Abstract
In the Brontë mythology of three talented, intimate and devoted sisters, Anne has played, in George Moore’s words, the role of ‘literary Cinderella’, relegated to the ashes of history for her failure to reach the standards set by her sisters.1 In short, it is usually assumed that Anne is trying to do what Emily and Charlotte are doing but that Anne cannot succeed through lack of talent. I suggest, instead, that Anne was self-consciously critiquing her sisters’ work and establishing alternative standards and values. Ironically, Anne has played, vis-a-vis her sisters, the traditional role of the woman writer within patriarchy. That is, Anne is critiquing her sisters’ works in the same way that women writers critique the values and standards of male writers. And rather than acknowledge the critique and distinction, we have measured the work by inappropriate standards which cannot do justice to its achievement. Such is often the fate of the woman writer in patriarchal culture. We might also note that as the surviving sister, Charlotte was in the position of ‘patriarch’ to determine which of Emily’s and Anne’s novels were reprinted and which were not.
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Notes
George Moore, Conversations in Ebury Street (New York, Boni and Liveright, 1924), p. 260.
Pauline Nestor, Charlotte Brontë (London, Macmillan, 1987), p. 28.
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976), p. 95.
I am grateful to Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (Brighton, Harvester Press, 1983), p. xii for pointing out the connection between an emphasis on reason and Enlightenment feminism.
Ibid., p. 10.
Hannah More, Moral Sketches of Prevailing Opinions and Manners, 3rd ed. (London, T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1819), p. 76. This edition, which I consulted in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, belonged to Anne Brontë and someone, although it may not be Anne, has marked the passage I quote.
Edward Chitham, ‘Diverging Twins: Some Clues to Wildfell Hall’ in Chitham and Winnifrith, op. cit., pp. 94–5.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York, W.W. Norton, 1971), pp. 304, 321, 330, 332, 350, 361, 362, 363, 366.
Ibid., p. 398.
Ibid., p. 368.
Miriam Allot (ed.), The Brontës: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 274. All further references appear in the text abbreviated as CH.
Jan Gordon, ‘Gossip, Diary, Letter, Text: Anne Brontë’s Narrative Tenant and the Problematic of the Gothic Sequel’, English Literary History 5, 4 (1984), p. 740.
‘Biographical Notice’, in Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (ed.) William M. Sale, Jr. (New York, W. W. Norton, 1963), p. 8.
Edward Chitham, ‘Diverging Twins’, op. cit., p. 100.
Charlotte Brontë, op. cit., p. 274.
Ibid., p. 277.
Ibid., p. 277.
Pauline Nestor, op. cit., p. 34.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 82, argue that ‘Even when she becomes a professional artist, Helen continues to fear the social implications of her vocation. Associating female creativity with freedom from male domination, and dreading the misogynistic censure of her community, she produces art that at least partly hides her experience of her actual place in the world’. This reading seems misguided. As we have seen, Helen shows no fear of the ‘social implications of her vocation’, and she hides her ‘experience of her actual place in the world’ so her errant husband cannot find her and force her to return home.
I again differ from Gilbert and Gubar, ibid., p. 82, who claim that Brontë’s Helen Graham ‘is prototypical, since we shall see that women artists are repeatedly attracted to the Satanic/Byronic hero even while they try to resist the sexual submission exacted by this oppressive younger son who seems, at first, so like a brother or double’. I argue in my Chapter 5 that the source of attraction for Helen is not a sexual masochism but a social idealism. One could argue for both except that Helen is revolted by Huntingdon’s attempts at coercion.
Pauline Nestor, op. cit., p. 35.
George Moore, op. cit., p. 261.
Ibid., p. 261.
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© 1989 Elizabeth Langland
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Langland, E. (1989). Influences: ‘Acton Bell is neither Currer nor Ellis Bell’. In: Anne Brontë. Women Writers. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20058-0_2
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