Reading: The Brontë Myth

The Brontë Myth by Lucasta Miller is a lit-crit examination not of the Brontës' work, but of the carefully crafted story of their lives, starting with the biographical sketch Charlotte wrote after Emily and Anne died, and reflected by her own accounts to literary London. Charlotte's account was the one on which Elizabeth Gaskell based her Life of Charlotte Brontë, and between the two of them they created an indelible image of the poor tubercular sisters trapped in a bleak country parsonage at the mercy of their abusive father and reprobate brother and surviving as long as they did only through the purifying power of their imaginations before dying pitiably young. We learn this story along with Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in school. According to Miller it's largely nonsense.

Charlotte could hardly be blamed for bending the truth to salvage her own and her sisters' maidenly reputations by making their isolated Yorkshire upbringing an excuse for their "coarse" subject matter. Contemporary critics used "coarse" in every other sentence when discussing Ellis, Acton and Currer Bell; I was heartily sick of it before I was halfway through The Brontë Myth so I can only imagine what Charlotte thought about it at the time. The trouble with Charlotte's filter, as Miller points out, is that it obscures the work itself by presenting it as having been done almost involuntarily, an inevitable response to the sisters' mythical suffering and divorced from any craftsmanship or talent they may have possessed. Emily is especially cheated by this treatment, being presented as some sort of faucet through which her novel pours without ever touching the sides.

I've always been more a fan of Charlotte's than the rest, just because when I studied Jane Eyre in ninth grade I was powerfully influenced by the idea of two strong individuals meeting across the class divide, whereas when I studied Wuthering Heights in tenth grade I was kind of disgusted by everyone's inability to have an identity of their damn own. "I am Heathcliff." What the heck kind of thing is that to say? But my favorite part of The Brontë Myth turned out to be its revelation of the historical Emily -- that is to say, its revelation that the historical Emily is unknowable, a Rorschach blot for generations of projectionists.

Apparently the real Emily left almost no record of her life, outside two maddeningly elliptical "diary papers" and pieces of a few letters. Her juvenilia (the tales of Gondal, invented with her sister Anne) are gone, believed destroyed by Charlotte after her death. She had no known friends, and her only documented interactions with people outside her own family depict her physically fleeing from them. I'm no particular misanthrope, but that's the kind of writer I only wish I had the courage to be.