Interpreting Shirley.

In 06-05-2009 post, sweetsunray writes:
“Something very peculiar occurs: our narrator LIES.
She starts by assuring the reader it 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", but contrary to the authors injunction, a very emotional reading of Shirley.
A refreshing response as opposed to the common blasé opinion. And in a subsequent post she adds :”Clearly though, CB created an unreliable narrator to us. It is curious to how she uses several times different narrator means in one story: omniscient 3rd person, to omniscient 1st person, over to subjective diary, and eventually revealing the omniscient 3rd person being someone anonymous who could never be omniscient, unless the person at the end is CB herself.”
Not only is sweetsunray's reading alive, it is incisive of Charlotte's attempt at a novel different from its predecessor, Jane Eyre, but it provokes one to research a critique of Shirley from a literary perspective. I'll use Gender and Generic Mixing in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley (1) by Gisel Argyle, as an interesting example, as it reflects some of the ideas touched on by sweetsunray's reading. All quotes in italic, are from the Argyle's monograph.

Crucially Argyle's study shifts the focus from examining Shirley as a novel in isolation, to a study of the novels in sequence: Jane Eyre 1847, Shirley 1849 and Villette 1853. Expanding the critique, she examines the possible stylistic influence of Emily's Wuthering Heights 1847, upon the composition of Shirley. Charlotte edited the manuscript for the second edition of Wuthering Heights and the question is to what extent did Emily's stylistic departure from conventional narrative influenced Charlotte's departure from the protagonist narrator form of Jane Eyre. Argyle quotes Charlotte, 'The successor to Jane Eyre was to be "'more subdued,'" as the author consented in her letter to G. H. Lewes, in 1848; (26) in Emily's Wuthering Heights (1847), Charlotte had available a model for both preserving a scandalous meaning and subduing its immediate effect. Charlotte Bronte's preface to the second edition of Wuthering Heights, in 1850, alludes to such a sense when she offsets the "'horror of a great darkness'" with Nelly Dean's sunny qualities, although her stress is on Nelly as a character rather than narrator. (27) Thus, both her own Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights could serve her as well as her readers as points of departure, as horizons of expectations in a literary series, which guide the reading of Shirley for the writing author and the reader.

A partial answer is offered by 'that after the focus on only one person in The Professor and Jane Eyre, Bronte turned in Shirley to the community and to experience in social and political terms, which are represented through a "disembodied" mystifying third-person narrator.' In conjunction with the thematically moral question, ' In Shirley Bronte engages the following questions, left unasked by Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre journeys through the world, tests herself against it, and retires at Ferndean, a wise and happy wife; what would it mean for a woman to remain in the world? Jane as narrator defies public opinion--"Anybody may blame me who likes"; what would it mean for a narrator to represent public opinion? Instead of a single, though changeable, even capricious omniscient narrator', we begin to sense the thematic convolutions in Shirley.
Argile notes that 'Shirley is commonly noted as a "detour," .....The reason for this status is, of course, Bronte's departure from the use of a protagonist-narrator in favor of a third-person narrator for Shirley.' As noted by sweetsunray's “she uses several times different narrator means in one story: ....”, Argyle's ' we have here in fact three distinct narrators, two of whom represent social and historical law respectively, whereas the third represents psychological law and is therefore closest to the narrative voice in Jane Eyre.'

'The material of Shirley is presented in three distinct although not always separate generic modes, which are, in order of appearance, the comedy of manners, the historical romance, and the psychological romance.' Shirley remains an aesthetic work, not a political tract, thus the rationalization -'The thematic unity of Shirley has been persuasively argued by several critics, among them the editors of the Penguin edition, Andrew and Judith Hook, and Helene Moglen. (18) The Hooks, reading the work as a "condition of England" novel, see denial of the world of imagination as "link[ing] the different elements in the book: the life histories of Caroline Helstone and Shirley Keeldar and their romantic involvement with the Moore brothers; the women's rights, tutor-governess theme; the regional, Yorkshire manners theme; and the unemployed poor, Luddite theme" (p. 20). They also judge the ending successful in "linking the romantic marriages of Shirley and Caroline above all to Hollow's Mill and its meaning" (p. 32). In a compatible interpretation, Moglen demonstrates that the conception of victimization in a patriarchal society connects the plots of romance and labor riots, but she judges the execution inhibited and perverted by Bronte's lack of either a sophisticated political understanding or of more radical convictions.' - is problematic in my opinion, and reflects the unease felt by sweetsunray's - “our narrator LIES”

'In the second generic mode, the historical romance, the narrator's relation to the action is omniscient, to the reader that of an informative, reflective mentor with a conservative bias, as in the following authorial rationalization of the millworkers' plight for the sake of "the progress of invention": "As to the sufferers, whose sole inheritance was labour, and who had lost that inheritance ... they were left to suffer on; perhaps inevitably left" (p. 62). This narrator will spare the gentle reader's sensibilities, for instance from any "harrowing up" of his soul with accounts of brutal child labor (p. 90). The characterization is limited to the depiction of typical traits on occasions of sociopolitical crises, rather than showing moral and psychological development.'

