I've just finished reading Charlotte Bronte's Villette for about the millionth time, so in honor of Charlotte (if one can call perpetual uneasiness an honor), I'm posting my essay about her novel Shirley. Meanwhile, imagine me wandering the aisles of the grocery store, blinking under the lights, examining the bananas and pondering Captain Ahab. Sounds a little like Ginsburg and a little like Bob Dylan, don't you think? But I promise to be more well behaved, at least on the outside.

Inventing Charlotte Brontë

Dawn Potter

[first published in the Sewanee Review, summer 2010]

A couple of days ago, having gotten sick of the Aeneid, I found myself fidgeting among my bookshelves looking for something to distract me from the ponderous exploits of that pious sap Aeneas (and it’s no wonder Juno keeps trying to kill him off; he’s such a pill). Fairly quickly I pulled out Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley; and just as quickly I remembered that the paperback I’d been dipping into periodically for the past twenty years had disintegrated, on last use, to a jaundiced, brittle stack of pages laced with little white spine-glue chips that sifted onto my stomach when I tried to turn a page in bed.

This discovery has not led me to toss the book sensibly into the woodstove and choose something more cohesive to read. Rather, in hopes of saving the last fragile remnants of cheap binding, I’ve taken to reading Shirley at a speed that resembles the delayed slow motion one sees in explanatory replays of baseball pitches: sitting bolt upright, preternaturally alert for a page explosion, my neck cocked stiffly at goose angle, both hands gripping the Scotch-taped cover with the sort of tension I also exhibit when I’m driving in a snowstorm.

If Charlotte Brontë were to step into my kitchen right now, she would no doubt glance briefly and without interest at my contortions over her novel, snort, and then announce that my discomfort serves me right. “You ought to suffer,” she’d say. “And what’s more, you like it.”

Oh, Charlotte. One could not exactly call her a sadist. Nonetheless, with Currer Bell for a big sister, Emily and Anne must have had their white-knuckle moments. Even her ally and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell, whose tender forbearance presses me to remember how terribly the Fates battered away at Charlotte’s short life, hints at a vein of harshness in her friend’s character and expectations: “She is sterling and true; and if she is a little bitter she checks herself.”

Charlotte, in truth, is more than “a little bitter.” She is often downright vengeful—as are, at some point, all of her major and many of her minor characters, from Shirley’s tense, repressed, white-faced Caroline Helstone to Villette’s chubby, manipulative Madame Beck to Jane Eyre’s mission-besotted Saint John Rivers to, most malignantly, The Professor’s bullying schoolmaster William Crimsworth. An author is not necessarily a stand-in for her inventions, but Charlotte constantly acknowledges the pleasures of torment, whether she is inflicting pain on her characters or speaking their lines or engaging in one of the intimate author-to-reader chats that she, like so many Victorian novelists, sows liberally among her plots.

The Brontë sisters had brief and often dreadful lives, and the family’s predilection for pain comes as no surprise to any reader of their novels. Even the less skillful Anne writes well enough to make that family pattern clear. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, her bland and priggish heroine finds considerable consolation in thwarting a drunken husband’s happiness, being prone to diary jottings that regretfully admit, “I ought to sacrifice my pride, and renew my efforts once again to make his home agreeable and lead him back to the path of virtue.” And then there’s Emily, who in Wuthering Heights blithely depicts Hareton Earnshaw, one of her romantic leads, in the act of hanging a litter of puppies from the back of a chair. Even in her moments of high tragic melodrama, Emily forces me to focus not on the lovers’ passion but on specific details of cruelty, as when the dying Catherine “retained in her closed fingers a portion of [Heathcliff’s] locks she had been grasping. As to her companion, while raising himself with one hand, he had taken her arm with the other; and so inadequate was his stock of gentleness to the requirements of her condition, that on letting go I saw four distinct impressions left blue in the colourless skin.”

