Susanne Bach

“I will never have another man in this house”. The Perpetual Curate Patrick Brontë and His Perpetual Daughter Charlotte (1816–1855)

‘Never another man,’ – this verdict was penned by Patrick Brontë, father of the world famous authors Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë. Since he was “the cornerstone of [Charlotte Brontë’s] emotional life” (Wyatt 1985: 216), one has to take a closer look at him to gain a better understanding of his daughter’s life and work. Therefore, this study investigates Patrick Brontë first, and then focuses on father-images, father-substitutes, and father-ideals in Charlotte’s own life and in her novel Jane Eyre. I am not suggesting that readers will find a portrait of her ‘real’ father in her work; however, I am convinced that the intense and ambiguous father-daughter relationship and the internal image270 of him would have shaped Charlotte’s general idea of fatherhood. The early death of her mother and her siblings, together with the looming threat of her father’s death from a disease – not to mention the danger to their economic survival – would have bred a substantial fear of loss, thus intensifying the bond between father and daughter.

Using a psychoanalytic reading of Charlotte Brontë’s life and her novel Jane Eyre on the one hand, I will show where (paternal) presence and absence, desire and rejection meet, and in how far God the Father plays a role.271 Working with ideas from cultural studies on the other hand, I intend to delineate the climate in which Charlotte grew up and which can be held responsible for the fashioning of her inner world. First of all, this inner world was shaped without lasting maternal influence, and in turn, “their father was the great dominating influence in their lives” (JC 2000: 4 – 5).272

Patrick Brontë, born 1777, “was the first born [sic] of a family of ten children, in impoverished circumstances” (JC 2000: 6). He truly was a self-made man who continued renaming, and thus re-inventing, himself: The old family name was Ó Pronntaigh, but Patrick used variations such as Brunty, Branty, Bronte, Brontè, and finally Brontë (cf. “Brontë [Ó Pronntaigh]” 2013; Green 2008: 171; JC 2000: 20). His life had been shaped by change. Consecutively, he became a blacksmith-, linen draper-, and weaver-apprentice before working as a teacher, studying at Cambridge, drilling with the volunteer military corps, and finally being ordained as an Anglican clergyman and appointed Perpetual Curate.273 In 1812, Patrick married Maria Branwell and in 1816, Charlotte, the third of their six children, was born.274 The death of his wife in 1821 left the children under the care of their father. An aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, rushed to help, and ‘Tabby’ (Tabitha) Ackroyd, a servant, was employed.

After her two elder sisters’ death in 1825, it became Charlotte’s role to play substitute mother to Branwell, Emily, and Anne. The siblings collaborated on the “Angria” and “Gondal” tales, before starting to write and publish their own works. After the death of their aunt in 1842 and of her three siblings (1848/49), Charlotte remained alone with her ailing, and at the same time dominant father, who was used “to being in charge and knowing best” (Thormählen 2007: 15).

Patrick Brontë was bold and courageous as tales, which tell of his saving children from danger prove (cf. JC 2000: 81, JC 2000: 100 – 102; Barker 1994: 35). This “serious, strong-minded” man was “not easily dissuaded from his beliefs” (JC 2000: 94). He would rise to perpetual curatorship and soon forget – or try to forget – his own humble origins. He seemed to have completely suppressed the memory that when courting Mary Burder between 1806 and 1808, he had encountered hostile rejection by her family who saw him “as an upstart Irishman with no money behind him” (JC 2000: 94). When his daughter Charlotte approached him many years later with the news that Patrick’s own curate, “who happened also to be an impecunious Irishman” (JC 2000: 95), had proposed to her, he objected as strongly to his daughter’s suitor as Mary Burder’s family had objected to him.

After he married Maria Branwell and lived in Haworth, Patrick Brontë had a separate study, which was off-limits to his children (JC 2000: 14). In some biographies, the ambiguous relationship to his six children is pointed out, claiming that he perceived his offspring as a “hindrance to his personal ambitions” (JC 2000: 15). According to other sources, he dedicated himself to their intellectual and moral development, “providing them with books, art and music lessons” (JC 2000: 16). Charlotte’s first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, puts this in candid words: “[…] Mr Brontë was, of course, much engaged in his study; and besides, he was not naturally fond of children, and felt their frequent appearance on the scene as a drag both on his wife’s strength, and as an interruption to the comfort of the household” (EG 1996: 41).275

True to the spirit of the times, Patrick Brontë was partial to his son Branwell, as Charlotte confides in a letter: “My poor father naturally thought more of his only son than of his daughters” (qtd. in Green 2008: 234, author’s emphasis) and paid more attention to his education than to that of his daughters.276 On the “flyleaf of his concordance to the Bible,” the following contract was found: “I agreed with Branwell, that under Providence, we should thoroughly read together, the following classics, in the following order […]. The progress of the reading is to be regularly set down in this and the following pages” (Green 2008: 132). Branwell “studied regularly with his father” (Nussey, qtd. in Green 2008: 135) his daughters, even though they did show “knowledge of the classical world” (Green 2008: 132), “had never learnt grammar at all, and very little geography” (Menon 2003: 18). At this stage of their development, they could be called mainly self-taught because, as Newman explains, Patrick Brontë “gave them the run of his library and of the local lending library. The children read avidly whatever appealed to them” (4).

