Passionate Reserve and Reserved Passion in the Works of Charlotte Bronte

Abstract

When first began to write, Charlotte Bronte told George Henry Lewes, I restrained imagination, eschewed romance, repressed excitement.' This pattern of general reserve, a point of self-definition freely avowed both by Bront& as writer and by all of her major characters, is a pattern we have grown accustomed to think of as a tragic psychic compromise, a martyring of creative potential. Such reserve, by which mean deliberate refusals of self-expression-refusals that ostentatiously dam up passion and desire-appear to us as hopelessly unhealthy, compelled both by outward oppression and deprivation, and by inward paralysis. But our sense of limitations inherent in Bront&'s reserve depends very heavily on neo-Freudian psychology, which tends to equate pressure of desire toward expression with more authentic movements of selfhood-an equation our culture too readily accepts as natural and obvious. For Charlotte Bront6, however, desire is engendered by means of reserve rather than despite it. That is to say, desire is not quelled in her constrained characters and narratives; rather, desire articulates itself by collapsing distinction between expressed passion and reserve, making these gestures parallel, sometimes interchangeable modes of self-extension. The oppositional psychic tensions we tend to find so disturbing in Bront6's work are, in fact, unstable oppositions that, through their very instability, seek to intensify desire and subjectivity within which desire circulates. Recently, writers as different ideologically as Michel Foucault, Carl Degler, and Nina Auerbach have argued that forms of Victorian self-control play a more positive, empowering role within subjectivity than we have come to think.2 Foucault, in particular, has most directly challenged what he calls the repressive hypothesis by simply inverting its terms: repression not established as a principle of limitation of pleasures of others by what have traditionally been called 'ruling classes.' Rather it appears to me that they first tried it on themselves . . . what was involved