Fallen Women in Gaskell's Life and Fiction

As Roxanne Eberle has pointed out, Elizabeth Gaskell used her fiction as a forum through which to advocate for the “option of reforming the repentant sexual transgressor within the English home” (154) – a radical stance that went against much of the existing medical and religious discourses of the time. Medico-moral approaches to prostitution, for instance, focused on regulating prostitutes’ behavior through registration systems and forced hospitalization or incarceration, often in the name of protecting the British home. In such cases, the prostitute was, as Deborah Epstein Nord explains, posited as the “silent and invisible corruptor of apparently respectable families” (110), a carrier of venereal diseases like syphilis that could wreak havoc on the lives of the innocent wives and children of men who came into contact with her. Likewise, while religiously-motivated magdalenist “rescue” programs employed a rhetoric of greater compassion and benevolence in “homelike” establishments than could be found in the earlier “committee-run, prison-like refuges,” they nonetheless were modeled more like disciplinary convents than family “cottages” (Mason 94).Footnote ⁵ None of the reformist approaches to fallenness openly advocated welcoming fallen women into private homes.

Yet Gaskell repeatedly posited this very option as the most practical and effective solution to the question of what to do with fallen women. Her writings insist that redemption for the fallen could be found in the sanctity of the domestic sphere, either in the loving environment of their original home or in the rescuing embrace of surrogate families – as demonstrated in the real case of Pasley, the sixteen-year-old prostitute whom Gaskell helped relocate to Australia in 1850. Moved by the story of the original neglect and abuse that led to Pasley's fall and eventual incarceration in New Bailey Prison – “for ‘no one had ever cared for her in this world,’” Gaskell observed – Gaskell mobilized her significant social resources in an effort to improve the girl's future prospects. Less than a month after meeting Pasley, Gaskell proudly reported to her friend Eliza Fox that she had “found a man and his wife going to the Cape, who will take loving charge of [Pasley],” and “a whole nest of good ladies in London, who say they will at any time help me in similar cases.”Footnote ⁶

For Gaskell, the problem of Pasley begins and, happily, ends in the confines of the familial home, and the girl's rehabilitation comes not as a result of institutionalization or even the act of emigration itself, but rather in enveloping her for the first time in her life with the “loving charge” of surrogate parents and a sympathetic community. Similarly, by reclaiming, rather than banishing, their wayward daughters, the families of Gaskell's fiction find their fallen women reclaimed from the brink – often quite literally, as when Ruth's suicidal leap is arrested by the cry of Mr. Benson, the man who will become her adoptive parent.

Ruth (1853) is Gaskell's most extended exploration of fallenness, though fallen women feature heavily in much of her fiction.Footnote ⁷ Both the eponymous subject of the short story “Lizzie Leigh” (1850) and the prostitute Esther in Mary Barton (1848) demonstrate the tragic fates of women who are denied the potential saving power of the familial home (and both their falls are predicated on their being turned out of their homes unfairly). In Esther's case, an entire family is destroyed not by her sexual transgression, but by a patriarch's refusal to forgive it: long before Esther turns to prostitution, John Barton's prohibition that his disobedient sister-in-law must never again “darken his door” prevents Esther from returning home despite her fervent desire to do so (MB 9; ch. 1), and Barton's wife dies in part from the shock she had “in the mysterious disappearance of her cherished sister” (23; ch. 3). Esther only dares infiltrate the Barton household again in disguise as part of her larger mission to save her niece Mary from meeting a fate similar to her own; thus Gaskell's first fallen woman enters only to protect, rather than contaminate, the home and its inhabitants. In Lizzie Leigh's case – which mirrors Esther's in the girl's path from seduction to illegitimate pregnancy to eventual prostitution – Lizzie's mother Anne is determined to “take home the wandering sinner, and heal up her sorrows, and lead her to her Father's house” (LL 22), despite Anne's husband and son's insistence on the girl's punitive expulsion from the family. Lizzie is ultimately saved from her life on the streets by the intervention of her brother's “pure” and compassionate fiancée, Susan. Through powerful acts of maternal and sororal resistance to social mores, Lizzie is received back into her merciful mother's house, where she spends the remainder of her life tending to the suffering and sick, and praying for forgiveness to enter – in defiance of the unsympathetic principles espoused by her earthly father – a divine Father's house in heaven.Footnote ⁸

Rescue and redemption comes too late, if at all, for the outcasts Esther and Lizzie. Ruth, however, marks a departure from these tales of the destruction and condemnation experienced by the fallen; instead, Ruth follows an unwed mother who flourishes, along with her illegitimate son, when accepted into a familial home of a Dissenting minister, Thurstan Benson, and his sister Faith. Once established inside the domestic sphere, the unlikely heroine also defies popular mid-nineteenth-century assumptions that to allow a fallen woman into a home equates, in the words of Gaskell's contemporary W. R. Greg, “the introduction of filth into the pure sanctuary of the affections” (450). Instead, Ruth infects her community with her virtuous example, and combats literal contagion through her selfless acts as a nurse.

