Folklore in the Works of Charlotte Brontë: A New

Critical Approach

by

Ariella Feldman

A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR

OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English Literature

School of English, Drama and American & Canadian Studies
University of Birmingham
April 2020
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 Abstract

My key objectives are to establish a new contextual framework of folklore in the realist novel

so as to widen current Gothic interpretations of Charlotte Brontë’s uses of the supernatural

across her fiction, to provide evidence of local cultural and Romantic literary sources of

folklore in her novels, arguing for their relevant influences on Brontë’s narrative and

ideological uses, and to connect Brontë’s literary allusions to folk belief to her letters. Firstly,

I establish Brontë’s local folklore milieu as a narrative source in Shirley (1849), comparing

the material to historical secondary sources. Secondly, I argue for Brontë’s early adaptation of

the literary antiquarian Walter Scott’s narrative and thematic uses of folklore in the Glass

Town and Angria Tales. Thirdly, with Scott’s Romantic fairy tradition material as a resource,

I argue for Brontë’s transformative use of the fairy motif in the study of various socio-cultural

issues in Jane Eyre (1847). Lastly, I examine Brontë’s imitation and development of Scott’s

rhetoric of scepticism in his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830) for the study of

Enlightenment Rationality and Christian truths, in relation to the ghost motif of Villette

(1853).
 Acknowledgements

In the novel Jane Eyre, a kind fairy dropped the idea of Jane advertising as a governess.
Similarly, two fairies (Angela and Eileen) suggested I enrol on a WEA course on the study of
Jane Eyre being held in a local church. When asked about the frequent references to fairies in
the novel, the tutor suggested it as an area of enquiry for anyone who had the time and the
inclination. This thesis is the result of taking this idea to heart. I wish to acknowledge the
initial input of Dr Essaka Joshua, former Lecturer in English Literature at the University of
Birmingham, now Teaching Professor of English and Joseph Morahan Director of the College
Seminar at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, for supporting the project at MPhil level
and encouraging me to expand it further. Once the project progressed to PhD, cultural
historian Dr Bob Bushaway supported the cultural historical aspect of the study. Having
tragically passed away in February 2013, he was superseded by Dr David Gange, Senior
Lecturer in History. Professor Deborah Longworth, Head of Department of English Literature
has remained my primary supervisor throughout the remainder of the research and my thanks
go to her, especially, for her unwavering belief in this study. I also wish to thank my partner
Christopher Boivin for proofreading, relentless patience, love and emotional and financial
support over the years. I received the Daphne Carrick Memorial Scholarship in Brontë Studies
some years ago for this proposed line of investigation. I hope that the results do justice to the
award.
 Table of Contents

Introduction: Brontë’s Literary Uses of the Supernatural:

Folklore in the Realist Novel as a Narrative Framework .......................... 1

Chapter 1: Brontë’s Local Sources and Shirley ......................................................... 48

Chapter 2: Brontë’s Romantic Sources for Glass Town and Angria:

Walter Scott’s Narrative and Thematic Uses of Folklore ....................... 79

Chapter 3: Jane Eyre’s Fairy Motif: Symbols of Physical Difference,

Sexuality and Aspects of Gender .......................................................... 113

Chapter 4: Villette’s Ghost Motif:

Superstition versus Enlightenment Rationality and
Christian Truths ..................................................................................... 145

Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 177

Bibliography: ................................................................................................................ 183

 Introduction

Brontë’s Literary Uses of the Supernatural:

Folklore in the Realist Novel as a Narrative Framework

Magic in all its forms appealed to her. The land of elves and fairies was her favourite
subject, whereas Branwell rarely mentioned such insubstantial beings.

Christine Alexander1

This thesis argues that the role of folklore in Charlotte Brontë’s oeuvre is generally

overlooked. Overwhelmingly, critics locate supernatural elements across Brontë’s fiction

within a Gothic tradition, as argued in Robert B. Heilman’s ‘Charlotte Brontë’s “New

Gothic”’ (1958).2 Folklore scholar, Jacqueline Simpson, however, persuasively studies the

Brontës’ use of folk motifs in her article ‘The Function of Folklore in Jane Eyre and

Wuthering Heights’ (1974),3 providing a starting point for my project on Brontë’s folklore.

Although Brontë critics acknowledge her familiarity with folklore, few pay much attention to

its narrative and ideological function throughout her fiction. In the Glass Town and Angria

Tales, for example, folklore contributes to plot, characterisation, setting and atmosphere.

Folklore themes developed in the novels are traceable also to the juvenilia. The Professor

(1857) contains the fewest references to folklore. In both Jane Eyre and in Shirley (1849), the

fairy departure motif reflects the Victorian engagement with nostalgia, an attitude or

1
Christine Alexander, The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 69.
2
Robert B. Heilman, ‘Charlotte Brontë’s “New Gothic”’, in From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad: Essays
Collected in Memory of James T. Hillhouse, eds. R.C. Rathburn and M. Steinmann (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1958), pp. 118-132.
3
Jacqueline Simpson, ‘The Function of Folklore in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights’, Folklore 85 (1974), pp.
47-61.

1
worldview that lamented the past embodied also in the novels of Thomas Hardy. In addition

to its narrative value in Shirley, folklore also reflects the novel’s regional genre and

historicity, again, possibly anticipating Hardy’s character and environment novels. Although

emerging as a narrative in Shirley, folklore has a greater ideological role in Jane Eyre (1847).4

Brontë’s use of the fairy part of folklore as a form of coding is a conscious attempt to express

aspects of culture which are normally difficult to articulate openly. The fairy symbolises

cultural or male definitions of Victorian femininity, issues about otherness or difference,

female power, spiritual equality and issues about eroticization and sexual taboos. Brontë’s use

of folklore as a communicative tool to explore the ideology of womanhood and male sexuality

possibly resonates with other realist novelists including George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. The

trope of the ghost in Villette (1853) can be read as a way to examine the tension between

superstition and Enlightenment rationality similarly to Charles Dickens’ short stories.

However, I suggest that Brontë’s sceptical Victorian worldview is compatible with her

religious piety, a position she might not regard as paradoxical. I situate Brontë’s ghost within

the Victorian obsession with eschatological issues on death and the afterlife. This thesis aims

to direct Brontë’s uses of the supernatural towards the realist novel so as to reappraise Gothic

led critical perceptions of her novels.

As to Brontë’s source material I argue that the presence of region-specific folklore

references across Jane Eyre and Shirley suggest her drawing on the Yorkshire rural world or

oral tradition that might also be demonstrated, to a degree, across Brontë’s letters. Evidence of

folklore as a cultural aspect of the local environment may have exacerbated magical thinking

(I explain this term later) referenced in her letters. Certainly, magical thinking is a key

character trait in her major heroes and heroines, distinguishing them from other fictional
4
All subsequent references to Charlotte Brontë’s novels are to Jane Eyre (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), Villette (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), The Professor (London: Penguin Books, 1989), Shirley
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

2
characters. Brontë’s second major source of folklore, I argue, is drawn from the work of

Walter Scott (1771-1832). Richard M. Dorson in The British Folklorists: A History (1968)

regards Scott as the ‘first major figure to cultivate the literary uses of folklore with sympathy

and comprehension [...] served well the cause of antiquarian folklore’.5 While Dorson’s work

is more historical, Coleman O. Parsons devotes an entire study to the literary role of folklore

in Scott’s historical romances.6 Both of these studies, however, situate Scott firmly in a

folklore literary tradition. I argue that throughout her tales, Brontë adapted Scott’s narrative

uses of folklore. She transformed Scott’s fairy material for the role of fairies in Jane Eyre and

adapted Scott’s ghost investigations for her theme of Enlightenment rationality in Villette.

In sum, Brontë critics do little to advance the relevance of folklore in her fiction.

Simpson is invaluable in advancing the topic of folklore studies in her critical analysis of Jane

Eyre. However, her study overlooks analysis of the role of the fairy motif in gender studies

and does not extend to the other novels. Simpson’s analysis of Wuthering Heights, however,

is very useful. It draws attention to Emily’s interest in ghosts, an enquiry I develop in my

analysis of the role of the ghost motif within the study of eschatology and early psychology in

Villette. There is, to my knowledge, no other critical study on the role of folklore in Brontë’s

other works. Brontë critics do not associate Scott, the literary antiquarian, with folklore.

However, they do acknowledge the presence of folklore in Brontë’s local environment.

To an extent, Jason Marc Harris’s recent study of the hitherto critically overlooked

relationship of folklore and literature in the Nineteenth-century is a context for my argument.7

His work is limited to the analysis of folklore in folk legends, fairy tales and ghost stories or

the literary fantastic and pays less attention to prose fiction. Yet, it lays a foundation for my

5
Richard M. Dorson, The British Folkorists: A History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 107.
6
Coleman O. Parsons, Witchcraft and Demonology in Scott’s Fiction; with Chapters on the Supernatural in
Scottish Literature (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1964).
7
Jason Marc Harris, Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Ashgate: Publishing
Company, 2008).

3
study of the interrelationship between folklore and Brontë’s literature. His brief inclusion of

Scott’s literary uses of folklore in his short stories is relevant to my study. This thesis shifts

the focus of Harris’ examination of folk narratives to Brontë’s realist novels. I argue that

‘magical thinking’, alluded to in his study, functions as a key character trait in her work.

‘Magical thinking’ is a term borrowed by Harris for his analysis of superstition in the

Victorian literature of fantastic and fantasy texts. Michael Shermer describes magical thinking

as our attempt to evolve as ‘skilled, pattern-seeking causal-finding creatures [...]. We have

magical thinking and superstitions because we need critical thinking and pattern-finding. The

two cannot be separated. Magical thinking is a by-product of the evolved mechanism of

causal thinking’.8 Magical thinking is an area of study within the wider context of the

psychology of imagination.9 Harris’ goal is to situate the significance of folklore in folk tales

and legends or narratives of the literary fantastic. He acknowledges the role of the realist

novelists, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot and Hardy, whom Harris identifies as writers in whose

fiction supernatural folklore figures as a significant presence.10 He omits the Brontës in this

list yet casts a glance at the ‘fairy-departure motif’11 in Shirley (pointing also to its itemization

as motif F388: Departure of the Fairies in folklore studies). Carole Silver, in Strange and

Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (1999) moreover, argues that the subtext

behind Mary Garth’s retelling of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ at Mr Vincy’s New Year’s Eve celebration

in Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2), suggests that ‘fairy lore and fairy faith penetrated even the

so-called realist tradition’ and even those ‘less committed to realism are even more revelatory

8
Harris, Folklore, p. 11. See Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudo-Science, Superstition
and Other Confusions of Our Time (New York: Holt, 2002).
9
Marjorie Taylor, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Development of Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
10
Harris, Folklore, p. 208.
11
Ibid., p. 9.

4
of prevailing cultural beliefs experienced by the Victorians’.12 To develop my interpretation

of the fairy feature in Jane Eyre, I take my lead also from Silver’s examination of the

symbolic role of the elfin world in the works of the Victorian realist novelists and their

anthropological role in Romantic poetry, particularly in Scott. Silver more than Harris

examines the association between folklore and the novel form, providing a better foundation

for my examination of fairy lore in Jane Eyre. Still I need to refer as closely to Maureen

Duffy, The Erotic World of Faery (1972)13 as her work specifies the relationship between

fairies and sexuality. Studies of the supernatural in the works of Dickens (and second sight in

Eliot’s Daniel Deronda) in The Victorian Supernatural (2004)14 reinforce my argument that

the ghost trope extends beyond Gothic to Victorian fiction and provides a context for my

study of the ghost trope as sceptic discourse in Villette. I further my critical reference to

Michael Wheeler’s Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (1990)15

for his discussion on contemporary religiosity on the afterlife.

I am careful to advance folklore motifs in Brontë’s work from beyond or as well as

the Gothic. My reading requires a critical openness to re-position the conventional narrative

framework of Gothic currently deployed to examine Brontë’s uses of the supernatural and re-

frame it as folklore within the realist novel. To recognise the place of folklore and fantasy in

Brontë’s fiction is to reconsider critical perceptions of her fiction such as Tim Dolin’s

comment that Villette shifts ‘between realism, with its overt concern for plausibility and

causation, and Gothic romance, with its concern for sensational emotional effects’.16 In the

light of my revision this opposition would no longer apply but would be replaced by
12
Carole Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), p. 5.
13
Maureen Duffy, The Erotic World of Faery (Cardinal, Sphere Books, 1989).
14
Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, Pamela Thurschwell, eds, The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004).
15
Michael Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990).
16
Brontë, Villette, p. xviii.

5
superstition or magical thinking and rationality, characteristic of folklore in the realist text.

My research has identified numerous different folklore types of which some are motifs

alluded to across Brontë’s fiction, specifically: fairies, ghosts, omens contributing to narrative

themes. The allusion to customs, witchcraft, charms, luck, gypsy lore, proverbs, Robin Hood

legend, cunning folk, astrology, devil, second sight, wraiths, weather lore, diurnal periods,

thresholds and divination operate as narrative strategy (and some are also linked to theme).

The types of folklore, alluded to across Brontë’s fiction, are itemised in J Simpson and S

Roud’s Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore (2000).

Brontë’s fictional characters themselves also have a penchant for folk fiction or folk

narratives such as legends, nursery songs, fairy tales and fables (both are types of folk tales),

ballads and oral stories. In her fiction, Brontë does not use the term ‘folklore’ although she

was writing Jane Eyre about the same time that romance writer and literary antiquarian

William John Thoms (1803-1885) first coined the phrase ‘Folk-Lore—the Lore of the

People’17 in The Athenaeum (22 August 1846). The terms ‘superstition’ and ‘supernatural’,

however, were in very common usage in Nineteenth-century fiction, and across her fiction,

Brontë uses these terms and also others pertaining to folklore types such as sayings and signs

for omens (and sayings also for proverbs), anniversaries for customs, and magicians,

soothsayers, gypsies, beldame, Mother Bunch and fortune tellers for astrologers or wise

men/women or cunning folk. References to fairy, Robin Hood, second sight and ghost, on the

other hand, are explicit.

Part of my aim in this thesis is to argue for folklore in the realist text as an alternative

narrative framework to the Gothic for thinking about the role of the strange, the otherworldly

and the supernatural in Brontë’s fiction. One of my objectives is to reposition Brontë’s

17
Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, eds, Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000), p. 130.

6
fictional uses of the supernatural world to a folkloric context thus re-identifying generic

identities of her supernaturalism as realism as well as Gothic. Subsequently, it provides a

forum to widen current critical studies of gender in Jane Eyre and develop the study of

science and religion in Villette. In the following chapters I delineate the presence, sources,

narrative and ideological relevance of folklore across the tales and the novels. The overall

objectives of this project are to re-contextualise the material as folkloric, to examine the

functions of Brontë’s literary uses of folklore, to identify Brontë’s literary sources, especially

Romantic sources and local sources of folklore, with reference to her imaginative experiences,

to connect Brontë’s personal engagement with folk beliefs with her fictional characters and

finally, to intimate Brontë’s fiction as reference for folklore studies.

The last decade has seen an immense growth in the academic discipline of folklore

studies and I take my lead from this scholarly field of enquiry. The remainder of this

introduction sets the scene for my study of folklore in Brontë’s fiction and life.

Formation of Folklore Studies

Folklore is a cultural and intellectual field of enquiry into a number of topics including past

traditions, performance and beliefs with its inter-disciplines of anthropology, archaeology,

cultural and social history, sociology and literary studies. Folklorists study folklore genres

such as oral, performance, calendar customs, life-cycle customs, superstitious beliefs and

material culture. In nineteenth-century rural England, folk beliefs provided an alternative to

mainstream Christianity but rural society was also structured around folk customs officiated

by the church. Folklore as an aspect of antiquity became an area of study in popular

antiquarianism and later, for Victorian folklorists. Richard M. Dorson provides a definitive

chronology of the development of British folklore. The formation of folklore studies in

7
England began within the field of popular antiquities with William Camden (1551-1623),

recognised as the father of folklore studies with his publication, Britannia (1586). The

concept of antiquities included oral traditions (proverbs and superstitions such as the evil eye)

and Camden, in his field work, devoted one section to the ‘Manners and Customs of the

Ancient Irish’.18 There followed a succession of antiquarians including key figures, the squire,

John Aubrey (1626-1697) with his record of supernatural experiences, Miscellanies (1696),

lexicographer Francis Grose (1731-1791) of The Provincial Glossary with a Collection of

Local Proverbs and Superstitions (1789), and curates Henry Bourne (1694-1733) and John

Brand (1744-1806), the latter adapting Bourne’s Antiquitates Vulgares (1725) in

Observations on Popular Antiquities (1777). Bourne’s work advocates Anglican orthodoxy

and his comments on omens, highlighted in chapter one, are relevant in the light of Brontë’s

letters. By 1718, the Society of Antiquaries was established providing a permanent resource

for books on British antiquities. Described also by Dorson as a major founder of English

Antiquaries, Joseph Strutt’s (1749-1802) Queenhoo Hall (1808) was published by Scott.