In 1824, Mr. Brontë sent Charlotte, together with her sisters Emily, Maria, and Elizabeth, to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge (Lancashire). In every respect, this school’s performance can be called incredibly neglectful in most respects; readers of her novel Jane Eyre will recognize the Clergy Daughters’ School in the fictional Lowood School, in which the protagonist undergoes humiliation, trauma, fear, cold, poverty, hunger, punishment, and even encounters disease and death. Soon, Charlotte’s sisters Maria and Elizabeth contracted tuberculosis, and died in June 1825. As a consequence, Charlotte and Emily were removed from the school, which has somewhat mollifyingly been labeled as “hostile to physical comfort and ignorant of hygiene” (Newman 1996: 5). As late as 1831, Patrick Brontë decided that Charlotte needed a “formal education” and sent her to Roe Head School (Green 2008: 138 – 139). Allegedly, he never expected much of her (cf. Gordon 1994: 165). She stayed at Roe Head only from 1831 to 1832. Between 1839 and 1841, Charlotte lived the difficult life of a governess, “a low-paid drudge (…) subjected to various indignities” (Newman 1996: 5), in rank below her employers but above the servants; and often ridiculed or disregarded by the children; another topic that found its way into the pages of Jane Eyre.

In order to escape the dire fate of governesses, she thought of opening a school at the parsonage. Wanting to prime herself for this resulted only in another in-between position when she was admitted to Héger’s boarding school in Brussels in 1842. Charlotte and her sister Emily taught music, and in exchange, received room, board, and tuition. In 1842, she returned to Haworth after their aunt’s death and went back to Brussels in 1843, only to leave it again a year later, after an unhappy attachment to Monsieur Héger. Charlotte “abhorred teaching” (Adams 1978: 153). This (to the best of knowledge correct) statement is open to all sorts of readings. One could assume that her own experience of schooling was so bad that she feared its continuation, no matter in what disguise. One could guess that being taught by her pastor-father-super-ego already was too much of a good thing for her. One could surmise that teaching for her simply was a despised way to earn money, and that it was only writing that carried the emotional excitement she longed for, the exertion of her mind’s freedom, and the flight from and the shaping of reality.

However, Patrick Brontë not only stood in for their formal education but also for an informal one. His talent for telling tales seems to have been running in the Brontë family; his own father Hugh was renowned for the captivating way he would tell stories (JC 2000: 15). He had passed this on to his son Patrick, for whom it would later come in handy when preaching: “The moment he climbed into the pulpit, a spell was cast over the whole congregation, and no-one moved” (qtd. in JC 2000: 15 – 16). In addition to being a talented preacher, Patrick was also a poet and writer. In the preface to one of his books, he emphasizes the “indescribable pleasure” of being able to write “from morning till noon, and from noon till night” (qtd. in JC 2000: 103). His missionary and / or didactic zeal surfaces frequently, admonishing his readers to think of their own mortality. Like many Evangelicals, he was “strongly aware of the sinfulness of man and the sole hope of redemption through Christ” (Thormählen 1999: 15). A Christmas hymn which he wrote – as Green politely understates – “does not reflect much of the joy of the Christmas season” (246); and in his “Verses sent to a Lady on her Birthday” (my emphasis), he writes hardly cheerful:

[…] your eyes of sparkling blue,
And velvet lips of scarlet hue,
Discoloured, may decay. […]
You’re but a breathing mass of clay,
Fast ripening for the grave.

His wife Maria Branwell seems to have been well-matched to Patrick. In one of her letters to him, she wrote: “[W]e will … embrace every opportunity to prove […] sincerity and strength by acting, in every respect, as friends and fellow-pilgrims travelling the same road, actuated by the same motives and having in view the same end” (qtd. in JC 2000: 111). Patrick entered her name together with his in the baptismal register – the first time that a mother’s name was recorded at all in Hartshead’s register (JC 2000: 123). The marriage was happy, and they had many friends (JC 2000: 125, Barker 1994: 58). However, Maria died young, a process “which she tried to hide from the children” (Adams 1978: 149). After her death, Patrick “missed her at every corner” (qtd. in Sadoff 1982: 139).

