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Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley: Jane Eyre’s Subversive Cousin
Melissa De Paoli
English Department
Bethlehem Central High School
Delmar, NY
NEH Seminar 2004
Charlotte Bronte is best known for her classic Jane Eyre, and many readers wouldn’t think to pick up any of her other novels. Certainly her novel Shirley with its bulk of almost 700 pages is enough to exhaust any potential reader. Additionally, nothing much really happens beyond the ordinary: people fall sick and are nursed back to health, men court women, women become friends, families get together and talk, and the two heroines marry at the end. Charlotte Bronte herself acknowledged how different Shirley was from its successor Jane Eyre in her original manuscript of Shirley: “Do you expect passion and stimulus and melo-drama?…you must have a change:…something real and severe and unromantic as Monday Morning…” (qtd. in Smith vii-viii). This big, sprawling novel has even been taken to task for its lack of unity by more than one critic.
The question then becomes: why bother to read this novel? For its faithful portrayal of the Luddite attacks on machines and mill-owners in Yorkshire during the early eighteenth century? Perhaps. Perhaps, though, it is more important to look at its “lack of unity” and focus on the fact that nothing much really happens because the characters are waiting—waiting for the end of the war, waiting for the end of the trade embargo, waiting for the end of loneliness. Thus, the novel’s structural problem becomes key: the entire narrative becomes a deliberate “space of waiting” (Lawson 735). And ultimately, the characters are largely denied their expectations, their hopes. This subversive tragedy becomes a novel not about the superficial achievement of happiness through change but about the real inability of things to change (Zlotnick 97). Bronte uses her double-layered plot that helps to cause the lack of unity, to comment on a concern dear to her heart: the marginal, meaningless existence of middle-class women in nineteenth century English society. She draws a parallel between the poverty-stricken, unemployed textile workers who were at the mercy of a trade embargo during the Napoleonic Wars and the middle class women living amongst them who were also denied any real kind of employment and who thus lived idle, useless lives without a vital role in society. Thus, although Caroline and Shirley, the novel’s two heroines, superficially achieve “happiness” by marrying at the end of the novel, by doing so they actually firmly lock themselves into a marginal existence in a man’s world (Zlotnick 98). Bronte’s novel becomes then a subversive tragedy undermining the conventions of her age.
Charlotte Bronte sought to make a clear break from Jane Eyre’s melodrama when writing Shirley, but while doing so she still drew from the experiences that she knew. She set her novel in Yorkshire during the Luddite riots of 1811-1812 because she had ample sources from which to draw real-life experiences: her father had been a curate in the area in which the Yorkshire riots occurred, her teachers at Miss Wooler’s school remembered these attacks, and Bronte supplemented these memories with the files of the Leeds Mercury, which had reported extensively on these events (Smith xiv). Bronte’s novel, though, was not to become just a novel about the workers’ plight during the Industrial Revolution. Many writers had already anticipated her in this effort, and some she condemned: she criticized Frances Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy as a “ridiculous mess” that she, because of her inexperience with the worker’s life, would have made even worse (Smith x). In Shirley itself, Bronte explains that her purpose is not to reveal physical abuses to which industrial workers were subject: “Child-torturers, slave masters and drivers, I consign to the hands of jailers; the novelist may be excused from sullying his page with the record of their deeds” (Bronte 61). Thus, she chose to focus not on the workers’ physical labor itself but on the results of their unemployment, which was rampant during that era. That unemployment and poverty was something she could have seen and understood.
Once again, as in Jane Eyre, Bronte also chose to portray in Shirley the difficulties of making one’s way in the world when a middle class woman without family or money. She had certainly experienced this spiritually empty existence where the only occupation open to her in her gentile poverty was as a governess--a thankless, ill-paying job. She had experienced the difficulty of repressing one’s own desires and individuality in order to eke out a soulless existence in someone else’s home: “The thought came over me: am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolical and most asinine stupidity of those fatheaded oafs, and on compulsion assuming air of kindness, patience and assiduity?” (qtd. in Dunn 403-404). Bronte, at one point, had even considered the merits of lowering herself socially to escape her middle class existence: “I could like to work in a mill. I could like to feel some mental liberty. I could like this weight of restraint to be taken off” (qtd. in Smith 195). And it is this personal experience which takes center stage in Bronte’s Shirley: her portrayal of the workers’ desperation as the trade embargo and the Napoleonic Wars drag on becomes a kind of wallpaper, serving to highlight the two heroines’ middle class spiritual desperation as each strives to play a more vital role than the one to which she is consigned. “What was I created for…?” asks Bronte’s orphaned, penniless heroine Caroline, “Where is my place in the world?” (Bronte 174).
Bronte sets the plight of her two heroines, Caroline and Shirley, in the midst of a crisis in the woolen districts of the Midlands--a bad harvest in 1812, uncertainty over the price of grain, and the financial difficulties caused by the orders in council which forbade much of England’s trade with Europe and the United. The inevitable tension between the mercantile classes and laboring classes caused by this crisis was described during debates about the orders in council in the Parliamentary Debates of 1812:
In what state do you now find that once busy hive of men? Silent, still, and desolate during half the week; during the rest of it miserably toiling at reduced wages, for a pittance scarcely sufficient to maintain animal life in the lowest state of comfort, and at all times swarming with unhappy persons, willing, anxious to work for their lives, but unable to find employment (Debates 492).
Thus, in the very opening pages of Shirley workers retaliate by breaking the new frames that were to have been delivered to the mill owner Robert Moore, for “[m]isery generates hate: these sufferers hated the machines which they believed took their bread from them; they hated the buildings which contained those machines; they hated the manufacturers who owned those buildings” (Bronte 31).
