The Novel Shirley by Charlotte Bronte - Thesis Example

Illustrate how social problems are depicted in the novel ‘Shirley’ by Charlotte Bronte. Examine how politics, religion and economy were the main causes of all social problems in the novel. Introduction In the Victorian age the novel was the main form of literature available to readers. Many 19th century novels deal with the problems of society and are sometimes described as realist novels (Taormina 2005). Charles Dickens does this for instance in such works as ‘Oliver Twist’, which deals with how society deals with unmarried mothers and their children under the workhouse system. Despite the fact that the authors deal with fictional characters, the situations in which the characters find themselves often have their counterpart in real life, situations which would be familiar to readers of the time. This type of writing began in the 18th century and, because of the arrival of the industrial revolution, these novels are often set in large cities, usually concentrating, at least in part, upon the poorest in society. The writers, unlike those who produce modern genres such as science fiction and fantasy, dealt with realistic situations and described a world that readers could recognize. The characters were not absolutely perfect, but have characteristics which are a blend of both virtue and vice. There is often an attempt to show how someone’s character can mature and change in positive ways. . The Victorian novel featured a story telling technique which included very full descriptions, multi plotting, and often dealt with social issues, and because ,as ‘Shirley ‘was , they were often published in several parts, often there are several sub climaxes. Charlotte Brontë was one of a clerical family of five sisters and a brother whose mother died when Charlotte was only 5 years old in 1821. The two eldest sisters died young, and she was the oldest of the surviving children. The three remaining sisters were creative writers from an early age. When older Charlotte became first a teacher, and later a governess. She travelled to Belgium, together with her sister Emily, to study. Her first published work was ’Jane Eyre’ subtitled as an autobiography in that it is written with Jane as its narrator. This was published in 1847. The lesser known ‘Shirley ‘ appeared two years later in 1849 according to Drabble, ( page 136, 1996). This was at the end of a period known as ‘The Hungry Forties’ according to Diniejko ( 2010), a time of great public unrest in both cities and in more rural areas. Unlike her near contemporary Jane Austen , ( 1775-1817) who managed to live through the French Revolution, the Peninsular Wars and the Luddite Revolt without ever making even the smallest reference to these in her novels, Charlotte engages strongly with the issues affecting wider British society in this novel. In her earlier, perhaps better known work ‘Jane Eyre’ she does make some mention of the need for women to have profitable and satisfying careers, but that is all. Such ideas as political unrest are not described. Shirley Thesis. The Brontë sisters had quite a wide experience of real life, including a knowledge of industrial unrest and other social problems – either from their own knowledge or from the newspapers and other information available to them. This is reflected in this novel. Discussion Bronte is interested in many different problems she sees in English life and she manages to weave the troubled industrial background theme with the more private themes of love, religious faith and marriage, as well as the troubled fate a woman who cannot find success either in marriage or in satisfying work. Because of such varied themes the work has been described as being a disjointed novel’.( Lewes as cited by Stedman, , page 78, 2002). Drabble ( page 910, 1996) quotes Charlotte as having said that she intended this, the most social of her novels, to be ‘as unromantic as Monday mornings.’ She published it under the male name of ‘Currer Bell’, believing this would make it more likely to be published. Charlotte starts her story by assuring the reader that this book won't be a romance:- If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning. (Brontë, Chapter 1 , paragraph 2, 1849) Yet, despite this introduction, and its setting among horrors of the Luddite revolt of the early 19th century, and the fact that it was written about the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, romance is certainly threaded through the whole work, in particular the ideas around realizing someone you love is slowly turning away from you, and how this can be dealt with. This one-sided love was something Charlotte knew from her own experience with her former teacher in Belgium. Charlotte’s experience in Belgium led to her mill owner being described as half Belgium/half English. Despite the industrial difficulties the owner insisted upon installing machinery which cut down on the amount of labor required, despite the reactions of workers. First of all there is an attempt to actually destroy the mill and later, even to kill the owner. This character would have been to some extent perhaps based upon Constantin Heger, a Belgian teacher to whom she is known to have written a number of emotional letters revealing her love for this married man. (The Brontës in Brussels, undated). Although one heroine gives the book its title, there are in fact two contrasting women involved. A theme throughout the novel is one close to Charlotte’s heart- that of finding suitable occupations for women who only seemed to have the choice of marriage or spinsterhood, living dependent upon others. Ingham in 1996 (as quoted by Diniejko, 1996) sees the