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BIOGRAPHICAL AND OTHER INFLUENCES
In 1834, when Brontë was fourteen years old, she was described by Branwell in one of the Angrian tales as ‘nothing, absolutely nothing…next door to an idiot’ (Gérin, 1961: 82). Despite the probable tongue-in-cheek context for this patronising remark, it suggests Brontë’s sustaine f probably unconscious struggle to challenge her family’s persistent perception of her as gentl nd weak, and in permanent need of protection and shelter from the vagaries of daily life in Haworth. ‘The family’s protective care for the delicate, and later asthmatic, Anne’ (Alexander and Smith, 2006: 66) was of course sincerely meant. As the sixth and last sibling, who was only eighteen months old when her mother died, Brontë was obviously especially vulnerable, but it seems that the family’s understandable desire to shield her from the realities of life often deteriorated into the notion that she was altogether less and somehow inferior to Emily, Charlotte, and Branwell, her three remaining siblings. What was genuinely intended as caring and cherishing may have become unintentionally judgemental and dismissive. At best it was restrictive and unhelpful. Indeed, this perception has come to inform much of the Brontë critical literature. As Lucasta Miller explains: ‘The adjectives routinely applied to her are pretty, little, slight, [and] feminine’ (2002:158).
However, in truth Brontë in some ways was the strongest and most assertive of all the Brontës: she was the only sibling to become a successful governess or tutor who survived, even flourished, in such an awkward position for a lengthy period of time; and her second novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is arguably, of all seven Brontë novels, the text which offers the most aggressive and searching critique of prevailing social conditions in mid-Victorian England. Elizabeth Langland writes that ‘Anne was, of the sisters, perhaps the most rigorously logical, the most quietly observant, the most realistic, and, in certain spheres, the most tenacious, the most determined, and the most courageous’ (Langland, 1989: 4). Therefore this chapter will argue that the unfortunate image of Brontë as timid, passive, and ordinary, is both unjust and seriously inaccurate, and should be replaced with the image of a young woman who possessed a sturdy sense of self and who would pursue ‘the unpalatable truth’ (Anne Brontë, 1848: 4) unflinchingly.
The Brontë whose voice speaks to us so earnestly and insistently by way of Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was the sum of the many parts or contexts of her life that shaped her personality, her worldview, and the direction taken by her fiction. The chapter will discuss three pivotal biographical influences on Brontë: her family, her painful experiences as agoverness, and her reading history. I will first explore the complex and often problematic skein of family relationships through which Brontë had to navigate, and I will look especially closely at the unmistakable influence of her father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë. Patrick Brontë’s evangelical Christian faith and his elevated sense of social awareness find powerful resonance in his youngest daughter’s life and writing. Of her three siblings, Brontë was particularly close to Emily: Ellen Nussey, Charlotte’s good friend, described how Emily and Brontë ‘were like twins, inseparable companions, and in the very closest sympathy which never had any interruption’ (quoted in Barker, 1994: 195). This intimacy led to the two sisters’ collaboration over the Gondal juvenilia. However, Charlotte, as I have already shown in Chapter 1, definitely entertained ambivalent feelings towards Brontë and her work, while Brontë herself felt profoundly humiliated and betrayed by Branwell’s descent into the murky world of substance abuse. Thus a sense of alienation between Charlotte and Brontë, and between Brontë and Branwell, is evident by the time of Brontë’s death in 1849. The chapter will also show how the sustained emphasis on the denial of opportunities to some of the female characters in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is in part indicative of Patrick Brontë’s constant privileging of Branwell over his sisters in terms of the allocation of resources, be these emotional, financial, or in the context of opportunity and potential. Of course, this also represents the broader social situation in terms of the marginalization of women in Victorian society. My analysis will then move forward to a consideration of Brontë’s two periods of employment as a governess and of how this experience informs her critique of the governess in Agnes Grey. Finally, I will investigate Brontë’s reading history and discuss the influence of Samuel Richardson on the shape and direction of her ow writing.
The family’s unintentional infantilising of Brontë apparently irked her. The dangers of assuming that episodes described in fiction closely reflect the real-life experiences of the writer are well known. This has already occurred frequently in Brontë scholarship, especially with regard to Winifred Gérin’s identification of biographical resonances in Brontë’s novels, especially Agnes Grey, as I have already shown in Chapter 1. Gérin has been heavily criticised for her naïve willingness to quote extensively from Brontë’s novels in support of her claims about the writer’s life. However, the way in which the young adult Agnes is treated as a child by her family in Agnes Grey, as well as Gilbert’s patronising infantilisation of Eliza Millward in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, could well suggest that Brontë acutely resented such an attitude. PatrickBrotë always referred to Brontë in terms of the diminutive as ‘my dear little Anne’; Ellen Nussey saw her as ‘Anne, dear gentle Anne’. Juliet Barker explains that ‘all her life she had been the cherished and protected “little one”, the baby of the family, who was always spoken of in terms of more than ordinary affection’ (Barker, 1994: 237). Brontë was Aunt Branwell’s obvious favourite, possibly because she was ‘docile [and] pensive’ (Gaskell, 1857: 198). Gaskell continues: ‘Miss Branwell had taken charge of her from her infancy; she was always patient and tractable, and would submit quietly to occasional repression, even when she felt it keenly’ (198).
It would have been easy for Brontë to submit to this stifling environment, to succumb so that she could indeed have become the supine ‘nothing, merely nothing’ of the Angrian tale. The family’s energetic and sustained attempts to make her path even, regular and unimpeded could have had the unintended consequence of turning this ‘milder, more ordinary’ (Bentley, 1969: 55) child into a lazy, insipid woman. But instead Brontë proved to be tenacious and in some ways quite extraordinary.
Chapter 1: The Critical Response 1847-2013
Chapter 2: Contexts
Chapter 3: Biographical and Other Influences
Chapter 4: Agnes Grey
Chapter 5: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Conclusion
Bibliography