Political reformer William Hone (1780-1842) wrote The Every Day Book (1830), The Table

Book (1830) and Year Book (1831-2), reference works that Dorson suggests were popular on

Victorian shelves and parlour tables. Thomas Crofton Croker (1798-1854) of Fairy Legends

and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825) was of particular interest to Scott. Fuelled partly

by political nationalism, these Enlightenment antiquarians’ contributed to a British cultural

heritage. So too, literary antiquarians Scott, James Hogg and Robert Southey (all familiar to

Brontë) pioneered a cultural record. It is possible that the works of Grose, Camden, and Hone

provided Brontë with source material on folklore from the libraries at the library of the

18
Richard. M. Dorson, The British Folklorists: A History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 3. For
further studies of Popular Antiquarianism see Marilyn Butler, ‘Antiquarianism (Popular)’ in An Oxford
Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832, ed. Iain McCalman (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), pp. 328-338 (p.328), and Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-
Century Britain (London: Hambledon and London, 2004).

8
Heaton family, Ponden Hall, Stanbury, and at the Keighley Mechanics Institute. Certainly,

Brontë, interested in vernacular language, frequently alludes to Grose’s Dictionary of the

Vulgar Tongue (1796), another source for folklore, in her early tales. In The Provincial

Glossary Grose defines much folklore especially on second sight and Hone records poetical

adaptations of the Robin Hood legend. Scott, too, interacted closely with the works of these

antiquarians, owning many of their texts, as I show in chapter two. The key point is that Scott

and Brontë could position themselves as literary engagers of folklore.

By the 1840s, coinciding with Brontë’s novel writing years, the field of folklore

studies was well established. In The Athenaeum (22 August 1846), Thoms, fellow of the

Society of Antiquarians in 1838 and secretary of the Camden Society, invited his readers to

record ‘the manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs [...] of olden time

[...] what we in England designate as Popular Antiquities or Popular Literature [...] and would

be more aptly described by a good Saxon compound, Folk-Lore—the Lore of the people’.19 In

the next instalment (29 August 1846), Thoms saw it as imperative to claim a British

mythology as the Grimm brothers had done for Germany whilst acknowledging

Shakespeare’s preservation of the fairy mythology of England. He agreed with fellow

antiquary-folklorist Thomas Keightley (1789-1872) of The Fairy Mythology (1828) ‘that the

belief in Fairies is by no means extinct in England’ and asked whether any Devonshire

correspondent could ‘furnish new and untold stories of his native Pixies?’ He considered ‘Is

the Barguest no longer seen in Yorkshire?’20 Thoms expressed the Arcadian sentiment of

Merry England (later alluded to in Shirley), hoping to find legends, roundels and fairy songs

in areas untouched by industrialisation.

19
William John Thoms, ‘Folklore’, The Athenaeum (22 August 1846), pp. 862-863.
20
William John Thoms, ‘Folklore’, The Athenaeum (29 August 1846), p. 886.

9
 Brontë may have consulted some of these works. She read The Athenaeum for reviews

of her work. Croker and Keightley’s work were published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh

Magazine (1818-1828) and it is likely that her Irish born father was familiar with Croker’s

Fairy Legends.

In 1878, the Folklore Society formalised the systematic study of folklore, publishing

books and a journal. In 1913, Charlotte Sophia Burne (1850-1923) (county collector for

Shropshire) was more offensive than Thoms, defining folklore as the ‘traditional Beliefs,

Customs, Stories, Songs and Sayings current among backward peoples, or retained among the

uncultured classes’.21 Between Thoms and Burne, there emerged the mythological, savage

and anthropological folklore theorists, with Max Müller’s Contributions to the Science of

Mythology (1897), Edward Burnet Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) and Andrew Lang’s

Myth, Ritual and Religion (1913). In his epilogue, Dorson laments the decline of the British

folklore movement in the early twentieth century yet also celebrates folklore’s contribution to

intellectual history that commenced with Camden’s antiquities.22

In the 1900s, the folklore society published a large number of Victorian and

contemporary county folklore collections based largely on oral sources. These included Mrs

Eliza Gutch’s (1840-1931) County Folklore: Examples of Printed Folk-Lore Concerning the

North Riding of Yorkshire, York and the Ainsty (1901) and County Folklore: Examples of

Printed Folk-Lore Concerning the East Riding of Yorkshire (1912). However, Antiquarian

Joseph Horsfall Turner (1845-1915), editor of Yorkshire Notes and Queries with Yorkshire

Folk-lore Journal (1888) and writer of Haworth Past and Present (1879) also amassed a

folklore collection for the West Riding. It is possible that his material constitutes a reliable

record of that specific area. In ‘Our Customary Feasts’ (1913) (initially printed in the

21
Simpson and Roud, p. 130.
22
Dorson, pp. 440-441.

10
Brighouse Echo and reprinted in the Halifax Courier), Turner proves an authority on West

Yorkshire’s traditional customary legacy. His material is invaluable to the association I am

making between the local world of folklore in Shirley and Yorkshire rural cultural life.

Hilda E. Davidson explains that by the 1960s, Alan Dundes had advanced the study of

folklore (or folkloristics) from the ‘narrowly historical approach and atomistic studies’23 with

its motif-index approach, as an example to interpreting its meanings, patterns and themes. But

he approved of Vladimir Propp’s structural study of the folk tale in his Morphology of the

Folk Tale (1968). Dundes’ analyses were often psychoanalytical and he influenced

generations of folklorists. Dundes explains that the folk or any group share some traditions

which they call their own. Jason M. Harris quotes Jan Harold Brunvand’s inclusive definition

of folklore as:

The traditional, unofficial, non-institutional part of culture [...] It encompasses all

knowledge, understandings, values, attitudes, assumptions, feelings, and beliefs
transmitted in traditional forms by word of mouth or by customary examples [...]
folklore itself is the whole traditional complex of thought, content, and process which
ultimately can never be fixed or recorded in its entirety; it lives on in its performance
or communication as people interact with one another.24

Brunvand states that folklore relates strongly to culture or bodies of knowledge but

specifically to informal unofficial knowledge. It is both oral and written, and traditional, and it

is passed on generationally. The genres or types of folklore are referred to as folk beliefs, folk

narratives, ballads, myths (known as sacred truths), legends and folk art. Its stories or beliefs

23
Hilda Ellis Davidson, ‘Folklore and Literature’, Folklore 86 (1975), p. 74. See Alan Dundes, The Study of
Folklore (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965), Alan Dundes, ed. International Folkloristics (Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
24
Harris, Folklore, p. vii. Jan Harold Brunvand, The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction (New York:
Norton, 1986), p. 4.

11
exhibit a dynamic variation generationally and geographically.25 To the people or community

who grow up with folklore, it is often mundane, trivial and familiar but it is also positive

providing a sense of place and identity. Lynne S. McNeill states that folklorists question the

definition, classification (or genre), source, origin, transmission, variation, structure, function,

purpose, meaning and application of folklore.26 Finally, a current definition of folklore

according to Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud is that folklore is the voluntary and informal

communication (orally, performed or written) of a group’s (of any size, age, or class) cultural

traditions, past and present. It is both stable and varied and can adapt to new circumstances.

They state that ‘the essential criterion is the presence of a group whose joint sense of what is

right and appropriate shapes the story, performance, or custom —not the rules and teachings

of any official body (state or civic authority)’.27

It is partly within this context that I consider the role of folklore in Brontë’s fiction. I

draw on folklore feminist theory, general studies in folklore and studies in anthropology to

examine Brontë’s ideological use of fairy material, and studies in religion for the discussion

of the ghost motif (outlined in my methodology). There is no reason why Brontë might not

read antiquarian material. Crucially, Camden, Grose and Hone are integral to the study of

popular antiquities. In her two northern-based novels, Jane Eyre but especially Shirley, Brontë

draws on local folklore for narrative uses and my reading of cultural historicism provides the

background for this enquiry. Brontë is in a prime position to absorb local folklore within the

rural Yorkshire community and to read both antiquarianism and the creative uptake of

25
Harris, Folklore, p. vii. See also Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature (1932-7), Stith Thompson
and Anti Aarne, The Types of the Folk Tale: Classification and Bibliography (1961), Ernest W. Baughman,
Types and Motif-Index of the Folk Tales of England and North America (1966), Reidar Christiansen, The
Migratory Legends: Proposed List of Types with a systematic catalogue of the Norwegian variants (1958),
Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928), Historical Roots of the Wonder Tale (1946), Theory and
History of Folklore (1984) ed. V Propp; Bengt Holbek, Interpretations of Fairy Tales: Danish Folklore in a
European Perspective (1987).
26
Lynne S McNeill, Folklore Rules: A fun, quick and useful introduction to the field of Academic Folklore
Studies (Utah State University Press, 2013), pp. 1-17.
27
Simpson and Roud, p. vi.

12
folklore in the British literary canon. This context is a useful starting point in which to lay a

foundation for the re-orientation of Brontë’s writing as folkloric.

Studies of Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Hilda E. Davidson provides an overview on the subject. Oral folklore material and broadside

ballads, medieval folk tales and legends helped to shape a British folklore literary tradition.

Shakespeare’s literary uses of folklore (and other Elizabethan drama) provided material on

ghosts, fairies, wise men, legends, omens, devil, witchcraft, and so on, for the Gothic novel,

Romantic poetry and prose and the Victorian realist novel. The interaction between folklore

and literature developed with critical studies in folklore and English literature (by folklorists)

and centred on the meaning of folklore, for example in Beowulf’s dragon, the Chaucerian

poetic, in Shakespearian comedy and the Hobby Horse in Jacobean drama. In their poetry, the

Romantics Scott, Hogg, Southey, Coleridge and Keats reflected the preservation of a British

cultural heritage devouring folklore and the fairy tradition. They revived and adapted folk

narratives, folk legends, ballads and folk tales to compete with Scandinavian mythology.28

On the Gothic uptake of folklore, Devendra P. Varma says that Gothic novelists of the mid

eighteenth-century, drawn to the wild and extravagance of folklore, rediscovered the

‘traditional lore of old heathen Europe, the richness and splendour of its mythology and

superstitions, its usages, rites, and songs’.29 In the case of Gothic horror, the vampires of

Eastern European folklore (first recorded in England in William of Newburgh’s twelfth

century chronicles), were popularised in John William Polidori’s The Vampire (1816) and

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818).

28
Davidson, Folklore, pp. 73-5. See also Kenneth Muir, Folklore and Shakespeare (London: Folklore Society,
1981).
29
Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame: being a History of the Gothic Novel in England, its origins,
Efflorescence, Disintegration and Residuary Influences (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), pp. 24-5.

13
 Clearly, folklore permeates the literary canon including the Gothic novel. We need to

start thinking about the Gothic uptake of folklore similarly to the Victorian novel.

Initially, Katharine M. Briggs (1898-1980) interest lay in the field of the English

folklore tradition in early English drama focusing on fairy traits, fairy tradition and folk

narratives in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in The Anatomy of Puck (1959), Pale Hecate’s

Team (1962) and The Fairies in Tradition and Literature (1967). Later, she specialised in the

study of folk tales (or fables, fairy tales, novella, nursery tales, supernatural tales and legends)

developing important collections in ‘The Transmission of Folk-Tales in Britain’ Folklore 79

(1968) and, particularly, A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language (1970-

1). Briggs brought together a compendium on British fairy lore in A Dictionary of Fairies

(1976), and The Vanishing People (1978). Specifically, Briggs talks of Scott drawing from

Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), most likely James Macpherson’s

Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1765) and the myths, legends and historical traditions of his

native Border country, to become ‘the great originator of the Romantic Revival in nineteenth-

century English Literature’.30 Scott’s devil folk-themed The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) is

founded on the legend of Gilpin Horner, a man believed to resemble the boggart-like

hobgoblin of the Borders. In the ballad ‘Alice Brand’ of The Lady of the Lake (1810), Scott

shows his familiarity with fairy traditions of Fairyland, shape-shifting, fairy abduction of

mortals, the unluckiness of wearing green near fairy territory and rescuing captured mortals

by the aid of objects sacred to Christianity (the cross, Bible, bread). Briggs notes Scott’s

interest in James Hogg, Croker, Robert Chambers, the Grimm brothers and many more and

recognises his prestige as contributor to folklore studies. Briggs’ precedent for identifying

Scott as a literary folklorist furthers my association between him and Brontë.

30
Katharine M. Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural
Creatures (London: Allen Lane, 1976), p. 349.

14
 Less relevant to my investigation but illustrating the enormity of folklore in literary

studies, in the 1980s, Jack Zipes developed studies on the impact of ideology on fairy tale

criticism and composition. Topics range from society and moral didacticism, industrialism,

the Woman Question, utilitarianism and socialism. His Why Fairy Tales Stick: Evolution and

Relevance of a Genre (2006) is one of many. Earlier, Zipes also distinguished the

Kunstmärchen (or literary fairy tale) of the German Romantic tradition from the

Volksmärchen (folk fairy tale) in Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and

Fairy Tales (1979). Jacqueline Simpson’s main contribution was to advance folklore legend

(or a short traditional oral or written narrative about a person, place or object, often of a

supernatural nature and believed to have existed). Included are Simpson’s ‘The Legends of

Chanctonbury Ring’ Folklore 80 (1969), ‘Beyond Aetiology: Interpreting Local Legends’

Fabula 24 (1983), and ‘The Local Legend: A Product of Popular Culture’ Rural History 2:1

(1991). So prestigious is Simpson’s reputation as a folklore scholar that her article on the

Brontës folklore (referred to in the opening section of my introduction) should be valued as a

reliable critique.

Folklore as a literary critical area of enquiry was most marked from the 1990s with

critics distancing their reappraisal from previous preconceptions of folklore as product based

(as data collection and confirmatory evidence). Critics, such as Silver and Harris, focus much

on the interaction between folklore and Romantic-era writing. Folklore material often

expresses ideas relating to nationalism, national identity and nation building with its

distinguishing features of ‘cultural practices, stories, traditions, dwellings, songs, music’.31 In

a very recent study, Frank De Caro argues briefly on the interaction between folklore and

fiction in his study of folklore’s appropriation to other contexts, that we would know far less

31
Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkin, eds, Folklore and Nationalism in Europe during the long Nineteenth
Century (Leiden: Brill, 2012), p. 1.

15
about folklore before the nineteenth-century had folk texts not been succeeded by literary

ones. Echoing Brunvand, he says that the success of folklore in literature as an area of enquiry

‘in part is a result of folklore’s general tendency to be in a dynamic state of flux because of its

fluid, unwritten nature, so that adaptation into written forms is a natural step’.32 Folklore lends

itself to Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco’s idea of the ‘open text’, with its potential for

‘variant readings and permutations’.33 Folklorists, de Caro states, study the subject as a

process of communication in which meaning is irrevocably grounded in cultural and social

contexts. Literary critics have come a long way from perceiving folklore in nineteenth-century

literature as simply local colour, anachronism, or affiliation solely with children’s fiction. He

recognises the significance of folklore’s progress in fiction and acknowledges ‘folklore’s

appeal as an aspect of culture suitable for adaptation or ideological borrowing generally’.

Moreover, De Caro recognises folklore’s use as a symbol of localism for regional writers, as

embedding a worldview held by a bygone Other and distinct from other groups, as a theme in

literature relating to ‘other realities beyond the real’, and its resonance for women writers to

convey ‘semi-secret female messages’.34 Although De Caro’s interest lies in non-literary

forms, his summing up of folklore in fiction, encapsulates my analysis of the role of folklore

in Brontë’s work.

Making headway between Scott and folklore, Carole Silver explains Scott’s role as a

prime collector and analyst of fairy lore. Moreover, Scott’s creative use of fairy lore

underpinned a historic interest in cultural anthropology.35 Silver, Dorson and Parsons state

that Scott’s poems, ballads, verse romance, historical prose and Letters on Demonology and

Witchcraft (1830) bear witness to his interest in fairy traditions and beliefs. They all point to

32
Frank de Caro, Folklore Recycled: Old Traditions in New Contexts (Jackson: University Press of Mississipi,
2013), p. 6.
33
Ibid., p. 7.
34
Ibid., p. 8.
35
Silver, pp. 10-13.

16
Scott’s particular interests in the origin of the fairy superstition, the sources of the elfin

peoples, the changeling phenomena and fairy abductions, the link between fairies and witches,

and the use of euphemisms as protection against fairy malevolence. Scott was instrumental in

exploring the genres of folk tale, local legend and fairy traditions. Folklore, for Scott operated

as narrative strategy. Furthermore, Dorson notes how the Letters demonstrate Scott’s

contribution to nineteenth-century literature’s rhetoric of scepticism. Dorson is stronger than

Parsons and Silver in recognising Scott’s folklore as an antidote to rationality. Jason. M.

Harris’ main focus is to examine the cultural authority of Enlightenment rationality over

supernaturalism in the legends of James Hogg. Yet, his reference to Scott’s use of second

sight in The Two Drovers (1827) and The Highland Widow (1827)36 reiterates again Scott’s

folkloric role in the progression of science. This aspect of Scott’s work is influential to

Brontë’s uses of the supernatural across her fiction.

For studies of folklore in short stories and the novel, The Victorian Supernatural

(2004) is useful. It includes Eve Lynch’s discussion of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novelette

‘Ralph the Bailiff’ (1861), and ghost stories ‘At Crighton Abbey’ (1871) and ‘The Shadow in

the Corner’ (1879). They are well equipped, she states, with ‘apparitions, mesmerism,

fantastical occurrences and inexplicable omens—the stock-in-trade of tales of domestic

“possession”’. Although useful, I question her associating folklore solely with domestic staff,

who she also describes as devoid of education, property, social standing and economic

independence.37 In Louise Henson’s work on Charles Dickens’ ghost stories in A Christmas

Carol (1843) and The Chimes (1844), she argues that these stories characterise the dichotomy

36
Harris, Folklore, pp. 198-200.
37
Eve M. Lynch, ‘Spectral Politics: the Victorian ghost story and the domestic servant’, in Bown, Victorian
Supernatural, pp. 67-85 (p.74).

