androcentric literary world in the Feminine phase, and then were protesting against the androcentric literary world in the Feminist phase. In LCB Elisabeth Gaskell addresses the woman question from different perspectives. The following are selected from a close reading of volume I.

4.1. Sexist attitudes and family relationships.

Gaskell´s biography focuses on the life history of the family. The amount of care and detail that she gives of the supporting characters – Patrick, Branwell, Arthur Nicholls – almost makes one forget that these men would never have become biographical subjects in the first place if it had not been for the literary achievements of their female relatives, especially Emily and Anne.

Elisabeth Gaskell reflects a dialogue Charlotte´s father is having with his sons and daughters in which both Patrick and Elisabeth show their sexist attitudes:

I asked Branwell what was the best way of knowing the difference between the intellects of man and woman; he answered, ‟By considering the difference between them as to their bodies¨. I then asked the next what was the best mode of education for a woman; she answered,‟That which would make her rule her house well”. Ch. III, pp 35.

According to Peters (1975, pg.16) the conflicts within Charlotte that influenced her work were not generated ( as they were for the psychobiographers ) by mental pathology, but by the tensions commonly experienced by talent and intelligent middle-class women of her time, for whom “ life could not be other than a battle between conformity and rebellion¨. Similarly he presents Charlotte not as a victim but as a professional whose success as a writer singled her out from the common run of women: if she did not fight for her rights it was because she personally had achieved the success and power her “ less fortunate sisters still cry for “.

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4.2. Writing, love and marriage.

Charlotte had always made it clear that she was not born to be married. Marriage was something alien to her most inner nature.

I am tolerably well convinced that I shall never marry at all. Reason tells me so, and I am not so utterly the slave of feeling but that I can OCCASIONALLY HEAR her voice. Ch. IX, pp 121.

Philys Bentley (1969) says that it is difficult to judge whether Charlotte was happy in her marriage or not. To Ellen Nussey, one of Charlotte´s best friends, she wrote: “ It is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife”. She used to say “ my time is not my own now”. We might understand this longing for her own time as a deprivation of much of her writing time.

According to Lucasta Miller (2001) one of the aspects of the marriage which still evokes feminist disapproval is Arthur´s attempt to censor Charlotte´s letters to Ellen. Natasha Walter (1998, pp.189) states that Charlotte Brontë, who married after writing three of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century, was reduced to seeking her husband´s approval for writing letters to her best friend.

4.3. Jane Eyre as an alter ego of Charlotte in Gaskell´s biography.

It seems that Gaskell had used the sorrows of her life as a means of diverting attention from the works. She recurrently assimilates some events in Charlotte´s life to passages appearing in some of her novels, especially Jane Eyre. In fact, Elisabeth Gaskell often mentions this novel along the biography striking the resemblance of some events and circumstances in the novel and occurrences in Charlotte´s life:

She was far superior in mind to any of her play-fellows and companions, and was lonely amongst them from that very cause; and yet she had faults so annoying that she was in constant disgrace with her teachers, and an object of merciless dislike to one of them, who is depicted as ”Miss Scatcherd” in ”Jane Eyre,” and whose real name I will be merciful enough not to disclose. I need hardly say, that Helen Burns is as exact a transcript of Maria Bronte as Charlotte’s wonderful power of reproducing character could give. Ch IV, pp 43.

In Jane Eyre, Jane confesses to having passions of her own, telling Rochester that women feel just as men feel. This acknowledgement of female desire merges into an acknowledgement of women´s need for self- expression, for intellectual or professional fulfillment, both of which, it is implied, are conventionally considered the preserve of men.

In Jane Eyre, Jane‟s actions suggest a feminist critique of social injustice against women; Jane sets out on her own, rejecting Rochester‟s proposal to go away with him as his illegitimate bride thereby refusing to become the “fallen woman”, however impossible her situation becomes as a friendless, moneyless woman. Jane‟s will is strong enough to act autonomously, but she is not entirely feminist, in that she defines her identity almost entirely in terms of her relationships with men. Therefore, the „missed possibilities‟ of Jane Eyre‟s feminist critique is Jane‟s inability to define herself and act according to her own

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will, rather than in reaction and relation to her relationships with men.

