7. Under Brontëan Thunder
A single word so seen at such a time
Opens a hundred corridors in the heart
--C. Brontë, Poems
The spectacle of critics contending to name a dominant psycho-dynamic in Charlotte Brontë's life and work encourages the thought that early object-relations influence what a particular critical approach perceives, in a kind of receiving back of its own message in reverse, as Lacan puts it. So, for one, the "central figure in Brontë's imaginative confrontation with her own experience is ... her father" (Sadoff 139), while for another, "the single most important event ... was the death of her mother" (Keefe xi), and, for a third, it is her brother's life which "profoundly affected Charlotte's personal and artistic development" (Moglen 39). But like her heroines who hold "two lives" or seem "double-existent" (Villette [V] 140, 464), one imagines that the author also, "[t]o speak truth ... compromised matters" and "served two masters" at least (V 334). Texts, like lives, are overdetermined. In her detailed study of Charlotte Brontë's style, Margot Peters notes how characters are frequently split so that they function at once as individuals and as parts of a personality; she finds that "ambivalence is the key to Brontë's themes and style" and suggests that such ambivalence results "from the continual but unresolved conflict of opposing drives" (128, 156). So characters, imitating their author, pace relentlessly backwards and forwards, and so we see the two-faced god explicitly invoked as Jane Eyre makes a "true Janian reply" to Rochester ("I have been with my aunt, sir, who is dead" [JE 205]). A word that looks two ways can offer a temporary respite from such conflict--or rather, the conflict is sublated into the effort to find words adequately ambivalent for it.
One of the interesting splits occasioned by ambivalence occurs as the author throws out or pro-jects the text. The text, for Brontë, as for Blake, is an "emanation" made up of other emanations, spectres, and powers. Scott's Kenilworth, she writes Ellen Nussey at sixteen, is "one of the most interesting works that ever emanated from the great Sir Walter's pen" (Wise and Symington [WS hereafter] 1 Jan 1833, 1.109). Like Caroline in Shirley [S], "[t]he whole time ... talking inwardly" (S 191), the Brontë text carries on a dialogue with itself as well as with its hypothesized "Reader". In Jane Eyre the emanation of an author whose early childhood passed at the village of Thornton finds in "the third story of Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the past: a shrine of memory" (92). Retreating into her foreknowledge of the plot and its impending mystery story, the narrator remarks: "my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot and allow my mind's eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it ... and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale ... --a tale my imagination created" (95-96). Rochester disappears for "a visit to the third story" (132), which takes us, as it moves toward its disclosure, "[h]ere then ... in the third story, fastened into one of its mystic cells" (184). Hearing "the snarling, canine noise" (as of a dog "worrying" something) that summarizes Bertha's story, the narrator reports that "my own thoughts worried me"--which "thoughts" are glossed on the next page by Dick's [Richard Mason's] comment that his sister Bertha "worried me like a tigress" (185, 186). Once this story is dislodged from its "secret inner cabinet," Bertha's lair literally changes to become merely "that third-storey room" (272, emphasis added).
Another instance of the text's internal dialogue takes the shape of one word at the novel's crucial juncture. Having left Thornfield by coach, Jane is set "down at a place called Whitcross" (283). While many readers have felt that the last third of Jane Eyre represents an unfortunate turn into fantasy, one critic argues that this place "appropriately signals [Jane's] entry into a land of literalized dreams, because the name's meaning is as close to literal as any naming can be": "Whitcross names only itself" (Homans, 94). But given the repeated "whispering to myself over and over again, `What shall I do?'", "`What am I to do?'", and "What was I to do?" (33, 261, 284), perhaps we hear at this crossroad or word a crossed wit at her wit's end worrying over how to progress with her pilgrim, which story to explore with Jane Eyre. "Whitcross" names itself as an event in the unfolding of the text. The decision to "hold on to a hollow" (284) determines the novel's unsatisfying swerve into wish-fulfillment (beginning with Jane's "nestling to the breast of the hill").
So close does Brontë seem to the shifting energy of the letter that one wonders whether any of her literal constructions could be found to name "only itself". "Jane Eyre," to take a highly remarkable instance, suggests a vast complex of overdetermination and cryptonomy. Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok introduce the term "cryptonomy" to describe the repression, burying, encrypting, or making taboo of words that would name or locate the traumatic origin of certain neuroses, and the displacing of those taboo words by other lexically contiguous ones.(1) Reanalyzing Freud's "Wolfman," they find the text of Serge Pankejeff's life as expressed through its particular vocabulary or "verbarium" to be structured by a network of interlingual puns which deflect attention from--even as they preserve--key words (tieret [rub], goulfik [fly, slit], and vidietz [witness]) that frame his "impossible desire to occupy one or the other place in the scene [between father and sister] he saw, his genuine `primal scene'" (40). Such a scene can no more be remembered than it can be erased, and so occasions the hollowing out for it of a crypt, an unconsciousness which must continually be maintained and which in being maintained continually impinges on the ego and its language. One critic, joining these formulations to Jane Eyre's wealth of "ere" sounds and inadequate maternal figures, has no difficulty in suggesting that the mot tabou Jane hides is "mre" (Rappaport 1099; to put it more economically, her mot: mother). That this method then produces from the heroine's first name "the immediate French equivalent ... haine" [hate, hatred] (Rappaport 1101) may seem "startling," excessive, or just inane, but undeniably Brontë's involvement with French goes very deep, and the fact that she writes only once of her mother in her copious correspondence and journals (Moglen 21) indicates some powerful psycho-dynamic at work.
Certainly the sounds and shapes of the letters which echo and chime through "Jane Eyre" make an eerie medley of the novel's concerns. First of all, in this story of Jane before she married and became a writer, "ere" frequently appears, often to introduce Jane herself (e.g., "Ere long I became aware ...," "Ere I had finished ...," " ... ere I rose ...," "Ere I permitted myself ... [15, 31, 85, 143]). "Ere" also becomes "where," to pose the unanswerable question to the past: "where was the Jane Eyre of yesterday [i.e. of `ere']?--where was her life?--where were her prospects?" (260--the contemplation of these questions leads to Jane's "longing to be dead"). The "spiritual" or neurotic intensity Jane receives from times ere underlies her associations with "air" and "fairy." Jane's young, French-speaking charge stumbles over the name of her new governess, "Aire? Bah! I cannot say it" (89), and Rochester tells the "puzzled Miss Eyre" that "a puzzled air" becomes her (116). The difficulty of getting the invisible to speak (or the unconscious to stop speaking) generates this catalogue of synonyms: "Oh for some good spirit to suggest a judicious and satisfactory response! Vain aspiration! The west wind whispered in the ivy round me; but no gentle Ariel borrowed its breath as a medium of speech" (192; italics added)--here Eyre cannot answer. Other images, however, suggest that spirits not gentle would borrow the breath of the wind to communicate with Charlotte Brontë. Recovering from her first unconscious fit, Jane hears voices "speaking with a hollow sound, as if muffled by a rush of wind" (15), and on the night preceding her second, as the wind seems "to [her] ear to muffle a mournful under-sound," Jane finds the "`sullen, moaning sound' ... eerie" (247). Invisible or not, the reality of spiritual being is never in question: "it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal,--as we are!" (222). "Are" is heard as "ayre" in Villette (127), and for Jane Eyre French begins with "the verb Etre" (65).
