Kungfunurse

Along with Byron, the Bronte kids read Blackwood's Magazine, which was famous for its Gothic tales of the supernatural and was also a major influence on Edgar Allan Poe. You can tell, in the very early stuff included in this volume, that Charlotte was a big fan of magic and the marvelous; she was more into trying to imagine what it would be like if everyone was 30 feet tall than she was into realism. It's also interesting that Charlotte developed an early taste for metafiction. She and the other authors appear in some of these stories as "Genii" who enable their heroes to accomplish miraculous feats. The Spell, as its name implies, does dabble in magic; but though you wouldn't call it exactly realistic--it is very, very Romantic--its plotting is a lot more rational and coherent than it is in any of the earlier stuff. This despite the fact that "Charles Wellesley" announces in a preface that his purpose in writing this story is to prove to everyone around him that his brother, the Duke of Zamorna, is mad.

The Duke of Zamorna is sometimes identified as an early protoype for Rochester. I wouldn't go that far; but it is interesting to me that Charlotte Bronte is already trying out some things that will be very important in Jane Eyre, including and especially the idea of the double. Jane is constantly forced to confront other women who become her double: first Helen Burns, whose Christianity Jane incorporates after Helen's death, and then the two women who fill the Mrs. Rochester role before Jane has a chance to: Blanche Ingram (who goes through a charade marriage to Rochester as part of her mercenary and insincere courtship of him) and Bertha Mason (who actually is married to Rochester). This reading of Bertha as Jane's double--as, essentially, the embodiment of the rebellious rage that the 18 year old Jane no longer allows herself to express--is of course indebted to Gilbert & Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic. But doubling is something that is inevitably produced by a bigamy plot, where all the shock and thrills ultimately derive from the scandal of there being two of something there should only be one of.

For a long time, The Spell looks like a bigamy plot. The epistolary section focuses on the Duke of Zamorna's wife, who is jealous of his poorly concealed affairs with other women. And we eventually see the Duke of Zamorna getting everyone together to declare to them that a different woman, Emily, is his true wife and the mother of his two children. All of these noblemen are amazed and some of them--especially those related to the current Duchess of Zamorna--are very angry. Before that happens, though, we get a lot of hints that Zamorna has some kind of demonic doppelganger out there. He's reported being seen in public while he's also sick and dying at home, he doesn't seem to remember having done and said things that other characters saw him do and say, etc. It's eventually revealed that there are actually two Zamornas. Yes, all along the Duke of Zamorna (named Arthur Augustus Adrian Wellesley) has had an identical twin brother--hilariously and prophetically named Ernest--and they have concealed this fact from nearly everyone due to a spell that was placed on them the night they were born . Ernest is married to Emily; Arthur is married to the Duchess. So it's not a bigamy plot after all. Instead of a plot that doubles women, it's a plot that reveals its hero as split/doubled.

It's part of the terms of the curse that both twins have to "in reality be but as one." Despite being two separate people, they have to share a single life: according to the curse, if they are ever seen together by anyone, they will die. One is doomed to be famous and the other to be obscure. So for most of the story, Zamorna appears to be a wildly incoherent character with a volatile and cruel disposition. He's inconsistent in his affections (sometimes he loves his wife and sometimes he doesn't; sometimes he has a very weird dom/sub thing going on with a peasant girl named Mina Laury, sometimes he's completely indifferent to her), he's cruel to his friends and lovers (when they're not actually his friends and lovers), etc. The doubling is a way of having a hero who's both loving and cruel, both good and bad, both dignified and irreverent. Even after the curse is lifted and everything's explained, we're told that the two brothers have infiltrated each other's lives to such an extent that nobody will ever really know what words or deeds to attribute to which brother.

So this is interesting to me, because it does show you sort of how Rochester was built. The main difference between Rochester from Jane Eyre and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights is that with Rochester, underneath the Byronic exterior there is the capacity for love, compassion, remorse, and repentance. Heathcliff is a sadistic bastard all the way down. 18 year old Charlotte wanted to have it both ways with her ideal man--the fascinating despotic egotism AND the capacity for faithful love and companionate marriage--and decided the way to do it was to literally make two of him.

Another thing that's interesting to me is the fact that Charlotte invested so much in this Charles Wellesley character as her alter ego. We're always told that the Bronte sisters adopted pseudonyms because women's writing didn't sell. But Currer Bell was not her first alias; and she seems to have been very captivated by the opportunity to play her family's games as Charles instead of Charlotte.

