Shirley (Charlotte Brontë, 1849)

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Charlotte Brontë. Shirley. Pub. 1849. Ed. Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith. Oxford: World's Classics, 2008. Print.

Reading Notes

  • 27 Napoleonic context for industrial unrest
  • 77 scene with Caroline and Robert reading Shakespeare's Coriolanus: C as a historical-cultural analogy for Moore Griffiths 2016
    • they have to be close to read together
    • Sh as a locus for moral education
  • 269 Shirley's vision of "Nature...at her evening prayers" - a feminine natural theology (with reference to Milton)
    • "screw Milton and the church, this is what I see out here in nature"
    • "let's rewrite Western religious mythology: what would it look like written by women - this is what I think"
  • 279ff confrontation with frame-breakers narrated from the bushes by Caroline/Shirley
  • 405ff Louis reciting Shirley's school vision of "the first Blue-Stocking" - deep time, cosmic imagery (see notes below too)
    • like Jane Eyre's painting, strange, very female work read through the male gaze
    • the reading of an erotic text together but a text Shirley wrote (vs. R and C reading Coriolanus)
    • this prose poem reads like a textual insertion: Shirley gives lessons in feminist theology but also it's couched in a deflating way by the narrative frame
    • how religion might mean different in a feminist, historicist way
    • a crescendo of spiritual patterning and about female suffering
    • CB utterly committed to the church (her positive regard for Helstone, for ex) but opens this space for a character, like Thoreau who's giving you new ideas in conversation with shared religious culture
  • 540 closing frame back to 1848: ambivalent about future

Writing Notes

  • Lewes: “Power it has unquestionably, and interest, too, of a peculiar sort; but not the agreeableness of the work of art… It is not a picture; but a portfolio of random sketches” (159-160).
  • the "disagreeable" ending
  • Brontë envisioned Shirley as a realist novel in the vein of the contemporary “condition of England” or “industrial” novels appearing in the late 1840s. Her intentions in this regard are clear from a letter to her publishers from February 1849 when, still writing the novel, she was “so dismayed to find [herself] in some manner anticipated both in subject and incident” by Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) (Letters 2:174).
  • The treatment of sentiment and melodrama within an historical frame suggests, of course, the influence of Walter Scott, about whom a young Charlotte had exclaimed, “For fiction, read Scott alone; all novels after his are worthless” (Gaskell 115). In his definitive 1937 account of the European historical novel, György Lukács maps the development of the nineteenth-century historical novel out of the eighteenth-century realism (ahistorical, in his judgment) of Fielding and Richardson. Remarkably and perhaps not coincidentally, Brontë sets Shirley in the exact moment when Lukács argues a new historical consciousness developed
  • Peter Capuano has compellingly argued that, contrary to critics who see Shirley as a displacement narrative about Chartism, Brontë’s treatment of hand-work – of Luddites who are suddenly unable to find manual labor, and of middle-class women who are increasingly sidelined from work and must keep their hands occupied with sewing – “establishes a thematic relationship between the powerlessness of the croppers in an unbridled capitalist economy and the powerlessness of middle-class women in a patriarchal hierarchy” (238).
  • Domesticity is not the “stable other” in the industrial novel, as John Kucich has observed of North and South. Rather, as Gaskell’s novel and Shirley demonstrate, the domestic sphere is a politicized site for narrating the affective response to industrialization. By creating an historical analogy between the affective “showing” of middle-class female frustration and despair with the “telling” of lower-class labor struggle, Brontë shows the shared origins of these states in the same local nodes of increasingly industrialized national capitalism.
  • We see, then, that the first bluestocking (405-7) and the narrator’s final vision (541) are two strategies Brontë deploys to interpret her own historical consciousness, the way that history has shaped her own local, Yorkshire experience. Brontë’s insight in Shirley was that the affective experience of patriarchal repression, which repeats down the ages from the first bluestocking through Caroline to us, can be used analogously to understand the vicissitudes of historical change brought about by industrialization, which she could already see in 1848 would shape history through localized profit but moreover through systematic loss. For this is how Brontë finally understands history in Shirley: as loss.

Class Notes

  • very much a follow-up to Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
    • less socially constrained, but still geographically constrained
    • can see her basically directly responding to Elizabeth Rigby's anti-Christian criticisms - but it's not simple, there are no simply virtuous clerics here, and it's quite ambitious: we're not in London, there are significant religious and political issues, worrisome gender politics and xenophobia
  • an historical novel written in "the hungry 40s"
  • offering a critique of the church - not anticlerical, very much written from the inside
  • reminiscent of Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872) - a study in provincial life
  • evangelicalism rises with industrialization
    • more closely associated with the C of E than today
    • backlash against religious truth being located in feeling (Chartism) because it's epistemologically unreliable
  • must remember that half the population was in church last Sunday in the 1850 survey - the secularization master narrative is so compelling
    • no one things that religion is the same, but the idea that religion in the west is no longer a force - Matthew Arnold watching for it to recede in "Dover Beach" is premature
  • they're not all religious, but all major Victorian novelists seriously engage with religion
  • contrast with North and South (Gaskell, 1855) -- Thornton can do what he wants, Moore's hands are tied
  • Moore leads Caroline on, but is stuck: he'd be crazy to marry her in his position early in the novel
  • Caroline is Moore's moral compass as Jane is Rochester's
  • pp 179ff - "Captain Keeldar"
    • Shirley as a structural element, a go-between the worlds of male and female
    • Caroline: we make our own happiness, but she's miserable -- she's stuck but this is inconceivable to Shirley and Helstone
    • C can't achieve happiness through external/economic means so she has to internalize this attempt, where Shirley can, she has an estate of her own
    • 3rd person narrator makes it more "quiet desperation" here than in Jane Eyre
    • the triple-decker novel is big and that matters - there are chapters of C being depressed - you can't necessarily do this in a serialized novel. Here her success permits Bronte to say this is what heartbreak looks like - you wake up the next day and it still sucks
  • social unrest
    • the difficulty of being in this position for Shirley, and the flexibility of Farren and Moore, though they're stuck in their roles
    • 274 Farren: "they'd have less"
    • In North and South, Gaskell prizes the outside view on labor - Bronte does not hold with this
    • enclosures: power relations and shifting away from the commons in the landscape
    • religious aspect of social unrest: they're Methodists who aren't committed to the predestination ideology but still to salvation
    • 254 Battle of Royd-Lane
      • dissenters are satirized and condemned (CB is pretty unfair)
      • Shirley and Helstone instinctively close ranks within their class
  • Shirley and Caroline on 220ff
    • queer affection - no language for it, "sisterhood"
    • the narrative tension of the relationship gets an added twist here of the homoerotic (Sharon Marcus - the plasticity of same-sex relationships and intimacy don't mesh cleanly with our notions)
  • "The School Feast": there were religious wars even in the C18, this is what we get in this tamer time, but it's still invested with stakes
  • Caroline refuses not to approve of a match between Robert and Shirley, like JE refuses to do something wrong (p. 219)
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