All this only begins to sound what "I am Jane Eyre" might mean. Jane's association with fire has long been seen as a means for showing her passionate nature, or, more specifically, her embittered rage, anger, and ire. Brontë's father, of course, came from Ireland (or, Eire), and Brontë set her juvenile tales in a land she and her brother named "Angria," where, on a fine day, one might encounter a woman who "flew into a most unimaginable fury--tore her hair from her head and shrieked like a rabbid [sic] wild cat(2) .... `I do hate you!--I abhor you!--I could kill you!' ... grinding her teeth, and then, crying afresh, ... `But still, still--I love you till my heart aches as if it would break'" (in Chase 23). Jane Eyre remembers "the embers" of her "ire" (13) and attributes her initial liberating expression of anger to a "sentiment of deep ire and desperate revolt" (22). Her uncle Eyre is placed on the island with the doubly-irate sounding name of Madeira, making it perhaps more appropriate that Jane should be made heir. But given her "habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression," Eyre usually regards expression of ire or anger as error; she knows that strong anger makes one the str-anger she fears to become, and learns nothing new from Rochester's injunction, "Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre" (120). With such intense conflicts and repressions, a recurrent term for Jane's condition is "misery" (Fr. misre). Little "Miss Jane Eyre" tells the apothecary that she cries "because I am miserable" (18-19), while much later Miss Eyre tries to conceal her identity though admitting "Miserable I am" (306). "Eyre" is also an old word for a journey or errand, as in the ancient "Justices in eyre" and the name of their court, the "Justice eyre," was available to Brontë through her childhood favorite, Sir Walter Scott. Jane's life can be seen as a journey, to be sure, but more interesting is the word's connection to the "all-pervading legal language" (Peters 146) of the novel. Peters astutely relates Jane Eyre's preoccupation with courtroom vocabulary to "the one word conspicuous by its absence in the novel--guilt" (152).
We may wonder what it would mean to be conscious, simultaneously, of all these airy nothings, much less (if it could be conceived) to intend them (if they could be intended). But perhaps the question is moot in the case of someone who discovers cues and guidance in language. Shirley's Caroline, for instance, "mutely excited," finds "her own mind ... too busy, teeming, wandering, to listen to the language of another mind" (S 189)--evidently "she," whatever this would refer to here, attends instead to "the language of her own mind." One aspect of the signature Brontëan split, then--as of every other poetic text in its way--is such a separation from language, even what seemed one's own. The split from language, which is a split from oneself in as much as that self is largely constituted by language, can be materialized by wordplay or pun. One laughs or groans at the momentary encounter of our fundamental repression, the knowledge that "one" is not a unified subject speaking a univocal language. Rather like an obverse to Lacan's "mirror stage," in which the infant laughs jubilantly at appropriating and imagining the image (only) of a non-fragmented self, the pun shows the "I" how it shifts among the invisible constituents of a single material image. As a kind of mirror the pun shows not a surface that reflects back, but a depth which draws one out of oneself: Brontë's "visionary hollow" (JE 11) of the looking-glass hollows "I ... myself" into "a faded, hollow-eyed vision" (V 96).
a. The Name of the Father Puns and wordplay, at any rate, offer a symptom or index of a certain orientation toward language and over-determination which, once established, may encourage further speculation. To take a simple example, in Villette Lucy Snowe thinks of "England ... that dear land of mists" (V 196) with a touch of nostalgia for what's missed; but when she comes to consider expenses, the adjective takes additional bearing: "`Living costs little,' said I to myself, `in this economical town of Villette, where people are more sensible than I understand they are in dear old England'" (450). Jane Eyre characterizes a socialite as loving "if not [Rochester's] person, at least his purse" (176), and when Brontë places us outside a Methodist service to overhear a "shout of `I've found liberty!' `Doad o' Bill's has fun' liberty!'", we share her fun in mocking the license of the enthused "shouts, yells, ejaculations, frantic cries, agonized groans" (S 163-64). Taking liberty with the Word of her father requires more caution. "Levitical," the famous first chapter of Shirley (italics added), opens with the amusing image of the "shower of curates" who "lie very thick" (39) on the countryside, and while it proceeds to ridicule these "rods of Aaron" and their "gift of tongues," only after thirty chapters does the text risk disclosing the joke in its initial chapter title: "`No levity, Miss! This is not a laughing matter'" (515). Some of Brontë's readers would surely not have been amused at the symmetry to be inferred between the "shower of curates" and their thick lies and the "shower of manna" or "Biblical promises" reserved for those like the humble spinster "Miss Mann" (i.e. Woman), forgotten by "all humanity" (196). When another religious spinster is praised as one who "`with meek heart and due reverence, treads close in her Redeemer's steps,'" Brontë has one of the curates break in, "`Ahem!'" (285) for the expected "Amen!"
That biblical echo and allusion pervade the work of all the Brontës cannot be surprising in view of the strong Methodist heritage conveyed by their father and their environment: for and through his evangelical allegiances the Rev. Mr. Patrick Brontë was promoted to Haworth, the rugged Yorkshire parish formerly ministered to by Wesley's chosen successor, William Grimshaw (Harrison's engaging 1948 discussion of these matters deserves revival). The question is what to make of all the suggestiveness and influence: whether to see, for instance, one of the Reverend's daughters as aspiring to an image of "the writer as apostle, serving that Master of all masters, the Word," that is, "the saving Word Himself" (Tayler 177, 302), while another "maintains the inheritance of the Bible ... solely in order to protest it back against itself" (Davies 18). Brontë's punning shows her relation to the discourse of institutionalized, patriarchal Christianity of her father to be problematic, as though she intuited, with W. Gass, that "[t]he worship of the word must be pagan and polytheistic. It cannot endure one god" (20). Hence the curiously relativising edge in Shirley's argument that "Caroline was a Christian; therefore in trouble she framed many a prayer after the Christian creed" (342--Brontë must remember her Angrian Caroline, who worships a different idol and is told, "Crede Zamorna!" [Novelettes 353]); and hence, in Villette, the odd appropriation of St. Paul to characterize Paulina as a child with "no mind or life of her own" who "must necessarily live, move, and have her being in another" (83; cf. Acts 17:28). Paul is a crucial figure, and indeed has to be considered as "the grand progenitor of Patrick Brontë as published author" according to identifications put forth in the prefaces to his three books (Tayler 276-77). Both, then, share responsibility for upholding the silence and subjection of women which the typical chauvinist Joe Scott urges upon Shirley (S 322-23). With his "`great respect for the doctrines delivered in the second chapter of St. Paul's first Epistle to Timothy,'" Scott argues dogmatically that "`Adam was first formed'" and that "`the woman, being deceived, was in the transgression.'" These remarks are no doubt introduced to illustrate Shirley's immediately preceding radical and rhetorical question that "Milton"--and with him the male ethos generally--"was great; but was he good?" and her conclusion that "Milton tried to see the first woman; but, Cary, he saw her not'" (314-15). We are, perhaps, as did Blake a generation earlier, to see the patriarchal system running from St. Paul to Milton and, most recently, to the appalling mill-towns which Shirley sees darkening the landscape.