17
between sceptic scientist and superstition,38 thus continuing this literary tradition from Scott.

Pamela Thurschwell reads George Eliot’s study of second sight in Daniel Deronda (1876) in

the context of Victorian psychology of selfhood. Thurschwell quotes critic Nicholas Royle on

the novel’s pervasiveness of ‘ghosts and spirits, by forecasting, foresight and ‘second sight’,

by strange intuitions, fantastical coincidences, instances of apparent telepathy, or

omniscience’. But she situates Eliot’s novel within the Gothic tradition as opposed to folklore

in the novel saying that ‘Gothic elements also structure the narrative world of Eliot’s

fictions’.39 Thurschwell’s analysis is relevant. It seems to pinpoint the problematic issue of

treating Eliot’s novel as Gothic rather than as folklore in Victorian fiction, similarly to Brontë

critics on Brontë.

In sum, we can say that the Romantics and Victorians were often obsessed with all

things supernatural, otherworldly or folkloric incorporating omens, ghosts, fairies and second

sight into their ghost stories, novellas, fairy tales, legends, Gothic and Realist novel. As

Bown, Burdett and Thurschwell say in their introduction to The Victorian Supernatural:

The supernatural pervaded literature, art and science – to name only three of the most
powerful cultural forces [...] gender relations, the nature of mind [...] the expression of
sexual desire [...] were shot through with the language of the supernatural [...] the
Victorian supernatural was a complex of images, ideas, beliefs and metaphors that
entered into every aspect of life, often in strange and surprising ways.40

Once the domain of the Romantics, the Victorian writers proceeded to ‘imitate, revise and

transform preternatural folkloric material’ in folk narratives for authorial and ideological

objectives, as Harris argues.41 Folklore is often central to character subjectivity and is

38
Louise Henson, ‘Investigations and Fictions: Charles Dickens and ghosts’, in Bown, Victorian Supernatural,
pp. 44-63.
39
Pamela Thurschwell, ‘George Eliot’s prophecies: coercive second sight and everyday thought reading’, in
Bown, Victorian Supernatural, pp. 87-105 (p. 91). See Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1990), p. 92.
40
Bown, Victorian Supernatural, p.2.
41
Harris, Folklore, p. 1.

18
contemporaneous with authors’ worlds. Supernatural folklore, moreover, offers a discourse

through which Victorians could express cultural ideas on class, race, religion, gender,

sexuality, science, physical or anatomical difference, industrialism and nationalism.42

Within this context we can rethink a narrative framework for the study of Brontë’s

uses of the supernatural.

Brontës and Folklore

Folklore critics and scholars study Brontës’ fiction. Katharine M. Briggs noted Jane

Eyre’s ghost in the red room and Rochester’s mock gypsy scene and Catherine Earnshaw’s

ghost of Wuthering Heights. Yet, she argued, ‘All the atmosphere of folk legend broods over

the Brontë books but it is nowhere overtly expressed’.43 But Briggs identified far more folk

material in Elizabeth Gaskell’s tales and novels.

Two years later, folklore scholar Jacqueline Simpson found much more to analyse in

‘The Role of Folklore in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights’, Folklore 85 (1974). Simpson

asserts that folklore in Jane Eyre is ‘an essential part of the minds of their heroes and

heroines’ used at ‘climactic moments’ and linked to their ‘central themes’.44 The types of and

function of folklore are comparable in the two novels, with both writers making full use of

fairies, ghosts, witchcraft, omens, wraiths and dreams. But the degree of belief differs. Jane

believes in presentiments, sympathies and signs but subordinates them to religious faith.

Simpson adds that ‘Rochester too says of himself “some superstition I have in my blood, and

always had”. The maids’ influence on Jane’s understanding of folklore differ, with Miss

42
Harris, Folklore, p. 34.
43
Katharine Mary Briggs, ‘Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Literature’, Folklore, 83:3 (1972), pp. 194-209 (p.
202).
44
Simpson, The Function of Folklore, p. 47.

19
Abbot and Bessie Leaven (drawn from the Brontës maid, Tabitha Aykroyd (1771-1855))

collectively believing in ghosts in the red room and Bessie enchanting Jane with local lore and

stories from ‘old fairy tales and older ballads’.45 Whilst the allusion to ghosts, goblins,

vampires, dreams and omens add to the atmosphere of horror, fear and foreboding, more

significant is Jane’s fairy image in the mirror, assuming thematic significance later in the

novel. Simpson argues that ‘the idea of Jane as a being of the otherworld, particularly as an elf

recurs at each stage in their growing love’, the fairy motif conveying the theme of love

between Jane and Rochester. It symbolises the spiritual affinity between the couple, their

difference from other people, and Rochester’s amusing perception of Jane’s otherness from

other women.46

Simpson’s analysis provides a solid foundation for my study of the fairy element in

Jane Eyre. Her article remains the only study to date on the topic of Brontë’s folklore. I

extend Simpson’s reading, framing the enquiry within a feminist context and advancing the

ideological enquiry that the fairy motif offers a coding discourse to express issues on gender

and sexuality.

Simpson’s study of folklore in Wuthering Heights (1847) is more detailed and lengthy.

In it she argues that Emily’s fullest sympathies are with those characters who believe in the

supernatural or whose thoughts focus on folklore. Hareton and Cathy’s interaction with fairies

symbolizes their happy childhood, whilst Catherine and Heathcliff’s wholehearted belief in

omens and ghosts reflects their affinity to nature and expresses their fiery souls. Naturally

superstitious (like her counterpart, Bessie Leaven), Nelly Dean expresses the most complex

attitude. She rationalises so-called psychic experiences but believes in omens. According to

45
Simpson, The Function of Folklore, p. 47.
46
Ibid., pp. 48-51.

20
Simpson, Nelly’s closing comment, after the death of Heathcliff is the only reference to the

‘voice of community’:

The country folk ‘would swear on the Bible, that he walks’; Joseph ‘has seen two on
’em, looking out of the chamber window’, [...] not only the shepherd’s boy but the
very sheep and lambs will not pass the place where ‘there’s Heathcliff and a woman
yonder, under t’nab’.47

Catherine and Heathcliff’s superstitious natures are partly motivated by the desire for their

version of spirituality. Of the other staff, Zillah is not superstitious and Joseph’s beliefs are

associated only with Biblical literalism. Despite Lockwood’s initial fear of his dream-vision

of Catherine’s ghost, he returns to the official Church position.

Simpson goes on to identify the sisters’ shared knowledge of folk motifs such as

devils, witchcraft, wraiths, fairies, omens in the form of mirror reflections and dreams of

children, and the use of omens to heighten the atmosphere of doom. In both Jane Eyre and

Wuthering Heights, folklore symbolises the shared spiritual affinity between the protagonists

and the theme of love. Imagery from folklore symbolises not only Jane’s ‘difference’48 from

other women but also expresses the ‘otherness’ or basic strangeness of Heathcliff. Simpson

states that Emily makes greater demands on her reader’s suspension of disbelief, offering

fewer concessions to explanations of elf-bolts, wraiths, pigeon feathers and double-gangers,

while Charlotte provides the maid Bessie with folk beliefs that Jane inherits. Simpson

concludes that the two writers associate folklore less with the wider rural community but with

the ‘inner life which sets the heroes and heroines apart from ordinary humanity and binds

them irrevocably to one another, whether in life or death’.49

Simpson’s analysis of Emily’s treatment of ghosts further supports the viability of

applying a folklore narrative framework for the study of the supernatural. Although she
47
Simpson, The Function of Folklore, p. 60.
48
Ibid., p. 50.
49
Ibid,, p. 61.

21
identifies much shared commonality between the two sisters’ use of folklore, there is more to

add. Whilst my focus is with Charlotte’s novels, I have noted their shared reliance on Scott’s

fiction: The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), The Lady of the Lake (1810), Rob Roy (1817),

Count Robert of Paris (1832) and The Black Dwarf (1816).50 They build on other folk motifs:

the negative zone of midnight and white birds and animals presaging disaster. Their

knowledge of supernatural beings: fairies, changelings (or un-baptized infants), ghouls, imps,

wizards, witches, goblins and vampires is comparable. We can now reframe their characters

belief in omens, fairies and ghosts as magical thinking and as the tension between superstition

and Enlightenment rationality. Emily’s use of ghosts is an area for further study but its

presence implies a shared eschatological enquiry. We have to question Nelly’s ‘Do you

believe such people are happy in the other world, sir? I’d give a great deal to know?’51 But,

like the finale of Lucy Snowe’s intellectual journey, Nelly ‘wondered how anyone could ever

imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’.52 Emily’s fairy allusions

compare with Charlotte’s codification of sexism. Emily was just as likely to absorb cultural

influences from the local Yorkshire community and from her Celtic inheritance. Emily, more

than once, speaks of the ‘Fairy Cave under Peniston Crag’53 and the Gimmerton Band at

Christmas. Certainly, in Shirley, too, the voice of community is heard loud and clear. In sum,

Emily and Charlotte’s novels are immersed in traditional culture and both writers deploy this

material to narrative and thematic ends.

Although limited to its modification of Victorian swan bride tales, Carole Silver also

touches on the role of fairies in Jane Eyre. Silver argues that Jane Eyre’s ‘otherness’, sexual

50
Florence Dry, The Sources of “Wuthering Heights” (W. Heffer & sons, 1937), p. 84. Patrick Diskin also
associates Emily’s novel with the Celtic work of William Carleton in ‘Some Sources of Wuthering Heights’,
Notes and Queries, 24 (1977), pp. 354-361.
51
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 146.
52
Ibid., p. 300.
53
Ibid., p. 108.

22
and spiritual passions and ‘unChristian’ nature is depicted in the language of folklore: fairy,

elf, sprite, imp and sylph.54 Unlike many Victorian fairy bride narratives, Jane is a fairy bride

manqué but would have earned her title as a fairy bride had she married Rochester before she

left him. Silver suggests key sources such as Keightley’s Fairy Mythology and/or Arabian

Nights or fairy tales told to her by Aykroyd, echoing Simpson’s association between Brontë

and her maid. Silver’s reading offers another springboard for my further enquiry into ideology

and sources of Brontë’s folklore. Silver includes other realist novelists such as George Eliot in

Middlemarch (1872), Thomas Hardy in Jude the Obscure (1895) and Edith Wharton in The

Custom of the Country (1913), all of whom might have adapted these folk tales into their

varying studies of gender relations and the institution of marriage. I relate to Silver’s study to

examine the role of fairies in Jane Eyre but develop the idea that Brontë’s use of fairy features

also as a rhetoric for Victorian novelists’ unable to openly express their interests in male and

female sexuality, ideas of equality and Victorian sexism.

Silver refers to the changeling motif in Wuthering Heights with Lockwood’s

perception of Catherine Earnshaw’s aberrant behaviour and of Heathcliff, that ‘imp of Satan’.

She refers also to Rochester’s response to Jane’s apparent change in behaviour on reuniting at

Ferndean by addressing her as mocking ‘changeling’ in Jane Eyre. Whilst Silver explores the

symbol of changelings as an anxiety of difference I argue that the changeling motif is part and

parcel of Rochester’s idea of Jane’s physical otherness and another example of sexist coding.

In her final chapter, ‘Farewell to the Fairies’, Silver points to Brontë’s allusions to the

fairy lament in Jane Eyre and Shirley. With the older generation lamenting the passing of time

in Shirley, I incorporate Brontë’s explicit reference to an Arcadian attitude to the past or

54
Silver, p. 107. See also Barbara Fass Leavy, In Search of the Swan Maiden: A Narrative on Folklore and
Gender (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994), pp. 106-107.

23
theme of nostalgia for a once-pastoral ‘Merry England’ in my chapter on traditional culture in

Shirley.

More generally, Simpson and Roud and Iona Opie and Moira Tatem cite the Brontës’

fiction as sources for omens with Jane Eyre’s Gytrash and Wuthering Heights’ pigeon

feathers.55 On Shirley, cultural folklore historian Norman Simms argues that Brontë is

familiar with the symbolic role of folk custom in nineteenth-century social protest movements

with the Luddite reliance on the communal yell. Brontë also exploits the ritual power of

Whitsuntide for the Luddite riot.56

Albeit rather brief (excepting Simpson’s work), these associations between Brontë and

folklore reinforce my central premise that her material can be reframed as folklore in the

realist novel. Simpson’s article is instrumental in situating the presence of folklore in Brontë’s

(and Emily) realist novels and identifying their narrative and ideological uses of folklore.

Simpson and Silver are crucial for their survey of fairies in Jane Eyre. I develop their

enquiries, pursue the analysis of ghosts in Villette and identify local and literary sources.

Brontë Critical Canon: The Study of Folklore

Brontë critics, scholars and biographers acknowledge allusions to folklore in the work of the

Brontës. In The Oxford Companion to the Brontës (2003) Christine Alexander and Margaret

Smith include ‘Folklore’ in their guide:

Tabitha Aykroyd remembered when ‘fairies frequented the margin’ of the Haworth
beck. The Brontës learned much folklore from her and from their reading. Charlotte
refers playfully to ‘fairishes,’ elves, brownies, and sprites, but like Branwell, she also
knows about the ominous Gytrash or black dog, vampires, deceptive marsh-spirits,

55
Simpson and Roud, p. 159.; Iona Opie and Moira Tatem, eds, The Oxford Dictionary of Superstitions (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 309.
56
Norman Simms, ‘Ned Ludd’s Mummers Play’, Folklore 89:2 (1978), pp. 166-174; See also James A.
Hargreaves, ‘Methodism and Luddism in Yorkshire 1812-1813’ Northern History 26 (1990), p. 172.

24
 and Banshees. Wuthering Heights is haunted by the presence of the other world: the
unquiet spirits of the dead, Cathy’s belief that she is unable to die, Heathcliff’s
agonized pleas to her to haunt him, and his final ‘walking’ with her, terrifying the little
boy who dares not pass their spirits.57

Elsewhere in the Companion Alexander and Smith offer a description of the ominous Gytrash

and classify it under the heading, ‘Natural World’. They point to Branwell’s description of the

Gytrash in his fragment ‘Thurstons of Darkwall Manor’ (1837), as a northern dialect term for

a spectre, ghost or apparition that manifested in the form of a black dog (described also in

Jane Eyre). Under the heading ‘Fairy Tales’ Alexander and Smith write:

The Brontë children, inspired by the Arabian Nights, James Ridley’s Tales of the
Genii and traditional tales like those told by Bessie in Jane Eyre, invented their own
fairy tales, in which wicked enchantresses, handsome princes, ill-treated virtuous
ladies, dwarves and child-eating ogres lived in castles or imprisoning towers.58

They add that Brontë alludes to Charles Perrault’s ‘La Barbe-Bleue’ in her three major novels

particularly in Jane Eyre and incorporates structural elements from the Cinderella Story and

possibly from Beauty and the Beast. They also associate the image of Madame Walravens in

Villette as ‘Malevola, the evil fairy’ with Perrault’s tale. This entry ends with ‘see Folklore.’

Under the more detailed heading ‘Mythology’, they say:

In Villette some mythological references are heavy with omens: in chapter 36, ‘The
Apple of Discord’, Lucy solves the deadly ‘Sphynx-riddle’ of Père Silas’s connection
with Paul Emmanuel. In Jane Eyre the omens are those of folklore, the only mythical
reference being Jane’s allusion to Rosamond Oliver as a Persian Peri.59

Within the context of Brontë’s local environment they quote Aykroyd’s lament of the loss of

the fairies. They describe Pendle Hill, a landmark boundary between Lancashire and

Yorkshire as an area famous for its link to the Lancashire witch trials of the Seventeenth-

57
Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith, eds. The Oxford Companion to the Brontës (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), p.198. See also Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Q.D. Leavis (London: Penguin, 1966),
p. 484.
58
Alexander and Smith, p. 185.
59
Ibid., p. 335.

25
century (alluded to as Pendleton, Pendle Farm and Pendlebrow in the juvenilia).60 Smith and

Alexander describe Ponden Kirk as a millstone grit landmark at the head of Ponden Clough,

on the moors above Stanbury and are represented in Wuthering Heights as Penistone Crags.

‘There is a tradition that anyone passing through the tunnel in the Kirk (the ‘Fairy cave’ of the

novel) will marry within the year. Hareton Earnshaw shows the younger Catherine Linton ‘the

mysteries of the Fairy cave, and twenty other queer places.’61 In their description of Haworth,

they refer to the typical ‘Whitsuntide’62 Sunday school feast and procession, recalled in

Shirley as the only festival celebrated in Haworth, primarily to punctuate sectarian hostility.

Lastly, they link Kirklees Priory, the ruins of a Twelfth-century Cistercian priory, in the

grounds of Kirklees Hall to Shirley. They draw on Gaskell’s description of it as ‘mouldering

stone in the depth of the wood, under which Robin Hood is said to lie.’63 In Shirley, Caroline

and Shirley plan to ‘penetrate into Nunnwood’ where the ruins of a nunnery lie in a deep

hollow dell.’

