THEIR GOOD WOMAN IS A QUEER THING:
DEPENDANT FEMALES IN THE NOVELS OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË
A University Thesis Presented to the Faculty
of
California State University, East Bay
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts in English
By
Holly Moisa
June, 2014
Copyright © 2013 by Holly Moisa
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Acknowledgements
The completion of this project would not have been possible without the help of many. I
would like to extend my sincerest thanks to Dr. Eve Lynch for her endless hours spent
reviewing my work and for truly sparking my love of the Victorian novel. I would also
like to thank my husband, Jon Moisa, and my Irwin family for always encouraging me to
push ahead with my own personal goals, despite the obstacles that life has placed in my
path. The academic and moral support that I have received has left me incredibly
humbled, as the completion of this project has not been an individual effort, but one that
has required the input and assistance of many. Thank you.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….iv
Chapter One. Introduction……………………………………………………………...…1
Chapter Two. Female Employment and the Middle-Class Lady………………………...13
Chapter Three. The Education of Females in the Victorian Era……………..……….….39
Chapter Four. The Importance of Feminine Capability: Redefining Victorian
Womanhood………………………………………………………………….……..59
Chapter Five. Meaningful Connections in Victorian Marriage………………………….80
Chapter Six. Conclusion………………………………………...……………………….97
Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….101
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1
Chapter One
Introduction
In the mid-nineteenth century, Victorian England was loaded with rules and
guidelines that helped to ensure that society was operating with the utmost propriety. A
large number of these principles were aimed specifically at the female population in an
attempt to keep the mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters uncorrupted by the supposedly
harsh influences of the outside world. While men were expected to have daily interaction
with the world of commerce and industry, middle and upper-class ladies were sheltered
away in their parlors and sitting rooms, protected from the vices of the public sphere. In a
time when females were supposed to be docile and dutiful, not every woman found this
passive existence to be practical or fulfilling. Among this group of forward-thinking
women was a young Charlotte Brontë, an aspiring author and poet who had spent her
early years questioning the opportunities available amid the strict traditions of Victorian
society. By 1847, Brontë had embarked upon her writing career and had begun to use her
novels to cautiously explore what lay just beyond the female status quo.
Charlotte Brontë is considered by many critics and students to be an early feminist,
a proponent of getting women out of the home and into the workplace. Her novels are
full of women who venture out into a world largely dominated by males, with the hope of
being able to adequately provide for themselves. While it is a simple task to cherry-pick
the characters who are relatively successful at achieving this goal, it is more important to
look at the bigger picture and the reasoning behind Charlotte Brontë’s creation of these
circumstances. Although it is possible to assert that Brontë wanted her female characters
2
to forge a place for themselves outside of the home in order to achieve total
independence, her novels repeatedly suggest that she was actually looking for a way to
broaden the established definition of women’s roles in Victorian society. Rather than
advocating total autonomy, Brontë’s writing cautiously encourages females to be raised
as thinking, feeling, and contributing members of society, while never completely
abandoning the domestic sphere.
In Victorian England, becoming a wife and mother was the primary way for a
woman to be viewed as a respected and contributing member of the society. Brontë
recognized how this narrow existence had the potential to be very detrimental and
incredibly limiting for nineteenth-century women. Throughout this study, the idea of
being a contributing and productive member of society extends beyond the confines of
the traditional definition of the domestic sphere, allowing an individual to contribute both
intellectually and financially towards her community in ways beyond motherhood and
household management.
The novels Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette give great insight into Brontë’s
motivation behind her female characters and their places within Victorian society.
Central to her novels is the question of what happens to women when they have no one
on whom they can depend. While her answers may not have been revolutionary, they do
suggest that Brontë was calling for a wider lens with which to view and assess the
Victorian social structures as they pertained to women at that time.
Charlotte Brontë does not advocate for women to enter the public sphere in
traditionally masculine professions such as doctors, lawyers, or politicians. Instead, her
3
novels encourage females to develop themselves in ways that prepare them to excel at
socially acceptable jobs and make well-informed decisions in their personal lives.
Brontë’s novels do not attempt to redefine Victorian womanhood by disregarding the
rules of propriety, but by broadening what it means for a woman to be a productive,
respectable, and contributing member of the community.
For Charlotte Brontë, writing afforded the perfect opportunity to support herself
financially, as well as to provide a platform for exploring the confining nature of
Victorian womanhood. In a time period when women were not believed to have the
intellectual capacity necessary to be successful writers, Brontë chose to adopt a male
pseudonym in order to establish her validity as an author. Writing under the male name of
Currer Bell, Brontë had to ensure that the views she expressed were consistent with those
of a nineteenth-century male author. Calling for equality between the sexes or the
complete integration of women into the male occupations of Victorian England would
have been unlikely on the part of a male author. Because of this, Charlotte Brontë had to
exercise caution in her writing, never making outrageous claims about women’s place
within society. Even after her true identity was publically revealed, Brontë maintained the
same level of discretion in order to avoid being labeled as unladylike.
Instead of calling for total equality of the sexes, Brontë created characters who
achieve success in their own lives by asserting a certain degree of independence without
actually leaving the domestic sphere that was so comfortable for her Victorian audience.
Because of this, it is incorrect to refer to Brontë as an early feminist, as she does not
advocate the complete dissolution of the separate spheres or total feminine equality.
4
Instead, Brontë uses her novels to suggest that the issues regarding women were not so
much political or economic, as much as they were about how women were regarded or
how they regarded themselves as members of the society.
Rather than creating openly subversive literature, Brontë’s writing subtly expresses
ways in which society’s dependent women could improve their own circumstances
without being seen as vulgar or improper. In order to do this, her novels repeatedly
emphasize several key points, including employment as a means for achieving selfreliance, the importance of education for young girls and women, the value of female
capability over beauty, and the need for marriages based upon mutual respect and
compatibility rather than financial or social criteria.
In order to fully understand why Charlotte Brontë was concerned with how society
viewed women, it is important to look at the plight of dependent females during the
author’s lifetime. In mid-nineteenth-century England, the opportunities available to
women were fairly limited. Early English gender prescriptions featured men as
industrious breadwinners with their wives by their sides as helpful companions. Because
of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of factory production moved men’s occupations
outside of the home and away from the women. This decline of home industry created a
marked distinction between masculine and feminine work, developing into a mid-century
doctrine of “separate spheres.” This separation of the pubic and domestic spheres
positioned men as competitors in the amoral, economic realm, and relegated women to
the role of either decorative trophies or spiritual guardians of men's immortal souls
(Marsh).
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Throughout the Victorian era, the concept of the “Gospel of Work” was in the
forefront of public thought. This was the idea that work was good in and of itself, and
that it ennobled and fostered a sense of stable identity or community. To remain idle was
viewed as an act against God, but steady employment improved one’s spiritual wellbeing and helped to develop a sense of intrinsic satisfaction (Landow).
While these concepts were readily applied to men within the society, a woman’s
idleness was viewed as a positive attribute, an outward indication that the men with
whom she was attached had the ability to financially support such inactivity.
For Victorian ladies, marriage was considered the norm, as it afforded both physical
and financial protection. For a woman to remain unmarried was often difficult and
problematic for both herself and her family. In her book, Women in the Nineteenth
Century, Margaret Fuller asserts, “Marriage is the natural means of forming a sphere, of
taking root on the earth; it requires more strength to do this [provide for one’s self]
without such an opening” (591). To be a woman in Victorian England and provide for
one’s self was an arduous task, often faced with varying degrees of scorn or indifference.
Marriage was the sure way for a lady to establish herself in a socially acceptable manner
and be seen as a productive member of society.
The ultimate goal of securing a husband became a problem by the middle of the
nineteenth century. The 1851 census revealed that England had a great surplus of women,
leaving a large portion of the female population without potential husbands. There were
over 500,000 of these so-called “redundant women” who were being forced to find ways
in which to provide for themselves (Anderson 378). Because of the great burden of
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supporting adult female relatives, many families were desperate to find methods for these
dependant women to become financially independent. These ladies, most of whom had
been groomed to become wives and mothers, found themselves looking for options that
capitalized on their pre-existing domestic skill set.
Middle-class women were often subjected to the social stigma that dictated that it
was demeaning for a female to support herself financially or involve herself with any sort
of fiscal matter. This made it socially conflicting for the women who found it necessary
to acquire outside employment. The jobs that existed for Victorian women were limited
in nature and garnered very little pay or respect. For a dependant woman who had no one
to be dependant upon, attempting to procure an income while maintaining feminine
respectability was often quite difficult.
Charlotte Brontë was by no means immune to the effects of this situation, and her
chosen subject matter is clearly a reflection of these circumstances. As the daughter of a
widowed reverend and one of six children, the limited resources of the Brontë family
were mainly directed at the education of her only brother, Branwell. Because of this, her
father, Patrick Brontë, expected his daughters to eventually support themselves as either
governesses or housekeepers and educated them solely for these purposes.
The domestic occupations of governess, teacher, housekeeper, and paid-companion
were among the few jobs that were considered proper for a young Victorian lady.
Because paid companionships were relatively rare, and middle-class girls often
considered professional housekeeping to be beneath them, the number of young women
becoming governesses was ever increasing in the nineteenth century (Victorianweb.org).
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This influx of governesses flooded the market with a large number of women who were
unfit for the position, but who had few other available employment opportunities. With
so many unqualified young ladies working as governesses, the position often garnered
little respect. Almost a hundred years earlier, Mary Wollstencraft observed, “[F]or
women, few are the modes of earning a subsistence and those very humiliating” (53). A
century later, Victorian ladies were still encountering the exact same dilemma. Brontë’s
novels reinforce the idea that in order to earn more respect for the female occupations, the
women themselves needed to realize the importance of the roles they filled and actively
work to improve their individual skill set.
In the article, “Class and Gender in Charlotte Brontë’s Novels,” Helen Taylor
asserts that Brontë used her writing as a vehicle to advocate women’s entrance into the
public sphere, noting, “She is one of the few women novelists who have focused…on the
problem of women struggling to make lives for themselves without love, hope, or
beauty” (83). While it is true that Brontë focused on women’s struggle to find a proper
place for themselves within society, she is not calling for a complete integration into the
public sphere or a rejection of the woman’s role within the household. It is equally
erroneous to assume that Brontë only advocated female betterment for those who were
loveless, hopeless, and unattractive. Her novels repeatedly reiterate the importance of
developing all young middle- and upper-class girls into well-rounded and intelligent
ladies.
It is likely that Charlotte Brontë would have been unable or unwilling to call for a
total abandonment of the private sphere by women because such a declaration would
8
have been too radical or too detrimental for a lady such as herself. Even though her
female characters remain within the domestic realm of the workforce, Brontë frequently
demonstrates the benefits that come from the employment of women outside of the
familial home. In the novels, Jane Eyre and Villette, Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe both
achieve self-reliance as a result of their teaching jobs. While Jane becomes a governess
and Lucy becomes a teacher, Brontë goes to great lengths to illustrate this sort of
“women’s work” as both difficult and rewarding, worthy of much more respect than was
commonly given to these professions. Rather than simply depicting it as a natural
extension of motherhood, Brontë shows these jobs as legitimate occupations that serve an
important role within society.
In order to increase respect and decrease the humiliation associated with the
available female occupations, Brontë’s novels emphasize the need for young girls to be
educated in more practical subjects. Rather than grooming girls simply to become wives
and mothers, Brontë demonstrates the benefits that would occur from having women who
were contributing members of the community, regardless of whether they married and
had children. Brontë’s novels suggest that one of the ways to change society’s views
about women was through female education. By properly preparing young women to
excel at suitable occupations, the hope was that these jobs would eventually be regarded
with the respect that Brontë believed they deserved.
Acquiring an education was imperative for women who were not typically
Victorian marriage material. Realizing early in life that she would not be seen as a
desirable mate, Charlotte Brontë focused her attention on amassing as much education as
9
she possibly could. While her schooling had been suitable for a governess or teacher,
Brontë continued studying foreign languages and other subjects in order to gain an
advantage over the other young women competing for female jobs (Gordon 134). By
increasing her own knowledge and creating characters such as Lucy Snowe who are lifelong learners, Brontë pushes other young women to demand more from themselves than
the minimum requirements of traditional feminine knowledge.
Brontë loathed the silly and foolish young ladies that were so common in
nineteenth-century England. As a teacher, she severely disliked many of her female
students for their vapid and shallow personalities, which she felt interfered with her
ability to be successful at her job. In her personal journal, Brontë asked herself, “Am I to
spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage
at the idleness, apathy, and the hyperbolical and most asinine stupidity of these fatheaded oafs?” (Gordon 67). Experiences such as this likely motivated Brontë to create
the characters of Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe, and Caroline Helstone, who focus on
developing their individual capabilities rather than their external appearances. Like
Charlotte Brontë, they are not beautiful or ostentatious, but rather plain and austere.
They are intelligent women who are capable of understanding matters outside of the
home without being seen as unladylike. While these characters remain within the
boundaries of the domestic sphere, they use their brains and personalities, rather than
their beauty and superficial charms, to propel themselves through life.
Brontë’s contempt for passive female existence is very evident in the author’s
second novel, Shirley. Throughout the novel, Brontë explores what happens when women
10
actively concern themselves with the traditionally male world of politics. Her female
characters, Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone, bond over their distaste for social
hypocrisy and their desire to do something worthwhile with their lives. Attempting to
involve themselves in the industrial unrest that is taking place within their town, Brontë
depicts these women with the intellectual capacity necessary to comprehend serious
issues outside of the home. Although Brontë creates these characters as intelligent and
well-informed ladies, she is careful not to cross the line into inappropriate or alienating
subject matter by ensuring that both women end up safely within the bonds of
matrimony.
The issue of marriage appears to be a very conflicting topic for Charlotte Brontë.
Although she despised the inactivity and intellectual bleakness that was so common in
Victorian marriages, she had a loneliness that could only be alleviated by having a
partner in life (Gordon 243). Brontë redefines marriage in her own mind and novels,
basing it not on social or financial necessity, but on companionship and mutual respect.
In 1851, Charlotte Brontë wrote a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell regarding the essay, “The
Enfranchisement of Women,” by Harriet Taylor Mill. In this letter, Brontë actively agrees
with the author, who suggests that marriages would be much more successful “if the
affection which the two sexes sought from one another were that genuine friendship,
which only exists between equals in privileges as in faculties” (Villette 598). Brontë
recognized the importance of mutual admiration in the quest for a fulfilling relationship.
Her novels repeatedly reinforce this idea, depicting characters who are active participants
11
in their own lives, choosing partners based upon love and mutual respect rather than
superficial social criteria.
The relationships of Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe, and Shirley Keeldar clearly illustrate
Brontë’s beliefs about marriage. The union of Jane and Rochester is based entirely on
reciprocal respect and affection, as each character fulfills the emotional and intellectual
needs of the other. Shirley Keeldar chooses to marry her tutor, a man with whom she has
been in love for years, in spite of his position of social inferiority. Lucy Snowe never
ends up marrying her true love, Paul Emmanuel; however, she is able to recognize the
appropriate nature of their relationship because of their similar intellect and passionate
severity. While numerous minor characters embark upon relationships that are based on
more frivolous qualities, the main characters consistently reinforce Brontë’s beliefs about
the proper foundation for marriage.
The main characters of Charlotte Brontë do not always conform to the standards of
ideal womanhood, but they never come across as coarse or unladylike. Her characters are
rich because of their imperfections, carefully crafted as thinking and feeling human
beings, complete with depth, emotions, and desires. Brontë uses the personalities and
longings of her characters in order to subtly impart her message about the female need for
an active life. In order to write novels that appealed to the widest audience possible,
Brontë remained somewhat cautious, quietly making her recommendations for women
while still keeping her female characters safely within the domestic sphere that was so
familiar to her audience. By doing so, Brontë is able to make modest social commentary
while still ensuring her own personal success as an author.
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While she was relatively forward-thinking for her time, Charlotte Brontë was by no
means a feminist. It would have been difficult, even for an intelligent lady like Brontë, to
imagine women completely abandoning the domestic realm. She never used her novels
to call for total equality for the sexes, but instead provided ways in which dependent
women could improve upon themselves in order to become members of society who were
worthy of respect, rather than constantly being viewed as a burden. By advocating
employment, education, personal capability, and balanced marriages, the novels of
Charlotte Brontë aimed to help change the ways in which Victorian society viewed their
women and the ways in which Victorian women viewed themselves.
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Chapter Two
Female Employment and the Middle-Class Lady
Throughout the nineteenth century, female employment was viewed somewhat
duplicitously. Women who found themselves without anyone to depend upon were often
forced to secure a job in order to provide for themselves. At the same time, this
mandatory self-sufficiency was seen as both dangerous and undesirable to Victorian men
who preferred to see females confined within a household. While the lower-class women
often had no choice but to seek employment, middle- and upper-class women were seen
as unfeminine and from improper families if they sought something outside the domestic
realm with which to occupy their time. Despite the fact that women had the potential to
be highly contributing members of the community, this widespread attitude caused
society as a whole to look down upon the women who left the safety of the private sphere
in order to work outside of the home.