St. Paul figures more largely in Villette through the submissive Paulina and the dominating Paul Emanuel. When Lucy Snowe finally takes off on her own and passes her first night in the greater world of London, she finds herself overcome by "a terrible oppression": "a deep, low, mighty tone swung through the night. At first I knew it not; but it was uttered twelve times, and at the twelfth colossal hum and trembling knell, I said: `I lie in the shadow of St. Paul's'" (107). We think of the cathedral, no doubt, but the author of the epistle to the Colossians casts a deep shadow over the heroine's struggle for self-determination and mutual respect. And while St. John Rivers can propose marriage saying, "`With St. Paul, I acknowledge myself the chiefest of sinners'" (354), Jane Eyre's saving grace before this "man, erring as I" (358) is her realization that even the seemingly noblest ideology merely serves the ends of those it empowers (St. John, for instance, sees himself as not subject to the "erring control of my feeble fellow-worms" and authorized "to offer ... direct from God, a place in the ranks of His chosen" [353]).
Brontë's most scandalous wordplay in this vein comes when Lucy, having no acquaintance, must spend "the long vacation" at the Pensionnat: "the house was left quite empty, but for me, a servant, and a poor deformed and imbecile pupil, a sort of crtin" (227). What sort? Cretins are dwarfish, which might remind one of Charlotte Brontë's tiny frame ("the smallest creature I had ever seen (except at a fair)," wrote Harriet Martineau [Grin, Charlotte 411]), and the word is indeed cognate with "christian" or, in French, "chretien" (the idea perhaps being that such afflicted individuals were also Christians, i.e. human beings). Lucy makes the crtin a double by feeding her and by other unspecified "personal attentions." This double's name, Marie Broc, takes her more than halfway into the Bront family with the icons of its Marias, the dead mother and eldest daughter (one notes also Broc's expansion in the "Father" who arranges Jane's/ Charlotte's transfer to Lowood/Cowan Bridge, Mr. Brocklehurst). Owing to the crtin's presence, Lucy prays "to Heaven for consolation and support," though she concludes that God's "great plan" entails "that some must deeply suffer while they live, and ... of this number, I was one" (229). Later she refers more realistically to depressed "imbecile extravagances of self-accusation" (349), but her struggle with cretinism reflects the past of one who had to grapple, at age eight, for instance, with a father's preaching that "Whatever may tend to give you unworthy notions of Christ; whatever may be calculated to make you think highly of yourselves, or to look down with discontentment upon your lot; whatever would aim at inflaming your natural passions, which are already much to fiery and ungovernable, is bad, and ought carefully to be avoided" (P. Brontë 202).(3)
b. The Name of the Mother The phonemes of imbecile Marie Broc can direct us to another of Brontë's split-off phantasms in Villette, Madame Modeste Maria Beck. Indeed, Villette increasingly reveals itself as one of literature's most complicated artifices of splitting and projection. The text, like the narrator, seems "to hold two lives," one of which is "nourished with a sufficiency of the strange necromantic joys of fancy" (140) or imagined communication with the dead. The author even has the narrator overhear a personal letter and observe that "several of these passages appeared to comprise family secrets, and bore special reference to one `Charlotte'" (112). The book opens with a description of the narrator's good "godmother," Mrs. Bretton of Bretton, and the first chapter is titled with that family name, as if to flaunt the author's anagram (Bretton/Brontë). Then, immediately following a letter erroneously supposed by the heroine,(4) Lucy Snowe, to come "from home," a young avatar arrives in the form of "Missy" Home; at the age of six, she has, like the author before her, "recently lost her mother" (62), though "the loss was not so great" since Mrs. Home "had neglected her child" (62-63). Madame Beck, so long seen as a bitter fictionalization of Madame Heger from Charlotte's Brussels experience, seems an unlikely addition to the family manes, but perhaps images nearly ten years old (as were Charlotte's memories of the Pensionnat when she wrote Villette) are maintained to the extent that they screen--both conceal and express--more formative and enduring images constructed in childhood. Madame Beck, for instance, was "ne Kint," or, to draw on the German which Lucy studies throughout, "born Child" (Kind).(5) She suddenly appears to Lucy in a sentence which also illustrates the author's denial, word recombination, and interlingual amplification: "No ghost stood beside me, nor anything of spectral aspect; merely a motherly, dumpy little woman" (127; italics added). While the image of Madame Beck's "dumpy, motherly little body" (185) persists, she quickly becomes for Lucy a "white figure" seen "in the dead of night" with a "face of stone (for of stone in its present night-aspect it looked: it had been human and, as I said, motherly, in the salon)" (132) who glides about "ghost-like" on "`souliers de silence'" (136). This stone mother of the narrator's "spectral and intolerable memories" (548) "never seemed to know the wish to take her little children upon her lap, to press their rosy lips with her own, to gather them in a genial embrace, to shower on them softly the benignant caress, the loving word" (157). In short, she embodies what Brontë calls "the hollow system" (158).
