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"Bookmaking out of the Remains of the Dead": Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Life of
Charlotte Brontë"
Author(s): Deirdre d'Albertis
Source: Victorian Studies , Autumn, 1995, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 1-31
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/3829414
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"Bookmaking Out of the Remains of the Dead":
Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte
DEIRDRE D'ALBERTIS
We were so happy together; we were so full of interest in each other's subjects.

-Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte (508)
he relationship between Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte
Bronte has long been thought of as one of the great literary

friendships of the nineteenth century. Regarded as the sum-
mation of the deep and abiding admiration she conceived for her
fellow writer, Gaskell's biography has been read by literary critics-
feminists in particular-as a record of the many acts of kindness the
two women performed for one another. Standard versions of this
story cast Gaskell in the role of protector and champion, an older-
almost maternal-and wiser friend, if the less gifted novelist. Bronte,
on the other hand, emerges as a deeply spiritual, emotionally tor-
mented, and physically disabled writer of sheer "genius."
Yet the mother/daughter or "sisterly" relationship between
these two women was not as placid and untroubled as either traditional
or feminist literary accounts might suggest. Although we may no longer
share their concerns, a small but significant number of disapproving
critics in Gaskell's own lifetime found fault with the biographer's verac-
ity, questionable research methods, and over-identification with her
subject. John Blackwood wrote to G. H. Lewes in 1857, complaining
bitterly of "execrable taste in the book.... I detest this bookmaking
out of the remains of the dead" (Haight 2: 322-23). From a late-twen-
tieth-century perspective, however, it is clear that Gaskell's "defense" of
Bronte's life did more than any other single text to create a myth of
martyred feminine creativity that continues to dominate our vision of
the lonely woman artist as a heroic genius set apart by aesthetic integrity,
intellectual detachment, and physical dis-ease. This essay takes as its
starting point the contention that Gaskell was neither the selfless chron-
icler of another's achievement nor the second-rate novelist proud to
bask in the luminous rays of Bronte's genius that she has often been
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DEIRDRE D'ALBERTIS
represented to be.' Rather, I will argue, Gaskell's biography disp

disguised form of literary competition with Bronte, a desire to m
rialize her rival's life, and in so doing, to subordinate the other w
as the subject of her text. This competition stemmed from their dif
ent aims as novelists, as well as from the very real sense in which t
were (and still are) pitted against each other as exemplary w
writers of the nineteenth century, even as we continue to insist on
"sisterhood."2
In distancing herself from Bronte's physical suffering and m

ancholy spells, Gaskell implicitly questions an equation of infirm
pain, and morbidity with artistic excellence. The biographer's co
tence and extroversion is shown to contain, as well as to explain
social maladjustment and introversion of Charlotte Bronte. In
near the end of her life, Gaskell delivered her own artistic credo
aspiring female novelist:
My first piece of advise to you would be Get Strong-.... I have known well w
is to be both wanting money, and feeling weak in body and entirely dishearte
All this does not help you over your present difficulties, does it? Well then let
what will-How much have you got in your own power? How much must you s
to because it is God's appointment? (Chapple 694-95)
The practical, conversational tone of Gaskell's letter avoids dw

on her own example by addressing shared domestic concerns w
her reader. Gaskell's advice discloses an approach to writing th
resolutely grounded in the pragmatics of creativity. The indiv
acts upon material circumstances, and in a restricted sense, sh
her own destiny; health, strength, and self-determinatio
Gaskell's primary goals. The language of duty or submission to
vine ordination is framed in terms of bracing discipline, a cond
that determines both resources and limitations for the female artist.3
We find two competing models of literary authority in Gaskell's

Life of Charlotte Brontie only one of which she favors. The distance between
these two writers, so often understood in terms of a difference in talent
or in temperament, has rarely been regarded as textually and historically
constructed. The paradox of this apparent opposition is that Gaskell not
only lionizes Bronte but establishes, however unwittingly, Bronte's mor-
bidity as the authoritative model for women writers. What produces this
paradox, I will argue, is the problem of duty, which both writers assume
is the discourse that differentiates them from male writers. Although it
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"BOOKMAKING OUT OF THE REMAINS OF THE DEAD" 3
is true, as Dorothy Mermin asserts, that Victorian "women were anxiou

to redefine their art as womanly service: selfless in intent, self-effacin
in execution, enhancing rather than replacing womanly responsibili
and if possible attributable to the impetus of a man" (18), it is certainly
not the case that writers as diverse as Gaskell and Bronte, George El
and Christine Rossetti understood "womanly service" in identical terms.
Charlotte Bronte interpreted duty as a form of suffering: intense psyc
or physical pain experienced within the narrow confines of the "gothic
family scene at Haworth. Elizabeth Gaskell, in contrast, regarded du
as a passport to the world outside a vulnerable, sentient self, a lice
(indeed an injunction) to help, by representing, others who suffer. The
writing of The Life of Charlotte Bronte is the most concrete evidence of t
definition of duty, for it dramatically sets the self (what Gaskell term
the "Individual Life") to one side and chronicles the pain of another
experience. Gaskell uses biographical writing to undermine a roman
myth of tortured feminine creativity, even as she apotheosizes its chief
example in Bronte. What I hope to demonstrate here is how each woman
fashioned duty into a labile principle of self-authorization. Bronte r
nounces the body in order to write; Gaskell renounces ego in pursuit of
a communal literary ideal. Therefore, although we may read Bronte and
Gaskell as proponents of radically different forms of self-renunciation
we must also acknowledge that they invoke in duty a common term
which in Geoffrey Gait Harpham's account of the ascetic imperat
functions, like all forms of self denial, "as a strategy of empowerment
gratification" (xiii).
Gaskell assigned gender traits to styles of authorial self-presenta
tion, attempting to cordon off specifically "feminine" forms of duty o
"womanly service"; yet self-denial in the realm of Victorian writing, figu
as professional altruism, effectively erased the very distinctions Gaskel
attributed to gender. The division in The Life of Charlotte Bronti betw
self-interest and selflessness is characteristic of both Victorian notions of
duty and an emergent professional ethos.4 The "sororal" struggle I am

uncovering between Gaskell and Bronte, therefore, should be regarded
less as a local conflict between rivals than as a crucial instance of what
Herbert Sussman has referred to as "a desperate if vain endeavor to achieve

sharp gender classification" on the part of both Victorian men and women
in their literary work (376). Current discussions of the professionalization
of letters in the nineteenth century, focusing primarily on the male
author's stake in self-conscious constructions of masculine authority,
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4 DEIRDRE D'ALBERTIS
should include the claims of women writers to competing forms of

nine or domestic authority, forms that paralleled or even intersecte
adigms of masculine duty and literary culture.
The principles of duty and self-denial intrinsic to professi
identity on the one hand, and to gender classification on the other, un
cut one another, unsettling and rendering "morbid" the biograp
judgments about feminine self-sacrifice and "healthy" artistic produc
in The Life of Charlotte Bronti.
In opposing morbidity and health, or self-indulgence and duty,

Victorians used a limited, but highly nuanced vocabulary to express
moral and aesthetic theories of value. Society, the individual, and art
were all judged by a standard of health made manifest, according to
Bruce Haley, in a "sense of wholeness and unencumbered capability"
as well as "the production of useful, creative labor" (21). Indeed, "the
concept of the healthy mind gave the Victorian critic not only a stan-
dard of evaluation but also an analytic technique," biographical criti-
cism (Haley 57). Judgments of the health or morbidity of individual
works of literature were complicated by a long-standing conviction that
artists were "naturally nervous, excitable, and passionate" (Haley 51).
Following a romantic model of artistic creativity, Victorian critics were
forced to acknowledge that "the poet's natural susceptibility (his diath-
esis, as pathologists of the time would call it) to obsession, self-pity, and
despair arises from that same energy which makes him a poet" (51).
Nevertheless, influential Victorian men of letters such as Leslie Ste-
phens promoted an opposing ideal of robust creativity: "so far as the
poet is himself a man of healthy nature and powerful mind, he will be
qualified to act as a mouthpiece of the forces that make for good"
(qtd. in Haley 68).5
In The Life of Charlotte Bronte terms such as health and morbidity
are used to convey often contradictory views of Bronte's behaviors and
attitudes, linking her conduct to states of mental, moral, and physical
unhealthiness (see Shuttleworth). Judgments about health and infir-
mity inform not only the biography's ordering and presentation of
events in Bronte's career, but also support the book as a whole with a
determining logic of morbidity-the breakdown of mental and physical
stability-tending towards disease and ultimately, death.
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Quoting extensively from Bronte's letters, Gaskell appe

