Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and the Tropes of Mastery
p. 49-80
Résumés
“Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and the Tropes of Mastery” explores the way in which these writers cross from the intensely personal, intimate space of the (love) letter into the explosive spaces of fiction and poetry. In the first part of the essay, I explore Charlotte Brontë’s interrogation of the relationship between domination and submission in her four extant letters to her “literature master,” M. Héger, and in Jane Eyre, a fictional “Master Narrative” illuminating the conflicting economies of vocation, authority, gender, and desire. In the second part of the essay, I explore the ways in which Emily Dickinson’s “reading” of Brontë’s Jane Eyre leads to a re-writing and a re-visioning of that text in new forms and “unforeseen sequences.” By focusing on the dialectics of binding (in Dickinson’s “Master Letters”) and unbinding (in Dickinson’s letters and poems), I propose that Dickinson conceives of writing as a form of radical–antinomian–inquiry. Ultimately, the essay seeks to reveal the links between gender, exile, and the writing of endlessness.
Cette étude examine un modèle d’écriture dans lequel le désir de maîtrise, l’« obscure appropriation » du texte, cède le pas à la dialectique de la mémoire et de l’oubli, de l’ouverture et de la clôture, de la vision et de la transgression. Lorsque Dickinson passe de la lecture à l’écriture, une « connivence secrète » se fait jour par laquelle les mots et l’œuvre tout entière des deux femmes s’éclairent et se hantent mutuellement. Le présent essai n’est pas une « étude d’influence, » mais bien plutôt l’analyse de conjonctions mystérieuses, une méditation sur deux écrivains dont chacune élabore un nouvel espace de connaissance et de liberté en inscrivant son moi « autrement » que dans les conventions discursives de la culture et de la littérature de son époque.
Charlotte Brontë, tout comme Emily Dickinson, quitte l’espace intensément personel et intime de la lettre (de la lettre d’amour, surtout) pour aller vers l’espace explosif de la fiction et de la poésie. Dans un premier temps, j’explore la façon dont Brontë met en question et en scène la relation entre domination et soumission à travers les quatre lettres qui nous sont parvenues de sa correspondance avec son « maître en littérature, » M. Héger, ainsi que dans Jane Eyre, « Récit de Maîtrise » fictif qui met en lumière les conflits opposant la vocation, l’autorité, les genres et le désir. Dans cette œuvre de jeunesse, où le « Maître » est le Logos, féminisme et téléologie ne peuvent manquer de s’affronter, et le conflit naît au moment où le désir qu’a Brontë de contrôler la force de la Parole se heurte à ce qu’elle reconnaît être comme son exclusion hors de tous les modèles d’élucidation patrilinéaire. Dans un deuxième temps, j’examine les façons dont, en relisant Jane Eyre, Dickinson est amenée à ré-viser et réécrire ce roman sous des formes nouvelles, en « suites inattendues. » Me concentrant sur la pratique dickinsonienne de la reliure et de la déliaison dans les “Master Letters” et dans les fascicules, je suggère que l’écriture est pour Dickinson une forme radicale, voire antinomienne, d’investigation. Enfin, je cherche à mettre au jour les liens qui unissent les genres (genders), l’exil et l’écriture de l’infini.
Texte intégral
All that is written in this book should be clear and legible.
Patrick Brontë’s inscription in his daughters’ exercise book
The language of the heart is ungrammatical.
Jack Spicer
Part I. Signature/Forgery/Fiction
The Hush
1When Charlotte Brontë was still quite young, she announced her intention to “get a stake in life.” The object of her search underwent considerable transformation over the years, but her ambition drove her on until she died. Charlotte Brontë studied mastery: embedded in all her writings is an obsession—considered, rigorous, conflicted—with the will to power. Though she was, by her own description, small, dumpy, and insignificant, it was Charlotte alone who assaulted the publishing world, forcing the sisters’ single volume of poetry into print, then writing and publishing four novels before dying at the age of thirty-eight. During the Brontës’ lives together she acted as publicist and critic, often ruthlessly judging their collective talents and shortcomings. After their deaths, her fingerprints would be found all over the proof pages of newly revised editions of the Poems, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey.1This fascination with mastery was not, however, the outgrowth of megalomania, or of a selfishness buried deeply within Charlotte Brontë’s unconscious. Rather, Charlotte Brontë’s obsession followed her conviction that defining her relationship to mastery also involved defining her relationship to gender, language, authority, and God. Unlike her father, whose literal fight with blindness came almost as poetic retribution for his failure to recognize the contradictions inherent in his own rise to power, Charlotte Brontë stared into the very core of unresolved conflict. To her, a single woman writing on the margins, transgression presented itself not only as a fear but as an opportunity.
2Charlotte Brontë’s mastery of the Bible amazed her family and her teachers: her familiarity with both testaments seems to have been exceptional even for a clergyman’s daughter. But the Bible was not a book of comfort. The Revelation of St. John underwrites Jane Eyre’s most discordant assertion of power: “I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” Hidden within this promise is a threat Charlotte Brontë dared not ignore. The experience of mastery, the privilege of bearing witness to the Spirit, required the utter annihilation of the self: “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of my God . . . . I will write upon him my new name” (Rev. 3: 12). The beauty and the terror of Revelation comes fully upon us when voices out-of-time speak simultaneously, when the single identity of man is made one with God’s multiplicity and His nothingness.
3The crisis Charlotte Brontë faced in her writing is linked to her attraction to two kinds of mastery–one which ceaselessly asserts the self against God’s name, and one that embraces namelessness. This crisis, or rather Brontë’s hesitation in the face of it, falls like a shadow over the various bodies of her work. In the early stages of her career, Charlotte Brontë chose to explore a form of mastery aligned with brutal and violent self-assertion. Later, however, she reconsidered the metaphysical consequences of her choice. Having once broken the law of the Father by exploiting the blasphemous potential of language, Charlotte Brontë could not cherish the hope of her ultimate transcendence. Yet she was still able to explore the coordinates and dimensions of endlessness. In the silence that attends her exclusion from immortality, the “self” can begin and begin again its endless generation; in the space of heretical narrative, mastery depends upon the writer’s ability to defy the pressures of a text towards its conclusion. In Jane Eyre, therefore, mastery figures as suspension. It is that moment, or that break, when Charlotte Brontë’s admiration for a mastery joined to violent subordination gives way to an admiration of the mastery of mastery itself, that interests me.
4Contemporaries of the Brontë sisters often remarked on their extreme reticence. To speak or to write, other than in secret, took immense energy and resolve. It is possible, then, that if Charlotte Brontë had remained in Haworth, in the Angrian chrysalis of pure imagination unrent by the conflicting economies of power and desire, she would never have experienced a break into language.2 The signs of this break are manifested most clearly first in a series of letters written during 1836 to her close friend Ellen Nussey, and then, eight years later, in four remarkable letters to Constantin Héger, her literature “Master” in Brussels. Together, these two cycles of letters form the first moment of Charlotte Brontë’s explorations of mastery. Only after a careful reevaluation of both cycles, only after turning with and returning to each of them, can we begin a re-reading of Jane Eyre, where the hush of the double ending resists the very notion of ending.
