Charlotte Brontë’s Atypical Typology by Keith A. Jenkins (review)

Keith A. Jenkins opens his masterful study of Charlotte Brontë with my warning that modern readers know so little of the Bible and the ways Victorians read it that they often misunderstand much in Victorian literature. Thirty years later, I have some good news and a lot more bad: important books by Mary Wilson Carpenter, Janet L. Larson, Linda H. Peterson, Jenkins himself, and a few others represent the good. The bad appears in the fact that the vast majority of our graduate and undergraduate students do not know anything about Genesis, Exodus, the Psalms, the Gospels, or Pauline epistles—much less typology, prophecy, and apocalyptics. The Victorian authors whose books they read would consider them illiterates.

Typology (or typological symbolism) is a Christian form of scriptural interpretation that claims to discover divinely intended anticipations of Christ and his dispensation in the laws, events, and people of the old testament. Thus, samson, who sacrificed his life for God’s people, partially anticipates Christ, who repeats the action, endowing it with a deeper, more complete, more spiritual significance. Similarly, the scapegoat and the animals sacrificed in the temple at Jerusalem, both of which atoned for man’s sins, and Aaron, God’s priest, are types. Unlike most pre-Victorian writers who used typology in specifically religious works, such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), Brontë and others apply it to secular texts.

According to Jenkins’s strong feminist interpretation, Brontë uses such imagery and allusions as her “chief weapon in the battle she wages against the societal constraints placed on women. She infuses her novels with biblical types, while at the same time dissociating herself from the patriarchal mindset implicit in classical typology.” Jenkins provides examples of her “three basic strategies,” which involve destabilizing gender, undermining providential views of history, and translating “the otherworldly into this world”—that is, discussing things in the fictional world in terms of heaven, Eden, or some imagined realm (16).

Many of Brontë’s allusions that employ biblical typology are of the sort that George Monteiro and Peterson taught us to recognize in the poems of Robert Browning. Browning used types to solve what Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) identified as the fundamental problem of first-person narrative—that is, readers’ inability to evaluate the speaker’s veracity. Browning solved this problem by having speakers misapply and mangle commonplace biblical texts: for example, in “the Bishop orders His tomb at St. Praxed’s Church” (1845) the speaker demands a tomb constructed with materials described in Leviticus as required for God’s temple. Christians took them to be types of heaven; the bishop treats them as means of earthly immortality.

Jenkins shows the ways in which Brontë makes similar use of types. Take, for example, his skillful explanation of a brief allusion in Villette (1853) to the lament David sang after he learned of the deaths of Saul and Jonathan: “When narrating her first encounter with Madame Beck and detailing the scrutiny she underwent, Lucy uses what appears to be only an offhanded expression to confess that she was crying. Many readers may simply skip over the words ‘tell it not in Gath,’ assuming them to be a private oddity of Lucy’s speech” (124). Lucy’s odd phrase comes from 2 Samuel 1 where David proclaims that the Philistines have slain Israel’s glory: “how are the mighty fallen! tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon, lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice” (qtd. in Jenkins 124). Jenkins explains that when Lucy uses these words, she makes clear that she views the townspeople as the Philistines and her female students “as the daughters of the Philistines, whose taunts of triumph she fears. In the face of such an enemy, Lucy cannot afford to reveal any weakness by crying” (124). Jenkins then proposes a second interpretation: Gath was the city from which Goliath came, and with the...