sympathetic to what Bronte called the "horrid phantom of n
ness." Even so, the author subtly casts doubt on Bronte's
preoccupation with her own health-by reporting others' reac
to such sufferings ("it was treated as affectation-as a phase o
aginary indisposition" by her employers) and by indirectly o
cally highlighting the relentless nature of Bronte's self absorpt
the following letter she expresses her strong wish that the su
her health should be as little alluded to as possible" [415]). Ga
own attitude towards the frailty of Bronte's constitution may
expressed by the narrator's matter-of-fact comment in the s
volume: "Haworth was in an unhealthy state, as usual" (481).
Gaskell spends an enormous amount of time providing
plausible etiology for Charlotte Bronte's exquisite physical vulnerab
From the biographer's vantage point, the childhood deprivation
school regime at Cowan Bridge present the most likely origina
for such sensitivity:
what the healthy suffer from but momentarily, and then forget, those who
brood over involuntarily, and remember long-perhaps with no resentme
simply as a piece of suffering that has been stamped into their very life. (1
Although Bronte may have sustained real injury at Cowan Brid

kell implies that some choice remains available to the individua
aftermath of suffering. Absolving the "ailing" Bronte from respon
for her pain-her brooding is described as "involuntary"-G
language nonetheless reinforces the notion of choice between infir
and health.
This choice returns us to conflicting definitions of duty en-

dorsed by the two writers. "How much do you have in your own power?"
is the central question Gaskell poses to the young woman writer. As a
biographer, she consistently points out how Bronte's decisions are seem-
ingly motivated by duty and submission, but in reality dictated by will:
"this solitude was a perilous luxury to one of her temperament; so liable
was she to morbid and acute mental suffering" (251). Sociability, activ-
ity, engagement in a world external to the self and its wounded consti-
tution, are all linked to the particular conception of duty to which
Gaskell appeals when she deplores the "perilous luxury" of retreating
into self-consciousness and introspection. Sensing the egotistical under-
pinnings of a fascination with pain-Miriam Bailin has hypothesized
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that "somatic disorder becomes the primary form of self-as

(48-49) in Brontie's writing-Gaskell clearly shares her subjec
misgivings when Bronte warns Ellen Nussey against the solipsis
sures of growing "proud of our strength" in enduring pain (38
Bronte's insistence on the inescapable nature of sufferin
self-renunciation in her letters, fiction, and those excerpts from b
are reprinted in the Life stands in dramatic antithesis to Gaskell's c
tional optimism. Shown to be incapable of deriving comfort from
nity in either the good luck or the misfortune of others, Bronte
there may be "fellow-creatures" suffering "countless afflictions in t
each perhaps rivalling-some surpassing-the private pain" (Gask
emphasis added) of her own hardships, yet such wider sympath
infrequent expression in Bronte's work. Gaskell repeatedly stresse
this very lack of external engagement beyond the confines of the s
the foundation of Charlotte Bronte's character.6
Constant recourse to the term "morbid" in Bronte's letters and in
Gaskell's text indicates a cultural predisposition to judge the intensity of

subjective self-representation as diminished physical vitality. Confirming
what Miriam Bailin has described as the "ubiquity in her novels of fever,
debility, hypochondria, and morbid decline" (48), Bronte represented the
heroine of Villette, Lucy Snowe, in precisely these terms: "anybody living
her life would necessarily become morbid" (Gaskell 485). Symptomatic of
the autobiographical impulse in her fiction as a whole, the confessional
scene in Villette represents for Bronte not "healthy feeling" but "the semi-
delirium of solitary grief and sickness" (485).
Emphasis on the special status of individual pain for Bronte
spreads to an insistence on the unique, unknowable individuality of
perception. The two are viewed as intertwined and indistinguishable.
The uniqueness of her pain is the guarantee of her creative vision, her
feminine genius apparently removed from more conventional or "nat-
ural" bodily experiences of women-namely childbirth and its atten-
dant physical states-to the condition of a morbid and yet curiously
disembodied intelligence.7
Perpetually unwell as she was, Bronte approached the act of
writing as an extension of her morbid condition, asserting the incurable
nature of her afflictions: "none-not the most skillful physician-can
get at more than the outside of these things: the heart knows its own
bitterness, and the frame its own poverty" (407). Drawing upon what
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Nancy Armstrong has identified as a "peculiar cultural logic, w

contains female creativity and gives it pathological causes and
quences" (286), Bronte might appear to accept the "poverty" of
"frame" as a specifically female complaint. In assuming that the wri
illness was unambiguously coded as feminine, however, Armst
downplays the legacy of literary forms not marked primarily by d
tic ideology.8 Bronte's representations of suffering, I would arg
tually served to assimilate her to conventions of what Anne K.
has recently "rechristened a 'masculine' Romanticism," rather
traditions of middle-class women's writing or literary self-fashioni
Gaskell's biography illustrates how Charlotte Bronte (like
sister Emily) rejected affiliation with womanish domesticity in orde
embrace a masculine romantic, rather than neutral, ideal of geni
male romantic genius was traditionally figured as androgynous,
the female artist doomed to quixotic assimilation as a "surrogate
through suffering and disease to a dominant model of authorsh
Battersby). Gaskell's text attempts to show us how morbid, how self
sorbed, how culturally "male" Charlotte Bronte was forced to b
in her pursuit of an unattainable ideal of genius.10
Critics have long questioned Gaskell's separation of Bron
domestic "life" from her literary '"ork." Clearly, the biographer's f
division between life and letters originated in the disjunction be
her subject's two names: Charlotte Bronte and Currer Bell.'1 In a
debated passage, Gaskell takes this split to be the key to Bronte's ge
henceforward Charlotte Bronte's existence becomes divided into two parall

rents-her life as Currer Bell, the author; her life as Charlotte Bronti, the w
There were separate duties belonging to each character-not opposing each
not impossible, but difficult to be reconciled. (334)
Not impossible, but difficult to be reconciled: the biography ch

succession of moments in Bronte's life that fuel Gaskell's critique of
masculine model of authorship revered by Bronte, a woman who
shipped literary men such as George Smith and William Makep
Thackeray with the fervor of an acolyte. Although Bronte was prep
upon occasion to reproach her heroes, castigating Thackeray as "
Turk and heathen," she was convinced of her idol's genius: "Tha
is a Titan of mind. His presence and powers impress me deeply
intellectual sense. I do not see him or know him as a man" (Gaskell
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394). No mere "man," Thackeray approaches the gigantic statur

demigod, taking his place in the pantheon of Bronte's most pow
imaginative influences.
Out of respect for his compelling virility, Bronte defer
Thackeray's "observations on literary men, and their social oblig
and individual duties, [which] seem to me also true and full of m
and moral vigour" (451). Yet Bronte's notions of the vigorous m
letters differed from his. Discomfited and mystified by the high ex
tations of this provincial novelist who, as he later recalled, grew "an
with her favourites if their conduct or conversation fell below her ideal"
(Thackeray 487), Thackeray went out of his way to assert his power to
determine for himself the "social obligations and individual duties" of
the literary man. Nearly half a century later, George Smith recalled that
Bronte's heroics roused Thackeray's antagonism.... [H]e seemed tempted to say

the very things that set Charlotte Bronte's teeth, so to speak, on edge, and affronted
all her ideals. He insisted on discussing his books very much as a clerk in a bank
would discuss the ledgers he had to keep for his salary.... [H]e was provoked by
what he considered .. . [her] 'high falutin.' (791)
Thackeray countered Bronte's "heroics," the product of an older Ro-

