Charlotte Brontк died just short of her thirty-ninth birth- day; Emily died of tuberculosis at thirty. Anne died at twenty- nine, leaving behind two novйis (Agnes Grey and The Tenant ofWildfell Hall) that are much inferior to those of her sisters. It is remarkable that in their brief and highly constrained lives, lived in the bosom of a distinctly odd family, the sisters were able to focus their imaginations to produce such an outpouring of fiction, including two novйis that retain their power undi- minished to the present day.
79A
CHARLOTTE BRONTК
1816-1855 Jane Eyre
A lady once asked Samuel Johnson [59] why in his Dictionary he had defined "pastem" as the "knee" of a horse. "Ignorance, madame, pure ignorance," he replied. Why, in earlier editions of this book, did I omit Jane Eyre? Carelessness, dear reader, pure carelessness. From my teenage reading I remembered Jane Eyre as an interesting but old-fashioned romantic novel slanted to female interests. And so, until recently, I did not bother to reread it and so correct a narrow-minded youthful judgment.
The jacket blurb on my copy calls Jane Eyre "one of the great love stories of ali literature." This says what is most important to the general reader. The book is about passion, and the passion is so concentrated and powerful that it breaks free of the stiff,
overwrought prose. Here the style cannot throttle the feeling. Jane Eyre would make a great opera. The book's value is not demeaned by the fact that it is best read at the age of twelve or thirteen, and better by girls than by boys. Teenage romanticism has today been overlaid by our ultrapermissive culture, but it has not been killed or even basically altered. Were this not so, Jane Eyre would long ago have ceased to be read.
Yet Jane Eyre is not so much about love itself as about Jane's need to be loved. Ditto for Rochester. It's curious how many modern novйis, quite unromantic in tone, use this same theme. We can think of it, in modern jargon, as the expression, in a novelized dream, of the repressions Charlotte herself felt when she was approaching thirty.
Think of Jane Eyre also as a development noveclass="underline" the emer- gence of the Ugly Duckling—a development, on the part of the Brontкs, that took place largely in their imaginations. As Jane walks down the corridor of the third story of Thornfield Hall (before Rochester appears) she has visions of a larger life, of "a tale that was never ended—a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with ali of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence." Surely here Charlotte is talking about herself, and her sisters, too.
So much of this seemingly old-fashioned story seems pecu- liarly modern. For example, though Charlotte Brontк gives us nothing but genteel hints, Mrs. Rochester is a stunning portrait of a nymphomaniac. Similarly, the inexorable St. John Rivers is a study in repression, though Charlotte Brontк would not have put it that way. And Stephen King today attracts the fascinated and terrified reader with the same kind of appeal that Charlotte manipulates with her lunatic in the attic.
One of the strongest reasons for the novePs unkillability is the permanent attraction of the Byronic hero, and in particular the Byronic hero as "older man"—especially if he is in need of reform. The character Rochester is truly complex, a self- mocker and a mocker of others, who lives by and on irony. This creates his own misery, but he wants to conquer the ego that
eats his soul. He might very well have been created by any of the novelists of our Age of Anxiety, Norman Mailer perhaps, or Philip Roth.
Jane Eyre is among the first feminist novйis ever written, in its own indirect way a protest against the nineteenth century idea that women "ought to confine themselves to making pud- dings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags." The book can also be seen as a forerunner of thousands of rebellion-against-authority novйis.
Of the dated style one may say that the story is so gripping that the outworn words are no impediment. We are overcome by Charlotte Bronte's passionate belief in her story—plus her intelligence, which makes us forget the old-fashioned expres- sion and the melodramatic action.
I recently came across this remark from Oscar Wilde: "Owing to their imperfect education, the only works we have had from women are works of genius." There^ something to this. When women have finally won their battle, as they will, they will produce works as mediocre as those of most male writers. Meanwhile, Jane Eyres impassioned cri-du-coeur claims its rightful place in our Lifetime Reading Plan.
79B
EMILY BRONTИ
1818-1848 Wuthering Heights
Like Jane Austen [66], Emily Brontк was a parson's daughter, but there the resemblance ends. It is unsettling to pass from one to the other. They do not belong to the same world. They do not even seem to belong to the same sex. One is a master of perfectly controlled domestic comedy. The other is a wild demiurge of undomesticated tragedy. One excludes passion, the other is ali passion. Jane Austen knew her limited, highly civilized world thoroughly; her novйis grew out of needle-sharp observation as well as native power of mind. Emily Brontк knew the Yorkshire moors, her own family, and little else, and we can hardly say what her single novel grew out of.
In many respects Wuthering Heights is an absurd book. It retains something of the daydream atmosphere of the Brontк sisters' Yorkshire childhood. But the daydream has become a nightmare. Its plot, turning on the devilish Heathcliff s revenge on ali those who stood in the way of his passion for Catherine Earnshaw, is sheer melodrama. Its story-within-a-story method of narration is confusing. Its characters use a language uncon- nected with normal speech. And these characters, except for Heathcliff and Catherine, are drawn with no special skill.
And yet somehow people have found the book gripping. Not as a work of art, perhaps, but as a dream is gripping. Its primary quality is intensity. Despite ali the old-fashioned machinery of the intrigue, we succumb to this intensity, or at least are made uneasy by it.
Emily Brontк is an original. She had, it is true, read a few of the romantic poets and Gothic romancers of her time, but Wuthering Heights owes little to them. It is also true that she may have received some real-life stimulus, when composing her novel, from the crazy love affair through which Branwell was passing at the time. But at bottom the origins of this strange book are untraceable. It was spewed up out of a vol- canic, untrained, uncritical, but marvelous imagination. It had no true forebears. It has had no true successors.
C.F.
80
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
1817-1862
Walden, Civil Disobedience
Thoreau seems to have spent much of his life talking to himself; since his death he has been talking to millions. Perhaps, indeed, hundreds of millions, for the program of Gandhi (who influenced Martin Luther King) and at one time the politics of the British Labour Party were both profoundly affected by Thoreaifs ideas. Now, far more than a century after his death, it is safe to say that Walden (with which we may group Civil Disobedience) is one of the most influential books not only of its century, but of ours. Today, defying everything our evolving technocultural society lives by, it speaks to us more urgently than ever. It and Huckleberry Finn [92] are probably the two central American statements in our literature. If I add that Thoreau^ prose is as enjoyable, as crackling, as witty, as full of sap as any yet produced on this continent, I shall have listed the essential reasons for reading Walden and as many other of the major essays as you care to try.