Of the Tales by Branwell Brontë, Biographer Mary Butterfield notes the family’s

familiarity with local Haworth traditions such as the Horton Gytrash and Heaton family

legend of a headless man called Henry Cass or Casson.64 Similarly Gaskell states Brontë’s

awareness of the supposed ghost-haunted houses and local legends of Haworth old Hall and

Howley Hall, once the property of the Saviles, taken over by Lord Cardigan and not far from

Roe Head School, reputed also to be haunted. Gaskell also points to Oakwell Hall (the model

60
Alexander and Smith, p. 364.
61
Ibid., p. 393.
62
Ibid., p. 237.
63
Ibid., p. 287.
64
See Mary Butterfield, Brother in the Shadow: Stories and Sketches by Branwell Brontë (Bradford Libraries
and Information Service, 1988), p. 47. Mary Butterfield cites Croker’s Fairy Legends as a source for Branwell’s
fragment.

26
for Fieldhead in Shirley) near Birstall, located near ‘Bloody Lane—a walk haunted by the

ghost of Captain Batt, the reprobate proprietor of Oakwell Hall.’65

Critics focus especially on Brontë’s adaptation of myth and fairy tale for plot,

imagery and characterisation in Jane Eyre. Brontë feminist critics, Sandra Gilbert and Susan

Gubar recognise the role of myth and fairy tale for the novel’s recurring patterns and

images.66 But, as a bildungsroman and literary realist novel, Molly Clark Hillard argues that

there are too many references to fairy tales and legends in Jane Eyre to support critics’ claims

about the predominance of any one single source.67 The nun-ghost of Villette receives

attention with Sally Shuttleworth’s cultural critical commentary on Brontë’s study of

Victorian contemporary psychology. She argues that the nun ghost ‘functions as a site of

crucial interpretative conflict in the text’ with Dr John (representing the materialist or

scientific view) explaining the apparition as a ‘matter of the nerves [...] a case of spectral

illusion [...] following on from long-continued mental conflict’.68 Distancing the ghost from

Gothic, Shuttleworth offers a framework for Dr John’s diagnosis referring to the

contemporary debate on spectral illusion in medical science. She cites John Abercrombie’s

Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers (1832) and Robert Macnish’s The Philosophy of

Sleep (1830) (both held at the Keighley Mechanics Institute) and a public lecture ‘The

Philosophy of Apparitions’ presented at the Leeds Philosophical Society in 1850-1.69

65
Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London: The Folio Society, 1975), pp. 107-108. Alexander
and Smith, p. 354.
66
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-
Century Literary Imagination (Yale University Press, 2000), p. 351.
67
Molly Clark Hillard, Spellbound: The Fairy Tale and the Victorians (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
2014). See recent studies including Michael M. Clarke, ‘Brontë’s Jane Eyre and the Grimm’s Cinderella’,
Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 40:4 (2000), pp. 695-710; Abigail Heineger, ‘The Faery and the Beast’
Brontë Studies 31:1 (2006), pp. 23-29; Jen Cadwallader, ‘Formed for labour, not for love: Plain Jane and the
limits of female beauty’, Brontë Studies 34:3 (2009), pp. 234-246; Jessica Campbell, ‘Bluebeard and the Beast:
The Mysterious Realism of Jane Eyre’ Marvels and Tales 30:2 (2016) pp. 234-250, Heta Pyhönen, Bluebeard
Gothic:Jane Eyre and its Progeny (University of Toronto Press, 2010).
68
Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), p. 220, p. 282.
69
Ibid., p. 226.

27
 As to sources of folklore, Edward Chitham offers much evidence of Brontë’s Celtic

heritage by tracing Patrick Brontë’s (1777-1861) Irish folk roots of Ballynaskeagh. Chitham

claims that an ‘Irish influence mediated via Patrick Brontë reached the four Brontë children’

and their novels, especially Emily’s Wuthering Heights. His father, Hugh Brunty (1755-

1808), a consummate Gaelic story teller or Senachie (or seanchaí) narrated to his children the

fairy faith and changeling phenomena and recited folk songs. Brunty lived in an area with a

strong heritage of folk legends, ghost stories of headless horsemen, mythology and the Celtic

belief in the supernatural race known as Tuath Dé Danann. Of Patrick’s poems, the ‘Vision of

Hell’ and ‘Kitty’s Revenge’ contain common elements of folk tradition with the motif of

midnight, visions and prophecy tradition in the first, and ghosts in the second. ‘The Harper of

Erin’ from The Rural Minstrel (1813) has links to Killarney, the site of a ghost legend and

The Maid of Killarney (1818) alludes to keening, an Irish custom during the wake. As a child

Charlotte was especially keen to learn of Knock Hill and Lough Neagh, the site of a legend. 70

This evidence is the sum total of the critical appraisal of the role of folklore across

Brontë’s fiction. It is clear that critics acknowledge the presence of folklore in Brontë’s

writing and its role as narrative and source in Jane Eyre and in Shirley. The children were

obviously versed in folklore especially as a result of hearing about various fairy tales from

their father and the family’s maid, Aykroyd. Ghosts contribute to the atmosphere and

characterisation in Wuthering Heights and are linked to the theme of psychology in Villette.

Folklore is conceived as a minor aspect of local Yorkshire but one that is primarily unrelated

to the Brontës’. Much Brontë criticism is geared to the close inter-relationship between

Brontë’s Jane Eyre and fairy tale sources, many of which contain supernatural beings and

supernatural experiences.
70
Edward Chitham, The Brontës’ Irish Background (London: Macmillan Press, 1986), pp. 38-112. See also
Dáithi Ó hÓgáin, The Sacred Isle: Belief and Religion in Pre-Christian Ireland (The Boydell Press: The Collins
Press, 1999).

28
 The critical literary review of Brontë’s folklore requires extensive revision,

elaboration and elucidation. Throughout the critical canon, folklore references are often

overlooked or not defined as folklore, and are rarely contextualised within the field of

Folklore studies. For example, throughout her analysis of the early Tales, Christine Alexander

does not recognise the pervasive presence of folklore in Brontë’s early reading of the bible,

fairy stories, local legend, The Arabian Night’s Entertainments (1704), Tales of the Genii

(1764), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600), Macbeth (1606), The Poems of Ossian (1759),

and the Romantic poetry and prose of Southey and Scott. Alexander and Smith position

supernatural beings and phenomena within the context of folklore but there is a notable lack

of definition, classification, source, origin and functionality. Simpson’s article as examined

above is not referenced. The Brontë critical canon’s brief explanation of folklore needs much

revision. Aykroyd’s ubiquitous comment about the demise of the fairies could be better

understood with the wider discussion of Merrie England and Romantic counter-

enlightenment, the viewpoint expressed inter-generationally in Shirley. ‘Fairishes’ is a

localised Yorkshire dialect term for fairies, and ‘marsh-spirits’ should be explained as the will

o’-the-wisp or ignis fatuus or Jack O’ Lantern (alluded to in The Professor (1857)). From a

functionalist perspective, the banshee, elves, sprites, marsh-spirits and brownies are very

different types of supernatural beings and fundamentally different from vampires, ghosts and

witches. However, they all represent aspects of the otherworld. This material all needs

systematization and delineation. The oriental peri was later integrated into English folklore

collections such as Keightley’s (1789-1872) Fairy Mythology, and in her fiction, Brontë’s

‘peri’ operates in the same way as ‘undine’ and ‘sylph’ as a language to convey stereotypes of

women. Crucially, many of these references are not contextualised as folklore material.

29
 Critics fare better in associating Brontë with the fairy tale genre. Yet, there is no

folklore context. Fairy tales, according to Simpson and Roud:

Is the term used for a group of oral narratives centred on magical tests, quests, and
transformations, which are found throughout Europe and in many parts of Asia too.
They are defined by their plots, which follow standard basic patterns, and have been
classified by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folktale (1961) [...]
The best collection is Phillip, 1992, with accurate texts and valuable introduction and
comments; see also Briggs, 1970-1:A. i and ii, with some texts summarised: Jacobs,
1890/1968, with texts often reworked. All three collections include other genres of
folktale besides the fairytales.71

They define Myths as stories about divine beings, arranged coherently and treated as true and

sacred and endorsed by rulers and priests. If their rule is violated the actors of the story

become fairies, human heroes or giants and the story is no longer myth but folktale. If the

story is trivial but divine, the narrative becomes a religious legend.72

The Gytrash, listed under the heading ‘Natural World’ would be better placed under

‘Supernatural World’ or even better still ‘Folklore’, which are omitted in the Companion. The

‘gitrash’ makes its fictional presence far earlier than Branwell’s Percy in Charlotte’s Glass

Town ‘Military Conversations’ (1829) as a spirit ‘in the form of a large hound’ and later, as a

death omen in ‘Liffey Castle’ (1830). Brontë writes ‘That night in the countryside all the dogs

howled as if the Gitrash was abroad, and a sound like a funeral cry was heard at midnight in

every house’.73 Brontë’s knowledge of witchcraft extends beyond Lancashire to Yorkshire. As

part of literary history, the family would be familiar with Edward Fairfax, poet and translator

of Tarquato Tasso’s work. But as to local history, she would have known about the same

Fairfax from Fewston whose involvement in the major witchcraft trial of 1621 at the York

71
Simpson and Roud, pp. 117-118.
72
Simpson and Roud, p. 254.
73
Christine Alexander , ed., An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, 1, The Glass Town Saga
1826-1832, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 219.

30
Assize was later recorded by him in his Daemonologia.74 Fairfax may be a model for the

superstitious Edward Fairfax Rochester of Jane Eyre. The local tradition at Ponden Kirk is

better known as a love divination, a major type of folklore. Whitsuntide was, in fact, the most

important event of the rural year (as Shirley conveys). It is the church festival or Pentecost

held on the seventh Sunday after Easter as the commemoration of the descent of the Holy

Spirit and the inspiration of the Apostles. The Brontës not only celebrated Whitsun but also

the annual Rush bearing tradition, a custom originally designed to make the church more

habitable and popular in northern counties of England.75 Customs in Brontë’s novels

(Midsummer Eve, May 1, November 5, Wassail) convey her familiarity with traditional

culture. They are simply part of her characters’ way of life as an aspect of Victorian rural

culture with Brontë adapting them to the literary form as plot device, local colour, setting or

symbol of a major theme.

In the notes to Jane Eyre, many allusions to folklore customs and beliefs are

unexplained such as the potent divinatory date of Midsummer Eve (or St John’s Eve, 24 June)

and the repeated references to midnight as the lowest point of negativity in the customary

cycle of time (signalling danger ahead for Jane). The ‘charivari’ was a noisy communal event

known also as riding the stang in Yorkshire that describes a ritual conducted to express

disapproval of community social transgressions. In Shirley midnight also functions as the

negative time for the Luddite rebellion and the witching hour when fairies might be seen (as

Shirley hopes to see). In Villette there are no explanations for the Wassail-cup ritual. I suggest

Brontë wishes to convey a wistful nostalgia to Merry England as there are also allusions to

‘Old Christmas’ and ‘Old October’. Ginevra Fanshawe’s description of Lucy Snowe as

Mother Wisdom is possibly linked to the wise woman or cunning folk tradition similarly to
74
See the account in James Sharpe, Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Yorkshire: Accusations and Counter-
Measures (University of York: Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, 1992).
75
Simpson and Roud, p. 303.

31
Rochester’s disguise as ‘Mother Bunches’, (p. 191) the fortune teller of Jane Eyre.

Knaresborough-born Mother Shipton (her real name was Ursula Southeil) told prophecies,

taught magical recipes and charms and was the subject of seventeenth-century chapbooks

including Mother Bunches Fairy Tales (1777). In Wuthering Heights the musicians were

actually defined as the Waits employed by city corporations such as York but abolished by the

1836 Reform Act.76

Overwhelmingly, critics overlook the significant presence of folklore across her

fiction and its contribution to the narratives and themes in Brontë’s fiction. Shuttleworth is

helpful in suggesting the link between Victorian psychology and the contemporary debate on

spectral illusion theory offering a different context for the novel’s nun-ghost. This reading is

fundamental to one of my interpretations of the supernatural context of Villette. From a

folkloric perspective, the nun ghost of Villette and fairy feature of Jane Eyre offer additional

critiques of Brontë’s interests and concerns about religion, philosophy and science, and

culture, respectively. As I show throughout this thesis, not only the ghost in Villette but

references to magic and second sight in the Tales, and fairies in Jane Eyre altogether

represent folklore’s opposition to rationality. The study of Brontë’s folklore aligns her more

closely to Scott not only in terms of his narrative influence on her fiction but also

ideologically. Folklore in Shirley enhances our understanding of provincial life and its role as

a source. Despite the obvious northern identity of Jane Eyre and Shirley, advances are slow in

situating the local cultural environment as a source of folklore in her fiction. The

acknowledgement of Patrick’s Celtic folklore milieu does not extend to Maria Branwell

76
Simpson and Roud, p. 377.

32
(1783-1821) of Penzance, a county renowned for its folklore heritage.77 Gaskell highlights

Cornish society quoting Dr Davy, a contemporary of the family. He describes the locals as:

‘Superstitious, even the belief in witches maintained its ground, and there was an almost

unbounded credulity respecting the supernatural and monstrous. There was scarcely a parish

in the Mount’s Bay that was without a haunted house, or a spot to which some story of

supernatural horror was not attached’.78

The critical canon has yet to develop a closer association between Brontë and folklore

studies.

Brontë and the Gothic Tradition.

Without doubt, and this, is the crux of my premise, allusions or references to the supernatural

world, to superstition, to supernatural beings and to supernatural phenomena, are conceived as

solely Gothic. Alexander, for example, develops the Gothic legacy in examining the

juvenilia.79 The genre, familiar to and enjoyed by the Brontës from an early age continued its

presence in their novels. Alexander and Smith describe Gothic novels as fiction characterised

by elements of terror, the ominous, mystery, macabre, the supernatural, set often in the

Middle Age and in an oppressive atmosphere of a haunted castle. In their commentary on

‘Gothic novels’ in the Companion they suggest that Brontë was familiar with late Eighteenth-

century gothic sources: Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) (naming

and beginning Gothic fiction) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), A

Sicilian Romance (1790) and The Italian; or the Confessional of the Black Penitent (1797),
77
See for example, William Bottrell, Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall (Penzance: The
Author, 1870); Robert Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England (London, 1865); Anna Eliza Bray, A
Description of the Part of Devonshire Bordering on the Tamar and the Tavy; its Natural History, Manners,
Customs, Superstitions, Scenery, Antiquities, Biography of Eminent Persons, etc in a Series of Letters to Robert
Southey Esq (1836).
78
Gaskell, pp. 65-66.
79
Christine Alexander, ‘That “Kingdom of Gloom”: Charlotte Brontë, the Annuals, and the Gothic’, Nineteenth-
Century Literature, 47:4, (1993), pp. 409-436.

33
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), to name several and Gothic

tales and Romantic poetry published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. They argue that

Brontë exploited the genre for melodrama, exoticism and violence in the tales and adapted the

mode at a deeper more sophisticated level in her novels. Brontë’s literary use of the

supernatural is Radcliffean.

Although Alexander and Smith argue that Wuthering Heights makes more of

conjuring ghosts, dreams and hallucinations than Jane Eyre, all of the siblings exploit the

Gothic lineage, grafting its tropes, motifs, imagery, characterisation, atmosphere and setting

onto contemporary realism. Feelings of dread and terror, apparitions, unnatural phenomena

and disturbing dream states portray complex character psychologies. Gothic features do not

reveal ‘paranormal forces so much as they reveal characters’ superstitions, transcendental

beliefs, desires and subconscious awareness’.80 Excepting Shirley, all of Brontë’s novels (and

Emily’s novel) rely heavily on Gothic.

Scholars strongly associate Brontë with Scott’s Gothic. The Brontës’ devouring of the

Waverley novels and probably the ballads too is reflected in the frequent allusion, reference

and direct quotation of Scott across their fiction. Brontë critics argue that ‘much of the

Brontës penchant for […] Gothic novels […] had been fostered by their addiction to Scott’s

poetry and novels’.81 Branwell’s Gytrash of ‘The Thurstons of Darkwall’ (1837) is mined

from not only the spectre of Ponden House, near Haworth, but Scott’s spirits in his novels and

poems.82 Reference is also to Scott’s Scottish border ballads. More, generally, critics of

80
Alexander and Smith, pp. 222-223.
81
Ibid., pp. 444-446. See also Florence Swinton Dry, The Sources of “Jane Eyre” (Cambridge: W. Heffer &
sons, 1940), Florence Swinton Dry, The Sources of “Wuthering Heights” (Cambridge: W. Heffer & sons, 1937).
82
Butterfield, pp. 45-47.

34
Structuralism, W. A. Craik and E.A. Kneis and the Deconstructionist approach by Carole

Bock, credit Scott as an invaluable influence on Brontë’s narrative development as a writer.83

Robert B. Heilman’s influential article, ‘Charlotte Brontë’s “New Gothic”’ (1958)

examines Brontë’s modification of old Gothic conventions to the arena of psychology. In

Angria and on to The Professor (1857) Heilman argues, Brontë intensifies the ‘emotionalism

and psychology’ of the ‘Gothic novel of sensibility’ and asserts a freedom almost obsolete in

historical Gothic rarely employed in previous Gothic writers. In Jane Eyre, Brontë raises

Gothic stock of childhood terror, ghostliness, vampires, dreams, supernatural phenomena,

mystery and telepathy to psychological and symbolic heights, achieving greater levels of

insight into inner human reality. Brontë continues to eschew Gothic stereotypes of melodrama

and sensation in Lucy Snowe’s nun-ghost apparitions, the trance-like episode in the park and

in her emotional breakdown. Even the social sobering of Shirley with its passion and theme of

private life is adapted from the Gothic impulse.84 Delving deeper into the psychoanalytic

aspects of her novels, Robert A. Colby, writing a year later, studies Lucy Snowe’s

unconscious mind and its dynamic of dream-like symbols.85

However, more recently, critiques marginalise Gothic’s input in Brontë psychology.

