The Reluctant Ecumenist: Nobody Resents or Resembles Nuns More than A Charlotte Brontë Heroine

Last chance for the May subscription sale, if you’d like to try it:

Previously in Brontë coverage:

Every time this biographer of the Brontë family calls them unemployable: “Despite Charlotte’s derision, Branwell had at least secured a job.”

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Now, Voyager, dir. Irving Rapper: A determined, principled woman convinces her lover to stop propositioning her and make her his daughter’s governess

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë: A determined, principled governess convinces her employee to stop propositioning her by marrying him

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Every time a Brontë protagonist announces she wishes she were a man: “I believe if you had been a boy, Lucy, instead of a girl—my mother’s god-son instead of her god-daughter, we should have been good friends: our opinions would have melted into each other.”

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Yet Even More Brontë Siblings: SKIMSHINT CRANNABELL BRONTË, who ate the first manuscript of Shirley, and afterwards retreated to a sea-cave.

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Who Said It: Jane From Jane Eyre, or the Dog From The Call of the Wild? “While Jane Eyre and The Call of the Wild don’t perfectly map onto one another at the level of plot, they are, broadly speaking, both concerned with the emotional development of a mistreated and easily-riled orphan in search of a passionately codependent relationship. There is nothing Jane Eyre feels, broadly speaking, that a savagely beautiful husky dog would not also experience under similar circumstances; the interiority of the furry sub is the novel form.”

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Hannibal vs. Jane Eyre: Stand-off at the Organ of Veneration (also part II):

ZOE: so you are at the part where Will thinks he has been betrayed most dreadfully by the only man he trusted to tell him what a clock looked like?

then he is just about to learn that this is in fact Hannibal carrying out his idea of a sacred trust

DANNY: Yes! It's like when Jane hands over her drawings of drowning elves for inspection

and Rochester says, basically, “This is…fine. Thomas Kinkade fine. You're good at making eyes look unhappy.”

I like the curmudgeonly religious aspect of Charlotte Brontë best. Her writing on universal salvation is stirring and well-beloved for good reason, in particular Helen Burns’ “creed [which] extends hope to all and makes Eternity a rest” rather than “a terror and abyss.” But my favorite parts in all her novels are the sudden potshots she takes at other Christian denominations.

Most pointed and particular is her stringent focus on the figure of the nun: every Brontë heroine is 9/10ths a nun already, except for the fact that she passionately loves a man with all the fury and intensity that an old Chihuaua feels for a beat-up squeaky toy. She wants one or two friends, no more, she wants to wear simple and severe clothing, to read, to pray, to eschew vanity, to maybe look at a mountain from time to time, and to be very, very good.

During one of their first meetings, Mr. Rochester quizzes Jane on her history, when she confesses she’s never lived anywhere or done anything or talked to more than fifteen people, and concludes she is mostly a nun already:

“Miss Eyre, have you ever lived in a town?”

“No, sir.”

“Have you seen much society?”

“None but the pupils and teachers of Lowood, and now the inmates of Thornfield.”

“Have you read much?”

“Only such books as came in my way; and they have not been numerous or very learned.”

“You have lived the life of a nun: no doubt you are well drilled in religious forms.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Poor and obscure, small and plain:” The next-most-frequent point of comparison is the Society of Friends; just as she is almost but crucially not quite a nun, Jane is almost a Quaker, specifically a “plain, Quakerish governess.”

“I rose; I dressed myself with care: obliged to be plain—for I had no article of attire that was not made with extreme simplicity—I was still by nature solicitous to be neat.”

If Jane would not mind being beautiful, she at least considers an honest commitment to plain, sober neatness the next best thing. She is happiest when describing her appearance as resembling that of a slightly religious dove, but she lives in fear of commiting an act of fanciness:

“However, when I had brushed my hair very smooth, and put on my black frock—which, Quakerlike as it was, at least had the merit of fitting to a nicety—and adjusted my clean white tucker, I thought I should do respectably enough.”

When as an adult she becomes reacquainted with her cousins Eliza and Georgiana, it’s as two beautiful examples of what straying too far in either direction of the Church of England will do to ruin a person’s character and appearance:

Two young ladies appeared before me; one very tall, almost as tall as Miss Ingram—very thin too, with a sallow face and severe mien. There was something ascetic in her look, which was augmented by the extreme plainness of a straight-skirted, black, stuff dress, a starched linen collar, hair combed away from the temples, and the nun-like ornament of a string of ebony beads and a crucifix. This I felt sure was Eliza, though I could trace little resemblance to her former self in that elongated and colourless visage.

Never mind that Jane herself is always brushing her hair back from her temples:

“I brushed Adèle’s hair and made her neat, and having ascertained that I was myself in my usual Quaker trim, where there was nothing to retouch—all being too close and plain, braided locks included, to admit of disarrangement—we descended.”

