The Brontës Part 2 – Problematic “Heroes”

This article is part of The FrankenPod’s continued exploration of gothic writers and accompanies our most recent episode; 50 Shades of Heathcliffe with Oh No! Lit Class

The Brontë canon is filled with unique and intriguing women, they are flawed and driven. The men are a whole great big Byronic mess of sulky pains that we will have to save for another time. I’ve chosen to use stills from screen depictions for all but one of the photos of these characters for reasons that may become apparent.

Promotional photograph for the 1943 film Jane Eyre: Orson Welles & Joan Fontaine

Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Look, Jane knows she’s pretty special. It’s like she’s aware that someone is writing a book about her. The popular image of Jane as a virtous, but passionate young woman has indured for well over a century. Romanitic depictions often frame her as a misguided lamb walking into a situation, her love for Rochester and the inconvienience of his very much not dead wife have pitted Bertha and Jane somewhat against each other. Or have positioned Bertha as Rochester’s torturer (despite the fact that she is the one trapped in the attic). The fact is that Jane herself is not a particularly likelable or ethical person, but she does have principals and doesn’t tend to take much crap. Even walking out on Rochester in a situation in which other Bronte heroines may not have (see below).

 

Photo of Sir Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon from the 1939 film Wuthering Heights.

Catherine Earnshaw

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Cruel and wild as a kid Catherine tries to fit into society’s expectations of her as a young adult, but personality development does not appear to stick in Wuthering Heights. Or, more likely, her ties to Heathcliffe and their super unhealthy relationship undo any growth she has done as a human. Emily frames the change in Catherine in negative terms, and we are supposed to infer that if she remained wild and cruel like Heathcliffe then none of this would have happened. But as every tale of forbidden romance needs a social construct for the couple to rally against, Catherine is in a more privilidged position than Heathcliffe and that is seen as being the reason they cannot be together. Heathcliffe is described as “Romany” and he was adopted into the family so he doesn’t wasn’t born into the position of power that Catherine and her brother were. When Heathcliffe comes back and she has the nerve to have gone on with her life, the toxicity of their relationship and their codependency returns. Things turn bad, and Catherine has a fit and stops eating, starving herself to death, because  proportionate reactions are something that Emily did not seem to get.

 

 

Tara Fitzgerald as Helen in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 1996

 

Helen Graham

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

Helen tried being married to the type of men that Emily and Charlotte cast as the romantic leads of their books, and decided that she was not putting up with that particular brand of patriarchal bullshit. It really is quite the stark contrast between the resourcefullness and bravery of Helen Graham or Helen Lawrence Huntingdon and the reaction of Catherine to lie down and die. Helen acheives something in the 19th century that it is still not possible for everyone; she got her, and her child out of an abusive relationship. It is made an even more impactful tale when we realise that she went into the marraige with agency, thinking that she had made the right call, rather than being forced into a marraige was bad before it started. She chose to marry Huntingdon and then when he turned out to be the worst she tries to ‘fix’ him, but then realises that is just false reasoning, and she leaves him. In a bizarre but compassionate move she goes back to nurse him until his death, and then is able to move on with her life. However you will see that the picture I have used is from 1996, unlike Catherine and Jane, it wasn’t until recently that audiences saw the appeal of this wonderful creation of Anne Bronte’s.

 

It’s so hard to find a photo from any screen depictions of Bertha as she is often set up as such an elusive and disposable character. This is the front cover of Jean Rhys’s piece of literary revisionist fiction which gives Bertha much need voice

Bertha Rochester

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

I am not going to call her Bertha Mason because for the majority of the book she IS Bertha Rochester (although I’ll be honest I wouldn’t want that name associated with me if I was her, but in the absence of her voice to decline the title then Bertha Rochester it is). Bertha is perhaps the most important female character in the Brontë canon, she certainly rivals Helen when we are looking at feminist readings for the big three Brontë sisters. The “Madwoman in the attic” has been seen as a metaphor for the unchained female self. The sympathetic feelings of the modern reader toward Bertha are almost certainly not what Charlotte had in mind. Bertha is painted as a feminine monstrosity, albeit a slightly more nuanced monstrosity than many other unsympathetic portraits of a “hysterical”, “mad” or othered woman of her time. Bertha’s ambiguous ethnicity or race might shed a little more light on why Charlotte thought it was okay to imprison Rochester’s wife in the attic. It’s not a comfortable thought that a book that is so esteemed in the literary canon of female authors could essentially imprison a woman from another culture and drive her to self-destruction through isolation and emotional torture for essentially being difficult (flirting or having an affair does not excuse this kind of abhorrent treatment). Bertha’s moment for a romanticised and sympathetic BBC or Hollywood period drama has not arrived yet, when it does happen it won’t be a moment too soon.