'The novel's radical ideas are presented in the third, psychological mode, the last mode to emerge clearly. This mode had been the dominant one of its predecessor, Jane Eyre; but the first chapter of Shirley warns the reader against anticipating "sentiment, and poetry, and reverie" '. 'In the third and last mode, the psychological romance, the narrator is intimately engaged, to the point of identification, with three of the female protagonists, mostly with Caroline Helstone, occasionally with both Caroline and Shirley when they are discussing the life of woman'.

And it is this mode that causes the most problems in the neat schema of the generic modes: the comedy of manners, the historical romance, and the psychological romance. The distinction is blurred when the necessary separation of the views of author and that of the character, necessary for the autonomy of the character are compromised by what Argyle identifies as - “ the narrator is intimately engaged, to the point of identification, with three of the female protagonists”. Argyle is well aware of the problem - 'In both instances the author's own anger causes her to usurp her character's voice to speak more emphatically and sarcastically than is consistent with the character. In relation to the reader, the narrator presupposes a shared bias of female experience (in contrast to the implied male perspective of the two other narrators) which accounts for the notable excess in emphatic authorial congratulation, warning, and spite.'

A specific example is the of out-of-character speech of Caroline's "'King of Israel! your model of a woman is a worthy model!... Men of Yorkshire! do your daughters reach this royal standard?... Men of England! look at your poor girls ...Fathers! cannot you alter these things? " (p. 378). The authors “shared bias of female experience” is comprehended in a patriarchal social order - “Fathers! cannot you alter these things?”, an appeal to right the wrong, to the fathers, not a clarion call to the sisterhood. For feminists who identify Charlotte Bronte as a prototype feminist, this requires a mental somersault. However the self-abnegation demanded of women was acutely felt by Charlotte as reflected in Caroline's - 'but I perceive that certain sets of human beings are very apt to maintain that other sets should give up their lives to them and their service, and then they requite them by praise' (p. 190). But Charlotte isn't a radical, nor Shirley a polemicists tract, her pen is that of a satirist - 'Helstone's teasing questioning of Shirley's sentiment draws the reader's attention to the oxymoron: "'and especially I like that romantic Hollow, with all my heart.' 'Romantic--with a mill in it?' 'Romantic with a mill in it.' ... 'And the tradesman is a hero? Good!'" (p. 215). Also in the 'advice to Caroline on feminine modesty--"You expected bread, and you have got a stone; break your teeth on it, and don't shriek because the nerves are martyrized" (p. 128).


Where Charlotte uses the "disembodied" third-person narrator to reflect the social and political community, the tone is conservative and patriarchal. 'The narrator's relation to the action is omniscient, to the reader that of an informative, reflective mentor with a conservative bias.' - 'as in the following authorial rationalization of the millworkers' plight for the sake of "the progress of invention": "As to the sufferers, whose sole inheritance was labour, and who had lost that inheritance ... they were left to suffer on; perhaps inevitably left" (p. 62). Nor is the irony easily identified, as in - ' In Robert's daydream with Caroline, the realization of which is later witnessed by the narrator, "'the houseless, the starving, the unemployed, shall come to Hollow's mill from far and near'" (p. 598) to prosper under the care of the millowner Robert, the squire Shirley, the magistrate Louis, and the teacher Caroline.'. Is this just Robert's self delusion or Charlotte's comment on the industrialization of the rural England.

Charlotte's admiration for the man-on-horseback is in 'the allusion to Napoleon in Robert's gesture, "one hand in his pocket, the other in his waistcoat" (p. 153)'.Yet Robert Moore is drawn as a complex character, as in his speech - "to respect himself, a man must believe he renders justice to his fellowmen" [p. 506], 'has originated in Shirley's accusation that wanting "to make a speculation of [her]" [p. 499], he failed to render justice to her as a fellow human.' In the psychological mode 'each of the four major characters in some aspect serves as a double or a mirror image of another; for instances of each function, Shirley acts out for Caroline the criticism of Robert's confusion of love and business when she rejects his mercenary offer of marriage, and the brothers Robert and Louis Moore give diametrically opposite importance to inner and outer world. (21) Therefore, the major characters can be understood as fragmented projections of a single self, with Caroline's as the central consciousness; '