Or that Rochester constantly refers to her as severe, plain, a short glass of unsweetened ice tea, a horsehair sofa, et cetera. Eliza is too severe, too plain, too nunnish, and Jane is the happy medium between Eliza’s astringent, joyless piety and Georgiana’s fatuous indolence.

It was a wet and windy afternoon: Georgiana had fallen asleep on the sofa over the perusal of a novel; Eliza was gone to attend a saint’s-day service at the new church—for in matters of religion she was a rigid formalist: no weather ever prevented the punctual discharge of what she considered her devotional duties; fair or foul, she went to church thrice every Sunday, and as often on week-days as there were prayers.

They’re a real Goofus and Gallant, the pair of them. You’re not supposed to go to church three times on Sunday, but neither should you pass out on the sofa at 2pm. You can have a little high church if you want incense and bells, but there’s such a thing as carrying it to far. Get off the couch, by all means, but if you reach Rome, you’ve gone too far and need to turn around.

Later in the novel, during her sojourn with the Rivers, Diana begs Jane not to consider going to India with St. John, saying,

“You are much too pretty, as well as too good, to be grilled alive in Calcutta.”

St. John represents a sort of in-person ersatz Catholic flirtation for Jane, I think; he offers a mystical marriage, “good and great, but severe; and for me, cold as an iceberg,” which she rejects firmly, although it takes a great deal of mental and spiritual energy to overcome her initial hypnotized response. She wants to say no to St. John almost right away, but fears she won’t be able to.

There’s a real echo between the fear of being “grilled alive” if she goes with him and her dismissive response to Eliza’s decision to become a real-deal nun:

One morning she told me I was at liberty. “And,” she added, “I am obliged to you for your valuable services and discreet conduct! There is some difference between living with such an one as you and with Georgiana: you perform your own part in life and burden no one. To-morrow,” she continued, “I set out for the Continent. I shall take up my abode in a religious house near Lisle—a nunnery you would call it; there I shall be quiet and unmolested. I shall devote myself for a time to the examination of the Roman Catholic dogmas, and to a careful study of the workings of their system: if I find it to be, as I half suspect it is, the one best calculated to ensure the doing of all things decently and in order, I shall embrace the tenets of Rome and probably take the veil.”

I neither expressed surprise at this resolution nor attempted to dissuade her from it. “The vocation will fit you to a hair,” I thought: “much good may it do you!”

When we parted, she said: “Good-bye, cousin Jane Eyre; I wish you well: you have some sense.”

I then returned: “You are not without sense, cousin Eliza; but what you have, I suppose, in another year will be walled up alive in a French convent. However, it is not my business, and so it suits you, I don’t much care.”

Being like a nun, or like a missionary, or like a Quaker, is perfectly all right, but one should never commit the error of going all the way. Better to stay in England, and be the most normal eccentric on the block.

The “nuns are good”/“nuns are bad” split is even stronger in Villette, where everyone in Lucy Snowe’s life considers her as good as a nun already, and she herself is haunted by the apparition of one:

There went a tradition that Madame Beck’s house had in old days been a convent. That in years gone by—how long gone by I cannot tell, but I think some centuries—before the city had over-spread this quarter, and when it was tilled ground and avenue, and such deep and leafy seclusion as ought to embosom a religious house—that something had happened on this site which, rousing fear and inflicting horror, had left to the place the inheritance of a ghost-story.

A vague tale went of a black and white nun, sometimes, on some night or nights of the year, seen in some part of this vicinage… The legend went, unconfirmed and unaccredited, but still propagated, that this was the portal of a vault, imprisoning deep beneath that ground, on whose surface grass grew and flowers bloomed, the bones of a girl whom a monkish conclave of the drear middle ages had here buried alive for some sin against her vow.

Buried alive, grilled alive, walled alive; if “I thought quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem as an adult” was a popular riff in the 2010s, the same was true for Brontë heroines and immurement in the 19th century.

Nuns are bad:

Say what you will, reader—tell me I was nervous or mad; affirm that I was unsettled by the excitement of that letter; declare that I dreamed; this I vow—I saw there—in that room—on that night—an image like—a NUN. I cried out; I sickened. Had the shape approached me I might have swooned. It receded: I made for the door. How I descended all the stairs I know not.

Nuns are good:

Well, on the evening in question, we were sitting silent as nuns in a “retreat,” the pupils studying, the teachers working.

Nuns are bad, and they have a legacy to leave you:

The long nun proved a long bolster dressed in a long black stole, and artfully invested with a white veil. The garments in very truth, strange as it may seem, were genuine nun’s garments, and by some hand they had been disposed with a view to illusion. Whence came these vestments? Who contrived this artifice? These questions still remained. To the head-bandage was pinned a slip of paper: it bore in pencil these mocking words—

“The nun of the attic bequeaths to Lucy Snowe her wardrobe. She will be seen in the Rue Fossette no more.”