Charlotte’s attitude toward suffering is, at least in comparison to Emily’s, less supernatural; but it can seem even more insidious and inescapable. Often that’s because she tends to assume that the reader agrees with whatever pronouncement she happens to make on the subject. I don’t necessarily find this tendency irritating. On the whole, I like being invited personally into a novel, and I also like an opinionated author, though being talked at rather than to, especially in a novel I’ve reread many times, often has the contrary result of reinforcing my indifference to the subject, as when Charlotte veers off onto one of her laudatory Duke of Wellington tangents: “that MAN then representing England in the Peninsula,” who dispatches, “in the columns of the newspapers, documents written by Modesty to the dictation of Truth.”

But frequently her lecturing does demand my attention, even snatches it, for she is among the roughest of authors. There’s not a trace of Trollopian suavity in this novelist, and her attempts at Thackeray-style comedy are notably unfunny. She is stern, and she is deathly earnest. But when her enthusiasm or anguish overlaps my own excitement or pain, I cannot look away.

The question is whether I believe her or not. And oddly, a similar question has lately arisen between my husband and myself, with the subject being the verity of what I write. His term is self-mythology, and he’s right. The very act of compressing my thoughts and reactions into a framing handful of words requires me to separate myself from those thoughts and reactions. Before I know it, they’ve assumed a new shape on the page, one that rather resembles me but is certainly more vividly colored—my emotions hepped up, my perceptions rarefied, my comedic eyeglass buffed to a high polish.

Artists may be more or less expert at dealing with the self-mythology problem, and family members may be more or less patient about it. Charlotte herself unquestionably lurched and steered among the hazards of self-invention; and sometimes I wonder if over-immersion in her novels, or at least in her state of mind, has compromised my own powers of control. For I find it easy to take her authorial posturing for granted; I even assume that she tells the truth. Yet at the same time I know that many of the truths she proclaims are elements of a magnified self, a way of dealing with a daily reality that was not only grim but also monstrously dull. According to Mrs. Gaskell,

as far as [Charlotte] could see, her life was ordained to be lonely, and she must subdue her nature to her life, and, if possible, bring the two into harmony. When she could employ herself in fiction, all was comparatively well. The characters were her companions in the quiet hours, which she spent utterly alone, unable often to stir out of doors for many days together. The interests of the persons in her novels supplied the lack of interest in her own life; and Memory and Imagination found their appropriate work, and ceased to prey upon her vitals.

The “persons in her novels [who] supplied the lack of interest in her own life” were not just Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre and Shirley Keeldar. The speaking author was also one of “her companions in the quiet hours”; and while this character, presented as her facsimile, no doubt really does bear some relationship to the Charlotte who nursed her dying sisters and sailed seasick on a ferry to Belgium and married that odd-looking man Mr. Nicholls, she has been distilled, tinted, spiced; her moods rarefied, her opinions sharpened. The author has stepped into her author role; she plays it to the hilt: spare, cool-eyed, hot-blooded, misanthropic, sometimes overwrought, often downright nasty.

Though I never think of Charlotte Brontë as a writer of poems, poet is her speaking author’s moniker of choice. The word seems to imply, as plain writer does not, an artistic temperament; and Charlotte clings tightly, very tightly, to the idea of herself as an artist. But built into her monologue is also her notion that I, her reader, am, if not precisely a poet, at least an excuser of poets, not so much for the crime of creating poems but for behaving like the poet character that Charlotte has invented for herself.

As another self-mythologizer who also happens to call herself a poet, I am well aware of the connotative anxiety inspired by that word. Truly, anxiety may be too kind a descriptor. Anyone who jumps up in a crowd and shouts, “I’m a poet!” risks not only her own public humiliation (what kind of arcane, stupid, useless identity is this?) but also, by publicly standing alone as an iconoclast who “understands poetry,” risks humiliating the crowd—those ordinary bystanders who at mere mention of the word poet feel themselves sinking back into high school hell, slumping behind a desk during English class, desperately avoiding the teacher’s eye, desperately hoping he won’t ask them to explicate why or how iambic pentameter has anything to do with regular talking because nothing on earth is less regular than whatever is going on in King Lear.