Thresholds
5In her study of the Brontës’ devotion to nature, Enid Duthie writes, “It was a landscape which, as part of the sweep of the moors on a spur of the Pennines, must have awed them at first with its vastness. The heathery slopes stretched, fold upon fold, to the horizon. There was no single spectacular feature, no soaring mountain against the skyline for the eye to focus on.”3 Here, where borders blur and time is optical illusion, the imagination moves fluidly and organically into words becoming poems becoming . . . In the series of hallucinations Charlotte Brontë experienced during her stay at Roe Head, she strained to recover the boundlessness and indeterminacy of that imaginative terrain. Summer. 1836. She flung up the sash:
. . . sound of inexpressible sweetness came on a dying gale from the south, I looked in that direction-Huddersfield and the hills beyond it were all veiled in blue mist, the woods of Hopton and Heaton Lodge were clouding the water-edge and the Calder silent but bright was shooting among them like a silver arrow . . . . Then came on me rushing impetuously all the mighty phantasm that we had conjured from nothing to a system strong as some religious creed. I felt as if I could have written gloriously-I longed to write.
(“Roe Head Journal,” August, 1836)4
6But the enforced regimen of Roe Head, where the curriculum was largely determined by Mrs. Chapone’s prescriptions in Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), was spiritually deadening. Time and again, Charlotte Brontë’s visionary moments were punctured by mundane reminders of her servitude: “But just then a Dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited” (“Roe Head Journal,” August, 1836).
7Charlotte Brontë had obeyed her summons to teach at Roe Head without a murmur of protest. This personal sacrifice would enable her brother Branwell to travel to London to attend the Royal Academy. If his progress spelled her paralysis, so be it. But when Charlotte Brontë’s hypochondria erupted into the full-blown spiritual crisis recorded in her early letters to Ellen Nussey, more than her fear of moral unworthiness was at stake.5 The sheer excessiveness of her language hid a suppressed impetus for creativity. As she castigated her “deadness” and revealed her terror of doctrinaire Calvinism, she also reveled in the language of abjection. Instead of simply voicing the fears and doubts assailing her, Charlotte Brontë betrayed her writerly resolve (mastery) in the face of annihilation (revelation):
Don’t deceive yourself by imagining that I have a bit of real goodness in me. My Darling, if I were like you, I should turn my face Zion-ward . . . . But I am not like you. If you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up . . . you would pity me and I daresay despise me. But, Ellen, I know the treasures of the Bible, and love and adore them. I can see the Well of Life in all its clearness and brightness; but when I stoop down to drink the pure waters, they fly from my lips as if I was Tantalus.
(Roe Head, May 10th, 1836)6
8Interposed between Charlotte Brontë and Zion is the imagination that devours good works; interposed between the self as writer and the self abandoning self is her word. Crossing and re-crossing the ground of the Scriptures, Charlotte Brontë still fails to heed the invitation of John-Christ-God: “And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst, come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (Rev. 22: 17). To give oneself up to the Spirit, to approach the Bridegroom, is as perilous as it is desirable. Wedding bans may summon her away from her vocation, just as here Charlotte Brontë’s knowledge of the Bible paradoxically excludes her from the feasting table. The pure waters of the well of life, or rather the words that can speak them, tantalize without quenching: they recede from the mouth that tries to utter them, and that utters blasphemy instead: “You cannot imagine how hard, rebellious, and intractable all my feelings are. When I begin to study on the subject, I almost grow blasphemous, atheistical in my sentiments” (W & S, 1:143).
9In her grief, her guilt, and her isolation, Charlotte Brontë turned to Ellen Nussey for sympathy and moral certitude: “I wish I could see you my Darling. I have lavished the warmest affections of a very hot, tenacious heart upon you” (W & S, 1: 143). But Brontë’s daring also led her to fix a gulf between them: “I am not like you” is a negation that cannot be traversed. For months, Ellen tried to comfort and succor her school friend, and, when Charlotte Brontë seemed beyond the effects of consolation, she piously preserved her letters for posterity. It is a cruel irony that, many years later, in a letter to her publishers, Charlotte confessed, “When I first saw Ellen, I did not care for her . . . . If she attempts to read poetry, or poetic prose aloud, I am irritated and deprive her of the book.”7 Like many women of her time, Ellen Nussey was a poor reader and a restrained correspondent. Her consult to Charlotte, proffered sincerely, stressed patience and submission. Yet Nussey’s passivity and conventional restraint unleashed in Charlotte a power that had lain dormant since her arrival at Roe Head. Again, Charlotte deprived her of the book–this time metaphorically–and the religious trials which made 1836 so disturbing and elating, came to an abrupt conclusion: during the Christmas holidays, when Charlotte had a brief reprieve from her duties at Roe Head, she wrote to Robert Southey, poet laureate of England, sending along with a brief personal introduction a few pages of her work.
Intrusions
10“By a strange fatality,” reports Winifred Gerin, “Charlotte’s letter . . . reached [Southey] on the return from a long and saddening pilgrimage to the haunts of his childhood and youth in the West Country . . . . The valedictory nature of the visit . . . had induced an elegiac state of mind peculiarly out of harmony with the hopes and visions of his young and eager correspondent.”8 In fact, it would have been an even stranger felicity had Southey’s response been other than patronizing. A thoroughly orthodox man, a gentleman, he could only hope that ladies would refrain from composing Byronic verses: “The day dreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind . . . . Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be” (W & S, 1:87). Southey’s letter, received after a passage of two and a half months, had a curious effect on Charlotte Brontë. At first glance, her reply seems perfectly self-effacing. The language of abjection that had been so marked in the letters to Nussey returns here in full force:
I cannot rest until I have answered your letter, even though by addressing you a second time [emphasis added] I should appear a little intrusive; but I must thank you for the kind and wise advice you have condescended to give me . . . . At the first perusal of your letter I felt only shame and regret that I had ever ventured to trouble you with my crude rhapsody. I felt a painful heat rise to my face when I thought of the quires of paper I had covered with what once gave me so much delight but which was now only a source of confusion . . . . Following my father’s advice-who from my childhood has counseled me, just in the wise and friendly tone of your letter-I have endeavored to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfill . . . I try to deny myself; and my father’s approbation amply rewarded me for the privation . . . . I trust I shall never more feel ambitious to see my name in print [emphasis added]; if the wish should arise, I’ll look at Southey’s letter and suppress it . . . . That letter is consecrated.
(W & S, 1:157-58)
11And yet as the letter continues, each sentence escalates in a play of force, and the turnings and re-turnings of the text, its “intrusiveness” unleash the conflict and violence at the heart of her message. Suppression and denial feed from the same source as power and desire.
12Charlotte Brontë’s intrusiveness was not exceptional, but part of a larger pattern and context. At this crucial juncture in English history, rising in the world involved trespassing on forbidden territory. The negotiation of the rift between the old agrarian order and the new industrial order often proved devastating, and the signs of upheaval were everywhere present. Far from remaining shielded from historical crisis, Haworth, and the West Riding area generally, were at the center of the conflict. According to Terry Eagleton, “[The Brontës] lived… through an aspect of the events which Karl Marx described in Das Kapital as the most horrible tragedy of English history.”9 Machine breaking, reform agitation, the Poor Laws, the Plug Strikes, and Chartism entered Charlotte Brontë’s imagination against her will, and the iron bridgework of her novel is shored up and tom by these historical conditions.
13From the crises of law and class and order, of the Angrian and agrarian against the industrial, the crisis of gender must not be excluded. Charlotte Brontë’s sensitivity to models of production was concurrent with her consciousness of the modes of textual reproduction. Southey’s letter is “consecrated” not only, or even principally, because of his literary reputation, but more simply because of his gender. Southey’s admonitions repeat her father’s and echo God the Father’s; indeed, the Son begotten by the Father “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” describes a Christian model of production in which the words of poetic language are authorized through direct patrilineal enlightenment. Robert Southey, poet laureate and Father of English letters, disperses his words legitimately; underwritten by the Logos, his words will ultimately be re-gathered by it. In a woman’s mouth, however, words may turn to stones; her letters must be buried–like the dead–out of sight. And where can she rest if the immortality of her discourse is always placed in jeopardy? Outside law and legitimacy–an outlaw–her restlessness spells her endlessness.