Women of the lower class had almost always been employed outside of the home
out of sheer necessity. They engaged in occupations such as seamstresses, washer
women, straw-plaiters, domestic servants, and factory workers (victorianweb.org). The
novels of Charlotte Brontë are rarely concerned with this sort of employment, as the
author’s main focus is with the plight of women similar to herself. Deeply enmeshed in
the social separation that existed in the nineteenth century, even a forward thinker like
Brontë was unwilling to devote much attention to the class below her own. While
women of the lower classes worked because they had to, middle-class ladies were
conditioned to believe that labor depreciated one’s femininity and social status.
14
The male members of middle- and upper-class families discouraged their wives and
daughters from finding work because it reflected poorly upon their financial state. In the
essay, “Nobody's Angels: Domestic Ideology and Middle-Class Women in the Victorian
Novel,” Elizabeth Langland asserts, “The Victorian husband depended on his wife to
perform the ideological work of managing the class question and displaying the signs of
the family’s status” (291). The woman’s job was to publically project the family’s
wealth and to ensure that the household adhered to the standards of their class. Because
of this, society viewed female employment as an affront to the family, as it detracted
from a woman’s duty to outwardly display the family’s social position.
The Queen, A popular woman’s journal published in the latter half of the Victorian
period, initially propagated the idea of work as being “the inevitable bondage of women
in the lower classes or of respectable women of the middle or even the upper classes
driven by misfortune to earn their own livings” (Young 193). Society held the opinion
that women worked only when they absolutely had to, which publically indicated that a
family could not financially afford to keep their female members in idle comfort.
The novels of Charlotte Brontë are traditionally known for having a female
protagonist who strives for self-sufficiency, either out of necessity or out of personal
choice. The fact that the types of jobs available to Victorian women were often
inadequate, either in number, quality, or levels of respect, was of very little concern to the
male population at this point in history. The idea that women might desire worthwhile
endeavors with which to occupy their time was a concept that Victorian men had
difficulty comprehending after decades of women only working out of absolute necessity.
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Charlotte Brontë highlights the fact that while some women prefer to be actively
engaged, regardless of their financial stability, the women who are forced to work should
be afforded employment opportunities which pay adequately and garner a certain level of
respect. Jane Eyre is a novel that is concerned with the fate of an impoverished and
orphaned lower-middle-class woman who is forced to work in order to survive. Brontë’s
second novel, Shirley, revolves around middle-class women who long for something
more substantial than an idle life of leisure. Villette is a hybrid of the two, looking at an
educated young woman who, although of middle-class upbringing, has been forced to
procure her own income due to lack of familial connections.
The novel, Jane Eyre, was often viewed as improper and unacceptable reading
material for Victorian girls (Langland 294). The idea that a young woman might set out
on her own in order to find work and exert her independence was somewhat frightening
to a society that viewed women as the “angels of the household,” best kept safely within
the protection of the private sphere. The supposedly corrupting influence outside of the
domestic realm caused some Victorian critics to view the character of Jane Eyre as
unladylike and inappropriate.
Charlotte Brontë did not write the novel with the intention of disregarding the
Victorian rules of propriety. The plight of Jane Eyre mirrors that of thousands of other
young English women who found themselves in a similar sort of forced independence.
As a female who is essentially alone in the world, Jane Eyre has only two options for
survival early in the novel: she must either remain a school teacher at the Lowood
Institution or find a job elsewhere as a governess. Because she has been dependent upon
16
family members who no longer have any desire to support her, Jane finds herself in a
position where her only alternative is to become self-reliant. The employment
opportunities for women were very limited, and because of this, Jane is forced to
capitalize on the skills which she already possesses in order to support herself.
Victorian society firmly believed in an innate maternal instinct that was inherent in
all women. Because of this, the jobs of teaching children, as either a governess or formal
teacher, were viewed as a natural extension of the God-given traits with which women
were believed to be universally predisposed. In the article, “School Novels, Women’s
Work, and Maternal Vocationalism,” Heather Julien notes that throughout the Victorian
era “what women did when they taught was somehow different from what men did, that it
was not indeed ‘work’ but rather an expression of idealized maternalism” (120). Because
society believed that teaching mirrored what women were born to do, these jobs garnered
very little respect, yet remained among the only acceptable options that were available to
females at that time.
Teaching is frequently a common thread seen throughout the various novels of
Charlotte Brontë. In Jane Eyre, Jane becomes a teacher at the Lowood Institution after
being a student there for eight years. Because she has experienced very little of the
outside world, remaining at the school as an employee is a simple and safe transition for
Jane to make. While the domestic security is appealing, the stagnation of the teaching
position causes Jane to find herself yearning for something more:
My world had for some years been in Lowood: my experience had been of its
rules and systems; now I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a
varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those
17
who had the courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of
life amidst its perils. (72)
The idea that a woman might not be satisfied with a job that was supposedly a natural
extension of her intrinsic abilities would have been somewhat shocking to Victorian
society, almost seen as an affront to God.
Similar to the dissatisfaction Jane experiences as a teacher, her second job as a
governess to little Adèle is equally unfulfilling. The novel contains very few descriptions
of what Jane actually teaches Adèle and instead focuses on the internal dialogue that runs
through her head while she is assuming the role of instructor. Her attachment to the child
is hardly maternal, highlighting the fact that Jane views her role of governess primarily as
a paying job and as a means of supporting herself financially. She does not become a
governess because it is a natural extension of what she was born to do, but because at this
point in history, she has few other options for securing an income and providing for
herself.
The job of governess was somewhat of a gray area in the minds of Victorian
society. Heather Julien proposes the idea that governesses were both “workers disguised
as ladies, as well as ladies disguised as workers” (123). While the young women who
held these jobs were usually of the lower middle class, being employed as a lady within
an upper-class home often elevated their social status, at least superficially. This
ambiguity of status in a society that was highly preoccupied with class affiliation helped
perpetuate an atmosphere of mistrust or suspicion that often manifested itself in complete
indifference to the individual governess. Because of this, women employed as
governesses were often treated as little more than another member of the household’s
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staff, despite the fact that they were responsible for the education and well-being of the
family’s children.
The idea that an educated woman could be treated as little more than a cook or
housekeeper seemed highly distasteful to Charlotte Brontë. Having experienced life firsthand as an ignored and unappreciated governess, Brontë does not hesitate to express the
shortfalls of governesship through the characters in her novels. In Jane Eyre, it pains Jane
to think of her cousins, Mary and Diana, working as governesses in households that truly
do not appreciate everything that they have to offer:
Diana and Mary were soon to leave Moor House, and return to the far
different life and scene which awaited them, as governess in a large,
fashionable, south-of-England city; where each held a situation in families, by
whose wealthy and haughty members they were regarded only as humble
dependents, and who neither knew nor sought one of their innate excellences,
and appreciated only their acquired accomplishments as they appreciated the
skill of their cook or the taste of their waiting-woman. (300)
These characters are ladies of a small country manor who are instantly reduced to
“humble dependants,” receiving very little respect because of their positions as working
women.
Brontë depicts Mary and Diana as highly intelligent young women who strive to
educate themselves to the highest level possible. They have received a proper formal
education and, like Charlotte Brontë, teach themselves additional subjects in order to gain
an edge in an oversaturated governess market. Through the characters of Mary and
Diana, Brontë shows the importance of providing middle-class females with the skills to
support themselves should it become necessary. Originally comfortable members of the
middle class, poor family financial decisions leave Mary and Diana without the monetary
19
support needed in order to survive. While it is fortunate that they have been recipients of
an education that allows them to support themselves, Brontë implies that it is shameful
for incredibly smart women such as these to be viewed as little more than common
members of a wealthy household’s staff.
While holding a position outside of the familial home served as a means of earning
enough money to survive, young Victorian women with no relatives to depend upon
found themselves completely at the mercy of the families by whom they were employed.
When Jane asserts her independence and leaves Rochester and the safety of Thornfield,
she finds herself broke and alone, practically starving to death on the outskirts of a small
town. The independence of a governess was not true independence, as the means for
survival were wholly dependent upon the employing family.
True to the Victorian hierarchy of female employment, Brontë places the job of
governess in a slightly inferior position to that of school teacher. The primary reason for
this minor difference in status is due to the fact that a teacher is not a dependent member
of a wealthy household, but more of an independent employee. When Jane finds herself
the sole teacher at a school for country girls, she knows that she is overqualified for the
job, but she is temporarily satisfied by the safety and independence which it affords,
acknowledging, “In truth it was humble–but then it was sheltered, and I wanted a safe
asylum: it was plodding–but then, when compared with that of a governess in a rich
house, it was independent” (303). No longer dependent upon a wealthy family for her
survival, Jane’s job as teacher is much more autonomous, though not necessarily more
fulfilling.
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Charlotte Brontë, who disliked her own job as a teacher, describes Jane’s work as
“servitude,” clearly rejecting the idea that teaching is a natural extension of a woman’s
maternal instinct. Her frank attitude about money and salary shows her lack of
sentimentality about work and compensation (Julien 124). While Jane views teaching as a
means for achieving financial independence, she does end up developing a sense of
satisfaction about it, though not for the reasons that society would have come to expect:
Whenever I went out, I heard on all sides cordial salutations, and was
welcomed with friendly smiles. To live amidst general regard, though it be
but the regard of working-people, is like “sitting in sunshine, calm and sweet”:
serene inward feelings bud and bloom under the ray. At this period of my life
my heart far oftener swelled with thankfulness than sank with dejection. (312)
Jane feels good about herself and what she is doing, not only because her effort is
appreciated, but because she is doing it on her own. It is important to note that while she
finds some satisfaction in teaching, it should not be confused with sentimentality, as it is
more a measurement of her own ability and achievement than it is a fulfillment of a
natural calling. Contrary to the traditional beliefs of Victorian society, Jane’s success as a
teacher is a direct result of her own intelligence and organizational skills rather than her
instinctual need to nurture.
The novel Jane Eyre allowed Brontë to publically explore the nature of work
available to the middle-class women of the nineteenth century. Because there were few
other options for females at that time, Jane’s acceptance of the jobs of governess and
teacher would have been viewed by the readers to be natural and socially acceptable.
What would have been seen as less organic to the audience was the way in which Jane
21
views her positions, not as a loving and caring surrogate mother, but as a woman looking
out for her own financial position and well-being.
While Jane Eyre revolves around a woman who is forced to work in order to
survive, Charlotte Brontë’s next novel, Shirley, is more concerned with the plight of
dependant middle-class women and the ways in which they are supposed to occupy their
time. Set during the early nineteenth century, amid the Industrial Revolution, the story
draws a parallel between the plight of the displaced factory workers and the troubles
being faced by dependent women at that time. In the article, “Charlotte Brontë and
Victorian Psychology,” Sally Shuttleworth claims, “Both the labour and the marriage
market are overstocked. Middle class women and mill workers are alike made redundant,
transformed from valued producers into worthless commodities by economic factors over
which they have no control (184). While Brontë focuses ample attention on the historical
rebellion among the factory workers, she skillfully weaves in the difficulties being faced
by underutilized females and highlights the similarities between the two.
While the factory workers basically remain a nameless and faceless crowd, the
character of Caroline Helstone is the personification of the middle-class woman who
longs to be recognized for her individual worth outside of the private sphere. Unlike Jane
Eyre, who has no one on whom to depend, Caroline is completely dependent upon her
uncle the reverend, who appears to have scant resources available to provide for Caroline
long term. Bored and well-aware of her potentially dire financial future, Caroline realizes
that it would be to her benefit to secure a source of income in order to support herself
later in life.
22
Like much of her writing, Charlotte Brontë’s own life was somewhat reminiscent of
her plot line. Because the majority of the Brontë family money was going towards the
education of her only male sibling, Branwell, Brontë was well aware that her own
reverend father would be unable to provide her with an enticing dowry. Although she
was a member of the middle-class, Brontë knew that she would need to find an
occupation that would allow her to make enough money to survive as a single woman.
Possibly because she had been raised in a cash-poor middle-class family, Brontë’s
work ethic frequently spills over into her novels, creating storylines that rarely reward an
idle, passive existence. From gossip and social visiting to decorative needlework and
making the perfect cup of tea, Shirley is full of situations that echo the author’s boredom
and critique of the leisurely tendencies of middle-class woman. Rather than being
involved in active conversations about intellectual topics such as literature or politics,
Caroline is often subjected to mind-numbing, yet proper, feminine activities:
The evening seemed long to one person in that room. Caroline at intervals
dropped her knitting on her lap and gave herself up to a sort of brain-lethargy–
closing her eyes and depressing her head–caused by the unmeaning hum
around her: the inharmonious, tasteless rattle of the piano keys, the squeaking
and gasping notes of the flute…and more than all, the interminable gossip of
Mrs. Sykes murmured close at her ears. (116)
This monotonous and superficial manner of living causes Caroline to constantly yearn for
more engaging and worthwhile circumstances. For a woman like Charlotte Brontë, who
spent her evenings as a young woman discussing literature and politics with her own
siblings, the idea of being subjected to such an intellectually-void lifestyle was clearly
distasteful.
23
The problem faced by Caroline and many middle-class Victorian young women was
the fact that they were supposed to be satisfied with doing practically nothing. In several
instances in the novel, Caroline openly wishes that she had been born a boy. Well-aware
of the opportunities that are afforded to males, she longs for a sense of activity rather than
the idleness that is viewed as proper by society: “She would wish that nature had made
her a boy instead of a girl, that she might ask Robert to let her be his clerk, and sit with
him in the counting-house, instead of sitting with Hortense in the parlour” (75). Caroline
views active engagement in an occupation that would eventually allow her the freedom to
provide for herself as much more desirable than spending her days learning intricate
sewing stitches and waiting on an uncle who wants little to do with her.
In Shirley, Charlotte Brontë takes a firm stance on the necessity for female
occupation. In an impassioned statement, Caroline openly criticizes society’s need to
keep females engaged in simple, mindless activities that do little else than set them up to
be idle members of a household,
The brothers of these girls are every one in business or in professions; they
have something to do: their sisters have no earthly employment, but household
work and sewing; no earthly pleasure, but an unprofitable visiting; and no
hope, in all their life to come, of anything better. This stagnant state of things
makes them decline in health: they are never well; and their minds and views
shrink to wondrous narrowness. The great wish–the sole aim of every one of
them is to be married, but the majority of them will never marry: they will die
as they now live. (370)
A stagnant life that is only to culminate in marriage leaves much to be desired in a time
and place where there were many more women looking for husbands than eligible men
available. Brontë characterizes the apathy that results from this type of narrow existence
24
as incredibly detrimental to the well being of women, leaving them with a rather empty
and worthless existence.
Brontë’s frustration regarding the mundane options for Victorian ladies is apparent
in the character of Caroline Helstone. Caroline expresses her dissatisfaction over the fact
that females are not encouraged to utilize the full scope of their capabilities, wondering,
What do they [fathers] expect them to do at home? If you ask, they would
answer, sew and cook. They expect them to do this, and this only, contentedly,
regularly, uncomplainingly all their lives long, as if they had no germs of
faculties for anything else…Could men live so themselves? Would they not be
very weary? (370)
The idea that females are supposed to willingly endure a torpid lifestyle that men would
reject for themselves as both monotonous and unchallenging demonstrates Brontë’s
beliefs about the imbalance of value placed on female existence. In a time when over
50% of the population was made up of women, Brontë clearly saw the social benefits of
allowing females to occupy their time in a productive fashion rather than wasting their
lives engaged in mindless activities.
The belief that women need to be actively engaged in worthwhile pursuits is not an
idea that Brontë confined to Shirley. Caroline’s attitude directly echoes the fervent
statement of Jane Eyre in Brontë’s earlier novel regarding forced feminine tranquility:
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men
feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much
as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a
stagnation, precisely as men would suffer. It is narrow-minded in their more
privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to
making pudding and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and
embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if
they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for
their sex. (93)
25
The opportunities afforded to women in the nineteenth century left much to be desired.
The mindless activities in which women were allowed to participate did little to help
them better themselves or encourage them to contribute to society. By suggesting that
women needed something outside of the home with which to occupy their time was a
fairly taboo proposal, yet one that Charlotte Brontë repeatedly comes back to time and
again within her novels.
In Shirley, Caroline Helstone is often shown dealing with a sense of depression
regarding her stagnant position in life. Brontë creates a character who longs to be
engaged outside of her uncle’s home in order to break up the tedium of her everyday life.
Midway through the novel, Caroline entertains the idea of becoming a governess simply
for change of scenery and to have the opportunity to actively provide for herself. Typical
of the Victorian mindset, the middle-class Helstone refuses to hear of his niece working
for a living, regardless of the fact that he has no means to support her after his death. The
fact that nineteenth-century men were often too proud to allow their female family
members to work outside of the home ultimately set a large portion of the female
population at a disadvantage, as they lacked the skills needed to provide for themselves if
necessary.