mantic conception of genius, with a sort of Trollopian hardheadedness,
a new model of masculine self-presentation in keeping with mid-Victor-
ian commercial culture and a developing guild mentality.
Bronte refused to be put off by Thackeray's stratagems. She
emulated the virile "Titan of mind" by shedding her character as a
"woman" when writing, speaking boldly from behind the mask of a
more capacious identity, a figurative or assumed "manliness." Despite
her qualms about his moral character, Charlotte Bronte cherished the
notion of a shared (if invisible) likeness between herself and Thack-
eray-"If I were he, I would show myself as I am" (Gaskell 469)-made
concrete when she describes the "arrival" of W. M. Thackeray, Esq. at
Haworth Parsonage in the form of a portraiture engraving. Bronte
writes to George Smith, telling him that the image of Thackeray hangs
"in state" next to a picture of Wellington and her own portrait by
Richmond; "Thackeray looks away from the latter character with a
grand scorn, edifying to witness" (Gaskell 497). All three images-Wel-
lington, Bronte, and Thackeray-co-exist on a single plane of repre-
sentation in Bronte's account; if the author of Vanity Fair "looks away"
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from the author of Jane Eyre it is with the theatrical scorn of an Edw
Rochester, and not the kindly condescension of a Robert Southey.
Rather than read this imagined kinship as a form of erotic
yearning, as did certain contemporaries, we should regard Bronte
hero-worship as a mark of her intense ambition to be, like Thacker
a "professional" author. From her earliest attempts to be publishe
by "making print," imitating the manufacturing process she associat
with literary publication (Gaskell 130), Bronte was determined
stand on equal footing with the most important writers of the day
cannot, when I write, think always of myself and what is elegant a
charming in femininity" (38). Rather, she thought of that other, wr
ing self-not elegant and charming-as freed from the fetters o
determining femininity. Her preoccupation with Thackeray enabl
Bronte to make use of a discourse gendered in the masculine, rath
than to identify herself with the (often inconvenient) masculinity
his actual person.
Gaskell reveals how heavily weighted Bronte's early reading was
towards what Terry Eagleton has described as "myths of power." Ne
less to say, the power Charlotte Bronte admired and craved was alm
exclusively male: at eighteen she counselled Ellen Nussey to "re
Johnson's Lives of the Poets, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Southey's Li
of Nelson, Lockhart's Life of Burns, Moore's Life of Sheridan, Moor
Life of Byron" (Gaskell 151-52). Exemplary women writers app
nowhere in this list (her failure to appreciate Jane Austen's fiction
well-known), and Bronte's juvenilia showed little interest in specifica
feminine forms of power. The single female "hero" of her youthf
writings, Zenobia, was described by Bronte as "a masculine soul in
feminine casket" (Alexander 23).
Not surprisingly, given her training as a reader and writer
Bronte grew angry with G. H. Lewes when he made a public issue
her gender in his review of Shirley: 'judge me as an author, not a
woman" (Gaskell 398). From the young novelist's first visit to Londo
where she found lodging at the Chapter Coffeehouse (shades of
Johnsonian literary fraternity doubtless lending a certain glamour
the place) to her professional correspondence with her male mentor
at the Cornhill headquarters of Smith Elder & Co., the isolated curat
daughter envisioned literary genius in a masculine guise, even as s
self-consciously advocated a literary model based on feminine duty.
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Despite her desire to be exempted from critical judgmen

woman, Bronte herself distinguished masculine from feminine
excellence when it came to reviewing the accomplishments of her p
Critical praise for a member of her own sex was reserved for
Martineau, who, she believed "combined the highest mental c
with the nicest discharge of feminine duties" (Gaskell 438). The
of feminine character informed Bronte's conviction that Martineau was
"not a person to be judged by her writings alone, but rather by her own
deeds and life, than which nothing can be more exemplary or nobler"
(439). Thus Bronte's ideal of "feminine" genius combined literary tal-
ent with gender-specific virtues: womanly honor and a well-developed
sense of specifically domestic duty.
These values guided Bronte's attack on the feminist Harriet
Taylor as "a powerful-minded, clear headed woman, who had a hard,
jealous heart, muscles of iron, and nerves of bend leather . . . who
longed for power, and had never felt affection" (Gaskell 458). A woman's
life of the mind, divorced from a sense of affection or duty, appalled
Bronte. Consequently, she herself chose to lead an existence of perpetual
personal sacrifice, fantasizing about an ideal life shared with her closest
friend, Ellen Nussey, "strengthening each other in that power of self-de-
nial, that hallowed and glowing devotion, which the first saints often
attained to" (Gaskell 177). In this fashion Bronte strove to rework a
masculine tradition of romantic suffering by recasting her painful sub-
jectivity in the more acceptable terms of Christian martyrdom and fem-
inine duty.
Based upon the evidence of The Life of Charlotte Bronte, it would
seem that Gaskell and Bronte agreed that true genius could not exist
in women without equal portions of both domestic and intellectual
distinction. Yet Gaskell undermines Bronte's commitment to "domes-
tic" genius by constantly exposing the other writer's failure to integrate

masculine mental culture and feminine duty, those separate interests,
which if "not impossible," were very often "difficult to be reconciled."
The result of this failure was a clear subordination of duty as Gaskell
understood it (to "Get Strong" and turn outward from the suffering
self) to the requirements of what she perceived as a male model of
authorship. Gaskell's account thus renders Bronte's sense of duty "mor-
bid," for it is shown to turn from the public sphere of social responsi-
bility inward toward the private experience of physical and emotional
self-denial. Although Bronte's physical ailments could be interpreted to
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"register such desirable and diverse deviations as the Christian grace

affliction or the distinctiveness of a refined sensibility" (Bailin 8), Gas-
kell generally faulted Bronte both for accepting a masculine romanti
myth of painful solipsism and for transforming a feminine construction
of duty into morbid retreat from the social world of women's work.
II
The second model of feminine creativity manifest in the biog-

raphy-and epitomized by Gaskell herself-is based on a commitmen
to social realism and service through one's literary talents, articulatin
the relation of duty and literary production in a completely differe
register from Bronte's practice as a writer. Gaskell sets out the paradox
of the woman writer's role in the following, unambiguous terms:
A woman's principal work in life is hardly left to her own choice; nor can she drop
the domestic charges devolving on her as an individual... And yet she must not
shrink from the extra responsibility implied by the very fact of her possessing suc
[literary] talents . . . meant for the use and service of others. In a humble and
faithful spirit must she labour to do what is not impossible or God would not have
set her to do it. (Gaskell 334)
We will recall that Bronte's "separate duties" as woman and author ar

characterized as "not impossible, but difficult" to reconcile. Gaskell t
labors in her writing to "do what is not impossible," yet her solution is
to conceptualize all work, domestic and literary, as being less a matte
of choice-or of an exclusive literary vocation-than a charge fro
God to write "for the use and service of others." This tradition of writin
has been discussed variously by Christine Krueger as rooted in fema
preachers' evangelistic discourse and by Regenia Gagnier as the "othe
regarding" textual production of conservative middle-class women. Cer-
tainly, the Manchester minister's wife rejected utterly the authoria
prototype of the metropolitan Man of Letters that proved so seductiv
for Bronte. Gaskell wrestled instead with a constant urge to criticize or
satirize many of her male contemporaries; her spats with Dickens ove
the work she published with him in Household Words and her refusal to
be either bullied or sweet-talked by him are now legendary.'2
"Duty," in Gaskell's use of the term, represented different, and
more unambiguously public values than those recognized by Bronte
defining the obligation of the individual not only to family member
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"the quiet, regular duties of the daughter, the wife, or the mothe
to friends, colleagues, and society in general (Chapple 334). W
Bronte rejected any notion of public service through her literary
while martyring herself to the claims of her immediate family in
life, Gaskell derived whatever inspiration she required to write
from just such an expanded definition of duty towards others. Th
1850 she writes to her friend, the painter Tottie Fox:
If Self is to be the end of exertions, those exertions are unholy, there is no

that-and that is part of the danger in cultivating the Individual Life; but I d
we all have some appointed work to do, whh [sic] no one else can do so w
[sic] is our work; what we have to do in advancing the Kingdom of God;
first we must find out what we are sent into the world to do, and define it a
it clear to ourselves, (that is the hard part) and then forget ourselves in our
and our work in the End we ought to strive to bring about. (Gaskell 107)
Gaskell focuses on the difficulty of finding one's vocation-"so

pointed work"-without self-indulgence: "if Self is to be the e
exertions, those exertions are unholy." The writer's definition
calling is carefully phrased in the plural: she exhorts Tottie
undertake collaborative projects of artistic production (not un
process whereby she published most of her own books, which vari
involved her four daughters and husband as copyists, editors, and
ary agents). One of the best known anecdotes about her begin
a novelist dramatizes Gaskell's decision to write Mary Barton
escape from private suffering after the death of her infant son, W
when she turned to chronicle the collective social pain of Man
during "the hungry forties" (Uglow 150-55). Yet this all too f
explanation of how the writer discovered her vocation accen
"Self," or "the Individual Life," at the expense of Gaskell's stat
mitment to "advancing the Kingdom of God," distorting her
tions and assimilating her writing practice to a theory of "domest
much closer to Bronte's than to the one outlined in Gaskell's letter to
Fox or the biography itself.