In Ruth, the English home is imbued with a transformative power that halts and even reverses the deadly metamorphosis usually associated with a sexual fall. In many fictional depictions of transgressive women, narratives of physical and moral ruin are enacted upon the female body, virtually like the stages of a terminal illness: seduction, pregnancy, disease, and death are recognizable phases in the fatal progression. In many cases, possessing a beautiful female body leads directly to a woman's fall; Ruth meets her seducer, Mr. Bellingham, because she is chosen, based solely on her remarkable attractiveness, to assist her employer at an upper-class ball. Ironically, the same beautiful bodies then come to bear visible marks of moral corruption. Lizzie Leigh becomes wrinkled and ugly, “old before her time” (LL 27), while the once lovely Esther becomes “nought but skin and bone, with a cough to tear her in two” (MB 391; ch. 38). Ruth, in contrast, grows more handsome, healthy, and graceful after her actual sexual transgression and subsequent pregnancy, as the Bensons notice that her original beauty is amplified by “complete and perfect health,” “a thoughtful spiritual look,” and an “increase[d] dignity in her face [that] had been imparted to her form.” Literally, Ruth holds her head up higher, as the narrator remarks, “I do not know if she had grown taller since the birth of her child, but she looked as if she had” (173; vol. 2, ch. 19). Ruth's bodily improvement belies any claims that “sins” such as hers are naturally corrupting, and likewise proves that other fallen women only fall apart because of the degrading environments and actions into which they are forced by a judgmental society. Notably, Ruth does not have to prostitute herself to survive, as do both Esther and Lizzie. Instead, the household that she joins both materially supports her in the present, and, as Eberle points out, provides her with a model of economic self-sufficiency that effectively allows her to “withdraw her body from purchase by male figures” for the rest of her life (157).Footnote ⁹ Furthermore, while many readers have noted that Ruth's social integration is effected through her maternity, her ability to embrace motherhood is, like her continued health and beauty, only enabled because she has been offered a secure place within the Benson family.Footnote ¹⁰ Esther and Lizzie are propelled to prostitution by maternal instinct, seeking out the only means available to care for their children, but both their daughters die – one in illness and abject poverty, one separated from her mother's care – despite their best efforts. In contrast, Ruth and her son grow strong together in the shelter and security of a loving home.

“Once fallen, always fallen” was a foregone conclusion, Logan argues, according to Victorian middle-class popular opinion (17), and under prevailing gender ideologies that link acceptable femininity with morality, the loss of a woman's moral reputation dangerously erased her socially-recognized “self” and value. Linda Hughes and Michael Lund refer to such a woman as a “blank in the social order” (73). However, the Bensons halt this predetermined doom and recover the seemingly irrecoverable by taking Ruth under their roof, where she learns to reconstruct a purposive identity within a family – as virtual daughter and actual mother – that replaces the emptiness usually associated with the fallen. Having been restored to a “self” – or, more precisely, given a temporary new one, as the widowed “Mrs. Denbigh” – at home with the Bensons, Ruth is eventually able to implement those loving private roles in a productive public position as a nurse. In this role, the fallen woman removes, rather than spreads, contagion, braving the “poisoned air” of the fever-ward to minister to the sick. Even after her past is made public, Ruth's quietly selfless actions ultimately outweigh society's judgment. By the end of novel, she appears as the literal embodiment of the “virtuous woman” of biblical Proverbs, as in the streets of her town “many arose and called her blessed” (R 352; vol. 3, ch. 33).Footnote ¹¹ Given a chance to live a valuable life, Ruth proves herself equal to those domestic angels whose price is far above rubies, and when she suddenly dies as a result of her exertions, the once-supposed monster of sin becomes one with the heavenly angels as well.

Throughout her fiction, Gaskell repeatedly posits the home and its attendant domestic affections and duties as the most efficacious setting in which to rehabilitate a fallen woman. Her short stories and novels echo other elements of her personal vision of real-life magdalenist rescue work as well, especially, as Eberle notes, “a vision of cloaking the sexually transgressive woman in the persona and dress of a ‘proper’ Victorian wife” (154). From the “decent” disguise that momentarily allows Esther to cross her niece's doorway and thereby save Mary's future, to the false name that affords Ruth “some years of peace” (R 297; vol. 3, ch. 27), Gaskell's narratives demonstrate that fallenness is largely a social construction, unfairly assigned by discourse, rather than individual actions. Gaskell also calls for women to work together against her society's current definitions and treatment of apparent female deviance, suggesting it is the duty of female communities – much like that “nest of good ladies” she found in her dealings with Pasley – to literally re-cover (and hence, morally recover) women left exposed and abandoned without the shelter of the domestic sphere.Footnote ¹² When approached in 1855 to defend Charlotte Brontë's honor, then, it is no wonder that Gaskell would employ the very strategy she had so long promoted: she, along with female collaborators, “covered” Brontë's unconventional life with an overarching narrative of home, domesticity and sympathetic selflessness.

