Historical Reality and "Divine Appointment" in Charlotte Brontë's Fiction

Author(s): Carol Ohmann

Source: Signs , Summer, 1977, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Summer, 1977), pp. 757-778
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/3173209

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 Historical Reality and "Divine
Appointment" in Charlotte
Bronte's Fiction

Carol Ohmann

From The Professor (1846) and Jane Eyre (1847) through Shirley (18
Charlotte Bronte wrote fiction implying that the conditions govern
life in this world should and perhaps could alter; she moved towa
radical critique of the English society she knew. But her radicalism
always in tension with conservative tendencies, and she was better,
inJane Eyre and Shirley, at posing social problems than at sighting wa
solve them.2 In Villette (1853) she reassigned the causes of injustice
unhappiness, locating them in an austere cosmic scheme rather than
temporal and changeable order; as W. A. Craik has put it, she had "lo
faith in life" by the time she wrote Villette.3 I shall be concerned in
essay with describing the terms of her loss, first by pointing
paradigm of experience and response that governs (and animates
her novels, then by speaking of the transformation of that paradig
from her first novel to her last.
The paradigm is one of deprivation, all the more keenly felt and
resented because it goes hand in hand with a lively apprehension of its
opposite. With the idea of deprivation, rendered as poverty or
insignificance or constraint (even bondage) or misery goes the idea of
fulfillment, as riches or glory or freedom or ecstasy. The paradigm
1. The Professor was written in 1846, though not published until 1857. The other dates
I note are dates of publication.
2. For an earlier version of this argument, centering on Bronte's early life and her
concern in Shirley with the use and misuse of power, see Carol Ohmann, "Charlotte
Bronte: The Limits of Her Feminism," in Female Studies, vol. 6, ed. Nancy Hoffman,
Cynthia Secor, and Adrian Tinsley (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1972).
3. W. A. Craik, The Bronte Novels (London: Methuen & Co., 1968), p. 174.

[Signs:Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1977, vol. 2, no. 4]

? 1977 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

757

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758 Ohmann Charlotte Bronte's Fiction

generates the most memorable and forceful moments of Bronte's

fiction: Jane Eyre protesting as a child to Aunt Reed and later as a
governess to Rochester that she is fully as human as they and has the
same rights; Shirley Keeldar's refusal to enter Briarfield church and
Caroline Helstone's lament at the vacancy of her days; Lucy Snowe's
determination to travel alone to the Continent. And the paradigm also
impels the plots of the novels toward Jane's reunion with Rochester at
Ferndean, Shirley's understanding with Louis Moore and Caroline's
with Robert Moore, Lucy's full lifting of the spirit with Paul Emanuel at
the Faubourg Clotilde. Matthew Arnold computed only half the equa-
tion when he wrote that Bronte's "mind contains nothing but hunger,
rebellion, and rage."4 She was concerned always to move her heroines
(and her heroes) toward satisfaction and to figure forth for them what
that might mean, even though the working out of solutions was for her
the more difficult effort of imagination.
In The Professor Bronte is primarily concerned with laying out two
diagrams or patterns, the first of ideal marriage and the second of
economic success. Her hero and her heroine, William Crimsworth and
Frances Henri, who are both orphaned, both penniless, face two tests:
they need to earn a living in a way that won't dehumanize them, and they
need to make a marriage that won't diminish them either. Bronte creates
and deploys them (at much expense of credibility) so that they do both
exemplarily. They marry because they are congenial, finding each other
lovable and likeable. Afterward neither one lords it over the other, and
they both work, teaching in Belgium at first for wages, then in a school of
their own. Bronte records their success with considerable enthusiasm:

Behold us now at the close of the ten years, and we have

realized an independency. The rapidity with which we attained this
end had its origin in three reasons:-Firstly, we worked so hard for
it; secondly, we had no incumbrances to delay success; thirdly, as
soon as we had capital to invest, two well-skilled counsellors ...
gave us each a word of advice as to the sort of investment to be
chosen. The suggestion made was judicious; and, being promptly
acted on, the result proved gainful....
To England we now resolved to take wing.... We thought it
high time to fix our residence; my heart yearned towards my native
county of shire; and it is in -shire I now live; it is in the
library of my own home I am now writing.5

The Professor gives us a particular kind of bourgeois dream come true.

William and Frances do not strain against the legal institution of mar-

4. Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. George W. E. Russell (New York: Macmillan Co.,
1895), 1:34.
5. Charlotte Bronte, The Professor (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1931), pp.
271-72. Subsequent references to The Professor are to this edition and appear in the text in
parentheses.

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Signs Summer 1977 759

riage, though they certainly make a private alteration of its u

neither do their efforts toward affluence wreck on any circ
they can't control. They find work that uses their intelligence
insulting it (at first Frances was a mender of lace, and William
his brother's mill in the north of England). They save, th
proprietors or entrepreneurs, they find profitable ways to i
buy an estate. They have an inheritance to pass on to their bo
soon be going to Eton.
Most readers, remembering Bronte's feelings for Constan
have seen The Professor as a love story that allows the happy
withheld. What I want to remark here, though, is that Bron
concerned with her characters' chances of earning a living
prescription for what a marriage should be; we get in som
program for rising economically and, for the moment, an ass
the program accords with what the novel terms the English "
249). Bronte writes in The Professor as if her ideal designs o
work were possible, as if they could be realized by real men
Looking back on the novel, she insisted on its accuracy: "I sai
hero should work his way through life as I had seen real livin
theirs" (preface[, p. xv]).
Yet at the same time that she voices her approval of th
system, Bronte also qualifies that approval by placing W
Frances in lasting tension with forces that might conceivabl
their smooth course and their convictions.6 From the per
Bronte's later novels, the most promising character in The P
Yorke Hunsden, in whom she concentrates a considerable e
has, however, very little issue in the novel except in conversa
den looks dangerous, Mephistophelian, in fact; and he
treason, at least by the lights of William and Frances. France
grown up on the Continent (her father was Swiss) regards
the Promised Land, to which Hunsden replies in a Shelleya
"'Come to England and see. Come to Birmingham and Ma
6. Terry Eagleton, in Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes (Lond
Co., 1975), is also very much concerned with radical and conservative ele
contradictions between them in Charlotte Bronte's novels, and he speaks ve
the classes to which characters belong and the values Bronte attaches to thos
from particular points of argument, I differ primarily from Eagleton (a) in
protest against the limitations she experienced as a woman as central to unde
work and (b) in arguing that her work undergoes significant change or evolu
Professor to Villette, whereas Eagleton argues in terms of"a primary structural
of which each novel offers a "mutation" (p. 74). I find him often convincing
ing, yet I also find him markedly unsympathetic in his treatment of Bron
modern consciousness judgmentally back on her work, overweighting, e.g
vatism of Shirley (whose feminism he virtually ignores) and seeing Villette as f
plished and less integrated than it is. Tom Winnifrith comments extensivel
own experience of the English class system and her attitudes toward class d
fiction in The Brontes and Their Background: Romance and Reality (New Yo
Noble, 1973), pp. 140-42, 147-54, 156-59, 160-82.