And what are we to make of chapter 18's injunction - “Which the Genteel Reader is Recommended to Skip, Low”, of Shirley's vision : “'Milton's Eve! Milton's Eve! I repeat. No, by the pure Mother of God, she is not! ..... I saw - I now see - a woman-Titan....So kneeling, face to face she speaks with God”. To which genteel Caroline replies: “'Pagan that you are! what does that signify?'” ....”Come, Shirley, we ought to go into church.'”
'Shirley's radical vision of Eve, the woman-Titan. This fantastical tale, imagined by a woman and narrated by her to another, is the novel's ultimate challenge to the "naturalness" of the political, social, and psychological assumptions which the two "male" modes champion.' Or of the imagery of 'Shirley's virtually rabid dog bite (the dog's name, Phoebe, alludes to the Titan goddess of the moon) and her self-administered cauterization function as a dramatization of the narrator's earlier sharp warning to Caroline against the "self-treachery" of revealing romantic passion: she is to close her fingers firmly on the scorpion which fate has given her and let it sting her through the palm (p. 128)”. Clearly the mythological references are not hap hazardous, yet what is the connection to the themes of the novel? Is Charlotte playing games with the critics?
Argyle has an interesting interpretation: 'Besides contributing to the obvious sexual symbolism of the episode, which is generally acknowledged and to which reference has already been made, the name Phoebe also alludes to the passing of the prophetic gift from the matriarchal to the patriarchal powers, that is, from the Titan goddess Phoebe to the Olympian god Phoebus Apollo, as narrated in the Oresteia (Eumenides 4-8).'

Clearly Shirley is a complex work, demanding an attentive and sophisticated, not genteel, reader. However the question whether it was a successful work remains. Apart from academic studies, for the general reader the answer is suggested in the Forums, popularity of Charlotte's novels, poll, where Shirley is next to last.



Reference

Gisela Argyle is an associate professor of humanities at York University, Toronto.

A letter, Mary Taylor to Charlotte; Wellington, New Zealand, c. 29 April 1850

I have seen some extracts from 'Shirley' in which you talk of women working. And this first duty, this great necessity you seem to think that some women may indulge in – if they give up marriage & don't make themselves too disagreeable to the other sex. You are a coward & a traitor. A woman who works is by that alone better than one who does not & a woman who does not happen to be rich & who still earns no money & does not wish to do so, is guilty of a great fault – almost a crime – A dereliction of duty which leads rapidly and almost certainly to all manner of degradation. It is very wrong of you to plead for toleration for workers on the ground of their being in peculiar circumstances & few in number or singular in disposition. Work or degradation is the lot of all except the very small number born to wealth.



Mary Tailor was a special friend, one who Charlotte considered her intellectual equal and deeply felt the loss when she emigrated to New Zealand. Unfortunately Charlotte's reply to Mary Taylor was destroyed when Mary burned all of Charlotte's letters, obeying her wishes.

Review of Shirley from Daily News, 31 October 1849

There are a few things more forbidding than the commencement of a novel by the author of Jane Eyre. Like people who put dwarfs and monsters to keep their gates, or ugly dogs to deter idle folks from entering, so doth this writer mange to have an opening chapter or two of the most deterring kind. What so disgusting as the family in the midst o whom Jane Eye is first discover? The three curates and their junketing, with whom Shirley commences, is quite vulgar, s unnecessary, ad a disgusting .....But what is striking is the sentiment. Shirley is the anatomy of the female heart. By Shirley we mean the book, and not the personage; for the true heroine is the rector's niece, the history of whose heart is one of the most beautiful chronicles ever set down by a female pen. For that Currer Bell is petticoated will be as little doubted by the readers of he work as that Shirley Keeldar is breached.
The merit of the work lies in the variety, beauty, and truth of ts female character. No one of the men are genuine. Here no sch men. There are no Mr Helstones, Mr Yorks, or Mr Moores. They are all as unreal as Madame Tussaud's wax works.


Review of Shirley from the Atlas, 3 November 1849

The first chapter of Shirley is enough to deter many a reader from advancing a step further than the threshold. It required all the remembered fascination of Jane Eyre to keep don the feelings of dissatisfaction (e had nearly write another word with the same commencement which the first chapter of Shirley raised up within us. All this is very coarse – very irreverential. And there is besides, discernible in other parts, an unseemly mode of allusion to solemn topics, jesting with scriptural names, and a light usage of scriptural expressions, which will grate painfully upon the feelings of a considerable numbers of Currer Bell's many-minded readers.

G.H. Lewis, review of Shirley in the Edinburgh Review
(extract)

... A more masculine book, in the sense of vigor, was never written. Indeed the vigor often amounts to coarseness, - and is certainly very antipode to 'lady-like.' ..Power it has unquestionably, and interest too, of a peculiar sort; but not the agreeableness of a work of art .. 'Shirley' is inferior to 'Jane Eyre' in several important points. ... It is even coarser in texture, too, and not infrequently flippant; while the characters are almost all disagreeable, and exhibit intolerable rudeness of manner .. Again we say that 'Shirley' cannot be received as a work of art.
Currer Bell has much to learn, - and, especially, the discipline of her own tumulus energies. She must learn to sacrifice also a little of her Yorkshire roughness to the demands of good taste; neither saturating her writings with such rudeness and offensive harshness, nor suffering her style to wander into such vulgarities as would be inexcusable – even in a man.

Charlotte to G.H. Lewes; Haworth, January 1850

I can be on my guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends.