novel as dealing with strong feminist issues. The ‘Shirley’ of the title is depicted as having choices simply because she was a woman of independent means. Diniejko,( 2010) describes the novel as being a ‘state of England ‘ novel. The quiet heroine of this story, Caroline Helstone’ is trapped in a young woman’s oppressive and restrictive Yorkshire rectory life, a situation Charlotte knew well.. She represents a common type of Victorian woman being shy, bowing to authority and repressed. It is possible the Charlotte originally planned to kill Caroline Helstone off at some stage in the story, but while Shirley was being written tragedy struck the Brontë family with the death of first Bramwell, followed by Emily and then Anne. Anne may be the person on whom the character of Caroline was based ( Darrow 1997) and so Charlotte may have changed her story in order to avoid killing off her sister’s alter-ego. The other main female figure, Shirley Keelder, is someone whose wealth means that she can make her own rules about her behavior, perhaps she represents the person Charlotte would like to be. As well as being clever Shirley is lively, free to do exactly what she wants, and very, very wealthy. The name ‘Shirley‘ was considered to be a male name at the time of writing, as it still is on occasions, as in wrestler and actor Shirley Crabrtree, usually known as Big Daddy. Her father had intended to give the name to his son if he had one. ( Shirley, Chapter 11). So we have Shirley Keelder having in abundance some of the freedoms she might have had if she were a male. As a direct result of this novel the name became popular as a girl’s name. Both female heroines are in love with Moore, yet manage to remain friends despite this. Charlotte of course first sent her work to a publisher under a male name, feeling that it would be rejected without such a device. Men are seen in this book as being capable of doing almost anything , whereas women had to depend upon their males and be put upon by them , as in the description of the curates and their landladies in chapter 1.Giving her protagonist a ‘male’ name enables Charlotte to give her, despite her female charms, some of the characteristic associated at the time with richer men - that is the ability to make her own decisions. Caroline is a very different personality, much less forceful than Shirley ,and her love for Robert almost kills her. Until she meets up with the very different Shirley, she has no true friends. Moore is injured when defending his property and Caroline has a long illness. As they recover it becomes clear that Robert’s brother Louis, at one time tutor to Shirley, is in love with the heiress, and that Caroline and Robert are also in love despite his earlier actions in chasing after Shirley. Although he is in love with someone else, Robert Moore, the mill owner in Charlotte’s narrative, when he found himself in financial difficulties due to events beyond his control, , tried to marry Shirley, an heiress whose money he needed, and wanted, to get him out of his financial difficulties. There are however other important themes. ‘Shirley ‘ is set in the Yorkshire that Charlotte knew so well, but is placed towards the end of the Napoleonic wars which had persisted for 12 years from 1803 – 1815, so just before Charlotte was born. The Wars came out of the aftermath of the French Revolution (1789 – 1799). English had its own attempt at revolution in the actions of the Luddites who appear in the novels. The riots developed during the war because Britain almost totally stopped exporting wool as they could not easily trade with mainland Europe, and so jobs were lost. Its style is far removed from the first person narration of her earlier successful novel ‘Jane Eyre.’, but has instead a narrator set at one remove form the action described. Details of the industrial upheaval not far from away her Yorkshire home were to be found in local newspaper reports as in a Leeds newspaper report ( 9th April 1812) of an attack by ‘the army of General Ludd’ upon Rawfolds Mill and the people guarding it on behalf of mill owner Mr Cartwright.’ The author blends this question about women with ideas such the fear that England was becoming serious split into two nations i.e. rich and poor. Early in 1812, Luddism spread north from Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire into Yorkshire, where croppers, a highly skilled group of finishers in the textile trade, realized that the newly developed shearing frame would almost certainly put them out of work. Parliament passed the Frame Breaking Act in 1812 which made the group’s machine smashing activities a capital crime. But these people felt that this was the only way in which they could protect themselves with trade unions, the successors of the medieval trade guilds, being illegal until the mid19th century. Brontë seems to have sympathized with workers who are mainly concerned with the loss of employment. They were not destroying the machines because of their ignorance and reluctance to accept change, but because they believe that mill owners would constantly reduce the number of workers, replacing the majority of workers, even highly skilled ones, with labor-saving machinery. The following passage, in Yorkshire dialect, shows how clearly Bronte understood the position of these working men ( Bronte, 1849, page 137) .:- “I’ve not much faith I’ Moses Barraclough,” said he; “and I would speak a word to you myseln, Mr. Moore. It’s out o’ no ill-will that I’m here, for my part; it’s just to mak’ a effort to get things straightened, for they’re sorely acrooked. Ye see we’re ill off, — varry ill off: wer families is poor and pined. We’re thrawn out o‘ work wi’ these frames: we can get nought to do: we can earn nought. What is to be done? Mun we say, wisht! and lig us down and dee? Nay: I’ve no grand words at my tongue’s end, Mr. Moore, but I feel that it wad be a low principle for a reasonable man to starve to death like a dumb cratur’: — I will n’t do’t. I’m not for shedding blood: I’d neither kill a man nor hurt a man; and I’m not for pulling down mills and breaking machines: for, as ye say, that way o” going on ’ll niver stop invention; but I’ll talk, — I’ll mak’ as big a din as ever I can. Invention may be all right, but I know it isn’t right for poor folks to starve. Them that governs mun find a way to help us: they mun mak’ fresh orderations. Ye’ll say that’s hard to do: — so mich louder mun we shout out then, for so mich slacker will t’ Parliament-men be to set on to a tough job. Bodenheimer, (1991, cited by Diniejko, 1996) saw Bronte as promoting the idea of paternalism, or protectiveness, as a possible solution to the ills of her society, an idea which would almost always be rejected in modern times.. It was a case of acceptance being better than revolution. She perhaps saw the possibility of newly industrialized society as becoming a big ordered family with good and generous employers co-existing alongside dependent employees. This was a revival of earlier master-servant relationships, something which has more or less disappeared today, but Charlotte was after all a woman of her time, a Christian with patriarchal ideas as part of her religious upbringing, The paternalistic ideal was positive relationships based upon humane ideas, in the same way that Christianity of the time taught a paternalistic faith with God ruling over all, but for the benefit of his creation. This was an age when churches rang to the words of hymns such as ‘All things bright and beautiful’ (Mrs C.F. Alexander, 1848) – the original third verse stated that : The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate. This is a reflection of what many others were thinking, as in a report of Luddite rioting near Leeds, ( April 1812) where the writer says :- We have of late frequently deemed it our duty, from the regard we feel to the laboring classes, and to the laws of our country, to warn those that are engaged in those violent proceedings of the fatal consequences that await them in the unequal contest which they are now waging with the civil and military power of the country Brontë’s themes do not seem very relevant to modern life and ideas. Not all twenty first century readers will have much knowledge of the Napoleonic Wars and their negative influence they had on British life. Because of this they might find it hard to relate to heroines such as Caroline, and they are unfamiliar with young people having long and serious, possibly fatal, illnesses. We now have the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’. Women of course still have difficulties, but at least they now have a voice, and for the majority there is the possibility of useful work. There is great unemployment in the early 21st century, but it isn’t down to just one cause, and there is provision for at least minimal financial support as well as help in finding work and retraining and education is universally available. The problems of women and those of industry and workers had a common cause. The workers needed a wage, the owners needed to make a profit, and keeping women in a secondary position meant that men usually had control of any money – it all comes down to economics taking priority over other aspects such as justice and human rights. The relatively modern equivalent of the coming of the shearing frames occurred when the newspaper industry moved from ink and hand created blocks of news to digital production, methods requiring far fewer staff, with Reuter’s being the last important news source to leave Fleet Street in 2005 ( Hagerty, 2005). The newspaper production staff resented what happened, but there was the welfare state to back them up , however inadequately, and also the possibility of retraining in new roles or even new industries. Modern day readers would find it difficult perhaps to relate to people who still wanted things to go on as they did before the Industrial Revolution, any more than they can really empathize with Caroline, who doesn’t seem able to stand up to the social forces around her. Charlotte on the other hand seems to have been well able to stand up for herself and put forward her ideas. As a middle class young woman she would have been expected to side with the mill owners, but it is clear she stands up for the underdog. She did however make some concession by ignoring the Chartist movement as a topic, and so avoiding upsetting her father. Instead her story is set in time back just a few years to the Luddite riots. To deal with issues that were actually taking place could have led to clashes in the family, and also to the embarrassment of her clergyman father who would have mixed in society with the middle class employers. Religion and personal faith is yet another strand in this novel as in the implied atheistic beliefs of Robert Moore. Shirley herself expresses the point that she does not follow conventional Christian thinking patterns of the time :- . . I am sick at heart with all this weak trash: I will bear no more. Your thoughts are not my thoughts, your aims are not my aims, your gods are not my gods. We do not view things in the same light; we do not measure them by the same standard; we hardly speak in the same tongue. ( chapter 31) She is speaking to her relative Mr Sympson, who is concerned by her behavior: and its effect upon the family- ‘My family respectability shall not be compromised.’