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760 Ohmann Charlotte Bronte's Fiction

come to St. Giles in London, and get a practical notion of how our system
works. Examine the footprints of our august aristocracy; see how they
walk in blood, crushing hearts as they go. Just put your head in at
English cottage doors; get a glimpse of Famine crouched torpid on black
hearthstones; of Disease lying bare on beds without coverlets . . .' " (p.
249). Hunsden's pronouncements here and elsewhere tug against the
novel's affirmation of the status quo, and so does William's work in his
brother's mill, for there Bronte lays a scene in which a manufacturer
plainly exploits his workers and is himself at the mercy of his markets.
Every certainty William and Frances state Hunsden theoretically opens
again to question. The system that lets them in, he says, keeps others out,
and they may rise against it.
The Professor is a cautious novel as well as a conflicted one. In choos-
ing to create a male narrator, as readers have remarked since The Profes-
sor was first published, Bronte writes under a handicap, distancing her-
self too far from her own experiences and her own feelings. And The
Professor, it must be obvious even in this brief account, avoids developing
conflicts. William and Frances accord with each other very easily once
they are engaged; the weight of convention scarcely touches them as
they make up the unconventional terms of their marriage. At the end
they worry that Hunsden may have too much influence on their son,
whom they mean to model after themselves. The novel simply projects
their disagreements into the future unresolved; they have not mattered
in the action rendered.
In her next two novels, Bronte was to draw much more frankly on
her own experiences and their implications. She was to become more
skeptical (in Shirley especially) of the English system and what I think we
can take to be received "truths" about the mobility the system allowed
even to the intelligent, the hardworking, the thrifty; above all, she was
concerned to render the position of women who were born like herself
genteel but poor, constrained by need to work for a living. The elements
in The Professor with a potentiality for subverting the novel's merely
liberal and conservative convictions are there in the wings, waiting. In
Jane Eyre, they move to center stage, and Bronte concentrates on the
subject of the single soul and the tumults that can toss it in revolt and
resistance.

In Jane Eyre Bronte tells, without the emotional reserve of The Pro-
fessor, a story of rebellion against a poverty that is literal and also of the
heart and mind. We share the point of view of a younger Jane, in revolt
at Gateshead, at Lowood, at Thornfield, and at Moor End against depri-
vation. Poor, obscure, plain, and little, a dependent orphan, a charity

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Signs Summer 1977 761

child at school, a teacher and a governess, she is born to s

submission, warned again and again to be kind, patient, assidu
as we all know, the novel translates its heroine from depr
fulfillment, from poverty to riches and glory. I concentrate h
the extraordinary successJane Eyre achieves as a novel but on
lems that it leaves behind, for Bronte to return to again in S
Villette.

The first concerns Rochester's conversion to Jane's egalitarian per-

suasion, so that at the end of the novel his marriage to her is ideal and
they are no longer gentleman and governess, master and servant, pa-
triarchal man and subordinate woman but simply and fully Edward and
Jane. The second concerns their relationship to the society from which
they have come. Unlike William Crimsworth and Frances Henri, who
reach an unconventional understanding in a paragraph or two, Roches-
ter and Jane feel the full weight of social institutions; their consciousness-
es are deeply shaped by traditional social and sexual roles. It is as if
Bronte has asked, What would it take, what would it really take, to
change a man and a woman so that they can love and marry in a way that
fulfills them both? She creates a hero who has already suffered a series
of trials; Rochester isn't young-he can't possibly be. As he enters the
action, he has long since been through the early catastrophe of his mar-
riage to Bertha Mason and through his unconsoling liaisons with Celine,
Giacinta, Clara. He has learned to overlook money, status, erotic appeal
in itself. It is, in the language of the novel, a soul he seeks now, someone
to talk to as well as embrace, to tell over his life to (though he doesn't risk
telling it all) and to answer him stoutly back; someone to count on and to
love him for himself alone. Yet finding Jane and testing her, even listen-
ing to her passionate declaration of her equality with him and agreeing
with it, he is not changed enough. He will shower her with ornamental
gifts; he will keep his worst secret from her; he will have her regardless
of what an unlawful marriage might someday mean to her. He is still
Edward Rochester, Esq., owner of Thornfield and all it contains, until
Bertha burns it down and leaves him blind and maimed. Then he is
changed, plain Edward at last to plain Jane.
InJane Eyre Bronte cannot imagine a hero remade, cannot work th
process through, without violence, so great is the resistance to chang
felt to be, so otherwise unmalleable the weight of inbred superiority
mastery.7 Further, Bronte can scarcely in Jane Eyre conceive of a vi
man, whose every gesture, glance, and speech is a sign of his sex
power, who is not also a man who dominates; who is used to privil
and its prerogatives; the master of wife, mistress, child, servants. It
7. Margot Peters alludes to the "radicalism inherent" inJane Eyre and remarks t
"Charlotte could not imagine any man learning [that a woman's rights are equal to
except by cataclysm" (Unquiet Soul: A Biography of Charlotte Bronte [Garden City, N.
Doubleday & Co., 1975], pp. 219-20).

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762 Ohmann Charlotte Bronte's Fiction

exciting to be in the presence of all this power, exhilarating to test it,

tease it, challenge it. It is poverty to live apart from it, but it is awful to be
hurt by it oneself. Bertha tries to kill it. And Rochester's injuries, his
blindness and the loss of his left hand, are precisely imaged to chasten
his sexual power.8 Although Bronte cannot in Jane Eyre conceive of
virility apart from mastery, she does want to; she wants, as it were, to
save Rochester's potency and set it apart from the rest of his power. So
Jane walks to Ferndean through a wood that is unmistakably eroticized,
suggesting again and again phallic strength and fertility as well. She
reports that Rochester does not so much embrace her as "entwine" and
"gather" her strongly to him,9 and she assures him that he is not like a
tree that is "'lightning-struck,'" as he suggests that he is, but like one
that is "'green and vigorous'" (p. 391). But we are in the presence of
contradiction; using the same terms to chasten and to cherish her hero,
Bronte presents us with an impossibility and asserts that it is possible.
The tree cannot be at once riven and whole; Rochester gathers Jane to
him, but he also holds up his "mutilated limb," and it is a "'ghastly
sight'" (p. 384). The symbolic castration performed in the earlier chap-
ters cannot simply be canceled later. The problem of how to change the
hero and change him plausibly is frankly and convincingly faced inJane
Eyre, but it is not solved.
Jane, meanwhile, as Sandra Gilbert has persuasively argued else-
where in this issue, undergoes her own kind of conversion or change,
her "pilgrimage toward selfhood." Jane does not after childhood act out
her anger or let her mind unravel save in dreams; it is Bertha who sets
Thornfield blazing. Yet given the dynamics of the novel, someone had to
light that fire. Violence is a precondition for Rochester's change; only
through an experience so extreme that it wounds him literally and last-
ingly can Rochester lose his ingrained habit of condescension. It takes no
less, in Bronte's imagination, to alter his consciousness and to prepare
him for a marriage of equals.
In the very rendering of Jane Eyre's longing for fulfillment, Bronte
conveys a moral imperative with broadly social implications. As
Raymond Williams has put it convincingly, speaking of Blake, "An in-
tensity of desire is as much a response, a deciding response to the human
crisis of that time [the rise of industrialism and its consequences] as the
more obviously recognisable political radicalism."10 And in the eyes of

8. Richard Chase first made the argument for the symbolic significance of Rochester's
injuries in "The Brontes: A Centennial Observance," Kenyon Review 9 (Autumn 1947):
487-506.
9. Charlotte Brontie,Jane Eyre, ed. Richard J. Dunn (New York: W. W. Norton & C
1971), p. 382. Subsequent references toJane Eyre are to this edition and appear in the
in parentheses.
10. Raymond Williams, The English Novelfrom Dickens to Lawrence (New York: Oxf
University Press, 1970), p. 61.