In reading Shirley, a question pops-up, who was the audience that Charlotte had in mind when she wrote?
The last three novels become progressively more difficult for the average reader. And this is even nowadays, when the reading public has been 'educated' , 'sophisticated', by all the authors following the Brontes. Or is it possible that we have regressed, have been desensitized by the MTV culture? If one reads the contemporary reviews, and dismissing the moralizing conservatives, even the litterari critics, such as G.H. Lewis, found that - “She must learn also to sacrifice a little of her Yorkshire roughness to the demands of good taste: neither saturating her writings with such rudeness and offensive harshness, nor suffering her style to wander into such vulgarities as would be inexcusable- even in a man.”

Charlotte was perplexed by the critics. When she was introduced to Harriet Martineau, whom she admired, “she was glad of the opportunity to consult me about certain strictures of the reviews which she did not understand, and have every desire to profit by.... She besought me then, and repeatedly afterwards, to tell her, at whatever cost of pain to herself, if I saw her afford any justification of the.” (Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, 1877). Charlotte's views of the criticism of Shirley are best summarized in the (Letter of Charlotte to George Smith; Haworth, 16 March 1850)
“... the puzzle is that while the people in the South object to my delineation of Northern life and manners, the people of Yorkshire and Lancaster approve: they say it is precisely that contrast of rough nature with highly artificial cultivation which forms one of the main characteristics; Such or something very similar has been the observation made to me lately whilst I have been from home by members of some of the ancient East Lancaster families whose mansions lie on the hilly borderland between the two counties – the question arises whether do the London Critics or the old Northern Squires understand the matter best?”

Is the reader to take Charlotte at face value when she says - “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; “ If we are to accept a prosaic “delineation of Northern life and manners”, is Louis the common Yorkshire landowner? Or Mr. York whose dialect one moment is: “'My father war afore me, and that's all t' answer I sall gie thee; and it's as good a reason as Mr. Helstone can give for the main feck o' his notions.' “, and at will speaks - 'with nearly as pure a French accent as Gérard Moore.', in the same paragraph -

'Ay, there it is. The lad is a mak' of an alien amang us. His father would never have talked i' that way. - Go back to Antwerp, where you were born and bred, mauvaise tête!'
'Mauvaise tête vous-même, je ne fais que mon devoir; quant à vos lourdauds de paysans, je m'en moque!'
'En ravanche, mon garçon, nos lourdauds de paysans se moqueront de toi; sois en certain,' replied Yorke, speaking with nearly as pure a French accent as Gérard Moore.
'C'est bon! c'est bon! Et puisque cela m'est égal, que mes amis ne s'en inquiètent pas.'
'Tes amis! où sont-ils, tes amis?'
'Je fais êcho, Où sont-ils? et je suis fort aise que l'écho seul y répond. Au diable les amis! Je me souviens encore du moment où mon père et mes oncles Gérard appellèrent autour d'eux leurs amis et Dieu sait si les amis se sont empressés d'accourir a leur secours! Tenez, M. Yorke, ce mot, ami, m'irrite trop; ne m'en parlez plus.'
'Comme tu voudras.'

Are we to assume that the Yorkshire and Lancashire reader was fluent in French? And the passage in French is not unique, as the scattered fragments of chapter 6, chapter 9, chapter 27, attest. What is Charlotte's intent? Especially when in chapter 5 she writes - 'Eh, bien! Tu ne déjeûnes pas ce matin?'
“The answer, and the rest of the conversation, was in French; but as this is an English book, I shall translate it into English. “ Is this the 'cool, and solid' prosaic prose that she'll sketch in Shirley?
Clearly Charlotte is after something else than establishing a color of a character, a delineation of a locale and period.
Compare the contrast of Joe, R. Moor's servant -
“We allus speak our minds i' this country; and them young parsons and grand folk fro' London is shocked at wer "incivility;" and we like weel enough to gi'e 'em summat to be shocked at, 'cause it's sport to us to watch 'em turn up the whites o' their een, and spreed out their bits o' hands, like as they're flayed wi' bogards, and then to hear 'em say, nipping off their words short like, "Dear! dear! Whet seveges! How very corse!"',

and the verses of Chénier that Caroline sings -

'Mon beau voyage encore est si loin de sa fin!
Je pars, et des ormeaux qui bordent le chemin
J'ai passé les premiers à peine.
Au banquet de la vie é peine commencé
Un instant seulement mes lèvres ont pressé'
La coupe en mes mams encore pleine.

'Je ne suis qu'au printemps - je veux voir la moisson;
Comme le soleil, de saison en saison,
Je veux achever mon année.
Brillante sur ma tige, et l'honneur du jardin
Je n'ai vu luire encore que les feux du matin,
Je veux achever ma journée!'

Or of the extensive usage of quoted poetry -

Who has read the ballad of 'Puir Mary Lee' - that old Scotch ballad,
Oh! ance I lived happily by yon bonny burn --
The warld was in love wi' me;
But now I maun sit 'neath the cauld drift and mourn,
And curse black Robin-a-Ree!