Up until a week before its completion, Brontë evidently thought that her second novel should be titled Hollow's Mill (letters of Aug. 21, 24, 29, 1849; WS 3.12-15), so emphasizing a crucial site and agent of the social tensions which concern Shirley. Once the haunt of fairies (242, 599) and "green, and lone, and wild," "a bonnie spot" (599), the joys of the Hollow have been hollowed out by men--beginning with Shirley's father, who first built the mill there. As the novel opens, Hollow's-mill has become "the place held most abominable" (62) by the local working class, and the present owner, Robert Moore, receives an anonymous note addressed "to the Divil of Hollow's miln" (64). By the concluding paragraphs the dominating Moore (subsuming the Angrian Caroline's Zamorna amour) wants still more and promises to turn the "barren Hollow" into a milltown hell: "the rough pebbled track shall be an even, firm, broad, black, sooty road, bedded with the cinders from my mill: and my mill, Caroline--my mill shall fill its present yard" (597). Preoccupied with their own power of action, men like Moore are oblivious to the "terrible hollowness, mockery, want, craving" (190) in an existence with no object of its own--that of "Low Persons" (ch. 18, title) like laborers, children, and women in particular. Shirley's social vision of "the whole enginery of this human mill" (496) initiates what emerges in Villette as the "hollow unreal" (594).
Villette knows that "the starved hollow" (334) exists because something unassimilable is put within it and sealed away. When Lucy decides to dispose of her precious letters from Graham she goes to "a hole, or rather a deep hollow" in the pear-tree she has named "Methusaleh": "I knew there was such a hollow, hidden partly by ivy and creepers," she says, and there she intends "to hide a treasure" and "bury a grief." Finding the hole large enough to receive the hermetically sealed "casket" of letters, she "thrust[s] it deep in"; this done, she puts a "slate on the hollow, secured it with cement, covered the whole with black mould, and, finally, replaced the ivy." Then she rests, "like any other mourner, beside a newly-sodded grave" (380-81). Lucy here re-enacts a fantasy of "non-introjection" (Abraham and Torok), or a rejection of loss and mourning whose goal is the "reinforced strength" Lucy temporarily obtains ("Introjection" 381), but whose cost is another extension of the internal crypt or hollow. That Lucy's letter-grave repeats the past is marked by its exact duplication of another, earlier offering to Methusaleh's patriarchy, for another "slab, smooth, hard, and black" visible between its roots is said to be "the portal of a vault" containing "the bones of a girl ... buried alive, for some sin against her vow" (173).(6) The girl Lucy wants most to repress, by holding her "in catalepsy and a dead trance," lives in her feelings and thought "of past days" (175). "Oh, my childhood!" constitutes for her "the being I was always lulling" but which certain signifiers, including "accidents of the weather," can rouse to "a craving cry I could not satisfy" (175-76). For most of the novel, Lucy's problem is that she remains pent up at Pensionnat Rue Fossette--ruing her little "fosse" or "hole in the ground, grave."
The fault line linking hollows, graves, and craving may help to gloss one of the most striking elements in Lucy's "strange vision of Villette" toward the novel's end. Given a "strong opiate," Lucy sees in imagination the city's "summer park, with its long alleys all silent, lone and safe; among these lay a huge stone-basin--that basin I knew, and beside which I had often stood--deepset in the tree-shadows, brimming with cool water, clear, with a green, leafy, rushy bed" (547). The sound of distant music engenders in her the desire "to listen to it alone by the rushy basin" (548), and so she sets off "to find the stone-basin, with its clear depth and green lining," thinking of its "coolness and verdure" with "the passionate thirst of unconscious fever" and longing "to come on that circular mirror of crystal, and surprise the moon glassing therein her pearly front" (551). Instead, her quest for this visionary reflection of the maternal breast leads her into a dream-like review of past acquaintance--including the Brettons, Becks, and de Bassompierres. "De Bassompierre" is the new name of the narrator's first double, "Missy" (Polly/Paulina) Home, now ennobled and, through the machinations of a plot only probable psychologically, engaged to marry Mrs. Bretton's son Graham; it is as close as one could ask for a French version of "stone-basin" ("bassin de pierre"). "Beck" in English can mean basin (OED has a citation from 1828), but in any event brings up the common German "becker," or basin. Each of these terms--basin, bassin, becker--is used to denominate the pelvis, and so might evoke Charlotte's mother's death from the "stomach cancer" of the early biographers which has been more recently appraised as "some chronic disorder consequent upon her rapid childbearing, probably pelvic sepsis" (Rhodes in Moglen, 21fn.). "Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged," counsels Isaiah (51:1), and in Villette Brontë attempts just that. Indeed, the phantom mother, dead before Charlotte was five and a half, precedes the conception of Villette in the form of her courtship letters, given to Charlotte to read for the first time. "The records of a mind whence my own sprang," Brontë calls them, noting the "modesty" in the letters and concluding, "I wish she had lived, and that I had known her" (WS 3.18). But as the figure of "Modeste Maria Beck" suggests, the author still wrestles with Jane Eyre's realization about such revenants--that "[t]his idea, consolatory in theory, I felt would be terrible if realized" (13). Every dream has a "navel," Freud writes, "a tangle of dream-thoughts" marking "the spot where it reaches down into the unknown" (Interpretation 564)--or the hollow, the crypt, the pelvic cavity. The "stone-basin" offers such a spot for Villette's dream text;(7) Lucy, after all, never actually reaches it, becoming fascinated instead with the "shadow-world" (185) conjured up out of her hollow.
Yet another trace of the mother in the kaleidoscope of Villette dominates the novel's structurally rather awkward chapter four. Here--sandwiched between images of childhood and adolescence in Bretton and her decision at twenty-two to seek a wider world--Lucy Snowe for a few pages and unspecified but correspondingly short fictional time serves as nurse and companion to Miss Marchmont. That Marchmont offers a kind of guide or mentor or spirit-mother (as against Lucy's actual godmother Mrs. Bretton) is suggested by the reappearance of her name, joined to a tangible legacy, at the novel's end. Her surname in fact serves as a kind of double imperative: the narrator writes of her longing for something "to fetch me out of my present existence, and lead me upwards and onwards" (176, italics added) and again links the name's components together in describing her fear that some beetles might "steal on me a march, mount my throne" (205, italics added). Miss Marchmont is, moreover, the first "Maria" of the novel, and though "invalid," she "gives" Lucy "the power of her passions to admire, the truth of her feelings to trust" (97).(8)
Maria Marchmont's tragedy is the inexplicable, accidental, Christmas-eve death, thirty years before, of the lover whose name she quite emphasizes: "my heart lived with Frank's heart. O my noble Frank--my faithful Frank--my good Frank!" (99). One might note that if, as seems likely, Charlotte Brontë wrote this in the year following September 1851, the elapsed thirty years also commemorates the death in 1821 of her mother, Maria Brontë. Maria Marchmont, in the climax of the short, obtrusive chapter which ends with her death, sees herself as a "woe-struck and selfish woman," but one now ready to prepare "for reunion with Frank" (101) because she can say "with sincerity, what I never tried to say before--Inscrutable God, Thy will be done!" (99). The desired's name seems set as an emblem of this text's ostensible desire to be frank, to eschew the lies and falsehoods Lucy equates with everyday life in Villette. One can see the slide of this particular signifier in Brontë's letter to W. S. Williams of 6 November 1851 which reports that a "frank kind answer" from Mrs. Gaskell permits the enclosure "for your Son Frank" of a requested letter of introduction (WS 3.286).
