Perception and Expression in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë by Judith Williams (review)

HUMANITIES 129 Bovarys' bourgeois quarters in Yonville become symbolic projections of the constraining 'prisons' to which these provincial women are confined. Each heroine is subjected to 'the tyranny of her surroundings.' These 'fictional sisters' even look alike: they are brunettes who are sometimes physically contrasted with unsympathetic blondes such as Harriet Smith and Rosamond Vincy. They would probably concur with Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (who could also be counted among the fictional sisters) in her rejection of 'books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness ... I want to avenge Rebecca and Flora MacIvor, and Minna and all the rest of the dark unhappy ones.' The likenesses that Sabiston musters are impressive, and sufficient to establish that she is dealing here with a shared vision, almost a recognizable subgenre of the novel. As she traces the similarities and differences in the treatment of the shared theme through her individual chapters on each of the four novels, what emerges as the most interesting element is the interaction of the moral and aesthetic strands: Emma Woodhouse's ethically dubious enterprise of turning the people around her into the material for her imaginist's artifact, Emma Bovary's reduction of herself into a passionately palpating object, Dorothea's moral sense that has thriven at the expense of the aesthetic, Isabel's self-surrender to barren aesthete. An early passage in this book asserts 'The final and inescapable prison for all four women is neither the provinces, nor marriage, nor ignorance, but the prison of womanhood.... All women remain provincials in relation to masculine culture with its varied options and outlets.' This leads one to expect a more severely feminist and political approach than is actually employed. The two male authors are treated as on a par with the female ones in supplying access to the female consciousness and presenting the female predicament; and they too are seen as 'concerned with the reordering of society which must start with its nucleus, male-female relations.' These novels, claims Sabiston at the end, 'deserve a critical methodology applied to them that does not simply trace feminist themes, but gives full justice to the dynamism of the text.' This is the methodology that she effectively applies herself. Her book is graceful, searching, revealing. It is informed by a personal commitment that she is quite ready to acknowledge: 'We care about these heroines as if we had known them in life.' Dorothea, Isabel, and the two Emmas have found appropriate 'protection and regard.' (JULIET Me MASTER) Judith Williams. Perception and Expression in the Novels of Charlotte Bronte UMI Research Press. 175. us $39.95 Judith Williams organizes her careful and well-written readings of 130 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 Bronte's four novels around the notion of seeing in both literal and metaphoric senses. Bronte's fiction, she argues, is impelled by the struggle ~to perceive not only with the eye and the rational understanding but also with imagination and sympathy' (Introduction). This struggle, along with the status of physical sight itself, becomes darker and more ambiguous as the novels progress, and Williams makes her point by tracing in detail the recurring narrative patterns - notably patterns of imagery - that inform the Bronte texts. Like most readers of Bronte, Williams sees her narrative as generated by polarities (inner/outer, male/female, enclosure/expanse) which it strives both to overcome and to evade, as in the much disputed endings of novels like Jane Eyre and Shirley. Only in her final novel, Williams feels, does Bronte confront questions about human experience evaded in the earlier novels, for here she 'finally turns to face the deep, wide, black, and all-devouring ocean of suffering' (78). Williams is especially good on Villette, devoting two chapters to it and providing a thoughtful and thorough reading that does justice to the linguistic density, narrative complexity, and overall force of this tormented work. The strength of this study stems from the familiarity with and control of the Bronte texts that allow Williams to draw attention to buried metaphors, little-noticed allusions, and subtle convergences of character and pattern. Her respect for Bronte's own language leads to agreat deal of...