5 - Literalization in the novels of Charlotte Brontë

Summary

One of the most striking differences between the work of Emily Brontë and that of her sister Charlotte is found in their representations of childhood. For Emily, the natural child is “half-savage and hardy and free,” rambling on the moors, breathing the dry, salubrious air of the high ground. For Charlotte, the child is plagued by privation and ill health, rarely escaping the unhealthy miasmas of symbolic prisons like Lowood. In part, this can be explained by the two girls' differing experiences at the Cowan Bridge School for Clergymen's Daughters, the institution that inspired Lowood. The healthy young Emily was the “pet” of the school and probably too young to be aware of the institutional neglect that hastened their elder sister Maria's death. But this experience marked Charlotte so completely as to mar forever her memories of childhood, despite her appreciation of its imaginative intensity and personal attachments. One might observe that if Wuthering Heights is a novel of regression, Charlotte Brontë's novels are about the struggle toward maturation. Charlotte's “Farewell to Angria” closes her apprenticeship to childhood romance and opens arguably one of the most important chapters in the development of the bildungsroman for the British tradition.

Perhaps because of her early acquaintance with privation and disease, Charlotte demonstrated less faith in the kind of natural health promoted by domestic medical texts, and exhibited less aversion to doctors and their interventions, than did Emily.