marriage, yet she does not call her history 'Jane Rochester: An Autobiography.' -356-
No wonder her protests shocked readers. No angel in the house, or her author, could be innocent, or believe in the sanctity of love, and still speak with a man so easily, if censoriously, about sex and his mistresses, and about her own feelings. No woman should want to control her fate so desperately that she seeks out new «servitudes» in order to experience «realities» conceived in her imagination, realities having no apparent connection to the domestic. No unmarried woman in reality should say no to a minister's request for marriage and service to God and, listening to a voice in the wind, return to a man who may yet be married. 'Reader, I married him.' What is the moral here?
Though French critic Eugene Forçade (Brontë's favorite critic of her novels) found Jane Eyre 'a drama in which society plays more or less the cruel and tyrannical role assigned to fate in the tragedies of antiquity,' and praised Brontë for her refusal to 'call down a fiery judgment' on that society, few English readers could see anything beyond the passions of Jane Eyre, and even fewer could find a moral in them. In her Shirley of 1849, Charlotte Brontë took the reviewers' objections to Jane Eyre and readers' expectations of a moral and inscribed them in the text. She produced a hungry-forties novel, in the manner of Mrs. Gaskell and Disraeli: a third-person narrator represents the hopelessness of men without jobs, the mercenary individualism of the middleclass factory owners, the paternalistic concerns that should mark the wealthy (here impersonated by Shirley, the ambiguously named title heroine), and the despair of middle-class women unable to work. Indeed, this last focus frames all other concerns and indicates the force of Forçade's suggestion that Brontë could have called her novel 'Shirley, or the condition of women in the English middle-class.'
Set in the period of the Napoleonic wars, Shirley offers a panoramic picture of a nation and its individuals in the 'throes of a sort of moral earthquake.' There is no patriotism, little real fellow feeling, a 'great gulf' between the classes, and a sense of hopelessness that recalls Thomas Carlyle's analysis in Chartism (1839) and Past and Present (1842). The ideology of work that Carlyle preached ('The latest Gospel in this world is, know thy work and do it') is repeated in Shirley, and given special meaning because it is not only the gospel of the workers, but of Caroline Helstone, the title character's middle-class friend who is also the central female figure in the novel. The meditations of Caroline on work and the discussions between her and Shirley are a gloss on Carlyean ideas, already implicit in Jane Eyre, that a person -357- without work is a person in torment. For Caroline, work might not 'make a human being happy,' but 'successful labour has its recompense; a vacant, weary; lonely, hopeless life has none.' She finds no virtue 'in abnegation of self,' in a self-denial that leaves no room for liberating work but only for 'undue humility' and 'weak concession.' In one of her meditations that, along with her conversations with Shirley, articulate the real interest and agenda of the novel, she says: 'I believe single women should have more to do-better chances of interesting and profitable occupation than they possess now. And when I speak thus, I have no impression that I displease God by my words, that I am either impious or impatient, irreligious or sacrilegious.' Yet the rigidity of the social world-its religion, its class system, its prohibitions against respectable women working, its conventions that demand that a 'good woman' be 'half doll, half angel'-forces on women a psychological deadening and an entrapment in the self.
This presentation of the imprisoned female self in a society convulsed by social problems that have no solution is finally resolved in a way that belies the very issues Shirley has raised. Brontë chose to divide her Jane Eyre figure into the meek Caroline Helstone and the lively Shirley Keeldar, who is wonderful in her spirited defenses of women and in her comments on any issue that catches her attention. But while Caroline and Shirley can speak forthrightly and strongly about the fate of women in a male-governed social order, they are trapped in a social code that demands that women find confirmation of their worth in home and family. Caroline's Bunyanesque question, 'What was I created for?' which propelled the plot of Jane Eyre, is counterpointed by her 'yearning to discover and know her mother' and by her pinings after Robert Moore and 'the little parlour of [his] house [which] was her earthly paradise.' Shirley's independence is compromised by her desire for a man to reverence. The two heroines marry the brothers Moore, one a factory owner who learns to heed Caroline's pleas that he give more paternal attention to his workers' humanity, the other a schoolmaster who needs to be more masterly in his treatment of Shirley. The book ends in lovers' vows.
Almost. The narrator recognizes the escape the plot provides from the tough social reality depicted in the novel, and recognizes implicitly that, while Jane Eyre defined her domestic role, Shirley and Caroline submit to theirs as if there were no choice. Nor was there in the 1840s, or before. Jane was orphaned, independent: 'Who in the world cares -358- for you?' She was finally granted a fortune, a real 'independence,' as a confirmation of her singular moral individuality. In Shirley, the female protagonists are inserted into a densely figured historical background. In that environment progress for women must be purely personal-toward marriage. These women, independent as are their ideas, cannot imagine a world outside of loving. The marriage plot simply cannot cohere to the novel's political discussions. While Brontë recognizes the ways this plot confines women to domesticity, she fears the revolutionary nature of the alliance she has constructed in her narrative between middle-class women and lower-class (male) workers who beg for work so that they may respect the social order.
Still, the narrator faces with severe scrutiny the issues that the marriages gloss over. Hers is a voice of 1849 damning any notion that readers will tolerate anything like the real in their fictions. She begins the novel by announcing to the reader that «romance» is not on the menu, but rather 'something real, cool, and solid,' and concludes by seeing the whole as a 'story.' She muses often about readers' desires that novels avoid harsh reality (and writes some of the reviewers' negative comments about Jane Eyre into the mouths of characters):
Whenever you present the actual, simple truth, it is, somehow, always denounced as a lie:… whereas the product of your own imagination, the mere figment, the sheer fiction, is adopted, petted, termed pretty, proper, sweetly natural: the little, spurious wretch gets all the comfits, — the honest, lawful bantling, all the cuffs. Such is the way of the world.
In her closing tableau of vanished fairies, she challenges readers to feel any satisfaction, even if the novel does end in lovers' vows. 'The story is told. I think I now see the judicious reader putting on his spectacles to look for the moral. It would be an insult to his sagacity to offer directions. I only say, God speed him in the quest.'
At the end she undercuts the romance she has just told by displacing the novel's green world and throwing the reader into the ashy landscape of the present. This narrator's voice makes Shirley one of the most illustrative of the social-problem novels of the 1840s because of the problems it encounters in representing political action. Brontë's narrator refuses to traffic in any modern celebrations of progress. That voice reminds the reader that Chartist disturbances now constantly disprove the idea that some lasting good has come out of past actions. More importantly, it asserts that the politics of Victorian storytelling and the -359- politics of class conflict are not easily accommodated. Indeed, the narrator places «offstage» the workers' attack on Robert Moore's mill (it is narrated through the heroines' effort to hear what is going on), a scene which Mrs. Gaskell or George Eliot would have rendered directly. Indeed, as Deirdre David noted in Fictions of Resolution, Mrs. Gaskell in North and South intensifies the meaning of 'the threat which an uneducated and undisciplined working class presents to middle-class culture' by placing women at the front of the threatened group. Love stories centering on the feelings of women allow little room for political exploration when women are not recognized as political agents.
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