Using Caroline Helstone as a mouthpiece, Charlotte Brontë puts forth her ideas for
getting women into occupations that will ultimately benefit the individual, as well as their
family and the society as a whole. By appealing to the men of the families, Brontë works
to convince fathers that it would be to their own advantage to encourage their daughters
to do something with their lives other than sewing and husband seeking:
26
You would wish to be proud of your daughters and not to blush for them–then
seek for them an interest and an occupation which shall raise them above the
flirt, the manoeuvrer, the mischief-making tale-bearer. Keep your girls’
minds narrow and fettered–they will still be a plague and a care, sometimes a
disgrace to you: cultivate them–give them scope and work–they will be your
gayest companions in health; your tenderest nurses in sickness; your most
faithful prop in age. (371)
Rather than calling outright for a complete dissolution of the separate spheres, Brontë
indirectly uses the insecurities of British fathers in order to promote the potential benefits
of female employment.
Mary Taylor, a close friend of Charlotte Brontë, criticized Brontë as a “coward and
a traitor” because Taylor believed that she did not go far enough in her demands for
women (qtd. in Miller xxvi). While considering her subject matter for her follow-up
novel to Jane Eyre, Brontë wrote to her publisher, William Smith Williams, “I often wish
to say something about the ‘condition of women’ question…[I]t is true enough that the
present market for female employment is quite overstocked–but where or how could
another be opened?” (qtd. in Miller 635). Because of Charlotte Brontë’s Victorian
upbringing, it may have been impossible for her to openly create a list of new
occupations for women without risking the scorn of the public.
While Brontë may not have been openly revolutionary in her rhetoric about female
employment, her private beliefs about the subject have been well documented. In a letter
to Elizabeth Gaskell, Brontë discusses the 1851 essay, “The Enfranchisement of
Women,” which makes a case not only for giving women the right to vote, but for
“equality in all rights, political, civil, and social, with the male citizens of the
community” (Mill 13). Brontë told Gaskell that she agreed with much that was being
27
said in the essay, particularly the aspects which dealt with female employment and the
women’s right at an equal opportunity:
If there be a natural unfitness in women for men’s employment–there is no
need to make laws on the subject–leave all careers open–let them try–those
who ought to succeed will succeed or at least will have a fair chance–the
incapables will fall back into their right place. (qtd. in Lawson 599)
Giving women a chance to be employed within arenas that were not typically feminine
had the chance of improving the workforce of England as a whole. Brontë saw how
employing competent female workers could be beneficial to society, but realized that
until men stopped seeing women as inferior, the chance at equal opportunities for females
in the workforce would remain slim. While Brontë may have privately believed that
women should have the opportunity to attempt traditionally male jobs, she recognized the
need to exercise caution in order to prevent herself from being seen as seditious and
improper. Rather than calling for a complete upheaval of the societal norms, Brontë
asserts that women should have access to appropriate jobs and be respected, rather than
looked down upon, for doing so.
Brontë’s novels frequently demonstrate how active engagement in worthwhile
pursuits is absolutely imperative for female survival. Similar to Lucy Snowe’s nervous
breakdown in Villette, Caroline Helstone finds herself ill and wasting away from lack of
meaningful interaction. Throughout her novels, Brontë repeatedly comes back to these
scenes of mental anguish, asserting that a life of idleness is not at all healthy for middleclass women. Around 1850, Charlotte Brontë’s publisher, Williams, wrote a letter asking
Brontë for advice on careers for his own daughters, to which she replied,
28
Lonely as I am, how should I be if Providence had never given me courage to
adopt a career…How should I be with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a
Moorish parish where there is not a single educated family? As it is,
something like a hope and motive sustains me still. I wish all your daughters–I
wish every woman in England, had also a hope and a motive. (qtd. in Taylor
87)
Writing provided Brontë with that very hope and motive, and because of this, she wished
that other females would find similar occupations that would help them to survive the
circumstances that life often presents. Just as Caroline convinces herself that she needs an
occupation to prevent her from dwelling on sadness and petty things, Brontë advocates
for her publisher’s daughters to find careers that would provide meaning to their lives.
Far from being a modern-day feminist and calling for complete integration of
women into men’s roles, Brontë mainly shows the results that occur when women are
kept stagnant. Knowing that a change needs to occur and knowing exactly how to bring
about that change are two different things entirely. As Caroline questions what she is
supposed to do with her life, Brontë’s voice is heard echoing behind the sentiment, “I
have to live, perhaps, till seventy years. As far as I know, I have good health: half a
century of existence may lie before me. How am I to occupy it? How am I to fill the
interval of time which spreads between me and the grave?” (168). Shirley is not a novel
that was outright revolutionary for women, yet it served as a protest against the
deadening life that young women were often subjected to as unmarried, unemployed
dependants.
Brontë’s final novel, Villette, serves as an interesting study of nineteenth-century
female employment. The story charts Lucy Snowe’s attempt to find a place in the public
sphere that is both mentally and financially fulfilling, while still being viewed as socially
29
acceptable. The situation of Lucy differs from Jane Eyre and Caroline Helstone in
regards to Lucy’s station in life. Unlike Jane Eyre, who spends her adolescence as a
pupil in a charity school, Lucy Snowe’s childhood is presumably spent as a comfortable
member of the middle class, as indicated by her education and connection with the
Bretton family. Unlike the middle-class Caroline Helstone, who has been raised as a
dependent in her uncle’s household, Lucy Snowe has no family members on whom she
can depend and is forced to find work in order to survive. Lucy’s search for the means to
support herself acts as a survey of the jobs available to women at this time,
acknowledging both the strong and weak aspects of each occupation.
Lucy Snowe is a fictional example of the large population of so-called redundant
women existing in nineteenth-century England. With no bonds of kinship and little
chance at matrimony, Lucy is forced to summon a sense of independence that may have
otherwise lain dormant. The author’s awareness about the widespread issue of redundant
women is revealed, as Lucy reminds herself: “There remained no possibility of
dependence on others; to myself alone could I look. I know not that I was of a selfreliant or active nature; but self-reliance and exertion were forced upon me by
circumstances, as they are upon thousands besides” (100). By creating a character whose
situation mirrors that of half a million English women, Brontë draws attention to the
question of what women are supposed to do when they have no one to depend upon but
themselves.
Like Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe is in a position in which finding a job is an absolute
necessity. Because she is desperate for a source of income and a place to stay, Lucy finds
30
herself accepting jobs that she would not have ordinarily chosen. Because opportunities
for female employment in the Victorian era were so limited, Lucy initially becomes a
caretaker to the elderly Miss Marchmont, eventually becomes a governess/nursemaid,
and ultimately ends up as a teacher.
The position of caretaker was deemed socially acceptable by Victorian society
because, like teacher and governess, it was viewed as an extension of women’s
fundamental ability to nurture. Because it was a job that existed within the safety of the
domestic sphere, females were permitted to become caretakers if their situation found it
necessary. Lucy’s role as caretaker is anything but satisfying, and although she finds it
stifling and isolating, she has been “disciplined by destiny” to understand that life is not
simple and that another acceptable opportunity may be hard to come by (102). Satisfied
with having any job at all, Lucy would have remained with Mrs. Marchmont indefinitely
in order to have a place to live and enough money to survive: “I would have crawled on
with her for twenty years, if for twenty years longer her life of endurance had been
protracted. But another decree was written. It seemed I must be stimulated into action. I
must be goaded, driven, stung, forced to energy” (102). While Lucy is often restless in
her own mind, it is circumstance rather than personal choice that causes her to seek out
another source of employment. Rather than creating Lucy as a young woman who is
looking for daily entertainment, Brontë carefully constructs her as a character who works
for the same reason as a man, as a means of securing financial stability.
In the 1839 essay, “The Women of England,” Sarah Stickney Ellis points out the
hypocrisy surrounding the differences between working men and working women in the
31
Victorian age. She asserts that Victorian men were able to spend their days employed in
any number of degrading jobs and were still considered gentlemen as long as they were
able to keep a respectable household. She goes on to explain that middle- and upper-class
Victorian women were treated much differently and ceased to be ladies if they engaged in
any occupation that had to do with trade or commerce (588). Had Lucy Snowe searched
for a job outside of the domestic arena, the mainstream Victorian reader may have been
less sympathetic with her plight, viewing the author and her message as potentially
subversive.
Charlotte Brontë does not use the character of Lucy Snowe to advocate for a radical
overhaul of the social system. Instead, she used the opportunity to shed light upon the
fact that jobs within the domestic sphere were a legitimate form of employment and were
in fact worthy of society’s respect. The independence and self-satisfaction that occur as a
result of being actively engaged would undoubtedly help women to contribute to society
in a meaningful manner rather than causing them to detract away from it. In writing her
novels, Brontë frequently stresses the fact that women in situations similar to Lucy’s
should not cease to be ladies simply because they work outside of their familial home.
Cautious about appearing inappropriate, Brontë deliberately ensures that Lucy’s
quest for employment never disregards the rules of propriety placed upon Victorian
ladies. Reinforcing this idea is the fact that Lucy’s next two jobs as governess and teacher
are located within the domestic security of Madame Beck’s pensionnat. Lucy sees
nothing shameful in earning her keep, provided that the employment is not viewed as
improper,
32
I told her [Madame Beck] how I had left my own country, intent on extending
my knowledge, and gaining my bread; how I was ready to turn my hand to
any useful thing, provided it was not wrong or degrading: how I would be a
child’s-nurse, or a lady’s-maid, and would not refuse housework adapted to
my strength. (130)
Brontë balances out Lucy’s independence with her sense of propriety in order to prevent
her from being viewed as overly radical. While her need for personal betterment is
tempered by society’s restrictions, Brontë is still able to create a situation that ultimately
proves to be rewarding for Lucy Snowe.
Much like Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe’s job as governess to Madame Beck’s own
children is a position that is not an ideal fit. Because she is desperate to find any sort of
work within the limited sphere of feminine respectability, Lucy is forced to accept
another position which she might have otherwise passed up, noting, “My work had
neither charm for my taste, nor hold on my interest; but it seemed to me a great thing to
be without heavy anxiety, and relieved from intimate trial; the negation of severe
suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know” (142). Lucy is
satisfied with her governess position because it gives her otherwise tenuous existence a
certain degree of security and ease. Had her options been more diverse, Lucy may have
sought employment elsewhere, but because of the limited options available to women,
Lucy manages to find satisfaction in being a governess. Similar to both Jane Eyre and the
author herself, Lucy is not drawn to the position of governess because of an
overwhelming and unfulfilled maternal instinct. Like thousands of destitute middle-class
women in England at that time, Lucy willingly remains a governess because of its social
acceptability and the safety it affords.
33
The job as English teacher at Madame Beck’s school is more intellectually fulfilling
for Lucy Snowe, though far from being completely independent. Forced into teaching by
Madame Beck, Lucy finds herself once more climbing the ladder of female occupations,
though again, not as a result of her own restless nature. In a conversation with Ginevra
Fanshawe, Lucy briefly chronicles her life as an employed lady, asserting, “Yes. I am a
rising character. Once an old lady’s companion, then a nursery governess, now a school
teacher” (380). Brontë’s audience would likely have assumed that this sort of
occupational betterment would have brought about contentment for a character such as
Lucy Snowe. While this may initially appear to be true, the language that she uses to
describe her teaching position is peppered with references to chains, slavery, and
bondage, which is hardly the language of a woman who is completely satisfied with her
current situation. Perhaps because the pensionnat is essentially a home to the boarding
pupils and the family of Madame Beck, the similarity between this sort of teaching and
the job of governess made it less desirable to the independent Lucy Snowe.
Mirroring the author’s real life experience, Lucy finds herself dismayed with being
a teacher; however, the value she places on self-sufficiency over personal comfort causes
her to endure. Because the job provides her with an increased level of ease and security,
Lucy sees no other option than to remain at Madame Beck’s school. When questioned by
a grown-up Polly Homes Bassompierre about why she chooses to teach, Lucy answers
very frankly, “For the sake of the money I get …; for the roof of shelter I am thus enabled
to keep over my head; and for the comfort of mind it gives me to think that I can work for
myself, I am spared the pain of being a burden to anybody” (357). Because the benefit of
34
being self-sufficient outweighs the negative aspects of the job, Lucy is willing to work
hard at teaching, regardless of whether or not it is her natural calling.
While being employed as a teacher in the pensionnat may not have been the most
enriching experience for Lucy Snowe, it is one that affords her the most independence
and freedom. The high value she places on these traits is demonstrated when Lucy
promptly turns down Mr. Bassompierre’s offer to become Paulina’s paid companion,
regardless of the fact that it would have paid three times her current salary (369). She is a
friend to Paulina because it is on her own terms, but the idea of being a fashionable
accessory for an upper-class woman and assuming the role of a “bright lady’s shadow” is
distasteful to the fiercely autonomous Lucy:
I could teach; I could give lessons; but to be either a private governess or a
companion was unnatural to me. Rather than fill the former post in any great
house, I would deliberately have taken a housemaid’s place, bought a strong
pair of gloves, swept bedrooms and staircases, and cleaned stoves and locks,
in peace and independence. (369)
Unwilling to sacrifice her self-respect in order to live a life of leisure as a dependent in
the Bassompierre household, Lucy chooses to rely only on her own natural abilities, even
if it falls within the confines of Madame Beck’s pensionnat.
Because Charlotte Brontë was a lady of the middle-class, she had to be relatively
cautious regarding her advocacy for female employment. Just as Brontë makes a plea
with fathers regarding their daughters in the novel Shirley, she employs a similar
approach in Villette. Brontë uses the respectable character of Mr. Home de Bassompierre
as a male mouthpiece to reinforce her own beliefs about female employment, as he
remarks, “If my Polly ever came to know by experience the uncertain nature of this
35
world’s goods, I should like her to act as Lucy acts: to work for herself, that she might
burden neither kith nor kin” (357). Having a wealthy father encourage his upper-class
daughter to potentially support herself lends a certain degree of credibility to Brontë’s
argument about the need for females to develop a practical skill set. Without a solid
foundation to build upon, a woman whose abilities are limited to piano playing and
decorative needlework would find it difficult to secure an adequate form of income
should the need present itself.
While Brontë often mocks her own shamelessly dependent female characters,
Madame Beck is a prime example of the author bestowing a high level of respectability
upon a strong, independent woman. Although Madam Beck employs rather questionable
methods of surveillance, it is indisputable that she is a capable and accomplished business
woman in her own right. While Lucy Snowe eventually comes to resent Madame Beck
meddling in her personal affairs, she never wanes in her respect and admiration for her
employer’s business acumen:
Madame must have possessed high administrative powers: she rules all these
[120 pupils], together with four teachers, eight masters, six servants, and three
children, managing at the same time, to perfection, the pupils’ parents and
friends; and that without apparent effort; without bustle, fatigue, fever, or any
symptom of undue excitement. (137)
Madame Beck is a highly organized and methodical business woman. Lucy admires her
independence and strength to such a degree that she admits that Madame would have
been better off running a country rather than the school because the pensionnat “offered
her powers too limited of a sphere” (139).
36
Like Lucy Snowe, Madame Beck had once been a protected member of the middleclass who found herself in need of a reliable source of income. Brontë presents Madame
Beck as a woman to be emulated for forging her own way and becoming a business
owner, while earning, rather than losing, the respect of society. She is not depicted as a
struggling, dowdy schoolmarm, but as a female entrepreneur who engages in acts of
philanthropy and participates in cultured societal events. Through the character of
Madame Beck, Brontë shows that a working woman can be a highly productive and
contributing member of society without sacrificing the feminine respectability that was so
important during the Victorian era.
Lucy’s own desire to emulate Madame Beck culminates with her becoming the
proprietress of her own school. While she is beholden to Emmanuel Paul for initially
jumpstarting the enterprise, it is through her own hard work and dedication that the
school becomes successful. The questionable ending of the novel, which strongly implies
that Emmanuel Paul dies in a shipwreck, is necessary in order to ensure that Lucy Snowe
remains in complete control of her school. Had Emmanuel Paul returned, he would have
become a partner in the operation, inhibiting Lucy’s sole dependence upon herself and
limiting her new level of freedom.
In the essay, “Charlotte Brontë, Mary Taylor, and the ‘Redundant Women’
Debate,” Anna Fenton-Hathaway claims that the independence achieved by Lucy Snowe
is not a so-called happy ending. She contends, “We learn that the school ‘flourishes’, but
Lucy offers no further detail than this. Surely if Charlotte had believed that selfemployment affords self-sufficiency and pleasure, she would have taken more time in
37
Villette to describe these effects” (145). While the lack of detail may have been
unsatisfactory to some, it is absolutely necessary in order to fulfill the author’s desired
effect. To sing her own accolades would have been inconsistent with the character that
Brontë had worked so hard to develop throughout the novel. Lucy Snowe is an observer
of others, giving very few details about herself along the way. Her strong points and
achievements are always observed by characters other than herself, and because all of
these characters have already had their stories completed, there is no one left to comment
on Lucy’s success.
Fenton-Hathaway asserts that Charlotte Brontë had an interesting standpoint
regarding women and work. In her essay, she claims that Brontë’s novels suggest that
while exceptional women can potentially transcend the pre-existing social structures,
trying to empower the unexceptional was a waste of energy (142). This is debatable, as
Brontë’s characters of Jane Eyre, Caroline Helstone, and Lucy Snowe are hardly
exceptional women. Brontë portrays them each as an “every woman,” who, when given
the opportunity to improve their situations, does so because human nature desires a life of
activity and forward momentum. These characters are not extraordinary women, but
rather ordinary women who are intelligent, motivated, and resourceful. Rather than being
the exception to the rule, Brontë uses these characters to show that even seemingly
average women have the desire to be contributing members of society and should be
afforded the opportunity to do so.