Then whudder awa', thou bitter biting blast,
And sough through the scrunty tree,
And smoor me up in the snaw fu' fast,
And ne'er let the sun me see!

Oh, never melt awa', thou wreath o' snaw,
That's sae kind in graving me;
But hide me frae the scorn and guffaw
O' villains like Robin-a-Ree!

This is not ' real, cool and solid' prose, the 'delineation of Northern life and manners', but rather the attempt to evoke emotional truth, not just a prosaic truth.

That this is not just fancy, a flowery use of language to embellish a tale is demonstrated in the conversation of Caroline and Shirley where Eve stands for 'every woman' , and Charlotte coyly labels the chapter - Which the Genteel Reader is Recommended to Skip, Low.
With good reason.

'Caroline, I see her! and I will tell you what she is like: she is like what Eve was when she and Adam stood alone on earth.'
'And that is not Milton's Eve, Shirley.'
'Milton's Eve! Milton's Eve! I repeat. No, by the pure Mother of God, she is not! Cary, we are alone: we may speak what we think. Milton was great; but was he good? His brain was right; how was his heart? He saw heaven: he looked down on hell. .... Milton tried to see the first woman; but, Cary, he saw her not.'
'You are bold to say so, Shirley.'
'I would beg to remind him that the first men of the earth were Titans, and that Eve was their mother: from her sprang Saturn, Hyperion, Oceanus; she bore Prometheus' ----
'Pagan that you are! what does that signify?'
'I say, there were giants on the earth in those days: giants that strove to scale heaven. The first woman's breast that heaved with life on this world yielded the daring which could contend with Omnipotence: the strength which could bear a thousand years of bondage, .... The first woman was heaven-born: vast was the heart whence gushed the well-spring of the blood of nations; and grand the undegenerate head where rested the consort-crown of creation.'

Charlotte's apotheosis of Eve is more than what she dared in Jane Eyre. Here she is skirting the rejection of the orthodox tenets of a religion.
However the most interesting part in the composition of Shirley, is in chapter 36. Where Charlotte alternates in the voice of the progonist in telling the tale. She uses the authors voice - “Yet again, a passage from the blank book, if you like, reader; if you don't like it, pass it over:” and alteranates the voice of speaker between 1st person, 3rd. person -

You! What have you to do with Miss Keeldar?'
'To protect, watch over, serve her.'
'You, sir? - you, the tutor?'
'Not one word of insult, sir,' interposed she: 'not one syllable of disrespect to Mr. Moore, in this house.'
'Do you take his part?'
'His part? Oh, yes!'
'She turned to me with a sudden, fond movement, which I met by circling her with my arm. She and I both rose.
'Good Ged!' was the cry from the morning-gown standing quivering at the door. Ged, I think, must be the cognomen of Mr. Sympson's Lares: when hard pressed, he always invokes this idol.'

Charlotte's audience was herself – She wrote Shirley as a continuation, a sophisticated version of the Angria chronicles transposed to Yorkshire. She wrote under the depression of the loss of Emily, Anne and Branwell. She was bereft of the emotional and intellectual support that made life bearable and she returned to the Angria fantasy as a solace.

Interpreting Shirley – personal musings, part 1

Which the Genteel Reader is Recommended to Skip,
With a bow to Charlotte. The following are the resulting impressions of a prolonged reading and study of Shirley. They are subjective. This is an open document, open to revision and debate. I'll break the note into two parts: Death, Style and the subgroup Stylistic Inconsistencies.

DEATH

When Shirley is looked at from a psychological and an aesthetic viewpoint, we get closer to understanding that writing for Charlotte was both a psychological necessity and an intellectual exploration of the world. Shirley was written approximately between 1848 and 1849, through an acute and prolonged depression, a year of tragedy for Charlotte. In the village of Haworth the mortality rate between 1838 and 1849 was 41.6 percent before reaching the age of six. Lack of basic sanitation was a major contributing factor: “ When the Superintending Inspector General of the Board of Health visited Haworth in 1850 he found open channel running down the steep main street, a sluce for refuse of all descriptions. There were no severs. He found 50 middensteads, one in the West lane behind the parsonage heaped with entrails, slaughterhouse refuse, and 'green meat.' He found 23 manure piles. He found 11 pumps that gave impure water... The parsonage boasted a pump in the kitchen – the well sunk into ground just yards from the cemetery”(1)
“Brief as their lives were,Branwell, Emily and Anne Bronte, bettered the 28.5 years average life expectancy of Haworth residents.” (2) Her mother died when she was 5 years old, Maria and Elizabeth died in 1825, followed by Brennan in 1848, Emily 3 months latter and Anne in 1849