Gaskell's attitude towards literary vocation as it emerges from the
biography contrasts sharply with Bronte's declaration that "I must have my
own way in the matter of writing.... [I]t is for me a part of my religion
to defend this gift and to profit by its possession" (Gaskell 383). Bronte's
"religion" of genius recognized a duty to express her "secret and clear-see-
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ing soul" (505), a responsibility only to realize the individual's full artis
potential. Duty, for Elizabeth Gaskell, referred outwards to a collective
social ideal of the coming "Kingdom of God" (grounded in the langu
of Unitarianism) whose realization her work should hasten.
In redefining literary vocation, The Life of Charlotte Bronte re
draws the boundaries of the writing self. Bronte's imagination for
grounds a private, reflexive subject, defined by the intensities of
family in isolation, revealed through confessional first person narratio
and painfully embodied in the fevered body familiar to all readers
her novels. Gaskell champions a model of selfhood defined precisely
opposition to Bronte's repressed introspection. Her authorial man
festo-"Get Strong"-stands against the morbid somatic organizatio
of Bronte's production as a writer. Even "submission" partakes of
active, almost calisthenic quality: in her letter to the beleaguered a
prentice writer, Gaskell instructs the younger woman in self-mana
ment rather than self-sacrifice. Indeed, Gaskell's very act of writing th
biography counterbalances the notion of duty as suffering articula
by Bronte, and exemplifies instead a competing literary ideal to "forge
ourselves in our work.... [O]ur work in the end we ought to strive
bring about."
Criticizing it through contrast, Gaskell revealed Bronte's model
of literary authority to be insufficiently "dutiful," and thus, insufficiently
"feminine," the values both writers ostensibly shared. Bronte's idea of duty
removed her from the realm of feminine public engagement essential to
her biographer; her creativity was shaped by a masculine tradition openly
rejected by Gaskell. The proposed union of mental culture and feminine
duty-emblematized by the biographer's professional use of her married
name, Mrs. Gaskell-was shown by the biography to be unattainable for
the more celebrated author with her painful fracturing of identity into
"Charlotte Bronte" and "Currer Bell." Gaskell suggests that this splitting
of the self to shore up a masculine fiction of transcendent artistic auton-
omy, and the accompanying failure to integrate duty and creativity explains
the peculiar pathology of Bronte's life and work. With her own pro-
nounced irreverence towards male literary giants of her time and her
refusal to sacrifice feminine values at the altar of masculine genius, Gaskell
would seem to represent a genuinely alternative literary perspective-ex-
horting women to "Get Strong" and exercise social power-to the tortured
example of Charlotte Bronte.
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IIn
The paradox that confronts us as we examine the incompatible

strains of authorship represented by Bronte and Gaskell in the biogra-
phy is vexing. Why did Gaskell write The Life of Charlotte Bronti if she was
covertly hostile to the model of literary practice associated with her
subject?'3 Furthermore, if Gaskell espoused a more "healthy" approach
to writing as a woman, why did so many of her readers object to the
biography as a "morbid" document? One contemporary admirer of the
Life admitted that "inasmuch as it discusses sick minds almost without
admitting that they are unsound, it is itself likely to be regarded by the
inconsiderate as an unhealthy book" (qtd. in Easson 382).14
Gaskell's intimate relation to her subject's "sick mind" manifests
itself most clearly through the morally compromised vehicle of gossip.
Rejecting what she called the "Individual Life," and the form of life-writing
that had evolved to apotheosize male literary genius, Gaskell attempted to
shape the Life from distinctively "feminine" materials. Gaskell's biography
grants pride of place to the informal, the anecdotal, the confidential aside;
gossip represents a "mode of subterfuge," which, according to Patricia
Spacks, "invites readers into a complicitous relationship" with the female
teller of tales (113-14). This contract between reader and narrator in the
biography refers, as in Cranford, to values Gaskell generally associated with
the discursive province of women. In writing as she thought duty dictated,
however, Gaskell mixed incompatible feminine modes: the high-minded,
moralizing tone of domestic fiction and the more homely discourse of
"womanly" gossip. G. H. Lewes's effusive praise of Gaskell's representation
of the "true religion of home" was not shared by more fastidious readers
of the biography, who reviled her as a "gossip and a gadabout" (qtd. in
Allott 330, 360). Her failure to "keep to facts" was denounced by hostile
reviewers as evidence of Gaskell's irredeemably "feminine" approach as a
biographer.' Gaskell's use of gossip, then, and her related interest in
memorialization, discloses more than a commitment to traditionally fem-
inine forms of discourse. The dark side of her method-her conviction
that knowledge is social and that writing should refer outward to an

interpretative community-was a sense of vicarious pleasure in the suffer-
ing of others, the displacement of pain onto the figure of Bronte, and a
"morbid" fascination with the morbidity of her subject.
The terms of condemnation most congenial to Gaskell's critics
were those of rumor, falsehood, and gossip. Despite Carlyle's explicit
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association of gossip and biography-'Define to thyself, judicious

the significance of these phenomena, named Gossip, Egotism, S
Raillery, Slander... Do not they mean wholly: Biography and Autobio
phy?"--few of Gaskell's reviewers wished to recognize any affinity be
these forms of speculation ("Biography" 253-54). The Athenaeum
instance, printed a notice following publication of the biography's f
edition castigating "the telling of an episodical and gratuitous tale so
as concerns the dead ... with mere impressions in place of proof
"they may be slanders" ("Our Weekly Gossip" 727). Attacks upon Th
of Charlotte Bronte accurately reproduced the dialectic between dut
self-interest, health and disease, or "impressions" and "proofs" of li
authority which served to structure the biographical text itself.
For the most part, scholars have been extremely reluctan
confront the problem of Gaskell's equivocal attraction to such
episodical and gratuitous tale" (see Uglow). We are asked to tak
granted her selflessness, her virtue, and her solidarity with a sister w
rather than to look on gossip and a lack of objectivity as mark
authorial self-interest. Gaskell's contemporaries had no such qua
S. Dallas took Gaskell publicly to task not for her overzealous d
of the Brontes, but for an utter lack of understanding of their cha
ters: "Good Mrs. Gaskell, who has a firm basis of self-esteem to go
and who probably was never troubled in her life with a doubt as
own excellent qualities, has no idea of... reserve proceeding from
other source than indifference and selfishness" (90). Dallas deno
the judgmental tones commonly associated with women's gossi
also questions Gaskell's self-professed stance as the retiring narr
another's life. Misplaced "self-esteem," contends Dallas, has bli
Gaskell to the true meaning of a Brontean reserve which procee
from "indifference and selfishness," but rather, as John Kuci
argued, from a concentration or distillation of character throu
pression and "a greater inward development of desire" (253).
Gaskell herself unwittingly reinforced Dallas's laudatory read
of the recluse at Haworth by maintaining Bronte's isolation fro
communal meaning-making ritual of gossip. Bronte is represent
furiously erupting against feminine "chat" in her letters to Ellen N
Gaskell repeatedly sets Bronte apart from other women (she didn't k
how to pay a simple social call, she refused to gossip with her fr
again affiliating her with a male-inflected model of literary auth
Even so, gossip is the key not only to Gaskell's own resolutely "fem
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method as a biographer, but also to her inherent extroversion as a