Right after The Spell there's a poem called "We Wove a Web in Childhood" in which Charlotte talks about this whole collaborative fiction project and how much she missed their shared imaginary world whenever she went to live somewhere else. After the poem ends, there's a prose epilogue in which Charlotte claims to have actually seen the image described in the last stanzas appear in her ordinary surroundings:

"Never shall I, Charlotte Bronte, forget what a voice of wild & wailing music now came thrillingly to my mind's--almost to my body's--ear; nor who distinctly I, sitting in the schoolroom at Roe Head, saw the Duke of Zamorna leaning against that obelisk, with the mute marble Victory above him, the fern waving at his feet, hisblack horse turned loose grazing amont the heather...I was quite gone. I had really utterly forgot where I was and all the gloom & cheerlessness of my situation."

And then one of the teachers interrupts her and it's gone.

"Farewell to Angria," written in 1839, is not entirely what I expected. It's very short, for instance--two paragraphs--and it's hard to say who this "reader" is that she's addressing. So far, the only people reading the Angria stories are the people who are writing them. So it seems likely that this was really written for Branwell, Emily, and Anne, as a way of explaining why she was withdrawing from their collaborative project.

In the second paragraph she does talk about this as a step she might be taking for her own peace of mind. After lamenting the parting from places and characters that now feel like part of her extended family, she says, "Still, I long to quit for a while that burning clime where we have sojourned too long. Its skies flame--the glow of sunset is always upon it. The mind would cease from excitement & turn now to a cooler region, where the dawn breaks grey and sober & the coming day for a time at least is subdued in clouds."

But the first paragraph suggests that the problem with Angria isn't that it's too stimulating, but that in becoming more fully realized and more familiar, it's starting to bore her. She's proud of all the work she's done fleshing the place and the people out; but all the same "the eye is tired of the picture so oft recurring & now so familiar."

Underneath it all is the sense that Charlotte believes that she's now a skilled enough writer to reach a community of "readers" wider her own family--and that if she's going to find that bigger audience, she can't take Angria with her. She is perhaps now mature enough as a writer to notice that despite their nominally exotic setting, the environs of her last two novels closely resemble her own, and her characters are spending a lot of time in houses that are indistiguishable from the English homes she knows. In both "Mina Laury" and "Caroline Vernon," the wars and intrigues and politics of Angria and Verdopolis--all the things that would be front and center in high fantasy--fade into the background. Like "Mina Laury," "Caroline Vernon" is built around a romance plot involving the Duke of Zamorna. What's in this novella is very interesting; also interesting is what's not in it.

Like "Mina Laury" before it and Jane Eyre after it, "Caroline Vernon" is named after its protagonist. Caroline Vernon is the illegitimate daughter of the Earl of Northangerland. Zamorna and Northangerland are allies and frenemies. Zamorna married the Earl's legitimate daughter Mary; he has made her pretty miserable with his epic infidelities. Nevertheless, when Caroline was born, Northangerland set her mother up in a house and appointed Zamorna as Caroline's guardian. Zamorna seems to have taken the job seriously, and to have been a helpful counterweight to Caroline's narcissistic and hysterical mother. At the beginning of the novel, Northangerland decides that since Caroline is fifteen now, and since her mother refuses to accept that she's no longer a child because seh doesn't want to acknowledge how old that makes her, it's time to take Caroline to Paris and bring her out in society. Zamorna tries to talk him out of it, apparently out of a sincere fear that the Parisian society she'd be entering will ruin Caroline's earnest and thoughtful character.

In fact, Paris doesn't spoil Caroline, though while there she does hear from some of her Parisian associates that Zamorna is not the stand-up guy she thought he was. Discovering that he's famous for ruining women is dismaying to her at first. But almost immediately, his Bad Character becomes a source of erotic fascination. Caroline returns to "Angria" with a burning desire to see Zamorna again; but her father sticks her in an isolated country house and leaves her there. Caroline eventually just takes off one day and travels to a town where she knows Zamorna has gone and gets herself invited to the house where Zamorna's staying. Crushed at first by his seeming indifference to her, Caroline is sitting alone in the library when Zamorna comes in...and at the end of that conversation, she has agreed to run away with him. And she does. The story ends with her father showing up--furious--cracking Zamorna across the face with a pistol, and promising to ruin him if he doesn't immediately give Caroline into his custody. Zamorna defiantly declares he's survive the worst Northangerland can do; and that's the end of it.