Christina Crosby’s deconstructionist reading of Villette centres on Gothic’s undermining of

Brontë’s literary realist goals. Crosby reads the ghost nun of Villette as an unwelcome

83
See W.A Craik, The Brontë Novels (London: Methuen, 1969), E.A. Kneis, The Art of Charlotte Brontë (Ohio:
Ohio University Press, 1969), Carol Bock, Charlotte Brontë and the Storyteller’s Audience (Iowa University
Press, 1992).
84
Heilman, pp. 118-132. Interestingly, Brontë is not referred to in several key early twentieth century Gothic
criticisms such as Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (New York and London:
G.P Putnam, 1917), Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest: History of the Gothic novel (London: Fortune
Press, 1938) and Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame: being a History of the Gothic Novel in England, its
Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration and Residuary Influences (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966).
85
Alexander and Smith, p. 409. See Robert A. Colby, ‘Villette and the Life of the Mind’, PMLA 75:4 (1960), pp.
410-419. See also Margaret Homans, ‘Dreaming of Children: Literalization in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights,
in The Female Gothic, ed. Juliann E. Fleenor (Montreal: Eden 1983), pp. 257-259.

35
intrusion destabilising realism by its ‘incompletely repressed Romanticism’86 that subverts

psychological truths of the unconscious. Similarly, Nathalie Mera Ford agrees that the generic

doubling of romance and realism is regarded as a gateway to ‘disruptive Romantic

conventions of the non-rational mind’ and illustrated by states of reverie, dream and trance

portrayed in Shirley and Villette that depict an:

Unstable if compelling psychic terrain, one that is best for her highly sensitive female
protagonists to avoid, despite its enduring allure. In an increasingly rationalistic world,
romantic notions of creative subjectivity with transcendent experience were felt to
compromise nineteenth-century ideas of excessive introspection’.87

Likewise, in her introduction to Jane Eyre, Sally Shuttleworth contests Bertha Mason’s

Gothic intrusion to the realist novel’s theme of gender.88 In her feminist critique, Diane Long

Hoeveler, initially, recognises Gothic’s two hundred year old tradition and its role in

critiquing patriarchy (thus recognising Gothic as in touch with social and cultural realities).

But then she bemoans the ghost of Lucy Snowe of Villette as the ghost of a defunct and dying

literary tradition. The Gothic, she concludes, is a dying discourse system’.89 However, on the

subject of doubling in Jane Eyre, Alison Milbank resurrects its Gothic element arguing that

the novel is founded on the spectral and then the real. The novel ‘evokes a spiritual world

through unexplained ghostly visions and sounds, yet finally provides a natural origin for all

the effects’.90 The Gothic horror of Bertha Mason, operating as a doppelganger, proves

invaluable, according to Nicole A. Diederich. Its psychological awakening enables Brontë to

86
Christina Crosby, ‘Charlotte Brontë’s Haunted Text’, Studies in English Literature 24 (1984), pp. 701-715 (p.
673).
87
Nathalie Mera Ford, ‘”The Track of Reverie”: Vision and Pathology in Shirley and Villette’, Brontë Studies
36:2 (2011), pp. 141-151 (p. 150).
88
Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. xvii.
89
Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism: the professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the
Brontës (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), p.222
90
Alison Milbank, ‘Gothic Femininities’, in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, ed. Catherine Spooner and
Emma McEvoy (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 155-163 ( p. 157).

36
subvert the conventional rhetoric on marriage with a ‘discourse of remarriage that exposes the

often powerless subjectivity of both the first and the second “angel in the house”’.91

In terms of genre, structure, narrative and theme, Brontë’s Gothic is seen to either add

or subtract to her novels. In terms of material, critics are unanimous that allusions to vampire,

ghosts, wraiths, macabre dreams, witchcraft, apparitions, Gytrash and any other supernatural

phenomena, are contextualised as Gothic (with some of these references overlapping also with

folklore). Brontë’s Radcliffean Gothic is positioned in opposition to realism according to

structural, psychoanalytic and feminist critics. Critics examine this tension across her novels

without challenging these generic assumptions. Regarded positively or negatively, Gothic

romance characterises Brontë’s fiction. It is seen to function along with myth and fairy tale as

exemplified in Gilbert and Gubar’s monumental work on rebellious feminism and the

progress to self hood in Jane Eyre. As a liability or of literary value, Gothic is central to

Brontë scholarship.

Several points need to be made. Firstly, prior to Heilman’s essay on Brontë’s Gothic,

the Victorian periodical press rarely, if almost never, applied the term to her fiction. The

Victorians placed far greater value on the Realist tradition and truth to life than Gothic

romance. Of Jane Eyre, G. H. Lewes says in an unsigned review in Fraser’s Magazine

(December 1847) that: ‘Reality, deep significant reality—is the great characteristic of the

book’.92 Reviewers’ comments on the novel’s defects, targeted at elements of improbability,

melodrama, the supernatural and superstitions, mystery and the unnatural, might have in mind

Brontë’s novel as typifying Victorian realist texts as well as or excluding the Gothic novel.

Contemporary reactions to Gothic features in Villette are few. The one exception is an

91
Nicole A. Diederich, ‘Gothic Doppelgangers and Discourse: Examining the Doubling Practice of (Re)
Marriage in Jane Eyre’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 6:3 (2010), pp. 1-27 (p. 27).
92
Miriam Allot, The Brontës: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p.
84.

37
unsigned review in the Literary Gazette (5 February 1853) that refers again to the intrusion of

reality with the novel’s phantom nun. Are these comments targeting Brontë’s Gothic or the

Realist novel? Across her fiction there is no direct quote, allusion or reference to Walpole,

Lewis or Shelley. Did Brontë actually read these works? There are no explicit indications of

her reading this material. The only specific reference is to Radcliffe’s The Italian in Shirley

(referring to Rose Yorke’s worldly desire to travel) and Brontë’s reference in a letter to

William Godwin’s (1756-1836) Caleb Williams.93 There is little analysis between Villette and

The Mysteries of Udolpho. However, had Brontë read Radcliffe’s novel she may have

imitated her ideas about Enlightenment rationality. Radcliffe’s question ‘whether the spirit,

after it has quitted the body, is ever permitted to revisit the earth; and if it is, whether it was

possible for spirits to become visible to the sense’,94 might resonate with Lucy’s

eschatological investigation in Villette. According to Terry Castle in the introduction to The

Mysteries of Udolpho, Radcliffe’s intention is to awaken in her readers, ‘a sense of the

numinous—of invisible forces at work in the world’95 and that her interest in divine mysteries

is seen also, to promote the values of Enlightenment rationality whilst also upholding

orthodox Christian values. Castle’s comments resonate with my reading of Villette.

Secondly, Jane Eyre associates her ghost beliefs not with Gothic but with the oral folk

narratives of Bessie’s nursery tales and ballads and Jane’s enquiry of a Thornfield ghost is

rooted in local legend and not Gothic sources. The nun-ghost of Villette originates as a ‘ghost

story’ or ‘vague tale’ or ‘legend’ rather than to Gothic. Thirdly, the identity of Scott as

antiquarian needs development as well as his influence as a Gothic writer. Nowhere is Scott

recognised as a writer of folklore yet I would argue that folklore permeates all of his poetry

93
Margaret Smith, ed., The Letters of Charlotte Brontë with a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, 2:
1848-1851 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 202.
94
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 549.
95
Radcliffe, p. xxi.

38
and prose. His Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830) is conceived of more

dismissively as occult material rather than a major resource of psychology, early science and a

fundamental folklore resource. Fourthly, although my reading of gender coheres, to a large

degree with Gilbert and Gubar’s study of female power in Jane Eyre, they do not recognise

folklore features. The idea of the romance/realism opposition in Brontë’s novels (as Tim

Dolin and others suggest) might be re-read as psychological reality or magical thinking and

Enlightenment rationality as an aspect of the realist novel. This tension is played out in

characters’ desire for rational explanations of their irrational fears, superstitious beliefs or

magical thinking, religious beliefs in the divine, dreams of omens and their instinctive

presentiments. Critics do not seem to acknowledge Brontë’s adaptation of folklore from

Celtic fiction, Romantic-era poetry and prose or earlier material such as Shakespearean drama

and possibly Gothic novels. Most middle class homes would contain standard works of the

bible, classical mythology, Chaucer, The Thousand and One Nights (1704), Pope, Milton,

Swift and Johnson, all of which contain folklore material. Moreover, the Brontës also owned

James Macpherson’s Ossian (1759), Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817), and Scott’s work.

Across her writing, Brontë also alludes to the evil fairy of Voltaire’s Candide (1759) and the

witch or sorceress of Wilhelm Meinhold’s Sidonie von Bork, die Klosterhexe (1847) (and also

of The Amber Witch (1844) which Brontë requested from Smith Elder and Co). It does seem

that the Gothic novel is but one source of many for which she could exploit various features

of folklore.

In all, folklore receives little attention compared with the role of Gothic, fairy tale and

myth in Brontë critical studies.

39
Folklore in Gothic.

In addressing assumptions between ‘Folklore and the Gothic’,96 Harris makes some headway.

He pinpoints the question: How do supernatural folk beliefs and folk narratives function in

nineteenth-century literary representations of fantasy, and the fantastic, many of which are not

Gothic?97 Harris points to Gothic’s antecedents of myth, fairy tale, folk ballad revival,

legends, medieval romance and Celtic lore.98 In noting commonality, Gothic atmosphere,

folklore and the fantastic in nineteenth-century fiction often rely on stock motifs of ghosts,

demons, corpses and vampires, and vocabulary: supernatural, haunting, terror, horror,

marvellous and monstrous. Castles and manors juxtapose wild settings in Gothic reminiscent

of folk legends (and, often fairy tales).99 They embody the aesthetic and emotional

atmosphere of ‘the fantastic- even though the moment of hesitation may prove to be but

uncanny according to Todorovian terms’.100 Ideological similarities include psychological

states underpinning cultural repression,101 Nationalism and ideas of borders, Imperialism,102

Transcendentalism and crucially, Enlightenment rationality and science.103

96
Harris, Folklore, p. 19.
97
Ibid., p. 20.
98
Ibid., p. 20. See also Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1979), Margaret Carter, Spectre or Delusion: The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction (London: UMI Research
Press, 1987), G. Malcolm Laws Jr., A Literary History of the Popular Ballad (Durham: Duke University Press,
1968), David Punter, The Literature of Terror (London: Longman, 1980), Marina Warner, Fantastic
Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
99
Harris, Folklore, p. 19. See Lucy Armitt, ‘Gothic Fairy Tale’ in The Handbook to Gothic Literature ed. Marie
Mulvey-Roberts (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
100
Harris, Folklore, p. 20. See Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
Trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973).
101
Harris, Folklore, p. 3. See William Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985).
102
Harris, Folklore, p. 150. See Patrick Bratlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830-
1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 227.
103
Harris, Folklore, pp. 5-6. See Marshall Brown, ‘Philosophy and the Gothic Novel’ in Approaches to Teaching
Gothic Fiction: The British and American Traditions, ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Tamar Heller (New York:
MLA, 2003), p. 47.

40
 Although Harris notes a literary time difference between them, he seems to overlook

the fundamental difference. Folklore is rooted in an oral tradition characterising cultural

history that predates the Enlightenment whereas Gothic is a post-Enlightenment literary

construct, mode or genre. One is grounded in history and oral tradition but adapted to the

literary form, and the other is a literary form. Gothic is but one literary genre or mode to adapt

folklore from its cultural/historic context. Gothic exploits the ghost in particular but also

werewolves, devils, magicians, witches, vampires, wraiths (or doppelgangers) (and more

briefly to fairies and omens) for its supernatural atmosphere, plot and theme. Ghosts in

English folklore were rooted in communal tradition and to a degree, were endorsed in

Scriptural texts. By the late eighteenth-century, Gothic writers had seized on the ghost

material to inject mystery and the macabre, the uncanny, and symbolism of being haunted.

The Gothic and folklore evade comparison because folklore is not in itself a literary genre,

and conversely Gothic is not an oral history. Gothic is not folk literature. It is feasible,

however, to compare folklore in folk narratives and Gothic. Harris’s main aim is to examine

how nineteenth-century writers revise, imitate and transform folklore material into their

narratives. Situating Gothic is useful if only to provide examples of an earlier literary

tradition’s interaction with folklore.104 It is better to approach the subject as ‘folklore in

Gothic’ rather than Harris ‘folklore and Gothic’. The role of folklore in Gothic fiction is

beyond the scope of this project. Suffice to say, the distinction is clear.

The picture is complicated because folklore permeates much of Gothic and realist

fiction. But there are also distinctions. Fairies are a major feature in folk literature and

Victorian Realist novels. My introduction, thus far, cannot stress more the significance of

fairies in the Realist novel. The fairy motif occupies a central place in folklore literary studies

104
Stacey McDowell, ‘Folklore’ in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, ed. William Hughes, David Punter and
Andrew Smith (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 252-254 (p. 253).

41
especially in discussions on Victorian fairy tales, folk tales and Victorian realist novels.

Fairies feature far less in Gothic supernaturalism. As Maureen Duffy says in her chapter

‘Gothick Horror’, fairies, as part of the setting in The Mysteries of Udolpho are quickly

rationalised away.105 But, significantly, as Silver demonstrates, the Victorian realist novel is a

genre in which the fairy occupies a central place. Moreover, ghosts, vampire, customs, second

sight, love divinations and charms as well as fairies, feature widely in the Victorian novel.

The ghost, however, remains the stock-in-trade of Gothic romance.

On Scott, David Morse engages with the role of ghosts in Kenilworth, The Pirate,

Quentin Durward, The Fair Maid of Perth, The Talisman and The Heart of Midlothian not

only thematically, to explore cultural history, but structurally too. He writes:

There is scarcely a single novel that does not make some use of superstition and magical
practices [...] Superstition is seen by Scott as a cultural and not an individual
phenomenon [...] superstition and the irrational [...] break down assumptions about
continuity and orderliness and become symptomatic of an instability in the world and in
men’s conceptions of it [...] Superstition can be seen as a method of ‘reading’ history.106

So too, Dorson, Parsons, Silver and Harris also examine Scott’s deployment of his ghosts

from a folklore perspective.107 Ghosts are pervasive not only in Gothic romance but also in

Scott’s historical romances, Dickens’ and Gaskell’s Victorian short stories, Hogg’s folk

legends and the realist novels of Brontë, Eliot and Hardy, characterising the rhetoric of

scepticism. The Gothic tradition, then, does not have the monopoly on the ghost trope. Ghosts

are part of a much wider context that includes fairies, omens, customs, and so on. Yet, as I

show in Brontë, the realist novel ventures on to explore the thematic potential of fairies. This

is the area of folklore study. We must extend our reading of the ghost trope to not only Gothic

but also to folklore in the realist novel.

105
Duffy, p. 230.
106
David Morse, Romanticism: A Structural Analysis (The Macmillan Press, 1982), pp. 163-181.
107
See Dorson, pp.113-115; Parsons, Witchcraft, pp. 5-15, pp. 105-122; Harris, Folklore, p. 199, Silver, pp.10-
13.

42
 Lastly, folklore critics interact with folk literary forms that comprise of shorter prose

or folk tales or folk narratives such as fairy tales, fables, nursery tales, supernatural stories,

novellas, legends, broadsides, chapbooks, riddles, folk songs, ballads (a subdivision of folk

song) and drama. However, folklore material, as I reiterate, is not the sole domain of folk

fiction but also Gothic romance, Ghost and Horror stories and, significantly, literary realism.

The main focus of my study is geared to addressing the sources and ideological uses

of folklore. The entire study of Brontë’s folklore, to date, has remained the domain of folklore

critics. The role and function of folklore in Brontë’s fiction is crying out for a broader

scholarly literary field of enquiry. However, its requirement of cross-disciplinary interactions

with folklore studies, cultural anthropology, cultural history, psychology, and literary studies

and folklore, is also necessary. Throughout this study, I re-examine Brontë’s narrative uses of

the supernatural as folklore examining direct quotations, allusions, references and motifs

across her fiction that indicate her assuredness of folklore traditions and beliefs, and her

awareness of literary fairies (and witches), Romantic theories on fairy origins, contemporary

debates on spectral illusion theory and differing theories on beliefs in ghosts. This thesis re-

sets the context of Brontë’s uses of the supernatural in the folklore of the realist novel rather

than Gothic, focusing in particular on the functionality of the fairy motif in Jane Eyre and

ghosts in Villette. Although Brontë treats other types of folklore for narrative purposes only,

their allusion only serves to reinforce this new narrative framework. This project, then,

furthers the study of folklore in Brontë Victorian novels. I therefore address the following

three research questions: Who, what and where are Brontë’s major sources of folklore drawn?

What and where are folklore references in Brontë’s fiction? What are the ideological

functions of folklore in Brontë’s fiction?

