Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (7 page)

It’s when she doesn’t leave the frame, when she moves in ways men don’t prompt or expect, that a woman unsettles us. She stops being a reflection, and becomes a presence: A person, suddenly standing in the room.

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Anatomy of a Trainwreck

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

The story begins, as all things must, with a timid governess. A woman in her twenties—not particularly pretty, not particularly wealthy, socially awkward—sets out into the world, determined to earn her way by gainful and ladylike employment.
The education and moral uplift of the young, perhaps: This would allow her to live an independent and sufficient existence, while performing acts pleasing unto her God.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Or don’t, actually, because this is where it gets interesting. This particular young woman is, unbeknownst to everyone including herself, about to write some of the best-known and most widely beloved books of the nineteenth century. This entirely unexceptional young woman would not draw our notice, were it not for the very exceptional fact that she is Charlotte Brontë.

It’s not that Charlotte lacked ambition. All of the Brontës were bookish children, and they began to write at an early age. They collaborated on a family magazine, which summed up the highlights of their life together, and wrote not one but two epic, sprawling fantasy sagas: Branwell and Charlotte, the older children, had created the world of “Angria,” and Anne and Emily, within a few years, followed suit by creating “Gondal.” So Charlotte knew that she could write, and she knew that she loved writing, and naturally, as she grew older, she wondered if she could turn it into a career.

But the response she received was chilling. When she wrote to the poet Robert Southey for advice, telling him she wanted “to be for ever known” as a poet, he informed her that, while she undeniably had some talent, it was irrelevant:
“Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s
life: & it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment & a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity.”

It’s not merely Southey’s “advice” that is depressing, but the eager, obsequious tone of Charlotte’s response. “I had not ventured to hope for such a reply,” she wrote, “so considerate in its tone, so noble in its spirit. I must suppress what I feel, or you will think me foolishly enthusiastic.” To assure him of her virtue, she went on to outline the womanly “duties” currently on her plate: “My father is a clergyman, of limited though competent income … I thought it therefore my duty, when I left school, to become a governess,” she wrote. “In that capacity I find enough to occupy my thoughts all day long, and my head and hands too, without having even a moment’s time for one dream of the imagination. In the evenings, I confess, I do think, but I never trouble anyone else with my thoughts.”

I confess, I do think
. Here was a woman seeking to establish herself as a writer, while being required by her male contemporaries to keep so busy with her proper feminine tasks—marriage, housekeeping, and, most importantly, the rearing of children, whether they were her own or someone else’s—that she didn’t have the time or inclination to sit down and imagine anything, let alone to develop those thoughts into a substantial piece of writing. To seek publication
was, by definition, to “trouble” other people with her thoughts. To publish would mean that she had failed at being female.

And then, there was the question of money. Jane Austen had been able to write her novels under conditions that, while certainly not ideal—she took up a small table in the family sitting room, covering her work with a sheet of paper when someone interrupted her to make conversation—also involved full days spent at home, and a guaranteed lifetime income from her family. But when Charlotte told Southey that she scarcely had time to think, she was telling the truth: She was a governess in a private home: a combination nanny, teacher, and all-around workhorse. The job was miserable—at one point, the children pelted her with rocks until she bled—and, understandably, did not last long. And, when it ended, she set out with her sister Emily to teach at a Belgian girls’ school. It was here that she met the school’s owners: Madame Claire Zoe et Monsieur Constantin Heger.

We still don’t know precisely what happened with Constantin. In fact, it’s remarkably hard to even understand why it happened. Photographs reveal a short, severe-looking middle-aged man, with a receding hairline and the sort of craggy, unforgiving features you’d expect to see on someone waving a shotgun full of rock salt and telling you to get off his lawn. His personality wasn’t any more appealing than his looks:
“He is professor of rhetoric, a man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable in temperament,” is
how Charlotte first describes Heger, in a letter to her friend Ellen Nussey. She also describes him as an “insane tom-cat” and a “delirious hyena,” and mentions that he frequently reduces her to tears. Fredericka McDonald, another teacher at the school who later wrote a book about the Heger-Brontë affair, was a bit nicer, crediting Heger with
“intellectual superiority, an imperious temper, a good deal of impatience against stupidity, and very little patience with his fellowcreatures generally.” She, too, noted, that “M. Heger liked his pupils to cry, when he said disagreeable things.” It was apparently the only way to stop him from saying them.

What it came down to, in the end, was that Charlotte was lonely. Emily went back to England. Charlotte scarcely spoke French; she couldn’t talk to anyone. She found the Belgians cold and unfriendly. She tried to distract herself by wandering the streets, just to get the sense that she was part of a crowd, but it didn’t work. The language was different, the culture was different. Even the religion was different: Charlotte, the daughter of a Protestant curate, got so desperate for emotional support that she wandered into a Catholic church and made confession, a lapse in piety for which she never quite forgave herself. And then, there was the fact of her age; she was twenty-six, and she had never published a piece of writing, fallen in love, or worked at a job she did not hate.

“My youth is leaving me,” she told a friend, who’d suggested she might try working as a nurse. “I can never do better than I have done, and I have done nothing yet.”

Finally, it all got so bad that Charlotte tried to quit the school, just started to walk out of the building with the intention of never coming back. But someone stopped her. One person, in all of this, told Charlotte Brontë that she had value, and persuaded her to stick around. That someone was Constantin Heger.