Graham Bretton has a "frank tread" which Lucy believes she would follow "to the world's end" (125), but the word is more strongly associated with the "fierce and frank, dark and candid, testy and fearless" M. Paul (396). With his "frank fashion which knew not secretiveness," Paul encourages Lucy--usually in en franais--to "speak frankly" (513, 512), and by the novel's close, Lucy can relate to him her "whole history ... truthful, literal, ardent, bitter," including, in particular, her jealousy regarding his "god-daughter and ward, Justine Marie Saveur." Like her namesake, Paul's first beloved who "gave herself to God" (484), like the crtin chretienne, and like Miss Marchmont, this Marie Saveur is also linked problematically to the Saviour; together with Modeste Maria Beck, these five occurrences of Maria/e exemplify how for the author, as for her double in Shirley, "memory kept harping on the name ... an elegy over the past still rung constantly in her ear; a funereal inward cry haunted and harassed her" (199). Still grappling with whatever Christian consolation was given after the deaths of Maria when the author was five (mother's) and nine (eldest sister-mother surrogate's), the narrator of Villette wishes to speak frankly about lies, and especially against the notion that "[a]s to what lies below"--in the ground or in the unconscious--"leave that with God" (252). But her frank wish is another disguise.
c. The Brother's Keepers While the many Marias in Charlotte Brontë's last novel indicate some kind of conscious acknowledgement of their namesakes' formative role in her psyche, the complete repression of another principal object of her relations suggests its greater importance in the text. The collapse and death of Charlotte's brother, Patrick Branwell, one might speculate, makes the blackhole which distorts the spacetime of Villette's universe. There are, to be sure, biographical connections available for the two male protagonists. Dr. John Graham Bretton (nicknamed Isidore by one character to supply an additional miscue) is linked to George Smith of Brontë's publishers, Smith Elder, several times Brontë's host in London and like Graham an aging mama's boy; Paul Carl David Emanuel is seen, naturally, as a version of the idolized Professor Heger Brontë encountered in Brussels. Without questioning the pertinence of these associations, one might imagine that they are also themselves screens for still others--perhaps deeper and more repressed.
A "character" is a bundle of relations and associations, some of which may be strong enough to relay considerable jolts of affect. The most striking aspect of the relationship between Charlotte and her only brother, one year younger, comes in the complete reversal of Charlotte's attitude toward him beginning with her return from Brussels when she was twenty-seven. Their decade-long, mutual preoccupation in the creation and elaboration of Angria is well known, and Charlotte's residual if ambivalent allegiance to him in spite of already evident transgression can be seen in her 1837 story of "Henry Hastings" (one of Branwell's Angrian pseudonyms).(9) In 1843 she writes from Brussels to say how "very much" she wants to hear from him, displaces her anger at his neglect into berating her companions, and closes by reminding him of their shared past: "I always recur as fanatically as ever to the old ideas, the old faces, and the old scenes in the world below. Give my love to Ann and believe me // YOURN!" (WS 1.297). But by 1844 Charlotte had been forced to confront and introject her idealized fantasy for the married Professor Heger, while Branwell was constructing his fantasy relationship with the married Mrs. Robinson, seventeen years his senior, mistress of the household where he and Anne Brontë were employed as tutor and governess. Rather than outrage over the public infamy, Charlotte perhaps experienced more the anger of a jealous lover scorned. When Branwell's fantasy burst and he spent the next three years giving up to his inability to cope, she retreated into icy observation. A few days after his death she writes W. S. Williams that, "It is not permitted us to grieve for him who is gone as others grieve;" there is, she continues, "no dear companion lost," and "nothing remains of him but a memory of errors and sufferings." "I trust time will allay these feelings," she writes (2 Oct. 1848, WS 2.261), unaware that she will have first to deal with the deaths of Emily and Anne and their memorial in Shirley before her unconscious can reconsider Branwell.
The narrator of Villette reports that, "Certainly, at some hour, though perhaps not your hour, the waiting waters will stir; in some shape, though perhaps not the shape you dreamed, which your heart loved, and for which it bled, the healing herald will descend" (252). Yet for most, the passage concludes, the first and sole visitant is "him the easterns call Azrael"--the Mohammedan angel of death, but also Branwell's persona in one of his longest poems and a name to which Charlotte and Branwell often refer in their early co-productions (Alexander, ed. 347 fn.). By the time Brontë was writing Villette she had returned to Branwell via an effective transitional object in the form of James Taylor, one of her correspondents at the firm of Smith, Elder. Taylor's resemblance to Branwell struck Brontë "forcibly"--"it is marked," she writes; he had her brother's physiognomy and red hair, and already in late 1849, Brontë writes of the "determined, dreadful nose in the middle of his face which when poked into my countenance cuts into my soul like iron" (WS 3.221, 53).
At the same time as James Taylor becomes a Branwell-signifier, Brontë confronts the spectacle of her old friend Mary Taylor's brother, Joe Taylor, in a state of mind like "that which was so appalling exhibited in poor Branwell during the last few years of his life" (31 Jan. 1850, WS 3.72). Two months later, ostensibly responding to the recent death of an acquaintance's mother, Brontë swerves from the maternal realm to dwell on "the oblivion of faults which succeeds to Death. No sooner are the eyes grown dim, no sooner is the pulse stilled than we forget what anxiety, what anguish, what shame the frailties and vices of that poor unconscious mould of clay once caused us; yearning love and bitter pity are the only sentiments the heart admits" (italics added). The repetition of "poor" in the next paragraph to describe "my poor brother" points to Branwell's heavy presence (31 Mar. 1850, WS 3.91-92). Six months later, she writes to praise Sydney Dobell's poetry, especially "a certain brief lyric ... a sort of dirge over a dead brother--that not only charmed the ear and brain--it smote the heart (25 Oct. 1850; WS 3.175).(10) In April 1851 James Taylor passed through Haworth on his way to five years in India and proposed marriage. Brontë's consequent behavior acts out her ambivalent feelings about Branwell: "each moment he came near me, and that I could see his eyes fastened on me my veins ran ice. Now that he is away, I feel far more gently towards him, it is only close by that I grow rigid--stiffening with a strange mixture of apprehension and anger--which nothing softens but his retreat" (9 Apr. 1851; WS 3.222). That "Papa" took "a decided liking" to Taylor only complicated matters. Then he was gone overseas, nothing resolved, and the fitful and evaporating correspondence of the following year left Brontë in "that anxiety which is inseparable from a state of absolute uncertainty about a somewhat momentous matter" (4 Mar. 1852, WS 3.320), with "the saddest memories my only company" (12 Apr. 1852, WS 3.331). Finally, in the summer of 1852, she answers her friend's query "about India": "Let us dismiss the subject in a few words and not recur to it. All is silent as the grave" (1 Jul. 1852, WS 3.341) and ready, judging by the completion of the manuscript in November, for burial in Villette.
