Mind and Body in Charlotte Brontë's Fiction

Abstract

When I first published Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology in 1996, I received what can only be described as a piece of hate-mail. The writer informed me that her book group had been studying the Bronte novels, and so had decided to read my book. The experience was clearly traumatic, since I apparently ruined Bronte for her, and the entire group, for ever more. I was strongly encouraged never to write again, etc. In the age of the internet we have become used to the vicious tweet or blog, but at a time when email was only just coming into being, it clearly took some determination to find out an author and pen a letter. I had expected to upset many Bronte readers, but the vehemence startled me. Why had my heavily researched, scholarly monograph evoked such a reaction? In these days, when we are encouraged to reach out to the public, and to ensure our work has “impact,” one could perhaps judge my book to have been a success; it certainly had a profound effect on members of the general public, well beyond what might be expected of an academic monograph, just not in a particularly positive way. The response is instructive, however: it demonstrates the profound personal and emotional engagement which can underpin reading, and also the investment in particular models of interpretation. The two are very closely intertwined, and what I had done, clearly, in challenging the latter, was to disturb the former, and the symbiosis between reading and a sense of selfhood. In a way, the backlash I experienced was a demonstration, in the current day, of the arguments of the book. I had set out to challenge the deeply embedded belief that the Brontes somehow lived and wrote in a social and cultural vacuum; that they were intuitive geniuses who took inspiration from “above” rather than the world of which they were a part. More particularly, I had aimed to show that the models of selfhood in Charlotte Bronte’s fiction drew on the social, psychological and economic constructions of the period.