Recovering Brontë

Gaskell's decision to compose a biography that would compel readers to “honour [Brontë] as a woman, separate from her character as authoress” (Letters 347), has been met with unfavorable reactions by many modern critics. Suzann Bick argues that the focus on the personal over the professional in The Life of Charlotte Brontë creates a disappointing and “essentially one-dimensional portrait” of Brontë (“Clouding” 46), while Deirdre D’Albertis locates a fierce literary rivalry at work in Gaskell's approach, in which Gaskell appears to use The Life as a means by which to “subordinate the other woman as the subject of her text” (2). However, in light of Patrick Brontë's original invitation to write the biography as a defense against “malignant falsehoods” about Charlotte Brontë's reputation, it is only reasonable that Gaskell eschews portraying her subject as above all an author. As Linda Peterson notes, the same reviewers who had already criticized Currer Bell's works for “unfeminine coarseness” would have likely “found further ammunition in a construction of Brontë's authorial self as ‘professional’ and thus implicitly ‘masculine’” (915). Brontë's professionalism needs no defense; her “womanliness,” however, does.

To launch this defense, Gaskell marshals a new “nest of good ladies” to assist in an authorial version of magdalenist reform. Aided by the likes of Brontë's lifelong friends Nussey and Mary Taylor, both of whom in effect co-author portions of The Life, Gaskell compiles “hundreds of letters, domestic details and personal testimonies to attest to Brontë's good breeding, innate feminine delicacy and adherence to feminine duties” (Parker 73), and serve to reinscribe the public author into the domestic space.Footnote ¹³ Nussey and Taylor appear throughout the biography as Brontë's surrogate sisters, particularly after the deaths of biological siblings left Brontë devoid of female familial support. Their work on The Life is presented accordingly as a natural extension of their sororal dedication. These efforts are in turn presided over by Gaskell, who, as Gabriele Helms notes, casts herself “in the surrogate mother's role – the mother who has to protect her child” (352). The Life can therefore be read as the collaborative work of a female community and self-styled family, through whose loving efforts a fallen, unfeminine genius is rehabilitated into the more socially-acceptable image of proper woman, who happened to write.

However, Gaskell begins her task of clearing Brontë of charges of deliberate unfeminine coarseness (and hence depths of potential “fallen” immorality) with a move that initially seems counterintuitive: she declines to portray her subject's life as conventional or stable, but instead highlights how easily a “fall” into impropriety might have occurred for a young woman growing up in Brontë's particular environment and circumstances. In The Life, Western Yorkshire and the parsonage at Haworth appear far removed from contact with the outside world, unfamiliar and nearly barbaric, and Gaskell's narration ponders “what strange eccentricity – what wild strength of will – nay, even what unnatural power of crime was fostered by a mode of living in which a man” – or as Gaskell's readers must surely ponder, a woman – “seldom met his fellows, and where public opinion was only a distant and inarticulate echo” (LCB 22; vol. 1, ch. 2).Footnote ¹⁴ Brontë's family situation appears little better. In keeping with many fictional depictions of fallen and falling women like Ruth, Brontë is motherless, and thus potentially vulnerable to untoward influence. Maternal guidance is instead provided by her Aunt Branwell, who hailed from a Cornish community that Gaskell describes as “very superstitious,” rarely “dignified or intellectual,” and in which “drunkenness and dissipation occasioned the ruin of many respectable families” (36; vol. 1, ch. 3). Though Gaskell is quick to note that “in the Branwell family itself, violence and irregularity of nature did not exist” (37; vol. 1, ch. 3), the impression is nonetheless one of a young girl whose sole female role models consisted of rough or odd women who were steeped in unconventional habits and beliefs.Footnote ¹⁵The Life thus claims that Brontë and her sisters grew “into girlhood bereft, in a singular manner, of all such society as would have been natural to their age, sex, and station” (46; vol. 1, ch. 3).

And if Brontë's siblings are any indication, readers of The Life should suppose such childhood circumstances are more likely to produce improper than proper people. Gaskell infamously held little back in her representation of the varied indiscretions of the sole Brontë brother, Patrick Branwell, including his intemperance, debt, and his alleged affair with Lydia Robinson (later Lady Scott), the discussion of which resulted in Gaskell being threatened with a lawsuit for libel.Footnote ¹⁶ Branwell is not alone in receiving such unbecoming biographical treatment, however. Gaskell's portrayal of Emily Brontë in particular calls to mind some of her more desperate “fallen” characters, despite the middle Brontë sister's surely irreproachable sexual history. Although largely associated with the home – indeed, she “droops” whenever forced to leave Haworth – the Emily of The Life is far from domestic; she is at times unearthly, but no angel. Instead, Gaskell imbues her with a preternatural fierceness, describing her face as “full of power” and her demeanor as “extremely reserved,” which Gaskell suggests is indicative of her complete indifference to pleasing others (106, 99; vol. 1, ch. 7). More comfortable with animals than with humans, Gaskell's Emily is a wild being who silently cauterizes her own wounds with red-hot pokers and beats her offending pets with a savagery only surpassed by the intense affection she otherwise shows them.Footnote ¹⁷ Her behaviors are so consistently outside the boundaries of acceptable femininity that observers remark she “should have been a man” (177; vol. 1, ch. 11). In these ways, Emily is also highly reminiscent of the nameless beekeeper of Gaskell's 1850 short story “The Well of Pen-Morfa,” whom the text describes as a “stern and severe-looking” unwed mother who “associated with no one” and was “sad and distrustful to her kind,” but carried on with a dignified “mute endurance” that earned her neighbors’ respect, though she rejects their friendship (162). Like this fallen woman in her “primitive dwelling,” Emily appears so close to the natural world that she seems to have reverted to it, and is unable or unwilling to behave as society expects.

