Charlotte Brönte’s road to reality E-Book

Luisa Conti Camaiora

• Herausgeber: EDUCatt
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Charlotte Brönte’s road to reality: aspects of the preternatural in Jane Eyre and Villette

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Leseprobe

© 2012EDUCatt - Ente per il diritto allo studio universitario dell’Università CattolicaLargo Gemelli 1, 20123 Milano

mail: [email protected] (prod.) - [email protected] (distr.)

Nuova edizione 2012su licenza Europrint Publications

ISBN edizione cartacea:978-88-8311-913-2

ISBN edizione ePub:978-88-6780-490-0

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Chapter one

NECROPOLIS AND ITS SPECTRES:THE MANIPULATION OF REALITY

Chapter Two

THE MAGIC OF ENCHANTMENT:THE TRANSFORMATION OF REALITY

Chapter Three

PARADISES LOST AND REGAINED:THE TRANSCENDENCE OF REALITY

Chapter Four

THE MINOS SYNDROME: THE EVALUATION OF REALITY

Chapter Five

VISIONS AND REVERIES: THE PREMONITION OF REALITY

Chapter Six

AND TO CONCLUDE...

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

In the preface to the second edition ofJane Eyre, in 1847, Charlotte Brontë asserts that “Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion”[1](p. xx), and she continues: “Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is – I repeat it – a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them” (p. xxi). The purpose of Charlotte Brontë’s novels is thus to reveal reality, understood not as appearance but as truth, as that which both constitutes and underlies the nature of phenomena. Her aim is to arrive at the essence of experience, as distinct from its merely superficial, apparent or external manifestations.

Indeed, in this same preface, Charlotte Brontë proceeds to sustain that: “The world may not like to see these ideas dissevered, for it has been accustomed to blend them; finding it convenient to make external show pass for sterling worth – to let white-washed walls vouch for clean shrines” (p. xxi). Here, society’s tendency to fuse and conflate external and internal, the seeming and the real, is clearly expressed, as is affirmed the awareness of how the world clings to its illusions and delusions, and even of how “It may hate him who dares to scrutinize and expose – to raise the gilding, and show base metal under it – to penetrate the sepulchre, and reveal charnel relics: but hate as it will, it is indebted to him” (p. xxi). As this passage makes clear, for Charlotte Brontë it is the duty of the novelist to disclose and reveal what the painted sepulchre conceals; the writer must expose the finery of show and uncover the bare bones of reality.

The purpose of this study is to examine, inJane EyreandVillette,how Charlotte Brontë arrives at a portrayal of reality by using elements associated with certain aspects of fantasy and imagination[2]. These aspects have here been termed the pre­ternatural, and it will be argued that, apparently paradoxically, Charlotte Brontë employs features of the preternatural to arrive at the exposure of reality. By preternatural is here meant all that which lies outside the ordinary course of the natural, that surpasses, goes beyond or differs from what is considered normal, and that therefore assumes the connotations of the unusual and exceptional and, in certain moments, of the supernatural.

Given these premises, a brief reflection on Charlotte Brontë’s attitude towards the preternatural will not be out of place. The first point to be stressed is that it is impossible to arrive at any kind of determination of Charlotte Brontë’s personal ideas regarding the presence and relevance of the preternatural in the life of man by examining what is said about the subject in her novels. Even if certain of her characters pose themselves the problem of the supernatural and give voice to opinions and hypotheses, these remain the evaluations of the characters themselves, and not necessarily of their creator. Furthermore, such assessments are often expressed at moments during which the characters’ own credibility may be called into question. It is therefore not fruitful to try to determine the personal opinion of Charlotte Brontë with regard to the supernatural as such, but rather to document its overall purpose, that, as has been indicated above, has here been retained to be that of furnishing a pathway towards reality. It is therefore of interest and importance to identify the different thematic forms that the preternatural may assume in the novels of Charlotte Brontë and to enucleate the presence of the suggestions and episodes through which it proposes itself, bearing in mind that such features not only evidence a documentation of reality, but are also functional in the delineation of the characters and in the construction of the plots.