While modern feminist critics often wish that Brontë had been more revolutionary
in her rhetoric regarding women and work, it is important to remember the rules of
38
propriety that were operating throughout Brontë’s lifetime. To separate the woman from
her cultural and societal foundation is practically impossible because being a Victorian
lady infiltrated every aspect of Brontë’s life to a certain degree. At the time Brontë was
writing Villette, the public was well-aware of the fact that Currer Bell was a woman, and
more specifically, that she was a lady of the middle-class. Even as a forward-thinking and
intelligent woman, Brontë was far from subversive and had to be careful not to
immediately alienate her audience or cause her own respectability to be called into
question. By creating female characters who support themselves with worthwhile,
respectable occupations, Brontë suggests that society as a whole had the potential to be
greatly improved.
Charlotte Brontë is not openly advocating for women to enter all realms of the
public sphere; she does not even suggest types of employment other than those that were
already deemed socially acceptable. What she does do, however, is show that women
often work for the same reasons as men, as a means for survival and out of the desire to
live an active life. She firmly promotes the idea that when women work, it is, in fact,
work, regardless of whether or not it exists within the safety of the domestic realm.
Women’s work, like men’s, is often difficult and unrewarding, but the fact remains that it
is contributory and beneficial to society as a whole. The novels of Charlotte Brontë
highlight her beliefs that women’s work is worthy of respect, and that it is both errant and
insulting to assume that women excel at these jobs within the domestic sphere only
because it is a natural extension of motherhood rather than the direct result of personal
ability.
39
Chapter Three
The Education of Females in the Victorian Era
Female education in the Victorian era is an issue often examined within the novels
of Charlotte Brontë. There is no question that Brontë felt very strongly about the
importance of a solid educational foundation, not only for the characters in her novels,
but for the entire female population as well. She frequently critiques the subjects and
skills taught to all classes of females, focusing on the importance of education both as a
means of creating self-sufficiency as well as a way to help women earn respect as
contributing members of society.
Jane Eyre is widely known as a novel of education. Brontë devotes a considerable
portion of the story to scenes of learning, gaining life experiences, and adopting skills
that would be beneficial to females of potentially limited resources. Although Jane Eyre
is the novel most commonly known to advocate for a worthwhile female education, it
would be remiss to say that Charlotte Brontë does not touch upon this topic in varying
degrees within her other novels, Villette and Shirley, as well.
Because of her own personal experiences as both a student and a teacher, Charlotte
Brontë is able to take a well-informed look at the topic of female education and suggest
ways in which it could be improved. Brontë saw how educating all classes of females
would help to change the ways in which society viewed women and she used her novels
to explore the various options. While Villette and Shirley focus on the benefits of
properly educating middle- and upper-class girls, Jane Eyre takes a more broad approach
and looks at the advantages that occur from educating all classes of females.
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It is impossible to look at Villette without acknowledging that the setting is an
environment of education. The vast majority of the novel occurs within the walls of an
all-girls boarding school and revolves around Lucy Snow’s role as English teacher.
Villette takes a critical look at the education of well-to-do young Victorian women, which
tended to focus more on preparing females to become socialites and wealthy wives, rather
than well-rounded members of society who were respected for traits other than their
ability to secure a husband.
The location of Villette is critical to the observations that Charlotte Brontë makes
about Victorian education. Rather than setting the novel in her own nation, Brontë sets
Madame Beck’s pensionnat in a country other than England in order to critique the
educational shortfalls of upper-middle-class girls without directly attacking her own
society. While the majority of the novel is set within the school, the amount of actual
learning that appears to be taking place is almost negligible. By creating the school in the
fictional country of Labassecour, Brontë is free to take a mocking attitude towards the
simplistic and unchallenging education that was frequently bestowed upon the higherclass females within her own country.
The education that was provided to upper-middle-class young women during
Brontë’s lifetime was insufficient and would not be overhauled until later in the century.
In 1864, the Royal Commission on Secondary Education found that formalized female
education “lacked thoroughness and foundation” and was “in need of organization and a
broader curriculum” (Levine 30). As a teacher at the Roe Head School, Charlotte Brontë
witnessed these educational shortfalls and found herself dismayed and frustrated by the
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complete lack of intellectual desire exhibited by her pupils, often calling them “dolts” and
noting that their “stolid incomprehension saps her spirit” (qtd. in Gordon 55).
Madame Beck’s pensionnat is an example of a school that prides itself on
demanding the very minimum from its female pupils and is content with merely turning
out proper ladies of society. Lucy Snowe’s descriptions of the learning that takes place
appears to be the simple observations of an outsider, but can very logically be seen as a
critical commentary by the author about the mediocre education provided to uppermiddle-class females. Lucy Snowe describes Madame Beck’s pensionnat in a rather
unimpressed manner:
Full of healthy, lively girls, all well-dressed and many of them handsome…
not making very rapid progress in anything…[T]he pupils made notes of their
instructions, or did not make them – just as inclination prompted; secure that,
in case of neglect, they could copy the notes of their companion. (140)
Brontë shows how this type of education lacks a certain level of necessary discipline. The
young women are not prepared to be self-sufficient or productive members of society, but
are being groomed to be nothing more than decorative ladies of wealthy households. By
preventing Victorian girls from receiving a practical, well-rounded education, the chance
of women being seen as respected and contributing members of the community for
anything other than being a wife and mother was practically non-existent.
The character of Ginevra Fanshawe is Brontë’s depiction of what results from the
lack of practical knowledge being instilled in English girls. As soon as Ginevra is
introduced in the story, Brontë immediately sets her up as a mockery–a simple-minded
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young English woman who desires nothing more than to find a wealthy husband:
I know nothing–nothing in the world–I assure you; except that I play and
dance beautifully…. Do you know they wanted me to translate a page of an
easy German book into English the other day, and I couldn’t do it…In matters
of information–in history, geography, arithmetic, and so on, I am quite a baby;
and I write English so badly. (119)
Ginevra is completely unashamed at her lack of intelligence and shallowly defends
herself by admitting, “by-and-by we [her sisters] are to marry – rather elderly gentleman,
I suppose, with cash” (120). The fact that her schooling is for the sole purpose of finding
a husband speaks volumes about Brontë’s beliefs about the misguided insufficiency of
middle-class feminine education.
Brontë’s own experience as a teacher at the Roe Head School provided her with
unique insight into the insufficient nature of female education. She complained to her
close friend, Mary Taylor, that she was up against the “vacuousness of the feminine
mould” (Gordon 53). She was a woman in a time that had little public awareness of the
intellectual needs of woman and instead used education as a means of reinforcing a
vapid, shallow definition of femininity. Brontë’s own frustration with her pupils likely
encouraged her to create female characters who had a desire for substantial knowledge
rather than for simply securing a profitable marriage.
Calling for a complete overhaul of the female educational system was not
something that a female Victorian author, who hoped to remain a lady, was able to do at
this point in history. Instead, Brontë carefully weaves a solution into the storyline that is
neither radical nor revolutionary. Her answer to the problem of inadequate education lies
in the hands of the individual female. Lucy Snowe is an example of a woman who goes
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out of her way to increase her knowledge for the sake of personal betterment and to
increase her options in life. In order to do this, she teaches herself French, sits in on the
lessons of other teachers, and spends her evenings being intensively tutored in German.
While the other teachers are gossiping about trying to find husbands, Brontë shows Lucy
Snowe quietly and diligently working to improve herself.
Because the educational opportunities for Victorian women were not always
sufficient, Brontë advocates for women to be proactive on their own behalf. By creating
characters such as Lucy Snowe and Paulina Home Bassompierre, who voluntarily studies
German alongside Lucy Snowe, Brontë reveals that there is a way for females to excel
intellectually. While the formal system of education may not have been providing
adequate practical knowledge to young women, Brontë shows that the opportunity is
attainable if females are willing to avail themselves of it.
While Villette takes place within a school, the novel Shirley lacks any examples of
formalized education. Because the novel is set in the very early part of the nineteenth
century, very few opportunities for schooling outside of the home existed for females at
the time. Just as she sets Villette outside of her own society, Brontë sets Shirley in an
earlier time period in order to avoid seeming overly subversive and to safely assert that
females absolutely need to be educated. In the essay, “Class and Gender in Charlotte
Brontë’s Shirley,” Helen Taylor asserts that Brontë’s writing is an expression of outrage
at the enclosed nature of most women’s lives and the limited possibilities available to
them (85). By showing how young women yearn to be actively and intellectually engaged
in a time period when females had few opportunities for formal education, Brontë
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suggests that these desires are natural and innate, not merely a modern occurrence within
her own society. Because Shirley deals significantly with the shortfalls of female
idleness, providing her characters with some level of education was necessary in order to
show how strongly Brontë believed in the importance of leading an active life.
True to the traditions of the early nineteenth century, Caroline Helstone receives her
instruction from her older cousin, Hortense Moore. While her lessons are limited to
French and fine needlework, Caroline finds the fact that she is actively engaged as
relatively satisfying. Rather than spending her days in idle boredom, Caroline prefers to
be receiving at least some form of education. While she admits that she would prefer to
be learning a trade, Caroline gratefully accepts her limited education, as it provides her
with a distraction from her otherwise monotonous life.
Brontë creates Caroline’s uncle, the Reverend Helstone, to be representative of the
opinions of the nineteenth-century man regarding female education. Deeply rooted in the
true Victorian mindset, Reverend Helstone sees no reason that girls should be educated
beyond the areas that directly prepare them to be suitable wives or homekeepers. Failing
to acknowledge that Caroline’s life might be improved by receiving an education,
Reverend Helstone only agrees to allow a few simple lessons in order to prevent Caroline
from making demands upon his attention:
He had taken little trouble about her education; probably, he would have taken
none if she, finding herself neglected, had not grown anxious on her own
account, and asked, every now and then, for a little attention, and for the
means of acquiring such amount of knowledge as could not be dispensed
with. (74)
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The idea that Caroline might be seeking out greater knowledge, and not merely looking
for her uncle’s attention, is incomprehensible to Reverend Helstone. Because Caroline’s
restlessness infringes upon the peace within his household, her uncle agrees to allow
Hortense Moore to instruct his niece for the sole purpose of increasing his own personal
comfort level.
The concept of a young woman seeking out something beyond the traditional
training of a future wife and mother was unfathomable to a large part of the male
population. Reverend Helstone tells Caroline to “stick to the needle – learn shirt-making
and gown-making, and pie-crust making, and you’ll be a clever woman some day” (95).
The idea that a woman might desire knowledge outside of the domestic realm would have
been seen as an indication of a restless spirit and, thus, as a threat to the Victorian status
quo. Much like the way that keeping the poor population suffering served to protect the
middle-class, keeping young women occupied with domestic duties protected the
superior status of the male population from being infiltrated by females who believed that
they deserved better or even equal treatment.
Because Shirley is an earlier period piece, it is not an accurate depiction of actual
Victorian female education. This being said, it does contain Brontë’s beliefs about the
need for females to be properly educated, regardless of the given era. The young women
who are idle within the novel are background characters, never receiving much attention
other than vain petting and superficial accolades. Shirley and Caroline, the female
characters with a thirst for knowledge and a desire to do more in life, are placed directly
in the forefront, highlighting the aspect of human nature that propels individuals to
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improve and achieve, regardless of their gender or class. While formal education was not
an option in the earliest part of the nineteenth century, the young women seek to learn
whatever they can and make the most out of what is provided to them. By speaking freely
about the natural desire females have for intellectual improvement, Brontë attempts to
persuade society to begin to change the way in which it views women.
While the settings of Villette and Shirley are cleverly removed from Brontë’s own
surroundings, Jane Eyre deals directly with the issue of Victorian female education
across all of the classes. In the novel, Brontë explores lower-class education in the
charity schools, looks at the potential for educating the peasantry in village schools, and
acknowledges the importance of preparing middle- and upper-class girls to be selfsufficient in life. Brontë asserts that by properly educating all classes of females, women
will begin to see themselves as valuable, contributing members of the community. In
turn, society will reap the benefits of these well-educated females and begin to show
them the respect they so rightfully deserve.
In the novel, Jane Eyre, Jane is initially a member of the middle class, but attending
a charity school for orphans causes a certain level of downward social mobility. Her
ability to become financially independent in life is directly related to the quality of
education she is able to receive. Brontë’s novel sheds light on the fact that the girls who
most desperately needed a proper education were often subjected to cruel and abusive
treatment as well as to inadequate academic instruction. Because of these shortfalls,
young women were often left ill-prepared for the challenges frequently faced by those
who are forced to support themselves.
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Charlotte Brontë is able to accurately portray the female charity schools because her
own early education was very similar to that of Jane Eyre’s. It is widely accepted that
Jane Eyre’s education at the Lowood Institution was clearly modeled after The Clergy
Daughter’s School in Cowen Bridge where Brontë and her sisters were students for a
period of time (Gordon 23). Brontë uses Jane Eyre as a platform to publicly disclose the
abuses and defects of charitable education for females in nineteenth-century England.
Rather than preparing young women to excel at appropriate jobs outside the familial
home, Brontë shows how the charity schools were instead used to draw and reinforce the
distinct lines between the different social classes.
The publicly declared goal of charity schools like Lowood was to prepare their
pupils to hold jobs such as governesses, teachers, and domestic help, while serving to
guide them both morally and spiritually. Jane Eyre shows a very different reality than
that which was widely broadcast throughout society. The printed report put out by
Brontë’s former school called “Report of the Cowen Bridge School for Clergymen’s
Daughters,” states,
In all cases, the great object in view is their intellectual and religious
improvement; and to give that plain and useful education, which may best fit
them to return with respectability and advantage to their own homes; or to
maintain themselves in the different stations of life to which Providence may
call them. The system of education comprehends History, Geography, and
Use of the Globes, Grammar, Writing and Arithmetic, all kinds of
Needlework, and the nicer kinds of household-work, such as getting up fine
linen, ironing, etc. (qtd. in Dunn 391)
It appears that the clergy daughter’s school was trying to convince the public that their
students were receiving a proper feminine education, but in reality, it was actually quite
far from the truth. The private letters of Charlotte Brontë describe an environment in
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which girls struggle to survive amid unsanitary conditions, scarce food and resources,
harsh and abusive discipline, and dogmatic religious control. Completely devoid of any
real compassion, concern, or sentimentality, this atmosphere was hardly conducive to a
proper education.
Brontë’s first novel highlights the discrepancy between the public reports of
charitable education and what was actually taking place. Jane Eyre is initially enthusiastic
at her chance for an education, as she views it as a means to achieve self-sufficiency. Her
desire to sever her dependency on the Reed family is compounded with her thirst for
knowledge, producing what should have been an ideal student. Instead, Jane finds herself
unable to academically prosper, as she faces starvation, neglect, and physical abuse.
Brontë is highly critical of the educational environment in which young girls are unable
to thrive because of the conditions they are forced to endure as a direct result of their
lower-class status.
The Victorian middle and upper classes often had a significant amount of prejudice
towards the poor and working classes. It was quite normal for the more well-to-do
portion of society to hold the belief that the lower classes were poor because of their own
doing and that they deserved to live in poverty because they were either lazy or morally
corrupt (Gordon 17). Brontë explores how schools like the Lowood Institution reinforce
this dogma by trying to break the spirits of the lower-class girls and indoctrinate them
into the idea that they do not deserve any better in life. Mrs. Reed informs Mr.
Brocklehurst that she wishes Jane “to be brought up in a manner suiting her prospects…
to be made useful, to be kept humble” (28). By teaching these young girls that it is God’s
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will that they live a life full of self-denial and suffering, the middle class was protecting
its position from the potential infiltration of a lower-class that actually believed that it
deserved better. By preventing lower-class girls from attempting to improve their
situation, these females had little hope of ever being seen as respected members of
society.
In the article, “Jane Eyre: From Governess to Girl Bride,” Esther Godfry observes
that the social position of Mr. Brocklehurst expresses a middle-class interest in
preserving the economic status quo (857). In order to do so, it is required that very clear
divisions exist between the classes themselves, making sure the lower classes clearly
understand their inferior social position. While his own wife and daughters are draped in
all the accoutrements of upper-middle-class Victorian femininity, the charity school
students are forced to wear crudely made frocks and keep their hair cropped short.
Brocklehurst informs Miss Temple that his “plan in bringing up these girls is, not to
accustom them to habits of luxury and elegance, but to render them hardy, patient, and
self-denying” (53). Brontë shows how forcing the girls to rid themselves of all
indications of individuality serves to prevent them from ever encouraging the notion that
they might somehow improve their social position in life.
The famous literary review of Jane Eyre in the Quarterly Review complained that
“there is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and the privations of
the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God’s
appointment” ( qtd. in Shapiro 683). The belief that one’s position within society was
granted directly by God was quite prevalent during the Victorian era, but it was an
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assertion that Charlotte Brontë frequently toyed with in her novels. If she had firmly
believed in this ideology, she would not have encouraged lower-class girls to educate
themselves for the sake of improving their prospects in life, nor would she have had her
title character marry a man who was in a significantly higher social class.