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Signs Summer 1977 763

certain contemporary readers, Jane Eyre's literal poverty and

status emboldened the imperative, which might be read to say
only Jane but everyone like her has a right to what she cl
receives. Logically there is no reason to stop with Jane, as
Rigby saw, reading the novel with alarm and damning its writ
Quarterly Review.11 If governesses are admitted to be as good
masters, then there is no telling where the demand for equalit
take us next. This is the very "tone of mind" that overthrows
and reconstitutes society.
Bronte does not go so far inJane Eyre. The moral imperative
in the story she tells of how one man and one woman come to
unconventional marriage. But the novel itself does not follo
implications of this event, nor does it in any way suggest how th
be followed out. Jane, for example, is well dowered after all, but
a lucky inheritance from an uncle dead in Madeira. Conceiving
she can her ideal marriage, Bronte is concerned to make her
economically independent. But there is no democratic impe
Jane's inheritance, no potentiality for significant social change
that matters to anyone else born poor. The life Jane and Roche
together fails similarly to make connection with the social fab
resonate there. They are no longer sovereign and slave, m
servant; they are citizens, but citizens of a state whose populat
bers only two. Bronte brings Jane and Rochester through viciss
a marriage of equals, but once she has them there she cannot re
again to the society from which they've come. On their two in
incomes, they live islanded in a country retreat, companioned
and nature.

In Shirley, however, Bronte quite pointedly explores the English

system with an eye to exposing inequities. She does not finally resolve
her contradictory loyalties in her third novel; but she does render them
more fully and more precisely and with much more conscious under-
standing. Even more strikingly than in The Professor and Jane Eyre,
characters are drawn to relate to one another in terms of the power they
possess. Virtually everyone in the novel feels the pressures of being male
or female, richer or poorer, higher or lower in social rank, more or less
able to take initiatives and accedes to those pressures or else resists them.
Working outward, as it were, from competitive family relationships
(among husbands and wives, among siblings) to society, Bronte reveals a
number of literal parties in contention, each with its own economic in-
terests, Tory, Whig, and radical or Jacobin.
The novel is set in a time and place of economic and political crisis,
in the West Riding of Yorkshire toward the end of the Napoleonic wars

11. Elizabeth Rigby, "Vanity Fair-and Jane Eyre," Quarterly Review 84 (December
1848): 174.

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764 Ohmann Charlotte Bronte's Fiction

The Orders in Council have depressed the woolen mills in the riding,
and, given the English system, the depression is unequally felt.
Landowners and clergymen, who do not suffer themselves, favor the
war's continuance. Manufacturers want a truce or at least a strategy of
war that doesn't hurt trade. Opinion divides among the middle and
upper classes according to personal interest and divides vehemently.
And the working classes blame their suffering, their quite literal poverty,
on its most immediate and visible cause, the manufacturers who either
cut their wages or discharge them altogether.
"Misery generates hate,"12 the novel says; and hate breeds violence.
Irrationally, pointlessly, as the novel presents them, the workers break
and try again to break the machines and the mill, the literal property, the
visible capital, of the system that denies them satisfaction. Then mem-
bers of the propertied classes forget their own differences. They call
troops, they beat back the attack on Hollow's-mill. At dawn, the mill
remains; the workers only are scattered, leaving their dead and
wounded in the millyard. The system is confirmed in its inequities. What
does it take to change a society? That is the question implicit in Shirley.
The system is closed rather than open, constrained by its own internal
"laws," which determine disproportion in wealth and status, and con-
strained by events abroad that permit a limited range of responses.
Voice after voice in the novel speaks out in frustration and anger. Robert
Moore, who runs Hollow's-mill, is on the edge of bankruptcy. " 'I abhor,'
he says, 'all these things [the war, the war strategy, the Orders in
Council] because they ruin me: they stand in my way: I cannot get on-I
cannot execute my plans because of them: I see myself baffled at every
turn by their untoward effects'" (1:24). William Farren, whom Moore
has discharged, says of himself and other workers, " 'We can get nought
to do: we can earn nought'" (1:150). Caroline Helstone, who loves
Robert Moore, expects to lose him to the novel's other heroine, Shirley
Keeldar. "'I am poverty and incapacity,'" Caroline thinks; "'Shirley is
wealth and power'" (1:285). The voices heard above belong, obviously
enough, to those who can win little or nothing by their own efforts and
who cannot rely on inheritance, either.
While the public action builds to crisis and quiets again to stasis, the
novel does alter the consciousnes of a few of its characters.-As they
change and come to relate to one another, they press toward new
affiliations that transcend conventional class differences. In a remark-
able scene, Caroline and Shirley talk at length with each other and th
with two workers, William Farren and Joe Scott. Significantly, they t
outside of the church in Briarfield. Inside, the three parishes sit in ro
listening to a series of sermons; one or two are truly Christian, but m

12. Charlotte Bronte, Shirley: A Tale (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1931), 1:
Subsequent references to Shirley are to this edition and appear in the text in parenthes