In representing Charlotte Brontë's upbringing and surroundings as she does, Gaskell seems to suggest that such a life would likely end in either inevitable victimization, just as Pasley or Ruth found when left isolated and unsupported, or in viciousness or deviance, the territory into which Branwell and Emily apparently veer. Brontë thus proves to be all the more remarkable to readers when she not only does not fall, but rather is shown as developing into a voice of reason, morality, and normality in her otherwise chaotic world. Brontë is depicted as the primary manager of a difficult household, whose ventures into the public world were all motivated by her sense of appropriate feminine duty. For instance, Gaskell explains that Brontë became a governess against her own inclinations out of a sense of personal sacrifice, knowing that her father's limited income would be used to finance her brother's studies, and that Emily was ill-suited for such work away from home. Hughes and Lund observe that scenes of Brontë's “penetration into public spaces,” like the publishing world of London, are presented under “the aegis of modesty and innocence” (139), and are often connected to family obligations first. In one example, Brontë's excursion to the city is excused as having been taken “as much for her father's sake as her own,” since in between meeting with publishers she would, as Patrick requested, undergo medical checkups (LCB 324; vol. 2, ch. 4). “Masculine” intellectual pursuits, presumably distractions from a woman's proper tasks in the home, are also thoroughly domesticated in The Life; Gaskell represents the Brontë sisters finding “an odd five minutes for reading while watching the cakes” (110; vol. 1, ch. 8), and insists that notwithstanding Brontë's obsessive desire to create, “never was the claim of any duty, never was the call of another for help, neglected for an instant” in favor of authorial endeavors (246; vol. 2, ch. 1).

Gaskell therefore acknowledges that coarseness exists all around Brontë, but always at a remove, “in other's experiences or characters that [Brontë] could later put to good use in fiction without suffering their taint” (Hughes and Lund 133). Accusations of untoward aggression are drawn away from Charlotte Brontë and toward Emily, who is a ready scapegoat having written the likes of Wuthering Heights – a work Gaskell describes as “revolt[ing]” readers in its unflinching depiction of “wicked and evil characters” (LCB 270; vol. 2, ch. 2) – and having conveniently died without instigating biographies in her own defense.Footnote ¹⁸ Gaskell also simultaneously addresses and conceals the rumors (largely based on what reviewers deemed as inappropriately “passionate” plot points and characterizations at work in texts like Jane Eyre and Villette) of Brontë's own improper sexual desire and behavior by displacing such matters onto Branwell and the Robinson affair.Footnote ¹⁹ When placed against “a background of barely contained violence and overt eccentricity,” Brontë in all of her quirks appears, in Bick's words, as “a rather normal young woman” (“Clouding” 38). We might also equate “rather normal” with extraordinary, as Gaskell's text urges readers to view respectability, normalcy, and devotion to feminine duty as downright heroic, particularly when ruination may be the more likely fate.

This is not to say, however, that Brontë does not appear to be in danger of “falling” throughout much of the biography. According to Gaskell, Brontë despairingly realized that her personal ambitions often exceeded the narrow boundaries and duties of acceptable femininity to which she strove to adhere. The Life highlights Brontë's lamentations that, “I cannot bend my life to the grand end of doing good; I go on constantly seeking my own pleasure, pursuing the gratification of my own desires.” Warning friends that she possessed a corrupt heart that was a “very hot-bed for sinful thoughts,” Brontë saw herself as nearly already fallen; “I am not good enough for you,” she writes at one point to Nussey, “and you must be kept from the contamination of too intimate society” (qtd. in LCB 128–29; vol. 1, ch. 8). In these passages, Brontë exhibits precisely the kind of internal struggle Kalikoff ascribes to the typical Victorian falling woman, who finds it a “complex and ongoing” challenge to remain good while both avoiding the temptations (spiritual and physical) and accepting the responsibilities of the world (358). In The Life, this challenge also manifests physically for Brontë, much as markers of fallenness appear on the bodies of many of Gaskell's fictional characters. The pages of the biography become a virtual catalog of pain, replete with descriptions of her “bodily weakness,” “nervous disturbance,” lingering fevers, digestive complaints, mental “distemper,” and depressions of spirit, much of which, it is implied, is a result of trying to “subdue her nature to her life” (401; vol. 2, ch. 10).