Brontë saw the tendency for charity schools to enforce social separation as a gross
misuse of something that should have bettered the prospects of an entire class of females.
Instead of preparing young women to be respected and self-sufficient members of
society, schools like these did little more than break the spirits of their pupils. By
creating a character such as Jane Eyre, who is a survivor of a flawed system, Charlotte
Brontë gives the middle- and upper-class readers a glimpse into the abuses taking place
for the purpose of protecting their own social security.
Charlotte Brontë clearly had hope for the improvement of charitable female
education and used Jane Eyre to quietly advocate for such a change. By showing the
transition that occurs at the Lowood Institution after it undergoes a change of
management, Brontë reveals a vision of exactly what a proper learning environment
entailed:
Several wealthy and benevolent individuals in the county subscribed largely
for the erection of a more convenient building in a better situation; new
regulations were made; improvements in diet and clothing introduced; the
funds of the school were entrusted to the management of a committee. [The
school began] to combine reason with strictness, comfort with economy,
compassion with uprightness. (71)
Brontë was by no means calling for a system of education that was lax and lenient. Her
own intense personality demanded a strict system of rules and guidelines that would help
improve the individual’s long term success. She was harshly critical of schools that
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stifled the imagination and abused the child, but was not against a learning environment
that was well-defined and intellectually challenging (Gordon 389). After leaving the
Clergy Daughter’s School, Charlotte Brontë experienced a superior learning environment
and was personally aware of the positive outcome that results from this type of proper
treatment.
Several critics have suggested that Jane Eyre fails to address the issue of the quality
of the actual education offered to female charity students during the Victorian age. In the
article, “The Education of Charlotte Brontë: A Pedagogical Case Study,”
Sue Lonoff de Cuevas argues that the character of Jane Eyre does not advocate for a
better system of education and that she fails to question the teaching methods being
employed, asserting, “At Lowood, Jane attacks the wretched cooking, the minuscule
portions, the cold, the scanty clothing, and the sadistic Miss Scatcher, but not the
curriculum” (463). While she may not directly attack the curriculum, the implication is
definitely present. By showing the horrible conditions that girls are forced to endure,
Charlotte Brontë is clearly posing the question, “How are young women supposed to
focus on the quality of their education when they are using all of their energy to merely
survive?” Once the conditions have improved, Jane is able to focus on and enjoy her time
at Lowood:
I had the means of an excellent education placed within my reach. A fondness
for some of my studies, and a desire to excel in all, together with a great
delight in pleasing my teachers, especially such as I loved, urged me on: I
availed myself fully to the advantages offered me. In time I rose to be the first
girl of the class. (71)
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By transforming the school into a safe and healthy learning environment, Brontë shows
how students like Jane would be able to refocus their energy into the education at hand.
Jane does not need to make a formal list of the ways in which the education at The
Lowood Institution was insufficient because it goes without saying that a girl cannot
intellectually thrive in an environment of deprivation and abuse, regardless of the quality
of the curriculum.
In Jane Eyre, Brontë clearly marks the distinction that exists between the ways in
which the different classes view education. Rather than broadly asserting that all classes
of females should be adequately educated, Victorians believed that the quality of
education was directly proportional to the social position of the female. When Jane gets
the job as the country school teacher in Morton, she is suspect about the intelligence and
capacity of her rural lower-class female pupils. Even though Jane has been forced to
endure a charitable education, Brontë shows how her middle-class roots have not simply
disappeared. After pushing aside her preconceived notions and acknowledging her
opportunity to make a significant difference in the lives of these girls, Jane reminds
herself that one’s class does not define one’s character:
I must not forget that these coarsely-clad little peasants are of flesh and blood
as good as the scions of gentlest genealogy; and that the germs of native
excellence, refinement, intelligence, kind feeling, are as likely to exist in their
hearts as in those of the best-born. My duty will be to develop these germs.
(306)
This observation, while fictional, is from the point of view of a person who has
experienced both financial destitution as well as relative self-sufficiency. Originally a
cash-poor member of the middle class, Brontë acknowledges in Jane Eyre what it means
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to be poor, but demonstrates how one’s financial state should not dictate one’s
intellectual capabilities.
The village school at Morton serves as Brontë’s commentary on the importance of
female education at all social levels. Brontë asserts that even the poorest young girls
deserve access to a proper education because their financial situation should dictate
neither their character nor their capacity for learning:
I discovered amongst them not a few examples of natural politeness and
innate self-respect, as well as of excellent capacity, that won both my
goodwill and my admiration. These soon took a pleasure in doing their work
well; in keeping their persons neat; in learning their tasks regularly; in
acquiring quiet and orderly manners. The rapidity of their progress, in some
instances, was even surprising. (312)
The fact that these girls are poor does not make them lazy, slovenly, or naturally less
intelligent. Brontë expresses hope that by educating this group of girls, they will
eventually be able to better their situations and possibly provide for themselves or
contribute financially to either their birth families or their married families.
The private letters of Charlotte Brontë show significant evidence of the fact that
Jane as the village school teacher was modeled after her childhood friend, Mary Taylor
(Gordon 144). Taylor, a woman who exerted such strength and individuality that Brontë
was often taken aback by her radical ideas, left England and moved to New Zealand in
order to escape the restraints placed upon Victorian females. In New Zealand, Taylor
became a teacher in a very similar situation, educating a group of very poor young
women for very little pay. In a letter to Brontë, Taylor explained that she “was in her
element – because she is where she has a toilsome task to perform, an important
improvement to effect” (qtd. in Gordon, 144). This was a woman who was sturdy and
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self-reliant, who ignored conventions, status, and the middle-class norms of comfort in
order to make a difference by helping girls who might otherwise be deprived of the
chance at a decent education.
By putting Jane in a situation very similar to that of Mary Taylor, Brontë is
acknowledging the importance of the work that needed to be done within her own
society. In order for society to begin to change its views about women, educating the
poor and working classes was an important step. By starting at the bottom and educating
females of the lower classes, a generation of young women would be created who are
well-prepared for the jobs of governesses and teachers, rather than for lives of servitude.
These better-educated young women would then pass their knowledge and discipline on
to their students of the middle and upper classes. In turn, these wealthy females would
perhaps embrace the idea of being well-educated in subjects that were actually useful,
rather than occupying themselves with the frivolity and idle tendencies of the middle and
upper classes.
Although the mid-nineteenth century marks a period when society was just
beginning to acknowledge the importance of education, it was not until nearly 1900 that
schooling for girls became wide-spread (Levine 30). The females of the upper and middle
classes were often educated by governesses within their home, but rarely received any
outside formal education. Until this point, there were a handful of charity schools for the
lower classes and orphans, but these schools did not often reach down into the ranks of
the peasantry, possibly because of their distance away from the larger cities (Levine 30).
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By depicting a small village school that is run both effectively and economically, Brontë
suggests that this sort of education is, in fact, a worthwhile venture. Jane finds that the
young peasant girls she is responsible for teaching are willing and intelligent students,
worthy of a chance at an education. By increasing the portion of the British population
that had some degree of education, particularly the ability to read and write, Brontë
suggests the benefits to society would be wide-spread.
While educating the poor was important to help ease the burden on society,
education for wealthy females was more about improving their quality of life, and
helping to prepare them in the event that they should lose their source of financial
support. Just as she would later do with Lucy Snowe in Villette, Brontë shows the
importance of providing middle- and upper-class girls with the necessary skills for selfsufficiency and personal enrichment. By ensuring that these young women are
knowledgeable beyond the traditional domestic arena, not only would they be more
successful at maintaining a home and marriage, they would be better citizens, able to
participate in society on more than a purely superficial level.
Early in the novel, an adolescent Jane reflects on the fact that she has very little
knowledge about what school actually is. Her only real insight comes from Bessie, the
Reed family’s nurse, who has witnessed the education of upper-class girls in other
families. Jane recalls Bessie’s description of school as “a place where young ladies sat in
the stocks, wore back-boards, and were expected to be exceedingly genteel and precise”
(20). Rather than creating thinking and contributing members of society, this type of
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education is geared towards making young women into prim and proper ladies, the very
epitome of Victorian propriety.
Charlotte Brontë had very little respect for this type of superficial upper-class
education that does little in terms of intellectual enrichment or preparation for life. She
creates several characters in her novels that are set up as examples of this type of
inadequate education. In Jane Eyre, Blanche Ingram is a beautiful woman who has no
real intellectual depth. While she is adept at being a party guest and socialite, she is
vapid and easily dispensable. Jane’s critical description of Miss Ingram speaks volumes
about the uselessness of women who are raised only to be beautiful:
She was very showy but she was not genuine: she had a fine person, many
brilliant attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature;
nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit
delighted by its freshness. She was not good; she was not original: she used
to repeat sounding phrases from books: she never offered, nor had, an opinion
of her own. (158)
Blanch Ingram is a one-dimensional character who is worthy of neither Jane’s nor
Brontë’s time. She serves as a temporary foil to Jane’s deeply thinking and educated
character, demonstrating the misguided results of upper-class feminine education.
Besides creating women to be intelligent partners in marriage and contributing
members of the community, the most important benefit of properly educating middleand upper-class women was to prepare them to be self-sufficient in the event that their
family was no longer able to support them. Just as she would later do in Villette, Brontë
advocates education as a means for ensuring that even the upper- and middle-class
women have the basic skills necessary to be dependant upon themselves for survival.
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In Jane Eyre, Brontë creates the characters of Mary and Diana Rivers as examples
of young, middle-class women who are forced to depend upon their own skills for
survival. Like many middle- and upper-class girls, Mary and Diana come from a wellestablished family that is unable to provide them with long term financial support:
The girls, as soon as they left school, would seek places as governesses: for
they had told her [Jane Eyre] that their father had some years ago lost a great
deal of money by a man he had trusted turning bankrupt; and as he was now
not rich enough to give them fortunes, they must provide for themselves.
(292)
Like many other young women in similar situations, Brontë shows how Mary and Diana
take it upon themselves to learn subjects and skills that would help to increase their
marketability in order to support themselves financially. Because they were properly
educated, their ability to find employment and become self-sufficient is greatly enhanced.
Ensuring that even the girls of the middle and upper classes were well-educated allowed a
type of safety net in case they found themselves stripped of their middle- or upper-class
security.
Charlotte Brontë focuses on education as a means to change the way that society
viewed women and the ways in which women viewed themselves. By giving all females
the opportunity to receive a well-rounded, quality education, an entire generation of
thinking and reasoning females would be able to participate in society in a worthwhile
and productive manner. Rather than only respecting women for becoming wives and
mothers, education provided society with the opportunity to appreciate females for their
ability to make well-informed decisions and excel in appropriate occupations, if need be.
Victorian society needed to get away from the idea that lower-class females needed only
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to be trained in areas that made them fit for lives of servitude and that middle- and upperclass females needed only to perfect frivolous skills that made them charming hostesses
or proper party guests. Charlotte Brontë shows throughout her novels that by adequately
preparing these women to be productive members of society, they are better equipped to
take care of themselves if need be.
By creating an entire generation of well-educated women, England would be
helping to guard itself against the huge drain that 500,000 redundant women would place
on its economy. By educating the upper classes as well as the working classes, women
would begin to see themselves, and in turn be seen by the public, as valuable and
contributing members of society. Education is a necessary foundation in order to be a
valuable partner in a relationship, or to secure an appropriate job as a means of
contribution or survival. Without a proper, well-rounded education, the lower-class
females would continue to be seen as little more than animals and upper-class women
would remain vapid, empty, decorative trophies.
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Chapter Four
The Importance of Feminine Capability: Redefining Victorian Womanhood
The novels of Charlotte Brontë argue forcibly about the author’s logic regarding the
necessity of judging females primarily based upon their intelligence and individual
capabilities. In a society where a woman’s worth was mainly derived from her physical
appearance and marriageability, Brontë stepped away from the norm and advocated for a
new standard for determining the value of women. Within her novels, Brontë created a
cast of characters who either adhere to her new benchmark of womanhood or get caught
up in the superficiality of the standing definition. By contrasting these two categories of
characters, Brontë depicted the type of female whom she believes to be worthy of
society’s respect, as well as exploring the dangers that occurred from judging women
based solely upon their physical appearances and marital prospects.
Society viewed the ideal Victorian woman as beautiful, gentle, and innately good–a
doting mother, a charitable churchgoer, and a dutiful and obedient wife. Her early years
were spent primping and looking for an advantageous marriage, while her following
years were consumed with the care of her family and the overseeing of her household.
Nineteenth-century girls were well indoctrinated into this mode of thinking and the desire
to do anything besides this was often looked upon disapprovingly. The Victorian concept
of the “angel in the house” put women in charge of the moral fortitude of the family but
did little in regards to helping to prepare them for interaction with the outside world.
In each of her novels, Brontë developed a case for women to be intelligent and
capable rather than beautiful and shallow. Her novels quietly plead with society to
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redefine the ideal woman to include deeper virtues that make a female a good person on
the inside rather than just the outside. Through this sort of transformation, Brontë
suggests the potential benefits for society as a whole and creates characters within her
novels who reinforce this idea. Lyndall Gordon, Brontë’s biographer, asserts that
“Charlotte Brontë looks to a society improved through reformed characters” (153).
Brontë’s main characters embody the qualities that would help bring about wide-spread
improvement to the female population, as well as to society as a whole. By encouraging
women to focus on the more substantial aspects of their identity, the author’s hope is that
females will begin to be respected for their intellect and reasoning rather than their
physical appearance or their ability to secure a husband.
In Jane Eyre and Villette, Brontë creates main characters who are comprised of the
qualities that the author sees as particularly important. Both Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe
are intelligent and capable young women who overcome society’s views about females in
order to secure a place in the world. By showing how Jane and Lucy ultimately succeed
in life and avoid becoming victims of the Victorian ideals of womanhood, Brontë implies
that women are capable of doing much more than merely looking pretty.
The novels Jane Eyre and Villette clearly advocate for women to be in charge of
their own destinies and exert their own strengths in order to do so. Brontë does not create
characters who are openly subversive, but instead produces women who do everything
within the rules of propriety in order to achieve the goals of respect and self-sufficiency.
By showing her readers that women can be independent thinkers while still remaining
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proper ladies, Brontë demonstrates how a new standard of imagining women does not
have to interfere with the pre-existing standards of female decency.
The characters of Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre are both small, plain women who
dress in a very conservative and demure fashion. Throughout the novels, Brontë shows
how the simple exterior of a woman is by no means an indication of a simple mind. The
combination of modesty and competency creates an ideal woman who is able to be an
active participant in the world around her without being viewed as improper. Narrated by
intelligent and deeply contemplative women, Brontë’s stories focus on strong female
characters who propel themselves forward, while the young women who are pretty,
delicate dolls fade away into the background.
Unlike the traditional Victorian definition of beautiful and idle womanhood, Brontë
creates Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre as intelligent, motivated, hardworking females. Their
success in life comes because they depend upon their own intrinsic abilities rather than
relying solely upon their external qualities. Both characters are well aware that they do
not conform to the ideal standard of Victorian beauty, and because of this, Brontë
demonstrates the importance of acquiring skills that will help females succeed regardless
of their looks or marriageability. Charlotte Brontë shows that women do not have to be
victims of the societal norms, but that they have the power to rise above and help redefine
the meaning of womanhood.
Brontë recognized how changing the definition of true womanhood needed to start
with women’s attitudes about themselves and their fellow females. In the 1848 Quarterly
Review, Elizabeth Rigby made scathing accusations about the impropriety of the
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character of Jane Eyre, calling her a “decidedly vulgar-minded woman—one whom we
should not care for as an acquaintance, whom we should not seek as a friend, whom we
should not desire for a relation, and whom we should scrupulously avoid for a governess”
(179). Rather than appreciating the strength and independence that Jane exhibits
throughout the novel, Rigby exposed her own personal enmeshment in the Victorian
standards, publically condemning the character for veering away from the social norm. In
order for society to begin to change the ways in which it defined women, females needed
to realize their true potential and advocate for themselves and one another. Brontë’s
novels give a voice to this need and show the benefits that could arise if women began to
demand more for, and of, themselves.
Throughout her novels, Brontë advocates for women to develop skills that best
prepare them to be intelligent and respectable members of society. Because of its
transitory nature, beauty is not a trait that is highly important in Brontë’s hierarchy of
feminine attributes, as echoed in the sentiments of Lucy Snowe:
To speak truth, reader, there is no excellent beauty, no accomplished grace, no
reliable refinement, without strength as excellent, as complete, as trustworthy.
As well might you look for good fruit and blossom on a rootless and sapless
tree, as for charms that will endure in a feeble nature. For a little while, the
blooming semblance of beauty may flourish round weakness; but it cannot
bear a blast: it soon fades, even in serenest sunshine. (385)
More important than purely external beauty is the development of the capabilities that
give a woman a sharp mind and honest heart. Brontë recognizes the fleeting nature of
beauty and how inconsequential it is unless accompanied by something deeper. While
beauty without intelligence is destined to fade, intelligence, with or without beauty, is a
lifelong virtue that better defines a woman.