The fireside chat tone she so frequently favored in her fiction tak
added significance here in contrast to Bronte's high-minded intole
of women's social rituals.
Gaskell displayed a high degree of self-awareness when it came

to acknowledging the power of idle talk. A cursory survey of her col-
lected letters reveals her arch propensity for the detailed exchange of
"chatty" topics-"Now to gossip, which of course, is a woman's plea-
sure"-and much of Gaskell's correspondence regarding the Life dealt
with hearsay, second hand reports and the like (Chapple 424). Uncon-
cerned with the consequences of reproducing such partial reports, she
blithely inquired of her publisher George Smith, "Do you mind the law
of libel.-I have three people I want to libel" (Chapple 418). Although
Gaskell was basically impervious to a critique of gossip as "female" in
any pejorative sense, she grew heartily sick of the objections of her
"victims" and their threatened law suits, averted only through her hus-
band William Gaskell's efforts as her literary agent and editor. If the
form and method of the biography reproach the writing practices of a
"male-identified" writer such as Charlotte Bronte, the biography reveals
the negative effects of this critique as well.
From a "firm basis of self-esteem," in E. S. Dallas's words,
Gaskell asserted the positive significance of female culture-of gossip-
as the antidote to Bronte's isolation and the confessional style of writing
that grew out of her morbid self-regard. Related to this concern with
communal interpretation was the biographer's self-conscious mission
as memorialist. Taking up Bronte's account of her sisters' lives, which
concluded with the surviving sibling performing the "sacred duty" of
wiping "the dust off their gravestones" and leaving "their dear names
free from soil" (Bronte 3), Gaskell imitated this "sisterly" gesture by
attempting to purify Charlotte Bronte's name of any association with
coarseness or sensuality: "circumstance forced her to touch pitch, as it
were, and by it her hand was for a moment defiled. It was but skin deep"
(Gaskell 496). In keeping with this "sacred duty," the Life begins with a
visit to the gravestones Bronte had tended in her life. The text is
explicitly structured to accentuate memorialization as the beginning
and the ending of every story Gaskell tells her readers. Volume One
concludes with a memorial, Charlotte Bronte's critical judgement of
"Ellis Bell's" work in the published biographical notice, and the second
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volume ends with another, Mary Taylor's parallel postmortem vindication

of Charlotte Bronte's life.
The biography represents the act of remembrance, rather than

the physical moment of death, as the symbolic crux of any individual
life's meaning. Memorialization, with the accompanying prospect of
repressed competitiveness, is obsessively foregrounded in the text as a
way for Gaskell to explore the tension between her socially inflected
sense of the woman writer's role and Bronte's melancholic absorption
in literary self-objectification. Gaskell's Life is nothing if not a rhymed,
and measured, and most assuredly, printed monument to an intellec-
tual or artistic ideal, embalming the literary figure of Charlotte Bronte
even as it disparages her morbid physical condition. The memorializing
task is shown to be paradigmatic, epitomizing the act of biographical
writing itself, with all the accompanying power of self-aggrandizement
and misrepresentation attendant upon such literary acts.
A succession of deaths in the biography furnish Gaskell with an
opportunity both to undercut the centrality and authority of Bronti's
private pain by dispersing that pain through a sympathetic community
of observers (and sufferers, in the case of the dying Bronte clan), as well
as to criticize the link between that pain and feminine literary produc-
tion. Nina Auerbach has demonstrated that Gaskell's Life is above all
patterned upon "a series of spectacular death scenes of which Charlotte
is anguished spectator. Gaskell underplays the inevitable moment when
Charlotte Bronte herself takes center stage by dying" (92). Gaskell de-
liberately narrates the deaths of Branwell, Emily, Anne, and even Char-
lotte through the medium of others' reports or letters, emphasizing the
intensely social meaning attached to any individual's existence (Gaskell
353, 357, 372, 523). While Gaskell appears disinterested in "watching"
Bronte's death-and as Auerbach points out, actually represents Bronte
as the primary viewer of these scenes in the work rather than herself-
she has merely displaced her voyeuristic impulse onto the suffering
Bronte as well as an impersonal audience of readers, the same (implicitly
feminine) community constructed by the circulation of gossip.
How then do we explain the sharp dichotomy between disease
and physical vitality in a book which itself stands as a monument to
morbid curiosity?16 In her own life, Gaskell was deeply interested in
the relation of health to the mind and creativity. As we have seen, she
invoked health and strength as the necessary prerequisites for literary
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productivity. Urging her daughters not to dwell overmuch on tr

sient ailments or infirmities in their fiction, she wrote in 1859 to
Marianne Gaskell:
It is always an unhealthy sign when we are too conscious of any of the physical
processes that go on within us.... But certainly-whether introspection be morbid
or not,-it is not a safe training for a novelist. It is a weakening of the art which has
crept in of late years. (Chapple 541)
Excessive introspection, the central feature of the artistic character

represented in The Life of Charlotte Bronte, is here explicitly linked to a
"weak art" unbefitting the true novelist. Like Defoe, she writes, the
novelist must "set objects not feelings before you" (541).
Challenging Bronte's method as weak and unsound, Gaskell
encourages Marianne to pursue "healthy" training as a novelist: 'You are
an Electric telegraph something or other" (541). Her famous injunction
to write "with good simple strong words .. .just as if you saw an accident
in the street that impressed you strongly" (542), has been construed by
many as an evasion of authority in women's writing (Homans 235). Yet
read in the context of The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Gaskell's advice to her
daughter powerfully reaffirms a sense of critical distance and control
an unambiguous celebration of strength-rather than inadequacy in the
face of Bronte's interiorization. If Bronte embraced the blending of
narrator and heroine in her fiction, Gaskell evidently preferred the
detachment and control exercised by the writer of others' lives. She was
stirred by Bronte's tragic heroism and absorbed in representing the
martyrdom of the author ofJane Eyre. But she responded to this story in
much the same way that she would respond to the accident observed by
a pedestrian in the street. The spectacle of Bronte's distress enabled
Gaskell to report, to write precisely because she is representing some
one else's painful subjectivity. We have misunderstood Gaskell's "trans-
mission" of experience, to borrow Margaret Homans's term, as an ex-
hortation to be passive, when the crucial components of her advice to
her daughter were her refusal to be a victim herself and a foregrounding
of the public arena she selected as the site of her literary work.
Unfortunately, we can also detect an element of pleasure, an
uncomfortably prurient strain in Gaskell's narrative. Shortly after Bronte's
death, she wrote toJohn Greenwood at Haworth begging for the specifics
of the writer's final illness: "I want to know EVERYparticular... You would
oblige me extremely if you could, at your earliest leisure, send me every
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detail" (Chapple 335-36). Gaskell was drawn into her own form of ex
when she refused to play the passive female. In representing "the ac
in the street," Gaskell avoided the trap of "feeling" the pains of duty
about "objects not feelings," she reminds her daughter. Yet duty, the disc
of authority for Gaskell, required that someone should be sacrificed
biographer needed an afflicted subject to memorialize if only to
being absorbed herself in the condition she described. "It may b
without exaggeration that almost all literature has some remote con
with suffering," argued G. H. Lewes in his 1852 omnibus review, "The
Novelists," for the Westminster Review, yet women writers turn to f
"always to solace . . . the sorrow that in silence wastes their lives, and
withdrawal of the intellect from the contemplation of their pain, o
transmutation of their secret anxieties into types, they escape from
pressure of that burden" (133). E. S. Dallas more cynically observe
"Mrs. Gaskell is, indeed, lavish of her sympathy; but it is of the patro
apologetic kind, feeling for rather than with the sufferer" (78). Wh
we look to Lewes's generalizations about women and suffering,
Dallas's pointed complaint about Gaskell's lack of empathy, it re
clear that Gaskell had to shoulder the "pressure" of the "burden" of self
sacrifice or feminine duty in one manner or another.

The Life of Charlotte Bronti articulates a Faustian bargain-mas-
querading as opposing perspectives-ultimately forced upon all women
writers empowered by domestic ideology in the period. Gaskell shared
Bronte's morbidity even as she struggled through her writing practices
to dissociate herself from the other woman: "I put into words what
Charlotte Bronte put into actions," she asserted (334). Written to sus-
tain a competing notion of duty, the biography lovingly dwells on
Bronte's morbidity and becomes an unwittingly "unhealthy book" con-
fused with its subject ever since. By accentuating the most unacceptable
elements in Gaskell's act of life writing-her use of gossip, her narrator-
ial undercutting of Bronte's subjective authority, her morbid and sacri-
ficial need to memorialize "accidents"-I have thrust to the fore the
most self-interested "Other" Gaskell buried in a text usually read as stolid

and unquestioningly supportive of its brilliant subject.
What emerges from the apparent opposition of these two au-
thorial models is a shared inability to reconcile prevailing notions o
feminine duty and male-inflected mental culture; despite their different
solutions, neither woman was able to be-as Bronte imagined-her "own
woman, uninfluenced or swayed by the consciousness of how [her] work
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may affect other minds" (Gaskell 504). We cannot simply substitu

