Albion (45 page)

He informed one acquaintance that he wished to cast Johnson’s biography “in scenes,” as if he were somehow impelled by the theatrical nature of London life to proceed upon a dramatic model; then Johnson might become the chief actor surrounded by secondary players. If it is the business of the biographer to create drama, however, he must introduce pace or tempo into various confrontations. He must rehearse moments of significant action, such as that of Johnson kicking a stone in refutation of Bishop Berkeley’s theories. Most importantly he must create, or shall we say fabricate, memorable dialogue. Since Boswell himself was engaged in many of these conversations, he was also obliged to enter his own narrative with all the attendant problems of repression and revision.

There is a very interesting account of Boswell’s procedures in Adam Sisman’s
Boswell’s Presumptuous Task
, in which he suggests that Boswell subjected his narrative “to every type of revision: summary, paraphrase, expansion, contraction, conflation, interpolation, and so forth.”
⁵
Stories were abbreviated, and anecdotes transposed; short notes were amplified and, significantly, “details that did not fit were altered or discarded.”
⁶
That this is also the practice of most other biographers underlines its suggestiveness. The radical reshaping of a life is primarily the imperative of the artist who must fashion the narrative to accord with his or her own personal vision; it is also necessary to alter or discard facts and details in order to create a coherent character out of the raw materials lying all around. When Mr. Sisman goes on to suggest that Boswell was to some extent “forced to rely on his imagination to elaborate stories of Johnson’s early years,”
⁷
all the formal boundaries of discourse are dissolved. The overriding concern is with the creation of character.

Certainly Boswell did not scruple to invent facts, or omit inconvenient ones. He made only a few notes at dinner in May 1776 when Johnson and Wilkes, the radical London politician, were introduced; but out of these random jottings a fully prepared and described scene, of some four thousand words, was produced twelve years later. Boswell also engaged in what he described as “nice correction,” by which characters and scenes were omitted or refined for the sake of the narrative argument.

One of his more obvious procedures was to render originally short Anglo-Saxon words into their Anglo-Latin equivalents, thus adding sonority to Johnson’s stated opinions. Yet this was also a device which Johnson himself employed. On hearing himself say, of a drama, “It has not wit enough to keep it sweet,” he corrected himself and continued, “it has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.” There may have been an element of irony or self-parody here, but it may also have been a genuine attempt by Samuel Johnson to preserve a respectable mien for the benefit of his biographer; both men were involved in a process of artistic collusion.

Boswell also believed it to be necessary to bowdlerise or boswellise Johnson’s correspondence, so that no trace of grossness or vulgarity remained. But Boswell’s desire to maintain a stable identity for Johnson was designed to reassure himself as well as his readers. As one critic has suggested, “the impulse to create or construct a Johnson answering his private needs is overwhelmingly visible.”
⁸
There is often some consonance between the biographer and the subject of the biography, as if the biographer were ineluctably drawn toward certain destinies. In the act of inspection or observation, there is also an element of self-examination. It might account for Mrs. Gaskell’s biographical interest in Charlotte Brontë, for example, or for that of Carlyle in Frederick the Great.

There is another way of conveying biographical identity in a covert or factitious manner. Boswell admitted that, while composing his narrative out of notes or stray anecdotes, “he had rewritten some of these sayings of Johnson’s into what he considered the authentic Johnsonian style.”
⁹
It is once more a question of artistry, and has nothing to do with factual or historical concerns. That is why the “Johnsonian” style, as invented or embellished by Boswell, was powerfully influential. The biographer relates how, after publication of the
Life
, an acquaintance spoke of its success “in the circles of fashion and elegance.” He informed Boswell that “you have made them all talk Johnson,” to which remark Boswell appends: “I have Johnsonised the land.” The conversations invented by Boswell were anthologised as “Johnsoniana,” and in subsequent years his biography became the only official or extant source of Johnson’s life. This was his success as an artist—to have created a character who over the intervening years has become as recognisable and as familiar as Mr. Pickwick or Mr. Micawber. In 1835 Francis Jeffrey concluded in the
Edinburgh Review
that Boswell “has raised the standard of his [Johnson’s] intellectual character, and actually made discovery of large provinces in his understanding of which scarcely an indication was to be found in his writings.” He did not pause to consider whether those provinces were the rightful territory of Johnson or of Boswell himself. Yet this invented biography created the first “romantic” hero. Out of artificial material a great truth was born; romance, epic, fiction and drama come together to form biography.