Before proposing the five types of preternatural that have here been identified and that will be analyzed within the two novels,Jane EyreandVillette, it is of interest to examine some of the declarations, on the part of characters within all four of Charlotte Brontë’s novels, and thus also inThe ProfessorandShirley, regarding the supernatural or preternatural.

InThe Professor, there is a long description, proposed by the protagonist, William Crimsworth, of the symptoms and effects of hypochondria, the beginning of which in particular is relevant to the discussion on hand. Crimsworth describes his experience: “At last I dozed, but not for long; it was yet quite dark when I awoke, and my waking was like that of Job[3]when a spirit passed before his face, and, like him, “the hair of my flesh stood up”[4]. I might continue the parallel, for in truth, though I sawnothing, yet “a thing was secretly brought unto me, and mine ear received a little thereof. There was silence, and I heard a voice”[5], saying “In the midst of life we are in death”[6]. That sound, and the sensation of chill anguish accompanying it, many would have regarded as supernatural; but I recognized it at once as the effect of reaction” (p. 216). Crimsworth continues: “Man is ever clogged with his mortality, and it was my mortal nature which now faltered and plained – my nerves which jarred and gave a false sound, because the soul, of late rushing headlong to an aim, had overstrained the body’s comparative weakness. A horror of great darkness fell upon me. I felt my chamber invaded by one I had known formerly, but had thought for ever departed. I was temporarilya prey to hypochondria” (p. 216).

Here the propensity to give a supernatural attribution to the abnormal state of mind and body consequent on hypochondria is firmly discarded by the narrator, Crimsworth, who instead, but equally firmly, dissects his condition and state of being and attributes it to a psycho-physiological origin. Given that Crimsworth is a reliable character who may even be interpreted as a projection of Charlotte Brontë herself, the argument proposed here is that the preternatural is certainly not to be confused with particular and pathological states of the mind or body. Psychological and physiological pressures and unrest may give rise to hallucinatory, oppressive and disquieting conditions that it may be tempting to interpret as preternatural, but the fact nevertheless remains that the causes of such states are to be assigned to forms of ill-health and not to any external agency involving supernatural intervention.

Not by chance, therefore, is a very similar comment to the one proposed above prospected inVillette, after Lucy Snowe has seen the appearance of the nun. Dr. John, in whom she has confided her vision, has no doubt: “I think it is a case of spectral illusion: I fear, following on and resulting from long-continued mental conflict”[7](p. 227). Lucy, left alone, comments: “I was left secretly and sadly to wonder, in my own mind, whether that strange thing was of this world, or of a realm beyond the grave; or whether indeed it was only the child of malady, and I of that malady the prey” (p. 229). As it turns out, the vision is neither the effect of an illusion nor the visit of a ghost from another world, but the Count De Hamal in disguise.

If hypochondria is not to be confused with the preternatural, neither is superstition. This is made explicit inVillettewhere M. Paul, recalling the portrait of the dead nun in Madame Walravens’s house and the appearance of the ghostly nun at the pensionnat[8], asks Lucy: “You did not, nor will you fancy [...] that a saint in heaven perturbs herself with rivalries of earth? Protestants are rarely superstitious, these morbid fancies will not besetyou?” (p. 372). Lucy replies: “I know not what to think of this matter, but I believe a perfectly natural solution of this seeming mystery will one day be arrived at” (p. 373). No returns from the dead, and no meddling of spirits in heaven in human affairs are thus countenanced in this view of the supernatural. Yet when earlier in the book M. Paul had asked Lucy a direct – and, for the purposes of this analysis, a very pertinent – question: “Mademoiselle, do you Protestants believe in the supernatural?” (p. 334), her reply had been a tactful and non-committal: “There is a difference of theory and belief on this point amongst Protestants as amongst other sects” (p.334), an answer that, though exemplary in its diplomacy, furnishes no answer to the query.