Signatures
“The signature which you suspected of being fictitious is my real name. Again, therefore must sign myself €C. Brontë.” -CB to Southey
14When Charlotte Brontë wrote to Southey, she signed the letter with her Christian name. But even this assertion of coincidence between the one who writes and the one who signs failed to legitimize the words themselves: in this case, the moment of signing coincided with the moment in which Charlotte Brontë must resign “all hope of ever seeing my name in print.” Moreover, the name that appears to Southey as a forgery is in fact just that: originally “Brunty” or “Prunty,” Charlotte’s father changed the name when he escaped the crushing poverty of his childhood home in Ireland by attending Cambridge University. He never returned to his origins, and inscribed in the new name was his ambition, his yearning for social status, and his shame at having broken so ruthlessly with the past.10 The early and ignominious death of his only son, Branwell Brontë, cut off all hopes of the name’s passage into future generations and left him utterly bereft. Charlotte Brontë remembered that, at the time, “he cried out his losses like David for that of Absolom–my son! my son! and refused at first to take comfort” (W & S, 2:261). After only a few brief years, the Brontë line came to an end.
15The family legacy of ambition, however, could still be claimed and perpetuated. Thus, when Charlotte Brontë created aliases such as “Charles Tompkins” and later “Currer Bell,” she exploded the potential of self-making against signature, of fiction crossing (out) name. In Jane Eyre, she would master her original namelessness by continually re-presenting the self. First, however, she had to speak against the wall of silence, and let her intrusiveness be a force in itself, a bulwark against absence. By writing to Southey “a second time,” Charlotte Brontë was taking a first step towards her own autonomy. In her correspondence with Constantin Héger, the terrible cost of such autonomy was assessed and paid.
Devoirs
I feel an absolute conviction that, if the advantage were allowed us, it would be the making of us for life. Papa will perhaps think it a wild and ambitious scheme; but whoever rose in the world without ambition? When he left Ireland to go to Cambridge, he was as ambitious as I am now.
(CB to Elizabeth Bran well, Sept. 29th, 1841)
16Much has been made of Charlotte Brontë’s relationship with Constantin Héger, the austere and distinguished rhetoric professor she studied with in Brussels between February 1842 and January 1844, but slight attention has been paid to the correspondence between them, or to the place of that correspondence in Charlotte Brontë’s development as a novelist. In A Strange Way of Killing, however, Meg Harris Williams argues that “the relationship with Héger fell into two distinct parts: the actual relationship in Brussels (a period of mutual teaching followed by the ‘withdrawal of the light of his countenance’), and the one-sided relationship of the correspondence from Haworth.”11 It is the latter phase of the relationship, the phase that, following the “withdrawal of the light of his countenance,” takes place in shadow, that wants the space of interest here.
17“A Letter,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend” (L330). In the four extant letters that Charlotte Brontë wrote to Constantin Héger there is no sense of exchange, no interplay of voices–only one spectral mind testing and guarding its exile. What is striking about this correspondence is not simply its hysterical excesses, but, rather, its determined interrogation of authority, silence, fragmentation, and blindness. Though Charlotte Brontë probably believed she was in love with her “literature Master,” she also believed passionately in the possibilities of language. Even after she realized that her love was unrequited, she wrote on, continuing the charade of obedience and domination until she reached the point at which the one term erupts into the other. In the end, Charlotte Brontë’s letters would escape Héger’s gaze by crossing from French–his native tongue–back into English, and, almost, by crossing from an intensely personal space into a fictional one.12
18Monsieur Héger, a cautious man whose early hopes of becoming a barrister had faded into satisfaction with a lycee professorship, “authorized” Charlotte Brontë to write to him once every six months following her return to Haworth. She adhered to this edict for as long as she could, and the earliest extant letters written in Charlotte’s hand reveal her desire to conform to Héger’s strictures and her confidence that their separation was only temporary. At first, convinced that “I shall see you again some day,” Charlotte Brontë wrote to reduce the distance between them and to prepare for reunion. Later, however, the letters became exercises in atonement and the expiation of sins. In 1844, she confessed, “Ah Monsieur! je vous ai écrit une fois une lettre peu raisonnable, parce que le chagrin me serrait le coeur, mais je ne le ferai plus,”13 and emphasized a new willingness to counter past transgressions by repeating old lessons. Fearful that at their long awaited meeting she would stand mute before him, Charlotte Brontë undertook to memorize half a page of French each morning. Behind every litany, there is a logic; love keeps faith by intoning words: “… et j’ai un plaisir à apprendre cette leçon—monsieur—quand je prononce les mots français il me semble que je cause avec vous.”14
19Never does Charlotte Brontë take liberties or improvise upon the text of her old lessons as she recites them, and her reluctance to deviate from the preprinted pages is also a sign of her willingness to observe certain borders and abide by certain restrictions. Still, even as early as 1844, the year in which she first wrote to Héger, she was challenging his authority by writing “out of turn.” Had her letter been composed as a response to one of his communications, Charlotte Brontë might have lawfully given vent to her feelings. In writing out of order, however, she undermined Héger’s privileged position as the author of their discourse and exposed him to the violence of a voice speaking unbidden. She went further. In the same letter, she played upon his disappointments, the early loss of his chosen vocation, while imaginatively affirming her own calling:
[A]utrefois je passais des journées, des semaines, des mois entiers à écrire et pas tout à fait sans fruit puisque Southey et Coleridge . . . en ont bien voulu témoigner leur approbation—mais à présent j’ai la vue trop faible pour écrire—si j’écrivais beaucoup je deviendrais aveugle. Cette faiblesse de vue est pour moi une terrible privation—sans cela savez-vous ce que je ferais Monsieur? —j’écrirais un livre et je le dédierais à mon maître de littérature—au seul maître que j’ai jamais eu—à vous Monsieur.
I used to pass entire days, weeks, months in writing and not fruitlessly for Southey and Coleridge . . . were good enough to express their approval—but at present my sight is too weak to write—were I to write much I should become blind. This weakness of sight is a terrible privation—without which do you know what I should do Monsieur? I should write a book and dedicate it to my literature master-to the only master I ever had—to you Monsieur.
(CB to Monsieur Héger, 24 July 1844)
20When Charlotte Brontë imaginatively dedicates her future work to her literature-master, she also imaginatively inscribes–and circumscribes–him within her authoritative text. A dedication is a kind of engraving, a grave in which one buries one’s masters while loving them. The ground of the text that sweeps out beyond the dedication cannot be traversed by the original master; it is a continually shifting ground on which he is always displaced or placed at risk. Ultimately, Charlotte Brontë must risk Héger to the English language; only then will her letters undergo a transformation into literature. In 1844, she was not prepared to do this, and her letters, like her devoirs, are composed entirely in French–a language which she could control only imperfectly. But the thought had occurred to her: “Je vous ai souvent dit en français combien je vous respecte–combien je suis redevable à votre bonté, à vos conseils, je voudrais le dire une fois en Anglais.”15
For me, the universe is dumb,
Stone-deaf, and blank, and wholly blind;
Life I must bound; existence sum,
In the strait limits of one mind.
That mind, my own. Oh! narrow cell:
Dark-imageless-a living tomb!
There must I sleep, there wake and dwell
Content, with palsy, pain, and gloom.