According to Steve (2003) the sisters are outstanding in their portrayal of strong female characters struggling to become independent in a male-dominated society. In Charlotte´s books it appears frequently in the form of domination by others, as when Rochester showers Jane with clothes jewellery of his choice, and she responds by refusing to become his exotic slave-girl. In this they anticipate several later novelists, such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence.

5. CONCLUDING REMARKS

So it is Gaskell's ability to combine the feminine "ladies business" of her charming writing with a strong grasp and understanding of the social problems of her time, that gives her work the impact it has and its literary value. Gaskell's writing has indeed been considered "feminine" in its style, as she deals with social problems from a different, more Christian angle. Charlotte was not officially a feminist in the modern, political sense and did not directly engage in the legal struggle for women´s rights. Instead, she embodied a more inclusive definition of feminism which could involve “all women who have broken the mold to fulfill their creative, intellectual impetus“. In LCB Gaskell conveys Charlotte´s inner thoughts and feelings regarding her efforts to pursuit this creative driving force within a male-dominated literary world.

In the 1980s and 1990s a post-feminist consciousness has made it possible, perhaps for the first time since Gaskell, for biographers to see Charlotte as a victim, whether of the external tragedies in her life, of her own neuroses, or of patriarchal society. We highlight here two biographies, which both came out in 1994, Lyndall Gordon´s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life and Juliet Barker´s The Brontës, which are completely different in approach. Barker´s biography shares Gaskell´s vision and uses biographical details to access Charlotte´ s writings. The novels are not used, as so often in the past, as sources of biographical evidence; rather, the facts of Charlotte´s life history are put to the service of gaining a deeper understanding of her works. As a literary critic, Gordon comes to the life through the works, reversing the pattern initially established by Gaskell.

As we have seen throughout this study, life and art go hand in hand and the

character who emerges is subtle and complex. The future contains an infinite

number of Charlotte Brontës in the hands of tomorrow´s biographers, each one

of whom will have a different relationship with her and a different stance on

Charlotte´s feminism. However, all of them will remark the value of works such

as The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette as feminist critics of the

society of the time.

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6. REFERENCES

Attridge, D. (2004) The Singularity of Literature; Routledge.

Bentley, P. ( 1969 ) The Brontës and their world; Thames and Hudson.

Gérin,W.( 1967) Charlotte Brontë: The evolution of genius; OUP.

Gilbert,S. & Gubar,S. (1979) The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman

Writer and the Nineteenth Century Imagination; Yale University.

Lodge, D. (1992) The Art of Fiction. Ch.11 “Defamiliarization” ( Charlotte

Brontë ); Secker and Warburg.

Miller, L. (2001) The Brontë Myth. Ch.3 “Life into Literature”; Ch. 6

“Fiction and Feminism”; London. Vintage.

Miller J.H. (2002) On Literature; London and New York. Routledge.

Peters, M (1975) Unquiet Soul: A Biography of Charlotte Brontë;

Doubleday paperback, New York.

Showalter,E. (1977) A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists

from Brontë to Lessing; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Sweetland Dallas,E ( 1857 ) Blackwood´s Edinburgh Magazine; July.

Walter, N (1998) The New Feminism; London: Little, Brown and

Company Wolf.

Woolf,V. (1929) A Room of One´s Own; London: Panther.

i The prevailing attitude towards Elizabeth Gaskell's writing in the first half of the twentieth century was typified by Lord David

Cecil's characterisation of her in Early Victorian Novelists as

all a woman was expected to be; gentle, domestic, tactful, unintellectual, prone to tears, easily shocked. So far from chafing at the limits imposed on her activities, she accepted them with serene satisfaction.

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/gaskell/sacerdoti1.html web 15th May 2011