Of narpay faculty the department of the english language and literature course paper

CHAPTER II.Gothic elements in Victorian female novels
2.1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
Charlotte Brontë´s Jane Eyre (1847) results from the union of Realism, with the depiction of everyday life activities, and romance elements such as the extraordinary and the supernatural. Jane’s story, an orphan raised by her cold-hearted aunt in law who sends her to an authoritarian charity school where her best friend dies because of an epidemic causes sympathy on the readers² At the age of eighteenth, she becomes the governess of an illegitimate child at Thornfield House, Mr. Rochester’s manor, a mysterious an older man with whom she falls in love. Then, he asks her hand in marriage but at the day of the wedding, she discovers that Rochester is already married to his mad wife who is imprisoned in a chamber of the house.
During Jane’s childhood, there are moments of fear and tension which transport the audience to a gothic atmosphere. Gateshead Hall, Mrs. Reed’s mansion, represents a prison for her due to a series of continuous mental and physical abuses from her aunt and cousins: her aunt accuses her to be a liar, her cousin John hit her head with a book, and her cousins Eliza and Georgiana treat her with indifference. However, her most frightful experience lies in the red room scene when her aunt locks her in a chill and silent room as a way of punishment. According to Rebecca Sterne “light in many Gothic novels is instrumental in creating fear by making visible the threats that hover in a novel’s darkened passages”. She explains that the mediation of light in Jane’s moment of fear confirms the uncanny. Her subconscious leads her to believe that the room is haunted by the ghost of her dead uncle. ³At this moment a light gleamed on the wall… while I gazed, it glided up to the ceiling and quivered over my head…but then, prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were by agitation, I thought the swift darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world. My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated. ⁴Charlotte Brontë introduces us to a superstitious heroine who believes in myths, legends and tales of fairy beings when she sees a figure in the distance and thinks of a “Gytrash”, a spirit which torments lonely travelers or when she heard a “demoniac laugh—low, suppressed, and deep—uttered” ⁵ her imaginative mind makes her think of a goblin standing near to her bed. However, Jane does not represent the conventional virgin type heroine of traditional gothic novels, whose sensibility maintains her away from the real world. She depicts a courageous Gothic heroine when she extinguishes the intentioned fire of Rochester’s bed or when she takes care alone of Mr. Mason’s arm “almost soaked in blood” .⁶ Moreover, Jane portrays a kind of heroine who is able to make her own decisions. This is notorious when she rejects to be St. John’s wife because she does not love him as a husband. The only instance of the supernatural lies in the telepathic communication scene between Jane and Rochester. Jane hears his voice calling her even when they are separated by a great distance: “The feeling was not like an electric shock, but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling” .⁷ However, she does not relate this supernatural fact neither to deception nor to witchcraft but to the work of nature. According to Robert B. Heilman, Charlotte Brontë manages to achieve new patterns of feeling by mixing traditional gothic conventions with new elements introduced by her. As opposed to the traditional Gothic whose characters are afraid of supernatural facts, Charlotte’s New Gothic explores in depth the psyche of her characters through their thoughts and dreams. Jane’s dreams about a little child and a ruined Thornfield depict the anxiety and nervousness that she feels before her wedding. Moreover, he suggests that Charlotte’s gothic is undercut with her later usage of comedy elements in some passages such as the arrival of guests to Thornfield. After Mrs. Rochester’s attack to Mason at night, the ladies “in vast white wrappers were bearing down on him like ships in full sail so he orders them not to pull [him] down or strangle . ⁸
Mr. Rochester could be seen as the Byronic hero who enchants Jane. However, behind his chivalrous manners, there is a self-tortured man who is trying to escape from his turbulent and mysterious past. In some way, Rochester breaks with the archetypical figure of the gothic villain since he is not handsome: “He had a dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow”. ⁹ Bertha Mason, Rochester’s mad wife, is presented as a wild beast and a non-human creature. Even the good natured Jane describes her as a fearful and ghastly creature. ‘It seemed, sir, a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back It was a discoloured face—it was a savage face the lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed: the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes of the foul German spectre—the Vampyre.¹⁰However, she is the only one who feels sorrow for her situation when Rochester addresses to her as a monster: “you speak of her with hate—with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel—she cannot help being mad”. I would like to remark that the characters of Bertha and Jane could be viewed as counterparts. On the one hand, Bertha represents the madwoman in the attic, who cannot live in a domestic environment due to her wild nature, and on the other hand, Jane pictures the angel in the house, that is, the perfect femininity ideals. Nevertheless, Peter Grudin suggests that the figure of Bertha carries symbolic meaning by representing Jane’s inner fears about what she may become. ¹¹ It is also significant that Radcliffe has a visible influence on Charlotte Brontë. Radcliffe’s second novel A Sicilian Romance serves Brontë as a reference point to create the character of Bertha Mason. She is inspired by the figure of