(C. Brontë, from “Reason,” 1845)
21After a brief period of “high glee” in October 1844, during which Charlotte Brontë seemed to rally, she plunged back into darkness. The opening paragraph of her January 1845 letter is written against the nearly overwhelming forces of despair. Héger’s failure to respond to her petition for a single letter or a hurried note left her bitter and desponding. Here, negation replaces salutation; the word no bores into the prose and reverberates: “Non, rien . . . . Je n’ai rien de la part de Monsieur Héger . . . ni lettre ni message.’”16 Images of a bird—like starvation— “The poor have not much to sustain them–they ask only for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table”—waste the very body of the letter, and in 1845, Charlotte confessed, “je ne saurais que faire d’une amité entière et complète–je n’y suis pas habituee.”17 Finally, her emotional hunger is expressed simply as the unremitting silence that incarcerates her, and that at last floods to an (open) end: “On souffre en silence tant qu’on en a la force et quand cette force manque on parle sans trap mesurer ses paroles.”18 Having reached the very limits of the French language, having passed beyond the measured music of its cadences, Charlotte Brontë moved to accept the conditions of a fundamentally different grammar, and the harshness of her Mother tongue.
22On the eve of winter, she chose to discontinue her correspondence with Constantin Héger. In her last (extant) letter to him, Charlotte Brontë bitterly strikes out all recollections of her work as assistant governess at Héger’s L’Ecole. “I repudiate it,” she writes, and with it, no doubt, the social code that made her both gentlewoman and servant, threat and outcast. More importantly, so long as she may retain the privilege of writing to Héger once each November and once each May, she will no longer ask him to acknowledge her messages in anything other than a purely perfunctory manner. Héger’s letters would, of course, be welcome, but they would function only as signs of his propriety and his continental etiquette, not as evidence of his sympathy or higher understanding. His silence, on the other hand, would cease to have any meaning, or authority, at all. Finally, Charlotte Brontë added to the body of the French letter the English postscript that would serve as her true signature. “I must say one word to you in English,” she began, and the word amounts to a betrayal: “I am forgetting the French language . . . . Farewell my dear Master—may God protect you with special care and crown you with peculiar blessings.”19 It is this confession of forgetfulness that delivers her to her first language, and. almost, to the first word of The Professor, quickly followed by Jane Eyre.
Postscript
23Monsieur Héger handled Charlotte Brontë’s letters with extreme carelessness. According to Robert Keefe, he used the margins to ‘‘jot down the name and address of his shoemaker and other small items . . . before he tore up the letter[s] and threw [them] away.”20 But then the letters left him with no other option: they were unanswerable, and a letter that cannot be answered is not a letter at all. And so Héger, with typical frugality, forced the words to turn back into paper, turned the fragments into grease-paper and shopping lists. Compelled to speak from the far side of silence, Charlotte Brontë finally silenced her literature-master and came fully into her own power. It was not easy; it took years of writing and re-writing before the ‘‘withdrawal of the light of his countenance” became the dark type-script and printer’s proofs of her first novel.
Part II. America’s Memory, c. 1859
EDR [Brontë, Charlotte, 1816-1855]
1.2.15 Jane Eyre: an autobiography. By Currer Bell
[pseud.]. Copyright edition. In two volumes . . .
Leipzig, Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1850.
2v. 15.5cm. (Half-titles: Collection of British authors. Tauchnitz. v. 145-146)
From the library removed from Emily Dickinson’s home; contains autograph of S. H. Dickinson with note from “S. B.” [i.e. Samuel Bowles].
Catalogue record of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre found in the Dickinson Library. Reproduced courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University Library.
24Silence of ocean. Breaking. Across the Atlantic and the hush of four years’ time, one American woman was reading Jane Eyre. Enclosed in her father’s house, writing in isolation from a culture that would not, perhaps could not, hear her, Emily Dickinson drew strength and courage from English whisperings. Her American “preceptor,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was, like Constantin Héger, kind, conventional, and discouraging. In a correspondence that spanned over twenty years, he never once revised his original opinion of Dickinson’s work or offered any substantial encouragement. Though Higginson’s letters to her have been misplaced (destroyed?)–a strange silence in the historical record–Dickinson’s disappointment, bitterness, and submerged ambition reverberate in her replies with the full force of Charlotte Brontë’s “postscript.” On 7 June 1862, she wrote to Higginson for the third time:
I smile when you suggest that I delay “to publish”—that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin–If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her—if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase—and the approbation of my Dog, would forsake me—then—My Barefoot-Rank is better—21
25The fall into obscurity Charlotte Brontë steadfastly anticipated during the last years before her death at age thirty-eight, was daily experienced by Emily Dickinson. Utter anonymity replaced the need for an alias; perfect liminality led into infinity. Like Jane Eyre, whose survival depended upon her willingness to cut her ties with the past and re-invent her history, Dickinson’s survival on the edges of language depended on her ability to explode the concept of identity and to continuously redefine the self. To write, “I’m nobody!”22 is an astonishing appropriation of power, and with it, Dickinson, even more than Charlotte Brontë, challenged the linguistic composition of power itself. Charlotte Brontë and Emily Dickinson, two sheltered, diminutive women, dared to challenge the authority of the dominant discourse and construct a new discourse freed from the patrilineal, enlightened center of power. Knowing the letter of the law, each woman gladly transgressed it; “arraigned at [her] own bar,” each writer sentenced herself to eternal banishment and banishment from eternity.
26In 1848, Charlotte Brontë recorded that "About two months since I had a letter from my publishers—Smith and Elder—saying that Jane Eyre had a great run in America, and that a publisher there had consequently bid high for the first sheets of a new work by Currer Bell” (BL, 1: 435). Later, when she wrote to Mrs. Gaskell inviting her to Haworth, she compared the savage Yorkshire village to the American frontier:
When you take leave of the domestic circle and turn your back on Plymouth Grove to come to Haworth, you must do it in the spirit which might sustain you in case you were setting out on a brief trip to the backwoods of America. Leaving behind your husband, children, and civilisation, you must come out to barbarism, loneliness, and liberty. The change will perhaps do good, if not too prolonged.
(BL, 2: 329)
27No one writing in nineteenth-century America would have recognized the link between exile and liberty and grasped the truth in Brontë’s oppositions more clearly than Emily Dickinson. Yet Dickinson necessarily read Charlotte Brontë from a distance. “Icebergs italicize the sea,” she wrote, implying that the Atlantic is crossed only at great peril. When in 1885 her friend and future publisher sailed to Europe for a vacation, Dickinson warned: “‘Sweet Land of Liberty’ is a superfluous Carol till it concerns ourselves—then it outrealms the Birds. I saw the American Flag last Night in the shutting West, and I felt for every Exile. I trust you are homesick,” then signed herself “America” (L1004). Barbarism, loneliness, and liberty are connected with history and the imagination of origins. In the nineteenth-century, America’s memory of England was still a double memory of kinship and estrangement; the distance between the two was recorded in American writers’ attempts to re-invent English literary tradition in their own terms. The soft accents of Charlotte Brontë’s English must become Dickinson’s “axe shrill singing in the woods—” (P140).
28In poems such as “Before I got my eye put out,” “It would have starved a Gnat—,” and “My Life had stood—a/Loaded Gun—,” Dickinson reveals her indebtedness to Charlotte Brontë’s work. The greatest and most problematic debt, however, is not manifested in the poems per se, but in three fragments now designated the “Master Letters.”
Master.
If you saw a bullet
hit a Bird—and he told you
he was’nt shot—you might weep
at his courtesy, but you would
certainly doubt his word—23
29The history of the “Master Letters” is a history of gaps and lacunae. Probably written in the late 1850s and the early 1860s when long acquaintance with anonymity first dared Dickinson to test her freedom, they were not unsealed again until death blew open the door of her bedroom-study on May 15, 1886. Hidden, even as her own muse had been cloaked, for more than two decades, they were also sequestered from the New England custom of burning the correspondence of the dead, and, for a while, from the interests of biographers, critics, and editors. To this date, no evidence exists to confirm that these three letters, written on loose sheets of stationery in pencil and in ink, often heavily marked and revised, were ever posted, and the identity of the “Master” remains an enigma.