Mrs.
Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë
was one of the most popular and most controversial lives of the nineteenth century. A modern editor of this interesting volume has remarked that “she seems to have forgotten that it was not a novel that she was writing.”
¹⁰
There are indeed some startling resemblances between Mrs. Gaskell’s biography and her fiction, to the extent that Charlotte Brontë becomes the heroine of a novel rather than of her own life.

When Elizabeth Gaskell first met Charlotte Brontë, she wrote that “the wonder to me is how she can keep heart and power alive in her life of desolation,” a sentiment similar to the themes of female anguish and self-sufficiency in her novels
Ruth
and
Mary Barton
. The opening of her
Life
follows the same trajectory as that of
Ruth
and
Sylvia’s Lovers
, as the narrator walks through the landscape and setting of her story. The parsonage at Haworth “is of grey stone, two stories high, heavily roofed with flags, in order to resist the winds that might strip off a lighter covering.” In
Sylvia’s
Lovers
Hope Farm is “long and low, in order to avoid the rough violence of the winds that swept over that bleak spot.” In
Ruth
are to be found “grey, silvery rocks, which sloped away into brown moorland,” while in
Sylvia’s
Lovers stretch “the moorland hollows” and purple heather; in The Life of
Charlotte Brontë
are to be found “the dense hollows of the moors.” The first chapter of
Ruth
opens with a description of a town “in one of the eastern counties” where the streets “were dark and ill-paved with large, round, jolting pebbles, and with no side-path protected by kerbstones.” The first chapter of the
Life
opens with a description of Keighley where “the flagstones . . . seem to be in constant danger of slipping backwards.” There is a remarkable consonance of tone and theme. In each case the landscape creates a steadfast heroine, and what Mrs. Gaskell called Charlotte Brontë’s “wild, sad, life.” As Virginia Woolf suggested, “the
Life
gives you the impression that Haworth and the Brontës are somehow inextricably mixed. Haworth expresses the Brontës; the Brontës express Haworth; they fit like a snail to his shell.” This formula is itself so perfectly adapted to the English imagination that it might serve as its introduction; the mingling of character and landscape expresses a great truth, and out of this essentially fictional intuition by Elizabeth Gaskell have sprung a myriad books and literary pilgrimages.

It is appropriate, therefore, that Haworth Parsonage itself is perhaps the principal object of popular affection. Mrs. Gaskell did not start the identification of writer and place—the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 in Stratford has some claim to that honour—but Mrs. Gaskell’s setting of the Brontë sisters on the edge of the moors has greatly influenced the English literary inheritance. It combines a peculiar reverence for place, and a preoccupation with the formation of character. Just as artists have found inspiration on Salisbury Plain or among the Malvern Hills, so others have found consolation in areas which have become sacred or enchanted through their association with writers. From the 1870s forward there emerged a fashion for topographies or itineraries based upon the life of famous writers—
The
Homes of Tennyson, In the
Steps of Charles Dickens, Bozland, Dickens’ Places and People, The Home and
Early Haunts of Robert Louis Stevenson
are among the scores of volumes which appeared upon the subject. It became a national pursuit, and Tennyson was forced to move house in order to avoid the attentions and depredations of these literary tourists. There are many volumes upon the neighbourhood of the Lake District and Thomas Hardy’s semi-fictional “Wessex,” and there are books entitled
A Writer’s Britain
and
The Oxford Literary Guide to the
British Isles
. The
genius loci
has many hearths in England.

So Elizabeth Gaskell, inspired by the imaginative vision of her novels, re-created Charlotte Brontë. As a novelist she was preoccupied with details, and in similar fashion requested information on “the peculiar customs & character of the population toward Keighley.” As one of Mrs. Gaskell’s biographers has put it, “Charlotte Brontë’s life already fell easily into the patterns of Gaskell’s fiction, with its suffering daughters, profligate son and stern father, and its emphasis on upbringing and environment, female endurance and courage.”
¹¹
Mrs. Gaskell lends strong imaginative shape to her biography, also, with letters and anecdotes reinforcing the pace and emphasis of the narrative. She was commenting upon Charlotte Brontë’s husband as an “exacting, rigid law-giving man” at the same time as she was creating just such a character, John Thornton, in
North and South
. In the
Life
, too, Elizabeth Gaskell comments that standards of behaviour and morality “in such a manufacturing place as Keighley in the north” are very different from those of any “stately, sleepy, picturesque cathedral town in the south”; this of course is a principal theme of her novel
North and South
. But the resemblances do not end there. After the publication of the
Life
Charlotte Brontë’s father, Patrick Brontë, wrote to its author and informed her that “the truth of the matter is that I am, in some respects, a kindred likeness to the father of Margaret Hale in ‘North and South’—peaceable, feeling, sometimes thoughtful.” The circle of “fact” and “fiction” becomes complete.