All of this context can be brought to bear on one of the most remarkable images in Brontë's novel. Sometime after having sealed her Graham-grams into the tree-hollow, Lucy finds herself at the spot and recalls her "faith in his excellence" and "warm affection" for Dr. John ("Dr. Graham," besides making it more difficult to play with his identity, would perhaps risk a connection with the Dr. Graham whose Domestic Medicine the family used to track Branwell's decline [Grin, Branwell 133]). "What was become," she wonders, "of that curious one-sided friendship"? "Was this feeling dead? I do not know, but it was buried. Sometimes I thought the tomb unquiet, and dreamed strangely of disturbed earth, and of hair, still golden and living, obtruded through coffin-chinks" (451). (Graham's hair, like Branwell's, is variously "auburn," "orange-red," "golden" [73, 217, 531; cf. Grin, Branwell 254, 292, 19]). The underlying concern with Branwell helps to account for some of the strange displacements of Villette's narrative--the older Lucy Snowe, for instance, looking back to her adolescent investment with Graham but distancing the affect onto the still younger Paulina. As for Graham's "mama's boy" aspect which deflects attention to (and surely takes material from) George Smith, one notes that Charlotte's only recorded memory of her mother recalls Mrs. Brontë "playing with her little boy at twilight in the parlour" (Grin, Branwell 2). The narrator's sense of the different memories, times, people and feelings making up her character lead her to attempt to head off objections by announcing that "[t]he reader is requested to note a seeming contraction in the two views which have been given of Graham Bretton--the public and the private" (273). "Both portraits are correct," she states, and the need to affirm these contradictions, or to suggest that someone buried may not be dead, seems an important dynamic of Brontë's fiction.
But the yearning of "YOURN!" can never be filled,(11) and another of the novel's remarkable moments looks at Graham while seeming to recall a shared love of Arabian Nights and the old world of the Genii and its co-creator Patrick, "Little Bany" (Grin, Branwell 170): "I kept a place for him, too--a place of which I never took the measure ... I think it was like the tent of Peri-Banou. All my life I carried it folded in the hollow of my hand--yet, released from that hold and constriction, I know not but its innate capacity for expanse might have magnified it into a tabernacle for a host" (555, italics added). Here again we come upon the navel of the novel, for the hollow of Charlotte Brontë's hand in fact holds the pen milling out its capacity for expanse in the overdetermined letters which let her live and by which she can "let live" in Villette. As for Peri-Banou, Brontë knows the word actually signifies a female genie, and the context suggests that she recalls from her childhood reading the fairy's anguished reproach to Prince Ahmed, "Is it possible that you should have forgot that you have pledged your faith to me, and that you no longer love one who is passionately fond of you?" (Tales of the East [1812] 1.442, in Allott 635).
If, as Edward Chitham concludes, "the matrix of Wuthering Heights is a return to the intense and absorbing feelings of childhood and early adolescence" (249), then we might expect to sense in Emily Brontë's novel, as in Charlotte Brontë's text, the shadow, among others, of Branwell and the Glass Town world shared at first by all the children. One can, for instance, relate the personification of the moor, the "dark" (38, 260), "black villain" (97) Heathcliff to Branwell's longstanding blackamoor villain, Quashia Quamina. Mr. Earnshaw's trip to Liverpool (itself a near anagram of "Verdopolis" or Glass Town) where he finds Heathcliff matches curiously with one of Charlotte's parodies of Branwell. Rather incredibly, Earnshaw says he will "walk there and back; sixty miles each way" (38) and yet is absent only for "three days." Charlotte's "Patrick Benjamin Wiggins," however, seems to satirize some similar, fraternal trait with his claim to have walked between two towns, the distance being "forty miles and I did it all in twelve hours,--indeed it's more than forty, nearer fifty. O yes, and above sixty I daresay, or sixty-five. Now sir, what do you say to a man's walking sixty-five miles in a day?" (Grin, Branwell 70).
But perhaps a more intriguing shadow comes in Catherine's report of an early visit to her ill-fated, ineffectual--Branwellian--"sweet, darling cousin," "pretty Linton":
... he consented to play at ball with me. We found two in a cupboard, among a heap of old toys: tops, and hoops, and battledores, and shuttlecocks. One was marked C., and the other H.; I wished to have the C., because that stood for Catherine, and the H. might be for Heathcliff, his name; but the bran came out of H., and Linton didn't like it. (199)
The narrator imagines Catherine as wishing to appropriate what seems her fitting signifier and to impose on Linton, via his unfamiliar surname, a signifier which also suits Hareton and Hindley. In contrast to these ambiguous possibilities, however, the shifting, masculine "H." evidently stands in some special relation to "the Bran" which comes out of it (a bran well, then; and regarding "the bran," cf. "the Varens" in JE 126). That Linton doesn't like "the bran," and/or its "coming out," and/or his proposed signifier without "the bran" hints at some more personal involvement whose reciprocal would be Branwell's dislike in seeing that Linton came out of him. As for the possibility of a bran-filled H. for Heathcliff, we might ponder one of the most enigmatical remarks in this mysterious book, Lockwood's post-nightmare, manic, vatic, never-answered challenge to Heathcliff, "`Was not the Reverend Jabes Branderham akin to you on the mother's side?'" (31). It does seem that Branwell's namesake mother and her sister, Aunt Branwell, who took over the mother's role, permanently branded him with a religious jabber and imagery and sense of guilt which, with at times Heathcliffian bravado and language, he tried vainly to undo (as in his occasionally quite amusing prose fragment, "And the weary are at rest").