30Yet today, Ralph W. Franklin, an influential textual scholar and the most recent editor of The Master Letters, maintains that Dickinson “did not write letters as part of a fictional genre” and that “these [letters] are surely part of a much larger correspondence yet unknown to us” (ML, 5). A poet, a fugitive, a single woman, Dickinson must be traced to the doorstep of her “Master” and married. Like biographers and critics before him, Franklin continues to search for the single man who will solve the mystery of her house of art. She eludes him, strikes out alone.
31Franklin’s pursuit has blinded him to the risks Dickinson was taking with language, to her transgression of genre boundaries, and to her re-ordering of language along a vertical axis. Far from being pleading missives misdirected, these letters are poems aimed into inevitability. In them, nature is a fragmented space where the disturbing autonomy of the poet’s voice is evidence not of her eccentricity, but of her elliptical and extreme refiguration of English literary tradition. When I listen to these poems I hear the syntax of Shakespeare, Herbert, Ruskin, Browning, and Brontë strained and truncated in a new idiom. As an American woman reader, always doubly displaced from the locus of European meaning, my reading of Jane Eyre proceeds through a reading of Emily Dickinson’s earlier one; it is a reading of text superimposed upon text, tradition upon tradition.
32Charlotte Brontë’s letters to Monsieur Héger reach toward a fictional space; Dickinson’s “Master Letters” begin within that fictional space while also extending beyond its parameters into the spaces of love. The third love letter is, among many other things, Dickinson’s re-visioning of Jane Eyre. Beginning with an old image of subjection, with the magnificent conceit of the felled bird, it is a poem that explodes the consequences of Charlotte Brontë’s earlier explorations of the mechanisms of mastery. Forever unfinished, it is a fragment from a song sequence revealing the ambiguity of desire’s progress while also withholding the eschatological moment of salvation. Here, all final referents are forsaken; all signs are misleading. In the midst of what Simone Weil named “impossible pain and joy,” in the midst of a definition of poetry, the struggle towards a definition of identity is transformed by a volcanic eruption into synthesis and charged silence. Truth is glimpsed in the self’s violent and joyful transfiguration.
+No Rose, yet felt myself
a’bloom,
No Bird—yet rode in Ether—
(ML, 45)
is Emily Dickinson’s image—melody–
of mastery as suspension.
(Scene) of Angels
33According to Peter Allen Dale, “Jane Eyre is constructed to a pattern that seems to belong more to the seventeenth century than to the nineteenth,” for “it is John Bunyan, more than anyone else, who underlines the conception of this book [as] a spiritual journey that seeks to move from the Vanity Fair of this world to the secure repose of the Celestial City.”24 Yet as Dale goes on to observe, the final apocalyptic perspective of the novel is highly ambiguous: though the paradigm of Christian salvation closes the novel, it may leave Jane Eyre outside the gates. Human and divine perspectives are not easily reconciled, and in Charlotte Brontë’s preternaturally modernist work we already hear intimations of an essential disorder.
34Like the great secular narratives of the nineteenth century–the explanatory theories of Darwin, Freud, and Marx–Charlotte Brontë’s novel searches for a teleological end, and plots to make “chronological sequentiality reveal itself as . . . immanent structure.”25 If the fluent negotiation between the material and the spiritual is hindered by her (and her century’s) counter-imagination of liminality and the loss of a center, Brontë may still mask the tension between perspectives, and, in Jane Eyre, between endings. Two endings, not one: Jane’s, a ceaseless murmuring, an earthly paradise in which the consummation of desire is sanctioned, even sanctified; St. John Rivers’, an assertion of blind faith in the face of death, a premonition of God’s paradise. In the final chapters of the novel, Brontë’s prelapsarian language lures the reader into imagining that Jane and Rochester have found their way to Eden, that their ending together is sanctioned by the last words of St. John Rivers. Such negotiation would naturally have to be a matter of degrees: the degree of Jane’s innocence, the degree of Rochester’s humility, would have to reach a level of intensity so high that their sexual fulfillment is equivalent to St. John Rivers’ spiritual marriage to Christ.
35Yet paradoxically, the very edenic language that Brontë (or Jane) hopes will effect a comforting closure ultimately illumines her exclusion from Rivers’ model of faith. At the end of her tale, Jane is as “absolutely” in love with Rochester as when he had “stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun.”26 Jane’s blasphemous desire to overpass all limitations and to “open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended—a tale my imagination created and narrated continuously” (JE, 141), are neither renounced nor sublimated. Rather, in her penultimate address to the “dear reader,” she declares herself a new Eve: “I hold myself supremely blest–blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever . . . more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh” (JE, 475-6). And, though Rochester “begins to see and acknowledge the hand of God” in his fall and recovery, and to experience “remorse, repentance, and the wish for reconcilement to my maker,” his very prayers are still idolatrous: “I asked of God . . . . I pleaded; and the alpha and omega of my heart’s wishes broke involuntarily from my lips in the words–‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’” (JE, 471). In the end, the “True keep coming” into the lovely dark of idolatry; redemption is forgotten in the edenic restlessness of a voice and an imagination that cannot cease.
36Perhaps Charlotte Brontë grew fearful of Jane’s conclusions. Perhaps, when the undertow of her imagery threatened to pull her beyond all hope of salvation, she sought rest in orthodoxy. And yet, when Brontë moves to write the ending proper to Jane Eyre, she is strangely prevented. The final words of the novel belong not to Brontë, not to Jane, and not even to St. John Rivers, through whom they are conveyed: they belong only to St. John of the Apocalypse: “Amen; even so, come, Lord Jesus.”
37Emily Dickinson, who knew that sound and meaning are often synonymous, heard the discord in Brontë’s Eden. She knew that it is impossible to mediate between what Dale calls “the experience of a worldly, decidedly sexual love and a form [of love] conducive to salvation,”27 and approached the consummation of desire with profound distrust. In her early letters to Susan Gilbert, the childhood friend who would later become her sister-in-law, she expresses her suspicion that marriage can neither slake desire nor offer rest:
. . . but to the wife, Susie, sometimes the wife forgotten, our lives perhaps seem dearer than all others in the world; you have seen flowers at morning, satisfied with the dew, and those same sweet flowers at noon with their heads bowed in anguish before the mighty sun . . . . They will cry for sunlight, and pine for the burning noon, tho’ it scorches them, scathes them; they have got through with peace–They know that the man of noon, is mightier than the morning and their life is henceforth to him.
(L93)
38A desire that cannot be satisfied or sublimated must be endlessly deferred. When Emily Dickinson went “out upon Circumference,” out upon the border that “secures Eternity/From presenting–here” (P889), she discovered that the relationship between the physical and metaphysical spheres is not one of perfect concordance or consonance. Reciprocity, if it exists at all, is curiously contrapuntal; consciousness of a transcendent reality always includes a consciousness of our estrangement from it:
“Seen of Angels” scarcely my responsibility . . . When a little Girl I remember hearing that remarkable passage and preferring the “Power,” not knowing at the time that “Kingdom” and “Glory” were included.