The move to Haworth, in hindsight, had been an additional health risk, to say the least: the average age of death was 25 (Gordon 1994: 312) and approximately 50 % of the children died before their sixth birthday (cf. Cannon 2000: 13; Green 2008: 223). Gaskell elaborated frankly: “Haworth is built with an utter disregard of all sanitary conditions: the great old churchyard lies above all the houses, and it is terrible to think how the very water-springs of the pumps below must be poisoned” (EG 1996: 99). The only two public wells were “tainted by the outflow of privies” (Green 2008: 222). Disease and death were ever present. While their mother was ill, the children were often sent to walk through the moors; Maria Brontë rarely asked to see her children (JC 2000: 128). Patrick describes this trying time in one of his letters: “[…] I was at Haworth, a stranger in a strange land. It was under these circumstances, after every earthly prop was removed, that I was called on to bear the weight of the greatest load of sorrows that ever pressed upon me” (qtd. in JC 2000: 130). Both of Patrick’s dreams – to have a wife to love and to enjoy a literary career – in the end came to naught. His strong influence within the family can hardly be overstated. Most biographies foreground the closely knit Brontë family circle in the wake of Maria’s death – they were a “little society amongst themselves” (P. Brontë 1811, qtd. in Menon 2003: 17). This seclusion had consequences for everyday life, as Charlotte wrote to a friend: “I know my own sentiments, I can read my own mind, but the minds of the rest of man and woman kind are to me sealed volumes, hieroglyphical scrolls, which I cannot easily either unseal or decipher” (qtd. in EG 1996: 101).

Charlotte was the eldest daughter and nine years old when her mother died: “Her childhood was no childhood” (EG 1996: 41). If one assumes that every form of education in the nineteenth century was gendered (cf. Thormählen 2007: 121 – 123), questions arise not only pertaining to the influences of Charlotte’s upbringing but also in how far she underwent a female socialization process. Theoretically, there were women around who could count as potential identification models (Tabby, Aunt Branwell), but at the center of a typical female gender identification process, there was a huge gap: an absent mother.277

In a different context, namely with reference to Shakespeare’s King Lear (notably the story of a widower left with three daughters), Coppélia Kahn writes that the omission of a mother “articulates a patriarchal conception of the family in which children owe their existence to their fathers alone; the mother’s role in procreation is eclipsed by the father’s, which is used to affirm male prerogative and male power. […] [A] girl’s sense of femaleness arises through her infantile union with the mother and later identification with her […].” (1993: 95 – 96; author’s emphasis) This holds true for the Brontë-daughters as well. What quickly became clear to the children, too, was that patriarchy/maleness did not exist simply as a complementary ‘Other’ to matriarchy/femaleness but rather formed encompassing networks of heteronormative power, stressing principles of patrilineage. One telling example can be found in the letter to Patrick Brontë from the adored head of a Brussels boarding school, Constantin Héger, praising the curate’s intelligent and eager daughters as a mere reflection of their father: “I have not the honour of knowing you personally, and yet I feel for you yourself a sentiment of sincere veneration, for in judging the father of a family by his children there is no risk of being mistaken; and in this respect the education and opinions we have found in your daughters could only give us a very high idea of your worth and your character” (qtd. in Green 2008: 155).

If I were to assume that Charlotte’s attitude towards her mother was not completely untainted and simple (but rather ambiguous as in: ‘she loved me / she left me’; maybe even: ‘I drove her away / I killed her’, which according to psychoanalysis is a frequent notion of orphans; cf. Isaac 2008),278 then experiencing her father – a patriarch with many character facets – must have been even more ambiguous.

First, he had – in all senses of the word – replaced her mother, irrespective of the real causes. The mother’s female influence was supplanted or even annihilated. “One black day”, as we learn from Charlotte, he burned his dead wife’s copies of Ladies’ Magazine because “they contained foolish love stories” (Ch. Brontë 1829 – 1847: 240).279 This information is highly relevant on several levels: Patrick destroys something having belonged to her mother, he burns something written for females, and he ridicules love stories. The magazines were highly charged with meaning: “I shall never see anything which will interest me so much again” (Ch. Brontë 1829 – 1847: 240).

Second, he was the unmitigated focus of the Oedipal situation, in which the little girl “turns to the father as her love object.” It is the father then who fractures “the illusory link between mother and child” (Etchegoyen 2002: 23, 29). Since Charlotte’s “sense of self-importance” derived from her being “forever father’s daughter,” this set-up served as an “obstacle” to her fulfillment as a woman (Britton 2002: 107).

Third, there was no maternal corrective element;280 a child growing up with both parents perceives the father “directly, but also through the eyes of the mother. The mother’s conscious and unconscious expectations and fantasies about the role of the father will shape the father’s representation” (Etchegoyen 2002: 34). Thus, an absent mother also means the absence of the maternal mirror: she is “the second object, who perceives the child’s experience of the relationship with father, represents it in her own mind and offers it to the child” (Target/Fonagy 2002: 60).

In addition, the father is the head of the family, in accordance with the Biblical teaching that “[…] wives should submit to their husbands in everything” (Ephesians 5:24) The authority of domestic fathers had been effectively propped up by such absolute faith in God the father, writes McKnight, and evangelical Christianity’s “emphasis on a stern, judgmental God had led to similar expectations of the male head of the household” (2011: 4). Moreover, as a priest, Patrick was a representative of God acting out his elevated social position within a patriarchal religion.281 Not only was Charlotte the daughter of a minister, she also grew up surrounded by clergymen:

Most of their father’s friends were colleagues of his, and there was a strong clerical presence in the schools they attended as well as in the families of their own friends and pupils. Their father’s profession was the very basis of their household, the factor that determined their social position and their daily occupation as well as, of course, their accommodation (Thormählen 1999: 174).