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Signs Summer 1977 765

are spoken by men more conscious of being gentlemen th

clergymen or curates. The voices raised in the natural set
simply sermonize; they argue, and they speak opinions that
do not sanction.
Outside the church Shirley briefly rewrites the Bible and Milton too,
making men and women equal at the time of their creation. Shirley
implies, of course, that woman's place in society is of man's making
rather than, in Elizabeth Rigby's phrase, "God's appointment" and that
the myths of both religion and literature rationalize that place. Shirley
goes much farther than either The Professor orJane Eyre in its revelation
of the position of women; and its protest, pressing relentlessly to the
conclusion that women suffer deprivation-not quite as a class, not quite
as a caste-but in common, simply by virtue of their sex. Shirley Keeldar
is unique among Bronte's heroines in her circumstances: at twenty-one
she owns an estate whose income is a clear ?1,000 a year. Yet again and
again the novel shapes events to show how essentially similar Shirley's
experience is to that of Caroline Helstone, who has no estate at all and
no expectation of one. Wealthy as she is and with a vivacity of spirit that
Caroline lacks, Shirley is repeatedly made to feel the limits of her power.
There is little women can do to influence events, even in Briarfield,
Whinbury, and Nunnely, even if they have a clear ?1,000 a year. In the
scene outside the church, Bronte suggests that women form a potential
party and that the working classes also form a potential party. William
and Joe, Caroline and Shirley by no means agree on all points; they are
at the beginning of a conversation that makes a sign toward an open and
different society and a sign also toward a way of achieving it.
The novel goes no further in suggesting an alternative to the status
quo. Rather, it moves toward a quite unsuitably conventional ending, in
fact toward a double wedding, Caroline's with Robert Moore and
Shirley's with Robert's brother Louis. In its last chapters, the novel shifts
its question-What does it take to change?-and relocates it in the private
lives of its heroes and heroines. Before they let themselves love really or
at least tell their love, both Robert and Shirley have, like Rochester, to
change. It is true that Robert and Shirley both live under constraints.
Shirley's accrue to her because of her sex; Robert's to him because he
must sell cloth or else go bankrupt. Still, the two are relatively powerful in
the novel. Shirley is rich, Robert can take a certain number of initiatives,
whereas Caroline is "poverty and incapacity," and Louis Moore is a tutor
earning a small wage in other people's houses. It is up to Robert, not
Caroline, to propose their marriage; up to Shirley to give some sign that
she will welcome Louis as a husband if he will only dare to ask her. The
novel submits both Robert and Shirley to experiences that break their
excessive pride and lead them out of isolation.
These experiences are in line with the general, though not the sym-
bolically sexual, nature of Rochester's injuries, severe in the extreme,

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766 Ohmann Charlotte Bronte's Fiction

and they involve personal harm. Toward the end of the novel Robert is
shot by a worker. During his lengthy recovery he learns what it is to be
helpless entirely; he learns that he loves Caroline and needs her love in
return. Shirley is attacked physically too, by a dog she (mistakenly)
thinks is mad.13 After weeks of anxiety, wasting and lonely, she comes to
confide in Louis, who draws close to her at last.14 Talking to Caroline at
the very end, Robert imagines their future: Louis will be, benevolently
and wisely, the squire of Shirley's estate and in time magistrate of the
district; if Robert prospers, he will increase Louis's income, since Robert
rents from Shirley; and he will build a bigger mill and cottages with
gardens, will pave streets and roads, will enclose Nunnely Common and
make it into farms. Caroline will have a Sunday school; Caroline and
Shirley will have a day school. Workers will flock to Hollow's-mill, where
they will find work to do and homes to live in. Like The Professor, Shirley
offers a bourgeois, liberal dream. It pictures an extended Dickensian
family, paternally ruled, hierarchical, happy, having Christmas all the
year round. In the three parishes, the Industrial Revolution accelerates
without disturbing either the peace or the usual relationships of classes.
Louis and Robert work together within the English system for the good
of everyone because they are thoughtful men of good will.
But the idyll at the end of the book is Robert's dream. Bronte in fact
writes it out and then disowns it (whereas she endorsed the success of
William and Frances at the end of The Professor). Her narrative voice
stands far back from the action just before it ceases. It is regretful,
skeptical, and, more, censorious. "I suppose," the text reads, "Robert
Moore's prophecies were, partially, at least, fulfilled" (2:361). Certainly
the highway is there, and the cottages and gardens and a mill much
larger than the original one: its chimney is as "ambitious as the tower of
Babel." Bronte yearns for an earlier, rural England and disapproves of
Robert's aggressive expansion. In her last paragraph, she simply sus-
pends a final judgment of her material: "The story is told. I think I now
see the judicious reader putting on his spectacles to look for the moral. It
13. This dog, it has to be said, is something of an embarrassment to the plot; we do
not expect it or anything like it, and its attack remains inscrutably and irrelevantly doggy,
although adequate to effect a change of Shirley's heart.
14. I have passed quickly, I know, over the question of equality in marriage in Shirley.
This question, a vexed one, would require an argument in itself. Briefly, Bonte takes up
toward the end of the novel the position of Louis and Shirley with respect to dominance,
and many passages might lead to the conclusion that Shirley wishes to be mastered. Yet we
also hear that she regrets her loss of liberty and is reluctant to marry and, finally, that all
she has done she has done "partly ... on system" (2:353). It seems best to conclude, as
Charles Burkhart does, that Bronte "loses sight of the issue of equality in marriage" as she
closes Shirley (Charlotte Bronte: A Psychosexual Study of Her Novels [London: Victor Gollancz,
Ltd., 1973], p. 95). This subject of equality in marriage is there in the novel but
insufficiently developed. There is no doubt, though, of the other matter of Shirley's and
Robert's pride and isolation; experience humbles and brings them to an intimate relation-
ship with Louis and Caroline, respectively.

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Signs Summer 1977 767

would be an insult to his sagacity to offer directions. I on

speed him in the quest!" (2:362).
On the one hand, then, Shirley presses toward a radical cr
the English system; its view of experience is markedly politic
cized, insofar as it creates character in terms of power, redu
or sentiment to economic self-interest, reveals how ver
privilege is of its advantages, and shows in its portrayal of w
workers that there are millions in England whose interes
speaks for or even understands: the novel implies that for the
way out of poverty lies in a radical remaking of England
economically, socially, even culturally.
On the other hand, the novel displays a number of co
leanings. It prefers a rural England; it presents industrializat
tively, seeing it as inseparable from a laissez faire economic s
thrives only when it is uncurbedly competitive; even then it b
women, and children to tedious, dehumanizing labor. Louis th
as even Robert projects him into the future, is a more admir
than Robert himself, and the rest of the novel reinforces this
Bronte's association of both rebellion and resistance with madness
and rage is also, I think, conservative in effect. That association is adum-
brated in The Professor, appears in the action of Jane Eyre, and appears
again in Shirley. It appears in the public story, in the attack on
Hollow's-mill. And it appears in the more private experiences of the
characters in Shirley, in the most extreme alterations in consciousness,
which are those worked in Robert Moore and Shirley Keeldar. Bronte
cannot finally say what it takes to change a society in Shirley. Imagining
what it takes to change even one man or one woman, she once again
generates images of violence. She thinks inevitably in terms of a dialectic
offorce, thinks of moments of literal conflict and their cost. And her
representation of violence does not stop short of involving the middle
and upper classes. Both sides go with exhilaration to the attack on
Hollow's-mill; both are readier by far to fight than to reason, more
"animal" than "rational" (2:30). But Bronte did not approve of force as a
method of change. On the contrary, Jane Eyre learns to outgrow it, and
Robert Moore, lying wounded, deplores his antagonism of his workers.
The imagined ends of literal conflict, toward which her plots tend, func-
tion, I would suggest, as a brake to Bronti's radical impulses.
Further, I would argue that Bronte's radical impulses come into
very sharp collision with the ideal of Victorian womanhood which she
herself internalized, though not without conflict. To mention the most
obvious example, her heroines are always genteel, even when they are
poor. And at its best gentility goes hand in hand with sensitivity, with
intelligence, with good manners, with culture-but not, certainly not,
with civil insurrection, not even with the necessary confrontations of
peaceful politics. Even William is himself conspicuously "hygienic" or