43
 To that end, I engage with several theoretical models. Despite Bob Bushaway’s

deviation from more revisionist cultural historical analyses of nineteenth-century rural culture

his work best represents my study of folklore in Shirley and Brontë’s locale.108 For the section

on Brontë’s letters I draw on The Oxford Handbook of the Development of Imagination

(2013)109 a useful resource to understand the prevalence of magical or imagined thinking as

one aspect of the theory of imagination applying it to both Brontë fiction and her letters. My

main interest in the study of imagination is Karl S. Rosengren and Jason A. French definition

of magical thinking as the search for causality, the tendency to essentialize and the desire for

knowledge.110 For the study of the fairy motif in Jane Eyre I advance the ideas of feminist

folklore theorist Joan Newlon Radnor in Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk

Culture (1993). Radnor studies folklore’s coding, encryption or secret knowledge as a tool to

explore cultural issues on gender power, resistance and status reversal. These covert

expressions of subversion, Radnor argues, are common in women subjected to men’s

domination, silence and marginalization.111 The term, ‘symbolic inversion’ broadly defines an

act of expressive behaviour which ‘inverts, contradicts, abrogates or in some fashion presents

an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values and norms be they linguistic, literary

[…]’.112 However, there are limitations to Radnor’s work as it extends only to the ballad form,

legends, oral stories and Irish women’s lament poetry (and women’s diaries). Yet, the idea of

interpreting coding as a form of strategic communication in women’s folklore is relevant to

108
Bob Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700-1880 (London: Junction
Books, 1982), Bob Bushaway, ‘Tacit, Unsuspected, but still Implicit Faith’: Alternative Belief in Nineteenth-
Century Rural England’ in Popular Culture in England 1500-1850, ed. Tim Harris (London: Macmillan Press,
1995), pp. 189-215, Bob Bushaway, ‘Things said or sung a thousand times’: customary society and oral culture
in rural England, 1700-1900’ in The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain 1500-1850 ed. Adam Fox and Daniel
Woolf (Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 256-273.
109
Marjorie Taylor, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Development of Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
110
Ibid., pp. 49-50.
111
Joan Newlon Radner, ed., Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 3.
112
Ibid., p. 25.

44
my work on Jane Eyre. Other studies of symbolic representations of fairies in Carole Silver’s

Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (1999) and Maureen

Duffy’s The Erotic World of Faery (1972) are invaluable. Cultural anthropological studies in

Rites of Passage provide another resource for the theme of power and sexuality in Jane Eyre.

In The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969),113 Victor Turner adapts his

studies on status inversion and symbolic inversion from Arnold van Gennep’s definitions of

rites of passage in Les Rites de Passage (1908). I apply Turner’s concepts to suggest that the

fairy motif occupies a zone of power that elevates Jane’s social position and relegates

Rochester’s. Similarly, folklore studies on the symbolism of boundaries114 adapt van

Gennep’s model, useful also for my interpretation of the site of the stile as a border, symbolic

of Jane’s transition from girl to woman, as the Other or different, her sense of not belonging,

and to exploit her fairy image (as a site for supernatural beings).

For the study of the ghost motif in Villette, I draw on general revisionist studies on

Victorian religion in Frank Turner’s Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian

Intellectual Life (1993) and Richard Noakes in The Victorian Supernatural (2004) which

discusses spiritualism and science.115 More crucially, I fit the ghost theme within the very

specific framework of eschatology and the more specific analysis by Michael Wheeler on

Christian doctrine on the four last things: death, judgement, heaven and hell.116 In addition, I

draw on other Christian and ecclesiastical-led historical studies on doctrines of the afterlife,

113
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969).
114
Hilda Ellis Davidson, ed., Boundaries and Thresholds: Papers from a Colloquium of the Katharine Briggs
Club (Gloucestershire: Thimble Press, 1993), pp. 7-13, Barbara C. Spooner, ‘The Haunted Stile’ Folklore 79
(1968), pp. 135-139.
115
Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), Richard Noakes, ‘Spiritualism, science and the supernatural in mid-
Victorian Britain’ in The Victorian Supernatural, ed. Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 23-39 (pp. 23-27).
116
Michael Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990)

45
works that document the extent to which ghosts still commanded critical attention in post-

Reformation spirituality.117

The main body of the thesis is divided into two chapters that identify local and literary

sources and two subsequent chapters that examine themes. Chapter One situates Brontë’s

novel Shirley within her local cultural environment. Folklore serves the narrative features of

this regional novel and supports my claim that Shirley offers a record of traditional culture. I

draw on primary and secondary sources of Yorkshire folklore and compare the material in

Brontë letters, drawing comparisons of this trait in her fictional characterisation.

Chapter Two explores the influence of Walter Scott on Brontë’s writing and in

particular the similarities between Scott and Brontë’s creative treatment of folklore. Situating

Scott firmly in a folklore literary tradition, I advance the idea that Brontë and Scott shared

similar literary and antiquarian sources of folklore and demonstrate Brontë’s adaptation of

Scott’s narrative and ideological uses of folklore in his Waverley romances in her juvenilia.

Scott’s creative uses of supernatural beings such as dwarfs and supernatural phenomena

associated with astrology and magic, second sight and ghosts, are significant influences on

Brontë’s Glass Town and Angria. I also discuss Scott’s interest in Scottish literary folk

tradition, and examine how Brontë’s absorption of her local cultural environment resonates

also with Scott’s cultural milieu operating as oral folk sources.

In Chapter Three I turn to Brontë’s ideological uses of folklore and the fairy motif in

Jane Eyre. I draw on Scott’s fairy lore material, discussing how Brontë transforms it to depict

the ‘otherness’ of Jane and how her appearance constructs a new kind of heroine that

challenges the idealisation of Victorian femininity. The fairy conveys Rochester’s sense of

Jane’s power as another indicator of her difference. It is also a commentary on gender power

117
Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon, eds., The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul (Ecclesiastical
History Society: Boydell and Brewer, 2009).

46
relations. With Maureen Duffy’s resource I argue that Rochester’s encoding of Jane as fairy

not only communicates male attitudes towards women but conveys a language for him to

express his sexual desire of Jane.

Lastly, in Chapter Four, I suggest that Brontë imitates and adapts aspects of Scott’s

Letter One and Letter Ten of Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830) to examine the

tension between folk superstition and Enlightenment rationality in Villette’s nun-ghost

plot/motif. I argue that Brontë’s debate is less science versus faith but more internal to the

complexities of religious truths. Coleman O. Parsons is useful not only for the treatment of

ghosts across Scott’s work but the evolution of sceptic thinking in the nineteenth-century and

the counter-argument of belief in the supernatural. I refer to Frank Turner’s examination of

religion and Richard Noakes discussion on the supernatural, and several studies of the

afterlife in ecclesiastical history. Referring to Michael Wheeler’s study of eschatology, I show

that Brontë’s concerns about the afterlife were a matter of doctrine within the Christian faith

and not a venture into spiritualist thinking.

47
 Chapter One

Brontë’s Local Sources and Shirley

The misfortunes she mentioned were not always to her-self. She thought such
sensitiveness to omens was like the cholera, present to susceptible people—some
feeling more, some less.
Elizabeth Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë1

In this chapter, I aim to deepen the association between Brontë’s northern novels, especially

Shirley, their allusion to folklore and the local cultural environment of Yorkshire. It warrants

a reading of Shirley from the perspective of its cultural historical framework. The Yorkshire

locale, I argue, provides a source of folklore for her creative writing. References to local

folklore in Jane Eyre are also present. But, given that Shirley is a condition- of- Yorkshire

novel we might conceive of it as a more reliable folklore source. However, the Gytrash of

Jane Eyre is a local folkloric belief as examined in the introduction. Shirley seems to mirror

the local people’s interaction with the cultural framework of the beliefs, customs and proverbs

of rural county life in the early nineteenth century. Shirley is not simply a condition-of-

England novel but a condition-of-Yorkshire novel. Its historicity is in part indebted to the

folkloric framework. Not only does Brontë reconstruct the economic and political structure of

Yorkshire in 1811-2 (and national events of 1848) but also, to an extent, the cultural structure.

Despite the lack of folklore as ideological tool in Shirley, it adds to the narrative and helps to

shape its generic regional definition. This is a novel moreover, that intimates local traditional

culture as a key resource for Brontë’s knowledge of folklore. Notwithstanding the pitfalls of

treating her northern novels as factual rather than literary constructs, it is possible to study

1
Gaskell, p. 127.

48
them from the perspective of cultural change in rural Yorkshire. Shirley characterises this

aspect of nineteenth-century social change and to a degree, this novel is alert to cultural as

well as social history. I also identify the use of local folklore references to support the rural

narrative setting, the Luddite plot and Whitsun as key dramatic incidents. Folklore is an

aspect of magical thinking in characterisation and the notion of characters’ sense of place and

rootedness. Above all, the presence of folklore in Shirley offers a commentary on Brontë’s

awareness of cultural transformation in its sentiment of nostalgia. I examine the local cultural

backdrop of Yorkshire to argue its potential as a major source for Shirley. Finally, comparing

allusions to folklore in Brontë’s letters with her novels, furthers the idea of the local cultural

environment as a major inspiration for her. Her letters indicate not only her use of folklore as

a descriptive tool to convey emotion but provide evidence of her own magical thinking.

Critics and biographers situate this novel in the historic-regional setting of Yorkshire

landscape, people, or dialect and industrial Luddite theme and recognise Shirley within the

regional genre.2 Despite earlier acknowledgement of the regional specificity of Shirley and

critical praise for Brontë’s working class sympathies,3 Terry Eagleton’s study of the novel’s

politics sets the tone for critical evaluations of the Luddite theme.4 Yet, still, critical

consensus is to the novel’s reconstruction of a specific event in Yorkshire’s history with an

acceptance that Brontë drew on reliable sources of back copies of the Leeds Mercury and

first-hand accounts of the Luddite period from her father who was curate at Hartshead Church

during the protest movement of 1811-12. However, I am particularly interested in Janet

Cezari’s resurrection of accusations of the novel’s lack of unity stating that one of its ruling
2
See for example Phyllis Bentley, English Regional Novel (Norwood Editions, 1941), Arthur Pollard, The
Landscape of the Brontës (Exeter: Webb and Bower, 1988), Herbert E. Wroot, The Persons and Places of the
Brontë Novels (New York, 1906).
3
Asa Briggs, ‘Private and Social Themes in Shirley’, Brontë Society Transactions 13:3, 1958, pp. 203-219. See
also comments in the ‘Introduction’ to Charlotte Brontë, Shirley ed. Judith and Andrew Hook (London: Penguin
Edition, 1974).
4
Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës, 2nd edn. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp.
45-60.

49
ideas is its ‘defence against time. It expresses a deep longing for an earlier state of things’.5

Cezari argues that the novel ‘subverts the faith in progress that shaped the world of Victorian

England’. She recognises in Shirley in part the desire not for ‘progress, and not even

transcendence, but a reversal of the course of its own narrative’6 referring to the novel’s

closing comment on the loss of the fairies.

Notwithstanding the omission of folklore in critical studies of Shirley, I take my lead

from various analyses in order to further reinforce the argument that Brontë drew on her

immediate locale to source folklore material. The study of the regional novel might be better

placed by Keith Snell’s studies. Acknowledging that the regional novel mixes the real with

the imaginary, the known with the unknown, he defines it as one that contains local dialect,

landscape, setting, history and customs. Snell states that any regional writer might supplement

other descriptions as a ‘way of imagining, realising or knowing life, character and social

relations, with unique imaginative and evocative potential’.7 This genre, he adds, on occasion,

incorporates ‘novels dependent upon regional folklore’. Of particular note is Snell’s noting of

Scott’s historical settings incorporating vernacular surroundings ‘imbued with local narratives

and folkloric traditions’. He cites other examples including the provincial novels of Hardy’s

Return of the Native (1878) and Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), of which folklore is present.

In Carole Silver’s final chapter ‘Farewell to the Fairies’ she points out the lament to

the fairies in Shirley and Jane Eyre.8 Indeed, the fairy lament is embedded in both novels with

Jane Eyre vocalising her sadness on two occasions, once as a child and once as an adult. In

the former, Jane opts to read Gulliver’s Travels instead of fairy tales, having finally accepted

that having searched ‘among foxglove leaves and bells and under mushrooms’ the fairies had

5
Brontë, Shirley, p. xviii.
6
Ibid, p. xxii.
7
Keith D. M. Snell, The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1800-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), p. 4.
8
Silver, p. 194.

50
‘all gone out of England to some savage country, where the woods were wilder and thicker,

and the population more scant’ (p. 21). This passage also relates to the characteristic theme,

superstition and rationality prevalent across her fiction. Later, in the novel Jane repeats the

sentiment to Rochester saying:

The men in green all forsook England a hundred years ago [...] and not even in Hay
Lane or the fields about it could you find a trace of them. I don’t think either summer
or harvest, or winter moon will ever shine on their revels more. (p. 122)

I provide a context for Cezari’s comments, developing the idea of Merrie England in Shirley,

a novel more fitting to this world viewpoint given its theme of industrial change. These

studies support my argument and also go some way to my shifting Brontë’s novels in the

general direction of reframing Brontë’s novels as folklore in the realist novel.

Cultural Historical Analyses

The context of cultural history offers a useful framework to situate my reading of Yorkshire

folklore as a major source for Brontë. Although in passing, Jason Marc Harris refers to the

interdisciplinary nature of folklore, literature and cultural history, citing studies of customs

and beliefs by key historians Bob Bushaway (but also Patrick Joyce and John Rule) to

highlight their insistence of the persistence of folklore in the nineteenth century.9 These

studies support my claim that Brontë was in a position to develop her knowledge of local

folklore in the early to mid Nineteenth-century. Harris quotes an Anglican clergyman’s

experience as late as 1826 of a ‘world of comprehensive vision’ as opposed to a community

polarised by true faith and indolent superstition. Looking back the clergyman remembered

conjuring parsons and cunning clerks (or wise men), blacksmiths as doctors, and old maids

perceived as witches, saying ‘in short all nature seemed to be united—its wells, its plants, its

9
Harris, Folklore pp. 6-17.

51
beasts, its reptiles and even inanimate things in sympathising with human credulity; in

predicting or in averting, in relieving or in aggravating misfortune’.10

Tim Harris includes Bushaway’s historical study of alternate beliefs within Harris’

wider and revisionist discussion on popular culture. He too recognises the value of

Bushaway’s examination of the structure and system of belief in nineteenth-century rural

England. Bushaway’s work does offer a basis from which to establish the cultural context of

rural folklore. His studies all emphasise a consistent pattern of continuity yet change of

alternative belief and calendar customs and of a picture, nuanced and ambiguous,

characterising nineteenth-century rural England. His studies demonstrate the interrelationship

between cultural history and folklore studies. Bushaway also quotes from a local clergyman,

adapting the title of his essay, ‘Tacit, Unsuspected, but still implicit faith’: Alternative Belief

in Nineteenth-Century Rural England’ (1995) from some of the words of Reverend J.C.

Atkinson, a clergyman who walked the length and breadth of the Yorkshire dales to visit his

parishioners and described the beliefs as ‘a living faith’.11 Bushaway describes superstitions

such as divination, fairies, omens and prophecy as ‘alternative belief’. For many people, they

were integrated into the structure of rural life of the individual alongside place and landscape,

the natural world, seasons, weather and time, domestic life and work. Belief in omens did not

abate in the presence of the Church. They were integrated into life crises and celebration,

knowledge and wisdom. As a system, omens provided a universal set of principles for

controlling uncertainty, chance and minimising disaster. They provided a coping mechanism,

a living framework, a value system, a perception of reality and of existence. Beliefs were

based on phenomenology, observation and experience. Magic conveyed a symbolic universe

10
Harris, Folklore, p. 15.
11
Bushaway, Alternative Belief, p. 189. See Rev J.C. Atkinson, Forty Years in a Moorland Parish:
Reminiscences and Researches in Danby in Cleveland (London: Macmillan Press, 1891), p. 63.

52
(as did orthodox knowledge) from which people gained understanding of social reality.

People lived in close proximity with nature and believed in an ‘anima mundi.’ For some, the

sun, moon, planets, fire and water were allotted religious and cultural status. Superstitions

explained local and universal situations. They provided a knowable mechanism to deal with

uncontrollable situations and events, a form of wisdom communicated by identifiable

individuals such as wise men and women who could be consulted for remedies, solutions,

access to futurity and information. Omens were attached to rituals of birth, courtship,

marriage and death; all aspects of domestic life. Omens concerning death were the most

common. The behaviour of not only animals, birds (both often white) and insects, but also

church bells, night noises and deaths of others was also under scrutiny. Weather lore was

observed for clues to the future. On the term ‘Modern Superstition’, Thomas de Quincy notes

that ‘birds are even more familiarly associated with such ominous warnings [...]

ornithomancy grew into an elaborate science [...] magpies are still of awful authority in

village life, according to their number’.12

In his earlier, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700-1880

(1982), Bushaway examines the fundamental role of customs in the social and economic life

of rural England. His chapters cover the context of custom in relation to the community and

its calendars, the church and manor regarding legitimacy and, protest and crime. Although

focused on the South of England, Bushaway refers to the ubiquity and often similarity of

customs in the North with Lifting customs post Easter in Lancashire, the squirrel hunt and

rights of gathering wood in Derbyshire, Mummer’s plays, Doleing days or ‘Going a

Thomasin’ in Cheshire, the Rochdale Rush bearing, the Didsbury Wakes and northern

12
Bushaway, Alternative Belief, pp. 189-215. See also Simpson and Roud, pp. 266-267.

53
Whitsun.13 Bushaway discusses the ritual of Rough Music or Charivari,14 the ritual alluded to

also in Jane Eyre. In a more recent study on customary society and oral culture in rural

England, Bushaway stresses that the oral culture did not preclude the print culture of

chapbooks, broadside ballads and almanacs.15 In addition to Bushaway’s history of custom

and belief, other studies are helpful on the persistence of the wise men and women tradition

(otherwise known as astrologers, cunning folk and fortune tellers) who practised their trade

from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century. 16

These cultural historical studies compare favourably with the cultural context of

Brontë’s Shirley. Moreover, they concur with Brontë’s realistic portrayal of regional folklore

in Shirley.

