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<section id="outline-container-orgee35afe" class="outline-2">
<h2 id="orgee35afe"></h2>
<div class="outline-text-2" id="text-orgee35afe">
<span class="blogtop"><img src="./images/VWoolfSeated.jpg" width="800" alt="Virginia Woolf"></span>
</div>
</section>
<section id="outline-container-org0ce0959" class="outline-2">
<h2 id="org0ce0959"><i>Jane Eyre</i> and <i>Wuthering Heights</i>, an analysis by Virginia Woolf</h2>
<div class="outline-text-2" id="text-org0ce0959">
<p>
Of the hundred years that have passed since Charlotte Brontë was born,
she, the centre now of so much legend, devotion, and literature, lived
but thirty-nine. It is strange to reflect how different those legends
might have been had her life reached the ordinary human span.
</p>
<p>
She might have become, like some of her famous contemporaries, a
figure familiarly met with in London and elsewhere, the subject of
pictures and anecdotes innumerable, the writer of many novels, of
memoirs possibly, removed from us well within the memory of the
middle-aged in all the splendour of established fame.
</p>
<p>
She might have been wealthy, she might have been prosperous. But it is
not so. When we think of her we have to imagine some one who had no
lot in our modern world; we have to cast our minds back to the
‘fifties of the last century, to a remote parsonage upon the wild
Yorkshire moors. In that parsonage, and on those moors, unhappy and
lonely, in her poverty and her exaltation, she remains for ever.
</p>
<p>
These circumstances, as they affected her character, may have left
their traces on her work. A novelist, we reflect, is bound to build up
his structure with much very perishable material which begins by
lending it reality and ends by cumbering it with rubbish.
</p>
</div>
<div id="outline-container-org9639605" class="outline-3">
<h3 id="org9639605">Every doubt is swept clean from our minds</h3>
<div class="outline-text-3" id="text-org9639605">
<p>
As we open <i>Jane Eyre</i> once more we cannot stifle the suspicion that
we shall find her world of imagination as antiquated, mid-Victorian,
and out of date as the parsonage on the moor, a place only to be
visited by the curious, only preserved by the pious. So we open Jane
Eyre; and in two pages every doubt is swept clean from our minds.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the
left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me
from the drear November day.
</p>
<p>
At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the
aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist
and cloud; near, a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with
ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable
blast.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
There is nothing there more perishable than the moor itself, or more
subject to the sway of fashion than the “long and lamentable
blast”. Nor is this exhilaration short-lived. It rushes us through the
entire volume, without giving us time to think, without letting us
lift our eyes from the page.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<div id="outline-container-org7f6f53b" class="outline-3">
<h3 id="org7f6f53b">The writer has us by the hand</h3>
<div class="outline-text-3" id="text-org7f6f53b">
<p>
So intense is our absorption that if some one moves in the room the
movement seems to take place not there but up in Yorkshire. The writer
has us by the hand, forces us along her road, makes us see what she
sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to forget her.
</p>
<p>
At the end we are steeped through and through with the genius, the
vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Bronte. Remarkable faces,
figures of strong outline and gnarled feature have flashed upon us in
passing; but it is through her eyes that we have seen them.
</p>
<p>
Once she is gone, we seek for them in vain. Think of Rochester and we have to think of Jane Eyre. Think of the moor, and again there is Jane Eyre. Think of the drawing-room, even, those “white carpets on which seemed laid brilliant garlands of flowers”, that “pale Parian mantelpiece” with its Bohemia glass of “ruby red” and the “general blending of snow and fire” — what is
all that except Jane Eyre?
</p>
<p>
Note: Charlotte and Emily Brontë had much the same sense of colour.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
…we saw — ah! it was beautiful — a splendid place carpeted with
crimson, and crimson-covered chairs and tables, and a pure white
ceiling bordered by gold, a shower of glass drops hanging in silver
chains from the centre, and shimmering with little soft tapers
(Wuthering Heights).
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
…Yet it was merely a very pretty drawing-room, and within it a boudoir, both spread with white carpets, on which seemed laid brilliant garlands of flowers; both ceiled with snowy mouldings of white grapes and vine leaves, beneath which glowed in rich contrast crimson couches and ottomans; while the ornaments on the pale Parian mantelpiece were of sparkling Bohemia glass, ruby red; and between the windows large mirrors repeated the general blending of snow and fire (Jane Eyre).