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768 Ohmann Charlotte Bronte's Fiction

genteel in certain ways, hardworking, rational, given to reading books

and to complaining only under extreme stress-and even then com-
plaining only that he is unemployed, not that he is born to work as a mill
hand.15
Shirley is a less accomplished novel thanJane Eyre, less consistent in
point of view and tonal range, less controlled in the management of its
material; Bronte is less sure, for example, of where to write dialogue and
where to narrate, when to slow and when to hasten. At the not so still
center of these aesthetic difficulties lie, I am sure, the contradictions the
novel reveals, its conflicting loyalties, its radical and its conservative ten-
dencies. Scrutinizing further than The Professor the nature of the English
system, tracing out further than Jane Eyre the implications of poverty
and the imperative to equality, Shirley "concludes" in contradictions. To
resolve the impasse of Shirley, Bronte would have to stretch further
leftward on behalf of poverty her limits of permissible rebellion or else
resign herself for the sake of peace to the continuance of privilege; she
would have to stay outside the church exposed to all weathers or else
retire within, regretting still the confinement of almost everyone there
and the sermonizing. Either way would involve loss as well as gain in her
reckoning of the possibilities of life. As an artist, though, she had only to
gain from resolution, provided that she did not achieve it simplistically
or sentimentally, by denying her experience of poverty or forgetting her
complementary imagining of riches and glory. In Villette, unsurprisingly,
she made the choice of resignation.

The paradigm of poverty and riches still governs Bronte's last

finished novel. Lucy Snowe, the narrator and heroine of Villette, hungers
and thirsts after fulfillment; she comes to know in the course of the
action the intensity of her need and what in experience would satisfy it.
Villette is commonly called tragic, and with good reason. The term
signifies most obviously that its ending is not happy. More, it points
toward the kind of redefinition Bronte gives in Villette to her earlier
terms of conflict, so that we have a novel whose place is less emphatically
local than it is universal and whose time is more obviously any time than

15. Shirley does posit an alternate notion of gentility, giving it a regional rather than a
class definition, claiming that most "lads and lasses of the West-Riding are gentlemen and
ladies" (2:42), and dramatizing the idea in a small circle of men and women from various
classes who like and respect one another. But this "country" of equal "citizens" functions in
a limited way only-more myth than reality, as Eagleton has noted, calling it "metaphorical
gentility" (p. 56). The two definitions of gentility exist in contradiction in the novel, and I
suspect the Yorkshire "myth" also reveals, like the conclusion, a backward yearning for an
earlier, rural England, seen as more democratic.

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Signs Summer 1977 769

it is 1811-12 or even the first part of the nineteenth centur

economic, and social differences occupy the forestage of the
Villette; they do not finally determine its course or its conc
struggles more with her own nature than with her mate
stances, and were she to rebel at the end, it would be against
than oppression.
Villette offers at once a clear outline of what it means to be satisfied
rather than deprived. Twice a year as a child Lucy Snowe used to visit
Bretton. "The large peaceful rooms, the well-arranged furniture, the
clear wide windows, the balcony outside, looking down on a fine antique
street, where Sundays and holidays seemed always to abide-so quiet
was its atmosphere, so clean its pavement-these things pleased me
well."16 And the Brettons' characters, both mother's and son's, tally with
the amplitude, the serenity, and the rational order of their home. Mrs.
Bretton and John Graham Bretton (later Dr. John) are confident, cheer-
ful, and physically strong. They say what they wish, and they either have
what they want or they get it; they're at ease with each other, at ease with
the world.
Quite another, virtually the opposite kind of character appears in
Paulina Mary Home (later Home de Bassompierre), who arrives at Bret-
ton on a night of restless wind and lashing rain. Paulina or Polly is only
six; even so, she carried indoors a storm of her own. She makes no secret
of showing that her attachment to her father (her mother is dead) is
extraordinarily intense. Then Polly attaches herself to Graham Bretton,
watching him intently, stepping and fetching his marmalade and sweet
cake, matching her talk to his interests. When she is alone, she rocks a
little doll in a little cradle.17
This child has already imprisoned herself, Lucy implies, has already
embraced at the age of six in clearest abject outline the role of the
conventional woman. Indeed, it's appropriate to see a whole range of
characters in Villette-Polly; Mrs. Bretton; Miss Marchmont, to whom
Lucy is briefly a companion; Mme Beck, who runs the pensionnat where
Lucy eventually becomes a teacher; the hearty Continental girls who
study there; the English student Ginevra Fanshawe; the actress
Vashti-as all illustrative of patterns of life possible for women, patterns
shaped by the extent of the too narrow space society allows them to move
in. The feminist concerns of major interest in The Professor, Jane Eyre,
and Shirley still figure in Villette, but with a very marked difference. In
Villette Bronte shifts her emphasis away from society's influence on the
self to the very nature of the self, which she presents as largely given.

16. Charlotte Bronte, Villette (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1931), 1:1. Subse-
quent references to Villette are to this edition and appear in the text in parentheses.
17. For a detailed discussion of Lucy's reactions to Polly, see Eagleton, pp. 63-64;
and Helene Moglen, Charlotte Bronte: The Self Conceived (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1976).

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770 Ohmann Charlotte Bronte's Fiction

Polly's precocious domesticity is ridiculous insofar as it is narrow, but not

insofar as it is desperate. Her need for her father, then for Graham, is
profoundly felt, and she cannot help feeling it. Her emotional intensity
is beyond any choice of her own: "It was in her constitution," Lucy tells
us (1:22), and she comes close to stating the novel's view of character
when she remarks at greater length of Polly, "These sudden, dangerous
natures-sensitive as they are called-offer many a curious spectacle to
those whom a cooler temperament has secured from participation in
their angular vagaries" (1:11).
The very description of Bretton already foretokens, in its brevity, its
generality, its very decided use of the past tense, that those who dwell in
it must pass out from it. Her visits to Bretton, Lucy reflects, were like the
rest Bunyan's Christian and Hopeful enjoyed "beside a certain pleasant
stream, with 'green trees on each bank, and meadows beautified with
lilies all the year round'" (1:2). The journey is the novel's dominant
metaphor. Lucy travels literally to the imaginary kingdom of Labasse-
cour, to the capital city of Villette. Her journey, however, is very much
universalized, even allegorized like Christian's. It is life she travels
through, meeting on the way Fate, Providence, Destiny, Adversity, Dis-
appointment, Malady, Grief, Despair, as well as Renovation and Hope
and Victory. (The idea of the journey is supported and varied by
metaphors of trial or ordeal and specifically of prison and battle.) All the
characters who relate to Lucy are similarly en voyage; partly fated, partly
free, equipped with different natures, they are bound for calm or storm,
for the port of happiness or for wreck.
When Polly enters the action again years later, now beautiful and an
heiress, she is only partly recognizable as the same character. Bronte has
Lucy speak to the point of the change: Polly's voyage has included since
her childhood neither shallows nor storms; despite her "sudden,
dangerous nature," her intensity of feeling has found issue in reunion
with her father, and her love for him has been answered by his for her;
so she is stable, reasonable, somewhat shy but fundamentally
self-confident. When Polly comes to love Graham Bretton, who also
loves her in return, she simply enlarges the scope of her now older
heart's devotion. Polly comes to harbor, living as happily as this life
allows. No constraint impedes her power to feel, no privation leaves it
objectless. She flourishes as daughter, wife, and mother-a Caroline
Helstone who wins her goal without ordeal. Yet the kind of stress Polly
knew as a child persists in the novel. At Bretton, Lucy separated herself
from Polly's intensity; but for all her claims to coolness, Lucy's is also a
sudden, dangerous nature. As many readers have remarked, Lucy does
not know herself at Bretton or for some time to come. Neither does she
know fully what fate can bring.
Lucy isn't beautiful. She is without family and, and at the time she
journeys to Villette, without connections, without inheritance. Like Jane

