“Grotesque things carved by a besotted pagan for his temple:” Charlotte Brontë’s Figural Articulations of the Creative process

Abstract

100 Victorians Journal "Grotesque things carved bg a besotted pagan for his temple:” Charlotte ©ronte’s Figural tlrtieulations of the Creative process by §usan ©. Taylor Charlotte Bronte figured the writing process in multiple and complex ways, invoking metaphors rooted in the natural world, in theologies, and in conscious and unconscious confrontations within the psyche. In a number ofthese instances, Bronte imagines literary creativity and writing’s labor as physical acts of carving, sculpting, molding, assembling, animating, and worshipping. Envisioned as the creation of and interaction with embodied concepts and characters, Bronte’s models of literary creativity connect with the specific medium of sculpture. In Villette (1853), these explorations ofliterary productivity and their relationship to sculpture are taken up by Lucy Snowe as she composes French essays; she calls the “creative impulse” an “intractable ... deity,” “all cold ... all granite, a dark Baal with carven lips and blank eye-balls” that she must somehow “compel into bondage, and make it improvise a theme” (445). She subsequently describes how she, writing from research, “laboriously constructed a skeleton out of the dry bones of the real, and then clothed them, and tried to breathe into them life, and in this last aim I had pleasure,” ensuring “properly [jJointed” facts for “correct anatomy” (494).1 These renditions of the creative process as appeasing and controlling a god or assembling a body build upon two of Bronte’s earlier formulations: an 1840 letter to Hartley Coleridge describing the writer’s creations as “grotesque things carved by a besotted pagan for his temple” {Letters 1:240); and an 1843 Brussels devoir comparing a “mechanic” studying a “device” to a writer “dissecting” a text (Lonoff 240). Tracing Bronte’s earlier explorations of the implicit and explicit connections between writing and sculpture,1 1 In the Penguin edition, the word “jointed” (from the 1853 first edition) is replaced with “pointed,” but there is no editorial note explaining the change. I have kept the word “jointed” in this quote. Victorians Journal 101 including sources ofinspiration and the dynamics ofcreator-and-creation, reveals that these instances in Villette are the culmination ofa continuum of ideas about writing’s relationship to the self and to the arts. According to the OED, ideas of sculpture as both the artistic “production of figures in the round or in relief’ and as an object, the “product ofthe sculptor’s art,”2 are central to Bronte’s investigations of creativity in Villette and elsewhere.3 She draws upon both literal and figurative understandings ofsculpting and sculpture. Philip Rawson summarizes some differences in sculptural methods and effects ofthis artistic medium: Modeling builds the image from nothing, whereas carving takes away excess material enveloping an image that may seem already there, “hidden” inside. These two methods illustrate how sculptural procedures have often been taken as fundamental metaphors for processes of Creation by God. Metaphors, depending as they do on analogies, work both ways; and sculptural processes have gained special value and dignity from association with these metaphors. Philosophical traditions may later hide the physical side of such creation metaphors in abstract terms. (28) A crucial implication of Bronte’s invocation of sculpture as a metaphor for literary creation, then, is the power, even divine power, such creation can involve; the idea of the writer as god-like that she and her siblings explored in their juvenilia persists in her adult writing.4 In Bronte’s multifaceted ideas about writing, however, authorial power is also called into question, casting the writer as a supplicant approaching a deity embodying the “creative impulse.” Her concept ofthe writing process as mental interactions with figures imagined as statues of gods to be worshipped suggests that the writer’s mind is a sort of temple enclosing a god that cannot predictably be controlled. Housed in the mind, this god is part ofthe self, thus creativity is an innate, divine part of the writer’s psyche; and yet, she argues, we cannot know what will 2 OED: sculpture, definitions la and 2a. Definition la includes ways of producing sculpture, “either by carving, by fashioning some plastic substance, or by making a mould for casting in metal.” 3 See also Susan Taylor, ‘“The toad in the...