ABSTRACT
The above extract from the second part of Charlotte Brontë’s story “The Enfant,” which first appeared in Blackwood’s Young Men’s Magazine for June 1829, is a rare example in the juvenilia of the raw instinctive emotions of fatherhood at their most ecstatic. Almost everything about this fable is strange and atypical of what was to follow in the later juvenilia and early writings of both Branwell and Charlotte Brontë, in relation to their handling of what might be called family “structures of feeling” (Williams 132-33) – whether between fathers and children, or sibling pairs. For a start, this demonstration of paternal joy emanates from a minor Glass Town character with the unpromising name of Moses Hanghimself, in a brief, self-contained story without apparent links to the major dramas of Zamorna, Northangerland, and their families. The context is that Hanghimself’s nameless child (usually referred to as “it”) has been captured by the cruel child-snatcher, Pigtail, who is forcing the Enfant to sweep chimneys. Subsequently rescued by a party of gendarmes, the child is brought before Napoleon and restored to his father, who recognizes an adder bite on his arm, whereupon “the two leaped about as if they were half frantic” (EEW I: 36). All ends happily when Hanghimself buys a beautiful Languedoc estate with a generous donation from the Emperor, “where he now lives with his Enfant, two of the happiest and most contented people in all France” (EEW I: 36). The story is atypical of Charlotte Brontë’s early writing because fatherhood,
like brotherhood, is so rarely represented as an uncomplicated, consistently loving relationship. Even devoted father-daughter relationships, such as Northangerland’s with his daughter Mary, seem unnaturally intense, while relations between fathers and sons, from the outset injured by neglect or instinctive antagonism, often culminate in bitter rivalries that can never be resolved. If, as
sense of this is especially so in the representation of family life, where fathers order their newborn infants to be instantly put to death, and young adult sons are driven by a desperate hatred of their fathers. While the pervasive presence of family disharmony is widely acknowledged in Charlotte Brontë juvenilia criticism, the intention of this essay is to explore more fully the connection between domestic family relations, masculinity, warfare, and affairs of state in Angria and Glass Town, focusing on the concept of “fathers of the nation.” Fatherhood plays almost as great a role in the Brontës’ juvenilia as sibling rivalry, through the interactions of Wellington, his son Zamorna, and Zamorna’s father-in-law Northangerland/Percy. It is increasingly problematized as Charlotte Brontë establishes a conflict between the responsibilities of a father and the pleasures of a lover, and further exacerbated when the father is a public figure, whether a soldier, politician, or both. This essay explores Charlotte Brontë’s apparent disillusionment with father-figures as inconsistent and untrustworthy and considers how her protagonists’ struggle to sustain their paternal responsibilities conflicts with their professional ambitions. In the context of the wildly exaggerated vendettas and irrational resentments which characterize the juvenilia and early writings, the military model helps to validate male violence, while at the same time attempting to restrain it, as bitter enemies find themselves through family configurations “brothers-in-arms” or otherwise enmeshed in complex male kinship groups. As the next generation grows up, the father’s authority is repeatedly challenged. Although both Charlotte and Branwell Brontë view this generational shift from the perspective of sons who in turn become fathers, uncertain of their role and unable to bond with their own offspring, Charlotte Brontë, we argue, ultimately attempts to explain, and even redeem, some of her father-figures’most extreme actions, albeit through their bravery on the battlefield, or, only briefly, in a kindly response to a child’s needs. While it has become harder to generalize about the “stereotypical” nineteenth-
century father in the wake of two decades of ground-breaking research by social and literary historians, the pre-Victorian period relevant to the Brontës’ early writings has been less well served.1 As an historian of the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, Joanne Bailey argues that the prevailing ideals of masculinity for the period 1750-1830 were chiefly guided by Christian and domestic values. Men, she suggests, were thought to be emotionally sensitized by becoming fathers, and “derived intense joy from being a father to the point of transports” (Bailey 276). By contrast, “the cruel, tyrannical father was abhorred” (283). While Moses Hanghimself’s “transports” certainly fit this model, the same cannot be said of Charlotte Brontë’s more typical patriarchs who struggle to sustain the tenderness Bailey sees as widely characteristic of late eighteenthcentury fatherhood. Instead, she adopts the Byronic model of the Regency period, based on serial relationships with mistresses, indifference to offspring, and long-term abandonment of families. For Andrew Elfenbein, this Byronic emphasis comes after 1833, when the Brontës acquired Byron’s complete works;
hardens evolves from several overlapping models – from the historical military figure of the Duke of Wellington, through the caricatured Napoleonic despot Northangerland, to the volatile Romantic father Zamorna. Each model has its obvious limitations, which she both exaggerates, and also challenges, via a gradually shifting focus towards the demands of children for a different style of parenting. Her attempts to “redeem” failed fathers, such as Northangerland, are discussed at the end of this essay. The Brontës’ development of their tales from the starting-point of fantasy