It has also become evident that Mrs. Gaskell, like Boswell before her, omitted, edited and distorted details so that they might more accurately reflect her imaginative concerns. It was necessary for her purposes to emphasise the private and domestic life of Charlotte Brontë, for example, rather than to examine her professional career in proper detail. When Charles Kingsley wrote to congratulate her upon fashioning “the picture of a valiant woman made perfect by suffering” he touched upon an important truth; hers is a “picture” rather than a defined or definite reality. Gaskell omitted unfortunate facts, such as her heroine’s obsession with a Belgian schoolmaster, and frequently cut out significant details from Charlotte Brontë’s correspondence; she also chose to emphasise the endurance and courage of the three sisters, at the expense of downgrading their unhappy brother, Branwell. Gaskell, in other words, created the myth of the Brontës which may still linger among the readers of
Jane Eyre
and
Wuthering Heights
.

The ambiguity of Mrs. Gaskell’s achievement was recognised at the time. George Eliot praised her for creating “an interior so strange, so original in its individual elements and so picturesque in its externals . . . that fiction has nothing more wild, touching and heart strengthening to place above it.” The anonymous writer in the
Edinburgh Review
declared that “Mrs. Gaskell appears to have learnt the art of the novel-writer so well that she cannot discharge from her palette the colours she has used in the pages of ‘Mary Barton’ and ‘Ruth.’ This biography opens precisely like a novel.” But of course it is precisely because it is “like a novel” that it has created an enduring impression upon successive generations of readers. It represents a very English art.

Women and Anger

Silhouette of Jane Austen

CHAPTER 44

Femality and Fiction

There is a report
this day, 6 June 2001, on the “Orange” prize for women’s fiction in which a male and female jury chose a notional winner; it is reliably stated that the jury of women were impressed by the “feeling” of the book, Kate Grenville ’s
The Idea of Perfection
, while the men were enthusiastic about its “artistry.” The commonplaces of the English imagination, as they are applied to women writers, still survive.

It has generally been agreed, for example, that femality and fiction are related more naturally than femality and poetry; the novel, after all, is supposed to reside in the domain of lived experience, and to be guided by the promptings of observation or sentiment rather than the precepts of reason or theory. It has even been suggested that “the English novel seems to have been in some sense a female invention”
¹
with such paradigms as Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth and Ann Radcliffe. Fiction has been deemed a feminine occupation, too, “because it is commercial rather than aesthetic, practical rather than priestly.”
²
In the eighteenth century there was indeed “a common notion, or fear, that the novel had become a feminine genre,”
³
not in the male tradition of theatrically conceived picaresque but in the sphere of moral or sentimental fiction. The epistolary novel was also considered to be a female form, despite or perhaps because of the example of Samuel Richardson (who was clandestinely described as “old-maidish” precisely because of the nature of his fiction). Letters and diaries had always been modes of writing considered to be appropriate for women, because they were not of their nature available in a public forum; now all that had changed. By the last decades of the eighteenth century the novel itself “was virtually taken over by women” to the extent that it came “to be identified as a woman’s form” with over half the inordinate production of fiction in that century emerging from female writers.
⁴
In the nineteenth century, too, the female prerogative was clear. Marian Evans, in her days before the baptism of George Eliot, wrote in the
Westminster Review
that “fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully equal men . . . women can produce novels not only fine, but among the very finest—novels, too, that have a precious specialty.”