Unlike the editor of the Leeds Mercury, Bronte felt that it was the manufacturers who caused this crisis, oppressing the laboring classes, not the government (Rosengarten 599). And yet, she had no faith in the working class movement. Ultimately, Bronte provides no final solution to this tension between the two classes in her novel—she merely lays bare the inherent attitudes that cause such injustices and inequalities within English society (Hook, Hook 30-31). Perhaps this is why some critics complain about Shirley’s lack of unity: there is no dominating character holding the entire novel together, no central narrator, since Bronte wishes to portray society as a whole rather than taking a particular side. For this she needs multiple narrators (Hook, Hook 20)--her two female characters, Caroline and Shirley, and her two male characters, Robert Moore and his brother Louis.
It is Robert Moore, the mill owner, with whom Bronte shows any possibility of tempering this tension between the laboring class and the mercantile class. Bronte felt that the mercantile classes thought “too exclusively of making money” and that they were “extremely narrow and cold-hearted, hav[ing] no good feeling for any class but their own” (Bronte 166-167). Robert Moore first shows a lack of sympathy and an iron inflexibility towards the men who are so desperate for work that they break the new frames that Moore has ordered for his mill. Will Farren, Bronte’s vision of the noble, worthy worker, asks him, “Will n’t ye gie us a bit o’ time?—Will n’t ye consent to mak’ your changes rather more slowly?” to which Moore answers, “I’ll never give in” (Bronte 137-138). It is obvious that Bronte’s sympathies lie at least partially with this working man whom “Moore might have made a friend” and whose face “looked haggard with want (Bronte 138). Indeed, we see the results of Moore’s lack of sympathy later in the novel when Farren, who had fulfilled such a patient, noble role during these events, becomes bitter towards the likes of Moore: “Them that reckons to be friends to a lower class than their own fro’ political motives is never to be trusted: they always try to make their inferiors tools” (Bronte 326). Even others who oppose the unemployed rioters feel that Moore’s mill was attacked because of his inflexibility: “If Moore had behaved to his men from the beginning as a master ought to behave, they never would have entertained their present feelings towards him” (Bronte 367).
Moore is only partially redeemed after an absence of 100 pages when he leaves the neighborhood and travels to Birmingham and London. There he sees others in the same poverty-stricken position as the unemployed men of his village. He becomes a changed man and vows to treat his men more humanely in the future: “Unless I am more considerate to ignorance, more forbearing to suffering than I have hitherto been, I shall scorn myself as grossly unjust” (Bronte 543). Bronte won’t let him off so easily, though, and when he returns he is shot in retaliation by a madman and must spend many months convalescing. Thus, Moore atones for his sins symbolically and we hope for better relations between these two classes in the future.
This layer of Bronte’s plot, however, which provides what little action the novel contains, is only one small portion of the novel. What of the other 500 or so pages? After all, the novel is entitled Shirley, and the majority of its contents describes the lives and friendship of the two girls, Caroline and Shirley. And it is here where Bronte becomes much less straightforward in her approach and much more subversive, for she has a heavy message to convey about the spiritually deprived nature of a middle class woman’s existence.
Enter Caroline Helstone. She is the first of our heroines to enter the novel, and it is she who demonstrates how stifled a woman can become if she follows the conventions of the time. She is eighteen, coming of age; has no parents, no one to guide her; and wants to find her place in the world—(“What was I created for?”). She blithely sets out to make her way. At first she speaks of finding her worth by discovering an occupation, one other than the domestic arts that keep her cloistered up at home with her indifferent uncle. She discusses her aspirations with Robert Moore, her family’s friend: “I am making no money—earning nothing…I should like an occupation; and if I were a boy, it would not be so difficult to find one…I could be apprenticed to your trade—the cloth trade…I would do the counting-house work, keep the books, and write the letters, while you went to market…” (Bronte 71). Even she, however, abandons this idea as an idle whim. And yet she continues to search for “her place in the world.” She then proceeds to fall in love with Robert Moore and wishes to marry him, certainly a worthy occupation of a woman of her station. She soon discovers that this is not an option for her, for because of the trade embargo, Moore’s business is virtually bankrupt and he believes that marriage with her at this time would be “imprudent” (Bronte 107).
Caroline soon sinks into a depression as a result of her feelings but more importantly as a result of a realization of her own impotence (Gilbert, Gubar 388). And yet, even in the midst of all this she still strives to occupy herself and talks of obtaining a job as a governess, as a means of forgetting her disappointment and to find some worth in her life. Her family, however, will not allow her to even think of such an option. As Bronte herself well knew, becoming a governess meant that one lived in virtual slavery--a severe, desolate existence, solely dependent on strangers--for a mere few pounds per year. And yet, what was Caroline to do? For as Caroline explains, her alternative would be much worse: “I long to have something absorbing and compulsory to fill my head and hands, and to occupy my thoughts…Successful labour has its recompense; a vacant, weary, lonely, hopeless life has none” (Bronte 229). Bronte herself seems to speak directly through Caroline later in the novel, when she appeals directly to her audience to rectify this situation: “…I feel there is something wrong somewhere. I believe single women should have more to do—better chances of interesting and profitable occupation than they possess now…Men of England! Look at your poor girls, many of them fading around you…Fathers! Cannot you alter these things?” (Bronte 390, 392).
And who can Caroline look to as her role models to lift her out of this spiritual deprivation? As a virtual orphan whose mother had left years ago, she looks within her community. She looks to the other single women in her village, the old maids who do charitable works for others. And it appears that she will eventually become one of them as a single, unmarried woman: someone always on the periphery without real attachments, someone who is repressed and who attains little reward or respect for who and what she is, someone who is ridiculed because of her inherent “ugliness.”