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Signs Summer 1977 771

Eyre, she is poor, obscure, plain, and little. Her literal poverty
utes to what she fittingly calls her heart-poverty. People tend to
her or else to misunderstand her or simply to use her-as a conf
for example, to whom they presume to speak at length. Lucy's
however, brings her an exacerbated sense of deprivation, well b
any her circumstances alone determine. It is difficult for her to a
and again, she remarks that she is attracted to seclusion, to none
It is difficult for Lucy even to feel and to think in ways that a
self-expressive; she inhibits both her mind and heart, as a whole
metaphors signify in the novel.
The flood or fire beneath Lucy's snow and ice amounts to an
treasure she really does possess, though the world doesn't know
has power to teach; to enter wholly into a dramatic role; to feel
own core wind, rain, and storm as well as summer's sun; to
things that never were; and to love as Mme Beck, say, and G
Fanshawe never have and never can. But-and here treasure turns to
merest weight and pressure-how can Lucy spend her powers? Her
snow and ice once melted, in what channels can they safely course? The
powers within Lucy hunger and thirst for expression and satisfaction,
but they find neither or else find them only fitfully; experience offers
Lucy a "file to satisfy hunger" and "brine to quench thirst" (2:20). She
would feast, but she grows thin.
Graham Bretton appears to bring Lucy the satisfaction she thirsts
for; in a figure reminiscent of the idyllic opening description of place,
the river of Graham's kindness flows by the door of thepensionnat where
Lucy lives, hermit-like in her heart-poverty. But then it turns aside,
choosing another channel to flow in, as Graham and Polly engage to
marry; Graham Bretton is not meant for the likes of Lucy Snowe. It is
Paul Emanuel who comes, as his name suggests, to save, to undo the
prison door and break Lucy's bonds, to satisfy her hunger and thirst.
But Paul's role as the agent who frees and fulfills is not immediately
apparent; he is aggressively commanding; a Bonaparte, a tyrant, a des-
pot, an absolutist. Coming on Lucy in a picture gallery, he is shocked to
find her before a picture of Cleopatra reclined seminude on a couch; he
breaks into a series of questions and imperatives: What is she doing?
And doing alone? And how dare she? "'Asseyez-vous, et ne bougez
pas'" (1:254), he orders, seating her in front of four pictures forming a
series entitled La Vie d'une femme. Young woman, bride, mother, and
widow, the figures in the series form a dreary procession of domestic
and religious dutifulness. It is to such a life that Paul at first recommends
Lucy.
Paul is someone to whom Lucy intensely matters. Yet encounters
with him through much of the novel ironically seem to reinforce Lucy's
original predicament of deprivation. Monsieur Paul would straiten Lucy
thus and so. She resists. InJane Eyre Thornfield burned to resolve such a

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772 Ohmann Charlotte Bronte's Fiction

conflict; and in Shirley, Robert Moore was shot to humble his pride. In
Villette the conflict between a man who would dominate and a woman
who'd rather he didn't is resolved with relative ease, because of the terms
in which Bronte poses their opposition. UnlikeJane Eyre and Shirley,
Villette does not dramatize the fall of a hero from pride. In many ways, it
is true, Paul is strikingly unlike Lucy. As a man, he is well educated; as a
professor, successful and respected. He has family, friends, and col-
leagues. Yet the novel builds toward and presses to explicit mention the
profound likenesses between Paul and Lucy. Paul's nature is, like Lucy's,
intense. His irritability, his unpredictable outbursts of anger at students
and teachers, his ability to dramatize superbly the literature he reads are
signs of his own sudden, dangerous nature. He is self-controlled in every
way that is professionally and morally important; but, remarks Lucy,
"The force he exerted in holding [his feelings] in check, by no means
mitigated an observer's sense of their vehemence" (1:257). Although he
is freer by far and better circumstanced than Lucy is, Paul nonetheless
suffers her essential experience of deprivation. He suffers his own
heart-poverty, even his own poverty. His single room where no servant
comes, where his meals are as simple as a monk's, is the equivalent of
Lucy's meager portion of the dormitory in Mme Beck's pensionnat.
Unlike those of Rochester and Robert Moore, the crises of Paul's
ordeals belong to the past and are merely summarized in the fictive
present. He was in love with a woman whom he lost because he lost his
fortune; her family forbade the wedding, and she obeyed them, entered
a convent, and died there, still young. Paul, in faithfulness to the mem-
ory of his fiancee, has denied himself so that he may support her family,
who in turn lost their fortune. Paul's Catholicism has long prepared for
and nourished the self-sacrifice that has shaped his life. His confessor,
Pere Silas, encourages him to continue to deny himself and of course
deplores Paul's interest in the Protestant Miss Lucy. Paul has already
qualified really for Lucy's love as the novel begins, by his experience of
poverties. What the novel dramatizes, in place of the hero's fall, is Lucy's
discovery of Paul's character and his history. As she comes to know and
love him, he promises her a release from restraint and a leading back to
the idyllic serenity imaged in the novel's opening description. The house
in the Faubourg Clotilde with which Paul surprises Lucy, where she is to
have her own school, where they are to live together when they marry, is
reminiscent of Bretton. And yet it offers so much more to Lucy than
Bretton ever did. Within the confines of a careful economy, all is plenti-
ful and utterly pleasing. Eden-like the house is said to be, with its win-
dows kissed by vines, and the Edenic associations presented are those of
fruition.
In the portrayal of Paul himself, the same plenitude appears. lie
has of course rented the house, ordered its decoration, bought all it
contains, and given it into Lucy's care. In what he has done, Paul has

