Gaskell saw her primary role as that of elegist, celebrating not the work, but the life of her “dear friend, Charlotte Brontë” (p. 18). To that end, Gaskell employs her full arsenal of literary technique. Pathos is the currency of the Life because reader empathy is integral to Gaskell’s vindication project. Gaskell’s repetition of key themes and her layering of the voices of eyewitnesses, family, and friends lend the Life an authority and intensity that no other biographical study of Brontë shares. With these “viva voce glimpses into her [Brontë’s] daily life” Gaskell creates a circle of acquaintances around Brontë of which the reader feels a part (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 154). Gaskell employs one of Brontë’s own favored devices, direct reader address, to create a conspiratorial feeling between author and audience. (Brontë often used it for the opposite effect, to distance the reader or to anticipate reader hostility.) Gaskell does not address her memoir to any general audience, but rather to those who “know how to listen” (p. 267). She turns from “the critical, unsympathetic public,” to appeal to a “larger and more solemn public, who know how to look with tender humility at faults and errors; how to admire generously extraordinary genius.” Gaskell addresses posterity here, a public she envisions as both broader and more broadminded than Victorian society. “To that public,” Gaskell declares in the Life’s concluding line, “I commit the memory of Charlotte Brontë,” entrusting the reader with a heavy charge (p. 454).
While the Life seems transparent, it is not. Gaskell is skilled at manipulating point of view. Although she seems to give the reader un-mediated access to Brontë’s voice through personal correspondence, Gaskell carefully culled and edited that correspondence; she staged Brontë’s voice, and in so doing she stripped that voice of some of its power and pique. Despite Gaskell’s self-effacing comment that “the letters speak for themselves, to those who know how to listen, far better than I can interpret their meaning into my poorer and weaker words,” the very act of selection is an act of interpretation (p. 267).
But Brontë’s words do often speak for themselves more loudly than Gaskell’s attempt to shape them. One example is the letter to Nussey in which Brontë denies having published: “ ‘I have given no one a right either to affirm, or to hint, in the most distant manner, that I was ‘publishing’—(humbug!) ... Though twenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none.... The most profound obscurity is infinitely preferable to vulgar notoriety’ ” (p. 281). Gaskell calls this letter “confirmatory” of guilt in the “very vehemence... of intended denial,” but this is one occasion that “those who know how to listen,” as Gaskell describes her ideal reader, hear something other than Gaskell does, a playful tone that indicates mock anger and the spouting of lady-like correctness. Brontë is actually issuing an admission under the coy cover of a denial.
Brontë’s reaction to the proposal of marriage she received from James Taylor has a different meaning for today’s readers than it did for Victorians. Gaskell is eager to correct those who would “imagine, from the extraordinary power with which [Brontë] represented the passion of love in her novels, that she herself was easily susceptible of it” (p. 376). She offers Brontë’s confession to Nussey that she could not accept Taylor because her “veins ran ice” when he approached her as proof of Brontë’s natural modesty, thus distinguishing her from her passionate heroines. To a modern reader, however, the episode suggests, rather, the importance Brontë placed on sexual attraction in marriage.
There is an undulating movement to Gaskell’s narrative in its liberal use of foreshadowing and compression. She uses compression particularly effectively in reproducing the Brontë funerary tablet in the first chapter. The memorial, with its lines “pressed together,” the letters becoming “small and cramped” as “one dead member of the household follows another fast to the grave” mirrors the narrative’s overall movement (p. 16). Brontë’s memorial tablet, which Gaskell also reproduces at the end of chapter one, makes no mention of her professional achievement. On it she is stripped of all cultural referents except the titles of wife and daughter (p. 17). The Life of Charlotte Brontë, which does not refer to Brontë by her married name, is a monument that attempts to restore her complexity.
There is evidence that the Life served the corrective function Gaskell intended it to serve, rescuing Brontë’s works for those who had dismissed the writer as “coarse.” Gaskell received testimonials such as this one, from Charles Kingsley: “I gave up the writer and her books with a notion that she was a person who liked coarseness. How I misjudged her! ... Well have you done your work, and given us the picture of a valiant woman made perfect by sufferings. I shall now read carefully and lovingly every word she has written” (to Gaskell, May 14, 1857; in Wise and Symington, eds., The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships, and Correspondence, vol. 4, pp. 222—223). Those who come in search of this kind of vindication will find it, but for others the Life tells a different story, that of Brontë’s active struggle against constraints at the same time psychological and material, domestic and institutional. If Brontë does emerge from the pages of the Life as someone who studied “the path of duty well,” as Gaskell would have it, it is not as a victim, but rather as one who consciously “spent herself lavishly for others—lavishly and even wastefully,” as one reviewer observed (Easson, p. 380). It is the story of someone who is challenged by life, but not subdued by it: “ ‘Crushed I am not,’ ” Brontë told Nussey in the dark summer of 1849, “ ‘I have some strength to fight the battle of life’ ” (p. 313). The overall “effect of the book is melancholy,” one contemporary reviewer of the Life offered in summation, adding that although Gaskell’s Brontë was led by a “stern sense of duty... within that imprisonment of constraint was a really free spirit” (Easson, p. 383).
Anne Taranto was educated at Columbia and Oxford Universities and at Yale University, where she earned a Ph.D. She has taught courses on the novel and on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature at Georgetown University and is currently at work on a study of Charlotte Brontë’s relationship to the literary marketplace.
THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË,
AUTHOR OF
“JANE EYRE,” “SHIRLEY,” “VILLETTE,” &c.
BY
E. C. GASKELL,
AUTHOR OF “MARY BARTON,” “RUTH,” ETC.
“Oh my God,
Thou hast knowledge, only Thou,
How dreary ’tis for women to sit still
On winter nights by solitary fires
And hear the nations praising them far off.”
AURORA LEIGH.
IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I.
CHAPTER I.