Equally significant, too, were the number of female readers. In
Arcadia
, written in the 1580s and regarded as one of the first English novels, Philip Sidney addressed the “fair ladies” who would read his romance; it might even be suggested that ever since the time of the courtly
lais
the association between fiction and a female audience was established. It has been surmised that three-quarters of the reading public in the eighteenth century were female; it was considered to the discredit of the novel, in particular, that it was read by scullery maids as well as by high-born ladies. The prolixity and heterogeneity of the form thus seemed to create an audience similarly disposed. In that century, too, “fiction was often thought to be the most powerful (although also the most condemned) element in girls’ education.”
⁵
But the question, why Marian Evans and the Brontë sisters originally wrote under assumed male names, is not difficult to determine. They knew their strength, and wished to be judged on equal terms with male writers. They did not wish to be patronised or dismissed.

Yet the question of “precious specialty,” in Marian Evans’s phrase, remains perplexing. Did the female novel exhibit the inflections of a special kind of experience or an inimitable form of expression? Was it a matter of a new and ingenious subjectivity, for example, or a peculiar access of spontaneity? There have been many attempts to decipher “female patterns” within fiction, especially in recent years; the authors of
The Madwoman in the
Attic
, a study of female literature, have suggested “a distinctively female literary tradition” which accommodates “images of enclosure and escape” as well as “obsessive descriptions of diseases.”
⁶
They discuss George Eliot ’s “self-conscious relatedness to other women writers, her critique of male literary conventions,” and cite her “interest in clairvoyance and telepathy, her imagery of confinement, her schizophrenic sense of fragmentation.”
⁷
In that sense, of course, she is close to the female authors of Gothic fiction whom in no other area does she resemble; her preoccupation with “clairvoyance and telepathy” not only links her with Charlotte and Emily Brontë but also with that broad school of women writers who eschew “realism” as part of a male-ordered or mail-ordered universe.

For some female writers, however, there was no such alternative. In the seventeenth century Aphra Behn demanded “the Privilidge for my Masculine Part the Poet in me . . . to tread in those successful Paths my Predecessors have so long thriv’d in,” but complains that in practice “such Masculine Strokes in me, must not be allow’d.” The “masculine” powers which she invokes here are those of imagination and invention which, in the latter decades of the seventeenth century, were not deemed suitable for a woman. Behn remains important as the first professional female writer in England, however, “forced to write for Bread and not ashamed to owne it,” and as such she became synonymous in the English imagination with cupidity and immorality. She wrote everything—plays, poems, novels—and displayed a vivacious energy. “Whilst that which Admiration does Inspire/ In other Souls,” she wrote in one verse, “kindles in Mine a Fire” where “Fire” is the single most important and significant quality of her art. Thus was she branded a shame to all her sex, since her emphasis upon sexual gender in the act of self-assertion was also implicitly a reference to sexuality itself. This is the sub-text in all her compositions. Her witty juxtaposition of “masculine” and “feminine” parts in defence of her art led Virginia Woolf to define her “androgynous” mind as subtly subversive. In the public sphere she sympathised with the oppressed and exiled Stuarts, perhaps in native sympathy for all kinds of oppression, but her “Fire” is derived from passionate experience.

There
were of course women writers
in the seventeenth century other than Aphra Behn—Mary Wroth and Rachel Speght among them—and it has been claimed that by the end of that century “women were participating in the major historical and literary shift that was to place prose at the heart of modern written culture.”
⁸
Women were no longer intruders, but inhabitants, in the house of English literature. That is why, in the eighteenth century, there were at least traces of a recognisable tradition; women writers began to cite one another as authorities rather than as object lessons in extravagance or licentiousness. There was a great outpouring of literature which reached its apogee in Austen, Eliot and the Brontës. It has been surmised that in the 1790s there emerged “the first concerted expression of feminist thought in modern European culture”
⁹
as well as a number of books written specifically by women in the sphere of conduct, children and education. Printers and booksellers also responded to changes in female taste.

