Page 154 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

Unit 19: The Victorian Age (Social, Economic, Political, Cultural Conditions and Women Novelists)

The first two novels were based on her personal experiences at a Brussels boarding-house where Notes
she most probably fell in love with the Belgian scholar Heger who perfectly answered her conception
of a dashing hero of the Byronic type. Her soul had always yearned for such a Lochinvar, but she
being the daughter of a village parson, the men who made proposals to her actually were lacklustre
curates with one of whom she ultimately settled down in 1854-a year before her death. But she
worshipped a dashing, splendid, masculine figure as Heger was. Her frustrated passion for him
provides the groundwork of her first two novels. The heroine of her third novel is a governess, just
like her sister Anne. Her tempestuous love-affair with Rochester-a combination of wonderful
nobility and meanness is the staple of this novel. In Shirley, to quote Legouis, “she set a story of
intimate emotion against a background of Yorkshire in the time of the industrial disturbances.”
Perhaps the elemental and unchastened presence of the Yorkshire moor among which the Brontes
lived is to some extent responsible for the fierce passions and elemental emotions which are
characteristic of their works.
Charlotte Bronte in her novels revolted against the traditions of Jane Austen, Dickens, and
Thackeray. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair she praised in glowing terms, but she herself never attempted
anything of the kind. Her novels are novels not of manners but of passions and the naked soul. Her
characters-mostly the effusions of her own soul-are elemental figures acting in the backdrop of
elemental nature. The social paraphernalia is altogether dispensed with. “Gone”, says David
Cecil, “is the busy prosaic urban world with its complicated structure and its trivial motives,
silenced the accents of everyday chatter, vanished are newspapers, fashions, business houses,
duchesses, footmen, and snobs. Instead the gale rages under the elemental sky, while indoors,
their faces rugged in the fierce firelight, austere figures of no clearly defined class or period
declare eternal love and hate to one another in phrases of stilted eloquence and staggering candour.”
According to Compton-Rickett three characteristics “detach themselves from the writings of
Charlotte Bronte.” They are:
the note of intimacy;
the note of passion; and
the note of revolt.
The note of intimacy is caused by the markedly autobiographic slant of her novels. The note of
passion is struck by a lonely sensitive woman on behalf of another woman. Her point of view is
specifically the point of view of a woman. Like Mrs. Browning she effectually represents in her life
and novels the pangs of a forlorn woman whose Prince Charming is yet to come. She pictures and
highlights the primeval woman A s regards the note of revolt, we must point out that she was a
rebel by nature and a Puritan by training. She could not reconcile these two elements. “Charlotte”,
says Compton-Rickett, “had the soul of a primitive woman, leashed in by a few early Victorian
conventions, and she is always straining against the leash while upbraiding at herself for doing
so.” Though she did not fully, even appreciably, revolt against social conventions, she at least
revolted against the prevailing conventions of the novel.

19.2.2 Emily Bronte
Emily was a poet as well as a novelist, and her only novel withering Heights is a poem as well as
a- novel “There is no other book.” says Legouis, “which contains so many of the-troubled,
tumultuous, and rebellious elements of romanticism,” She-is fiercer than even Charlotte but her
fierceness is strangely accompanied by numerous strokes of intuitive illumination. She looks like
a Byron in petticoats. She is also a rebel, but her rebelliousness is tempered by a sense of spirituality.
She expresses, as very few do, the Infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn.
Wuthering Heights is a story of primal passions enacted amongst elemental environment. Catherine
Earnshaw in her wildness and beauty is like a panther. Heathcliff, with his consuming passion for
Catherine and his flaming desire for revenge, looks like a character from an ancient Greek tragedy.
Catherine’s call to Heathcliff from her grave has about it all the mystery of the hidden forces of the
universe. Indeed, Walter Allen observes: “The central fact about Emily Bronte is that she is a
mystic.” Her mysticism lies not only in her handling of the voice of the dead Catherine calling
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