Most importantly, Patrick Brontë was the children’s teacher (cf. JC 2000: 103; EG 1996: 50). Lastly, he liked to control the private sphere. In order to gain access to their innermost thoughts, Patrick had told his young children to don a mask and speak their true minds from underneath (EG 1996: 48).282 He influenced his children’s choice of friends: “Papa says he highly approves of my friendship with you, and he wishes me to continue it through life” (Ch. Brontë, qtd. in EG 1996: 129 – 130). In 1853, he opened a letter from Elizabeth Gaskell to (the absent) Charlotte and took the liberty to reply on her behalf: “I deem’d it best to open it, lest it should have required an immediate answer. […] I think that you, and she are congenial spirits, and that a little intercourse between You, might […] be productive of pleasure and profit to you both” (qtd. in Green 2008: 275).283 Charlotte, one needs to add, by then was 37 years old.

These aspects help explain Charlotte’s lifelong unquestioning obedience to her father, which produced phrases like the following: “My husband and I live at home with my father, of course, I could not leave him” (qtd. in EG 1996: 455; author’s emphasis).284 What kind of educational atmosphere (in the sense of socialization and enculturation) could produce such a statement? Some representative examples shall serve as answers.

Patrick proudly boasted in a revelatory manner that he could “converse with [seven-year-old Maria] on any of the leading topics of the day with as much freedom and pleasure as with any grown-up person” (EG 1996: 48). Furthermore, the highly structured timetable of Curate Brontë seems to have shaped his daughters as well. At the age of sixteen, Charlotte wrote that an

[…] account of one day is an account of all. In the morning, from nine o’clock till half past twelve, I instruct my sisters, and draw; then we walk till dinner-time. After dinner I sew till tea-time, and after tea I either write, read, or do a little fancy-work, or draw, as I please. This, in one delightful, though somewhat monotonous course, my life is passed (qtd. in EG 1996: 95).

Everything is dedicated to higher, intellectual purposes – so Charlotte and a friend even agree to corresponding in French “for the sake of improvement in the language” (EG 1996: 96), and her sister Emily could be found kneading dough while studying German (EG 1996: 110).

The only time free from physical and mental restraint, control, duty, and other demands began after their father and their aunt had retired for the night. The children “put away their work, and began to pace the room backwards and forwards, up and down, […] they talked over past cares, and troubles; they planned for the future, and consulted each other as to their plans” (EG 1996: 117; my emphasis) In their daytime world, duty was “paramount to pleasure” (EG 1996: 131). Gaskell states that Charlotte “seemed to have no interest or pleasure beyond the feeling of duty” (EG 1996: 111). In a letter, Charlotte confessed: “It is natural to me to submit, and very unnatural to command” (qtd. in EG 1996: 178).285 After her father’s beginning blindness, she considered it her duty to stay at home: “I have felt for some months that I ought not to be away from him – and I feel now that it would be too selfish to leave him […] in order to pursue selfish interests of my own – with the help of God – I will try to deny myself in this matter and to wait” (EG 1996: 212, my emphases).

She was able to be critical of the situation, however: “I feel as if we were all buried here. I long to travel; to work; to live a life of action” (EG 1996: 221). Ex negativo, she tried to convey her desires: In criticizing Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), she complained that there was “no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses” (qtd. in EG 1996: 274; my emphases).286

After having been proposed to by a young man at a friend’s house, she wrote: “I was aware that he knew so little of me he could hardly be conscious to whom he was writing. Why! it would startle him to see me in my natural home character; he would think I was a wild, romantic enthusiast indeed.” (qtd. in EG 1996: 133, my emphases). She realized not only that role playing in society is a necessity (cf. Miller 2001: 27) but also that adherence to moral and intellectual premises takes a heavy toll on the body: “Il n’y a rien que je crains comme le désœuvrement, l’inertie, la léthargie des facultés. Quand le corps est paresseux l’esprit souffre cruellement” (qtd. in EG 1996: 221).287 Coventry Patmore’s often quoted 1854 “angel in the house” was first and foremost an angel defined by a disembodied “ethic of purity” (Houghton 1957: 356). By referring to her own body, Charlotte Brontë slightly trespassed the borders of the correct and permissible. It might have helped to be writing about it in a foreign language, French. Paradoxically, in the nineteenth century, the female body was not a topic to bring up in polite conversation because women were “persuaded that nature clearly intended them for a spiritual role in social organization.” On the other hand, many Victorians “fixed women’s social, moral, and emotional lives in biology” (Wood 2001: 11).288

Charlotte Brontë was aware, as she wrote to a friend, that she had to hide her innermost (unruly? libidinous?) self:

If you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up and makes me feel Society, as it is, wretchedly insipid you would pity and I dare say despise me. But Ellen, I know the treasures of the Bible. I love and adore them. I can see the well of life in all its clearness and brightness; but when I stoop down to drink of the pure waters they fly from my lips as if I were Tantalus (qtd. in Penner 2008: 16).