The depth of the psychological trauma in the loss of the mother's love is touched on in - Charlotte Bronte: The Self Concieved, Helen Moglen writes: “The fact that Charlotte speaks only once of Mrs. Bronte in her copious correspondence and journals does not confirm the idea that the memory of her death and dying was so trivial that it could be easily dismissed, but rather suggests that it was so painful that it had to be suppressed.”
But she talked about her older sisters. Ellen Nussey, her confidante said: “In the early days she was certain of being quite alone with me, she would talk much of ... Maria and Elizabeth ... a kind of adoration dwelt in her feelings” She described Maria as a little mother among the rest, superhuman in goodness and cleverness.... She would ... weep and suffer when thinking of her. Charlotte gives voice to the longing for a mother's love in Shirley, and if we but change the name we can hear Charlotte speak: “Caroline, my child, I have a home for you: you shall live with me. All the love you have needed, and not tasted, from infancy, I have saved for you carefully. Come! It shall cherish you now”
However concurrent with the feeling of adoration of the elder sister, was that of abandonment. In a dream recounted to Gaskell by Mary Taylor: “She had been dreaming that she was wanted in the drawing room, and it was Maria and Elizabeth. She said that she wished she had not dreamed, for it did not go on nicely; they were changed; they had forgotten what they used to care for. .. “(1) In repeating and amplifying the death, that of her mother, Maria's death seems to have left Charlotte's mind fixated on the unchanging image of loss of the beloved which was to control the future novelist's view of life and of art.

In Shirley, Charlotte describes York's daughters, two extraordinary young girls. The description is idealistic: what is rare, most precious in two girls. Rose, the elder, is twelve years old, - “as to the gray eyes, they are otherwise than childlike - a serious soul lights them - a young soul yet, but it will mature, if the body lives; and neither father nor mother have a spirit to compare with it...so bright are the sparks of intelligence which, at moments, flash from her glance and gleam in her language. “ “Jessy - she is so gay and chattering, arch, original even now; passionate when provoked, but most affectionate if caressed; by turns gentle and rattling; exacting, yet generous; fearless of her mother, for instance, whose irrationally hard and strict rule she has often defied”. What is the purpose? Charlotte can not suppress her psyche and writes - “ little Jessy will die young,” contrasting death with the ideal.
Charlotte ask rhetorically -” Mr. Yorke, if a magic mirror were now held before you, and if therein were shown you your two daughters as they will be twenty years from this night, what would you think? “
And this is what Charlotte sees: “ Here is the place - green sod and a gray marble headstone. Jessy sleeps below. She lived through an April day; much loved was she, much loving. She often, in her brief life, shed tears, she had frequent sorrows; she smiled between, gladdening whatever saw her. Her death was tranquil and happy in Rose's guardian arms, for Rose had been her stay and defence through many trials. The dying and the watching English girls were at that hour alone in a foreign country, and the soil of that country gave Jessy a grave.”
The image of death is pervasive in Shirley, as is the theme of an absent mother. As is in the introduction of Jane Eyre, and reappears in Shirley, - Caroline's missing mother:' “Where is she?” had been on Caroline's lips hundreds of times before, but till now she had never uttered it.' In the first chapter of Villette, the theme is repeated: “ A little girl, I was told, would shortly be my companion: the daughter of a friend and distant relation of the late Dr. Bretton's. This little girl, it was added, had recently lost her mother“. In a general sense of loss, the recounting of death is omnipresent.

In Shirley chapter 24 is labeled as The Valley of the Shadow of Death, yet I think that for Charlotte it, not the marriages at the end of the novel, is the apex of the book. Psychologically it is the balm, the wish fulfillment, of her own tragedy and one of the reasons, the necessity, for writing Shirley.

In the chapter Mrs. Pryor's reveals to the sick Caroline: “'She is your mother: James Helstone was my husband. I say you are mine. I have proved it. I thought perhaps you were all his, which would have been a cruel dispensation for me: I find it is not so. God permitted me to be the parent of my child's mind; it belongs to me: it is my property - my right.... but the heart and the brain are mine: the germs are from me, and they are improved, they are developed to excellence. I esteem and approve my child as highly as I do most fondly love her.'
And Caroline responds: 'But if you are my mother, the world is all changed to me. Surely I can live - I should like to recover ----'...”My mother! My own mother!”
A deus ex machina trick in fiction, not realizable for Charlotte herself. Is Charlotte fictionalizing her own internal pain?

STYLE

In the early novels, The Professor, Jane Eyre, Charlotte follows a conventional narrative viewpoint. Not in Shirley! Why? She breaks with convention in varying between 1st. person, 3rd. person, authors voice, and even insertion in the text of what appears to be philosophical tracts that are but loosely related to the theme. Again why? Is it experimentation or perhaps simply reverting to the Angria journal style where consistency of style was unimportant. Whatever the reason, the deviation in stylistic narrative serves her well in the following novel, Villette.