Rather ingeniously, Gaskell subsequently justifies Brontë's authorship as an excusable step in properly managing the “falling” woman's inevitable psychic and corporeal pain, and even in potentially halting her fall. While Robert Southey thought women so “unfit” and “unfitted by” writing fiction that he famously warned Brontë, “The day dreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind” (qtd. in LCB 123; vol. 1, ch. 8), Gaskell portrays writing as a literal cure for “distemper” of mind and body. She recounts that in Brontë's most trying moments, when plagued by loneliness or frustration with the narrow confines of her life, “[t]he interests of the persons in her novels supplied the lack of interest in her own life; and Memory and Imagination found their appropriate work, and ceased to prey on her vitals” (401; vol. 2, ch. 10). This description recalls Elaine Scarry's discussion of transformative imagining, in which imagination “is there, almost on an emergency stand-by basis, as a last resort” in order to temporarily mitigate the otherwise passive experience of pain (166) – especially pain as a result of an unfulfilled desire or missing object, much like the reported “lack” Brontë experiences. In this light, Brontë's novels might no longer appear to her contemporaries as indicative of improper or unwomanly “public” exertions, but may instead be seen as therapeutic endeavors that, in lessening her pain, actually facilitate her commitment to domestic duties and roles. After all, Gaskell explains, “when she could employ herself in fiction, all was comparatively well” (401; vol. 2, ch. 10).

But Brontë's physical body often appears as a general impediment in itself, seemingly conspiring against even its possessor's attempts to alleviate the physiological symptoms of her emotional struggles. For instance, Gaskell reports that Brontë's first inclination was not toward prose composition specifically, but rather any form of artistic self-expression. However, failing eyesight prevented her from achieving her initial desire to “draw stories,” and in fact “prevented her from doing anything for two years” to assuage her “desire (almost amounting to illness) of expressing herself in some way” (LCB 439; vol. 2, ch. 13). The pain she experienced as a result of chronic headaches or liver ailments also often resulted in bouts of debilitating depression, which in turn kept her from writing. Though Gaskell states that Brontë was aware such spells were “constitutional, and could reason about it,” nonetheless “no reasoning prevented her suffering mental agony, while the bodily cause remained in force” (199; vol. 1, ch. 12).

D’Albertis observes that in The Life, Brontë appears “to accept the ‘poverty’ of her ‘frame’ as a specifically female complaint” (7). This is unsurprising, since even at its healthiest state, female physicality could be made disabling by exclusionary gender roles and practices. Brontë's sex subjected her to everything from occupational and educational restrictions – she is literally barred, by virtue of her female body, from entrance into certain public spaces or situations – to perceived limitations of intellectual and creative faculties. No wonder one of Brontë's personal letters in The Life reads, “I wish all reviewers believed ‘Currer Bell’ to be a man; they would be more just to him” (321; vol. 2, ch. 4). If Esther, Lizzie Leigh, and Ruth become targets of seduction once their female bodies circulate in public spaces, Brontë's public productions are critically targeted because of their author's biology.

Much of The Life thereby reads, in Pamela Corpron Parker's words, as a “portrait of gender-specific victimization” (74), in which woman's life is a “battle” and virtue, and consequently happiness, does not come easily. However, by depicting Brontë's difficulties in this battle, Gaskell is not finding fault with her biographical subject, or exposing Brontë's apparent inability to integrate her desires and feminine duty, as some critics have argued.Footnote ²⁰ Instead, Gaskell can be seen as portraying the “falling” heroine, who by definition cannot easily reconcile duty and desire, but who in her struggles proves herself more actively virtuous than those who have never slipped from propriety's pedestal. This falling depiction also allows Gaskell to manipulate her readership into a sympathetic bond with Brontë. By claiming in her final pages that only a “critical, unsympathetic public, – inclined to judge harshly because they have only seen superficially and not thought deeply” would confuse Brontë's selfless suffering or proximity to impropriety with real fallenness, Gaskell compels her readers to automatically envision themselves as active participants in a sympathetic, progressive, and admirably contemplative community. The biography concludes with a confident description of its readership as comprised of those who “know how to look with tender humility at faults and errors” as much as they know “how to admire generously extraordinary genius, and how to reverence with warm, full hearts all noble virtue” (457; vol. 2, ch. 14). Gaskell's text encourages actual readers to align themselves unconsciously with this vision of the ideal reader, who will close the book and reenter the world ready to sympathetically defend Charlotte Brontë.

Of course, Brontë's reputation presumably needs no further defense by the end of the biography, as her fall is arrested and her virtue “fixed” by a safe landing into marriage. The engagement, wedding, and brief married life of Charlotte Brontë and Arthur Nicholls occupy the last pages of The Life. Just as a respectable marriage often stood as the public woman's elusive yet “longed-for solution” in literature (Kalikoff 58), Brontë's marriage in June 1854 appears to “recover” her from fallenness multiple times over. In her early days of matrimony, Brontë is shown literally recovering from her chronic ill-health. She writes of her bodily wellness to Nussey in October, stating, “It is long since I have known such comparative immunity from headache, &c., as during the last three months” (qtd. in LCB 453; vol. 2, ch. 13). Brontë also seemingly recovers, as a direct result of her new role as wife, from the idiosyncrasies of personality that had partially contributed to the implications of “coarseness” against her. Gaskell writes, “We thought of the slight astringencies of her character, and how they would turn to full ripe sweetness in that calm sunshine of domestic peace” (451; vol. 2, ch. 13). Gaskell implies that “domestic peace” helps assuage the emotional and physical turmoil that had previously resulted from Brontë's conflict over public and private identities and desires; abandoning Currer Bell in favor of Mrs. Nicholls seemingly brings about holistic improvement. Occupied with caring for her curate husband and visiting his parishioners, Brontë admits, “I have not so much time for thinking” (qtd. in LCB 452; vol. 2, ch. 13),Footnote ²¹ as if she, just as Gaskell expected of the biography's readers, had lost “all thought of the authoress in the timid and conscientious woman [who had] become a wife” (LCB 444; vol. 2, ch. 13).