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Signs Summer 1977 773

played a strikingly rich variety of roles. He has been and

them off, savior and priest; king, benefactor, and teache
steward and servant; guest, friend, parent, even mother; a
husband-to-be. That so many of Paul's roles are those that co
sustain, apart from those that rule and control, is at once a te
Lucy's poverty and a balm to it. Clearly Bronte's intention is
Paul and Lucy from conventional masculine and feminine
have entered into a flexibility and richness of relationship be
that Graham and Polly experience or need to experience. Paul
are, in a way that brings the cliche to life, everything to each
simple meal they share in the Faubourg Clotilde is weighte
cally; it signifies the satisfaction of Lucy's hunger and thirst. L
is over, it seems; her journey, too. "I was full of faults; he too
me all home," she says (2:307). The novel concludes with a ful
ing of a masculine ideal. Paul is vividly energetic, self-expressi
with his prospective life in his classes, on the public podium, i
in the Faubourg Clotilde. He can be termed a domestic hero, w
no means suggests that he fails in sexual attractiveness or str
character.
It can be argued that Bronte solves in Villette, and solves without
contradiction or violence, the problem posed in bothJane Eyre and Shir-
ley: What does it take to change a man? Yet Bronte has Paul and Lucy
collide not primarily as patriarchal man and subordinate woman (or as
professor and teacher or master and servant) but as Continental man and
English woman. Paul's advice as to La Vie d'unefemme comes right out of
his background, out of his religion especially. As a Catholic, he's used to
suffering tyranny (for so Bronte presents Catholicism), to practicing
obedience. As a Catholic he initially urges on Lucy self-sacrifice: no
unchaperoned excursions, no scholastic glory, no pink dresses, no look-
ing at Cleopatra, and so on. As a Protestant Englishwoman on the Con-
tinent, Lucy is exempt from constraints that realistically bind Bronte's
earlier heroines who live at home, within the English system. Before the
novel's end, Paul simply comes to accept the difference between himself
and Lucy, and this involves no revolution in his thinking and certainly
implies no revolution in the kingdom of Labassecour. Paul accepts
Lucy's independence of mind because she is exceptional, a law unto
herself but not unto others; he allows Lucy her Protestant exercise of
self-determination.

By making their initial barrier one of national differences, by mak-

ing so much of Paul's Catholic experience an experience of deprivation,
by setting for herself terms other than those that historically obtained
England and that she herself knew there, Bronte is able to work towar
those climactic moments when she can dramatize the full and flexible
freedom of interaction Paul and Lucy enjoy. It is as if the reuni
Ferndean were moved forward into this novel's time and expanded.

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774 Ohmann Charlotte Bronte's Fiction

her original problem, Bronte finds in Villette not a realistic solution but a
literary one. For conflicts she could resolve earlier only by contradiction
or violence, she substitutes in effect the appearance rather than the
substance of stubborn and dominative masculinity. To put this another
way, she shifts in Villette the emphasis of the original question to this:
What will a man who is not so much changed as different be like?
The same disposition toward idealization occurs in Bronti's render-
ing of England and Protestantism. In The Professor Bronte had Frances
Henri maintain over argument that England was the best of countries; in
Villette she simply assumes Frances's conclusion, without entering serious
qualifications. Passage after passage very particularly remarks, even to
the point of contempt, on the inferiority of Continental beliefs and
practices in art, in education, in social relationships. In contrast, what-
ever is English is idealized, and so historical reality (the sexual and class
inequities of Jane Eyre and Shirley) is again reduced to abstraction. En-
gland or Britain (Bretton) comes virtually to stand for a set of values (for
freedom and honesty, for example) rather than a country of so many
millions, many of whom, like the workers in Shirley, go into the mills with
lunch pails or, like Caroline Helstone, simply wait for Robert to afford
her. Similarly, Catholicism receives a particular anatomy in Villette, but
Protestantism is prized free, really, from national locality and is not
institutionalized. It exists apart from the Church of England, as an ideal
antithesis to Catholicism, requiring liberty of thought, exercise of
reason, independence of will, and interposition of no priestly lies or false
comforts between the individual and truth.
In the face of Bronte's willingness in Villette to deal in abstractions,
in idealizations, what are we to make of "Finis," that chapter that has
failed to bring only to the most determinedly optimistic readers th
intelligence that Paul, returning from his last discharge of duty to the
family of his dead fiancee, is lost at sea? It is possible to posit a sensibilit
that would enclose the event in bitterness or turn it in protest against a
society in which Pollys and Grahams (handsome and rich) live happily
ever after but not Pauls and Lucys who are, like most of us, ungodlike t
look at and, again like most of us, have to work hard for an ordinary
living. The ending of the novel would then say that the plenitude of the
Faubourg Clotilde would be nice, but it cannot ever be. It would be
unrelievedly painful for Pauls and especially for Lucys, who begin with
so much less, to come to that conclusion-more comforting to think that
not every ship they sail on necessarily sinks.
As a little girl, Jane Eyre at Gateshead finds herself deprived and
scorned, bullied by the little Reeds whose mother showers them with
favors and adds to theirs her own insults to Jane. Her situation, Jane
finds, is intolerable; and nothing is more intolerable, nothing mor
maddening about it than the fact that there is nothing she can do t
change it, because it is basically irrational. That is, it is basically irrationa

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signs Summer 1977 775

if you believe, as Jane does, that good behavior ought to earn

praise and status and, more, affection. "I dared," she says, "c
fault; I strove to fulfil every duty; and I was termed naught
some, sullen and sneaking, from morning ... to night" (p. 12)
Bronte mirrors really a world that is similarly irrational. But
it in disguise, and she rationalizes irrationality in such a way
the response of anger and to counsel, instead, resignation.
The novel makes a mockery of fairy-tale and mythic
paradisal expectations. Leaving England after weathering the
a solitary journey to London, Lucy approaches the shore
Channel in a reverie induced by myriad fictions: "Methought
continent of Europe, like a wide dream-land, far away. Sunsh
it, making the long coast one line of gold..." (1:66). But L
narrator, looking a long way backward to her youth, says at
cel the whole of that, if you please, reader-or rather let it st
draw thence a moral-an alliterative, text-hand copy-'Day-
delusions of the demon.'" In Lucy's story, Bronte makes
means to offer truth, not fiction; Villette is to be a text, a his
than a tale. Immediately following her revery, Lucy is seasic
later at Boue-Marine ("Sea-Mud") in the kingdom of L
("Barnyard") and travels to the little, not the grand, capital c
lette. She will find a job as a nursemaid to Mme Beck's childr
learn to teach. There will be no lush inheritance from Madeira, no
discovery of three comely cousins. The novel's disappointment of fairy-
tale and mythic expectations serves to light by contrast the enduring and
very real mysteries of Lucy's character and fate.
In Villette Bronte stresses in her rhetoric as well as her action a
largely deterministic view of personality, first introduced by Po
arrival at Bretton out of the wind and rain. As Lucy starts her Chan
crossing, she says to herself, "'How is this? ... Methinks I am animat
and alert, instead of being depressed and apprehensive!' I could not t
how it was" (1:59). She explains an act of confession she impulsiv
makes to Pere Silas in these terms: "'I cannot put the case into word
but, my days and nights were grown intolerable; a cruel sense of de
tion pained my mind: a feeling that would make its way, rush out, or
me-like . . . the current which passes through the heart, and which,
aneurism or any other morbid cause obstructs its natural channels, se
abnormal outlet'" (1:233).
The metaphors from physiology and mechanics are particularly ar-
resting. They make quite explicit the novel's view of the mind as a
machine or mechanism generating its own energy or force. Some
machines, like Graham Bretton's, run well-the energy is generated at a
constant rate and drives the shaft, turns the gears, unimpeded. In sud-
den, dangerous natures like Lucy's, the sources of energy are uncertain.
Sometimes the power comes and drives well; at others it fails to be

