Overzichtsfoto van Haworth

Haworth and the Black Bull

Black Bull in winter

De stoel van Branwell Bronte in the Black Bull

Haworth, the home of the Bronte family, is almost as famous as Stratford-upon-Avon as a place for literary pilgrimage. The Revd Patrick Bronte brought his family to live in the parsonage at Haworth in 1820 and it is now kept as a museum. At the top of the steep and cobbled main street is the Black Bull, with its gritstone walls blackened by years of smoke pollution from the former tall chimneys of the local woollen mills. Branwell Bronte, the artistically frustrated brother of Charlotte, Emily and Anne spent many hours drinking at the Black Bull and eventually, in 1845, his consumption of alcohol and opium killed him. Emily caught a chill at his funeral and died just 10 days later, not living to receive the acclaim to her novel 'Wuthering Heights'.

Today the Black Bull inside is a touristy open-plan pub with the focus on good value food but in Branwell's day it would have been divided into a series of small dark rooms. According to Mrs Gaskell, Branwell's great conversational talents: "procured him the undesirable distinction of having his company recommended by the landlord of the Black Bull to any chance traveller who might happen to feel solitary or dull over his liquor". Across the Main street is the Apothecary. It was the house of the pharmacist at the time of the Brontes, where Branwell Bronte bought laudanum, an opium derived drug

rose apothecary from Haworth

Uitzicht vanuit de voortuin van The Parsonage in Haworth

VOORGANGERS EN TIJDGENOTEN VAN DE BRONTËS

AUGUSTAN PROSE (eind 17de-eind 18de eeuw)

In deze periode werd de aanzet gegeven tot een nieuwe literaire vorm, de novel, die in de
Victoriaanse tijd tot bloei zou komen. In deze novel nam men afstand van de fantastische en
heroïsche aspecten die tot dan toe het proza hadden gedomineerd. Men wilde komen tot een meer
realistische representatie van de wereld en de mensen die deze bevolken. De bekendste voorbeelden
van novels uit deze tijd zijn Robinson Crusoe van Daniel Defoe en Tom Jones van Henry Fielding.
In deze tijd doken ook de eerste heroines op in de Engelse literatuur. Voordien waren vrouwelijke
personages vaak randfiguren die zelf geen acties ondernamen, maar deze ondergingen. Hier worden
ze hoofdpersonages die op zoek zijn naar hun plaats in de samenleving en actief stappen
ondernemen om hun lot te beteren. Men kan echter nog niet spreken van vrijgevochten vrouwen: een
plaats zoeken in de samenleving wordt meestal ingevuld door het zoeken van een ‘favorable match’.
Enkele voorbeelden van novels met heroines: Moll Flanders en Roxana van Daniel Defoe (1660?-
1698), Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded en Clarissa van Samuel Richardson (1689-1761).

ROMANTIEK (1785-1830)
De heroine novel verdwijnt in de romantische stroming meer naar de achtergrond ten voordele van de
gothic (Frankenstein van Mary Shelley) en de historical novel (Ivanhoe van Sir Walter Scott). Enkel
Jane Austen blijft in deze tijd novels schrijven over jonge vrouwen die een geschikte partner zoeken.
Zij wordt dan ook beschouwd als anti-romantiek.
outhey (die in 1813 Poet Laureate -hofdichterwerd),
wel bekend als de 'Lake Poets' (dichters uit het Lake District). Wordsworth volgde Southey in
die functie op in 1843.

VICTORIAANSE TIJD (1830-1901)
In deze tijd kwam de strijd voor vrouwenemancipatie meer op het voorplan door onder meer het belangrijke essay The Subjection of Women door John Stuart Mill. Men ging zich afzetten tegen het
beeld van de vrouw als broze engel die beschermd moest worden van de harde realiteit. In ‘finishing
schools’ werden meisjes uit de gegoede klassen opgeleid tot poppetjes die konden borduren en
bloemschikken, maar die het denkwerk aan hun echtgenoot moesten overlaten. Dit leidde vaak tot
frustratie bij deze vrouwen die zich vaak stierlijk verveelden.
Vooraanstaande vrouwen zoals Queen Victoria en schrijfster George Eliot ijverden dan ook voor een
gelijke educatie voor vrouwen en mannen. Hun feminisme was echter gematigd. Zij waren tegen
stemrecht voor vrouwen en geloofden nog steeds dat de vrouw op de eerste plaats moeder en
echtgenote was. Verscheidene schrijfsters publiceerden autobiografische werken die uiting geven aan
deze frustraties: Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), Florence Nightingale (1820-1910).

Het Victoriaanse tijdperk was een echte bloeiperiode voor dit genre, met voorop uiteraard Charles
Dickens. Het was tevens de tijd van de heroines zoals Jane Eyre (uit Jane Eyre van Charlotte Brontë),
Dorothea Brooke (uit Middlemarch van George Eliot) en Becky Sharp (uit Vanity Fair van William
Thackeray). Naast de zusjes Brontë laten diverse andere auteurs heroïnes in hun verhalen
voorkomen, zoals Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1856), George Eliot (pseud. van Mary Ann Evans) (1819-
1880), William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) en Henry James.