Gaskell then literally re-covers Brontë with the veil of privacy that the biography had temporarily lifted, removing her subject from public circulation and permanently fixing her within the safety of the domestic sphere. After having narrated the events of the new Mr. and Mrs. Nicholls's wedding day, some details of which were “too private a nature for publication” (420; vol. 2, ch. 12), Gaskell brings her own project to a halt, proclaiming, “Henceforward the sacred doors of home are closed upon [Brontë’s] married life” (450; vol. 2, ch. 13). Hughes and Lund note that, as if to solidify the associations of public women writers and notoriety, many obituaries of Brontë had implied there was an infamy and virtual promiscuity in how much she was “talked about” (126). By closing the “sacred” – and therefore presumably inviolable – doors of “home” upon any more discussion of Brontë's life, Gaskell retroactively combats these existing associations, and proactively prevents any new malicious conversations from arising. She suggests that Brontë's private self need only to have been exposed once, and was only done so with the maternal care needed to reinstate her public persona back within the bounds of feminine propriety. Safe at “home” in the hearts of that sympathetic “Public” to whom the last line of the biography “commit[s] the memory of Charlotte Brontë” (457; vol. 2, ch. 14), Brontë's angelic legacy is now secured – exceeding, perhaps, her artistic one – and presumably ought be left undisturbed, except for respectful adulation.

A problem arises, however, when one considers that in Gaskell's narrative, the culmination of Brontë's whole-hearted recommitment to the home and her consequent assumption of the Angel in the House status is a deadly maternity. Interestingly, in her analysis of the falling woman literary trope, Kalikoff finds that such fictional heroines may meet a comparable end: when a falling character marries out of an obsessive desire to be good and a drive for “moral perfection,” she more often encounters a damaging self-renunciation, by which her descent is paradoxically hurried (362). Something similar appears to occur in Brontë's unfortunate descent to the grave as depicted in The Life. While the exact cause of Brontë's death – recorded officially as a “general wasting” disease – has been subject to much debate, Gaskell's account emphasizes the links between Brontë's failing health, persistent nausea, and reported pregnancy in the months immediately following her marriage to Nicholls.Footnote ²² This “quintessentially feminine death,” to use Parker's phrase (74), has not escaped the attention of feminist commentators, many of whom read Gaskell's account of Brontë's pregnancy complications as part of a larger process in which the woman writer is “subordinated” and eventually disappears under domestic relationships and roles. After all, Brontë is, by even conflicting medical diagnoses, effectively consumed by her condition. Achieving the idealized state of married mother reads, then, in the biography as a kind of martyrdom. Like Ruth, who dies enacting a domestic role meant to mitigate her transgressions, Brontë's life in The Life ends through much the same means by which her happiness was supposed to have been achieved, and by which her reputation was saved: a final “confinement” in the domestic sphere, which becomes solidified with a tombstone – the inscription of which Gaskell reproduces – that lists her primarily as “Charlotte, WIFE,” and secondarily as “daughter” (LCB 14; vol. 1, ch. 1). No mention of authorship, or other potential identities, is made.

As presented in their separate narratives, then, Brontë's and Ruth's deaths, real and fictional alike, both appear to conflict with Gaskell's scheme of recovery through domesticity. Readers are therefore faced with the question of what to make of the high price of becoming an “angel” in Gaskell's works; why does a woman's moral and social salvation so often resemble destruction? The answer may lie in Hughes and Lund's observation that, so often in Gaskell's writing, “what seems the closest conformity to domestic ideology also upends its claims” (135). Gaskell's apparent embrace and endorsement of domestic ideology in The Life is not, I would argue, uncritical. Instead, it masks a more radical agenda, through which female authorship is promoted, rather than erased, and conventional boundaries of female propriety are quietly challenged.

Exposing the Angelic Ideology

First, we might consider that although The Life appears to privilege exemplary domesticity at the expense of authorship, this partiality actually works for the woman writer's benefit. Just as Brontë's posthumous personal reputation would have suffered more had Gaskell emphasized her “masculine” professionalism, Brontë's body of work is protected and promoted by presenting its author as a virtuous and “proper” woman, whose writing is by association safe and even edifying for public consumption. The hagiographic nature of The Life actually offers little to undermine the powerful genius and often radical subject matter at work in Brontë's novels; instead, the biography simply helps to remove the texts’ external badge of “coarseness” and thus ensures their wider dissemination. Furthermore, Brontë's artistry is elevated by her evident propriety: by denying that Brontë ever acted upon improper emotions, Gaskell effectively asserts the tremendous power of Brontë's creative imagination and faculties, through which characters like Jane Eyre's fiery Mr. Rochester were “created out of sheer brilliance [rather] than personal experience” (Hughes and Lund 145).