Even her publications had to be kept a secret; possibly for fear that her father might disapprove of them. “The sisters had kept the knowledge of their literary ventures from their father…,” writes Gaskell, and when the postman wanted to deliver a letter to ‘Currer Bell,’ Mr. Brontë “replied that there was no such person in the parish” (EG 1996: 262). Gaskell also renders the heart-wrenching scene of Charlotte finally trying to surprise her father with the success of Jane Eyre and his inadequate response “quite accurate[ly]” and in painful detail:

‘Papa, I’ve been writing a book.’
‘Have you, my dear?’
‘Yes, and I want you to read it.’
‘I am afraid it will try my eyes too much.’
‘But it is not in manuscript; it is printed.’
‘My dear! you’ve never thought of the expense it will be! It will be almost sure to be a loss, for how can you get a book sold?’
(EG 1996: 263)

After having read it, together with reviews, his only praise consists of a weak “much better than likely” (EG 1996: 263).

Summing up the above, a psychoanalytic reading of Charlotte’s childhood and young womanhood, shaped by a present father and an absent mother, has to focus on the following aspects: first, it looks as if Charlotte – like her siblings – was initially not really wanted by her father, who apparently was intent on enjoying matrimonial bliss but not the demands of a growing number of children (cf. Sadoff 1982: 139). He accepted their presence dutifully, with their “innocent yet distressing prattle.” They “added to rather than healed the void” (Sadoff 1982: 139). Maybe Mr. Brontë even explicitly or implicitly blamed his children with their demands on their mother for the waning strength of his wife? In this context, one could ask why the sick and later dying mother hardly wanted to see her children and, first and foremost, what kind of message did that send to her children?289 Second, Charlotte Brontë must have felt her father’s rejection, his perception of his children as nuisances and the driving forces behind his faltering career. It comes as no surprise that this understanding would have fostered the idealization of an infallible father: God. Third, as the oldest daughter, she had to grow up very fast; she was, as Gaskell points out, “grave and silent beyond [her] years” (EG 1996: 43).

In addition, Charlotte possibly felt that she had to be her father’s sexless, intellectual equal. After the only son had miserably failed to live up to Patrick’s many expectations (cf. Green 2008: 230 – 231), Charlotte suppressed her female identity in order to be on an equal footing with her father. He wanted his children to be “hardy” (EG 1996: 44). In later years, Charlotte felt “underdeveloped” (qtd. in Green 2008: 252) and “almost repulsive” (EG, qtd. in Ch. Brontë 1852 – 1855: 160), possibly mirroring the adult Jane Eyre who was afraid that she was “not yet a complete adult but rather an incomplete child” (Adams 1978: 169). Moreover, in a sense, Charlotte was an extension of her father – writing the successful novel he did not or could not write – and the replacement for his deeply disappointing son, Branwell.290 In this, she would be in the psychoanalytic ‘Athene’ position: Her “importance is derived from being the incarnation of her father’s ideas” (Britton 2002: 107). In juxtaposition, Charlotte clung to her father, fearing to lose another family member (cf. EG 1996: 420). Patrick made the most of this fear by infantilizing her. As late as 1853 – Charlotte was 37 years old – he “never seemed quite to have lost the feeling that Charlotte was a child to be guided and ruled, when she was present; and she herself submitted to this with a quiet docility”(EG 1996: 440). Even one month before her death, by then a pregnant, married woman, she wrote: “[…] of course, I could not leave him” (EG 1996: 455; author’s emphasis). Thus, she confirmed the notion that Victorian women were “relative” creatures (cf. Basch 1974).

Additionally, she married a younger version of her father, another ‘extension’ of him: his Irish, penniless curate. This put her in a very late Oedipal situation: “In der Ödipussituation ist aber für das Mädchen der Vater das Liebesobjekt geworden, und wir erwarten, daß sie bei normalem Ablauf der Entwicklung vom Vaterobjekt aus den Weg zur endgültigen Objektwahl finden wird” (Freud 1985: 97).291 Structural features of romantic love are, according to Wyatt, “grounded in traditional patterns of relationships between fathers and daughters” (1985: 200). Accordingly, Charlotte feared to risk the precious love of her father. Her father in turn would not tolerate an opponent and fell into a “violent rage” and was “on the verge of suffering a […] stroke” (Green 2008: 262). As stated in one of his letters: “Never. I will never have another man in this house” (qtd. in Adams 1978: 54). Later, the proximity of clerical father and clerical husband is manifest in Charlotte’s perception: “[…] each time I see Mr Nicholls [her husband] put on gown or surplice; I feel comforted to think that this marriage has secured papa good aid in his old age” (qtd. in EG 1996: 452).

