Gaskell, who had to meet the needs of four growing daughters, the manifold responsibilities of a minister’s wife, and the demands of her rescue work, complained to her friend Charles Eliot Norton of the household mundanities that harassed her away from writing:If I had a library like yours, all undisturbed for hours, how I could write! ... But you see everybody comes to me perpetually. Now in this hour since breakfast I have had to decide on the following variety of important questions. Boiled beef—how long to boil? What perennials will do in Manchester smoke, & what colours our garden wants? Length of skirt for a gown? Salary of a nursery governess, & certain stipulations for amount of time to be left to herself (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 384).
Although she couches it in the neutral wish for a private library, Gaskell’s point is that if she were a man, and thereby liberated from the domestic responsibilities that divide her focus, she would be a better, or at least a more prolific, writer.
The Brontë—Gaskell correspondence evidences an ongoing conversation about women’s changing role. “ ‘Men begin to regard the position of woman in another light than they used to do,’ ” Brontë observed in her first letter to Gaskell. “ ‘They say... that the amelioration of our condition depends on ourselves. Certainly there are evils which our own efforts will best reach; but as certainly there are other evils—deep-rooted in the foundations of the social system—which no efforts of ours can touch’ ” (pp. 356—357). A letter written a month later suggests that the friends shared what was, for their day, quite a progressive position on women’s labor: “ ‘Why are you and I to think (perhaps I should rather say to feel) so exactly alike on some points that there can be no discussion between us?’ ” Brontë wrote to her future biographer. “ ‘Your words on this paper express my thoughts.’ ” The subject under discussion was Harriet Taylor’s article “The Enfranchisement of Women,” which appeared in the Westminster Review in 1851 and was attributed to J. S. Mill. Brontë opposed many aspects of it, but she embraced its treatment of the question of women’s employment, “ ‘especially’ ” the contention “ ‘that if there be a natural unfitness in women for men’s employment, there is no need to make laws on the subject; leave all careers open; let them try’ ” (p. 391). Oddly, although Brontë’s letter suggests that Gaskell expressed her absolute agreement (in a letter that is now lost), in a letter to J. S. Mill, written after the publication of the Life, Gaskell denies having read the article at all (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 435).
Whatever general beliefs Gaskell held about the fitness of women’s employment, she justifies Brontë’s literary career by characterizing it as a duty, an “extra responsibility implied by the very fact of her possessing such talents” (p. 273). In so doing, Gaskell uses conventional terminology about women’s place to a radical end. If entering into public discourse can be termed a feminine duty, then it is acceptable, even incumbent upon women to exercise their talents in this arena. Gaskell’s model is an extension of the Victorian ideology of the “angel in the house,” which held that women were to provide a global moral compass by exerting domestic influence. Similarly, to excuse women’s foray into print, Gaskell believes their work should be a vehicle for social improvement.
As Gaskell explains of Brontë, “She must not hide her gift in a napkin; it was meant for the use and service of others” (p. 273). It is easier, however, to make a case for the moral utility of Gaskell’s social problem novels than it is for Brontë’s less practically interventionist engagement with issues of the day. Brontë had a somewhat uneasy relation to her fiction in this regard. She writes to her publisher, George Smith: “ ‘You will see that “Villette” touches on no matter of public interest. I cannot write books handling the topics of the day; it is of no use trying. Nor can I write a book for its moral’ ” (p. 414). Brontë’s letter to Smith is unapologetic, but she assumes an air of self-chastisement when she writes to Gaskell on the same subject: “ ‘Villette has no right to push itself before Ruth. There is a goodness, a philanthropic purpose, a social use in the latter, to which the former cannot for an instant pretend’ ” (p. 422). The difference in tone of the two letters suggests, as does Brontë’s cautious criticism of Ruth’s tragic ending, that Brontë might have muted the force of some of her opinions in order not to alienate her new friend.
Villette did provoke Harriet Martineau, another new literary acquaintance to whom Brontë looked for approbation. In her review of the novel in the Daily News, Martineau faulted Brontë for her “incessant... tendency to describe the need of being loved,” and for allowing her heroine to “entertain a double love,” which was tantamount to an accusation of immodesty. Ironically, this criticism has much in common with the accusations in the Rigby review of Jane Eyre, although Martineau was coming at the issue from a different perspective. Martineau, a feminist, feared that the novel’s unapologetic exhibition of female desire would prove counterproductive to the political and social gains that were taking place based on an emerging sense of women’s rational equality with men. “There are substantial, heartfelt interests for women of all ages, and under ordinary circumstances, quite apart from love,” Martineau insisted, “and to the absence of it may be attributed some of the criticism which the book will meet with from readers who are no prudes, but whose reason and taste will reject the assumption that events and characters are to be regarded through the medium of one passion only” (Allot, p. 173). Brontë’s view, that the personal is political, would not seem a plausible feminist platform for another hundred years.
Significantly, Gaskell follows Brontë’s apology for Villette’s lack of moral utility, with the promise that “had she lived,” she would have started to produce more socially responsible work. On her final trip to London, Gaskell explains, Brontë was free to make her own itinerary and she elected to see “ ‘the real in preference to the decorative side of life,’ ” visiting Newgate and Pentonville prisons, Bethlehem Hospital for the insane, and the Foundling Hospital. “All that she saw during this last visit to London impressed her deeply,” Gaskell reports, “so much so as to render her incapable of the immediate expression of her feelings.” “If she had lived,” Gaskell predicts, “her deep heart would sooner or later have spoken out” (p. 423).
Conclusions
Gaskell came to know Brontë more completely through her research for the Life than she did through their friendship, which was of relatively brief duration and, as stated above, may have suffered in intimacy from Brontë’s strategically conforming to social standards when she thought it would please Gaskell. What impressed Gaskell most in reading Brontë’s personal correspondence was the degree to which her voice and “spirit” varied “according to the correspondent whom she was addressing” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 274). Bronte did not adopt the irreverent, rakish swagger in her letters to Gaskell that she did in those to Branwell, nor did she display the astringent sarcasm (which Gaskell quietly censored without a telltale ellipsis in the Life) that animates her anonymous letter to the critic and minor poet Hartley Coleridge, who had failed to appreciate her work. Gaskell also saw the “wild weird” writing of the juvenile period that she felt bordered on “delirium” (p. 72). Gaskell allows a “fac simile” of a page of one of these miniscule manuscripts to stand in for proper analysis, perhaps deterred by their balder articulation of eroticism and participation in the supernatural than is found in the mature works, and by the irreverent cynicism of Brontë’s male narrators of the Angrian period (p. 73).