In fact, with regard to this matter of what to believe, and thus of what the preternatural or supernatural may consist in, two characters in the novels offer their suppositions. The first supposition appears inShirleyand is proposed by a character who is subject to a state of suffering, within an extremely painful context. It is the hypothesis formulated by Caroline Helstone and it represents her attempt to find some consolation for herself in the face of the apparent prospect of death. Confronting the possibility of her own demise and the consequent separation that this would involve from Robert Moore, whom she loves, Caroline conjectures a means by which all contact with her beloved will not cease with death: “But he will not know I am ill till I am gone, and he will come when they have laid me out, and I am senseless, cold, and stiff. What can my departed soul feel then? Can it see or know what happens to the clay? Can spirits, through any medium communicate with living flesh? Can they come in the elements? Will wind, water, fire, lend me a path to Moore? Is it for nothing the wind sounds almost articulately sometimes – sings as I have lately heard it sing at night – or passes the casement sobbing, as if for sorrow to come? Does nothing, haunt it, nothing inspire it?”[9](p. 420). The passage, with its tone and emotional content, with the questioning of the possibility of communication between the living and the dead, with the hypothesis of nature constituting the connecting link between those alive and those departed, and with the dubious feasibility of the immanence of the dead in the manifestations of nature, is fraught with a notable density of emotion. It should be noted that Charlotte Brontë places these reflections in the mouth of Caroline, who is sick both physically and psychologically, thus suggesting that the hypotheses here presented, as also the emotions and feelings engendering them, have a limited validity, inasmuch as they are the expression of a sensitive temperament at a particular and transitory moment.

The second example, akin to the one presented above, occurs inVillette, where Lucy Snowe poses herself analogous problems to Caroline: “Are there wicked things, not human, which envy human bliss? Are there evil influences haunting the air, and poisoning it for man?” (p. 222). That this should be Lucy’s conjecture is in keeping with her character, given that she has an essentially pessimistic vision of life, so that it is not surprising that any mysterious force at work in the world should be perceived by her as eminently negative in function.

No matter whether the hypothesized supernatural agency is ardently desired, as in the case of Caroline, or equally ardently feared, as is the case for Lucy, what may be deduced is that, on the part of the narrator, the possibility of any kind of indirect supernatural intervention in the lives of men is presented in both cases as a mere conjecture. This is clearly signalled by the fact that Caroline’s and Lucy’s speculations are presented as questions, as surmises, and furthermore as reflections occurring in both the protagonists at particularly emotion-laden moments of their lives, so that ultimately the passages may be interpreted as indications of that in which the supernatural might reside, and not of that in which it actually consists.

A clearer declaration of a conviction of what the supernatural involves appears instead inJane Eyre, where it is presented by Helen Burns to Jane, both as lesson and consolation: “Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere; and those spirits watch us, for they are commissioned to guard us; and if we were dying in pain and shame, if scorn smote us on all sides, and hatred crushed us, angels see our tortures, recognise our innocence [...] and God waits only the separation from flesh to crown us with a full reward” (p. 79). This passage embodies the expression of the presence of a world of the spirit, of a realm of other-worldliness, and here Helen is acting the part of moral preceptor and guide to the young, inexperienced and impulsive Jane, who takes this lesson to heart.

If these passages document what some characters explicitly assert with regard to the preternatural or supernatural in the course of the novels, an annotation on Charlotte’s use of the specific word “preternatural” will not be out of place. The word, in two cases, is used by Charlotte Brontë to indicate a manifestation of abnormality in the subjective consciousness. It may thus convey the sense of something spectral, emerging from the supernatural dimension, as a return from the dead, or it may merely refer to an experience that goes beyond the boundaries of normality. The former use may be found, inJane Eyre, in Jane’s fear, when she is shut in the Red Room, that “a preternatural voice” (p. 13), that of her dead uncle, might come to comfort her, thus, obviously, actually terrifying instead of consoling. The latter use is found when Jane, remembering her journey from Gateshead to Lowood School, recalls that the day seemed to her “of a preternatural length” (p. 43).