Gaskell as an exemplary or "subversive" figure in Bronte's place. Neithe
a desire to rescue Bronte nor self-sacrifice could be said to motivate the
writing of Gaskell's book. This biographical narrative stands as a testa-

ment, rather, to an anxious, strenuously repressed identification between
two women who met, as if by providence, to play the roles of victim and
bystander, sufferer and dutiful recorder in The Life of Charlotte Bronti.
"Bookmaking out of the remains of the dead" enabled Gaskell to speak
morbidly of Bronte's morbidity; Gaskell's memorial forcefully rewrote
the martyred woman writer into a more seemly femininity and into the
ego-less community of death.
IV
Recent attention to the composition of gendered identities and

styles of authorship has trained historians of nineteenth-century literary
culture to regard with skepticism any strict correspondence between
separate spheres ideology and daily negotiations of sexual difference.
Herbert Sussman understands this enterprise as a crisis in authorial
self-definition, or "a struggle to conquer and maintain discursive terri-
tory for male and for female" (376). As concerned as Bronte and
Gaskell were to delimit the parameters of a specifically feminine writing
practice, both women still floundered in the task of clearly defining
what precisely constituted the "separate duties" of an author as opposed
to a woman. Despite claims to the contrary, both Bronte and Gaskell
responded to economic and social pressures within the world of Victor-
ian publishing, becoming fluent in the male regulation of that world
even as they marketed themselves as specifically female, and hence
external contributors to it (see Marcus).
Entering the ranks of an occupation which, at mid century, was
busy announcing itself as a profession-as Harold Perkin remarks, "au-
thorship at last became a profession in the material sense" (255)-Gaskell
and Bronte had no option other than to seek the recognition and patron-
age of powerful male editors, publishers, mentors if they were to compete
successfully with their male peers (see Tuchman, Swindells). Neither
woman could find a foothold in the publishing industry without submit-
ting, at least superficially, to the gender hierarchy they found there. Bronte
managed this by pathologizing domesticity as romantic suffering; Gaskell
championed an alternative form of feminine realism, even as she dis-
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avowed identification with the suffering woman she memorialized.

Gaskell's penchant for "feminine" narrative strategies, her emph
domestic duty and her attachment to an "other-regarding" female l
subjectivity, her primary discursive models in representing the conn
between health, duty, and literary production were found in the wr
of such men as Charles Kingsley, F. D. Maurice, and most impor
Thomas Carlyle. Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton (1848), bore an ep
from Carlyle's essay, "Biography," and she referred to his Life of Ster
a model in defining the outline of her biography of Bronte (Easson
In "Characteristics" (1831), Carlyle laments the loss of g
health both for individuals and for an ailing Victorian society torn b
materialism and metaphysics. The essayist ruefully looks back to a t
when "our whole being was as yet One, the whole man like an incor
Will" (2). "'Characteristics' tells of a society turned inward, listen
itself in morbid self-reflection and analysis," surmises Bruce Haley;
for Carlyle, "self-sentience, dispute, and deliberation are always sign
ill-health" (79, 73). Excessively introspective writers and "the d
self-conscious state of Literature" may be most at fault for the nat
morbid turn inward; "on the whole," Carlyle asserts, "'genius is ever
to itself" (336). To become aware of one's genius, or to cultivate insp
tion through self-examination, is to destroy its essential integrity.
Health in Carlyle's thinking is determined by the individ
willingness and ability to work. Thus his most famous alte
Teufelsdrockh, discovers work as the key to health, to Duty,
"authorship as his divine calling" in Sartor Resartus (1831):
Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a pr

produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then
up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might. Work whil
called Today; for the night cometh, wherein no man can work. (157)
To work is to escape the confines of a pain-wracked body; to work i

reverse the paralyzing "night" of solitude, a painful self-consciou
"wherein no man can work"; and to work, ultimately, is to estab
new religion, "The Church of Literature," which finds its prophet-p
in the form of the new true believer, the man of letters (see R
The mark of the writer's election is his high-minded scorn for all t
who prostitute their wares as hacks, authors who would make of
ture not a profession, but a trade.
With his fire and brimstone charge to the man-of-letters
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to regenerate English culture and society, Carlyle provided Gaskell

her most comprehensive and coherent pre-text for the critique
jective morbidity in The Life of Charlotte Bronti. The non-morbid
must act in a purely functional manner, unaware of its parts or "a
the physical processes that go on within us," as Gaskell remin
daughter, Marianne. Furthermore, our organic wholeness is pre
upon the absolute unity of body and mind, what Carlyle c
Incorporated Will." Hence Gaskell's obsession with accomplishin
which is "in your own power" is central to her understanding of B
miserable existence. The biographer isolates Bronte's self-con
pursuit of genius as the source of her ills while positing a reli
willpower as the key to truly productive work, be it literary or so
well as a sound constitution. Finally, Gaskell dramatizes the hea
ness of her own literary practice by willfully repressing her subje
as biographer in order to represent and in some sense "heal" the fi
in Bronte's divided consciousness.
Despite Carlyle's encouraging responses to Gaskell's fiction, he

stood in the same patronizing relation to her as poet laureate Robert
Southey assumed when dispensing advice to the aspiring Charlotte
Bronte. "Dear Madam (for I catch the treble of that fine melodious voice
very well)," Carlyle writes after the publication of Mary Barton, ". .. a
beautiful, cheerfully pious, social, clear and observant character is ev-
erywhere recognizable in the writer"; he goes on to conclude, "the
result is a Book deserving to take its place far above the ordinary
garbage of Novels" (qtd. in Easson 73). Carlyle anticipates more con-
tributions in kind, but ultimately questions the value of Gaskell's re-
forming impulse as a writer: "May you live long to write good
Books,-and to do silently good actions, which I believe is very much
more indispensable!" (73). Although Carlyle praises Gaskell's stated
intention in Mary Barton to "give some utterance to the agony which,
from time to time, convulses this dumb people" (Mary Barton xxxvi),
the workers of Manchester, he nevertheless extolls as paramount the
virtues of silence and good actions. Whereas Southey concluded his
missive to Bronte by declaring that "literature cannot be the business
of a woman's life, and it ought not to be" (Gaskell 173), Carlyle pro-
poses that literature cannot satisfy a woman's duty to do good actions,
nor ought it to do so.
Gaskell's language of health was aligned if not completely iden-
tified with Carlyle's theories of literary production. Yet Carlyle's influ-
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ence was predicated upon a male model of authorship hos

Gaskell's self-definition as a woman writer. "The success of th
novelists," writes Carol Christ, "and the pressure of democratizat
contributed to a heroizing of the male writer's role" (30). Carly
particular, worked to construct "a strenuously masculine ideal"
literary professional, based upon the precept of such "Genuine m
letters asJohnson, Rousseau, and Burns. Fighting to overcome hi
tendency to lassitude and ill-health, Carlyle demonized the merely c
mercial "hack" writer of reviews and occasional essays as effem
(Corbett 49). As the century progressed, Carlyle's critique of an
culated intelligentsia was advanced by a chorus of male critics;
Austin decried the predominance in poetry of "only women or men
womanly deficiencies" and Frederic Harrison looked back in 189
disdain to the early- and mid-Victorian era as "the lady-like age . . .
age of ladies' novels" (qtd. in Christ 23, 26).
The "lady" and the "hack" were, ideally, to be vanquishe
the male professional writer. Fortified with a conviction of their el
or "unmistakable vocation," the new professionals, in G. H. Lew
view, should form not "the army of Xerxes, swelled and encum
by women, children, and ill-trained troops," but "a Macedonia
lanx, chosen, compact, irresistible" ("Condition" 285). To fulfil
Carlylean ideal, the male writer had to purge himself of offens
effete mannerisms, while retaining access to those feminine attribu
defined by Lewes as "Observation" and "Sentiment"-necessary
art. "In poets, artists, and men of letters, par excellence," insisted L
in 1847, "we observe this feminine trait, that their intellect hab
moves in alliance with their emotions" ("Condition" 132). The t
difficultly for the new professionals came in striking a proper b
between masculine rigor or control and feminine responsivene
improperly managed, this trans-gendered combination could l
in the case of Bronte, to illness and morbid introspection.
Carlyle was nineteenth-century Britain's most persistent
vivid exponent of what Bruce Haley calls a "holistic, physio-et
vision" of the healthy body (75). Yet most Victorian intellectuals
Carlyle's ideal difficult to realize in their own lives; figures as dispa
as Charles Darwin and Florence Nightingale preferred to call in
upon what Bailin refers to as a "strong social sanction for inval
(12), retreating from work for others to concentrate on thems
Indeed, according to his own rigorous standards, the philosoph
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Chelsea himself failed to maintain an ideal harmony of health