Nuns are Methodists (“anyone who isn’t the exact same sort of Anglican as me is a religious nut job”):

And again, when of moonlight nights, on waking, I beheld [Paulina’s] figure, white and conspicuous in its night-dress, kneeling upright in bed, and praying like some Catholic or Methodist enthusiast—some precocious fanatic or untimely saint—I scarcely know what thoughts I had; but they ran risk of being hardly more rational and healthy than that child’s mind must have been.

If anything, Charlotte Brontë talks about other Protestant denominations the way transphobes talk about being a tomboy — “Quakers are all right, as long as you don’t take it too far”:

The other lady passenger, with the gentleman-companion, was quite a girl, pretty and fair: her simple print dress, untrimmed straw-bonnet and large shawl, gracefully worn, formed a costume plain to quakerism: yet, for her, becoming enough.

Catholics are Methodists, again, and also children:

I lent to [the Catholic tract] my ear very willingly, for, small as it was, it possessed its own spell, and bound my attention at once. It preached Romanism; it persuaded to conversion. The voice of that sly little book was a honeyed voice; its accents were all unction and balm. Here roared no utterance of Rome’s thunders, no blasting of the breath of her displeasure. The Protestant was to turn Papist, not so much in fear of the heretic’s hell, as on account of the comfort, the indulgence, the tenderness Holy Church offered…

The little book amused, and did not painfully displease me. It was a canting, sentimental, shallow little book, yet something about it cheered my gloom and made me smile; I was amused with the gambols of this unlicked wolf-cub muffled in the fleece, and mimicking the bleat of a guileless lamb. Portions of it reminded me of certain Wesleyan Methodist tracts I had once read when a child; they were flavoured with about the same seasoning of excitation to fanaticism. He that had written it was no bad man, and while perpetually betraying the trained cunning—the cloven hoof of his system—I should pause before accusing himself of insincerity. His judgment, however, wanted surgical props; it was rickety.

Catholics are terrific, and I can’t wait to marry one:

And was I grateful? God knows! I believe that scarce a living being so remembered, so sustained, dealt with in kind so constant, honourable and noble, could be otherwise than grateful to the death.

Adherent to his own religion (in him was not the stuff of which is made the facile apostate), he freely left me my pure faith. He did not tease nor tempt. He said:—

“Remain a Protestant. My little English Puritan, I love Protestantism in you. I own its severe charm. There is something in its ritual I cannot receive myself, but it is the sole creed for ‘Lucy.’”

All Rome could not put into him bigotry, nor the Propaganda itself make him a real Jesuit. He was born honest, and not false—artless, and not cunning—a freeman, and not a slave. His tenderness had rendered him ductile in a priest’s hands, his affection, his devotedness, his sincere pious enthusiasm blinded his kind eyes sometimes, made him abandon justice to himself to do the work of craft, and serve the ends of selfishness; but these are faults so rare to find, so costly to their owner to indulge, we scarce know whether they will not one day be reckoned amongst the jewels.

The Professor, being shorter, has fewer references to nuns, but still manages to work in a few half-admiring potshots.

Nuns are bad:

I had thought to see a tall, meagre, yellow, conventual image in black, with a close white cap, bandaged under the chin like a nun’s head-gear.

But nuns are also very good, and beautiful like angels:

And now the lids sank and the heads reappeared; I had marked three, the whisperers, and I did not scruple to take a very steady look at them as they emerged from their temporary eclipse. It is astonishing what ease and courage their little phrases of flippancy had given me; the idea by which I had been awed was that the youthful beings before me, with their dark nun-like robes and softly braided hair, were a kind of half-angels.

Nuns. Nuns! The girls I love best all want to be nuns!

Once again Charlotte Brontë has prefigured the moral panic about “butch flight,” only where “the Catholic Church” takes the place of “medical transition”:

No smile, no trace of pleasure or satisfaction appeared in Sylvie’s nun-like and passive face as she heard her name read first. I always felt saddened by the sight of that poor girl’s absolute quiescence on all occasions, and it was my custom to look at her, to address her, as seldom as possible; her extreme docility, her assiduous perseverance, would have recommended her warmly to my good opinion; her modesty, her intelligence, would have induced me to feel most kindly—most affectionately towards her, notwithstanding the almost ghastly plainness of her features, the disproportion of her form, the corpse-like lack of animation in her countenance, had I not been aware that every friendly word, every kindly action, would be reported by her to her confessor, and by him misinterpreted and poisoned.

Once I laid my hand on her head, in token of approbation; I thought Sylvie was going to smile, her dim eye almost kindled; but, presently, she shrank from me; I was a man and a heretic; she, poor child! a destined nun and devoted Catholic: thus a four-fold wall of separation divided her mind from mine.

Incidentally, neither Catholics nor Methodists come up at all in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and of course whatever was going on with Emily Brontë, nuns never entered into her mind for a second of it.

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