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Brontë’s novels suggest that beauty without real intelligence or useful skills
ultimately sets a woman up for failure. The ability to support one’s self was definitely an
issue in a time when England had a great surplus of unmarried women. Brontë
acknowledges this issue in Villette, as Lucy Snowe is unable to rely upon familial
connections or a potential future husband, forcing her to completely depend upon herself
in order to survive. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s description of Lucy Snowe is a
sobering, yet powerful assessment: “From first to last a woman without–outside society,
without parents or friends, without physical attractions, without money or confidence or
health–and her story is perhaps the most moving and terrifying account of female
deprivation ever written” (qtd. in Lawson 15). A situation as desperate as this one would
likely have been seen as hopeless to Victorian society. Rather than giving in to the
Victorian mindset, Brontë shows how a “woman without” can not only survive, but can
eventually thrive because of her own skills and competency.
Like Lucy Snowe, Jane Eyre is a character whose survival is dependant upon her
ability to intellectually conceptualize the world around her. Jane, a very cerebral
character, is capable of predicting the consequences of her actions rather than looking for
immediate gratification. While she is clearly not a traditional beauty, describing herself as
“poor, obscure, and plain,” her physical appearance does not get in the way of being a
deeply complex character (216). Like the author herself, Jane’s plain exterior adds to her
emotional and intellectual depth by forcing her to overcome society’s belief about
goodness and beauty being synonymous.
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While beauty often hides significant character flaws, Jane’s austere appearance
mirrors her serious personality and her strong work ethic. She does not waste time in idle
primping, dressing herself up like a doll in order to please Rochester. Instead, Brontë
shows how intelligence, modesty, and goodness can be traits that make a woman
desirable: “Retaining every minute form of respect, every propriety of my station, I
could still meet him in argument without fear or uneasy restrain: this suited both him and
me” (134). Brontë illustrates how the ability to interact intellectually can contribute to a
highly successful relationship and create a bond that is much more fulfilling than a
connection based strictly on appearances.
While Jane embodies the qualities that Brontë believes to be important in females,
Rochester’s former lovers are representative of the results that occur when women are
judged in purely superficial terms. Bertha Mason, Céline Varens, and Blanche Ingram are
all women who are beautiful on the outside but lack any real substance or innate
goodness. Brontë shows how Blanch Ingram’s beauty temporarily disguises her financial
motivation for marriage, Céline Varen’s outward appearance masks her greedy and
unfaithful nature, and Bertha Mason conceals her madness behind a gorgeous and exotic
exterior. Through these three characters, Brontë demonstrates how a woman can fully
conform to the Victorian standard female appearances while being completely devoid of
any worthwhile qualities. Brontë creates Jane with a keen awareness about human nature,
allowing her to project the idea that beauty is not equated with goodness of heart or mind:
“[Blanch Ingram] was very showy, but not genuine: she had a fine person, many brilliant
attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature” (158). Because Victorian
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society placed such a high value on beauty, women such as Bertha Mason, Céline Varen,
and Blanch Ingram were often able to rely solely upon their looks rather than developing
any deeper qualities.
Just as she does with Rochester’s former lovers in Jane Eyre, the character of
Ginevra Fanshawe in Villette serves as a similar warning about the danger of encouraging
females to focus only upon the superficial aspects of their existence. Ginevra Fanshawe
can be viewed as Brontë’s commentary on what is wrong with the qualities that are
valued in Victorian women. While beautiful and ostentatious, Lucy Snowe observes how
Ginevra is shallow, vain, and ill-prepared for life, noting, “Work or suffering found her
listless and dejected, powerless and repining, but gaiety expanded her butterfly wings….
Ginevra lived her life in a ballroom; everywhere else she drooped dispirited” (211).
Unlike Lucy Snowe who looks solely to herself for support, Ginevra focuses only upon
having a good time and finding a wealthy husband who will support her financially.
Rather than developing skills and abilities that would help her to succeed regardless of
whether she marries, Ginevra focuses her efforts on personal merriment, safe in her
assumptions that her beauty will earn her a life of ease.
The character of Ginevra Fanshawe is the antithesis of the self-driven Lucy Snowe.
While Lucy earns the respect of her peers through hard work and dedication, Ginevra’s
sense of importance is derived solely from her physical appearance. Lucy admonishes
Ginevra for believing that she is powerful because she is beautiful, asking her, “Who
gave you that power? Where is it? Does it lie all in your beauty – your pink and white
complexion and your yellow hair?” (217). Because nineteenth-century society pushed the
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idea that women were successful when they secured the most advantageous marriage
possible, Ginevra echoes the many females who believed that their self-worth was
directly tied in with their external beauty and worked only to improve that one small
aspect of their existence.
In conjunction with the character of Ginevra Fanshawe, Dr. John Bretton serves as
further warning about what results from society placing disproportionate value on
feminine beauty. The love that Dr. John believes he has for Ginevra is based solely on
her superficial qualities and has nothing to do with who she is as a person. She
shamelessly abuses his character, both ignoring him and using him for gifts, yet he is so
blinded by her beauty that he fails to see what a greedy, empty-headed coquette she is.
When the astute Lucy Snowe tries to warn him about Ginevra, John Bretton asks, “How
do you know that the spectacle of her grand insensibility might not be with me the
strongest stimulus to homage?” (281). He is drawn to her showy exterior and her aloof
nature but has dangerously little insight into her true character. Through the courtship of
Dr. John and Ginevra, Brontë shows how the way in which society determines the worth
of females is highly flawed and ultimately does a great injustice for both men and
women.
Throughout Jane Eyre and Villette, Brontë creates both examples and
counterexamples of what she views as a socially valuable female. While Lucy Snowe and
Jane Eyre are by no means perfect characters, it is their intelligence, diligence, and their
ability to reason that successfully propels them forward in life. Brontë repeatedly
proposes that individual strength surmounts external beauty in terms of importance,
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particularly evident as Lucy Snowe observes the painting of Cleopatra,“[S]he is strong;
and her strength has conquered Beauty, has overcome Grace, and bound both at her side,
captives” (329). Brontë’s novels encourage women to develop intrinsic qualities that will
help them become respected members of society, regardless of their marital status, with
the hope that females will begin to redefine themselves and that society will ultimately
follow suit.
In addition to Jane Eyre and Villette, Brontë’s second novel, Shirley, heavily
focuses upon the importance of feminine capability and exactly what it is that women
should be able to do and experience in life. Just as she does in her other novels, Charlotte
Brontë places significant emphasis on women developing strong characters and practical
abilities in order to achieve success. The idea that middle-class females were capable of
thinking about and doing things outside of the domestic realm was still rather taboo in the
mid-nineteenth century, but Shirley is a novel that confronts this matter head-on, in a way
that few authors at this time had even attempted.
While female authors of the nineteenth century were generally encouraged to write
novels of love, Brontë, against the advice of her publishers, decided to stray away from
this tradition (Gordon 187). Shirley is a novel that professes very early on not to be a
romance, but something “real, cool, and solid … something as unromantic as a Monday
morning” (5). While romance does develop throughout the novel, it is not the impetus of
the story itself. The relationships that commence at the end of Shirley do so because of
the well-developed minds of the female characters rather than their reliance upon the
superficial, predetermined Victorian standards of beauty and womanhood.
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Charlotte Brontë was a plain woman with sharp features, far from what society
viewed as beautiful. Because of this, she became aware at a very early age that she
would need to develop intrinsic traits that would help to propel her through life (Gordon
73). In Jane Eyre and Villette, Jane and Lucy are very much like Brontë – plain, austere,
and demure – but in Shirley, the idea of focusing on capability and character takes
somewhat of a different route. In Shirley, Brontë looks at females whose intelligence is
accentuated by their beauty and also explores the concept of the women who are ignored
by society for being spinsters or old maids.
Unlike the characters of Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre, Caroline Hestone and Shirley
Keeldar, the co-main female characters, are pretty enough to be considered socially
acceptable and marriage material. While Caroline is depicted as sweet and averagely
pretty, Shirley is described as being quite beautiful. Although these characters are both
pleasantly attractive, physical traits are not what defines these young women; their
intelligence and capabilities enhance their beauty, rather than having their beauty dictate
their overall value.
In Caroline Helstone, Charlotte Brontë creates a character who is deeply feeling,
thinking, and caring. She is serious, dutiful, and longing for a life more active than the
one she is destined to live. While her education has been rather limited, she is far from
being simple-minded. Her intellectual capabilities allow her to converse intelligently and
offer thoughtful advice to the men in her life. While the object of her desire, Robert
Moore, often remains distant for fear of falling in love, he never ignores Caroline’s
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insight on issues, such as discord among his lower-class factory workers, that would
normally be considered a man’s territory.
Brontë saw how confining a woman’s knowledge entirely within the domestic
sphere denied society a unique and valuable type of insight. Early in the novel, it
becomes obvious that Caroline is highly aware of the social and political discord taking
place within her town. Far from sitting idly in her room, oblivious to the world around
her, Caroline actively observes the undertones of mutiny threatening to erupt at Moore’s
mill and offers him sound advice: “You must not be proud to your workpeople; you must
not neglect chances of soothing them, and you must not be of an inflexible nature,
uttering a request as austerely as if it were a command” (90). By combining a welldeveloped mind with a woman’s sentimentality and capacity for empathy, Brontë creates
a type of female who is both useful and able to contribute to society and the people
around her.
In 1853, Charlotte Brontë told Elizabeth Gaskell that Caroline Helstone was based
partly upon herself and partly upon her childhood friend, Ellen Nussey (Gordon 340).
While the traits of the good, caring, and feminine woman belong to Ellen Nussey, the
aspects of Caroline’s character that are intellectual, ambitious, and somewhat unsettled
are reminiscent of Brontë’s strong, but often hidden, nature. This combination which
allows a woman to be intellectually capable while never sacrificing her femininity, is a
perfect blend of the traits that Brontë viewed as ideal.
Victorian society used external beauty as a measurement of a female’s worth
because it was a safe barometer. By keeping women occupied with something frivolous,
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society prevented them from developing or voicing deeper sentiments or dissatisfaction
about their roles in life (Barnhill 8). In Shirley, Reverend Helstone is a prime example of
the opinion of nineteenth-century men regarding the roles of females and the ways in
which they should occupy their time. Rather than creating a gender of thinking and
contributing members of society, Helstone would have preferred to have over 50% of the
population focusing only upon simple and trivial matters: “He could not abide sense in
women: he liked to see them as silly, as light-headed, as vain, as open to ridicule as
possible because they were then in reality what he held them to be, and wished them to
be, –inferior: toys to be played with, to amuse a vacant hour and to be thrown away”
(112). By keeping women occupied with superficial things, men did not need to worry
about females dwelling upon their inferior position within society and desiring more out
of life.
The issues of how Victorian women are viewed by society and how they viewed
themselves are embodied in Brontë’s characters Caroline Helstone and Shirley Keeldar.
Exploring these two women uncovers a type of female who questions who she is and
where she belongs, as well as a type of female who is secure in her identity and knows
what her role within society entails. While Caroline represents the longings of many
nineteenth-century ladies, Shirley is more of a hypothetical character, serving as an
example of what a woman has the potential to become if given the proper liberties.
Caroline Helstone is constructed by Charlotte Brontë as an internally restless young
woman who privately questions what her life is meant to be. Unsatisfied with a lifetime
of waiting on her uncle and sewing trinkets for the Jew’s basket, her acute awareness of
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her own potential leaves her ill at ease. Lyndall Gordon suggests that Caroline represents
all women whose energies were “unused by a society that relegated them, by law and
custom, to ineffectual positions” (190). As Caroline questions, “Where is my place in the
world?” it becomes clear that life must have more to offer than what she and thousands of
other women experience confined within the domestic sphere (384). While Caroline is
by no means lashing out publically about her feelings of restlessness, her intelligence and
common sense lead her to believe that she is destined for more in life.
Caroline Helstone is a character whose desire to better herself mentally helps to
improve her entire existence. Similar to the development of the relationship between
Jane Eyre and Rochester, Brontë uses Caroline to show how a woman’s desirability can
be greatly enhanced because of her intellect. Her intelligence, while not the result of a
highly formalized education, is one that denotes a fine mind. Caroline is quite capable of
conversing intelligently about topics such as Shakespeare with Robert Moore, who
acknowledges that she is never more beautiful than when she is involved in an
intellectual pursuit: “The whole aspect was pleasing. At the present moment – animated,
interested, touched – she might be called beautiful” (92). Her beauty exponentially
increases as she demonstrates her intellectual prowess, making her physical attributes a
bonus to her fine mind, rather than the other way around.
Unlike Caroline, who questions what her role in life is meant to be, Shirley knows
exactly what her future holds and does not let feminine norms obstruct her goals. In a
heated debate over women’s capacity for intelligence, Shirley asks Joe Scott, “Do you
seriously think that all the wisdom in the world is lodged in male skulls?” (311). This
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simple question reiterates Brontë’s belief that women had the potential and capacity to do
much more than was viewed as socially acceptable throughout the author’s own lifetime.
Joe Scott replies that “Woman is to take their husband’s opinion, both in politics and
religion. It’s wholesomest for them” (312). By suggesting that a female’s virtue is
preserved by her lack of insight and intellect, Joe Scott shows how Victorian men hoped
to keep women without the mental fortitude necessary to venture outside of the domestic
realm.
Brontë creates Shirley Keeldar as a character who, even within the confines of the
novel, gives certain people a heightened sense of anxiety. Her name alone suggests that
Brontë is somewhat avant-garde, as “Shirley” had always been considered a masculine
name until this novel was written (Miller xviii). While sufficiently beautiful, Shirley
Keeldar is far from the feminine ideal of idle and submissive womanhood. She is bright,
opinionated, and unafraid to speak her mind when necessary. Frequently heard referring
to herself as “Captain Keeldar,” she is well-aware of her duplicitous station in life:
I am indeed no longer a girl, but quite a woman and something more. I am an
esquire: Shirley Keeldar, Esquire, ought to be my style and title. They gave
me a man’s name; I hold a man’s position: it is enough to inspire me with a
touch of manhood; and when I see such people as that stately Anglo-Belgian –
that Gerard [Robert] Moore before me, gravely talking to me of business,
really I feel quite gentlemanlike. (194)
Brontë creates a character who, in the author’s mind, is the perfect balance of Victorian
femininity and masculine autonomy. She is a theoretic possibility: what a woman might
be if she combined intellect with both independence and a means of one’s own.
In Shirley, just as she does in her other novels, Brontë takes up the question of what
happens to the women who are not traditional beauties and lack much chance at marriage.
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Rather than focusing on these females in their younger years, as she does in Jane Eyre
and Villette, Charlotte Brontë instead looks at these women as they age in a society where
older, unmarried women are viewed as expendable. Written during a point in her life
when she firmly believed she would never marry, Brontë delves into the Victorian beliefs
about old maids and spinsters.
In the novel Shirley, the characters Miss Mann and Miss Ainley are older,
unattractive, and unmarried women who are widely viewed with varying degrees of
indifference. Caroline observes and acknowledges how the public continues to ignore
these women: “[H]ow wrong it is to neglect people because they are not pretty, and
young, and marry!” (171). Brontë uses these characters to demonstrate the fact that
unmarried women should not be seen as a burden to society when they are actually a very
integral part of the community.
Miss Mann is initially depicted as the traditional Victorian spinster, a cantankerous
old woman, hardened and embittered by her solitude and loneliness. She is almost
wholly ignored by her neighbors and spends the majority of her life in isolation. Through
the character of Caroline, Charlotte Brontë takes a deeper look into the life of spinsters in
order to reveal the true characters of women who are scorned or disregarded by the public
because of their lack of husbands or beauty:
She was a perfectly honest, conscientious woman, who had performed duties
in her day from whose severe anguish many a human Peri, gazelle-eyed,
silken-tressed, and silver-tongued, would have shrunk appalled: she had
passed alone through protracted scenes of suffering, exercised rigid selfdenial, made large sacrifices of time, money, health, for those who had repaid
her only by ingratitude. (173)
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Brontë reaches beyond society’s prejudice to portray examples of women who are plain
and unmarried, but who play an essential role within the community as caregivers and
through charity work. Brontë, who suspected that she would end up a spinster herself,
sheds light on the good that is being done by these sorts of women in order to show the
errancy of socially devaluing their existence.
In a country with approximately 500,000 redundant women, Brontë realized the
importance of the contributions that unmarried women were making to society. In the
novel Shirley, Miss Ainley, like Miss Mann, has given much to the community in the
form of active, hands-on assistance to the needy, doing jobs that other women would
have avoided at all costs:
Her works were not the works of almsgiving…. They were the works of a
sister of charity, far more difficult to perform than those of a lady bountiful.
She would watch by any sickbed: she seemed to fear no disease; she would
nurse the poorest whom none else would nurse: she was serene, humble, kind,
and equable through everything. For this goodness she got but little reward in
this life. (177)
Charlotte Brontë is pointing out the tragedy of this situation that was prevalent with
spinsters across the country at the time. Although caring for the sick and women’s
charitable philanthropy were viewed as useful to the community, these women were still
being pushed to the periphery of society because they were not beautiful or marriage
material.