Lady Mazzini, who is imprisoned by her husband in a chamber of the castle because of his desires to marry a younger woman. All the inhabitants of the manor heard strange sounds and moans at night which make them be terrified of the presence of a ghost. Just as Lady Mazzini, Bertha Mason is also locked by her husband in a room on the upper floor of Thornfield House. The tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) contains few Gothic elements in comparison to her sisters’ novels and other works belonging to this period. The lack of the supernatural locates The Tenant in a more realistic type of novel. However, the main pattern of Female Gothic is patent in the narrative of the plot. The protagonist, Helen Graham, is tormented by a miserable marriage with her tyrant husband Arthur Huntingdon from whom she finally decides to run away in order to find a merrier life with her son. The Tenant gives rise to a chorus of criticism from Victorian society in which the image of marital harmony was very well established in the mind of the population ¹²The arrival of a widow and her little child to an uninhabitable and gloomy manor and her mysterious past awakens all kinds of rumours and gossip among the inhabitants of the little territory of Linden-Car. The venerable and picturesque Wildfell Hall is located at the top of a hill surrounded by desolate and rough fields. Its walls made of grey stone, its thick stone mullions and tiny latticed panes together with its isolate and unsheltered situation makes readers remind of the ancient castles of traditional Gothic stories. Nevertheless, in spite of its cold and dark aspect, Wildfell Hall represents for Helen a happy household far away from her cruel husband. The narrative of the novel is written in an epistolary form by Gilbert Markham, the main narrator, who is telling the story to one of his friends. He acts as a mediator to make her story known to the readers. Moreover, Helen’s diary plays an important role because the narration of her failed marriage is included in the whole narration of the plot. The idea of finding an old and faded manuscript as a way of revealing a secret to discover the truth is a common device of Gothic fiction ¹³ The difference resides in the fact that in this case is Helen herself who gives her diary to Gilbert to make him know all the truth about her turbulent past. Helen is a young and inexperienced heroine who falls in love with the handsome Arthur Huntingdon. His aristocratic background and his good looks and manners attract the innocent Helen in spite of the warnings coming from her astute aunt who advise her to “let eyes be blind to all external attractions, ears deaf to all the fascinations of flattery and light discourse.—These are nothing” .¹⁴ However, Helen ignores her aunt’s advice and finally marries Huntingdon. As soon as she starts to know Arthur’s real nature, she starts to suspect that “his very heart, that trusted so, is less warm and generous than thought it” . Arthur is a cruel man who only looks after his own interests without caring about the people who surrounds him: he incites his wretched friend Lowborough to take refuge in drinking; he does not allow Helen to profess her faith; he conceals from his friend that Anabella Wilmot only wants to marry him because of his fortune and he calls his wife a “confounded slut” . Nevertheless, it is not until the eighth week of marriage that she recognizes that she was wilfully blind in relation to Arthur’s selfishness. He is a villain who maintains Helen imprisoned in the house under an absolute power from which Helen cannot escape. As soon as mental and emotional abuses increase due to his “predilection for the pleasures of the table” ¹⁵ she sees herself dragged into a kind of Gothic horror . Arthur is a sexist man who seems to be married for the purpose of exhibiting her as a demonstration of the perfect feminine behaviour. According to him, a woman must take care of the house and please all the desires of her husband. For example, when he travels to London to enjoy drinking with his friends, Helen must remain at home to act as a nurse after his excesses. Finally, his evil nature is undermined by his premature death: he is powerless to destroy his innocent son and he cannot drag his friends to death with him because they manage to reform by their own will. Grassdale Manor is a house of perversion and lack of moral principles. Helen suffers all kinds of domestic and sexual abuses from her husband and the hosts of the house. When Arthur claims that he has no wife and offers Helen to any of his friends, Mr. Hargrave, by taking his words seriously, proposes Helen to become her guardian and lover. Moreover, she soon discovers the extramarital relationships between Huntingdon and Anabella Wilmot who is as ambitious and shameless as Arthur. As opposed to Helen, who is a good- hearted heroine, Anabella represents the figure of the gothic villainess who makes use of her unscrupulous temperament to achieve her purposes. After Anabella’s departure, their conjugal life can be summarized as “two persons living together, as master and mistress of the house, and father and mother of a 20 winsome, merry little child, with the mutual understanding that there is no love, friendship, or sympathy between them” (Brontë, Anne, 96, vol. 2). In addition to this, his addiction to wine and his temperament worsen until the point that he treats Helen with despise as if she was not a human being. Everything I did was wrong; I was cold-hearted, hard, insensate; my sour, pale face was perfectly repulsive; my voice made him shudder; he knew not how he could live through the winter with me; I should kill him by inches. The domestic cruelty and coldness in which she is imprisoned represents her fears about what the future holds for her only child if he is still under the influence of his evil father. Finally, she makes use of her hidden courage and decides to depart from the gloomy domestic prison who maintains her and her son under the power of a selfish and abominable man.