The political dimension of the poetry written by the Brontës: dramatizing the constructions of class, nation, religion and gender

Abstract

Before one might legitimately enquire what the Brontës had to do with either ‘poetry’ or ‘politics’, one has to consider both the literary context from which they emerged (two generations of highly influential poets of the Romantic school) and the historical moment they were traversing (one of rising social and political turmoil). At the same time that, between 1820 and 1840-50, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë were writing their early poems and novels – under the possible inspiration of names such as Walter Scott, William Wordsworth and Byron, they were not only witnessing appalling economic and social distress in their father’s industrial parish but also watching radical Chartist activism move towards a crisis not far from their Haworth parsonage in Yorkshire. Although the Brontës’ political heritage is basically conservative, well illustrated in the avid readings of Blackwood’s Magazine, whose Tory politics they absorbed when still children, one cannot help wondering at the mixed feelings they must have experienced when they looked back at their radical Romantic predecessors and around themselves at their radical or Whig neighbours. These divided feelings of the Brontës in relation to what was happening around them in social and political terms were to be responsible for the multiple divisions and fractures that are dramatized in their poetic works, namely through the creation of the alternative imaginary worlds of Angria and Gondal. But Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë had, at one point, to move from the more public conflicts of class and nation (whether real or fictionalized) to the more personally private ones of religious faith and gender roles. Simultaneously that these writers and poets were going through successive religious crisis (some of them quite severe), the Church of England was facing serious fracture as well, in the various forms of evangelical revival, dissent and fanaticism – as the several emerging sects testify (Evangelicals, Methodists, Unitarians and Calvinists, amongst others). Although the Brontës appear to have caricatured mercilessly the more extreme or popular forms of Methodism and the whole family repudiated the elitist doctrine of predestination, the truth is that their respective poems are full of references to their harrowing doubts. Thus, their ‘tortured souls’ constitute further evidence of personal division or fracture. Furthermore, in their personal or fictionalized attempts to represent poetically the different male and female roles / constructions of early Victorian society, the Brontës were confronted with their hypothetical identities as women and poets. Notwithstanding their compelling and unifying assertion of feminine imaginative powers, the Brontës often describe themselves as entrapped in between worlds: not only the public and the private, the national and the foreign, but also the real and the imaginary, the body and the soul. And this results the most fundamental, unsolved inner conflict of all.