Jane Eyre

Ik ben momenteel

weer in de ban van

Jane Eyre

zowel het boek als de film

 met Toby Stephens and Ruth Wilson

Jane Eyre is het boek

dat ik als klein meisje verslond

en wat de basis legde

voor mijn liefde

voor de Bronte Sisters

Ik wilde alles weten over de schrijfster

van Jane Eyre

en haar vader, broer en zussen

dat is tot de dag van vandaag

het boek heb al veel keer herlezen

en daar ben ik nu ook weer mee bezig

Maar nu heb ik ook een verzamel DVD

met Jane Eyre

Wuthering Heights

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

en wat ik zie

bevalt me

meestal ben ik geirriteerd bij boekverfilmingen

omdat ik me een personage dan anders voorstel

maar daar heb ik geen last van bij deze verfilmingen

dus dubbel op genieten........

Mary Taylor

Interessante informatie over Mary Taylor

Brontë’s letters to Constantin Heger

 

 

collection-items/letters-from-charlotte-bront-to-prof-constantin-heger

 

In beginning her exploration of Brontë’s letters to Constantin Heger, Kauffman suggests that the letters reveal Charlotte Brontë’s transformation ‘from Heger’s correspondent into the novelist of Jane Eyre’ (Kauffman 1986: 160). Kauffman intends to connect the rhetorical strategies of the letters and of Jane Eyre to map ‘the metamorphosis of the rhetoric of passion from an authentic to a fictional discourse’ (p. 160).

To start with, Kauffman maps out the narrative of Brontë’s and Heger’s encounter including:

• Charlotte’s and Emily’s trip to Brussels in 1842 to learn languages;

• their return to England at the death of their aunt;

• Charlotte Brontë’s return to Brussels alone in 1843;

• and her final return to England in 1844.

Brontë began writing to Heger after her return and there is evidence to suggest that there were more letters than survive today. In the letters that do remain, Kauffman notes a variety of characteristics that fit the ‘amorous epistolary discourse’ on which her study focuses. These include:

• ‘the denial of the reality of separation’;

• ‘the desire for contact’;

• ‘despair at the master’s silence’;

• and ‘resigned desolation’ (p. 161).

In initial letters, Brontë is ‘submissive’ and puts ‘emphasis on having been given the authority to write’ (p. 161). However, when Heger write back with a firm, stern tone providing instruction as to how she must write, Brontë rebels and does the opposite; ‘she becomes more outspoken, more indignant, less submissive’ (p. 161-162). Kauffman notes that ‘[l]ike all amorous epistolary discourses, Charlotte’s letters are demands, pleas, threats, and confrontations, filled with the same marks of internal tension, contradiction, self-division, and torment’ (p. 163).

Like Mary Jacobus in ‘The Buried Letter’, Kauffman notes that the figure of student-governess-teacher is an ambiguous one in nineteenth-century British society. She describes Brontë as ‘simultaneously a family intimate and a family employee; the boundaries between belonging to and being excluded from the family are constantly shifting ones’ (p. 163). In Jane Eyre, Blanche Ingram tries to humiliate the governess-heroine and in her letters, Brontë expresses anguish at her humiliation in being a governess. In her letters to Heger, Brontë seems unsure as to whether to situate herself as governess or pupil as she tries to reconcile Heger’s warmth in past encounters and the coldness of his silence. Gaskell and others have tried to suggest that the romance between Heger and Brontë was imagined, but Kauffman provides much evidence that suggests that Heger exploited teacher-pupil relationships on a regular basis with his charismatic personality. Brontë’s letters are always a work of persuasion for him to break his silence and write to her again, which he never does. Silence is of course an obsession of Brontë’s novels too: ‘[i]h her letters, poems and novels Charlotte continued all her life to portray the intense misery of loneliness, exile and unrequited love’ (p. 170).

Kauffman, L. 1986, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre and Epistolary Fictions, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

The Letters of Charlotte Bronte

Vol 1: 1829-1847
Edited by Margaret Smith

"I cannot be formal in a letter,'' Charlotte Bronte apologised to an impossibly conventional ex-suitor, Henry Nussey. "If I write at all, I must write as I think.'' At that time, in 1841, a governess to the White family in Rawdon, Yorkshire, she confides her discontent with indulged children to this dull clergyman who, she knew, understood her not at all. It is this incaution, this need to explain herself against the odds, that makes her a great writer of letters. She seems to invite condemnation ("I am dwelling too much on my own concerns and feelings... I repent having written it'') so that a literal reader would find it easy to vilify or pity her, but none of her states of mind are exactly what they seem. It was improper for a clergyman's daughter in the 19th century to murmur against her lot, but she does so with a swelling commitment to another life which reveals a characteristic and unexpected strength: "my home is humble and unattractive to strangers but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world - [the] profound, and intense affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other when their minds are cast in the same mould''.