So here are the things that are most interesting to me about all this, from the point of view of Jane Eyre:

Caroline's feelings for Zamorna are pretty intense even before she goes to Paris, but she doesn't really understand them. Hearing about Zamorna's sexual past clarifies and intensifies these feelings instead of cooling them down. She doesn't fall for him in spite of his bad character, but because of it. Knowing his reputation as a seducer doesn't warn her to stay away from him; it gives her hope. The isolation of "Eden Cottage," which her father thinks will protect her, only gives her more time to brood over her obsession with Zamorna; and when she gets a single letter from him, it excites such passion and desire that she decides immediately to run to him. Charlotte's description of Caroline's mental state at the time stood out to me:

"Here was something more than the devil to pay--a voluntary elopement without a companion, alone, entirely of her own free-will--on the deliberation of a single moment! ...Miss Vernon did not reflect, did not repent, did not fear. Through the whole day & night her journey lasted she had no moment of misgiving. Some would have trembled from the novelty of the situation, some would have quailed under the reproaches of prudence, some would have sickened at the dread of a cold or displeased reception at their journey's end. None of these feelings daunted Caroline a whit. ...She could not see the blind folly of her undertaking. She had no sense of the erroneous nature of the step. Her will urged it. Her will was her predominant quality & must be obeyed."

So if you compare this to, say, Lydia's elopement with Wickham in Pride and Prejudice or Natasha's foiled elopement with Anatole in War and Peace, what stands out is that Charlotte wants us to see this as an expression of Caroline's own "will." It's not that Zamorna is any better for or to Caroline than Wickham and Anatole are to the teenaged girls they ruin--more on this in a moment--but that Caroline is the one who initiates the elopement. Zamorna's letter is definitely stirring the pot--he lets her know that in his eyes she's not a "little girl" any more, he teases her about her questions about his 'character' based on what she's heard in Paris, and he tells her to write to him again if she's "still unhappy at Eden-Cottage." But it definitely doesn't suggest this, and he's very surprised when she turns up in the drawing room of the house where she's staying, under an assumed name.

At the same time, Charlotte is also very clear about Zamorna's responsibility for Caroline's social ruin. Once he's confident that Caroline is in fact in love with him, we get an authorial intrusion describing Zamorna's "genuine character":

"Hitherto we have seen him before us rather as a mentor than a misleader--but he is going to lay down the last garment of light & be himself entirely. In Miss Vernon's present mood--burning & trembling with confusion, remorse, apprehension--he might by a single word have persuaded her to go back to Eden-Cottage. She did not yet know that he reciprocated her wild, frantic attachment. He might have buryed that secret--have treated her with an austere gentleness he well knew how to assume--& crushed in time the poison flowers of a passion whose fruit, if it reached maturity, would be crime & anguish."

But he doesn't--because "the selfish Zamorna" is incapable of depriving himself of something he desires just to avoid hurting someone else. "It is his creed that all things bright & fair live for him--by him they are to be gathered & worn as the flowers of his laurel crown." So instead, he tells her he's got a house in the middle of a forest where he secretly keeps his 'treasures,' and will she go there with him? And she says yes.

What "Caroline Vernon" seems to be about, really, is the weirdness of adolescent girlhood--specifically, the crisis of growing into sexual feelings for which your society gives you no legitimate means of expression. And one of the weirdest things about it--based on Charlotte's experience, it would seem--is the way these feelings get attached to men you already know, who by definition are not appropriate objects for them. For a while Caroline has a kind of double-consciousness about what it means to "love" Zamorna. At first, she tells herself, she just wants to be around him and know that he likes her; eventually, she admits that she hopes her half-sister Mary will die so that she can marry him. She's confused by the way her own image of Zamorna shifts after she hears about his sexual past and starts to think of him "no longer as a philosopher & apostle, but as--I need not tell my readers what they know or at least can guess. Thus did Zamorna cease to be an abstract principle in her mind--thus did she discover that he was a man vicious like other men." That's not the only part of this passage in which the narrator seems reluctant to follow Caroline's entire train of thought: "She thought of him no longer as 'the stoic of teh woods, the man without a tear' but as--don't let us bother ourselves with considering as what." At the moment that Caroline agrees to be spirited away to Zamorna's secret mistress house, the distinction between Zamorna as father figure and Zamorna as seducer collapses: "The man beside her was her guardian again, but he was also Mr. Montmorency's Duke of Zamorna."