Furthermore, she married – for nineteenth century standards – relatively late in life, maybe also for fear of forming an attachment to a man who might endanger her life with pregnancies (cf. Chamberlain 2006). As early as the onset of puberty, Charlotte was convinced to be “certainly doomed to be an old maid” (EG 1996: 141).292 Instead of looking forward to getting married, Charlotte confessed in a letter: “[…] he urges the month of July, but that seems very soon” (EG 1996: 447; my emphases).293 She was aware that her mother died at 38, “weak with childbearing” (Menon 2003: 16) Additionally, “[…] for Jane and for Brontë, sexual relations … contribute to a relationship of dominance and submission” (Menon 2003: 102), meaning that in marrying, Charlotte knew she might just pass from the hands of one ‘master’ into the hands of another. Charlotte feared to trust the future, to risk hoping, or to love “too much” (EG 1996: 94, 104) Her life taught her to “school herself against ever anticipating any pleasure; that it was better to be brave and submit faithfully” (EG 1996: 442).

Her attachment to Arthur Bell Nicholls was thus ambiguous. Initially, she was disconcerted by his behavior. One who was so “statue-like” ordinarily, in the act of proposing to her “[was] trembling, stirred, and overcome.” He showed emotions – she called this a “spectacle!” – while she could only ‘re/act’ and did not understand her own feelings. All of this gave her “a strange shock.”294 She first wanted him to leave the room, then inquired whether he had talked about this with “Papa”, and then, in her own words, she “half led him, half put him out of the room” – as if he were a dog that had misbehaved.295 She immediately consulted her father about this matter, knowing already that he “always disapproved of marriages, and constantly talked against them” (my emphasis). This time, he was even more than disapproving. According to Gaskell, he “could not bear the idea of this attachment of Mr Nicholls to his daughter.” It looks very much as if Mr. Brontë used his infirm state of health to blackmail his daughter emotionally and control her according to his needs and wishes (EG 1996: 420). In one of his poems, “The Happy Cottagers,” only death is allowed to separate father and daughter – until she, of course, follows him:

He prayed long for all,
And for his daughter dear;
That she, preserved from ill,
Might lead for many a year
A spotless life
When he’s no more;
Then follow him
To Canaan’s shore.296

Patrick Brontë, for his own (selfish) reasons, in fact nearly marred one of Charlotte’s last chances to achieve happiness for herself by initially objecting to her engagement. Writing a frustrated letter to her friend Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte compared Haworth to the “back woods of America” and warned: “Leaving behind your husband, children and civilisation, you must come out to barbarism, loneliness and liberty” (EG 1996: 435). “Barbarism” could be read as the subconsciously suppressed interpretation of her father’s behavior towards her; “loneliness” is her reaction to it, and “liberty” the ensuing attempt at sugarcoating this emotionally intolerable state of affairs. There were psychosomatic responses in Charlotte Brontë, too; she could not continue a conversation when a chair was not in its usual place. At night, she paced the room for an hour or more (cf. EG 1996: 439 – 440) and Gordon mentions a “breakdown which left its mark” (1994: 277). Only after her father had “gradually come round” (EG 1996: 447) to assenting to an engagement and only after it was made clear that the young couple would live in his house, did Charlotte dare to announce her engagement. The old patriarch would remain at the center of attention where now two people instead of one would attend to him. For Charlotte, he was still her main priority:

In all arrangements, his convenience and seclusion will be scrupulously respected. Mr Nicholls seems deeply to feel the wish to comfort and sustain his declining years. I think from Mr Nicholl’s character I may depend on this not being a mere transitory impulsive feeling, but rather that it will be accepted steadily as a duty, and discharged tenderly as an office of affection (EG 1996: 446).

What a strange act of transference! After all, one would expect the words ‘tenderly’ and ‘affection’ to be used referring to herself rather than to her father. However, Patrick Brontë did not attend the wedding. Charlotte was given away by a woman friend (EG 1996: 450), maybe a testimony to the “war of wills” (40) that Adamson sees at work, with “a strong attack of jealousy” (63) on the part of Patrick Brontë. All of this would put Charlotte in the ‘Antigone’ position: with “altruistic surrender” playing her father’s “indispensable handmaid and guardian” (Britton 2002: 113, 107). Mary Taylor, Charlotte’s lifelong friend, would write in 1856, that she could “never think without gloomy anger of Charlotte’s sacrifices to the selfish old man” (qtd. in Gordon 1994: 295).

One can speak of Charlotte’s life mainly as a life in the mind. Her father was, as Ellen Nussey puts it quite nicely, “remarkably independent of the luxuries and comforts of life” (qtd. in Green 2008: 134). He thought the world to be “bustling, vain, selfish” (qtd. in Green 2008: 155). The interior of the house was “scant and bare,” most rooms contained no carpets, and none had curtains (cf. Green 2008: 135 – 136). Charlotte said about her “Papa” that he “habitually prefer[ed] solitude to society” (qtd. in Green 2008: 244). She must have felt “physically isolated and intensely lonely” (Adams 1978: 33). All excitements, all transgressions, all desires were only possible in the realm of fantasy: in the mind, performed or written down.