Another use of the word “preternatural”, in the same novel, as synonym of “supernatural”, occurs to describe the laugh that Jane hears on the third floor of Thornfield Hall: “the laugh was as tragic, as preternatural a laugh as any I ever heard; and but that it was high noon, and that no circumstance of ghostliness accompanied the curious cachinnation – but that neither scene nor season favoured fear, I should have been superstitiously afraid” (p. 126). Here the sense of an experience outside the sphere of normality is emphasized, as also the association of this with fear and superstition. Instead an ironic, almost sardonic, use of the word is to be found when Jane describes the Dowager Lady Ingram, whose features, according to Jane, are furrowed with pride, “and the chin was sustained by the same principle, in a position of almost preternatural erectness” (p. 205). In this case the sense of the extraordinary is evident, and serves to underline the haughtiness and superciliousness of the lady described. A similar use to describe the extraordinary occurs inVillette, where Lucy Snowe employs the term to indicate the difficulty she has in initiating anything: “The beginning of all effort has indeed with me been marked by a preternatural imbecility” (pp. 319-20). This example conveys the extreme, subjective awkwardness of Lucy in facing any new experience.

In the study that follows, the preternatural and supernatural have been assimilated, and to facilitate the analysis of the presence of preternatural in the novelsJane EyreandVillette, five aspects have been selected for discussion[10]. The first aspect or motif, for convenience, hasherebeen called the Gothic preternatural[11]. In this study, the term will be used to refer to all that implies mystery, enigma, fear or horror, excessive or extravagant passions and abnormal manifestations of feeling. To this motif will also be conducible allusions to death, vaults, graveyards, corpses and sepulchres[12], as well as ghosts, spectres and spirits associated with the dead or with the rising from the dead. Furthermore, it will be considered to involve the sphere of reference that comprises references to suffering or torture (self-inflicted or otherwise), to extreme and exquisite pain, as also assertions of imprisonment, captivity, slavery, tyranny and oppression. In the two novels object of this analysis, this typology of the preternatural is the most common of those here identified, as well as the most immediately evident.

A parenthesis may here be opened concerning those supernatural suggestions involving nature that may be termed the Gothic use of nature. In this employment, nature is loaded with implications and connotations: sad and dismal scenarios are recurring elements, and often there is a deliberate exploitation of pathetic fallacy so that feelings of fear and terror (in the heroine in particular) find their correlative in the surrounding natural landscape which, besides reflecting, often also inspires, the sentiments of dread and horror that the novelist wishestoprovoke in the characters and the reader. In this way nature becomes endowed with its own particular Gothic character. It must be pointed out, however, that this Gothic atmosphere is very different from the conception of nature as the embodiment of a spirit, such as may be seen in the two previously cited quotations fromShirleyandVillette.Although in both these cases nature is invested with a spiritual trait or quality, it is so endowed in reply to a kind of intuition or supposition that a similar dimension may actually exist, so that the attribution of such a feature arises, not from a search for sensationalism, but from an awareness or acknowledgement that a spirit has been hypothesized as present. In the Gothic use of nature such an autonomous identity is merely suggested or manipulated to exploit the feelings that such a technique may provoke, and to make use of the complexity of emotions to which it may give rise. In this use, nature becomes an instrument for creating an impression of suspense and thus another of the many means employed to establish a “Gothic” atmosphere. In the passages already quoted there is instead no question of nature being used as an instrument for the sensational. The two characters, Caroline and Lucy, really pose themselves the problem of the understanding of the unknown, and in so doing raise a series of hypotheses that take their place in the functional thematic structure of the novel. Furthermore, whereas in the Gothic use of nature the heroine’s speculations or impressions regarding nature itself generally add little to the knowledge of her character, here these episodes provoke the need for a revaluation or re-elaboration of the interpretations of the characters involved, in terms of their very capacity of pose themselves such problems, a fact that results in a greater psychological depth being attributed to their personalities.