Behind these words lies a writer's life which Charlotte shared with her sisters, Emily and Anne, and brother, Branwell, and which was to issue in the phenomenally successful Jane Eyre in 1847. The date marks a logical end to this, the first of three projected volumes of letters. What do the letters tell us of the transformation of an apparently subdued governess to the novelist who could declare in a letter to her publishers on 4 January 1848: "It would take a great deal to crush me''?

Though modest quiet was expected of ladies, Charlotte could not contain the upsurge of language any more than she could deny her thought. Some of her most formative letters - letters in which we hear for the first time her complex authorial voice - were written to men who would not grant what she wished. When Charlotte sent the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, some of her poems, he told her in 1837 that "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life''. She replied with apparent propriety which completely reassured Southey, but her letter reverberates with veiled sarcasm which the editor of this volume does not hear: "In the evenings, I confess, I do think, but I never trouble any one else with my thoughts... I trust I shall never more feel ambitious to see my name in print; if the wish should rise, I'll look at Southey's letter, and suppress it.'' The brilliant verbal glide of her abjection to Southey was her first public performance of a role she made her own - hiding undaunted creative fire under a mask of perfect docility.

When Charlotte refused Henry Nussey in 1839, her letter explained in a patient and kindly tone that she was not the right wife for him, and prescribed instead a similar caricature of meek womanhood: "Her character should not be too marked, ardent and original - her temper should be mild...'' Again, the editor misses the scorn, and suggests that this tepid and passionless construct lies behind the marriage of Jane Eyre (yes, Jane Eyre who unites with her husband as bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.) Curiously, in the same letter, there is also a strong element of candour where Charlotte actually owns to being "satirical'' to the very man whose taste she's sending up.

It is telling to compare this layered letter with Charlotte's more direct explanation of her "natural home-character'' in a letter to Nussey's sister, Ellen. If she ever married, she must have an "intense attachment''. Nor could she "sit all day long making a grave face before my husband - I would laugh...'' To Ellen and to her other lifelong friend, Mary Taylor, she wrote in a bracing, unguarded, often humorous way. After her death, Mary, an outspoken feminist, destroyed all but one of Charlotte's letters as dangers to her reputation. Ellen preserved several hundred because she understood their future importance. Wishing to publish them and at the same time protect the docile image Charlotte herself had promoted, Ellen went through decades of anxiety. Her indecisiveness and growing bitterness made her an easy target for predators such as the arch-hypocrite, T J Wise, who bullied her into surrendering her letters. He promised that this treasure would go to the nation; instead, he sold off many letters (along with other Bronteana) to the highest bidders around the world. The history of the Bronte letters is a story as bizarre in its way as that of Jane Eyre.

The most famous letters in this volume are the four Charlotte wrote in French in 1844-45 to her beloved teacher in Brussels, M. Heger. The fact that Madame Heger pieced three of these letters together from torn fragments she found in her husband's bin suggests that Madame did not consider this tie negligible. There has been much speculation whether these surviving letters were adulterous or innocent. This is a misunderstanding of Charlotte's capacity for an indefinable form of love that thrived on Monsieur's recognition of her potential as a writer, his capacity to know her as she perceived herself to be. If we think of these letters in view of the great novels to come, they may be seen as the source of a new model of manhood: a hero who will engage with a hidden "other'' in a woman; who does not exclude it as alien. This future fictional enlargement on M. Heger gains its imaginative licence from distance - the correspondent's invisibility as reader. In this sense, what Charlotte undertook was not quite a real correspondence which reflects the correspondent; it was more an invented correspondence, close to an imaginative act and supplemented, probably, by many letters which Charlotte composed (in her mind or even on paper) but did not send. This ingredient of invention may explain Monsieur's increasing reluctance to reply. And although this was painful to Charlotte as a pupil, it was to her advantage as a rising writer to have to imagine passion, not enact it, for this freed her to imagine from a woman's point of view.
It has taken 140 years since Charlotte Bronte's death for a proper edition of her letters to be published. Readers must be grateful to Margaret Smith for the recovery of accurate texts - as accurate as they can be at this point in time, given their wanderings, dismemberments and mutilations. One letter was discovered to be in five fragments in five different libraries. The restoration of the texts themselves is a triumph of meticulous labour. Yet the clouding of Charlotte Bronte is not quite over. For between the reader and the letters is a laborious biographical introduction. Instead of trusting the letters to speak for themselves, the editor pre-empts Charlotte's witty, blistering, multi-shaded voice with a flattened account. We are told of religious anxiety in the late 1830s and "torments'' over M. Heger in the next phase, but we are not told about Charlotte Bronte's imaginative power to turn the losses of her life to gain. So, why undertake this edition? Her aim, the editor declares, is "to enhance'' our understanding of a woman who wrote novels. So are the letters only a set of useful commentaries rather than works of art? Margaret Smith comes to a strangely lame conclusion for a person with the privilege of editing one of the greatest letter- writers in the English language.