Gaskell and the “Brontë Myth”
Long before she was commissioned to write Brontë’s biography, Gaskell began a process of creating “a drama of her life in my own mind” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 266). Gaskell pursued information about her subject with the avidity of a paparazzo. On her first visit to the parsonage, for example, she asked a servant to show her the family graves without Brontë’s knowledge (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 166). And yet Gaskell believed she was motivated by the sympathy of a friend. She pitied Brontë from the first, and romanticized her “wild sad life” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 242). She jotted down particulars after hearing them directly from Brontë, and recorded the manner in which she revealed the authorship of Jane Eyre to her father, the privations she faced at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, and other more ephemeral and sentimental details that might have otherwise been lost, such as the “shiver” that passed over Brontë when she told Gaskell about bringing the dying Emily a sprig of heather from her beloved moors, and the pathetic spectacle of Emily’s dog, Keeper, following her funeral procession. These notes became the basis for the Life, and, accordingly, much of what is now regarded as the stuff of Brontë myth came directly from Brontë.
Brontë on occasion enjoyed playing the “wild little maiden from Haworth” for her new friend, perhaps sensing an eager audience (p. 82). In her first letter to Gaskell, Brontë offers a glimpse of life at Haworth replete with the romantic touches of “ ‘storms of rain’ ... sweeping over the garden and churchyard” and “the moors... hidden in deep fog” (p. 356). Brontë playfully warns Gaskell before her first visit to the parsonage that she will “come out to barbarism, isolation, and liberty,” and she urges her to come when the heather is in bloom, telling her, “I have waited and watched for its purple signal as the forerunner of your coming” (Charlotte Brontë to Gaskell, June 1, 1853; September 1853; in Barker, ed., The Brontës: A Life in Letters, pp. 374, 376).
The Brontë myth is exemplified by the supernatural animation of the natural world. Gaskell reports hearing Brontë defend the uncanny moment at the end of Jane Eyre, for example, when Jane hears Rochester’s call, borne on the wind from miles away, by insisting that “ ‘it is a true thing; it really happened’ ” (p. 338). Similarly, Brontë explains that she experiences her sisters’ presence in the moors after their deaths: “ ‘There is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry-leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of [Emily]. The distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizons’ ” (p. 345).
Although Gaskell does not provide critical commentary on the novels, she does provide firsthand accounts of their composition, the most vivid of these being the ritual the sisters adopted of pacing up and down the dining room at night when they were developing their plots and conferring on drafts of their novels, a practice that Gaskell witnessed Brontë continue alone after her sisters had died: “Three sisters had done this,—then two... and now one was left desolate, to listen for echoing steps that never came,—and to hear the wind sobbing at the windows, with an almost articulate sound” (pp. 317-318). The Gothic coloring of this passage is a prime example of Gaskell allowing the imaginative liberty of the novelist to take precedence over the literalism of the biographer. And yet there is an underlying psychological truth that Gaskell captures through pathetic fallacy. “ ‘The great trial,’ ” Brontë explained of her sisters’ loss, to Ellen Nussey, her lifelong friend, “ ‘is when evening closes and night approaches. At that hour we used to assemble in the dining-room—we used to talk.’ ” In her sisters’ absence, Brontë found herself consumed by their dying moments, remembering “ ‘how they looked in mortal affliction,’ ” and thinking of the “ ‘narrow dark dwellings’ ” in which they were laid, “ ‘never more to reappear on earth.’ ” “ ‘This nervousness is a horrid phantom,’ ” Brontë acknowledges (pp. 312-313).
As a novelist, Gaskell understood that there is an emotional truth that is more compelling than bare factual accounting. The Life exists on the border between documentary accuracy and a novelistic verisimilitude that Gaskell believed to be more authentic. To borrow the dichotomy between what is “real” and what is “true” that Brontë develops to express what she does not like about Jane Austen’s novels, there is a greater emotional truth to the Life that diminishes, if not excuses, its representational lapses (p. 276). Brontë feels that Austen’s unsentimental choice to represent life “without poetry, maybe is sensible, real,” but she finds it “more real than true” (p. 276). As Gaskell characterizes it, she always tells the truth in the Life, although she might not tell the whole truth: “I came to the resolution of writing truly, if I wrote at all; of withholding nothing, though some things, from their very nature, could not be spoken of so fully as others” (p. 420). Gaskell is less interested in strict reportage than she is in creating a sensibility of heightened romantic coloring that she believes is faithful to Brontë’s own mode of self-presentation.
The Life partakes of Brontë’s own strategies of self-representation in nuanced ways. In her diary paper for 1829, for example, the teenaged Brontë records a typical evening at home with her sisters, including a memory of her dead sister Maria. “ ‘Once Papa lent my sister Maria a book. It was an old geography-book; she wrote on its blank leaf, “Papa lent me this book.” This book is a hundred and twenty years old; it is at this moment lying before me. While I write this I am in the kitchen of the Parsonage, Haworth; Tabby, the servant, is washing up the breakfast-things, and Anne, my youngest sister (Maria was my eldest), is kneeling on a chair, looking at some cakes which Tabby has been baking for us. Emily is in the parlor, brushing the carpet’ ” (p. 70). This passage is significant for its “graphic vividness” as Gaskell notes. Maria, the departed sister, is as present as Emily and Anne. She has inscribed herself in the geography book and in Brontë’s consciousness, and she plays an ongoing role in family activities. Gaskell captures this collapse of past into present, this presence in absence in the Life and animates her narrative with a psychological rhythm that she found in Brontë’s own personal writing. G. H. Lewes praised the “psychological drama” of the Life, asserting that “fiction has nothing more wild, touching, and heart-strengthening to place above it” (Easson, Elizabeth Gaskelclass="underline" The Critical Heritage, p. 386).
Gaskell’s interest in Brontë was animated as much by her life as by her work: “I have been so interested in what she has written. I don’t mean merely in the story and mode of narration, wonderful as that is, but in the glimpses one gets of her, and... of the way in [which] she has suffered” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 72). Upon meeting Brontë for the first time, Gaskell telegraphed out accounts to all of her acquaintances. “Such a life as Miss B’s I never heard of before,” she informs one (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 75). “The wonder to me is how she can have kept heart and power alive in her life of desolation,” she tells another (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 79). Gaskell has long been charged with manufacturing the myth that Brontë’s life was one of “monotony and privation of any one to love,” and the Life’s main themes of isolation, emotional deprivation, and chronic ill health are now often dismissed by critics as products of Gaskell’s sentimentalism, but it seems that Brontë herself participated in the formation of this impression.