.( Chapter 31). Sympson accuses her of being an atheist and she responds vehemently, describing the awful view she has of his way of thinking:- 'Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best - making marriages…..: there is treachery - family treachery: there is vice - deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: The links between church i.e. the established Anglican church, and state are also explored, with its clergy caught up in between workers and gentry – they themselves not belonging to either group. In chapter 1 we have a full description of several Anglican clerics and in this Charlotte reveals something of what she sees as the uselessness of much that was considered to be good Anglicism:- It is not religion - the thing is never named amongst them; theology they may discuss occasionally, but piety - never. Despite the subject matter, and the attempt to explain the point of view of the rioters, Charlotte Brontë remained throughout someone with middle class values. Her main characters are middle class rather than working people. She dealt mainly with the problem of individuals adjusting to changes in society, and seemed to believe that human nature is essentially good, and that nay lapses are simply errors of judgment which can be corrected over time as a person matures. Conclusion It is clear that Charlotte was able to obtain all the information she required in order to write her social novel, which took her only two years despite all the family difficulties going on around her. As her writing in dialect also shows, she was in close contact with local working class people. The Brontë parsonage may have seemed to be a totally middle class area, but it was surrounded by working class people and not far from the ‘dark satanic mills’ (Blake 1808) of industrial Yorkshire. The novel has a number of different plot strands which are at times only loosely drawn together. It can be read as a romantic tale, or as a comment upon society, especially on the subject of women’s' lives, or as a historical description of the Luddite riots in the Yorkshire textile industry. This is because Charlotte was interested in all three areas. She had had a romance of sorts, however one sided. She was a woman controlled by the norms and values of her strongly patriarchal society, and she was living through the industrial revolution with all the difficulties it brought with it. She was part of all three despite being a middle class spinster living what could have seemed to be a life apart. The patriarchal religious ideas affected the whole of society, in particular the way the rich controlled their inferiors, because they genuinely believed that God had placed them in their particular social situation. Disraeli’s novel ‘Sybil’ discussed this idea of a divide between rich and poor.as being fixed. Published in 1842, his book is subtitled ‘The Two Nations.’ This idea in turn affected the country’s economic and political life. The owners had a responsibility to their workers, but only as long as they were their workers. There was a prevailing idea of there being ‘deserving poor’, that is those who were poor through no fault of their own. The rebels however were not seen as belonging to this group, despite the fact that it was not their fault that their jobs were disappearing and they felt themselves having no choice except violence. But as Charlotte says , in the words of the Luddite ( chapter 1) “Them that governs mun find a way to help us: they mun mak’ fresh orderations.” So , despite the accusations of too many themes not closely enough linked, this novel has a lot to teach its readers about history, politics, social history, feminist issues and even how to deal with unrequited love. This diversity does not however make it an easy read. References Alexander, Mrs C.F., All Things Bright and Beautiful, 1848, 13th August 2012 http://www.hymns.me.uk/all-things-bright-and-beautiful-hymn.htm, Blake, William., Jerusalem, 1808 Bodenheimer, Rosemarie, The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991 Brontë Charlotte, Shirley, 1849, republished by Oxford University Press, 1998 Darrow, Kathy, Nineteenth Century Literary Criticism, Andover, Gale Cengage, 1997 Diniejko, Andrzej,., Shirley as a Condition-of England- novel, Victorian Web, 2010, 13th August 2012 ,http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/bronte/cbronte/diniejko.html, Disraeli, Benjamin , Sybil,1842 republished Oxford, Oxford University Press 1998 Drabble, Margaret., The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford. 1996 Hagerty, Bill., Farewell Fleet Street, BBC News , 14th June 2005, 13th August 2012 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4091172.stm, Ingham, Patricia., The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel,.London, Routledge 1996 Luddite Attack on Rawfolds Mill, Leeds Newspaper , 9th April 1812, 13th August 2012 http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~maureenmitchell/luddites/luddites_william_cartwright_rawfolds_mill.htm, Shirley Crabtree, Obituary, , This is, 2nd December 1997, 13th August 2012 http://www.thisisannouncements.co.uk/5849072, Stedman, Gesa., Stemming the Torrent: Expressions and Control in the Victorian Discourses on Emotion, Farnham, Ashgate 2002 The Brontës in Brussels, undated, 14th August 2012 http://thebrusselsbrontegroup.org/the%20bront%EBs%20in%20brussels.html, Taormina, Anna, The Nineteenth Century Novel, 2005, 15th August 2012 http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/novels/history/19thcent.htm, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The United Nations, 1948, 14th August 2012http://www.ohchr.org/en/udhr/pages/introduction.aspx, Read More