Yorkshire Folklore Source Material

In this section, I argue that Brontë could have mined much of the folklore in Shirley from one

aspect of her local world. This county collection provides evidence of the local context for

Brontë’s possible fictional allusion to the local beliefs of ghosts, witches, fairies and omens,

felt by Caroline and Robert. This includes Caroline’s proverb and Joe Scott’s allusion to

boggarts. Brontë might easily reconstruct the Whit parade as it was an annual local custom.

Lastly, Caroline, Shirley and Louis Moore’s references to Robin Hood are reminders of
13
Bushaway, By Rite, pp. 167-202. See also Barry Reay, Popular Cultures in England 1550-1750 (London:
Longman, 1998) - Chapter five covers the festive structure in Middleton. See also Ronald Hutton, Stations of the
Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Although confined to
Oxfordshire, see also Alun Howkins, ‘The Taming of Whitsun: the Changing Face of a Nineteenth-Century
Rural Holiday’ in Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590-1914 ed. Eileen and Stephen Yeo (Harvester Press,
1981), pp. 189-206.
14
Bushaway, By Rite, p. 15, p. 167, p. 201. See also E.P. Thompson, ‘Rough Music’: Le Charivari Anglais,
Annales 1972: 2, pp. 285-312, E.P Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture
(London: Merlin Press, 1991), Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of
Class 1848-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1991), James Obelkavitch, Religion and Rural
Society: South Lindsey 1825-1875 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp.260-281.
15
Bushaway, Things Said, p. 258.
16
See also Owen Davis, Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History (London: Hambeldon and London,
2002), Ronald Hutton, Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999).

54
Yorkshire legend. Folklore references in her literature concur with evidence from West

Yorkshire and Haworth local historical documentation. In addition, the character name of

Fairfax, the ominous Gytrash and Jane’s ominous dreams of children in Jane Eyre are

probably drawn from the local folklore of Yorkshire. There are county folklore collections,

histories, reminiscences, broadsides and chapbooks, autobiography and diaries, confirming

the persistence of folklore throughout the nineteenth century including Yorkshire. Secondary

historical sources also confirm the prevalence of folklore in northern rural communities and

other English counties. Brontë was most likely to draw on some of the folk tradition of

northern beliefs and customs from oral tradition for the folklore of Shirley. Antiquarian

Joseph Horsfall Turner’s (1845-1915) Yorkshire Notes and Queries with Yorkshire Folk-lore

Journal (1888) (later, the Yorkshire Folk-Lore Journal) provides an excellent record of the

oral tradition of West Yorkshire. His collection is similar to Mrs Eliza Gutch’s (1840-1931)

more well-known County Folklore: Examples of printed folklore concerning the North Riding

of Yorkshire, York and the Ainsty (1901) and County Folklore: Examples of printed folklore

concerning the East Riding of Yorkshire (1912). His journal covers the range of northern folk

culture similarly to Shirley with references to popular beliefs such as boggards, fairies, ghosts

and death omens, Robin Hood place names and gravestones, local customs, proverbs, ballads,

folk tales, legends and songs. Turner describes ‘Boggard’, as a ‘ghost, common to Northern

languages saying: ‘One scarcely dare still out on dark nights before gas lights were common

for fear of boggards’.17 Turner records many omens in his Journal. They follow patterns of

avoidance: avoiding going out on Fridays, sleeping on pigeon feathered pillows (alluded to in

Wuthering Heights), seeing a cinder in the grate with a hollow side, a leafy smut shaking on

the fire grate, a broken looking glass, bearing a child with a blue vein on its nose, spilling salt,

17
Joseph Horsfall Turner, Yorkshire Folklore Journal (Bingley: T Harrison, 1888), p. 15.

55
turning back on a journey, a ticking spider, a corpse with a soft fleshy feeling, a howling dog

at night, corn shooting and bad weather and accepting a light at Christmas.

In Turner’s ‘Our Customary Feasts’ (1913), he describes Whitsuntide as a Quarter

Day, ‘a great day for baptisms in the early Christian church to commemorate the descent of

the Holy Ghost. The candidates were clothed in white.’ Turner explains how the modern

Whitsuntide (1800) was vastly reformed from the older form. He remembers the event as a

boy in 1852, the poorest child dressed in new clothes, presided over by the Sunday school

unions, inter-denominational, a procession led by superintendents and teachers, singing

hymns and the afternoon tea party at the chapel for coffee and currant cake.18 As to St Mark’s

Day, Turner describes Boggard Neet (April 24th, the night preceding St Mark’s Day) as a

night in the calendar to be feared.19

Yorkshire born local historian, Jessica Lofthouse provides a lengthy account of

boggards. Describing them as creatures from the otherworld she finds reference to them from

Clitheroe to the Yorkshire Pennines. Lofthouse describes other terms such as gabriel hound or

hatchet or gabbleratches, lile hob, dobbie, trash, skriker, gytrash, hedlow kow, bloody

tongues, grey cat, jack in irons, and lob lubberfiend.20 The bogle or boggle was also

associated with the dead. The barguest was another spirit or animal that changed shape, in the

folklore of Yorkshire and Lancashire, and was sighted at stiles, dark lanes and churchyards.

Often regarded as ominous they shrieked and howled. It could be a goblin, headless man, cat,

rabbit or more often a black dog. In 1844, place names in and around Haworth and Keighley

included Boggart field, Boggart Wood, Boggart Stones, Higher Boggart Stones, Boggart

18
Joseph Horsfall Turner, ‘Our Customary Feasts’, Halifax Courier (1913), pp. 13-14.
19
Ibid.,, p. 14.
20
Jessica Lofthouse, North-Country Folklore: In Lancashire, Cumbria and the Pennine Dales (London: Robert
Hale, 1976), pp. 24-43.

56
House. Localised ghosts and legends21 were linked to Ponden Hall and the Cunliffe family at

Wycoller with their variations of Gytrash, Padfoot and Headless horseman.

It is uncertain whether Brontë read folk tales but she may have heard of them. In ‘The

Rescusitated Ancient’ Branwell refers to ‘yaw will’nt as mich as club for an odd glass for an

owd creature ‘ats been shipwrecked wi’ Boggards in yawr service’.22 She may have read the

folk tale, ‘The Boggart’ in Keightley’s Fairy Mythology if it was published in Blackwood’s.

She was just as likely to have read Scott’s ‘The Buttery Spirit’ in The Minstrelsy of the

Scottish Border or heard of his ‘The Farmer and the Boggart’ or the Cornish tale, ‘The White

Bucca and the Black’. But raised in Haworth, there is no doubt that Brontë was familiar with

the boggart, alluding to it in her tales (as I demonstrate in the following chapter) as well as

Shirley. Certain Yorkshire folk legends including ‘The Barguest of the Troller’s Gill’, ‘The

Barguest near Grassington’, ‘The Bosky Dike Barguest’ and ‘The Appearance of Barguest, a

presage of Death’ were not published until 1888,23 well after Brontë’s death. But they might

have been narrated orally within the local community during her lifetime.

Brontë need not only draw on the oral tradition. Brontë might have also looked at

antiquarian sources kept at Ponden House in Stanbury and Keighley Mechanics Institute in

Keighley. She and her family borrowed books from these libraries. In the Provincial Glossary

(1787) (listed at Ponden House library), antiquarian Francis Grose includes the widespread

belief in ‘Omens portending Death’ such as a screeching owl flapping its wings against the

windows of a sick person’s chamber as in Wuthering Heights, three loud knocks at the bed of

a sick person, a drop of blood from the nose foretelling death and the howling of dogs,

similarly to the Gytrash. Similarly to Wuthering Heights, Grose includes the ominous belief

21
Lofthouse, pp. 88-120.
22
Butterfield, p. 76.
23
S.O. Addy, ‘Four Yorkshire Folk Tales’, Folklore, 8:4 (1897), Thomas Parkinson, Yorkshire Legends and
Traditions (London, 1888).

57
that it is ‘impossible for a person to die while resting on a pillow stuffed with the feathers of a

dove [...] the pillows of dying persons are therefore frequently taken away [...] lest they may

have pigeons feathers in them’.24

The mythology of Robin Hood is associated with a number of Yorkshire sites such as

Robin Hood bed, stone, quoilt, mill, grave, well (near to Ponden Kirk, Stanbury) and pub. His

grave site is located in Kirklees Park, the setting for Shirley’s Nunnwood forest. As well as

hearing about Robin Hood, Brontë may have read an early folk ballad, ‘Le Morte De Robin

Hode’ recorded in William Hone’s antiquarian The Year Book (1832):

To Kerklees stately priorie

Came an old time-worn man
And for food and shelter prayed he,
Ye chief of a noble clan [...]

On ye self-same night ye murdress died,

But she rotted not alone,
For they laid her carcase side by side
With Robin of Huntingdon
And they placed a fayre stone on ye mossy bed.25

The Robin Hood legend is part localised in Yorkshire and has been popularised in the ballad

tradition since the fourteenth-century. He is mythologized at Kirklees Priory reputed to be

buried in close proximity to Brontë’s Roe Head School which she attended in 1831. Brontë

biographers suggest that the Brontë family was familiar with the legend.26 Given that Brontë

investigated Luddism she would probably be aware of Robin Hood as another mythical figure

typifying banditry such as Jack Straw, Captain Swing and Ned Ludd. Robin Hood was part of

the folkloric cultural legacy of Yorkshire. Kirklees Priory is situated in the ruins of a twelfth

24
Francis Grose, A Provincial Glossary (Scholar Press, 1968), p. 47, p. 69.
25
William Hone, The Year Book (London: Thomas Tegg, 1832), p. 403.
26
See Gaskell, pp. 106-107, Alexander and Smith, pp. 286-287.

58
century Cistercian priory in the grounds of Kirklees Hall to the west of Hartshead and was

home to Sir George Armitage, a key figure in the suppression of Luddism.

As well as the term ‘fairish’, there is the northern dialect term, ‘feerorin’, associated

also with topographical sites such as caves, wells, bridges, steps, burial mounds and holes.27

There are no specific fairy place names mentioned in Shirley but there are about five

references to the fairy cave under Penistone Crag (the cave is Ponden Kirk, at the head of

Ponden Clough, on the moors above Stanbury) in Wuthering Heights. It is the site also for a

local love divination and a place where Charlotte Brontë and Gaskell walked.

Lastly, dedicating a chapter to the folklore of Haworth in ‘The Wise Man and the

Horse Doctor’, Steven Wood, local Haworth historian, confirms the presence of the cunning

man tradition with local wise man, Jack Kay (1766-1847) who resided close to the Haworth

parsonage and was buried by Patrick Brontë. He covers allusion to Kay in local broadside

ballads, the use of folk medicine and evidence of material charms (as archival evidence of the

past history of folklore at the Cliffe Castle museum).28 Brontë alludes to magicians in the

early tales, and Mother Bunches of Jane Eyre is a likely figure of the cunning woman

tradition, of which there were several in Yorkshire throughout the nineteenth-century.

Both the critical and local historiography provides a picture of the oral and written

culture of the folklore of Yorkshire (and folklore in more widespread use) as a plausible

source for Brontë’s Shirley. Apart from dialect differences and some variation in region

specific lore, Northern folklore oral tradition in the nineteenth-century was no different to any

other English county. Notwithstanding the role of historical imagination, Brontë is seen to

allude to the West Riding of Yorkshire’s cultural framework, recognising it as a crucial

27
Lofthouse, p. 15. See also Richard Blakeborough, Wit, Character, Folklore and Customs of the North Riding
of Yorkshire (Saltburn-by-the-sea, 2nd ed, 1911), William Henderson, Notes on the Folk Lore of the Northern
Counties of England and the Border (London: Longmans Green, 1866: reprint, Wakefield: EP, 1973: 2nd ed.,
London: Folklore Society, 1879).
28
Steven Wood, Haworth (Tempus Publishing, 2005), pp. 78-84.

59
source of folklore. In addition, Brontë could also engage in antiquarian material available to

her within the local community.

Narrative Features in Shirley

Brontë incorporates folklore as a narrative strategy. Yet, as plot device, its presence also

signifies a society in transformation. The novel’s tension between tradition and science seems

to anticipate some of the novels of Hardy. Folklore in Shirley is interspersed sporadically

throughout the novel. It hardly constitutes the motif value of fairies and ghosts inherent in the

other novels. It is easy for it to go unnoticed. However, we do need to interpret the material as

part and parcel of the local rural culture of the novel. It might offer a mirror to Yorkshire in

flux as much as to Brontë’s reconstruction of Luddism of 1811-12. Its fictional presence

suggests Brontë drawing on the oral folk tradition to enhance historical authenticity. Folklore

marks the local colour of the novel, typifying manners of speech with Caroline warning

Robert not to overstep his power over the weavers and framers with the proverb ‘It is a boast

of some of them that they can keep a stone in their pocket seven years, turn it at the end of

that time, keep it seven years longer, and hurl it, and hit their mark at last’ (p. 105). Caroline’s

local folk proverb is a warning similar to Mike Hartley’s anticipation of impending doom in

his vision of fairies ‘or moving objects, red like poppies, or white’ (p. 15). Clearly, Mike’s

omen acts as a foreshadowing technique. In a show of class solidarity and local patriotism,

Joe Scott, overseer to Robert Moore, pours scorn over Southerners, saying ‘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’ (p. 50). As I show later in the chapter, these folklore items

resonate with folklore county collections of West Yorkshire with Brontë referring personally

to the proverb to Gaskell.

60
 Folklore features, briefly, as characterisation. It explains characters’ fears, optimism

and over-active imagination or magical thinking. Robert Moore recoils from ‘Miss Mann’s

goblin-grimness’. It went further though than merely disliking her. On one occasion he ‘had

been fixed with Miss Mann’s eye. Robert Moore had undergone it once, and had never

forgotten the circumstance’ (p.153) and had scarpered forthwith. To Caroline, Moore’s

magical thinking about witches ‘was all a figment of fancy, a matter of surface’. Moore also

suggests his belief in good omens such as ‘those birds whose appearance is to the sailor the

harbinger of good luck’ (p. 216). At nine o’clock on the night of the Luddite raid, Shirley

Keeldar informs Caroline that ‘I would walk from Fieldhead to the church any fine

midsummer night, three hours later than this, for the mere pleasure of seeing the stars and the

chance of meeting a fairy’ (p. 279) to which Caroline replies ‘But just wait till the crowd is

cleared away’. In addition, folklore personifies Caroline’s fading youth and innocence with

the narrator saying, ‘Elf-land lies behind us, the shores of Reality rise in front’ (p. 83). It

explains Caroline’s insecurities in the following conversation with Mrs Pryor. She describes

her increasing dislike of the rectory and its proximity to the out-kitchens near to the

graveyard:

‘My dear! You surely are not superstitious?’

‘No, Mrs Pryor; but I think I grow what is called nervous. I see things under a darker
aspect than I used to do. I have fears I never used to have—not of ghosts, but of omens
and disastrous events; and I have an inexpressible weight on my mind which I give the
world to shake off, and I cannot do it’ (p. 202).

Reference to the Haworth churchyard in the notes to Shirley localises the novel to Brontë’s

home in which the parsonage stood in front of the graveyard.

Whilst folklore hardly advances characterisation, it does, however, point to an

interesting aspect of the central characters, Shirley and Caroline. Folklore expresses their

awareness of the changing times. Both they and the elder generation vocalise this viewpoint.

61
The idea that Yorkshire cultural identity is inextricably linked to people’s sense of the past or

to a pre-lapsed golden age resonates with the sentiment felt in Shirley. Symbolically, folklore

is an appeal to the past. The sense of nostalgia is realised in Shirley with Shirley and Caroline,

gazing down on Nunnwood forest. Shirley asks:

‘Was it not one of Robin Hood’s haunts?’

‘Yes, and there are mementos of him still existing. To penetrate into Nunnwood, Miss
Keeldar, is to go far back into the dim days of old. Can you see a break in the forest,
about the centre?’ (p. 178).

More explicit is Shirley’s:

‘When I was a very little girl, Mr Moore, my nurse used to tell me tales of fairies
being seen in that Hollow. That was before my father built the mill, when it was a
perfectly solitary ravine. You will be falling under enchantment’ (p. 199).

Shirley’s nurse is surely echoing Tabitha Aykroyd’s recollection of Haworth’s pre-

mechanisation, saying:

What is more, she had known the ‘bottom’ or valley, in those primitive days when the
fairies frequented the margin of the ‘beck’ on moonlight nights, and had known folk
who had seen them. But that was when there were no mills in the valleys; and when
all the wool-spinning was done by hand in the farm-houses round. ‘It wur the factories
as had driven ‘em away’.29

It is unclear as to whether Gaskell heard this comment directly from Aykroyd, another

employee at the parsonage, second hand from Brontë or another member of the family. But it

resonates in Shirley.

The novel’s ending is dedicated to the past rather than to the present with Shirley

asking her housekeeper to describe pre-industrial Yorkshire. She is the link to historic

continuity. Brontë gives the final word to the older generation, to Shirley’s housekeeper in the

epilogue:

‘What was the Hollow like then, Martha?’