(L330)
39Consistently and courageously Emily Dickinson, like Charlotte Brontë, chose to place power and a critique of power at the center of her discourse. The impulse towards self-annihilation through transcendence—one possible reading of “I’m Nobody”—is transfigured through Dickinson’s interrogation of identity in which the very anatomization of the speaking “I” becomes a form of empowerment. A century before Terry Eagleton observed that the characters in Jane Eyre are all fractured versions of the novel’s protagonist, Dickinson decreated the notion of identity by speaking simultaneously as Jane-Rosamund-Rochester-St. John Rivers. The hierarchies of authority and the linearity of progress—so crushing to both writers—are ruptured in Dickinson’s paratactic and elliptical poems. And the ambiguity and instability of power itself is illuminated though Dickinson’s poetic re-ordering of Charlotte Brontë’s images.
Suite in Ether | |
(Victorian English) | (American Plain Style) |
‘Jane, be still; don’t struggle so, like a wild frantic bird that is rending its own plumage in its desperation.’ | If you saw a bullet hit a Bird—and he told you he was’nt shot—you might weep at his courtesy, but you would certainly doubt his word— |
‘Wrapped up in a shawl, I still carried the unknown little child: I might not lay it down anywhere, however tired were my arms–however much its weight impeded my progress, I must retain it . . . .I saw you like a speck on a white track . . . .The blast grew so strong I could not stand . . . . I was shaken; the child rolled from my knee, I lost my balance, fell . . .’ | God made me–Master–I did’nt be–myself–I dont know how it was done–He built the heart in me–Bye and bye it outgrew me–and like the little mother–with the big child–I got tired holding him– |
My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world; almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. | . . . I heard of a thing called “Redemption”–which rested men and women– |
‘I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you . . . as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that Channel . . . come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.’ | . . . Have you the Heart in your breast–Sir–is it set like mine–a little to the left– has it the misgiving–if it wake in the night–perchance– itself to it–a timbrel is it– itself to it a tune? |
‘I know where your heart turns and to what it clings. | These things are holy, Sir, |
I know no medium: I never in my life have known any medium in my dealings with positive, hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between absolute submission and determined revolt. I have always faithfully observed the one, up to the very moment of bursting, sometimes with volcanic vehemence, into the other. | Vesuvius dont talk–Etna dont– [They] said a syllable–one of them– a thousand years ago, and |
A vision, as it seemed to me, had risen at his side . . . . a form clad in pure white . . . and when, after bending to caress Carlo, it lifted up its head, and threw back a veil, there bloomed under his glance a face of perfect beauty . . . . What did St. John Rivers think of this earthly angel?… He had already withdrawn his eyes . . . and was looking at a humble tuft of daisies . . . ‘A lovely evening,’ he said, as he crushed the snowy heads of the closed flowers with his foot. | What would you do with me if I came “in white”? |
Would Daisy disappoint you–no–she would’nt–Sir– | |
We must become one flesh without delay, Jane . . . .‘Mr. Rochester, I have just discovered the sun is far declined from its meridian . . . . Let me look at your watch.’ | Say I may wait for you– |
No woman was ever nearer to her mate then I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh . . . . To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. | . . .it were comfort forever–-just to look in your face, while you looked in mine– |
‘I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.’ | +No Rose, yet felt myself a’bloom, |
She was too enigmatical a being for me to solve in a hour’s interview, and an instinct told me that the slightest attempt at direct cross-examination would make her withdraw into her shell; I could only sit and watch, as one does in the woods; I must name my bird without a gun [emphasis added], as recommended by Emerson.
(T. W. Higginson’s impressions upon first meeting Emily Dickinson)
The Shot Bird’s Progress
40Two endings, not one.
41Dickinson’s letter-poem is about the overwhelming desire for and the impossibility of full union with the Other. By ceaselessly and joyfully performing the division between the “Master” and the supplicant, Dickinson protects Charlotte Brontë’s original purity of purpose, and holds apart Jane Eyre’s two endings. In Dickinson’s “linguistic territory of ferocious morality,”28 there can be no consummation of desire. Waking in the night to “misgiving,” love’s supplicant must yet plead for severance; survival here depends upon the self s/writer’s willingness to transfigure an old trope of subjection, to move outside the melody of the shot bird’s fall.
42At the center of Charlotte Brontë’s novel is Jane’s sudden rejection of the image within which Rochester has imprisoned her: “I am no bird, and no net ensnares me” (JE, 282). At this climax, Jane is beyond the possibility of harm: “Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it,” says Rochester. “If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only let the captive loose” (JE, 344-5). No bird. Outside definition, Jane exists in the pure potential of the negative moment. At this instant, she may venture to revolutionize “identity” and escape forever the cage of his hierarchical system of signification. Yet she fails to seize this chance, and instead, her wager for emancipation is followed by the double acts of consummation and self-cancellation. At the end of her tale—a tale that was supposed to be without end—Jane is not only ensnared in the very image she once fought her way free from, but doomed to the ceaseless repetition of edenic litany: “I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh” (JE, 476).
43Jane Eyre, whose ambiguous status as alien, interloper, and “discord” had formerly been the source of her empowerment, submits to a union of “perfect concordance”; the novel ends on a diminished third. Haunting its final pages is the image of the bird–once an emblem of possibility and pure energy, now become an emblem of crippling incarceration. Rochester, the self-image Jane embraces, appears to her as a “caged eagle” with “nails . . . grown like bird’s claws” (JE, 461). And, though she goes to him bearing water and candles, symbols of redemption and vision, his (and her) eyes remain clouded. Rochester’s “rehumanization”—still incomplete at the novel’s close—cannot lead to their redemption, or to their initiation into a new order of light. The progress of the bird is measured in its downward draw into the dark.
All overgrown by cunning moss,
All interspersed with weed,
The little cage of “Currer Bell”
In quiet “Haworth” laid.
This Bird–observing others
When frosts too sharp became
Retire to other latitudes—
Quietly did the same—
But different in returning—
Since Yorkshire hills are green—
Yet not in all the nests I meet—
Can Nightingale be seen—
Or—
Gathered from many wanderings—
Gethsemane can tell
Thro’ what transporting anguish
She reached the Asphodel!
Soft fall the sounds of Eden
Upon her puzzled ear—
Oh what an afternoon for Heaven,
When “Bronte” entered there!
(MB I, fascicle 7, c. 1859)
44When Emily Dickinson composed her 1859 tribute to Charlotte Brontë, her admiration for her English contemporary did not blind her to Brontë’s limitations. In “All overgrown by cunning moss” images of transport are flanked by images of entrapment: the “little cage of ‘Currer Bell’” is not shattered; “This Bird” does not escape the grid of latitude or the grammar of conformity. Though in the “Preface” to the second edition of Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë shuns convention and calls for a new kind of writing, her early plots still adhere to the principles of formal linear development.
45Emily Dickinson, drawing on Brontë’s example and then drawing beyond it, could be more daring: “I did not deem that Planetary forces annulled–but suffered an Exchange of Territory, or World–” (L280). Her innate ambivalence towards historical and metaphysical systems that disappear “by accident,” and to a notion of progress that “dissolves as it goes” (L280) led her to turn Brontë’s thematic account of crisis into a structural one. In the third “Master Letter,” a soliloquy spoken at the extreme limits of distress, the language of the sacred collides with the violence of secular Anglo-Saxon, and “final intentions” are subject to the forces of openness and negativity.
46To hold apart the two endings of Jane Eyre, Dickinson begins her letter-poem at the instant of greatest crisis, at that moment when, as Frank Kermode writes, “times cross; when our usual apprehension of successive past and future is translated into another order.” Here, “the gap between desire and act is wide. Though certain of the end desired [one] is at strife with [oneself].”29 In Brontë’s narrative, writing becomes a way of stitching up the tear through which Jane becomes “No Bird.” But, in Dickinson’s letter-poem, the seams of the novel are torn out, and ending—always immanent—is held off by desire. Here, in the tear, Brontë’s bird makes its “different return.”