One of these written stories was Jane Eyre – for Q.D. Leavis an “artless concoction […] of uncontrolled daydreams” (1986: 11); for Glen a clear “wish fulfilment fantasy” (1997: 5). Written in a “trance-like” state (Gérin, qtd. in Sadoff 1982: 120) at the bedside of her sick father, and published in 1847, the novel contains a lot of the ‘real’ life experiences of the Brontës in veiled, altered, or allegorized form, and possibly even more of its author’s subconscious.297 Writers “reveal instinctual or repressed selves in their books, often without realizing that they have done so” (Peterson 1992: 308). Writing can be “therapeutic” and grant “emotional release.” Thus Jane Eyre, for some, is “deeply rooted in Charlotte’s family experience” (Adams 1978: 157, 161, 148).

Writers do not exist in isolation, they are “inevitably influenced by the circumstances in which they live and the literature they encounter” (Menon 2003: 3) and, clearly, “[…] the Brontës had their material to hand” (Thormählen 1999: 174). Secondary literature has pointed out many similarities between Charlotte Brontë’s life and work. Charlotte, like Jane Eyre, is said to have been “poor, obscure, plain, and little” (281).298 Jane Eyre “offers a world, too, of physical restriction against which [Jane] chafes, continually searching for prospects through windows” (Boumelha 1997: 141). The lack of (good) mothers and the strong presence of patriarchal figures is obvious, both in Jane Eyre and Charlotte Brontë’s life. A lack of the novel’s defining genre attribution – Bildungsroman, gothic novel, ballad, folk-tale, fairy-tale, romantic fiction, governess novel, children’s fiction, spiritual autobiography, heroic narrative, anti-romance, foundling story, Cinderella myth, etc. (cf. Boumelha 1997: 133, 142; Adams 1978: 160; Mitchell/Osland 2005: 178) – might additionally point to the attempt at covering up the dreariness and flatness of the real life at home with a fireworks of forms and genres. By adopting a new name like her father before, and writing under the pseudonym Currer Bell,299 Charlotte was able to hide her true identity for quite some time: “The name Currer Bell enabled Brontë to materialize her professional self in abstract form, to put herself forward while simultaneously receding from view, a paradoxical strategy of self-promotion through self-effacement […].” (Marcus 2003: 160) Hidden under that cover, she was able to show more of herself than would have been possible otherwise.300

Jane Eyre is the story of a “governess-heroine” who “narrowly escapes marriage to her cousin-instructor but marries her ‘Master’” (Menon 2003: 80). Parallels between novel and life are manifold and have often been discussed by literary scholars. A few telling examples are: The Ingham family who dismissed Anne Brontë becomes the Ingrams (cf. Adams 1978: 159); Thornton turns into Thornfield Manor in Jane Eyre, and its Lowood is a “virtual carbon-copy” of Cowan Bridge School. (Adams 1978: 150) On the character level, Charlotte Brontë opposes the stern and “cold as an iceberg” (468) St. John Rivers and the would-be-bigamist Byronic rake Edward Rochester by presenting them both as possible husbands of the first person narrator Jane Eyre. Both men can be read as possessing traits of Charlotte’s father and of Arthur Bell Nicholls;301 they cannot be cleanly translated into the one or the other. Charlotte’s perception of the role multiplicity at home translates into a multitude of roles assigned to her principal characters. The proximity of father and husband was tangible for her. On the one hand, St. John Rivers is a ‘cold’ character, likened to the Greek and Roman God of light, Apollo (466). He stands for an asexual marriage to Jane as he needs a helpmate in India. This mirrors Charlotte’s sexless relationship as substitute wife and helpmate to Patrick Brontë. Charlotte finds strong words for this situation in Jane Eyre:

“Oh, St. John!” I cried, “have some mercy!” I appealed to one who, in the discharge of what he believed his duty, knew neither mercy nor remorse. He continued – “God and nature intended you for a missionary’s wife. It is not personal, but mental endowments they have given you: you are formed for labour, not for love. A missionary’s wife you must–shall be. You shall be mine: I claim you–not for my pleasure, but for my Sovereign’s service” (427 – 428).

On the other hand, St. John Rivers can stand in for Arthur Bell Nicholls, too. He, like Nicholls, is a young clergyman. In Jane Eyre, Rivers had been called away “by the sudden death of his father” (354) – could that be wish-fulfillment? The narrator caringly makes sure the father’s death is quick and painless: “[…] he was gone in a minute” (360).302 His death is nothing but “the removal of an impediment” (Thormählen 1999: 207). Thus in the long run, and in the wake of it, the young priest is able to get married. Could that be a hidden fantasy in which clergyman Mr. Nicholls may finally marry Charlotte against the wishes of her father?

In yet another reading, if we understand Jane Eyre’s replacing of Bertha Mason from a psychoanalytical-cum-feminist perspective, then Jane is the Electra complex-daughter who manages to get rid of the mother in order to marry the idealized father.303 Rochester himself advocates this reading: “I am old enough to be your father […]” (165), he says bluntly, early on in the novel, calling her his “girl-bride” (287), and in the very end, again, he feels that he “should now entertain none but fatherly feelings” for the 20 years younger Jane (469). Other characters support that reading as well, for instance, Mrs. Fairfax “nettles” Jane by deeming Rochester too old for her; he might “almost be [her] father” (293). David Smith calls this relationship straightforward “incest” (1965: 135).