The example of Fanny Burney, one of the most popular novelists of the eighteenth century, is of some significance. She was considered by Samuel Johnson to be “a writer of romances,” but from the beginning she was aware of the necessity for escape—escape, in particular, from “that inertness which casts the females upon themselves.” We may remark here upon a note of frustration, or anger, which seems to impel female creativity. As a child she had been denied the possibilities of education, while her brother was despatched to Charterhouse, and she describes herself in a biography of her father as “merely and literally self-educated.” She continues in an ironic fashion; “her sole emulation for improvement, and sole spur for exertion” was her father, “who, nevertheless, had not, at the time, a moment to spare for giving her any personal lessons; or even for directing her pursuits.” She found herself to be a charmed progenitor of language, however, and reported in her journal: “Making Words, now & then, in familiar writing, is unavoidable, & saves the trouble of
thinking
, which, as Mr. Addison observes, we Females are not much addicted to.” The vexation is once again evident. Her biographer has commented upon the fact that her “freedom with language reflects her self-image as an ‘outsider’ in literature and her defiance of conventional limitations in a manner that could be seen as rebellious, even revolutionary.”
¹⁰
Fanny Burney was known to Virginia Woolf as “the Mother of English fiction,” and Macaulay suggested that her novels “vindicated the right of her sex to an equal share in a fair and noble province of letters.” But she remained unassuming, even though her spirit and her career were devoted to the acknowledgement that “experience has a complex texture and that truth about it is elusive.”
¹¹
In a sense she left the theory, or at least its explication, to her successors.

One philologist has described her “relaxed enjoyment of language for its own sake, and an unabashed pleasure in its flexibility,”
¹²
which in turn lends a further significance to the remark of a literary historian that “for women the creation remained part of the creator”
¹³
rather than a detached product to be viewed ironically or dispassionately. This is as much to say that the “natural” language of female writers is much closer both to the expression of the physical body and to the inflections of subjectivity. So when, for example, “the Victorians thought of the woman writer they immediately thought of the female body.”
¹⁴
The experience of the body, and the experience of anger, are curiously entwined. One female critical theorist has described the process by which “feminine texts are very close to the voice, very close to the flesh of language . . . straight away at the threshold of feeling . . . I see it as an outpouring.”
¹⁵
In her essay upon women’s literature in English, “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf suggested that “the book has somehow to be adapted to the body” and that “it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. . . . Think of things in themselves.” If this is the peaceful “stream of consciousness,” as adumbrated by Woolf, then it must be related to Julian of Norwich’s perception that her book of visions was “still in process.”
¹⁶
The process is that of the interior life which cannot be ordered by rational perception, and of a female subjectivity which cannot become subject to male disciplines. It is what Fanny Burney meant, in self-deprecating fashion, by her “scribbleration.”

In her second novel,
Mary: and The Wrongs of Woman
, Mary Wollstonecraft depicted “feeling as the necessary instrument of female liberation,” with the addendum that if “feminine sensibility was an oppressive social construct, true feeling was a positive womanly quality and the hope for the future”;
¹⁷
the male expectation of what is feminine and unfeminine must be wholly overturned. While the heroine Maria is languishing in prison it becomes plain that sorrow “must blunt or sharpen the faculties to the two opposite extremes; producing stupidity, the moping melancholy of indolence; or the restless activity of a disturbed imagination.” It is the imagination of Aphra Behn and Emily Brontë kicking, as it were, against the pricks.

By the middle of the eighteenth century the female component of the English imagination was understood and celebrated. In 1748
The Female
Right to Literature
and, four years later,
Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great
Britain who have been celebrated for their Writings
appeared; in 1755 an anthology of poems written by women was issued under the title of
Poems by EminentLadies
. The fact that all of these volumes were composed and compiled by men does not alter the historical significance of the change in literary perception. Eliza Haywood launched the
Female Spectator
as a direct challenge to the male periodical, while the cult of the “Blue-Stocking” opened up hitherto inaccessible areas of male learning. “In former times, the pen, like the sword, was considered as consigned by nature to the hands of men,” Samuel Johnson wrote in 1753, but “the revolution of years has now produced a generation of Amazons of the pen, who with the spirit of their predecessors have set masculine tyranny at defiance.”

Jane Austen herself was indebted to her eighteenth-century predecessor Fanny Burney. The last chapter of Burney’s
Cecilia
intimates that “if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries . . . to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination.” Austen also celebrated the nature and role of the novel in opposition to Burney’s own somewhat self-deprecating attitude towards the form she had helped to fashion. “I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers,” she stated in the fifth chapter of
Northanger Abbey
, “of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding . . . Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried.” She imagines the response of a female reader, “Oh! It is only a novel!,” to which she adds her own acerbic commentary, “only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” Since in this context Austen cites Maria Edgeworth’s
Belinda
as well as Fanny Burney’s
Cecilia
and
Camilla
—in opposition to the work of Milton, Pope, Prior, Sterne and Addison—we are entitled to suggest that she was celebrating the merits of the female novel rather than those of male discourse.