In addition to bolstering Brontë's individual authorial powers, The Life is also composed, as D’Albertis notes, out of what are commonly seen as distinctly “feminine materials,” and places a high value on “gossipy” modes “generally associated with the discursive province of women” (14). Traditionally feminine spaces also become sites of productive power in the text. For instance, the noted scene of the sisters reading over their cakes may be less an illustration of genius domesticated than of genius unrestrained; the Brontës’ kitchen is empowered to produce physical and mental nourishment alike. In writing the biography, Gaskell also often privileges female knowledge and storytelling above arguably more appropriate masculine contributions, like those of Brontë's father and husband, who were among the most obvious sources available. While Gaskell may have had a number of personal reasons for this omission – including Arthur Nicholls's general opposition to the project from its inceptionFootnote ²³ – her choice to rely most heavily on Nussey, Taylor, and even Brontë's own words reflects Gaskell's larger commitment to female creation and collaboration.

Both the purpose of and process behind the composition of The Life thus appear to support female cultural authority and engagement beyond the domestic sphere. Why, then, does Gaskell seem to go to such lengths to deny Brontë the kind of emancipatory “wings” she desired, casting her friend instead as a flightless angel who did not fall only because she declined to soar? One possible answer is that this rather cheerless defense is meant to be recognized as such; that is, nineteenth-century readers of The Life could both acknowledge that Brontë strives incessantly to meet the contemporary standards of female propriety – and therefore could accept her (and her publications) as virtuous, rather than fallen – and simultaneously, by viewing the thankless pains that accompany her struggle, concede that such standards might be detrimental, or even impossible, to meet. The Life demonstrates that a woman's body might be effectively disabled by the endless physical and mental contortions required to fit the expected parameters of feminine morality. After all, it is ironic that the presumed “harlot's progress” of disease, pregnancy, and death appears in The Life to be Brontë's reward for proving her virtue, as her body is so weakened by years of agonizing self-denial that she is physically unable to fulfill the paramount female role in her society, motherhood.Footnote ²⁴ Therefore, the litany of physical complaints that Brontë suffers while trying to “subdue her nature to her life” is not necessarily meant to be emulated. Instead, the image that Gaskell produces of the Brontë sisters’ “wild, strong hearts, and powerful minds” being “hidden under an enforced propriety” (LCB 61; vol. 1, ch. 4) acts as an appeal to a sympathetic audience to regret such repression of power, not to admire a propriety that imprisons.

Thus we can see that so many of Gaskell's texts offer effective, if restrained, objections to the equation of female goodness with unmitigated selflessness. Their heroines – including Brontë – experience excessive physical and emotional pain all in order to suppress personal desire. In the self-sacrificing and largely unnecessary deaths that often occur for characters like Ruth (and so discomfited many early readers), Gaskell reveals the unnatural and fatal effects – themselves undeniable “falls” – of a supposed natural female selflessness.

Just as Gaskell challenges existing narratives of fallenness, then, we also see her question the Angel in the House model of ideal femininity. In her texts, domestic angels are ultimately difficult to discern from their fallen sisters. If the fallen woman is constructed in Victorian discourses as a “blank” cipher of lust, marked by a loss of self-control, Gaskell's angels control themselves into nothingness, literally becoming self-less through death in the name of virtuous self-renunciation. Both are revealed to be pitiable monsters and inhuman constructions; thus both are unsuitable identities for any real woman to occupy.

In this manner, The Life of Charlotte Brontë not only defends a single individual from allegations of coarseness, but also challenges the expectations of perfection unfairly thrust upon all women. It can be read, therefore, as a work of self-defense on Gaskell's part as well. This fact has been noted by some commentators in a more literal sense; presenting Brontë as a woman of exceptional virtue who praises Gaskell's fiction obviously helps shield the author of Ruth from her own implications of impropriety.Footnote ²⁵ On a broader scale, however, by exposing the dreadful artificiality of what Logan calls “angelic ideology,” Gaskell also seeks to vindicate women like herself who hope to integrate, rather than unnaturally divide, their public and private identities, desires, and responsibilities.

