ABSTRACT
In Imperialism at Home (1996), Susan Meyer linked the Brontës’ notion of creative power with British imperialism. Going back to the origins of the imaginary realms of the Brontë children, to Glass Town and Verdopolis, to the toy soldiers and the pin Ashantees, Meyer argues that it was the British imperialist impulse, marked out by territorial acquisition and notions of the right to take over and control “new” realms and their peoples, and “the exercise of imaginative possession,” that “enabled the children’s fiction writing” (30). But a far more fundamental impulse underlay Charlotte Brontë’s representation of the creative power of writing to produce life and new worlds, and that impulse comes from the Bible, from “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1.1). As the child of a clergyman, saturated with the language of the Bible and well-versed in Christian doctrine, the idea that the word creates and controls life is unquestionably biblical. Yet for the very same reasons – that Charlotte Brontë was a clergyman’s daughter, well-versed in the Bible and Christian doctrines against idolatry and pride1 – her divination of human creative power contravenes Christian precepts. As Christine Alexander observes in The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, the preoccupation with imaginative “visions made Charlotte feel sinful” (140). Charlotte Brontë is routinely construed as a feminist voice in the Victorian
period, but her contrasting portrayals of female creativity weaken that voice and highlight its ambivalences. Her contrasting portrayals of female creativity remind readers of the importance of Christian doctrine and the suffocating ideologies of female meekness and domestic service in the Victorian period. They especially remind readers of the need to be careful when applying contemporary ideologies to prior historical realities. In her work, Charlotte Brontë presents the idea that women have the right to intellectually stimulating and productive work, and to love in marriage. At the same time, she presents female imagination as both divinely empowering and devilishly destructive. This contradictory portrayal of female imagination is visible in her use of the construct of the Romantic figure of the poet-prophet or divine writer in her poetry and her fiction. Charlotte Brontë’s poetic speakers are the quasi-divine revealers of existential
truths: they are the apocalyptic visionaries who rend the veil of mortal
are beings, the inner depths of human emotion, the assuagement of suffering, the mysteries of life, and human fate. Even so, through her poetic speakers, as through her later prose narrators, imagination and creativity emerge as saviors, fatally wounded by the contrary ideologies that form their bedrock: her dual veneration and demonization of female passion and creativity and her portrayal of religious conviction tortured by doubt. Charlotte Brontë’s depiction of the poetic speaker as the quasi-divine revealer of existential truths, and her portrayal of the redemptive power of creativity and the power of the imagination to assuage suffering, are self-consciously Romantic constructs built on a rich biblical heritage. One hundred and fifty years of scholarship placed Charlotte Brontë firmly
within the Victorian canon as a novelist. But in the last decade, critics such as Michael O’Neill (2008) and John Bowen (2012) have considered the elements of Romanticism in the work of Emily and Anne Brontë. Hiroshi Nakaoka (1995) briefly considers how Romanticism is intrinsic to Charlotte Brontë’s work as a whole, and Alison Searle (2006) analyzes the Romantic echoes in Jane Eyre (1847). Sara Pearson’s (2012) close reading of “Pilate’s Wife’s Dream” (1846) and Julie Pfeiffer’s analysis of John Milton’s poetic influence begin to alleviate the critical neglect of Charlotte Brontë’s poems. Yet a detailed analysis of her poetry and the full impact of her relationship with Romanticism have never been developed, and this essay contributes to such an exploration. An analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s poetry provides otherwise unobtainable insights into her concepts of the imagination and creativity and their enmeshment in the contradictions that define her work. This essay assesses Charlotte Brontë’s poetry within the paradigm of the Romantic figure of the poet-prophet. In Western literature, the figure of the poet-prophet has its most influential
antecedent in the Christian Bible, in the apocalyptic visions of St. John, the prophet of the Book of Revelation. But the poet-prophet figure developed its defining characteristics and enjoyed its greatest popularity in the Romantic age. Charlotte Brontë’s engagement with the poet-prophet figure pervades her entire oeuvre, but it had its genesis in the early fantasy worlds of Glass Town and Angria, which form the subject base of her early poetry and demonstrate her early interest in the notion of the apocalyptic visionary – the divinely inspired prophetic observer. In the biblical tradition of apocalyptic writing, the apocalyptic visionary is
the divinely inspired prophetic observer revealing existential realities and offering redemption and truth.2 But the etymology of the word is the Greek apokalupto and apokalupsis, meaning a taking off of coverings, disclosing or revealing and manifesting or coming to light. In its most basic definitional form, apocalypse connotes the revelation or laying bare of the hidden discourse. It is this basic definitional form that applies to the concept of the writer as apocalyptic visionary in this essay. The iconography of the wilderness is also intrinsic to biblical apocalyptic
writing. The wildernesses of apocalyptic writings are landscapes and seascapes
conduits landscapes and seascapes establish aesthetic cues that denote the prophet seeking and receiving divine wisdom about the mysteries of life and human fate.3 The power of the written word to reveal divine truths is taken up enthusiastically in the Romantic age, as writers adapt the apocalyptic visionaries of the Bible into the figure of the poet-prophet. In Romantic permutations of the apocalyptic visionary, the writer, most often the poet, is the seer of truths, the prophet able to offer the authority, wisdom and divine access necessary to provide answers to questions or address anxieties about human existence. It is this portrayal of the writer as a visionary, a prophetic seer in possession of the divine power to reveal existential truths, that Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy have in mind when they describe the figure of the “artist as a solitary genius, sage and mystical shaman” (Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era 2), as a core trait in Romantic literature. One of the most evocative Romantic figures of the poet-prophet emerges in
Book V of Wordsworth’s Prelude (1850). Here, the figure of the poet-prophet dreams in a wild sea cave and the immortal value of poetry, and the divinity of its truth, is asserted through the symbolism of the stone (geometric truth) and the shell (poetry).4 Holding the shell to his ear, the dreamer hears a prophetic heralding of both violent destruction and possible renewal.5 For Wordsworth, poetic striving is synonymous with a striving for existential truth, and the growth of poetic sensibility is a religious growth in The Prelude. As he proclaims in a letter to Lady Margaret Beaumont of May 21, 1807, “a feeling of Poetry” is equated with a “reverence for God” (quoted in Barker, Wordsworth 90). As in The Prelude, Charlotte Brontë’s poet-prophets have their visions in or
of wild landscapes and seascapes in which there is a meeting of the mortal and the immortal, and imagination and imaginary realms are portrayed as divine or as conduits to the divine. But, unlike Wordsworth, Charlotte Brontë is not convinced of the righteousness of creativity; for her, the realms of the imagination possess an element of the diabolical, an element that will be discussed in the second part of the essay. The first part explores Charlotte Brontë’s depiction of her poetic speakers as akin to the divine, as well as the redemptive power of creativity. Ultimately the superiority, strength and redemption born of creativity is undermined by her portrayal of its repugnant and devilish aspects.