47At all moments nothing is certain and everything is conditional. Though Dickinson’s poem is comprised of a series of propositions—“If you saw a bullet/ hit a Bird—"; “If I came ‘in white’”, etc.–each one hides a dare and a prophecy. Like the language of divination, her formulations are cryptic– coded–and elliptical. Words go in disguise and change sides (of meaning); in the empty spaces of vocation, voice staggers or sings an account of image’s transfiguration: “Bird” becoming “Breath,” “Queen,” “Heart,” “Volcano,” “Master,” “Daisy.” The progress, or the aim, of desire is measured not in its movement towards consummation, but in its flight towards indeterminacy, towards the “‘No’” Dickinson called “the wildest word we consign to Language” (L562). Ultimately, the “shot bird” is itself transfigured into “No Bird”: “No Bird–yet rode in Ether–." And at the open-end of the poem, voice is absorbed in a medium for the transmission of light waves and radiant energy.
Models of Textual Production
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, ) full of grace and truth.
John 1:14
Daisy ‘confessed–
and denied not.’
Dickinson, from the third “Master Letter”
48Jane Eyre’s “autobiography” offers an image of the protagonist as both writer and outcast, poet and stranger, that illumines her dislocation from the Johannine model of production summarized in John 1: 14. Instead of participating in a dialectical movement from darkness to light, blindness to insight, as the text of John does, Brontë’s novel tends finally towards darkness, concluding in Ferndean in “a dark wood.” During the years between 1844 and 1846, when Patrick Brontë’s sight failed dramatically, leaving him a bed-ridden invalid, Charlotte was also beset by recurring fears of blindness. By a strange coincidence, she began Jane Eyre on the morning of her father’s eye operation: just as the light was restored to his eyes, Charlotte attempted to dispel her own metaphysical eclipse. “Quand le corps est paresseux, l’esprit souffre cruellement,” she had once written to Monsieur Héger, continuing, “Je ne connaitrais pas cette léthargie si je pouvais écrire.”30 Writing had the power to rejuvenate her and exorcise the darkness. Each black mark in the writing tablet left an open space, a blank or a light in the spirit.
49But, if writing remained a confession of ambition or an act of self-assertion, it might be attended by divine retribution. The end of Jane Eyre is also a balancing act, a wager between the name (signature) and namelessness. Thus, if Charlotte Brontë’s uncanny repetition of the name “John,” and the title or address “Master,” is a sign of her need to define herself against an exclusively male model of production, it is also a sign of her failure to wholly overcome a model of textual production that dooms her to silence or repetition. The economy of oppression operating in the material world of which Master John Reed is representative is most easily repudiated. John Reed’s brutal proclamation of genealogical ascendancy—an ascendancy tied to inheritance rights—can be crudely countered by child Jane’s physical blows, and more subtly and permanently crushed by Brontë’s authorial control of his fate: dissipated and disgraced, Master John Reed kills himself and is buried just as Jane Eyre begins her rise in the world. His death is inconsequential, and the narrative moves serenely on.
50Or does it? One of the strangest and most disturbing episodes in the novel takes place unexpectedly at Moor House, where Jane encounters St. John Rivers. “Of all the male enemies,” writes Robert Keefe, “the young clergyman represents the ultimate threat to her existence, for he is the only character in the book who is able to understand her fully, to comprehend in its paradoxical completeness her simultaneous expectation of both damnation and divine reward.”31 Moreover, St. John Rivers acts as the link not only between the material and the spiritual worlds, but between the past and the future. By uniting, in one name, St. John, the author of the Apocalypse, with Master John, the illiterate tyrant, Brontë traces a line of violence full circle. When the insatiable lust for power is sublimated it is more formidable, and more perilously challenged. Although Jane does rebel against St. John Rivers by rejecting his marriage proposal, her victory is equivocal. While St. John Rivers reads from the last chapter of Revelation— “May moonlight streaming through the window”—Jane can only confess, “I have no vocation,” and, when confronted by a “visionary messenger,” she cannot “behold the herald” (JE, 427). At the close of the novel, Jane, who has escaped capitulation once, finally succumbs. Instead of asserting her authorial–autobiographical–perspective, she surrenders her text to the Logos, while remaining precariously outside of its protection.
51In the final chapters of Jane Eyre, Brontë makes an unexpected move. Suddenly, she introduces another figure into the narrative, the absent figure of John Eyre, whose coming complicates Jane’s connections to patrilineal legacy and enlightenment. A name, or echo of a name, he makes no actual appearance in the novel; and yet, by bestowing upon Jane a small fortune via his last will and testament, his influence is profound. Once, she had cut all kinship ties and repudiated the system of inheritance that left her a beggar, now she embraces identity, family, and the very same system of inheritance. Thus, while Keefe and others rightly point out that Jane’s triumph over St. John Rivers is a triumph over mediation—“Jane will accept no mediator to recommend her to God”32 she falls into an even more perilous trap: at last, she allows her earthly fate to be mediated by a property settlement, by the intertwined systems of genealogy and patriarchy. Here again, the near identity of names, Jane-John, acts as a warning. For ultimately, Jane Eyre’s acceptance of property coincides with the writing on her of a new name, so that her own name–her proper name–is revealed as without consequence, weightless. Like air. This movement of the proper, this exchange through which identity is again defined within the old economy of landowner (lord) and God (Master), is affirmed by an event which returns the patrilineal to its origin in the Biblical line: the birth to Rochester and Jane of a son: “When his first-born was put into his arms, he could see that the boy had inherited his own eyes, as they once were–large, brilliant, and black” (JE, 476).
52Freed from particularity into particles, released from determination by a human other, Dickinson’s “No Bird” seems to reach into the vision of St. John, into that apocalyptic moment when self is emptied into the Master-Spirit-Word. However, if Dickinson’s “No Bird” sings at the elaborating point of infinity, it will not reveal the past, present, and future as a glorious continuity. Dickinson’s “No Bird” declines paradigm. Born in the throes of crisis, proceeding by flashes of perception and allusion, its course reveals only the impossibility of beginning and ending. Progress in the tear, in the middest, is not measurable. In all of Dickinson’s work, and especially in the “Master Letters,” source is lost in a labyrinth of image and intentions. No reading of her work can be stable or closed; meaning exists and is generated in the slippages between readings, between levels of reading.
53When Jane Eyre breaks from Rochester and travels unknowingly towards St. John Rivers, her carriage halts at a crossroads. Dickinson’s lyrical re-writing of Jane Eyre also sings/snaps at a crossing. At this crossing, there can be no re-gathering of words into the Word, for words are scattered beyond grammar’s recollection. In this lexical landscape of “text pulled from text,”33 temporality and causality are both shams; the line—of poetry, of patrilineal enlightenment—continually breaks and starts in a new direction: “Daisy ‘confessed–/and denied not’.”
54Dickinson’s intense familiarity with the Bible, like Brontë’s, permitted her to incorporate lines from both testaments into her own work with great dexterity, and the elusive lines above are actually a direct allusion to John 1: 20. The slender quotation marks cordoning them off from her own words will not, however, protect them against the daring of the appropriation. In their original context–a context she does not privilege–they convey John’s humility before Christ: John is neither the “Master” nor the light, but only “the voice of one crying in the wilderness” (John 1: 22). Though in Dickinson’s metaphysical drama the veil is not torn and the face of God remains concealed, the crisis itself consecrates her words and her vocation: Daisy’s cry is “hallowed.” And, though she cannot “tell all”–the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega–she can move through the shards of language towards a linguistic conversion. In the end, the “Master Letters” abolish all forms of mediation: instead of perpetuating a model of textual production based on a system of patrilineal enlightenment, there is the light itself. At the crossroads there is a trace of the holy; “No Bird” is flung into the Pleiades, into a pure burning in ether–or eyre.