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
The drawbacks of being Jane Eyre are not far to seek. Always to be a
governess and always to be in love is a serious limitation in a world
which is full, after all, of people who are neither one nor the
other. The characters of a Jane Austen or of a Tolstoi have a million
facets compared with these.
</p>
<p>
They live and are complex by means of their effect upon many different
people who serve to mirror them in the round. They move hither and
thither whether their creators watch them or not, and the world in
which they live seems to us an independent world which we can visit,
now that they have created it, by ourselves.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<div id="outline-container-orgb948b55" class="outline-3">
<h3 id="orgb948b55">Holding Charlotte Brontë up to Thomas Hardy</h3>
<div class="outline-text-3" id="text-orgb948b55">
<p>
Thomas Hardy is more akin to Charlotte Brontë in the power of his
personality and the narrowness of his vision. But the differences are
vast.
</p>
<p>
As we read <i>Jude the Obscure</i> we are not rushed to a finish; we brood
and ponder and drift away from the text in plethoric trains of thought
which build up round the characters an atmosphere of question and
suggestion of which they are themselves, as often as not, unconscious.
</p>
<p>
Simple peasants as they are, we are forced to confront them with
destinies and questionings of the hugest import, so that often it
seems as if the most important characters in a Hardy novel are those
which have no names.
</p>
<p>
Of this power, of this speculative curiosity, Charlotte Brontë has no
trace. She does not attempt to solve the problems of human life; she
is even unaware that such problems exist; all her force, and it is the
more tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, “I
love”, “I hate”, “I suffer”.
</p>
<p>
For the self-centred and self-limited writers have a power denied the
more catholic and broad-minded. Their impressions are close packed and
strongly stamped between their narrow walls. Nothing issues from their
minds which has not been marked with their own impress. They learn
little from other writers, and what they adopt they cannot assimilate.
</p>
<p>
Both Hardy and Charlotte Brontë appear to have founded their styles
upon a stiff and decorous journalism. The staple of their prose is
awkward and unyielding. But both with labour and the most obstinate
integrity, by thinking every thought until it has subdued words to
itself, have forged for themselves a prose which takes the mould of
their minds entire; which has, into the bargain, a beauty, a power, a
swiftness of its own.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<div id="outline-container-org9beed48" class="outline-3">
<h3 id="org9beed48">An untamed ferocity as a writer</h3>
<div class="outline-text-3" id="text-org9beed48">
<p>
Charlotte Brontë, at least, owed nothing to the reading of many
books. She never learnt the smoothness of the professional writer, or
acquired his ability to stuff and sway his language as he chooses.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
I could never rest in communication with strong, discreet, and refined
minds, whether male or female”, she writes, as any leader-writer in a
provincial journal might have written; but gathering fire and speed
goes on in her own authentic voice “till I had passed the outworks of
conventional reserve and crossed the threshold of confidence, and won
a place by their hearts’ very hearthstone.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
It is there that she takes her seat; it is the red and fitful glow of
the heart’s fire which illumines her page. In other words, we read
Charlotte Brontë not for exquisite observation of character—her
characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy—hers is grim
and crude; not for a philosophic view of life—hers is that of a
country parson’s daughter; but for her poetry.
</p>
<p>
Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an
overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have
only to open the door to make themselves felt.
</p>
<p>
There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the
accepted order of things which makes them desire to create instantly
rather than to observe patiently. This very ardour, rejecting half
shades and other minor impediments, wings its way past the daily
conduct of ordinary people and allies itself with their more
inarticulate passions.
</p>
<p>
It makes them poets, or, if they choose to write in prose, intolerant
of its restrictions. Hence it is that both Emily and Charlotte are
always invoking the help of nature. They both feel the need of some
more powerful symbol of the vast and slumbering passions in human
nature than words or actions can convey.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<div id="outline-container-org2dc1f56" class="outline-3">
<h3 id="org2dc1f56">A mood rather than a particular observation</h3>
<div class="outline-text-3" id="text-org2dc1f56">
<p>
It is with a description of a storm that Charlotte ends her finest
novel, <i>Villette</i>.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
The skies hang full and dark — a wrack sails from the west; the clouds
cast themselves into strange forms.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
So she calls in nature to describe a state of mind which could not
otherwise be expressed. But neither of the sisters observed nature
accurately as Dorothy Wordsworth observed it, or painted it minutely
as Tennyson painted it.
