Virgin Solitude: Envisioning a Textual Space for Spinsters in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley

Abstract

The marriages that close Charlotte Bront?'s Shirley ( 1849) provide a discon certing reminder of how difficult it was for a nineteenth-century woman to aspire to a single life. Although the novel celebrates feminine mythology and female independence, its closure unsettlingly traps its two heroines inside the very romance plot conventions it has been contesting; like its eponymous heroine, the novel itself seems to be conquered by love, and bound with a vow (637). In Shirley, there is no question that marital vows restrict Shirley's and Caroline s freedom and independence. Yet Bront? inserted another, overlooked ending in Shirley, one which provides a contrast and an alternative to the tradi tional marital closure. In two strange proleptic moments, the narrator projects the fates of two minor characters, Rose and Jessy Yorke, two decades into the future, chronologically well beyond the confines of the marriage ending. After summarily dispensing with the domestic Jessy by describing her early grave, Bront?'s narrator creates for the independent Rose a new textual space, a lush and fertile wooded solitude ( 150). Throughout the novel, Bront? and her heroines express their awareness of the constraints a romance plot imposes on women's characterization and destinies; yet, in the novel's plot itself, aging spinsters are ridiculed and marriageable young heroines are tamed, leading to marriage as a seemingly inevitable conclusion. However, Rose Yorke's scene of virgin independence, if read as an alternate ending to Shirley, not only provides a hopeful answer to the novel's questions about female independence and spinsterhood, but also highlights how women writers may subvert narrative form by writing outside the lines of the Victorian marriage plot. Bront?'s narrator hints at her subversion of the romance tradition from the