islands populated by “celebrated men,” complete with character sketches and “biographies,” as in “Characters of the Celebrated Men of the Present Time” (1829), promote a specific kind of masculine and military culture (EEW I: 123-30). From the start there are no women or mothers on the islands, and no real-life female celebrities with comparable appeal to the panoply of soldiers, explorers, and writers initially chosen by the four siblings (Brontë, Tales of Angria 37). Although some of her novellas pulsate with Byronic love-affairs, such as Mina Laury (1838) and Caroline Vernon (1839), and foreground a heroine, there is relatively little exploration of mother-daughter relationships in Charlotte Brontë’s early tales, or of options for women other than devotion to one of the great Angrian soldier-politicians. While there may be a simple biographical explanation for this (the death of the Brontë children’s mother before they could form a meaningful relationship with her), one also senses at this stage a lack of interest in the psychological complexity of women’s lives on the scale afforded to Zamorna and Northangerland in their multifarious public and private roles. Partly, of course, this stems from the political dimension of men’s lives that thrilled the Brontë children. Charlotte Brontë even told Mary Taylor “she had taken an interest in politics ever since she was five years old” (Barker, The Brontës 177). Moreover, the mystery and glamour about the reportage of men’s personal experiences made them naturally enigmatic in a household dependent on books and newspaper articles for information about public figures. Even the children’s father was becoming the subject of gossip and speculation, later portrayed by Elizabeth Gaskell as working off “his volcanic wrath by firing pistols out of the back-door in rapid succession,” or, as Juliet Barker summarizes, “a halfmad recluse who wanted nothing to do with his children”(Gaskell, Life 89; Barker, The Brontës 107). Though he later asked her to tone down the wild stories of “sawing the backs of chairs, and tearing my wife’s silk gown,” he was happy to be presented as “a little exccentric [sic], since you, and other learned friends will have it so” (Barker, The Brontës 803). In heightening the domestic dramas of the Parsonage, Gaskell, years after the Angrian sagas were written, shows how easily domestic masculinity could be caricatured or demonized, and the rages of Northangerland configured from easily-believed rumors. Within the tales, the fictitious characters confess to crushes on historical figures,
as when Caroline Vernon tells her father, Northangerland (in an echo of the siblings’ fantasy-island-building), that “Lord Byron and Bonaparte and the
that ever leaders of the earliest stories – Napoleon and Wellington – are conceived through their various permutations as Rogue/Percy and Zamorna as father-figures as well as military generals and heads of state, or that Caroline Vernon, after enumerating her favorite soldiers, realizes that her own father should be included in the list: “‘You are a soldier, aren’t you, Papa?’ she said, erelong” (371). When he denies it, she adds hopefully: “‘But you are a rebel and a republican … And you’re a pirate and a democrat too,’ said she” (371-72). Although the naiveté of her romanticism is clearly established in the text, Caroline’s equation of mature masculinity with leadership and warfare is not so different from her young creator’s. Charlotte Brontë’s early hero-worship primarily centers around the militar-
istic Duke of Wellington, as discussed at length in Christine Alexander’s “Charlotte Brontë, Autobiography and the Image of the Hero” (2011). As Alexander’s article demonstrates, however, Charlotte Brontë’s contextualization of his heroism was not purely confined to the battlefield. What most troubles the military men as soldiers and generals often stems from their domestic lives, and vice-versa, for the rivalries of the battlefield resurface in their drawing-rooms. This is especially true of Wellington’s persona, given the close relationship between the real-life family structure of the historical figure (a wife and two sons) and Charlotte Brontë’s fictitious creation. If the real Wellington was a demanding, but affectionate family man (as attested by his biographers), Charlotte Brontë sees this as a basis for his authoritarian, but fair, rule as father of the nation. He is essentially portrayed as a father of boys and young men, rather than of mature adults, so that his authority as a role-model can be emphasized. He is usually shown at home as a domestic figure, waiting for his sons’ return from an adventure. In several of the early juvenilia stories, Wellington appears as a deus ex machina to resolve a military dispute or make a decision, much as he might with his own children. On one occasion he rescues Arthur from a cavern, springing over a chasm “as if the spirit of an izard or chamois had been suddenly granted to him” (EEW I: 146), while in the episode of the “School Rebellion” (1829) in “Tales of the Islanders” Volume III (1830) the Duke is summoned to help restore Charles and Arthur, who have both collapsed in the chaos. Departing afterwards, in a quiet, business-like way, to quash the rebels,
He proceeded up to the place where they were encamped and called out in a loud tone of voice that if they did not surrender they were all dead men, as he had brought several thousand bloodhounds with him, who would tear them to pieces in a moment.