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776 Ohmann Charlotte Bronte's Fiction

sufficient or, coming with unexpected excess, forces an outlet where

none exists. To compare the mind to a mechanism is to say that it is in
large degree determined, but it is not to say that it is necessarily predict-
able. Lucy is surprised over and over by impulses from her inner nature.
For Bronte's concepts of movement, of power, of current, we would
ourselves substitute those of depth psychology and speak of the uncon-
scious, of inhibition and repression and the like. But unlike Freud,
Bronte offers little hope that a sudden, dangerous mind may admit of
repair or that what is hidden may be exposed to the sun, reclaimed.
Rather, mystery remains ultimately mystery in Villette; this is its final
revelation of human character and its final revelation of human destiny.
A number of natural phenomena are presented in the course of the
novel as true visitations from the extraordinary-a display of the aurora
borealis, winds that cry in disease and death, and other storms that
sweep what Lucy at one point calls the "'globe ... disordered'" (1:44).
In these instances of terrible beauty and force, Lucy intuits, even senses,
the ultimate powers that order human events. Many moments in the
novel, then, prepare for the paragraphs that tell of Paul's shipwreck:

The sun passes the equinox; the days shorten, the leaves grow
sere; but-he is coming.
Frosts appear at night; November has sent his fogs in advance;
the wind takes its autumn moan; but-he is coming.
The skies hang full and dark-a rack sails from the west; the
clouds cast themselves into strange forms-arches and broad radia-
tions; there rise resplendent mornings-glorious, royal, purple as
monarch in his state; the heavens are one flame; so wild are they,
they rival battle at its thickest-so bloody, they shame Victory in
her pride. I know some signs of the sky; I have noted them ever
since childhood. God, watch that sail! Oh! guard it!
The wind shifts to the west. Peace, peace, Banshee-"keening"
at every window! It will rise-it will swell-it shrieks out long; wan-
der as I may through the house this night, I cannot lull the blast.
The advancing hours make it strong: by midnight, all sleepless
watchers hear and fear a wild southwest storm.
That storm roared frenzied for seven days. It did not cease till
the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks; it did not lull till the deeps ha
gorged their full of sustenance. Not till the destroying angel o
tempest had achieved his perfect work, would he fold the wings
whose waft was thunder-the tremor of whose plumes was storm.
Peace, be still! Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on
waiting shores, listened for that voice, but it was not uttered-no
uttered till, when the hush came, some could not feel it: till, when
the sun returned, his light was night to some! [2:312-13]

God, though called upon, has not guarded Paul's sail. Indeed the pro
has given over to nature itself-to the sun, the days, the leaves, the fro

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Signs Summer 1977 777

the wind, the skies, the clouds-autonomy of action. In Luc

belief, God exists-again and again the novel testifies to tha
cosmos posed to Lucy is unrelieved by his interposition. The co
Lucy experiences it is willfully, terrifyingly naturalistic. There
tice in Paul's wreck, only mischance, and no justice in the f
wreck of Lucy's happiness which must follow. She is left with
and school. It is not enough; she has said as much in advance, s
of the time before she loved Paul, when she asked herself if h
sion was all that time was going to bring to her. If it were all, then
would describe merely an arc, not a full circle of satisfaction. H
fate at the novel's end is an exile from refuge, from "home," to
tion, to poverty of heart though not of purse.18
Lucy might have ended as a nun cloistered in a Carmelite co
her retiring nature inclines her to that, but reason forbids her
solace. Moreover, the age of miracles is past, as Lucy has remar
since. In The Professor religion, William Crimsworth firmly tel
consolation. Even if we should be bereaved, we can count on he
reunite us with those we love. In Jane Eyre God is also near
indeed he is active in this world, bringing Jane and Rochester t
Ferndean once they are ready to marry. It is more difficult to
the religious convictions rendered in Shirley; the novel is most
cally concerned with religion as an aspect of society, revealing t
shortcomings of characters who call themselves Christian thou
forget to act in charity. But certainly Villette's view of God is a
stoic. Lucy experiences a naturalistic world dominated by fate;
believe in a divine order somewhere beyond the visible di
globe-and wait, even if it should be only for death. Her p
presented as bleakly as that as the novel closes.
In Villette, as I have said, Bronte transforms the terms of he
conflicts in ways that allow her to achieve a finished, coherent f
renders a world in which some people suffer intensely and unf
attributes inequity to an austere cosmic design. Privilege is fin
down by God from his inscrutable distance; and so is pove
nothing can be done about his appointment except to under
endure until the end. Lucy Snowe qualifies for membership in a
and honorable literary elite whose estate is in no way materially
able, belonging as it does to the country of the sensibility;
through her suffering the treasure of wisdom. That, along
faith, is her temporal glory.
But I have been less concerned even with Villette than with the

18. Robert Bernard Martin discusses the "tragic awareness" of Villette, its acceptance
of suffering as necessary, and its resignation in The Accents of Persuasion: Charlotte Bronte'
Novels (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), pp. 143-49; he find in the novel more in the way o
Christian consolation than I do. Norman Sherry comments briefly on character and fate i
Villette in Charlotte and Emily Bronte (London: Evans Brothers, 1969), p. 87.

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778 Ohmann Charlotte Bronte's Fiction

configuration all Bronte's novels compose together; that configuration

gives us an example (it reverberates, I think, beyond itself; we can find
similar strategies in resignation and redefinition in Virginia Woolf, for
example, and in Doris Lessing) of a particular woman's consciousness
pressing further and further against its limits of political understanding,
exposing contradictions in its own values and commitments, and, unable
to resolve them, pulling back from precise historical reality, preferring
to represent, instead, a world view in which, most important, forces
outside of society determine who we are and what becomes of us.
In Villette Bronte suffered a loss in reckoning the possibilities of
action and achievement and happiness for someone born, like Caroline
Helstone and William Farren, like herself, outside of ample privilege.
But philosophy, even in (perhaps especially in) the popular sense, has its
consolations. And I shall just note here, with no pretense to complete-
ness, a few of the consolations the world view of Villette seems to me to
have offered Bronte, beyond the aesthetic gain she achieved over Shirley.
She was able to be patriotic (by treating Britain and Protestantism in an
ideal way), religious (if a little unorthodox in her austerity), and above all
accepting and resigned-that is to say, ladylike-rather than angry and
rebellious. In her way, she conformed after all to the code of the English
gentlewoman Elizabeth Rigby made so much of Bronte's departure from
inJane Eyre. By virtue of its rendering of deprivation and of the relation-
ship Paul and Lucy momentarily come to enjoy, Villette still has the kind
of radical force Raymond Williams speaks of; its ideology, however, is
profoundly conservative. It was a shame, of course, after Bronte had
come to perceive so much about the English system, but perfectly under-
standable, given the time, the place, the particular life of the writer.

Department of English
Wesleyan University

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