productivity. Although he never swerved from his faith in the h
powers of labor, Carlyle's struggles to produce as a writer and his bo
of ill health tormented him throughout his life. The shared con
with health which helps to explain Gaskell's dependence upon Car
masculinist model in defining women's literary authority under
the contradictions that made all gender distinctions unstable, and th
fore potentially morbid, in middle-class writing of the period.
The Victorians possessed a highly circumscribed language w
which to describe the relationship between the self with its richly t
tured interior states and other selves; "Duty" became the portma
term used to describe specific obligations and powers invented b
middle classes in constructing such a relationship. Tangible social
was the reward for all of this arduous denial of the self. 'Victorian culture
made well-known (if little understood) connections between social status

and repression" (252) observes John Kucich; both male and female
writers were drawn to self-renunciation as a potent source of enhanced
self-awareness and social authority. Straining to reconcile service, self-
lessness, and duty led to an inevitable preoccupation with morbidity.
"The durability of asceticism," suggests Geoffrey Harpham, "lies in its
capacity to structure oppositions without collapsing them, to raise issues
without settling them" (xii).
Bronte's biographer was bound to play out the ascetic's di-
lemma not only because of her mixed motives, but also because of her
precarious standing as an author. Gaskell was acknowledged, in a 1910
Cornhillcentenary tribute by A. W. Ward, to be "one of a band of writers
representing ... a reaction towards lost or half lost ideals of life....
Dickens was, in a sense, their captain, and Carlyle the prophet whose
mystic utterances sent them into the fray" (qtd. in Easson 571). Ward's
tribute presents an anomalous image of the "womanly" writer, "Mrs.
Gaskell," entering battle with Dickens and Carlyle as her brothers at
arms. Gaskell was both a part of this bellicose "band" of mostly male
writers who defined themselves as professional critics, historians, and
novelists, and very much an outsider in what Julia Swindells has called
the "Men's Club" of Victorian letters. If writers like Dickens "conceptu-
alized their work as contributing inestimable benefits to society," as
Mary Poovey has argued, and if a crucial "part of this representation
was the image of the selfless writer, whose altruism generously canceled
the 'debt' his grateful readers incurred," they were able to do so only
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by emphasizing the parity of male authorship and female domestic d

(102). Both women's work in the home and male authors' lit
endeavors were forms of non-alienated labor and both appeare
cancel out the self-interest implicit in participation in the marketpl
Thus, as historians of bourgeois professionalism in the nineteent
tury have acknowledged, writers (mostly male) made a bid for
altruistic status of disinterested professionals at precisely the m
when they stood to gain the most in doing so: such a posture en
a better chance of success in controlling new markets and mod
production, while enabling writers to cope with the increasing
modification of literature (see Feltes, Larson). The discursive p
of femininity and professionalism, however, soon came to over
ways that made women writers' positions nearly untenable. The b
ary between feminine duty and masculine service-both deemed
less but discrete forms of display-became hopelessly blurred.
Contrasting Bronte's and Gaskell's points of cathexis w
male literary models reminds us that "despite some feminist cla
the contrary," as Mary Jean Corbett points out, "a few women w
sought to appropriate masculine fictions to explore and express
own literary subjectivities" (55). Reviewers in the mid-Victorian
would have found Gaskell's intellectual and literary debt to Carl
obvious as to be unremarkable. Women writers clearly turned t
contemporaries for advice, criticism, even opposition in forgin
distinctively "feminine" literary voice and style. Womanliness-it
spectrum of gendered subject positions-and its accompanying
of duties was matched by an analogous set of masculinities, com
forms of manliness against which Gaskell or Bronte could test
practice or from which she could borrow in defining her own cl
professional authority. Gender segregation was a harsh reality for b
Gaskell and Bronte as "lady novelists": Victorian women were j
almost exclusively in terms of their "feminine" attainments in l
ture. G. H. Lewes praised Bronte and Gaskell insofar as they each
able to approach their craft "as a woman, and a truly delicate-m
woman" ("Ruth" 247). Yet, asJulia Swindells has observed, ninete
century "women who become literary professionals" were called
"to attempt to function as men, or, at least, [were] likely to ente
dominant forms of representation with certain gender atti
(102). So too, by extension, we know that male writers in the p
entered into subordinate or feminized forms of representation-
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notably the writing of novels-when it became profitable for th

do so (see Tuchman).
A central paradox of Carlylean writing noted by James
Adams is that "it is a self-defeating exercise to engage in the per
exhortation, 'don't think about yourself: Carlyle's collected wor
the great Victorian monument to this stumbling block" (449).
cally, when a woman writer exhibited similar reserve or diffidence,
"self-defeating exercise" could have a very different effect: Gas
strategic self-effacement was a bit too successful for her own
Representing an other-regarding subjectivity effectively muted Gas
oppositional literary perspective in the text of The Life of Charlotte B
even as it inspired Carlyle to urge the clergyman's wife "to do si
good actions," rather than devote herself to reclaiming what W
called "lost or half lost ideals of life" through her work as a writer.
When a male writer such as Dickens explored the thrillin
strictures of self-renunciation, as John Kucich remarks, his male ch
acters were permitted "a greater ability to cultivate the conserv
self-sustaining benefits of repression-including social authority-
expecting women not to explore these pragmatic benefits"
Dickens's men tend to rush to "repress themselves as an act," acco
to Kucich, while his "women sustain relatively changeless states
pression" (275). To define repression in Bronte's or Gaskell's wo
opposed to Dickens, then, is to confront "an unresolved cultural
ment about who controls the privileges of repression as an instru
of self-development" (Kucich 282).
The benefits of self-denial-so clearly allied in both Gask
and Bronte's minds with social prestige for the profession of au
ship-were unequally distributed in the middle years of the cen
Invited to attend an anniversary dinner at the Royal Literary
Society in 1850, Charlotte Bronte writes with excitement abou
mere prospect of glimpsing celebrated male guests from the la
gallery: "I should have seen all the great literati and artists gath
in the hall below, and heard them speak; Thackeray and Dicken
always present among the rest.... I don't think all London can af
another sight to me more interesting" (Gaskell 408). Elizabeth G
shows us a woman suspended on the periphery of a scene she pa
ipates in only from a distance, just as the biographer who recreates
scene speaks to us from an even greater distance as the narrat
Bronte's highly mediated and divided existence as a woman
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writer. If "asceticism is always marked by ambivalence, by a com

mised binarism" (xii), as Geoffrey Harpham suggests, this is a
dantly true when the self that is to be set aside has not yet ent
social arena, that great theater of renunciation, with "all the g
literati and artists gathered in the hall below."
Bard College
NOTES
I am grateful to many patient readers who took the time to help me clar
thoughts in this essay. I would like to thank Joseph Allen Boone, Peter Gadsby,
Hale, Robert Kiely, Jeffrey Knapp, Nancy Leonard, Andrew H. Miller, Deborah N
O'Toole, Elaine Scarry, and the anonymous referees who challenged me to t
subject with renewed gusto. Parts of this essay were presented at an Interdi
Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) conference in 1994 at The College of Wi
Mary and in the Bard Gender Studies Colloquium; my appreciation for comm
suggestions offered by participants in those discussions can only be acknowle
general way here.
1 I do not mean to suggest, as did certain reviewers, and indeed, h
daughter Meta, that Gaskell pursued a friendship with Charlotte Bronte sim
whatever gain in personal or literary prestige the association could afford (Wise
the historical denial of such a reading is significant. The extreme reluctance of
entertain the notion of any self-interest on Gaskell's part reveals a resistan
perception of this woman writer as competitive or aggressive. Alan Shelston, for
acknowledges the possibility only to dismiss it: "to suggest an almost improper i
the relationship on Mrs. Gaskell's part would, I think, be mistaken" (Shelston
2 Familial metaphors have dominated recent discussions of Elizabeth Gask
her female contemporaries. Readings of Gaskell as a "maternal" writer and thin
found influential expression in Margaret Homans's ground-breaking study, B
Word, as well as in Patsy Stoneman's Elizabeth Gaskell Homans identifies a strai
Gaskell's selfless "maternal" realism, defined through the "passive, womanly tran
of patriarchally encoded texts, and what she describes as "original symbolic cre
7he Life of Charlotte Bronte (170), a distinction I will question in this essay. De
takes issue with Homans's Lacanian arguments about women's literary realism o
similar to mine-finding the critic's unexamined "Romantic assumption(s)" to
with her celebration of mother-daughter bonding and the writing that results
feminine connection-yet I depart from her continuing emphasis on reading
primarily as a literary mother from the Chodorovian perspective of a feminist
"daughter." Alternately, the trope of sisterhood has informed another set of re
Gaskell (see Levin and Nestor).
3 Homans takes this letter as proof of Gaskell's "conflict between writ
mothering," claiming that Gaskell "is hardly convinced by her own advic
correspondent or to her daughter, Marianne Gaskell, also an aspiring writer.
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Homans's argument is an understanding of "cultivation of the self" as linked to