In thinking about possible "sources" for Emily Brontë's fiction, one has to recall that "apart from their father, Branwell was practically the only man she was ever to know with any degree of closeness and intimacy" (Rees 47). The father, nearing seventy as Wuthering Heights was being written, seems to shade into the comic figure of Joseph. In his own heavy brogue, the Reverend Brontë was ever using already anachronistic Methodist jargon (Harrison 94); owing to his dyspepsia he took his meals alone, and Lockwood's "charitable conjecture" that old Joseph "must have need of divine aid to digest his dinner" (14) perhaps reflects the joke at the other dinner table. Lockwood, in this attributing schema, does not need a male model if one imagines Emily Brontë's perspective on her sister's authorial impersonation and her urbane pretensions as "Captain Tree," "Charles Wellesley," "Charles Townsend," or "Charles Thunder" (punning on the Greek signification of the family name). But that Branwell might inform or even govern the figure of Heathcliff offers a possibility still capable of surprising. One crucial connection in this regard is Branwell's devotion to the figure of the dead sister Maria, who obsessively occupies his poetry, usually under the name not of Catherine, but Caroline (was as a feminine form of Charles also kept Charlotte in reference). Branwell's tormented, inverted religiosity, too, looms in the extraordinary picture Emily Brontë has Nelly Dean relate of Heathcliff "praying like a Methodist; only the deity he implored is senseless dust and ashes; and God, when addressed, was curiously confounded with his own black father!" (144). The question of Branwell's language during the drinking bouts that marked his long breakdown to death raises other considerations.
Even by modern standards, the scope and intensity of the abusive terms which reach liminal, typographic representation in Wuthering Heights are striking. Heathcliff, Nelly learns from little Hareton, is the "Devil Daddy" who teaches the boy "a string of curses, which, whether he comprehended them or not, were delivered with practiced emphasis, and distorted his baby features into a shocking expression of malignity" (95). Considering that "those fine words" which Nelly reports include "`Damn the curate, and thee!'" one can only wonder at what she omits from Hareton's report of Heathcliff's promise that "`the curate should have his ------ teeth dashed down his ------ throat, if he stepped over the threshold." In light of Nelly's move from the quoted "damn" to the expletive deleting dash, one might note the OED's observation that "fuck" is "[u]sed profanely in imprecations and exclamations as the coarsest equivalent of Damn," and that "fucking" is cited in a like sense. It appears that Heathcliff's blasphemous vocabulary approaches verbalization, while the sexual and scatological obscenities go uncited--Lockwood, for example, overhears "a brutal curse" from Hareton, but comments, "I took care not to notice" (21).
But the text, in the guise of the shocked Mrs. Linton on hearing Heathcliff, reiterates, "Did you notice his language?" (49). Heathcliff says that Isabella "degenerates into a mere slut!" (126), and refers to Catherine as an "insolent slut" (252). Isabella finds herself labelled a "pitiful, slavish, mean-minded brach," or bitch, and herself relates Heathcliff's earlier threat: "`You'd better open the door, you ----' he answered, addressing me by some elegant term that I don't care to repeat" (146). Her choice of "elegant" perhaps points to the term. In this vein, one might recall the vehement language of Anne Brontë's censorious version of Branwell in decline in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Arthur Huntingdon. Considering that she reports his "G-- d--n him!" (198) and "that old bitch, Rachel" (371), one can only suspect the worst of the "bad language," "dreadful language" (316, 445) used in assaulting his wife with "a volley of the vilest and grossest abuse it was possible for the imagination to conceive or the tongue to utter" (365) or the "cursing and abusing ... epithets" which his wife "will not defile this paper with repeating" (373).
In her preface to Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë anticipates that the language of her sister's novel offers a problem for "a large class of readers" who will "suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which its has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only--a blank line filling the interval" (9). One may feel, indeed, that Charlotte fully appreciated the extent to which her more uncompromising sister admitted a "language" Brontë knew would appear to many readers "unintelligible, and--where intelligible--repulsive": that Emily might hint by single words, rather than by single letters, at what the preface terms "those expletives with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse" (9). From this context one might reconsider the dream-traumatized Lockwood's account of a brief pre-dawn scene between Heathcliff and Catherine:
"`And you, you worthless----' he broke out as I entered, turning to his daughter-in-law, and employing an epithet as harmless as duck, or sheep, but generally represented by a dash." (34)
Here, perhaps, we have a specific instance to support Margaret Homan's contention that "according to Lockwood ... literal meaning must be ... replaced by substitutes that resemble the original but without its threatening power" (72). Charlotte Brontë's comment, in the preface, that "Men and women who, perhaps, naturally very calm, have been trained from their cradle to observe the utmost evenness of manner and guardedness of language, will hardly know what to make of the rough, strong utterance" (9) would itself be exemplified in advance by Lockwood's choice of "duck, or sheep" to displace "fuck, or shit." The reader who has finished Wuthering Heights and can imagine Heathcliff "swearing his tongue out" (34) with harmless execrations like "worthless duck" or "worthless sheep" will hardly know what to make of Emily Brontë's unreliable narrators, much less the "bracing ventilation" (14) they cannot confront.
This last suggestion raises the topic of sexual reference in a novel whose language one recent critic describes as "pure jeu d'esprit" (Davies 89). The theme opens with Lockwood's characterization of what he calls "shameless little boys" (14) in the "grotesque carving" over the front door--which sets up the contrast, several paragraphs on, where he confesses his own sexual avoidance "with shame" (15). Pushing into "the penetralium," Lockwood--whom one might imagine, like his author, to be conversant with French idiom--focuses on what "the huge fire-place" does not disclose: "culinary utensils," "cullenders" (14, italics added). Similarly, to his way of seeing and saying things, while the room possesses a "dresser, to the roof," the latter "had never been underdrawn [the place lacked underdrawers, by one construction]: its entire anatomy lay bare to an inquiring eye" except where "legs ... concealed it" (14). "In an arch under the dresser," he concludes, "reposed a huge, liver-coloured bitch pointer" (15). Lockwood proceeds to tell how "[his] dear mother used to say" he was unworthy of feminine attention, and how he had just proved her right. At the sea-coast he had admired "a most fascinating creature, a real goddess in my eyes, as long as she took not notice of me" (15). When, however, she "looked a return," he confesses "with shame" that he shrunk "like a snail" and the girl "persuaded her mamma to decamp" (15, italics added). This told, he returns us to the hearthstone where he "fills up an interval of silence by attempting to caress the canine mother, who ... was sneaking wolfishly to the back of my legs, her lip curled up, and her white teeth watering for a snatch" (15). That the dog is named "Juno"(12) and so suggests "a real goddess" in our eyes helps support a vision of its mocking of Lockwood's feeble copulatory urge--for as Partridge's Dictionary of Slang confirms, "snatch" denotes "a hasty or illicit or mercenary copulation," and was, in particular, Yorkshire dialect for "the female pudend." So, considering the function names of some other dogs (e.g. "Gnasher," 24), one pauses over the information that even those with whom "the ruffianly bitch" (16) owns acquaintance (like Lockwood, 18) are to avoid the house at night, since "Juno mounts sentinel there" (33). Lockwood, however, contents himself with relishing Cathy's "whole figure" and "admirable form" (19); as a "vain weather-cock," he thinks "to hold [him]self independent of all social intercourse" (35). "Miss Cathy," however, has already had "the mysteries of the Fairy Cave, and twenty other queer places" "opened" for her by Hareton on their trip to Penistone Craggs.The novel's syntax bears out the playful multiple combinational possibilities of such verbal atoms. In the first sentence, Lockwood describes his "landlord" as "the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with," leaving the reader who would lock on a reading to decide whether he means "only" or "lonely" neighbour, and "troubled" idiomatically or precisely. Confusion heightens at the first introduction:
...I announced my name.