In Jane Eyre Charlotte used principally the 1st. person viewpoint to establish character. In Shirley she uses a multiplicity of viewpoints, predominantly speech, conversation, to define character. For example: “To be sure! sartainly ! And mind ye recommend weel that them 'at brake t' bits o' frames, and teed Joe Scott's legs wi' band, suld be hung without benefit o' clergy. It's a hanging matter, or suld be ; no doubt o' that.", a Yorkshire dialect and " En revanche, mon garson, nos lourdauds de paysans se moqueront de toi; sois- en certain," replied Yorke, speaking with nearly as pure a French accent as Gerard Moore's.
“It will have been remarked that Mr Yorke varied a little in his phraseology ; now he spoke broad Yorkshire, and anon he expressed himself in very pure English. His manner seemed liable to equal alternations ; he could be polite and affable, and he could be blunt and rough. His station then you could not easily determine by his speech or demeanour ; perhaps the appearance of his residence may decide it.”
“During a two years' sojourn in Italy, he had collected many good paintings and tasteful rarities, with which his residence was now adorned. His manners, when he liked, were those of a finished gentleman of the old school; his conversation, when he was disposed to please, was singularly interesting and original; and if he usually expressed himself in the Yorkshire dialect, it was because he chose to do so, preferring his native Doric to a more refined vocabulary. " A Yorkshire burr," he affirme
Gerard Moore predominantly speaks a standard English, interspersing French expressions when exited, and French with his sister Hortense. Caroline speaks a very pure English, suggesting an unusual mind and education.
Thus when subsequently Charlotte describes Mr. York as “A Yorkshire gentleman he was, par excellence, in every point. “, his character has already been established by his words. The indirect characterization via speech patterns, results in subtle but vivid distinctions that establishes a direct link with the reader that a third person, authorial description can't achieve.

In defining Shirley: a repartee between Caroline and Shirley to establish Shirley's character.
Caroline, beginning in a low, rather tremulous voice, but gaining courage as she proceeded, repeated the sweet verses of Chenier ; the last three stanzas she rehearsed well.

" Mon beau voyage encore est si loin de sa fin !
Je pars, et des ormeaux qui bordent le chemin
J'ai pnsse le premiers a peine.
An banquet de la vie a peine commence,
Un instant seulement mes levres ont presse"
La coupe en mes mains encore pleine.
" .Te ne suis qu'au printemps—je veux voir la moisson;
Et eomme le soleil, de saison en saison,
Je veux achever mon annfe
Brillante sur ma tige, et Phonneur du janlin
Je n'ai vu luire encore que les feux du matin,
Je veux achever ma journee!"

Why the use of French? Is it only an ornament, a sketch of Caroline's character? I don't think so. It goes deeper than that and is suggested by the following:“She took those thin fingers between her two little hands – she bent her head 'et les eflleura des ses levres' (I put that in French, because the word 'eflleurer' is an exquisite word).”
Here not only does Charlotte switch voices from third person to an authors voice but reveals her personal feelings about the language, perhaps recollecting the two years of study in Brussels connected with the memory of Hagger.

An even more interesting is the example of characterization of Shirley in chapter Shirley and Caroline.
Shirley might be brilliant, and probably happy likewise, but no one is independent of genial society; and though in about a month she had made the acquaintance of most of the families round, and was on quite free and easy terms with all the Misses Sykes, and all the Misses Pearson, and the two superlative Misses Wynne of Walden Hall; yet, it appeared, she found none amongst them very genial: she fraternized with none of them, to use her own words. If she had had the bliss to be really Shirley Keeldar, Esq., Lord of the Manor of Briarfield, there was not a single fair one in this and the two neighbouring parishes, whom she should have felt disposed to request to become Mrs Keeldar, lady of the manor. This declaration she made to Mrs Pryor, who received it very quietly, as she did most of her pupil's off-hand speeches, responding,—
" My dear, do not allow that habit of alluding to yourself as a gentleman to be confirmed: it is a strange one. Those who do not know you, hearing you speak thus, would think you affected masculine manners."

Stylistic Inconsistencies

When Shirley is advised: “My dear, do not allow that habit of alluding to yourself as a gentleman to be confirmed: it is a strange one.“, but even more disconcerting is an abrupt shift from the linear story telling style to that of the author's personal recollection or that of social critique. It is as if the consciousness is suddenly interrupted by memory and the tale proceeds in an unexpected direction, and latter returns to the main theme.
An example is :“ Men of Yorkshire! do your daughters reach this royal standard? ....Men of England! look at your poor girls“, that is thematically at odds from the preceding and following paragraphs. Charlotte shifts from a 3rd. person voice, and abruptly adopts the author's voice in a 1033 word paragraph.

The preceding and following paragraphs of chp.23, An Evening Out, are in 3rd. person. Here abruptly Charlotte interjects herself in the author's voice:
“But, Jessy, I will write about you no more. This is an autumn evening, wet and wild. ... This evening reminds me too forcibly of another evening some years ago... when certain who had that day performed a pilgrimage to a grave new-made in a heretic cemetery ...They knew they had lost something whose absence could never be quite atoned for so long as they lived: and they knew that heavy falling rain was soaking into the wet earth which covered their lost darling; and that the sad, sighing gale was mourning above her buried head. ... but Jessy lay cold, coffined, solitary - only the sod screening her from the storm.”

