When I ponder the lives of the Bronte sisters, Emily, Charlotte and Anne, I am literally moved to tears. Emily died of tuberculosis in 1848, aged 30. Anne was felled by the same disease in 1849 at the age of 29. Charlotte managed to live ’til 1855 when, aged 39, she would expire of complications arising from her first pregnancy.
Born by the moors in the village of Thornton in West Yorkshire, the children of a Church of England clergyman, the three sisters showed amazing literary talents given the seeming limitations of their circumstances. Emily’s wonderful Wuthering Heights was published in 1847, the year before her passing.
As Charlotte, the chief source of information on Emily’s life, would later explain, she and her female siblings chose to publish under male pseudonyms in order to avoid what she referred to as the prejudice of their male dominated world. Emily wrote under the name Ellis Bell. Charlotte, whose Jane Eyre appeared in 1847, published as Currer Bell. Yet by the end of 1848 it was public knowledge that the Bells were in fact females. An 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights named Emily as its author.
The last half of the 19th C. in England, the Victorian Era, is generally deemed to be amongst the most puritanically oppressive periods in all of English history. Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff, a creature of the moors clearly representing Man’s animal instincts, appeared to be an implicit repudiation of the superficiality of the Victorian Ethos. Jane Eyre’s title figure was nothing like the ideal Victorian Woman. Indeed the heroines of both works showed utter disdain for the snooty class system by which all good girls were apparently bound. Of course there were condemnations of both books based on their “immorality,” condemnations which became even more vicious when it was discovered they had been written by women. But each continued to be published [i.e., they were not cancelled], often to great acclaim in literary circles. Yes, Wuthering Heights took some time to gain its reputation as a Classic while Jane Eyre was a bestseller almost from the year of its publication. Indeed Charlotte became somewhat of a darling to London’s literati in the years before her untimely death. These facts would suggest there was no “systemic” effort to demonize the Brontes, a truth validated by the existence of a number of 19th C. tributes to their brilliance and humanity.
Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels in 1842 to try and improve their skills in French and German by attending an academy run by one Constantin Heger. The latter, possibly in love with Charlotte, subsequently wrote of the brilliance and courage of the two women. A literary article of 1883 celebrated Emily’s love of all things wild and free, clearly seeing Heathcliff as an expression of that love. A newspaper piece in 1899 thought it was wonderful that she often returned from her solitary walks on the moors cuddling a rabbit or some other innocent creature. While “Queens of literature of the Victorian Era” [1886] was written by a woman [Eva Hope], the fact that it was published at all suggests the leftist notion of Western Civilization as an oppressive patriarchal machine intent on demeaning Women as the mindless victims of their menstrual cycles, is utterly simplistic.
As I have already pointed out, Plato began the assault on female stereotypes 2500 years ago. That the dialectical process defined by Socrates took up until the recent past to actually liberate Women from those stereotypes is a sad result of both the inherent intransigence of all established Norms and the impact of various historical realities far too complex to discuss here. But what I do want to discuss is the fact that while abominations such as the Catholic Church’s Inquisition lasted from the late 12th C. well into the 19th C. in places like Spain, Western Culture was at the same time rife with philosophical speculations and literary works, mostly produced by Men, utterly impervious to the condescending view of Womanhood implicit in such regimes. This is to say that unlike the intolerance evident on the contemporary know-it-all Left, the “patriarchal” West has in fact generally been tolerant of dissenting points of view whose ultimate effect has been the slow but relentless progress of its cultural norms.
Six hundred years ago, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, raunchy, witty and powerful, was clearly meant to question the conventional, stereotypical notion of Women as the subservient chattel of Men. Shakespeare’s plays abound with Females of every level of strength, courage and intelligence imaginable. So also the multitude of novels of the 19th C., those written by trailblazers such as the Brontes as well as those written by their Male contemporaries. Mary Ann Evans chose to publish Adam Bede [1859] under the pseudonym George Eliot, but by the time her wonderful Middlemarch was published [1871], everyone was aware of her gender. As one who wrote his M.A. thesis on James Joyce’s Ulysses, I must also cite Molly Bloom, the dynamic, unfaithful wife of the novel’s central figure, Leo, whose identification with the heroic Ulysses is truly ironic, the pathetic Leo having been abused by pretty much everyone he met on the day chronicled in Joyce’s novel.
My point is that the Left’s fanatical disgust with the “patriarchal” West is truly simplistic. History is far more complex than its neo-Marxist narrative could ever admit. Should a “conservative” point out that the Saudis only granted Women the right to drive a car 5 years ago, he/she will of course be denounced as a “White Supremacist.” Yet the unequivocal truth is that White, Western Culture, however flawed, has historically been eminently more evolved [i.,e, progressive] than any other regime on the planet!