Gaskell personally struggled with such integration in her own life, and her frustrations are famously evidenced in yet another 1850 letter to Eliza Fox, in which she discussed what she called the “plague” of her separate “Mes.” Variously identifying her disparate selves in a list that includes Wife, Mother, and Christian (“only people call her a socialist and communist,” she notes playfully), Gaskell eventually wonders, “How am I to reconcile all these warring members?” (Letters 108). Gaskell's use of the language of disease and violence – plague and war – in describing such feelings of internal division is worth noting, even if it is employed somewhat lightheartedly. She would invoke it again, in a far more serious tone, when discussing the public reaction to controversial works like Ruth, which made her feel like “St Sebastian tied to a tree to be shot at with arrows,” and to which she ascribed real physical consequences; she complained to friends of having seemingly contracted “a ‘Ruth’ fever,” becoming ill and living “in a quiver of pain” after reading cruel reviews (Letters 221–22). In particular, Gaskell was troubled by those who seemed to judge her writing as an immoral act, and admitted again to Fox, “I think I must be an improper woman without knowing it . . . you can't think how ‘improper’ I feel under their eyes” (Letters 223).

We can see then that Gaskell experienced viscerally the disabling, persecutory effects of too-rigid definitions and ideals of propriety. Unsure which “me” she must occupy, and aware of how arbitrarily she may be assigned an entirely unwanted one, a woman could feel (especially considering Gaskell's self-reported physiological symptoms of pain and illness) effectively torn apart. And yet, in the same letter in which she discusses her multiple Mes, Gaskell also rejects the notion that her struggle would be alleviated by subsuming all her selves into a single patriarchy-approved role as her husband William's helpmate. Though she confesses, “I try to drown myself (my first self) by saying it's Wm who is to decide on all these things, and his feeling it right ought to be my rule,” she ultimately finds, “that does not quite do” (Letters 108). Sacrificing her “first self” and its multiple facets to a selfless status is not a viable option for Gaskell. Her very use of the word “drown” – a choking, unnatural end – speaks to the intense personal violence such a “sacrifice” entails. Whereas nearly a century later Virginia Woolf would cite killing the Angel in the House as a path to feminist freedom, at the height of Victorian mores Gaskell briefly considers killing all but her angelic persona, and finds – as Brontë will, tragically too late – it would only amplify her suffering. Instead, Gaskell chooses to allow her many conflicting “Mes” to continue to wage war, but uses her writings to encourage society to expand its vision of womanhood to perhaps one day fit them all.

Thus, when Gaskell writes that women like Charlotte Brontë must not shrink from developing artistic talent, but realize “it was meant for the use and service of others” (LCB 272; vol. 2, ch. 2), she is not solely cloaking Brontë's authorship in shades of conventional feminine morality, or advocating authorial “service” as yet another form of abject female selflessness. Instead, she is encouraging a notion of duty to others that also empowers and justifies women stepping out of domestically circumscribed roles. Her vision of authorship offers an expansive sense of women's potential influences and interventions in the public sphere – one that includes, for instance, the otherwise “improper” act of publishing a work like Ruth. No confined guardian of existing cultural mores, the woman writer's wide-reaching service can be of her own design – even, if she so chooses, an iconoclastic one.

This is not to say that Gaskell called for a complete overhaul of women's social and cultural roles. Indeed, she upheld and personally embodied far more conventional ideas than she rejected. Charlotte Brontë herself saw Gaskell as a figure of conventionality, and teasingly urged her fellow author to leave her comfortable home life in order to brave the “wilds” of Haworth. In a letter Gaskell included in The Life, Brontë writes to her friend, “Leaving behind your husband, children, and civilisation, you must come out to barbarism, loneliness, and liberty. The change will perhaps do you good, if not too prolonged . . .” (qtd. in LCB 435; vol. 2, ch. 13).

The language of Brontë's invitation tellingly divides domesticity and liberty into two separate and seemingly irreconcilable categories, one containing all the comforts of the world, while the other leaves one outcast, but free. It is the same insurmountable division under which Brontë, as she is depicted in Gaskell's biography, labors and, failing to find a satisfactory middle ground, ultimately falls. Brontë's letter suggests, however, in that tantalizing and open-ended silence of the ellipsis, that Gaskell may be able to achieve a balance between the two, and infuse her own “civilisation” with a sense of “liberty” that will only improve her life – and, presumably, her art. It is as if Gaskell might sprout the wings Brontë denied herself, with which she could move with more ease between her worlds of social responsibility and individual desire.

And despite initial appearances, it is this very balance that Gaskell's biography of Brontë advocates. Ultimately, The Life does not support confinement and conformity, but works subversively to expand the boundaries of domesticity and propriety. Gaskell vindicates her fellow writer's character by calling into question the torturous standards by which Brontë, and in turn all women, had been judged, and even more injuriously, had learned to judge themselves. Just as Gaskell's fiction and personal philanthropic efforts called for the literal doors of home to be opened to sympathetically receive once-outcast fallen women, The Life of Charlotte Brontë ensures that the woman writer and her public productions can and should be welcomed into respectable homes with open arms. Moreover, the text calls for the same doors to open outwards as well, allowing “proper” women more freedom in the world at large and normalizing their public contributions to and influence upon society, be it through charitable service or authorial exertions, communal efforts or individual genius. Spurred by her own experiences of constraining ideals of femininity, Elizabeth Gaskell works to reform the very space of the home, transforming it from a place of either rejection for the fallen or imprisonment for the angels, to one of endless possibility, providing a safe springboard from which a woman might spread her wings and a soft landing for any falls.