Groping for Maturity

...Still, at the novel's close, the unromantic realities of their intended marriage are evaded...

...Helene Moglen's Charlotte Bronte: The Self Conceived uncovers the psychic roots that, combined with the patriarchic world of Victorian England, produced the impetus and tension that led to the creation of Charlotte Bronte's novels...

...Charlotte, however, was not free of the myth herself, and ultimately she was damaged by its hold on her imagination...

...Moglen further contends that much the same fate befell Branwell—the brother Charlotte needed to outgrow in order to grow...

...The conflict was both reflected and aggravated by the subject matter she chose...

...In Jane Eyre, poor plain governess Jane has something of an upper hand...

...In the process she reveals Charlotte's torturous groping for a mature self, one that would reconcile the conflicting demands of the urge to create, to be independent, and her desire to do her duty, either as a submissive drudge in her father's Yorkshire parsonage or as an underpaid governess...

...Indeed, she claims that Byron, the prototype of the romantic hero, was not killed in Greece: He committed suicide because he could not come to terms with the true necessities of quotidian life and love...

...Thus, even in her adolescent writings, like Lady Caroline Vernon, the protagonists were what we would consider passive masochistic heroines, willing victims of narcissistic and basically insecure male masters —Angrian Zamora, for example...

...Branwell...

...It concentrates instead on dissecting her individual works, from the earliest juvenalia to the last novel, Villette...

...Moglen rates Charlotte's last work, Villette, as her most successful...

...Nonetheless, in revealing the psychic mechanisms behind the author's novels, Helene Moglen has produced a valid and illuminating study...

...A tempestuous would-be poet, he eventually died of drink and drugs...

...E. C. Gaskell in 1857 and W. Gerin in 1967), much of psychological and artistic interest about the author remained unexplored...

...This, of course, would be a woman who was the reverse of the traditional 19th-century female reliant on what Moglen calls "the Victorian myth" —total sexual, mental and moral dependence on the male, usually envisioned as a romantic figure who could transcend the boundaries of mundane life...

...Reviewed by Norma Crandall Author, "Emily Bronte: A Psychological Portrait" Although there have been many biographies of Charlotte Bronte (among them the nearly-definitive ones by Mrs...

...In her first full-length novel, for instance, The Professor, Francis Henri, an inferiority-ridden, timid lace-maker and student, and Victor Crimsworth, a determined and strong teacher, are essentially different aspects of the author's unresolved selves...

...Paul conveniently dies in a shipwreck...

...1 have some reservations about this, since by then Charlotte was mentally and physically exhausted from her struggle to find a publisher...

...Moglen's short book—six tightly-knit chapters in all—dispenses with the usual data about the novelist's life...

...Charlotte's life, like her fictions, did not arrive at its goal of maturity...

...And Lucy, as did Francis Henri, has become a successful headmistress...

...It took Charlotte nearly a lifetime to conceive of either herself or her female characters as free individuals, capable of coping with everyday life...

...Rochester, for his immorality...

...Countless persons through the ages have felt the sting of neurotic dependencies, romanticized love objects, sexual repressions...

...For Charlotte, an early feminist, tried to create autonomous heroines, equal partners in male-female relationships...

...it simply made them more unbearable —to the point, Moglen contends, of killing her during her pregnancy...

...In what to me seems a very original insight, Moglen adds that inevitably, both such male rulers and female subjects would be doomed in the actual world, unable to sustain a real relationship...

...In fact, the two can come together only after Rochester has been made blind?hence dependent—in an accidental fire...

...The writer grew up in a remote parsonage in Haworth, ruled over by her rigidly authoritarian father, Reverend Patrick Bronte, and his ill-fated but idealized only son...

...Lucy suffers from unrequited passion for Graham Bret-ton and Paul from his assumed guilt for a former pupil's death...

...Though by day Francis achieves a kind of independence as an effective headmistress, at night she resumes her dependent role as Crimsworth's wife...

...She and her younger sisters, Emily and Anne, having no obviously marketable assets (beauty, wealth, etc...

...were almost nonper-sons...

...Moreover, many of Charlotte's conflicts were typical adolescent experiences found in every era...

...Bronte and two other sisters, led Charlotte to the fantasies of romantic literature, to the Victorian myth...

...Her need to escape from these circumstances, made doubly intolerable by the morbid Bronte mood occasioned by the early deaths of Mrs...

...Nevertheless, his mad wife, Berthe, locked away in a hidden room for many years, is a potent symbol of Jane's fears of the sexual subjugation and ego-destruction that underlie her relationship with masterly Rochester...

...Their sexual and other fears, symbolized by the ghost of a dead man, have been exorcized...

...These factors alone, therefore, seem an inadequate explanation for the genesis of Charlotte Bronte's Victorian imagination...

...Based on Charlotte's experiences with Professor C. Heger in the Pensionnat Heger, the book opens with Lucy Snowe and Paul Emmanuel linked by their common victimization...

...she can assert her moral values by denouncing her wealthy employer, Mr...

...But here, too, the ending remains marred...

...Her belated marriage to Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls did not relieve the tensions formed inside her...

...Charlotte wrote what she wanted and emotionally needed to happen, not what would have occurred in real life between two such people...