Nobody makes a person feel more ignorant than a poet. Merely by introducing herself with that title, a speaker can become a species of terrorist. But though I don’t find this an especially comfortable situation, Charlotte the author relishes it. A poet, she caustically avers, is no “milk and water” versifier. Her heroine Shirley may feel confident enough to declare, “Oh! uncle, there is nothing really valuable in this world, there is nothing glorious in the world to come, that is not poetry!” yet Shirley’s creator takes pains to ensure that I am not confusing such glory with either niceness or delicacy.

In our own less ladylike era, that insistence may seem trivial and self-evident. After all, even our kindest, most accessible poets ramble on fluently about suicide, homosexuality, and invasive medical procedures. Yet even when we allow for shifting fashions of subject and formality, who can deny that poetry publications remain heavily stocked with milk and water verses? Many have no doubt been written by pleasant, tender-hearted people who are fond of flowers, birds, and memories of their mother. But as Charlotte well knew, great art has not, on the whole, been produced by nice, sweet, tender-hearted people. If, even among writers who call themselves poets, that opprobrium has fastened itself to our image of the word, Charlotte, for one, is having none of it.

Fairly early on in Shirley, the author takes time away from the machinations of her plot to lecture the reader on the characteristic behaviors of a poet:

It is well that the true poet, quiet externally though he may be, has often a truculent spirit under his placidity, and is full of shrewdness in his meekness, and can measure the whole stature of those who look down on him, and correctly ascertain the weight and value of the pursuits they disdain him for not having followed. It is happy that he can have his own bliss, his own society with his great friend and goddess, Nature, quite independent of those who find little pleasure in him, and in whom he finds no pleasure at all. It is just, that while the world and circumstances often turn a dark, cold side to him—and properly, too, because he first turns a dark, cold, careless side to them—he should be able to maintain a festal brightness and cherishing glow in his bosom, which makes all bright and genial for him; while strangers, perhaps, deem his existence a Polar winter never gladdened by a sun. The true poet is not one whit to be pitied; and he is apt to laugh in his sleeve, when any misguided sympathizer whines over his wrongs. Even when utilitarians sit in judgment on him, and pronounce him and his art useless, he hears the sentence with such a hard derision, such a broad, deep, comprehensive, and merciless contempt of the unhappy Pharisees who pronounce it, that he is rather to be chidden than condoled with.

Is this really what Charlotte the poet thinks she is like? Is this really what she thinks I, her generalized poet-reader, am like?

More to the point, am I like this?

I think I’m not truculent. I’m often not quiet. I am certainly not reliably able to “measure the whole stature of those who look down on [me]”; although as a person who enjoys being chronically underemployed, I’m fairly skilled at “ascertain[ing] the weight and value of the pursuits they disdain [me] for not having followed.” I do have my “own bliss, [my] own society . . . quite independent of those who find little pleasure in [me],” although I wouldn’t exactly say that Nature is my “friend and goddess” in that pursuit: frankly, she is difficult to get along with.

But it’s Charlotte’s next assertion that really gives me pause. Certainly, judging from her own case, she had considerable reason to claim that “the world and circumstances often turn a dark, cold side to [a true poet].” But then there’s her follow-up, which she trots out with sour-faced propriety: “and properly, too, because he first turns a dark, cold, careless side to them.” At this point in her paragraph my brain stops being agreeably thoughtful and earnest and starts to bumble and reel instead. Am I misreading something, or is Charlotte Brontë the self-nominated poet primly explaining to me that regular people should shun poets because they are solitary and rude and ought to be taught a lesson?

As I mentioned earlier, Charlotte is not exactly a sadist. But she does enjoy pulling the kitchen chair out from under me; and if I break a tooth on the edge of the table as I fall to the floor, well, it serves me right for being so comfortable. Within a line, her true poet has metamorphosed from a shrewd but sympathetic hermit to a cold-hearted pariah who ought to be run out of town on a rail. No matter that the author allows him to “maintain a festal brightness and cherishing glow in his bosom.” For “the true poet is not one whit to be pitied; and he is apt to laugh in his sleeve, when any misguided sympathizer whines over his wrongs.” We true poets, Charlotte announces, have a cruel streak. Let those whining misguided sympathizers beware.