The contrast between the two different presentations of nature may be further documented by examining the occurrence, in Charlotte Brontë’s work, of examples of the Gothic use of nature. Both the exemplifications that will here be proposed are taken fromShirley: “Shirley sat at the window, watching the rack in heaven, the mist on earth, listening to certain notes of the gale that plained like restless spirits – notes which, had she not been so young, gay, and healthy, would have swept her trembling nerves like some omen, some anticipatory dirge” (p. 221); and “Often had she [Caroline] gone up the Hollow with him after sunset, to scent the freshness of the earth, where a growth of fragrant herbage carpeted a certain narrow terrace, edging a deep ravine, from whose rifted gloom was heard a sound like the spirit of the lonely watercourse moaning amongst its wet stones, and between its weedy banks, and under its dark bower of alders” (p. 230). In these two passages the desire to create an effect is obvious. In the first quotation the possible sensation is in fact explicitly stated, in the mention of the funereal, premonitory and disconsolate state of mind that the sound of the wind would have been likely to produce in an older and less healthy person than Shirley. In the second case, the conscious attempt to create a mood is confirmed and underlined by the entire presentation of the passage with its choice of details dear to the Gothic tradition – the narrow terrace, the deep ravine, the rifted gloom, the dark bower – all related, by means of the similitude, to the hypothesis of the “spirit of the lonely watercourse”. The calculated use of the spirit of nature that haunts these two passages is clearly that of the Gothic tradition.To conclude, it must be recognized that Charlotte Brontë presents a double rationale in her Gothic use of nature: on the one hand, its employment as documentation of reality; on the other, its use as a typical productive mechanism of sensationalism.

Returning now to the use of the Gothic preternatural in the two novels of Charlotte Brontë, this type of supernatural serves the purpose of the permitting the emergence of reality by providing a re-elaboration of the real, in the sense of emphasizing, amplifying or distorting certain of its features. It will here be argued that this technique therefore furnishes a manipulation of reality.

The magic preternatural concerns allusions to the creatures that characterize fairy-tales and to folk-lore traditions involving magic and the supernatural. To these may be added the references to other magic entities, essentially associated with oriental tales. In this typology, the modification operated by the writer’s fantasy and imagination takes the form of the transformation of the human world and points to a discrepancy with the tangible, allowing, by analogy or contrast, the perception of the real.

The religious preternatural is the definition here assigned to references and allusions to Christian belief[13]. This motif fundamentally concerns all forms of adoration of God and sacrifice and sacrificing to God, and by contrast, all mani­festations of idolatry. To this are assimilated references to heaven and hell, to angels and demons or devils and to the Garden of Eden. The transcendence of the ordinary and everyday that this type of preternatural entails induces a re-reading of the worldly and mundane.

The mythological preternatural involves allusions to mythological deities or to other mythic creatures, as also to actions and events deriving from the narratives of myths and legend. It is to the Greek and Roman mythological traditions that reference will be made, traditions in which the divinities are often conceived as presiding over the diverse orders and manifestations of the natural world. The function of the introduction of these typologies of presences is to favour an evaluation of the dimension of actuality in which they are inserted.

The term premonitory preternatural has here been adopted to refer to the presence of various types of forebodings and presentiments, articulated in different ways. These often have the characteristic of furnishing notification of subsequent events and occurrences, affording forewarnings of what will happen. In this way, though providing intimations different from those immediately available to the senses and to the reason, they furnish premonitions of reality.

The five different categories of the preternatural enucleated above often fuse and blend, as Charlotte employs them together, or one immediately after the other, or even one within the other, for her narrative purposes. Here, however, they will be treated separately, to allow their scope and functionality withinJane EyreandVilletteto emerge more clearly.

CHAPTER ONE - NECROPOLIS AND ITS SPECTRES: THE MANIPULATION OF REALITY

Jane Eyre

The Gothic preternatural, in its manifestation of suffering, opens the novelJane Eyre, with the presentation of the violent episode of the attack of John Reed on his cousin Jane. The attack is not new, nor unexpected. As Jane narrates: “He bullied and punished me; not two or three times in the week, nor once or twice in the day, but continually: every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of flesh on my bones shrank when he came near. There were moments when I was bewildered by the terror he inspired, because I had no appeal whatever against either his menaces or his inflictions” (p. 4). The state of constant fear of physical harm in which Jane lives is here rendered explicit, and Jane’s expectation of attack is punctually verified as John throws the volume of Bewick’s