"Mr. Heathcliff?" I said.
A nod was the answer.
"Mr. Lockwood, your new tenant, sir. ..." (13)Heathcliff's "`walk in,'" Lockwood writes, "was utterd with closed teeth [this should be attempted to be appreciated] and expressed the sentiment, `Go to the Deuce!'" (13)--that is, one might imagine, the realm of the dual one has already entered. "Even the gate over which he leant manifested no sympathizing movement to the words, and I think that circumstance determined me to accept the invitation" (13). What kind of determination--reading "that" as a conjunction--is "circumstance"? Having "entered the court," Heathcliff calls, "Joseph, take Mr. Lockwood's horse; and bring up some wine"; and the reflecting narrator splits himself grammatically (goes to the deuce) in reporting, "`Here we have the whole establishment of domestics, I suppose,' was the reflection suggested by this compound order. `No wonder the grass grows up between the flags ...'" (13, italics added). Lockwood's reflection, then, compounds the sorry state or order of the compound ("compound, or courtyard," OED) with Heathcliff's "compound order."
The reader deciding among the compound visions and linguistic duplicities of Wuthering Heights finds the critical task painfully arbitrary. Where Charlotte's Brontë's doubles are wont "to mount into the window-seat" or cockpit of consciousness and enjoy "the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating" (JE 5), Emily's Brontë's others cannot stand the pane of separation and strive repeatedly to cross the lattice. These images can stand for radically different perspectives about language and writing--its transparency or opacity, the degree to which the lettered lattice of the text can in fact offer a door to the wind (and its derivatives, spirit/anima/psyche). Where Charlotte Brontë's narrator tries to look frankly at the past and assure us that "now ... I see it clearly" (JE 12), Emily Brontë's reflects obscurely that "you'll judge as well as I can, all these things; at least you'll think you will, and that's the same" (152).
Notes:
1. Freud's contemporary, Thodor Flournoy coined the term "cryptomnesia" in his book-length study of the medium Helen Smith to discuss how her "romances of subliminal imagination" originated in "cryptomnesias" from books she had read as a child and later forgotten (see Ellenberger 171 and 317; Flournoy's book, From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambulism was published in 1899 and translated into English the following year).
2. The young, angry Jane Eyre, too, is described as "a mad cat" (9).
3. Little wonder Charlotte Brontë was haunted by Mrs Rigby's review of Jane Eyre and the contention that
Altogether the auto-biography of Jane Eyre is pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition. There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God's appointment--there is a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority either in God's word or in God's providence--there is that pervading tone of ungodly discontent which is at once the most prominent and the most subtle evil which the law and the pulpit, which all civilized society in fact has at the present day to contend with. (JE, "Backgrounds" 442)
4. Or rather, anti-heroine, or perhaps even, imagined diminutive of "villain" (and "villein"), "villette" (cf. Joyce's "Stephen Hero")--such a title marking Charlotte Brontë's willing assumption of the sins of "hunger, rebellion and rage" (which Matthew Arnold, for example, saw in Villette) projected onto her (the earlier Jane Eyre, rejecting that assumption, refers to "my villainy" [53]).
5. That Madame Heger's maiden name was Parent might have furthered such kinship (and kindisch) associations.
6. Like Bertha Mason, sealed in the third story, and Charlotte Brontë herself, "buried" alive in Haworth (25 Mar. 1845, WS 2.25). In view of her brother's poem "Azrael, or Destruction's Eve," which offers a tirade against religion delivered at Methuselah's grave, one wonders whether the patriarch's name might have been one of the children's joking ways of referring to their aging father (who lived to bury them all).
7. One might note here Freud's account (reporting work by V. and C. Henri) of "a professor of philology whose earliest memory, dating back to between the ages of three and four, showed him a table laid for a meal and on it a basin of ice. At the same period there occurred the death of his grandmother which, according to his parents, was a severe blow to the child. But the professor of philology, as he now is, has no recollection of this bereavement; all that he remembers of those days is the basin of ice" ("Screen Memories" 50). In an 1836 vision of characters who (remarkably) appear nowhere else in her sprawling juvenilia, Brontë sees a "Dr. Charles Brandon" (C.B.) who has evidently just performed an operation and is "washing his bloody hands in a bason," "a bason of water on a slab" (JE, "Backgrounds" 415). The picture leaves the twenty-year-old author "confounded and annoyed," and feeling "a heavy weight." In Villette, Lucy sees M. Paul wash his hands "in a little stone bowl" (506). Note also Melanie Klein, who writes of a child who "had also discovered the wash basin as symbolizing the mother's body" (Contributions 243), and Irene Tayler, who sees in Charlotte's hollows and dells "the fetal retreat to which she ... so many times alluded over the years" (262).
Given the mediating term of "Bassompierre" and its reference to "Home," one might pursue another possible determination and posit that "stone-basin=home," recalling Freud's invocation of "the former Heim [home] of all human beings.... the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning" ("The `Uncanny'" 245).
8. The emotional etymology of truth: truth is troth, troth is trust.
9. "It was very odd but [Henry's] sister [Elizabeth] did not think a pin the worse of him for all his Dishonour--it is private mean-ness--not public infamy that degrade a man in the opinion of his relatives--Miss Hastings heard him cursed by every mouth--saw him denounced in every newspaper. Still he was the same brother to her he had always been--still she beheld his actions through a medium peculiar to herself-- .... --natural affection is a thing never rooted out where it has once really existed" (Novelettes 242)
10. The verses to which she seems to refer include these lines:
Yet, brother, it were ill to weep, when life hath been so drear,
That we are left alone to keep its painful vigil here.
'Twere ill if thou hast trod the way to count the labouring hours,
Or mourn that sorrow fill'd thy cup with hastier hand than ours.
(Dobrell 33).11. Cf. Brontë's Elizabeth Hastings, "always burning for warmer, closer attachment-- she couldn't live without it--but the feeling never woke & never was reciprocated--O for Henry ..." (Novelettes 243-44).
12. As are pointers owned by Charlotte Brontë's Branwellian Henry Hastings and Zamorna (Novelettes 244, 291).