and the desire for fame; yet Gaskell demonstrates the ductility of duty as a cat
women's experience in the biography by examining the pleasure Bronte spe
takes in renunciation-thereby shattering a simple pleasure/pain dichotomy-
relation of that posture to romantic notions of the self. Homans perceives Ga
of duty as a lackluster rhetorical cover for her literary activities, rather
motivating force for her fiction, as I shall argue.
4 James Eli Adams has demonstrated how a very different writer, Walte
invested aestheticism with some of the same contradictory values I find in Gask
of Bronte; in both cases the middle-class writer "makes a badge of pers
professional distinction out of the very quality that seems designed to efface ind
in social life," reserve or disinterestedness (448).
5 See Leslie Stephen, "Art and Morality," Corhill Magazine 32 (1875).
6 Gaskell writes that "in after-life, I was painfully impressed with the fa
Miss Bronte never dared to allow herself to look forward with hope; that s
confidence in the future" (143).
7 One of the accepted tenets in comparative discussions such as Homan
Davis's of Gaskell and Bronte is that the older woman was both inspired, and in
sense fettered, by her experience of maternity, while the younger one achieved
her art because she bypassed the role of mother. Yet it was Bronte who was
destroyed by an inability to play both roles, the mother and the writer, rather than
The biographer, herself a married woman, chronicles the suppression of "the in
side of her character" undertaken once Bronte was wed to Arthur Nicholls. Numerous
commentators have speculated on the probable cause of Charlotte Bronte's death as the
consequence of "an unconscious rejection of the foetus" she carried nearly to term in the
nine months of her marriage (Uglow 655-56n3).
8 Armstrong separates the history of domestic fiction from that of poetry or drama,
concluding that "nineteenth-century literature was associated with poetry and fiction was
not, because, for one reason, fiction was written by women" (267n9). In her local readings
of novels by Bronte, Armstrong insists that the poetic tradition associated with masculine
culture was being transformed by the time of the late 1840s "as the production of high culture
becomes a feminine and feminizing process" (219). As a consequence, she never associates
Bronte's fiction with the masculine culture of Romanticism. The fact that actual women were
extremely active in the years between 1814 and 1848 as poets, playwrights, and novelists, as
we know from the revisionist work of critics interested in countering the myth of male
Romantic "genius," never figures into Armstrong's analysis (see Spencer and Mellor).
9 Mellor explicitly discusses Emily Bronte's fluid gender identification in relation
to a "masculine" as opposed to "feminine" tradition of Romantic writing, describing Emily
(if not Charlotte Bronte) as a sort of "ideological cross dresser" (186-208).
10 My argument here coincides with Irene Tayler's work on Charlotte Bronte's
imaginative cathexis with the creative impulse emblematized by the figure of the Father.
1 For more information about the conventions Gaskell's text shared with other
Victorian biographies, see Altick; for the conventions she discarded, see Kershaw.
12 Jenny Uglow charts the ups and downs of Gaskell's working relationship with
Dickens; she also notes a constitutional resistance in her subject to male hero-worship,
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particularly in the case of Ralph Waldo Emerson andJames Martineau, which she expres
generally as "a prickliness about intellectual pretension, [a] dislike of obscurantism
cant" (180). See also Hilary Schor's analysis of Gaskell's resistance to "the Dickensian st
in Cranford.
13 One obvious supposition, supported by statements made by Ellen Nussey and

Patrick Bronte, is that the decision to write the Lifewas determined primarily by professi
considerations. As Ellen Nussey observed: "such an act of friendship, performed with
ability and power, could only add to the laurels she had already won" (qtd. in Wise 189
The benefits of publication accrued to both authors: Patrick Bronte insisted that Gask
name be featured prominently on the bookcover in order to sell more copies of t
biography. We are accustomed to thinking that the play of influence and prestige betw
the two women was always as one-sided as it is now.
14 See the Leader 18 April 1857.
15 Criticism of Gaskell's role as a biographer ranged from Harriet Martineau
decidedly reserved attitude after the forced retractions of the third edition, to Ja
Fitzjames Stephen's diatribe against literary libel. Jenny Uglow cites numerous eminen
Victorians who had their doubts about Gaskell's "consistency," if not her veracity; Arth
Clough, after catching her out in a social lie, was "very dubious about reading
biography by 'Mrs. G.'" (433). One of the most remarkable pieces of evidence to sug
Gaskell's weakness for speculative gossip is an article published by Sharpe's Lon
Magazine in 1855 entitled "A Few Words About Jane Eyre." This anonymous celebr
sketch raised the ire of Ellen Nussey among others. Yet asJ. G. Sharps has argued, the
is some reason to believe that Gaskell herself was involved in the publication of t
offending journalistic expose (576).
16 Biographers and critics have detected a shared anxiety about physical frailty
Bronte and Gaskell. Uglow points out that Gaskell wrestled frequently with bouts of i
health, and Homans has uncovered in Gaskell's letters the "very lack of objectivity,
morbid concern with one's own health, that she seeks to criticize" (172). According
Davis, the novelist associated "solitude" with a respite from her many obligations and a c
for the "fatigue" that plagued her throughout her adult life (530). Rather than de
evidence of illness in Gaskell's life, I would emphasize the larger implications of this kinshi
between her chronic "fatigue" and Bronte's nervous disorders, conditions symptomatic
the difficulty in establishing a stable definition of literary service and self-sacrifice for m
and women writers at this time.
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"Bookmaking out of the Remains of the Dead": Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Life of

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/3829414

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We were so happy together; we were so full of interest in each other's subjects.

he relationship between Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte

Bronte has long been thought of as one of the great literary

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represented to be.' Rather, I will argue, Gaskell's biography disp

In distancing herself from Bronte's physical suffering and m

The practical, conversational tone of Gaskell's letter avoids dw

We find two competing models of literary authority in Gaskell's

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is true, as Dorothy Mermin asserts, that Victorian "women were anxiou

duty and an emergent professional ethos.4 The "sororal" struggle I am

Herbert Sussman has referred to as "a desperate if vain endeavor to achieve

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should include the claims of women writers to competing forms of

In opposing morbidity and health, or self-indulgence and duty,

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Quoting extensively from Bronte's letters, Gaskell appe

Although Bronte may have sustained real injury at Cowan Brid

This choice returns us to conflicting definitions of duty en-

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that "somatic disorder becomes the primary form of self-as

Gaskell's text indicates a cultural predisposition to judge the intensity of

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Nancy Armstrong has identified as a "peculiar cultural logic, w

henceforward Charlotte Bronte's existence becomes divided into two parall

Not impossible, but difficult to be reconciled: the biography ch

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394). No mere "man," Thackeray approaches the gigantic statur

Bronte's heroics roused Thackeray's antagonism.... [H]e seemed tempted to say

Thackeray countered Bronte's "heroics," the product of an older Ro-

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Despite her desire to be exempted from critical judgmen

tic" genius by constantly exposing the other writer's failure to integrate

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"register such desirable and diverse deviations as the Christian grace

The second model of feminine creativity manifest in the biog-

We will recall that Bronte's "separate duties" as woman and author ar

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If Self is to be the end of exertions, those exertions are unholy, there is no

Gaskell focuses on the difficulty of finding one's vocation-"so

Fox or the biography itself.

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The paradox that confronts us as we examine the incompatible

that knowledge is social and that writing should refer outward to an

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association of gossip and biography-'Define to thyself, judicious

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method as a biographer, but also to her inherent extroversion as a

Gaskell displayed a high degree of self-awareness when it came

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volume ends with another, Mary Taylor's parallel postmortem vindication

The biography represents the act of remembrance, rather than

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productivity. Urging her daughters not to dwell overmuch on tr

Excessive introspection, the central feature of the artistic character

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sacrifice or feminine duty in one manner or another.