Although the spinsters and old maids are not young and attractive, Brontë believes
that their good hearts, honest souls, and desire to help others should elevate them socially
rather than weigh them down for their failure to adhere to the Victorian norms. The
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omnipotent narrator observes the spinsters and recognizes how they are viewed by
members of Victorian society, regardless of their worthy and selfless contributions:
When the three were seated, they formed a trio which the gay and thoughtless
would have scorned, indeed, as quite worthless and unattractive – a middle
aged widow and two plain spectacled old maids – yet which had its own quiet
value, as many a suffering and friendless human being knew. (257)
Charlotte Brontë argues that these women, and thousands of other so-called “redundant
women,” need to be judged based upon their actions and abilities rather than on their
physical appearance or marital status. To assume that they are “worthless” because they
are “unattractive” is to completely ignore the fact that their contributions make them a
fundamental part of the community.
Mr. Hall, the vicar of Nunnely, is a mouthpiece used by Brontë to express her
beliefs about the importance of not judging women solely on their outward appearances.
He openly acknowledges the good that a woman like Miss Ainley does and believes “her
life came nearer the life of Christ, than that of any other human being he had ever met”
(176). Through the character of Mr. Hall, Brontë asserts that a woman’s quality should be
measured by her actions and deeds in life, not by how closely she conforms to superficial
standards of beauty:
It is not youth, nor good looks, nor grace, nor any gentle outside charm which
makes either beauty or goodness in God’s eyes. Young ladies, when your
mirror or men’s tongues flatter you, remember that, in the sight of her maker,
Mary Ann Ainley – a woman whom neither glass nor lips have ever
panegyrized – is fairer and better than either of you. (271)
The novel Shirley clearly demonstrates the need for Victorian society to redefine the
traits on which it bases the worth of women. Charlotte Brontë shows that it is the intrinsic
qualities – goodness of heart and mind – that make a woman valuable. The author spends
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considerable time highlighting these types of characters in her novels, while the
superficial, standard Victorian beauties are shown in little more than bas relief.
Brontë’s novels look at females from a perspective that was relatively unique in the
nineteenth century. Her focus on the deeper attributes and longings of women made
some members of the Victorian public uneasy. Brontë had to be careful not to make
Shirley Keeldar overly alienating in her independent ways and risk having readers shun
the novel that followed the very successful, yet often controversial, Jane Eyre. After the
publication of Jane Eyre, many critics criticized Brontë’s first novel as being improper
and unwholesome. In her 1848 review of Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Rigby accusingly said that
“Jane Eyre is pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition” because “it pleased God to
make her an orphan, friendless, and penniless,” yet Jane strived to alter her situation in
life (178). Although she disagreed with accusations such as these, Brontë had to be
cautious about crossing into somewhat dangerous territory. In a society where a person’s
role in life was seen as being God-given, Brontë had to ensure that Shirley’s often
masculine ways were not overly subversive to the point where she would be seen as an
affront to God.
By the time Shirley was published, there was much suspicion that the author, Currer
Bell, was actually a woman. This greatly added to the claims of impropriety, as a female
author depicting such freedom among women would have been viewed as dangerous to
the status quo. In the preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre, Brontë, who, in society
was the respectable daughter of a parson, lashes out indignantly at her critics in a rather
masculine manner, scolding the “carping few who doubt the tendency of books as Jane
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Eyre, in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong…conventionality is not morality” (1).
The insinuation that Jane’s character is morally corrupt because she does not perfectly
conform to the nineteenth-century standard had an immediate effect on the authorial
persona of Charlotte Brontë.
Critic Lucasta Miller suggests that the abrasive tone of Shirley lies in Brontë’s
defiantly defensive response to the criticism of Jane Eyre (xv). The first half of the novel,
in particular, is written in a highly masculine voice by an author who is refusing to give
in to the pressure of her publishers to produce womanly writing. Brontë goes so far as to
open the story by informing the reader that “if you think that anything like a romance is
preparing for you, reader, you were never more mistaken” (6). Refusing to conform to the
idea that romance and love stories were the only topics that women were capable of
writing about, Brontë created a novel that is an example of her own keen intellect and her
authorial proficiency.
The very act of writing the novel Shirley is a demonstration of the capability of
women. Not only does the storyline of Shirley advocate the importance of female
capability over beauty, the novel itself serves as an example of the author exhibiting the
same within her own career. The novel is full of examples of Brontë testing her limits and
demonstrating her knowledge of traditionally unwomanly subjects. Her commentary on
class conflict, civil unrest, religious corruption, and the effect of the Industrial Revolution
show just how well-informed Charlotte Brontë truly was. By setting the novel during the
Napoleonic Wars, Brontë was able to make historical observations on events that had a
direct effect on her own society later in the century. The political debates between
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Helstone, a Tori, and Moore, a Whig, are directly reminiscent of the debates that Brontë’s
own father had with his associates in the presence of his daughter (Gordon 278).
Critics have put forth the claim that this sort of unfeminine writing was an attempt
to guard Brontë’s identity as a woman, noting that she may have been “calculatedly aping
a masculine style as a way of protecting her incognito” (Miller xiii). While this may be at
least partially true, it does Brontë a great disservice to disregard her skills as a highly
knowledgeable member of society in order to attempt to justify her understanding of the
public sphere. Brontë’s thoroughly researched subject matter is a direct indication of
how seriously she took her job as an author. Rather than writing a love story that is
isolated in an ideal fictional setting, Brontë creates a tale in which all aspects of the
characters’ lives are directly impacted by the world around them.
While Brontë’s identity was no longer a secret, it is important to remember that the
majority of the public still believed Currer Bell to be a man at the time when Shirley was
actually being written. Charlotte Brontë intended for her audience to believe that the
character traits exhibited by Caroline Helstone and Shirley Keeldar were being presented
as both desirable and acceptable from the point of view of a man. This sort of testimonial
would be much more convincing coming from a male author rather than a female author,
who would have been seen as restless and incendiary. Without being highly subversive,
Currer Bell creates women who are intelligent and contributing members of the
community, rather than idle, gossiping ninnies, or beautiful, empty-headed dolls.
Charlotte Brontë was not a woman who was going to advocate for females to take a
revolutionary stance against the traditional Victorian norms. Instead, she saw the benefits
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of encouraging women to develop deeper qualities that would help society to realize their
true worth. Rather than creating generation after generation of Ginevra Fanshawes,
Brontë’s novels quietly show the widespread advantages that could occur if females are
encouraged to focus on qualities that are long lasting, rather than those which are fleeting
and possibly non-existent, like physical attractiveness. By promoting the idea that an
individual’s capabilities surpass the importance of their outward appearance or marital
status, Brontë hoped that society would begin to redefine their vision of ideal
womanhood.
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Chapter Five
Meaningful Connections in Victorian Marriage
The novels of Charlotte Brontë frequently touch upon the concept of marriage and
what the author suggests are the inadequate motivations behind it. Victorian society
viewed wealth and social connections as perfectly legitimate reasons that marriages
should be sought after, but Brontë’s novels reveal why the results are often disastrous.
Marrying for reasons that were socially and financially advantageous, while highly
advocated within Victorian culture, did not always yield the best connections and
frequently left women at a great disadvantage. Charlotte Brontë sees marriages based on
love, mutual respect, and true compatibility as a way for women to be valued and
respected as individuals, rather than merely becoming the property of their husbands.
In order for society to change the way that it viewed women and their roles in life,
Brontë believed that females needed to be seen as more than mere commodities. As she
told close friends, “I could not help but despise a husband who viewed me as no more
valuable than a lamp in the parlour or a horse in the stable” (Shorter 104). The idea of
being regarded as property was distasteful to Brontë, who realized that such a relegation
put women in a position of little respect or power.
Certain historical events in the nineteenth century had a direct impact on women’s
inferior position in the Victorian marriage market. England’s expansion into India, along
with the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) and the Crimean War (1853-1856) created a
fairly significant imbalance in the country’s population (Victorianweb.org). Because
young men were being sent away from home on military expeditions, Victorian England
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found itself with a disproportionately high number of females in comparison to the
number of eligible bachelors.
In a marriage market that had a surplus of willing women, men had plenty of
eligible females from which to choose, giving males the power to dictate the standards of
desirability. Those who failed to adhere to the sought-after criteria were often
marginalized, leaving them on the periphery of society. Because young women were
competing for a limited number of husbands, men began to see women as predators in
petticoats, as Brontë shows in the novel Shirley:
They scheme, they plot, they dress to ensnare husbands. The gentlemen turn
them into ridicule: they don’t want them; they hold them very cheap: they say
– I have heard them say it with sneering laughs many a time – the matrimonial
market is overstocked. Fathers say so likewise, and are angry with their
daughters when they observe their maneuvers: they order them to stay at
home. (370)
These females, who have been taught that marriage and motherhood are the highest goals
that a woman can hope to achieve, are scoffed at and devalued by the same people who
reinforce these goals. To promote the idea that females only need to look pretty and find
husbands, and then scorn them for trying to do so, puts these women in a very difficult
situation where earning respect is practically impossible. By preventing young women
from aspiring to anything higher than the purely domestic realm, men are ensuring their
own superior position, while keeping the married women in an inferior role and the
“redundant women” in an even lower spot.
Charlotte Brontë realized that Victorian women needed to be seen as partners in
marriage in order to be viewed as valuable members of the community. In order for this
to happen, society needed to begin advocating marriages based on compassion and
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compatibility rather than advantageous financial and social aspects. While far from
promoting a complete overhaul of Victorian standards, Charlotte Brontë frequently
creates characters and situations within her novels that illustrate the benefits of wellmatched marriages, as well as the disasters that occur otherwise.
Throughout much of her life, Brontë witnessed what Victorian marriage did to
wives, wiping out their independent character and transforming them into household
property. In a letter to her close friend Ellen Nussey, she writes that she wishes that
“men and women married because they liked each other’s temper, look, conversation,
and nature,” but acknowledged that “other reasons regulate matrimony – reasons of
convenience, of connections, of money” (qtd. in Gordon 228). Brontë saw this reality as
appalling and refused to allow her characters to waste away in such a manner.
In Jane Eyre, Brontë creates her title character as a young woman whose love is not
financially or socially motivated. Jane’s initial engagement to Rochester is peppered
with instances of Jane refusing gifts and displaying great discomfort at the idea of being
viewed as a newly-wealthy wife. She adamantly informs Rochester that she will not
accept his family heirlooms, stating “[N]ever mind jewels! I don’t like to hear them
spoken of. Jewels for Jane Eyre sounds unnatural and strange: I would rather not have
them” (220). Even after she leaves Rochester and inherits money of her own, Jane refuses
to see herself as more desirable simply because she has a better financial situation,
observing, “No one would take me for love; and I will not be regarded in light of a mere
money-speculation” (330). Because Jane is a character who does not determine a man’s
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marriage potential in terms of his financial status, she rejects the idea of basing her own
desirability on the same superficial criterion.
Through the character of Jane Eyre, Brontë questions why people marry for reasons
other than true love. The idea of being bound to a person simply because it is a culturally
sanctioned match is an issue that Brontë brings to the forefront of her novels. While
marrying for love seems like an obvious rationale, Jane cannot help but question the other
motives behind middle-and-upper-class Victorian marriages:
[These] principles [had been] instilled into them, doubtless, from their
childhood. All their class held these principles; I supposed, then, they had
reasons for holding them such as I could not fathom. It seemed to me that,
were I gentleman like [Rochester], I would take to my bosom only such a wife
as I could love. (160)
Marrying for love is the only way that Jane would be willing to tether her independent
spirit to another person and it makes little sense in her mind to do so for reasons other
than that. Just like the character she created, Brontë had difficulty understanding why a
person would choose a partner for life who had nothing emotional or spiritual to offer.
Having turned down three socially acceptable marriage proposals from men she did not
care about, Brontë was adamant about the importance of basing a relationship on true
love and genuine compatibility (Gordon 176).
In the novel Jane Eyre, Brontë includes several characters who marry for reasons
other than love and end up unhappy or forgotten along the way. The manner in which
these characters and their situations are presented has an almost comical effect, as though
Brontë is quietly mocking the long-held Victorian traditions. The vapid and shallow
Georgina Reed ends up making “an advantageous match with a wealthy, worn-out man of
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fashion” (206). The use of the word “advantageous” to describe a marriage clearly has a
monetary implication, while the fact that he is “worn-out,” which would normally make
him less desirable, is overshadowed by the fact that he is “wealthy.” The affluent Miss
Oliver marries a man whom she has known only two months, but as St. John Rivers
observes, “Where there are no obstacles to a union, as in the present case, where the
connection is in every point desirable, delays are unnecessary” (337). Because there are
no social obstacles to overcome, the fact that the couple barely knows one another is not
even the slightest issue. The character of Miss Oliver is never mentioned again, as her
future in a marriage of convenience has already been played out repeatedly in the
Victorian public eye.
Just as she does in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë uses the character of Ginevra
Fanshawe in Villette to illustrate the potential disaster that can arise from marrying only
for status. Ginevra marries Count Alfred de Hamal, a confirmed gambler and a fop, in
order to ensure that she becomes a member of the English nobility. Ginevra’s willingness
to marry the financially destitute de Hamal, who has nothing other than “his nobility,
native and hereditary,” highlights the absurdity of young ladies forgoing love in order to
secure socially profitable husbands (549). Brontë concludes the saga of Ginevra
Fanshawe by having the couple “fade into the background” with insurmountable debts of
both money and honor (550). While Ginevra marries for reasons that were customary
within Victorian society, her lack of true happiness is evidence of Brontë’s belief about
the misguided basis for nineteenth-century marriages.
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Brontë’s novels emphasize the need for females to have legitimate input in their
potential marriages in order to ensure that their desires in a partner are met. In Jane Eyre,
Jane’s ideas surrounding love and matrimony are clearly tested when the parson, St. John
Rivers, decides that Jane would make the perfect missionary’s wife. Rivers tries to force
Jane to marry him for his own practical uses, telling her, “You are formed for labour, not
for love. A missionary’s wife you must – shall be. You shall be mine: I claim you – not
for my pleasure, but for my Sovereign’s service” (343). He wants a companion and a
helper, but has no feelings of love or tenderness towards Jane. Brontë uses this potential
relationship to demonstrate how women were often treated as little more than useful
commodities rather than as individuals with wants and desires.
The character of St. John Rivers represents the tradition of the Victorian man
seeking out a marriage for self-serving purposes, with little concern over the impact it
will have on the woman. Although St. John desires to marry Jane to aid in his missionary
work, the lack of love makes it very similar to the practice of marrying a person simply
because it was socially beneficial. Jane recognizes his selfish and loveless motives and
realizes how unnatural such an arrangement would be: “[I]f I am not formed for love, it
follows that I am not formed for marriage. Would it not be strange to be chained for life
to a man who regarded one but as a useful tool?” (354). Brontë gives Jane the insight to
realize the degradation and sacrifice that occurs when a woman is viewed only in regard
to the benefits she provides to the man. The author refuses to have her title character
permanently tied to a person who does not love and respect her as she believes a husband
should.
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Unlike the one-sided relationship with St. John, Brontë creates the relationship
between Jane and Rochester as an example of a bond that is based on mutual respect for
one another’s hearts and minds. When Rochester initially proposes marriage to Jane, he
asks her to “pass through life at my side – to be my second self, and my best earthly
companion” (216). They have a spiritual connection that transcends the conventions of
Victorian society which Jane realizes as she tells Rochester that “it is my spirit that
addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s
feet, equal, as we are!” (216). Their connection is deeper than the superficialities of
traditional Victorian marriages, and because of this, Brontë allows these characters to
achieve what she sees as a happy ending.
Brontë’s novels had the potential to show young woman how to become wellregarded members of society. Rather than creating Jane Eyre as a poor governess who
desperately seeks a wealthy mate, Brontë creates her as an independent woman who is an
active participant in the determination of her future. Jane adamantly informs Rochester,
“I am no bird; no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will”
(216). Jane’s ability to distinguish between a genuinely fulfilling relationship and one
that is potentially oppressive reflects Brontë’s beliefs about how relationships based on
deeper qualities put women in positions of respect rather than subservience.
Like the relationship between Jane and Rochester, the bond that develops in Villette
between Lucy Snowe and M. Paul Emanuel is based on genuine affection and true
compatibility. Brontë heavily values this type of relationship over the sort of infatuation
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that is based on superficiality, as shown in Lucy Snowe’s description of her ideal basis
for love:
The love, born of beauty was not mine; I had nothing in common with it: I
could not dare to meddle with it, but another love, venturing diffidently into
life after long acquaintance, furnace-tried by pain, stamped by constancy,
consolidated by affection’s pure and durable alloy, submitted by intellect to
intellect’s own tests; and finally wrought up, by his own process, to his own
unflawed completeness, this Love that laughed at Passion, his fast frenzies
and his hot and hurried extinction, in this Love I had a vested interest. (541)
Brontë advocates for marriages and relationships that are time-tested and rooted in
mutual respect. Lucy is not looking for a passionate relationship that will burn out
quickly, but one in which every aspect of her being is improved upon because of her
involvement.
