When Brontë speaks generally about the lot of single women, she names economic dependency as their “great curse,” but in atomizing her own condition, she places emphasis not on her material condition, but on her intellectual and psychological needs.
Gaskell, too, was sensitive to “the trials of many single women, who waken up some morning to the sudden feeling of the purposelessness (is there such a word) of their lives.” “I think I see everyday how women, deprived of their natural duties as wives & mothers, must look out for other duties if they wish to be at peace,” Gaskell explains to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 72). Gaskell’s formulation of the problem, that women are appointed by natural order to perform specific duties, differs only marginally from Brontë’s more practical view that a career would be a superfluity for a married woman: “When a woman has a little family to rear and educate and a household to conduct, her hands are full, her vocation is evident—when her destiny isolates her—I suppose she must do what she can—live as she can” (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, May 12, 1848; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 66).
Gaskell refines her position in a letter to her friend Eliza Fox, an artist. “One thing is clear, Women, must give up living an artist’s life, if home duties are to be paramount. It is different with men, whose home duties are so small a part of their life,” Gaskell muses, coming to the conclusion that “assuredly a blending of the two is desirable. (Home duties and the development of the Individual I mean), which you will say it takes no Solomon to tell you but the difficulty is where and when to make one set of duties subserve and give place to the other” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 68). Gaskell’s awkward answer in the Life is to divide Brontë’s existence into “two parallel currents—her life as Currer Bell, the author; her life as Charlotte Brontë, the woman. There were separate duties belonging to each character—not opposing each other; not impossible, but difficult to be reconciled” (p. 272). While Gaskell’s ambivalence about female duty certainly registers here, the fact that she labels the currents “parallel” suggests that she saw the division not as a subordination of one role to the other, but rather as an uneasy coexistence of the two. In addition, Gaskell’s careful delineation between Brontë’s public and private personae has the effect of preserving her professionalism. Thackeray angered Brontë by referring to her publicly as “Jane Eyre,” a conflation that she felt effaced her artistry. She was not Jane Eyre; she had created Jane Eyre.
Gaskell conducted her own literary career with uncompromising professionalism, famously locking horns with Charles Dickens over creative differences when she wrote for his periodical Household Words. But her ambivalence about Brontë’s work persisted well into their friendship. “The difference between Miss Brontë and me,” Gaskell explained to a friend, “is that she puts all her naughtiness into her books, and I put all my goodness. I am sure she works off a great deal that is morbid into her writing, and out of her life; and my books are so far better than I am that I often feel... as if I were a hypocrite” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 154). Both Brontë and Gaskell saw their work as therapeutic. Gaskell wrote her first novel, Mary Barton, in an attempt to exorcize her grief over the death of an infant son. Brontë found relief from loneliness in the life of her imagination after the deaths of her sisters. “ ‘The faculty of imagination lifted me when I was sinking... its active exercise has kept my head above water since; its results cheer me now, for I feel they have enabled me to give pleasure to others. I am thankful to God, who gave me the faculty; and it is for me a part of my religion to defend this gift, and to profit by its possession,’ ” Brontë told Williams (p. 320).
Where Brontë sees writing as a form of solace and pleasure, Gaskell loads it with the corrective function of “normalizing” the self by working out unhealthy energy. Women’s participation in the “hidden world of art” is beneficial if it “keeps them from being morbid,” Gaskell believes, but if “Self is to be the end of exertions, those exertions are unholy, there is not doubt of that—and that is part of the danger in cultivating the Individual Life” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 68).
Gaskell feared that Brontë’s desire to write and to be heard was a self-indulgence that was abnormal and not strictly womanly. As Gaskell described it in a letter to a friend, Brontë had a “ ‘desire (almost amounting to illness) of expressing herself in some way’ ” (p. 436).
So desirous was Brontë of recognition, that she sent samples of her work to Robert Southey, England’s poet laureate, just before her twenty-first birthday. Southey recognized her talent, but discouraged her from pursuing a literary career, saying that “ ‘literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be,’ ” and promising that the woman who is “ ‘engaged in her proper duties’ ” . . . is “ ‘less eager for celebrity’ ” (p. 123). Brontë’s response seemed a model of contrition, and it pleased Southey as such, but it was carefully veiled rebellion (p. 125). Her letter fairly drips with sarcasm in the guise of naive acceptance: “ ‘You only warn me against the folly of neglecting real duties, for the sake of imaginative pleasures... You kindly allow me to write... provided I leave undone nothing which I ought to do ... I am afraid, sir, you think me very foolish. I know the first letter I wrote to you was all senseless trash from beginning to end; but I am not altogether the idle dreaming being it would seem to denote’ ” (p. 124).
Brontë’s original letter is not extant, but judging from her response it sounds as if she first approached Southey in an inauthentic voice that she here disowns. Brontë smartly assures Southey that she knows and does her duty She explains that as the daughter of a clergyman of limited income she has been forced out into the world as governess. “ ‘In that capacity,’ ” Brontë affirms, “ ‘I find enough to occupy my thoughts all day long, and my head and hands too, without having a moment’s time for one dream’ ” (p. 124).
Brontë’s avowal of domestic responsibility appeased Southey and was reassuring to Gaskell as well. Throughout the Life Gaskell anxiously repeats that Brontë did not cultivate the literary arts at the expense of the domestic ones. “Never was the claim of any duty, never was the call of another for help, neglected for an instant,” Gaskell protests (p. 246). She often counterweights discussions of Brontë’s professional engagement with examples of her fulfilling her duty to her father and other dependents. “ ‘The right path is that which necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest—which implies the greatest good to others,’ ” Brontë counseled Nussey when she was torn between staying at home to care for her aging mother and going out to “ ‘governess drudgery,’ ” as Brontë called it. “ ‘I recommend you to do what I am trying to do myself,’ ” Brontë adds, showing signs of a character in conflict, a struggle to be dutiful (p. 237).
In Gaskell’s discussion of Jane Eyre’s composition history, she relates the anecdote of Brontë’s “breaking off in the full flow of interest and inspiration in her writing,” to “carefully cut out the specks in the potatoes” that had been missed by the aging and nearly blind Tabby (p. 246). Rather than diminishing Brontë’s stature as a professional, as some contend, these details make the reader appreciate the divided nature of her labor. Examples such as this may have won Brontë a belated place in the hearts of Victorians who saw in her sacrifice “the martyr’s pang, and the saint’s victory,” but they impress today’s reader instead with the constraints under which she produced enduring literary classics (Easson, p. 381).