The Brontë Sisters
By Madeline Grant | June 22, 2024 | The Telegraph
Another day, another example of our cultural heritage in the hands of people who hate it; or at least can’t bring themselves to love it as it is. The Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, the childhood home and centre of study and interest in the Bronte sisters, has produced various baffling LGBT-themed resources as part of its series “Pride at the Parsonage: The Brontes and Gender Identity”.
I should be clear; I am not against gay historical figures having that side of their personalities and contributions explored. You can imagine it being quite a big deal, say, for the estate of Oscar Wilde. But trying to shoehorn 21st-century concepts of the “queer” into the lives and works of three vicar’s daughters from the mid-19th century, isn’t just deranged but faintly insulting.
One justification for this fantasy alternate universe appears to be that the Brontes used male pseudonyms to publish their work. Yet they adopted these not for fun, or to achieve the “queering” of gender boundaries, but out of cold necessity. (In Charlotte Bronte’s case, nothing screams “gender-queer” like being forced to publish under a man’s name, before dying from complications in the early stages of pregnancy.)
To most people, claiming something that was the product of repression as a choice made as part of some greater struggle sounds tangibly insane. However, it gives an insight into the mindset of many custodians of our cultural treasures. Theirs is a moral world where it is impossible to say that something is “good” for its own sake, because that would imply the existence of categories of objective “goodness”, or, shock horror, a morality different to their own. Instead, culture must always be repurposed to fit the prevailing ideology.
Similar attempts have been made to recast Shakespeare as a proto-gender pioneer due to the ubiquity of male actors playing female parts in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres; as if this were a creative choice by the playwright, rather than it simply being illegal for women to act on stage professionally until the Restoration.
The “Reclaim Her Name” project recently published a number of George Eliot’s novels under her birth-name, Mary Ann Evans. However, George Eliot chose her adopted name carefully, and delighted in it; George being the Christian name of her beloved partner GH Lewes, and Eliot “a good mouth-filling, easily-pronounced word”. In her essay Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, Eliot is scathing about the mania for women’s romance fiction during the era. Perhaps she wouldn’t have wanted her name to be “reclaimed” for the #Girlboss era?
Indeed, Charlotte Bronte’s ideas about equality come from a very particular place; one which has little to do with the secular egalitarianism of today. They are rooted in explicitly Christian understandings of souls being equal under God. Jane Eyre’s glorious words to Mr Rochester (which still bring a tear to my eye 20 years after I first read them) make this clear. “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you– and full as much heart!” You might have thought that those working at Haworth Parsonage (clue in name) would have some appreciation for this. Apparently not.
Truly getting to grips with literature of the past involves entering a thought-world different from our own, doing serious legwork with things like attitudes to death, faith and truth. The easy option is simply to impute contemporary ideologies onto these texts, rather than spending hours poring over the King James Bible in an effort to understand their hinterland.
suspect that one reason for the soaraway success of the podcast series The Rest is History is that it doesn’t view the past as a stick with which to beat the present – but as its own place, whose stories are valid and interesting. People who don’t feel comfortable inhabiting the past, or at least engaging with it on its own terms, are entitled to their opinion. But perhaps they shouldn’t be handed the keys to the museum.