 

The Brontës

This week The FrankenPod (rss feed for podcast app) episode is a conversation with Megan from Oh No! Lit Class on the literary family the Brontës. The gothic classic Jane Eyre was penned by Charlotte and Emily wrote the eerily gothic Wuthering Heights. It’s a bit of a rambling chat in which we also delve into the comedy sci-fi world of Douglas Adams, the childhood trauma of the Goosebumps series and the Byronic elements of Christian Gray, so I don’t have a script to publish. So here are some quotes from the works of the children of Patrick Brontë who survived to adulthood:

Photo by John Illingworth. Branwell Brontë A wood statue by the canal depicting Branwell, the black sheep of the Brontë family, as well as other landmarks and characteristics of Calderdale. Branwell was for a couple of years a booking clerk at the nearby Luddendenfoot railway station but left under a cloud.

Patrick Branwell Brontë

Thorpe Green by Patrick Branwell Brönte

I sit, this evening, far away,
From all I used to know,

And nought reminds my soul to-day
Of happy long ago.Unwelcome cares, unthought-of fears,
Around my room arise;
I seek for suns of former years
But clouds o’ercast my skies.Yes-Memory, wherefore does thy voice
Bring old times back to view,
As thou wouldst bid me not rejoice
In thoughts and prospects new?I’ll thank thee, Memory, in the hour
When troubled thoughts are mine-
For thou, like suns in April’s shower,
On shadowy scenes wilt shine.I’ll thank thee when approaching death
Would quench life’s feeble ember,
For thou wouldst even renew my breath
With thy sweet word ‘Remember’!

Charlotte Bronte by G. Richmond 1850

Charlotte Brontë

Quote from Jane Eyre spoken by Jane herself:

“If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should—so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again. […] I must dislike those who, whatever I do to please them, persist in disliking me; I must resist those who punish me unjustly. It is as natural as that I should love those who show me affection, or submit to punishment when I feel it is deserved.”

Disputed portrait by her brother Branwell; sources are in disagreement over whether this image is of Emily or Anne

Emily Brontë

Quote from Wuthering Heights, taken from Nelly’s final narration:

Mr. Kenneth was perplexed to pronounce of what disorder the master died. I concealed the fact of his having swallowed nothing for four days, fearing it might lead to trouble, and then, I am persuaded, he did not abstain on purpose: it was the consequence of his strange illness, not the cause.

We buried him, to the scandal of the whole neighbourhood, as he wished. Earnshaw and I, the sexton, and six men to carry the coffin, comprehended the whole attendance. The six men departed when they had let it down into the grave: we stayed to see it covered. Hareton, with a streaming face, dug green sods, and laid them over the brown mould himself: at present it is as smooth and verdant as its companion mounds—and I hope its tenant sleeps as soundly. But the country folks, if you ask them, would swear on the Bible that he walks: there are those who speak to having met him near the church, and on the moor, and even within this house. Idle tales, you’ll say, and so say I. Yet that old man by the kitchen fire affirms he has seen two on ’em looking out of his chamber window on every rainy night since his death

Anne Brontë Drawn by Charlotte

Anne Brontë

From the introduction to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:

I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.

10 Romantic Gothic Stories You Should Read Before You Run Hysterically Into the Moors Never to be Seen (Alive) Again

As I was looking for resources through the hit and miss machine that is Google, I kept coming across goth dating sites… this is not relevant, I just thought you should know the level of people in pseudo-Victorian garb staring whimsically off into space that I had to endure to research this was relatively high compared with other topics I have written about.

