Norma Henning

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

1992

Thesis Director

Sharon Bartling

Abstract

In this paper, I will examine the four novels of Charlotte Brontë: The Professor, Jane Eyre Shirley and Villette. I will examine the reason/passion conflict within the characters of William Crimsworth, Jane Eyre, Caroline Helstone and Lucy Snowe. I will show that there exists a basic duality within each of these characters: the pull of duty and the desire to escape into passion and the imagination. Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe resolve the conflict by recognizing the divided nature of their souls and emerge as complete and whole individuals. William Crimsworth and Caroline Helstone refuse to acknowledge the passion within their souls and remain divided and incomplete. When Brontë listened to her intuitive inner voice, she created the wonderful imaginative characters of Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe; however, when she fought against her inner voice, her plain and unemotional professor and the cacophony of voices which form Shirley appeared.

In her childhood, Brontë wrote imaginary stories, poems and plays about the created kingdoms of Angria and Glasstown. Critics have long believed that this childhood experience served as an apprenticeship for her adult work. My thesis will show that Brontë, paradoxically, spent the rest of her life trying to rid her work and life of the effects of this apprenticeship.

In her lonely years as a teacher at Roe Head School, Brontë was sustained by her secret Angrian dreamworld. Her only escape from the frustration of teaching the apathetic students of Roe Head was in dreaming of the imaginative writings she created in her childhood. However, Brontë, as a devout Protestant, began to feel guilty about her obsession. Her Protestant background taught her that this imaginary world was sinful and immoral. Later in her adult life, she was criticized for the imaginary and passionate nature of her work. Throughout her life and work, she attempted to resolve this conflict within herself and within the heroines and heroes she created.

In 1839, at the age of twenty-three, she stated her resolution to abandon the imaginative world of Angria in an untitled fragment known as “Farewell to Angria.” The Professor is Brontë’s attempt to present characters in predominantly moral terms. I will show that this resolution led her to create William Crimsworth, her plain and unemotional professor. He is presented as a pure, guiltless individual surrounded by a world of evil.

Brontë relinquished her vow to abandon the imagination and created Jane Eyre, a heroine who trusts in imagination, intuition, and vision. Jane fights the battle within her soul. She wins the battle because she listens to her intuitive inner voice that tells her what she wants to hear: she must return to Rochester. Jane realizes that if she does not listen to her inner voice, a life of emotional imprisonment with St. John will be the result.

Even with the success of Jane Eyre, Brontë was still criticized for her supposed excesses of the imagination. In her next novel, Shirley, she abandoned the central consciousness of her I-narrator and presented the story from an androgynous omniscient point of view. Through the examination of the character of Caroline Helstone, I will show that the reason/passion conflict is not a major theme of this novel. There is no central consciousness or inner voice with which the reader can empathize. Brontë presents so many issues, such as social reform, economic instability, and spinsterhood, that the voices become loud and strident and confuse the reader. The noise becomes deafening and, if there is a reason/passion conflict, it becomes lost in the babble.

Brontë recognized that she could not write about social issues in the traditional Victorian manner or in a manner which would take advantage of her talent: a talent which reached its high point with the creation of Lucy Snowe in Villette. I will show that Lucy is a creature of feeling. She is not concerned about the actual facts of a situation but her own emotional reactions to the situation. Does it cause pain, joy, suffering, guilt or fear? Lucy’s answer comes from her intuitive consciousness: the inner voice.

I support the view presented by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, that Brontë was, in essence, a trance writer who created two heroines, Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, who mirrored her own soul: a soul that was continually in conflict. Her narratives illustrate her struggle to resolve this conflict by unifying the dual natures of her characters.

I will approach the passion/reason conflict within Brontë’s characters from a psychosexual point of view. I will show that Brontë presents two heroines, Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, who have immersed themselves in the unconscious, and, in so doing, have rediscovered their souls. They have re-established contact with the spiritual nature of their inner beings. Jane and Lucy discover that reason and rationality are inadequate substitutes for a unity of spirit. Brontë struggled to present characters who recognize that the complete personality answers to both voices: passion and reason. The divided personality listens to only one voice and remains imcomplete. This study will also support the view of Charles Burkhart, who relates all of Brontë’s work to the "unconscious" nature of her writing, suggesting that her adult work was dependent on an unconscious substratum evident in her own Angrian writings.

In addition, I believe that a revisionist biographical reading has a substantial impact on the psychosexual examination of Brontë’s characters. It is impossible to deny that Brontë’s background and creative routine influenced her ability to create characters who were able to recognize and validate their own spiritual natures.

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