A very conscious shift language: devoir of La Première Femme Savante
“He proceeded to recite the following: he gave it in French, but we must translate, on pain of being unintelligible to some readers.” Why the concern, when the Chenier poem was given in French? Again, it was important to Charlotte as was Shirley's speech of Eve (A resonance of the image of Selene in the sketches in Jane Eyre.) The devoir La Première Femme Savante, is lengthy, 1834 words and hardly credible that Louis would remember word for word 3 years after he first saw it. It would have required an emotional shock to sear it into his memory. But the devoirs of Hagger were seared into Charlotte's memory. Thus the inclusion of a devoir is emotional revisiting the two years of study of French in Brussels and emotions connected to Hagger, here in the person of Louis.

Why these abrupt shifts, these deviations in style from the theme of Shirley? I do not think that they are hazardous, Charlotte was too accomplished a writer for them to be deviations from the theme. She cared about them, they were resonances of her experience, of her personality.
Stylistically Shriley bears a stronger resemblance to the Angrian journals than to Jane Eyre. The Angrian tales were an attempt to control the world through her imagination, to make sense of a reality of a hostile world. They provide her with a series of worlds she can control, an array of settings where she is free to project her deepest human needs.

Shirley is the Rosetta stone for understanding Charlotte's works. Not only chronologically, thus stylistically but more importantly it is physiologically the bridge between Jane Eyre and Villette.


Religious Orthodoxy

As if the stylistic shifts were not sufficient to disconcert the average reader, Charlotte overloads with deviations from the religious orthodoxy of the day. In chapter 27, “To love with my whole heart. I know I speak in an unknown tongue; but I feel indifferent whether I am comprehended or not.”
In the enigmatic title of chapter 18 - Which the Genteel Reader is Recommended to Skip, Low Persons Being Introduced, she writes:
“The first woman was heaven-born: vast was the heart whence gushed the well-spring of the blood of nations; and grand the undegenerate head where rested the consort-crown of creation.'

'She coveted an apple, and was cheated by a snake: but you have got such a hash of Scripture and mythology into your head that there is no making any sense of you. You have not yet told me what you saw kneeling on those hills.'

'I saw - I now see - a woman-Titan: her robe of blue air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing; a veil white as an avalanche sweeps from her head to her feet, and arabesques of lightning flame on its borders. Under her breast I see her zone, purple like that horizon: through its blush shines the star of evening. Her steady eyes I cannot picture; they are clear - they are deep as lakes - they are lifted and full of worship - they tremble with the softness of love and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead has the expanse of a cloud, and is paler than the early moon, risen long before dark gathers: she reclines her bosom on the ridge of Stilbro' Moor; her mighty hands are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to face she speaks with God.”
A woman who speaks directly with God, thereby uproot the patriarchal preacher or even the necessity of revelation in the Bible.

But therein lies the problem of Shirley – Charlotte introduces too many themes, ideas that are near to her heart, but they lack the dramatic cohesion necessary for a novel. She adopts a third person, sometimes an authors voice, to express them, but there she harangues and looses necessary suspension of belief to advance the tale.


CONCLUSIONS

Caroline describes Shirley - 'She is peculiar, and more dangerous to take as a wife – rashly.'
This can't be reconciled with the married Shirley.
“I do not ask you to take off my shoulders all the cares and duties of property; but I ask you to share the burden, and to show me how to sustain my part well. “

When Charlotte wrote in the introduction - 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, - and on the contrary that is what she delivers in Shirley, then the brief narration of chapter 36 is not satisfactory. It violates the rules drama, the art of the story-teller. She can't end the story of the two marriages, by summary, especially when such is against the grain of the character that has been developed in the preceding hundred pages.
In courtship Shirley asked of Louis: “'Will you be good to me, and never tyrannise?'...'Will you let me breathe, and not bewilder me?” Then the ending - “She abdicated without a word or a struggle. 'Go to Mr. Moore; ask Mr. Moore,' was her answer when applied to for orders.” And as a justification Charlotte writes - “In all this, Miss Keeldar partly yielded to her disposition; but a remark she made a year afterwards proved that she partly also acted on system. 'Louis,' she said, 'would never have learned to rule, if she had not ceased to govern: the incapacity of the sovereign had developed the powers of the premier.'” The stasis between Shirley and Louis is not preserved nor expanded in comment.
Are we read this as ironic, as the 'improvements' to the - “I can line yonder barren Hollow with lines of cottages, and rows of cottage-gardens ...'The copse shall be firewood ere five years elapse: the beautiful wild ravine shall be a smooth descent; the green natural terrace shall be a paved street:' “ and as the example of Haworth village proved - open channel running down the steep main street, a sluce for refuse of all descriptions.
To which Caroline replies: “'Horrible You will change our blue hill-country air into the Stilbro' smoke atmosphere.”