Romanticism and the Gothic overlap so much that it is probably easier to define was isn’t Romantic Gothic and it might take less time. So rather than go over a definition of Gothic Romanticism that is so similar to the millions of others out there, not to mention our introductory episode, I thought I would give you a list of a few of my favourite stories that deal in Gothic Romanticism that we haven’t covered on The FrankenPod podcast:

 

Byam Shaw‘s illustration for Poe‘s The Murders in the Rue Morgue in “Selected Tales of Mystery” (London : Sidgwick & Jackson, 1909) on the page to face p. 284 with caption “The sailor’s face flushed up; he started to his feet and grasped his cudgel”

The Murders in The Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe (1841)

Falling into the category of both the genius detective (pre-Holmes I might add) and urban gothic, and with at least one very clear example of gothic excess (that is the fate of the victims in the story and their killer). Dupain is a delight and in my opinion far more likeable and intriguing than his successor Holmes.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue is as much fun as you can possibly have with a corpse shoved up a chimney.

Available for free at Project Gutenberg as part of  The Works of Edgar Allan Poe Part 1

There is also an excellent dramatisation of Murders in the Rue Morgue that was released as part of The Rivals Audio drama on BBC Radio 4 with the eternally adorable James Fleet inserted into the narrative as Inspector Lestrade, who is an Arthur Conan Doyle creation. The thread of the series is that Lestrade, of Sherlock Holmes fame, is basically offering examples of detectives who are better than Holmes, and Dupain played by the incomparable Andrew Scott is his first example.

 

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

This was the first gothic novel I ever read and it has a very special place in my heart to rival Frankenstein. Pop culture has entirely ruined the ending for new readers unless they are 10 like I was. If you do let a 10-year-old read it, maybe go for a kid’s edition to minimise nightmares. Still worth a read despite the spoilers. Doubling you guys! More Doubling!

Available for free at Project Gutenberg 

 

Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)

I know that there are other vampire stories that pave the way to Dracula (some of which we will talk about on the podcast), but none of them quite achieve the drama and the sense of formidable invasion the way the Bram Stoker does. He has brought together a lot of ideas surrounding vampires and made them into an incredibly compelling novel that still holds up. It is also insanely problematic as most novels of its time are so easily outraged should tread carefully as with all these books really.

Available for free on Project Gutenberg

 

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)

Another childhood favourite of mine of which you are less likely to know the big twist. And you know what, like a lot of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels even if you have read it, the solutions are either so complicated and outlandish or unexpectedly pedestrian that the reader often has difficulty recalling the exact circumstances of the crime and the solution to the riddle. But that is a genius detective novel for you, their leaps of inductive reasoning (not deductive as any first-year critical thinking student will tell you) are incredibly entertaining but often don’t stand up to scrutiny. A fantastic story though, possibly the best in the Holmes canon.

Available for free on Project Gutenberg

 

Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier

Du Maurier, I would hazard to say is one of the great geniuses of gothic romanticism. Often eclipsed by her predecessors, the Bronte’s (for there are more than cursory similarities) she crafts books that paint a bleak, yet compelling picture of the world surrounding a young girl who is generally a damsel in distress. Her damsels in distress are often isolated without a clear ally. She uses tropes artfully, without letting them becomes cliches, and creates a few new narrative devices that will be deployed often and with great enthusiasm by her successors.

Available to buy at The Book Depository

 

Frontispiece illustration from the book, The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

This is stretching the definition of gothic I know, and most people would turn to Collins’ other, more conventionally romantic gothic novel The Woman in White. I am ashamed to say I haven’t read it yet. The Moonstone is part detective novel, part romance, part scathing indictment on contemporary society and colonialism.

Available for free at Project Gutenberg

 

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (1817)

Yes, Jane Austen. This is possibly one of the most cleverly crafted gothic novels and yet, it started life as a parody of one of the most influential stories of gothic romanticism of its time; The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. Catherine Morland, the hero of the piece, encounters many tropes of gothic fiction, but they are all overcome with a practicality and wit that is so uniquely Austen.

Available for free at Project Gutenberg

 

Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1862)

We could easily call this sensation fiction narrative a proto-detective novel. If the style of dress and manner of speech were 70 years in the future you could easily see this novel fitting in with the detective noir genre. There is double-crossing, murder, mistaken identity, a femme fatale and private investigator of a kind.

Available for free at Project Gutenberg as part of The World’s Greatest Books Volume 2

 

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte (1848)

If you are going to read a Bronte novel, might I humbly suggest this epistolary novel by possibly the least appreciated Bronte aside from Branwell? There are remarkably less awful people who you are supposed to sympathise with and decidedly less harmful relationships. It’s not a hugely popular opinion but I’ll take Anne Bronte over her sisters (and obviously Branwell) any day.

Available for free at Project Gutenberg