Toward which forces creep
55“ . . . past which forces retrograde” (P889). Charlotte Brontë and Emily Dickinson both committed their work to power and to chance. Their ambition—shocking even today—seemed to be without bounds. Time and again, violence and vocation twined together in monstrous union:
My life had stood–a
Loaded Gun–
In Corners–till a Day
The Owner passed–identified–
And carried Me away–
(MB II, Fascicle 34, c. 1864)
He prizes me as a soldier would a good weapon.
(JE, 430)
56But who is “he” who aims and fires? Who is the “Master” whose force is felt on every page of Brontë’s novel and who stands behind Dickinson’s ambiguous address? Was “he” themselves? Yes, and no. Their interrogation of the mechanisms of mastery went on and on until the term itself shattered. At last, there was nothing or no one (specific) to point or to fire at: “Master” lets go into multiplicity.
Possibilities:
57Master: Memory. “But this is not to be a regular autobiography: I am only bound to invoke memory where I know her responses will possess some degree of interest” (JE, 115).
58Master: The ideology of class structure.
59Master: Gondol, Byron and “The Prisoner of Chillion.”
60Master: William Makepeace Thackeray reading Jane Eyre; the encounter with gender.
61Master: God’s sovereignty; sovereign Ambition.
62Master: Silence or Vesuvian hunger.
63Master: An open window: the ghost of Emily Brontë.
64Master: The cipher playing inside decipher; the progress of negativity.
65Master: The queens head in a decorative frame on Dickinson’s writing paper.
66In the final chapters of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë begins to test the depths of negativity. The last pages are flooded with negations: “No woman”; “never did I weary”; “no fear of death.” And, though Brontë is unable to make the leap into negativity Dickinson accomplishes, her negations at least point to the dissonance of the novel’s double endings and the gap–the open–between them. By virtue of that dissonance or, rather, by the stranger virtue of the gap itself, Brontë is already illuminating the skewed axes of modernity. Her (and our) hesitation between endings (readings) figures spatially as a blank and temporally as a pause: imprisoned in the gap, we are compelled to acknowledge the fundamental irreconcilability of perspective. No resolution is possible, no complacent closure can be effected, and, despite the lust for power articulated by Jane Eyre and St. John Rivers, the text suspends all claims to mastery. Brontë’s heresy is nothing more than a hesitation between endings, nothing less than the intuition of endlessness.
67Emily Dickinson embraced the force of that heresy. Her writing challenges the tyranny of forms by becoming a scene of transgression, disenfranchisement, cancellation, banishment, brutality, and love. In the “Master Letters,” the fallen bird at last ascends as “No Bird,” as a conceit blown open: outside the law, poetry may still be an unreadable message or a trope of conversion. Unbidden and perhaps unopened at the time of their writing, these three letters must now be opened by us. They await an answer. An answer outside the dimensions of mastery.
68An answer in the tear.
Notes de bas de page
1 There is an abundance, perhaps even an overabundance, of source material on Charlotte Brontë’s life and work. Among those works most crucial to my readings are: Clement K. Shorter’s The Brontës and Their Circle (London: Dent, 1914); T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington, eds. The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendship, and Correspondence, Shakespeare Head Edition, 4. vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1932); Tom Winifrith’s The Brontës and Their Background: Romance and Reality (London: Macmillan, 1973); Christine Alexander, ed., The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, 2 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); and Winifred Gerin’s Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).
2 See Alexander, vol. 2 “The Rise of Angria 1833-1835.”
3 Enid L. Duthie, The Brontës and Nature (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 15.
4 All excerpts from Charlotte Brontë’s “Roe Head Journal” are quoted from Gerin, Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 95-115. The original “Roe Head Journal” is housed at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
5 With the possible exception of Emily, all of the Brontës experienced intense periods of religious crisis. For Charlotte Brontë, depression turned into “religious melancholia” during the period between May 1836 and May 1837 when she was teaching at Roe Head. For an interesting account of this crisis, and of Ellen Nussey’s role in it, see Gerin, pp. 95-115.
6 Quotations from Charlotte Brontë’s letters to Ellen Nussey are from Clement Shorter, The Brontë’s Life and Letters, vol. 1 (New York: Haskell House Publishers, Ltd., 1969) and T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington, eds., The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships, and Correspondence, 4 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1932). Further references in parenthesis in the text are to BL and W & S, respectively.
7 Gerin, p. 62.
8 Ibid., p. 109.
9 Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power. A Marxist Study of the Brontës (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 3.
10 See J. Lock and W. T. Dixon, A Man of Sorrow: The Life, Letters and Times of the Reverend Patrick Brontë (London: Nelson, 1965).
11 Meg Harris Williams, A Strange Way of Killing: The Poetic Structure of Wuthering Heights (Perthshire: Clunie Press, 1987), p. 161.
12 Though only four letters from Charlotte Brontë to Constantin Héger have survived, Mlle. Louise Héger, the professor’s daughter, maintained that a much larger number had been written. For one analysis of their relationship, see also Gerin, app. A, “Mrs. Gaskell and Monsieur Héger,” pp. 568-75. All quotations from the French texts of CB’s letters to M. Héger are from Gerin, app. D, pp. 584-591; references in the text will be to dates only. The English translations are my own.
13 CB to Héger, 24 July 1844: “Ah, Monsieur! I one time wrote you a letter less than reasonable, because sorrow was at my heart, but I should not do so again.”
14 Ibid: “… and I have a pleasure in learning the lesson–monsieur–when I pronounce the French words it seems to me that I am speaking with you."
15 CB to Héger, 24 July 1844: “I have often said in French how much I respect you, how much I am indebted to your generosity, your advice, I would like to say it once in English.”
16 CB to Héger, 8 January 1845: “‘No, nothing . . . . I have nothing for you from Monsieur Héger... neither letter nor message.’”
17 Ibid.: “One suffers in silence as long as one has the power to do so and when that power gives out one speaks without too greatly measuring one’s words.” Power–force, in French–is feminine; it is la force.
18 Ibid.: “I would not know what to do with a friendship entire and complete–1 am not used to it.”
19 CB to Héger, 18 November 1845.
20 Robert Keefe, Charlotte Brontë’s World of Death (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), p. 28.
21 The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols., edited by Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), L265. Further references in parenthesis in the text are to this edition, and are to letter number rather than page number.
22 The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols., edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955), P288. I have also consulted The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols., edited by Ralph W. Franklin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986). Further references in parenthesis in the text are to P and MB, respectively.
23 The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph W. Franklin (Amherst: Amherst College Press, 1986). Franklin’s edition of the three “Master Letters" includes facsimiles of the original documents. The richness of the material details of the manuscripts is here made manifest for the first time. Further references in parenthesis in the text are to ML.
24 Peter Allen Dale, “Charlotte Brontë’s Search for Endlessness,” Religion and Literature 16 (Autumn 1984): p. 1.
25 Penny Boumelha, Charlotte Brontë (London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1990), p. 28.
26 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, edited by Q. D. Leavis (New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 302, hereinafter abbreviated to JE and cited parenthetically in the text.
27 Dale, p. 4.
28 Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1985), p. 49.
29 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 84. See especially Ch. 3, “World Without End or Beginning,” pp. 67-89 and Ch. 4, “The Modern Apocalypse,” pp. 93-124.
30 CB to Héger, 24 July 1844: “When the body is idle, the spirit suffers cruelly . . . . I would not know this lethargy if I could write.”
31 Keefe, p. 111.
32 Ibid.
33 Howe, p. 29.
Auteur
Georgia State University
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