Charlotte Brontë: The two Countries

CHARLOITE BRONTE: THE TWO COUNTRIES NINA AUERBACH Charlotte Bronte is out of critical fashion at the moment. Despite the recent appearance of two careful studies of her artistic technique,' her novels are still often considered extravagant and inchoate, lacking the ironic distance and formal control of her sister Emily's W uthering Heights. There is some justice in this charge. We cannot find in Charlotte the almost allegOrical precision of design we find in W uthering Heights, and some of the most interesting criticism of her novels has eschewed analysis of pattern and design in order to locate an image at the centre of her work that defines her sense of subterranean inHuences working within the self and possibly the cosmos." It seems appropriate to search for a language of images in a novelist who plunges so far below conventional definitions of action and character, and who lived, perhaps fortunately for her art, before modem psychiatry attempted to evolve a new language of the psyche; but a single image does not seem sufficient to define Charlotte Bronte's world of constant conHict. The self is born in her novels out of a clash of extreme and opposing forces, and is rarely able to rest in the stability of a final synthesis. This essay will examine Charlotte Bronte's war within the self as it evolves in her two first-person narratives, Jane Eyre and Villette. Until she was at least twenty-three years old, Charlotte Bronte lived in two countries at once: the cold northern climate of Yorkshire was balanced by the tropical zone of Angria, the southern continent she created with Branwell, where her most significant emotional life seems to have been spent. Apparently fearing for her sanity, she struggled out of Angria in 1839, and it is not surprising that her first important image of the self should be based on this geography: '... I long to quit for awhile that burning clime where we have sojourned too long - its skies Harne - the glow of sunset is always upon it - the mind would cease from excitement and turn now to a cooler region where the dawn breaks grey and sober, and the coming day for a time at least is subdued by clouds,'" Her mind moves always through an unresolved dialectic, which she will continue to translate into the image of a divided country: she passes from a land with a sun that bums and Hames dangerously to a land with UTQ. Volume XLU, Number 4, Summer 1973 CHARLOTrE BRONTE: THE TWO COUNTRIES 329 no sun or colour at all. It is a critical cliche that Charlotte Bronte is concerned with the conllict between reason and passion or imagination, but her use of these abstractions is defined by her peculiar imagery: the 'cooler region' of reason or reality that follows the 'burning clime' of impulse and imagination is not a temperate zone between two extremes, but is itself an extreme of deprivation. In Jane Eyre and Villette, it is equated with the polar regions. The struggle between the worlds represented by fire and ice underlies both novels, and their vitality comes from the energy of the battle, not from the fulfilment of resolution. Like many Victorians, Charlotte Bronte was a Manichean - a continual clash of opposed forces gives birth to her world - and the world of ice is an active force in her novels, not a mere negation of energy. Indulging in the sexual sparring which is perhaps the major characteristic of Charlotte Bronte's love scenes, St John Rivers says to Jane Eyre: "'I am cold: no fervour infects me." [Jane answers:1 "Whereas I am hot, and fire dissolves ice. The blaze there has thawed all the snow from your cloak ..." '. But in the total structure of Charlotte Bronte's world, snOw is not so easily thawed. Lucy Snowe, the narratorheroine of Villette, gives us only a Single deSCription of her 'present' self: 'my hair which till a late period withstood the frosts of time, lies now, at last white, under a white cap, like snow beneath snow." If either element finally triumphs in the perpetual warfare that constitutes these novels, it may be that 'Ia flamme...