Absent mothers and very present patriarchs dominate Charlotte’s and Jane’s situations. St. John Rivers, Mr. Rochester, and Patrick Brontë alike are patres familias among their respective families / households, which in turn consist only of females. Charlotte, even when married, pregnant, and ill, always thought first of her father, just like Jane Eyre, who lonely, destitute, and near-starving only prays for the well-being of her Mr. Rochester (cf. 351). Jane Eyre obediently closes her narrative not with the tale of her personal happiness – the ultimate Victorian dream of a good husband and a firstborn son – but with a reference to clergyman St. John Rivers quoting from the Bible.304 Jesus speaks to him, thus closing the patriarchal text with the words of a – if not the – master: “‘My Master,’ he says, ‘has forewarned me. Daily He announces more distinctly,–‘Surely I come quickly!’ and hourly I more eagerly respond,–‘Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!’” (477) The “autobiography” of Jane Eyre ends with the quotation of a quotation of a quotation: Jane quotes St. John facing his end, who quotes Jesus (from the very end of the New Testament).305 The assertive female ‘I’ of the opening section (“I was glad of it, I never liked long walks” (39)) dissolves into an intertextual universe governed by the patriarchal principle of God the Father, His chosen ‘sons’, and the representation of what Lacan termed the Nom du père within the symbolic order.

As much as this is true, there is, however, a counter-truth present at the same time, as Beaty proposes:

The ending enforces a conservative, conformist, providential reading but it cannot erase the experience of the reading, which has involved the projection of alternative configurations over long stretches of the plot and subsumed innumerable details (qtd. in Boumelha 1997: 140; author’s emphasis).

Even though patriarchal domination is a given, this does not mean that it can completely erase female experience and female voice. They remain in the ‘wild zone’ (sensu Showalter 1988), which can be accessed by readers who know where to look for it. Jane Eyre and Charlotte Brontë, as woman writers, had to suffer from, and to exist within, a paradox: “To the extent that a woman writes within what we have retrospectively described as the symbolic order, she accepts cultural definitions of femininity, yet those definitions situate her as a woman outside the symbolic” (Homans 1997: 149).

This essay cannot provide an in-depth-analysis of Jane Eyre. However, Charlotte Brontë’s novel latently speaks of real life; it speaks of all the distressing paradoxes, emotional ambivalences, and atmospheric ambiguities its author had to endure during her lifetime. She might have feared, loved, and hated306 her father – his “paradoxical absence and hovering presence” (Sadoff 1982: 139), similar to the strong emotions which Jane Eyre displays towards St. John Rivers and Edward Rochester. Charlotte played the roles of daughter, half-orphan, mother substitute, wife substitute, nurse, and governess in her father’s house – like Jane Eyre who plays many different roles in her life according to force, necessity, or desire. Charlotte was a professional writer and the angel in the house for her ailing and nearly blind father, similar to Jane Eyre who writes her autobiography in bold letters but also plays loving and helping wife to sickly and nearly blind Mr. Rochester. Charlotte is Charlotte Brontë and Currer Bell, just as Jane Eyre is Jane Eyre and “Miss Elliott” (374). Charlotte is visible and wants to be invisible: “If I could […] I would always work in silence and obscurity […]” (qtd. in Marcus 2003: 160). Jane Eyre thinks in a similar vein; on the arrival of Ms. Ingram and her party, she hides in “[her] sanctum of the schoolroom; […] a very pleasant refuge” (195).

Instead of being invisible, Charlotte and Patrick Brontë are model cases for any prosopographic study. The data available is of an extremely broad range, their letters and other relevant documents are published, tiny details of their lives as well as broad overviews are well-researched, and the journal Brontë Studies, continuously published ever since 1895, has been dedicated to their study. The Daphne Carrick Memorial Scholarship awards a grant to finance original research in the field of Brontë Studies. There is national and international interest in keeping their heritage alive (cf. The Brontë Parsonage Museum; national societies in several countries). Charlotte Brontë’s oeuvre and life has also inspired the present: apart from romanticizing re-enactments,307 the most recent Jane Eyre film adaptation aired in 2011, and Jasper Fforde’s 2001 The Eyre Affair even fulfills readers’ most secret dreams by having book tourists literally travel into the novel. Jane Eyre has been rewritten several times, including, alas, as a space odyssey (Shinn 2002); and finally, contemporary fan fiction authors add chapters on, for instance, Jane Eyre’s wedding night (cf. WessexGirl 2011). All of this, and much more – no matter how weird, illuminating, or ill-fitting – goes back to the influence of one man, the perpetual curate Patrick Brontë, who consciously, subconsciously, deliberately, accidentally, and most of all intricately was – along, of course, with other forces – responsible for shaping his daughter Charlotte.