There was something else about Constantin that people tended to notice, something outside of his forbidding looks and nasty temper. He became a different person—a warm, charismatic, irresistible person—when he wanted to teach you something. Here’s Fredericka again: “The funny and pleasant thing about M. Heger was that he was so fond of teaching, and so truly in his element when he began it, that his temper became sweet at once; and I loved his face when it got the look upon it that came in lesson-hours: so that, whereas we were hating each other when we crossed the threshold of the door, we liked each other very much when we sat down to the table; and I had an excited feeling that he was going to make me understand.”

We don’t know whether Charlotte Brontë and Constantin Heger had an affair. We don’t know whether he loved her, whether he seduced her, whether he even so much as flirted with her; whether it was a forbidden romance or simply a misguided, one-sided crush. But what we do know is that Constantin Heger was Charlotte Brontë’s writing teacher. He made her write essays for him in French, to improve her grasp of the language. He critiqued the essays,
in depth, and passionately. He praised her skill. He made her read books—gave her books as gifts, many times—and spoke with her about what she read.
Some people even believe she may have spoken to him about her earlier attempts at writing, may have gone so far as to show him pieces of the Angria stories. There’s no evidence of a sexual affair, but there’s every evidence of a passionate textual affair, and in those moments, the blessing of being taken seriously as a reader and writer must, almost certainly, have blended with that strange, funny, exciting charm that Constantin possessed only when he wanted to teach you something. For the rest of Charlotte Brontë’s life, Constantin Heger and the act of writing were inextricably linked.

“Do you know what I would do, Monsieur?” Charlotte once wrote to Constantin, in a letter discussing her career plans. “I would write a book and I would dedicate it to my literature master—to the only master I have ever had—to you, Monsieur … That cannot be—a literary career is closed to me—only that of teaching is open[.]”

So I’m asking you: Imagine that. Imagine being a female genius, trapped in the nineteenth century, trapped in a job you hate, in a country not your own. You have some of the best books of your age inside you, and you’ve resigned yourself to the fact that you’ll probably never get them out, never do anything better than those stories you used to make up with Anne and Emily back home. You’re teaching kids, and that’s the only thing you’ll ever do, because even if you did
write—even if you
did
—decent women don’t publish their writing. It’s unladylike, it’s unfeminine, it’s vulgar, it’s condemned. It’s a distraction from the business of a woman’s life. You have no escape. And you have no hope. All you have is one man—one short, bald, mean, angry, middle-aged, married man—who sits down with you to work on your writing. And in that moment, when he’s speaking to you about books, there is no one who could not love his face.

Imagine how much you’d love that man’s face, if you were Charlotte Brontë. Imagine that man’s power: all the needs he would fulfill, all the desires he’d awaken, all the lives you’d suddenly realize you could be living.

And imagine it well, because you’re going to have to forgive Charlotte for some truly crazy ex-girlfriend behavior once she went back to England.

July 24, 1844
: I have been told that you are working too hard and your health has deteriorated a little—That is why I refrain from uttering a single complaint about your long silence—I would rather remain six months without hearing from you than add an atom to the burden …

October 24, 1844
: I would just like to ask you whether you heard from me at the beginning of May and then in the month of August? For all those six months I have been expecting a letter from you, Monsieur—six months
of waiting—That is a very long time indeed! Nevertheless I am not complaining …

January 8, 1845
: I did my utmost not to cry not to complain … I do not seek to justify myself, I submit to all kinds of reproaches—all I know—is that I cannot—that I will not resign myself to the total loss of my master’s friendship—I would rather undergo the greatest bodily pains than have my heart constantly lacerated by searing regrets. If my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely I shall be absolutely without hope—if he gives me a little friendship—a very little—I shall be content
—
happy, I would have a motive for living, for working … I don’t want to reread this letter—I am sending it as I have written it—Nevertheless I am as it were dimly aware that there are some cold and rational people who would say on reading it—“she is raving” …

November 18, 1845
: I have done everything, I have sought occupations, I have absolutely forbidden myself the pleasure of speaking about you—even to Emily, but I have not been able to overcome either my regrets or my impatience—and that is truly humiliating—not to be able to get mastery over one’s own thoughts … Your last letter has sustained me—has nourished me for six months
—
now I need another and you will give it me—not because
you have any friendship for me—you cannot have much—but because you have a compassionate soul … To forbid me to write you, to refuse to reply to me—that will be to tear from me the only joy I have on earth—to deprive me of my last remaining privilege—a privilege which I will never consent to renounce voluntarily
.

Of their correspondence, only these four letters survive. None was supposed to: Even these four were torn up by Heger and thrown into the garbage. (His wife fished them out and sewed the fragments back together. And—just to add a little more fuel to the speculative fire—at least one biographer would later swear she’d done this because Charlotte Brontë blamed Madame Heger for making her leave the school, and that, as Charlotte was leaving their house for the final time, she turned to her and muttered the words
“Je me vengerai.” I will be avenged
.) But the pattern is clear: Every letter gets a little bit louder, a little bit needier, a little bit sloppier, a little bit more desperate. In every letter, she reaches a higher and higher pitch of emotion. It’s with this final letter of November 18—the one where she insists, she demands, she rages, she tells him flat-out that she will never stop writing to him, never stop begging him to write back—that she appears to lose him entirely, after two years of pleading. This is where it ends.

Except that it doesn’t end. Almost exactly two years later, in October 1847, a man named Currer Bell publishes a novel entitled
Jane Eyre
, about a timid yet ardent governess
who falls for her unhappily married employer. It is very successful. It is also very, very scandalous. One reviewer decries its
“truly offensive and sensual spirit.” When her publisher’s mother accidentally leaves a copy lying around the house, visitors scold her for leaving
Jane Eyre
within reach of children. Honestly, if this governess is such a good girl, what’s she doing, making eyes at the boss? And what’s he doing, making eyes back?