I think these assertions are not fact—not in general, not as regards Charlotte the human being, not as regards myself. Yet I can’t plausibly defend the overall character of the entire population of poets past and present nor the everyday character of the flesh-and-blood Charlotte, that woman with whom I never shelled peas or consulted the dictionary or mended stockings or walked on a moor. As for myself, I can shyly venture to think that I’m mostly patient with “utilitarians who sit in judgment on [me].” I can think that I don’t hear their opinions with “hard derision” or “broad, deep, merciless contempt” but with melancholic worry. So perhaps what my reactions imply is a different truth: the truth being that I’m not a true poet, that I’m merely an “unhappy Pharisee.”

Charlotte laughs at me. “Don’t you wish you knew?” she asks.

A reader’s self-myth is terribly susceptible to an author’s manipulation. Possibly now, as you read this, you are convinced that I am inventing your own myth before your very eyes: scissoring my pages into the blank-faced paper-doll shadow of the peruser most susceptible to my fidgety exclamations, my tender anxieties, my cozy bookish distractions. “Oh, she thinks just what I think!” cries the paper doll. “Oh, she’s so interesting, so sensitive, so amusing!”

Charlotte Brontë’s manipulation is not so saccharine. Nonetheless, it molds me, the hapless reader persona, into a currant-eyed replica of the author’s own self-myth; and if I, the living being behind that hapless reader persona, find my gingerbread image rather troublesome to chew, whose fault is that? Hers? Or my own?

The question is unanswerable, though really it’s just one more of the many confusing unanswerable questions that periodically seem to seep from between the pages of Charlotte Brontë’s books, with no apparent purpose other than to tease and pester me. Perhaps I should amend Shirley’s encomium to “Oh! uncle, there is nothing really muddled in this world that is not a poet!”

But I keep rereading Charlotte’s novels, even though I never seem to be able to predict what they’ll put me through this time. Sometimes they do indeed choose to embrace me affectionately, but even more often they jump out from behind a hedge shouting, “He shall die without knowledge,” and then shoot me full of musket balls, as happens to Shirley’s thick-headed manufacturer-hero, poor man, just as he declares he’s “taught [his] brain a new lesson, and filled [his] breast with fresh feelings.”

So if a poet “is rather to be chidden than condoled with,” then chalk me up as chidden. I may not be what I make of myself on the page, but at least I have Charlotte to slap me around, reminding me that the remorseless dead have perennial power to redefine the living, reminding me to take stock of my anxious desire to be likable, reminding me that poetry may be “gladdened by a sun” while also arising from contempt and indifference. It is a lie to assume that my intentions are good, or at least well meant. It is too facile to declare that I am an artist, too dreadful to consider the alternative. “Life is pain,” Charlotte tells me. She sits down at my kitchen table. “Now let me show it to you.”

Mrs. Gaskell closes her biography of Charlotte Brontë with an awkward, ambiguous bow toward her subject’s difficult personality. “I have little more to say,” she tells me. “If my readers find that I have not said enough, I have said too much. I cannot measure or judge of such a character as hers. I cannot map out vices, and virtues, and debateable land.”

Mrs. Gaskell was a good woman who also managed to be a good writer. I sympathize with her reticence. But even though the biographer finds herself silenced, the subject talks on and on, taking pains to map out as many vices and virtues, as much “debateable land” as she possibly can. And although her map is treacherous and unreliable and her roads sink into impassible bogs, she herself achieves an integrity of conviction that is not itself truth but a manifesto of what ought to be truth. “When utilitarians sit in judgment on [a poet], and pronounce him and his art useless,” he ought to be able to hear “the sentence with . . . a hard derision, . . . a broad, deep, comprehensive, and merciless contempt.” In real life, I can’t. In real life, Charlotte couldn’t either. She was hurt by bad reviews and burdened by sadness. “I don’t know what heaviness of spirit has beset me of late,” she wrote in a letter. “Now and then, the silence of the house, the solitude of the room, has pressed on me with a weight I found it difficult to bear.” But she knew herself well enough to add, “If I could write, I dare say I should be better.”