</p>
<p>
They seized those aspects of the earth which were most akin to what
they themselves felt or imputed to their characters, and so their
storms, their moors, their lovely spaces of summer weather are not
ornaments applied to decorate a dull page or display the writer’s
powers of observation — they carry on the emotion and light up the
meaning of the book.
</p>
<p>
The meaning of a book, which lies so often apart from what happens and
what is said and consists rather in some connection which things in
themselves different have had for the writer, is necessarily hard to
grasp. Especially this is so when, like the Brontës, the writer is
poetic, and his meaning inseparable from his language, and itself
rather a mood than a particular observation.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<div id="outline-container-orgde0f8b8" class="outline-3">
<h3 id="orgde0f8b8">Wuthering Heights — a more difficult book to understand</h3>
<div class="outline-text-3" id="text-orgde0f8b8">
<p>
<i>Wuthering Heights</i> is a more difficult book to understand than Jane
Eyre, because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte
wrote she said with eloquence and splendour and passion “I love, ” “I
hate,” “I suffer.” Her experience, though more intense, is on a level
with our own.
</p>
<p>
But there is no “I” in <i>Wuthering Heights</i>. There are no
governesses. There are no employers. There is love, but it is not the
love of men and women. Emily was inspired by some more general
conception.
</p>
<p>
The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her
own injuries. She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder
and felt within her the power to unite it in a book.
</p>
<p>
That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel — a
struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something
through the mouths of her characters which is not merely “I love” or
“I hate,” but “we, the whole human race” and “you, the eternal powers
…” the sentence remains unfinished. It is not strange that it
should be so; rather it is astonishing that she can make us feel what
she had it in her to say at all.
</p>
<p>
It surges up in the half-articulate words of Catherine Earnshaw:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
If all else perished and HE remained, I should still continue to be;
and if all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would
turn to a mighty stranger; I should not seem part of it. It breaks out
again in the presence of the dead. I see a repose that neither earth
nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and
shadowless hereafter—the eternity they have entered — where life is
boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy and joy in its
fulness.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
It is this suggestion of power underlying the apparitions of human
nature and lifting them up into the presence of greatness that gives
the book its huge stature among other novels.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<div id="outline-container-orgfa898cb" class="outline-3">
<h3 id="orgfa898cb">A great poet as well as a novelist</h3>
<div class="outline-text-3" id="text-orgfa898cb">
<p>
But it was not enough for Emily Brontë to write a few lyrics, to utter
a cry, to express a creed. In her poems she did this once and for all,
and her poems will perhaps outlast her novel.
</p>
<p>
But she was novelist as well as poet. She must take upon herself a
more laborious and a more ungrateful task. She must face the fact of
other existences, grapple with the mechanism of external things, build
up, in recognisable shape, farms and houses and report the speeches of
men and women who existed independently of herself.
</p>
<p>
And so we reach these summits of emotion not by rant or rhapsody but
by hearing a girl sing old songs to herself as she rocks in the
branches of a tree; by watching the moor sheep crop the turf; by
listening to the soft wind breathing through the grass.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<div id="outline-container-org7161a33" class="outline-3">
<h3 id="org7161a33">Emily freed life from its dependence on facts</h3>
<div class="outline-text-3" id="text-org7161a33">
<p>
The life at the farm with all its absurdities and its improbability is
laid open to us. We are given every opportunity of comparing <i>Wuthering
Heights</i> with a real farm and Heathcliff with a real man.
</p>
<p>
How, we are allowed to ask, can there be truth or insight or the finer
shades of emotion in men and women who so little resemble what we have
seen ourselves? But even as we ask it we see in Heathcliff the brother
that a sister of genius might have seen; he is impossible we say, but
nevertheless no boy in literature has a more vivid existence than his.
</p>
<p>
So it is with the two Catherines; never could women feel as they do or
act in their manner, we say. All the same, they are the most lovable
women in English fiction. It is as if she could tear up all that we
know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparencies
with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.
</p>
<p>
Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its
dependence on facts; with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face
so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow
and the thunder roar.
</p>
<p.myindent>
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