Although Lucy gets a chance to experience true love for a short time, Brontë
prevents the character from getting married in a traditional Victorian happy ending. In
order to project the ideas that marriage does not have to be the ultimate goal in life and
that happiness is possible even if love eludes an individual, Brontë concludes the story of
Lucy Snowe by implying that M. Paul very likely dies in a storm at sea. While the
ending of the novel leaves a certain degree of ambiguity regarding the demise of M. Paul,
his death seemingly holds true with an earlier discussion between Paulina Home de
Bassompierre and Lucy Snowe in which the question is asked, “Is that the summit of
earthly happiness, the end of life – to love? I don’t think it is” (376). Lucy is left with a
successful school of her own and a bright and profitable future as a single lady. Brontë
creates an independent woman who has been able to experience love at its finest, but who
still manages to have a satisfying life without such a tie.
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Charlotte Brontë worried about the limits that often accompanied marriage in both
her novels and in her real life. In an era when young girls were brought up to be wives
and mothers, Charlotte Brontë scorned tradition, announcing at a young age that she
would never marry. In her private letters, she observed, “As far as my experience with
matrimony goes, I think it tends to draw you out of and away from yourself” (Shorter
201). She had a great fear of the stifling effect that marriage would have on her
independence and her writing career, which adds to the likelihood that M. Paul does, in
fact, die, leaving Lucy Snowe an unwed and independent woman. Brontë remained
single until her thirty-eighth year, when she married Arthur Bell Nichols, her father’s
curate and long-time family friend.
Critics have supposed that by marrying Nichols, Brontë had simply given in to her
own fear of loneliness, as well as to the pressure of adhering to Victorian norms.
Biographer Lyndall Gordon suggests that she “feared ending up alone and invisible, a
real life Lucy Snowe” (302). While this is one such possibility – although it is highly
debatable whether Lucy Snowe actually ends up lonely and “invisible” – it is also
possible that Brontë simply had found a soft, comfortable place to settle down with a man
who truly loved her. At thirty-eight years old, she had been fighting for her place in the
world for quite some time and a marriage based on true and honest companionship was
likely appealing. There is evidence that while she was leery about the lack of personal
time afforded to her in marriage, she enjoyed her wedded domesticity and had a genuine
emotional bond with her husband, mentioning in a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell, “As to my
husband – my heart is knit to him” (Gordon 314).
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Although Jane Eyre was written seven years earlier, Jane’s marriage to Rochester
has a similar calm. Like Brontë, Jane no longer has to struggle to secure her position in
the world because she is in a comfortable place that is of her own choosing. Unlike the
Victorian tradition of arranging marriages based upon various superficial aspects, Jane’s
marriage to Rochester is based on love and mutual respect:
I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold
myself extremely blest, blest beyond what language can express; because I am
my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her
mate than I am; ever more absolutely the bone of his bone, the flesh of his
flesh. (384)
This is a passage from a character who could find nothing more desirable than her current
condition in life. While many modern feminist critics criticize Jane’s abandonment of
independence in order to reinforce the Victorian norms surrounding marriage, it is
possible to argue that Brontë created Jane’s situation to illustrate the fact that
independence and the domestic realm do not have to be mutually exclusive. Jane’s
marriage to Rochester is an example of a woman exerting her own independence by
choosing a husband based upon her own set of criteria rather than society’s superficial
standards.
From a modern standpoint, it is easy to look at Jane Eyre and question why Brontë
folds Jane back into the traditional conclusion of marriage. In reality, it may be more
important to try and view the decision from the inside out, looking at it from a
nineteenth-century perspective. To modern sensibilities, it may seem as though Jane is
sacrificing her own independence for the security afforded by marriage, but it is likely
that it was simply not possible for Brontë, the daughter of a well-respected parson, to
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conceptualize a happy ending to her first novel without such a connection. Because
Victorians had such strong views regarding the importance of marriage, these ideas were
deeply engrained in the minds of practically every member of the female population.
While twenty-first-century readers may question why Jane ultimately ties herself down, it
is likely that nineteenth-century readers saw her firm matrimonial criteria and her active
participation in her own future as being very forward-thinking for the time period.
The novel Shirley is much different from the stories of Jane Eyre and Villette, but
remains consistent with Brontë’s views surrounding marriage. Dealing heavily with
political and historical issues, the tale begins in very unromantic way and professes to
remain this way throughout. Despite claims to the contrary, Shirley is a novel that ends
as the traditional Victorian love story–in marriage. The difference between the
customary nineteenth-century ending and the ending of Shirley is that the marriages that
occur between Shirley Keeldar and Louis Moore and Caroline Helstone and Robert
Moore are based on deeply meaningful connections rather than superficial or socially
advantageous reasons.
Throughout Shirley, marriage is a hotly contested issue that is often debated among
the characters. Several characters have very negative opinions that result from having
been in bad marriages based on the wrong factors. Echoing the author’s own concerns
about the loss of independence in an ill-suited marriage, Mrs. Pryor tells Caroline, “Two
people can never literally be as one. Let all the single be satisfied with their freedom”
(359). Brontë shows how a tradition of forging relationships for reasons other than love
leads individuals to devalue deeper connections and view marriage as an encumbrance.
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The character of Reverend Helstone reiterates Brontë’s belief about the potentially
stifling effects of marriage. Having been married to a woman who was not his intellectual
equal and for whom he had little respect, Helstone sees marriage as a burden and a
situation that is bound to fail: “They tire of each other – they tire of each other in a
month. A yolkfellow is not a companion; he or she is a fellow sufferer” (98). He views
matrimonial ties as fetters, binding two people together in a highly undesirable form of
misery. By having a male character voice dissatisfaction at the results of the current basis
for marriage, Brontë is able to show how a superficial bond is detrimental to both men
and women without seeming overly subversive.
Shirley Keeldar has a more optimistic view about marriage, but Brontë ensures that
she also has firm beliefs about what a marriage should not entail. Shirley desires a mate
who will lift her up intellectually and guide her in areas where she is not familiar. When
Caroline asks if she believes men and women to be equals, Shirley replies that she would
like to find a man to whom she can look up and admire because he is her superior, noting
that “it degrades to stoop, it is glorious to look up” (206). She is not claiming that all men
are superior to all women, but that a successful marriage should be uplifting and allow for
self-growth.
As a strong-minded, independent woman, Shirley’s role within the novel is often to
provide an outside point of view to characters such as Caroline Helstone in order to show
that there are options in life other than those that society has forced upon women. While
Shirley is a strong female character, it is Caroline who is representative of Victorian
womankind. An unemployed lady of no independent means, she is often forced to adhere
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to social standards that she would rather not participate in. While Caroline spends a
significant amount of time occupying her days unhappily sewing for charity and learning
traditional feminine skills, the one area she is not willing to fall victim to is that of
marriage. Caroline adamantly states, “There are happy marriages. Where affection is
reciprocal and sincere, and minds are harmonious, marriages must be happy” (358).
Refusing to marry for anything other than love, Caroline would rather remain single than
risk a lifetime of unhappiness.
By creating a character who is willing to forgo marriage in order to ensure her own
happiness, Brontë portrays a message that young women do not need to marry simply
because society says so. Caroline is unhappy at the idea of not marrying the man she
loves but is well aware of the fact that she would be infinitely more miserable if she
married a man like the dull and simplistic curate, Malone, or the childish, yet sociallydesirable, Sykes. By holding out and refusing to settle for an unfulfilling relationship,
Carolyn is ultimately rewarded with the husband she deserves.
Brontë’s novels capture the way in which family members often added to the
pressures of making a socially or financially advantageous match. In the novel Shirley,
Shirley’s uncle, Mr. Sympson, is representative of the familial pressure placed on middleand upper-class girls. He sets out to see that Shirley marries a wealthy man of society so
that he, her closest living relative, can “wash his hands of her” (439). Regardless of the
fact that he is not supporting her financially, he sees it as a burden to have a fully grown
woman as a legal dependant and desires to see her married to someone who has “a fine
unencumbered estate; real substance; good connexions” (439). In his opinion, it does not
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matter whether Shirley finds a man with whom she is in love; it only matters that he is
her social equivalent, with enough money to make the relationship respectable. In order
for society to change its views about women and marriage, Brontë suggests that families
needed to look out for the well-being of female relatives by encouraging deeper
compatibility in relationships.
In the character of Shirley, Brontë creates a young woman who avoids falling into
the trap that is set by Victorian society by refusing to marry for anything than other
genuine affection. She tells her uncle that when she marries it will be “to esteem, to
admire, to love,” to which he replies, “Preposterous stuff! Indecorous! Unwomanly!”
(441). He angrily accuses her of flying in the face of propriety and acknowledging no
rules or limitations. Rather than appreciating and respecting Shirley’s well-informed
criteria, Brontë shows how Victorian society dictates that anything other than strict
adherence to the social norms is an indication of moral corruption which endangers the
status quo.
Despite the pressures of family and society, Shirley has strict standards when it
comes to choosing a mate. She rejects tradition and scoffs at the idea of marrying a man
because of his estate. Through the voice of Shirley, Brontë puts forth her ideas about
what true love should be based upon and how a woman should choose a husband:
We watch him, and see him kind to animals, to little children, to poor people.
He is kind to us likewise–good–considerate: he does not flatter women, but he
is patient with them, and seems to be easy in their presence, and to find their
company genial. He likes them not only for vain and selfish reasons, but as
we like him–because we like him. Then we observe that he is just–that he
always speaks the truth–that he is conscientious. We feel joy and peace when
he comes into a room: we feel sadness and trouble when he leaves it. We
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know that this man has been a kind son, that he is a kind brother: will any one
dare to tell me that he will not be a kind husband? (205)
This description is far from the Victorian belief that a husband’s role is nothing more
than to provide financial and social stability in order to keep his wife and children in a
life of luxury. By following criteria that demands kindness and compassion, Brontë sees
the likelihood of marital contentment as greatly increased.
Brontë’s novels reveal how the very standard of choosing a wife puts females in a
significantly inferior position. By allowing men to secure advantageous mates based upon
their own individual needs, women were being robbed of the chance at having an active
opinion in the course of the relationship. While marriages formed upon superficial
grounds put the power in the hands of the men, relationships based upon love and respect
require that both partners are equally invested.
Unlike Victorian marriages of convenience, the relationship that Brontë creates
between Shirley and her former tutor, Louis Moore, is both intellectually and emotionally
elevating. Although he is her social inferior, Shirley tells Louis that she loves him
because “your judgment is well-balanced; your heart is kind; your principles are sound. I
know you are wise; I feel you are benevolent; I believe you are conscientious” (587).
Although the socially-imbalanced marriage is an exertion of independence on the part of
Shirley, Brontë places her safely within the tradition of marriage in order to avoid further
alienating the readers who viewed Jane Eyre as improper.
The article, “Class and Gender in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley,” written by Helen
Taylor and published in the journal, The Feminist Review, criticized Brontë for sinking
the highly independent Shirley into the bondage of marriage. Taylor states, “Imprisoned
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within her time, Brontë could not imagine what else a woman landowner could do with
her wealth and independence except give them to the man she chose to love” (90). While
it is true that Brontë may have felt the social pressure to ensure that her female characters
received a proper ending, it is not necessarily the dire circumstance that Taylor is trying
to project. The man Shirley chooses to marry is not one that society would have forced
upon her, but one who is sought out on her own terms. Shirley Keeldar chooses a partner
who will be exactly that–her partner.
Much to the displeasure of modern feminist critics, Charlotte Brontë does not
envision marriages for Shirley and Caroline that are free from male domination. Because
of the time period and the world around her, creating marriages in which the partnership
was completely equal would have been too unrealistic, particularly from the point of view
of a supposedly male author. Instead, Brontë shows that happy marriages can exist in
which the man is in a superior position as long as the husband and wife are well matched.
Shirley willingly takes a backseat to Louis Moore and allows him the dominant role
within the relationship, admitting that “I am glad I know my keeper, and am used to him.
Only his voice will I follow; only his hand shall manage me; only at his feet will I
repose” (586). These are not the words of a woman who plans on maintaining her fierce
independence, but the words of a woman who has willingly submitted to the man she has
chosen to love.
This novel, which starts out by explicitly informing the reader that it will be the
furthest thing from a romance, concludes with a very traditional Victorian ending. What
makes this ending different from the usual Victorian love story is the fact that the
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marriages that form are based on solid qualities and personally chosen companions.
Rather than marrying for the superficial reasons that society impressed upon its members,
Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone choose only to marry men who will better them
internally rather than socially. The final line that Shirley speaks to Louis Moore sums up
Charlotte Brontë’s beliefs about an ideal marriage and what it should entail: “Be my
companion through life; be my guide where I am ignorant; be my master where I am
faulty; be my friend always” (587).
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Chapter Six
Conclusion
The novels of Charlotte Brontë serve as a testament to the author’s beliefs regarding
the true potential of Victorian women. By creating characters in situations that challenge
both the individual and the status quo, Brontë explores the ways in which the definition
of womanhood could be broadened for future generations. While the methods utilized by
the author are by no means radical, her characters portray alternative options to the
narrow spectrum of female existence in Victorian England without overstepping the rules
of nineteenth-century propriety.
As a lady of the middle class and the daughter of a respected reverend, Brontë’s
position within society dictated that she maintain a certain level of public respectability.
Initially hiding behind the protection offered by her male pseudonym, Charlotte Brontë
used her novels to show scenarios in which young women step just outside of boundaries
of tradition in order to achieve individual success. Although the public became
suspicious of the author’s true identity, with some members accusing Currer Bell of
impropriety, Brontë refused to placate the skeptical portion of her audience and continued
writing in her established manner. Believing her novels to be well within the realm of
Victorian acceptability, Brontë felt no reason to alter her style or subject matter.
While the study of literature generally requires a reader to interpret an author’s
meaning by using evidence from within the text, understanding the overall motivation
behind the novels of Charlotte Brontë requires a slightly different approach. In order to
fully grasp what Brontë is trying to achieve, it is important to identify what it is that the
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author is not doing within her texts. Brontë’s novels are not step-by-step instruction
manuals that explicitly dictate how every Victorian woman can improve her existence in
life. They are also not thinly-veiled revolutionary propaganda intended to ignite vast and
immediate changes to the existing social order. Finally, Brontë’s novels are not
traditional Victorian romance novels in which the heroine receives the customary happy
ending simply because she is both beautiful and good. Her novels are works of fiction in
which relatively average females find themselves in positions where they are forced to
reach deep inside and summon up a sense of inner fortitude in order to survive. Rather
than creating subversive storylines or impossibly perfect heroines, Brontë’s message is
subtle, leaving the reader thinking about what they have read and considering which
aspects they might potentially apply to their own lives.
For Charlotte Brontë, mid-nineteenth-century Victorian England was neither the
time nor the place to call for an outright woman’s revolution. Because a female’s worth
was determined by how well she conformed to the rules of propriety, women–even
forward thinkers like Brontë–had to be cautious about appearing openly seditious. While
there were certainly nineteenth-century females speaking out against the enclosed
existence of women, Brontë chose a more indirect approach in order to maintain her
image as a lady and as a respectable author. Rather than immediately alienating her
readership with socially defiant commentary, Brontë masterfully weaves her suggestions
for women into highly engaging narratives with the hopes that individual readers will
recognize that ordinary females can do extraordinary things.
99
Writing was a creative outlet for the young woman who led a rather isolated life in
a remote parsonage among the Yorkshire moors. Because Brontë had no idea that Jane
Eyre would be the success that it was, it is highly unlikely that she wrote the novel with
the intention of igniting wide-spread social change. While redefining the entire concept
of Victorian womanhood may not have been her initial goal, each of Brontë’s novels
repeatedly reinforces certain elements that she seems to believe make up an underlying
formula for female success.
Charlotte Brontë’s novels indicate how a female’s need for education, employment,
capability, and love-based marriages went hand-in-hand in terms of individual and longterm betterment. Her novels suggest that providing girls with well-rounded educations
greatly improves their chances of becoming self-sufficient and gainfully employed if the
need arose. By encouraging the development of useful skills rather than vain
superficialities, Brontë’s hope was that young women would begin to be seen as valuable
and contributing members of society, regardless of whether that success occurred inside
or outside of the home. In turn, Brontë understood how women who feel respected for
their intellect and capabilities are much more likely to advocate for themselves and seek
relationships that are fulfilling on multiple levels rather than for merely socially
beneficial purposes. The idea is that happy marriages had the potential to do something
greater than simply provide personal or social satisfaction at an individual level.
Whether or not she explicitly set out to do so, Brontë’s subtle formula for female
success had the potential to encourage a trickle-down effect for future generations of
females. Because women in marriages based on love and respect were more likely to be
100
happy wives and mothers, they would likely pass along these new components of
womanhood to their own daughters, thus creating a new generation of females who
believe that they deserve better in life. In order for this to occur, females needed to be
reconditioned to believe that they were worthy and contributing members of society.
The novels of Charlotte Brontë have remained in the forefront of literary
discussions for well over a century because they touch upon a common element of the
human condition–personal betterment. Her stories initially seem to be simple tales of
young women searching for their places in the world, but upon deeper examination, it
becomes evident that Brontë may have in fact had a blueprint for female betterment,
albeit rather subtle. By masterfully weaving her formula for female success into highly
engaging narratives, Brontë is able to show her readers that alternative options exist, even
within the strict rules of nineteenth-century England.
101
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