29
Gaskell, p. 94.

62
 ‘Different to what it is now; but I can tell of it clean different again, when there was
neither mill, nor cot, nor hall, except Fieldhead, within two miles of it. I can tell, one
summer evening, fifty years syne, my mother coming running in just at the edge of
dark, almost fleyed out of her wits, saying she had seen a fairish [fairy] in Fieldhead
Hollow; and that was the last fairish that ever was seen on this countryside (though
they’ve been heard within these forty years). A lonesome spot it was—and a bonnie
spot—full of oak trees and nut trees. It is altered now’ (p.542).

This sense of regret for the passing of time might echo the voice of community. Shirley is a

commentary on history and the fairies symbolize the past. There is a shared sense of inter-

generational consciousness of the passing of time and the loss of something be it nature,

cottage industry, community, imagination or romance. However, the appropriation of the

English past does not detract from the novel’s sense of a radical detachment and discontinuity

with what has gone on before. According to Simpson and Roud, the lament for a vanishing

past was described as ‘Merrie England’. This Arcadian attitude to the past was popularised

by Walter Scott in his ballad Marmion (1808):

England was merry England, when

Old Christmas brought his sports again.30

They describe this sentiment not as an unscientific concept but as an historic attitude that

constituted a Victorian world-view, and had a profound impact on traditional festivals and

customs. They state that Merrie Englandism was essentially nostalgic with the sense of loss

felt mostly in terms of community. Countless novelists adhered to the Merrie England school

of thought in an attempt to recreate the golden age. The past of May Day and Christmas was

extolled. In Villette the wassail-cup ritual epitomises this sentiment with the Home and De

Basompierre families paying homage to ‘the mask of Old Christmas’ (p. 279) and ‘Old

October’ (p. 281), mentioned three times, with Graham Bretton saying ‘let us have a

Christmas wassail-cup, and toast Old England here, on the hearth’ (p. 280).

30
Simpson and Roud, p. 235.

63
 Perhaps the densest reference to folklore lies in the treatment of Whitsuntide. The

event marks the customary aspect of the novel’s local colour. The chapter title ‘Whitsuntide’

supports the novel’s main dramatic incident, action and plot of Luddism. It takes up three

chapters and Brontë does not spare on description of this inter-parish communal event. It

offers the reader more insight into Caroline’s introverted nature and it forms the backdrop to

the novel’s central drama. Whitsun is perhaps the most energised of all the novel’s scenes

(apart from the rebellion). It describes the social stratification of rural life and conveys a sense

of community parish rural life. Brontë includes all of the key features of this calendar custom:

Whit-Tuesday was the great day, in preparation for which the two large schoolrooms
of Briarfield, built by the present Rector, chiefly at his own expense, were cleaned out,
whitewashed, repainted, and decorated with flowers and evergreens [...] The
children’s feast was to be spread in the open air. At one o’clock the troops were to
come in; at two they were to be marshalled; till four they were to parade the parish;
then came the feast, and afterwards the meeting, with music and speechifying in the
church. [...] This notable anniversary had always hitherto been a trying day to
Caroline Helstone, because it dragged her perforce into public, compelling her to face
all that was wealthy, respectable, influential in the neighbourhood; [...] In the parson’s
croft, behind the Rectory, are the musicians of the three parish bands, with their
instruments. Fanny and Eliza, in the smartest of caps and gowns, and the whitest of
aprons, move amongst them, serving out quarts of ale. (pp. 246-7, p. 250).

This includes the wearing of white new clothes, the procession with brass band and banners

and ale. On the role of custom and social cohesion, Whitsun, Bushaway states was one of the

key customs for the maintenance of social unity and the ideal of community. He says:

Many of these calendar rituals might appear to serve no other purpose than that of
providing an opportunity for merriment and festivity, yet their deeper significance can
be discovered in the context of an attempt to enforce a view of corporate society.31

Similarly the event asserts the novel’s middle class paternalistic model of Church, state and

monarchical hegemony over the working classes. Whitsun is part and parcel of the social

structure of rural life. Its main function in Shirley is to maintain social order and social

31
Bushaway, By Rite, pp. 107-160, (p. 149).

64
cohesion. The singing of ‘God Save the King’ and the band playing ‘Rule Britannia’ controls

any potential customary features of rebellion or dissent. No aspect of the communal process is

left out. As to Luddism, folklore historian Norman Simms is convinced that Brontë knew the

‘ritual power of the event, even if she can only articulate two young girls’ fear of gruff men to

give the feeling of the attack itself’.32 The detail of Whitsun suggests Brontë’s familiarity

with the event and probable participation in it either in the joining of the three parishes of

Haworth, Oxenhope and Stanbury or in the Spen Valley during her period at Roe Head

School.

Folklore supports the novel’s major incident: the Luddite attack. Although Luddism is

central to Shirley, critics overlook Brontë’s familiarity with folklore’s use in nineteenth-

century social protest. As stated previously, Norman Simms recognises her knowledge of

ceremonial yells saying ‘perhaps her own syntactic outburst is closer to the mentality of the

rebellion than all the rest she has written’,33 identifying the yell to Yorkshire, to a specific

district and to the community of textile workers. Brontë’s localism is unequivocal with her ‘a

rioter’s yell—a North-of- England—a Yorkshire—a West-Riding —a West-Riding-clothing-

district-of-Yorkshire rioters’ yell’.34 Simms examines the northern machine breakers of 1811

from the point of view of folklore and notes the role of the Mummers plays, yells and dance,

the mythical but ideological character of Ned Ludd and the use of various disguises such as

blackened faces or masks, as Brontë draws on in Shirley. Simms is adamant not to trivialise

these folkloristic activities but regards them as fundamental to ‘archaic mentalities, those

modes of thought which persist in conditions of actual or socially enforced isolation’.35

Simms overlooks the fact that the attack takes place at midnight, a key feature of folklore that

32
Simms, p. 173.
33
Ibid., p. 174.
34
Ibid., p. 174.
35
Ibid., p. 166.

65
denotes the most negative time of day. On the Luddite theme, Mr Malone, the Irish curate,

questions an earlier revolt of the Luddite men saying ‘I do not see a mask or a smutted face

present’ (p. 30). Brontë knows the significance of disguise in the Luddite cause.

We can value the folkloric content in Shirley for its narrative function, its integral role

in reconstructing Luddism, its embodiment of nostalgia, and potential similarities with the

transformation and continuity of Yorkshire rural culture. Undoubtedly, folklore characterises

many of the features of the novel’s sense of place, period and identity of the people.

Brontë’s Letters

The comparison between her letters and fiction relates more to Jane Eyre than to Shirley.

However, it is clear that there seems to be a close connection between Brontë’s magical

thinking and her fictional heroines. Her magical thinking also compares with her local

culture. The Brontës engaged in the various customs of rural life. Patrick attended a musical

oratorio on the first day of the Rush Bearing custom at St Michael’s Church in July 1846.36

More than likely the Arvils or funeral customs described by Gaskell had ended in her

lifetime.37 Clearly, Brontë had heard of the ritual Charivari, signing off a letter to Ellen

Nussey (17 March 1840) from Haworth with the term, ‘Charivari’38 as a sort of joke or

derivation of her own name (and alluding to it once in Jane Eyre, p. 177). Brontë writes to

Ellen Nussey (28 May 1836) stating her intention of visiting Miss Wooler on Whitsunday in

Gomersal.39 Brontë writes to Nussey (4 April 1847) inviting her to stay at Haworth in May at

Whitsuntide.40 Whitsun was part of Anglican life. Arthur Bell Nicholls (husband to Brontë)

36
Juliet Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters (Viking Press, 1997), p. 152.
37
Gaskell, pp. 56-57.
38
Margaret Smith, ed., The Letters of Charlotte Brontë with a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, 1:
1829-1847 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p.212.
39
Smith, Letters 1, p. 145.
40
Smith, Letters 1, pp. 521-522.

66
felt unwell during his delivery of the sacraments on Whitsunday on 16 May 1853 and three

days later, Brontë enquired in a letter, as to how Ellen got on at the traditional Sunday school

procession and tea on Whit Tuesday (19 May 1853).41 Given that the Whit parade continued

to the early twentieth century, it is not inconceivable that Brontë attended the public event.

She certainly would have attended the church service if not the parade and tea. Whitsun was

an opportunity for fellowship, mutual help and Christian charity. As daughter to the Reverend

Brontë and Sunday school teacher, she would probably be expected to participate in this

ritual.

As to Caroline Helstone’s proverb mentioned earlier, Brontë repeated the same saying

to Gaskell which she included in her biography suggesting Brontë’s knowledge of local lore:

I remember Miss Brontë telling me that it was a saying round about Haworth, ‘keep a
stone in thy pocket seven year; turn it, and keep it seven year longer, that it may be
ever ready to thine hand when thine enemy draws near’.42

More evidence is available regarding her use of folklore as descriptive tool. For the

Victorians, the supernatural provided a metaphor to express emotion and attitudes and

physical appearance. Brontë’s letters typify Victorians’ ubiquitous use of folklore as

metaphor. Her knowledge of folk beliefs would emanate not only from fiction but prevailing

belief in the community. Ghosts and the supernatural provided a tool for her to express not

only mental states of anxiety and depression but also basic everyday feelings of joy and

frustration. More light hearted, to Ellen Nussey (1 April 1841) whilst employed as a

governess at Upperwood House, Rawdon, she reveals her wicked sense of humour, describing

Mr and Mrs White’s children as ‘imps’.43 But to Margaret Wooler (November/December

41
Margaret Smith, ed., The Letters of Charlotte Brontë with a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, 3:
1852-1855 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 165-166.
42
Gaskell, p. 47.
43
Smith, Letters 1, p. 250.

67
1846), Brontë recalls her bout of hypochondria whilst teaching at Healds House, Dewsbury

Moor saying:

I can never forget the concentrated anguish of certain insufferable moments and the
heavy gloom of many long hours—besides the preternatural horror which seemed to
clothe existence and Nature [...] I could have been no better company for you than a
stalking ghost.44

To W.S. Williams (11 March 1848) Brontë echoes The Professor’s Frances Henri Evans’

reference to ‘fairy-money’ (p. 216) to express her frustration at neglecting her art saying:

When I examine the contents of my portfolio now, it seems as if during the years it
has been lying closed, some fairy had changed what I once thought sterling coin into
dry leaves.45

In her preface to Wuthering Heights, Brontë reflects on its intimidating nature: ‘with time and

labour, the crag took shape; and there it stands colossal, dark and frowning, half statue, half

rock: in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like’. To Ellen Nussey (14 July 1849) Brontë

describes her ‘nervousness [...] is a horrid phantom—I dare communicate no ailment to

papa’.46 The supernatural world best expresses Brontë’s ecstatic reaction to the industrial

advances shown at the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace (1851): ‘it seemed as if magic only

could have gathered this mass of wealth [...] as if none but supernatural hands could have

arranged it thus [...] the multitude filling the great aisles seems ruled and subdued by some

invisible influence’47 On their honeymoon in July 1854, she and Arthur Bell Nicholls visited

Lake Killarney, the site of a local ghost legend. Brontë wrote to Catherine Winkworth (27

July 1854) from Cork describing the event:

We have been to Killarney—I will not describe it a bit. We saw and went through the
Gap of Dunloe. A sudden glimpse of a very grim phantom came on us in the Gap. The
guide had warned me to alight from my horse as the path was now very broken and
dangerous—she seemed to go mad—reared—plunged—I was thrown on the stones

44
Smith, Letters 1, p. 505.
45
Smith, Letters 2, p. 41.
46
Smith, Letters 2, p. 230.
47
Smith, Letters 2, p. 631.

68
 right under her [...] Of course the only feeling left was gratitude for more sakes than
my own.48

The Brontës also described their health in supernatural metaphors with Patrick frequently

annotating his copy of Thomas John Graham’s Modern Domestic Medicine (1827),

explaining Branwell’s ‘delirium tremens’ as the ‘patient thinks himself haunted; by demons,

see luminous substans, [sic] in his imagination’.49 Paraphrasing or directly quoting from

Robert Macnish’s The Philosophy of Sleep (1830) Patrick describes ‘nightmare’ as ‘being the

most horrible that appals human nature—an inability to move during the paroxysm — fearful

visions of ghosts etc’.

Not only was the supernatural metaphoric for Brontë, it also played a role in her

imaginative world. In her infancy and adulthood, she seemed to experience magical thinking

or ‘imaginary thoughts’ and unorthodox beliefs. Certainly, magical thinking is well placed in

her novels.

In their studies of the imagination Karl Rosengren and Jason French revise current

studies on magical thinking, explaining it as a universal cognitive process that certain actions

or behaviours will influence the outcome of some event by some sort of supernatural means.

They argue that superstitions such as ghost belief and premonitions are likely to happen when

‘incomplete meanings of rituals are passed down from parents and adults within a culture to

children’.50 Magical thinking reaches a peak in childhood and can be maintained in

adulthood. Very often these individuals recognise these beliefs as supernatural phenomena

but interpret them as natural or instinctive and not supernatural. Rosengren and French view

48
Smith, Letters 3, p. 280.
49
Shuttleworth, p. 32.
50
Karl S. Rosengren and Jason A. French, ‘Magical Thinking’ in Taylor, Marjorie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of
the Development of Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 42-55. See also Stuart Vyse,
Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 5.

69
magical thinking as a logical extension of fundamental lifelong characteristics of human

cognitive processes. Magical thinking is strongly associated with early play, magic and

pretence, creation of imagined worlds, religion, and, crucially, engagement with the local

cultural environment. It is the presence of cultural support that encourages magical thinking

in childhood. This way of thinking fosters lifelong creativity and opens up the realm of what

is possible. Both parent and the wider culture can foster magical thinking to become more

well-defined.51

Throughout Brontë’s letters there are references to folklore beliefs. Her magical or

imagined thinking is evident in her early years. It may relate to the children’s fictional

engagement in magic, pretence, creativity and the imagination. This was to be the foundation

of their Glass Town and Angria tales, the plots, settings and characters, of which many are

focused on fairies, ghosts and omens. Brontë was aged five years when her mother Maria

Brontë died on 15 September 1821. Sarah Garrs (1806-1899), the nursemaid, recalled

standing at the foot of the death-bed with the children.52 Four years later, her sister Maria died

on 31 May 1825 and Elizabeth died the following month on 15 June 1825. Garrs sent the

following information to biographer Marion Harland (nee Mary Virginia Terhune) for her

Charlotte Brontë at Home (1899):

One day in the autumn or winter succeeding Mrs Brontë’s death, Charlotte came to
her nurse, wild and white with the excitement of having seen ‘a fairy’ standing by
baby Anne’s cradle. When the two ran back to the nursery, Charlotte flying on ahead,
treading softly not to frighten the beautiful visitant away, no one was there besides the
baby sleeping sweetly in the depths of her forenoon nap. Charlotte stood transfixed,
her eyes wandered incredulously round the room. ‘But she was here, just now!’ She
insisted. ‘I really and truly did see her!’—and no argument or coaxing could shake her
from the belief.53

51
Rosengren and French, p. 53.
52
Smith, Letters 2, p. 123.
53
Barker, Life in Letters, p. 3. See Marion Harland, Charlotte Brontë at Home (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons,
1899).

70
This one event hardly constitutes lifelong fantasy orientation. Yet it might remind one of Jane

Eyre’s experiences in the red room. Jane Eyre’s childhood fears are played out within the

context of superstition. In the red room, Jane sees her reflection in the looking glass:

A strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and arms specking the
gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving when all else was still, had the effect of a
real spirit: I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy half imp, Bessie’s
evening stories represented as coming out of lone, ferny dells in moors. (p. 14).

In her reminiscences, Ellen Nussey describes Brontë as an entertainer at Roe Head

School in January 1831. She was charmed by tales of the school’s ghost legend of a lady in

rustling silks who frequented the upper storey, unused by the school.54 Again, fiction might be

the setting for Brontë to reflect on her youth. Whilst Jane Eyre is convinced she has seen a

ghost in the red room, having seen an eerie light gliding above her head, in her adulthood she

is more sceptical. Yet, Jane is still keen to establish any legacy at Thornfield of ghost legends,

traditions and stories attached to the third floor of the house saying to Mrs Fairfax, ‘if there

were a ghost at Thornfield Hall, this would be its haunt’ (p. 106). She repels any thoughts of

ghosts on hearing an uncanny laugh coming from the third floor:

The laugh was as tragic, as preternatural a laugh as any I ever heard; and, but that it
was high noon, and that no circumstance of ghostliness accompanied the curious
cachination; but that neither scene nor season favoured fear, I should have been
superstitiously afraid (p. 107).

Rochester, on the other hand, is credulous, believing that ‘ghosts are usually pale, Jane’ (p.

284). Gaskell recalls a friend of Brontë describing another occasion when Charlotte, on an

outing with her school friends, turned pale and almost fainted at realising she was walking on

graves at Hartshead Church. According to Gaskell, Brontë was afraid of death and never

became indifferent to the funeral bell toll and the:

54
Smith, Letters 1, p. 594.

71
 Chip, chip of the mason as he cut the grave-stones in a shed close by [...] Charlotte
was certainly afraid of death, not only of dead bodies, or dying people, She dreaded it
as something horrible. She thought we did not know how long the ‘moment of
dissolution’ might really be, or how terrible. This was just such a terror as only
hypochondriacs can provide for themselves.55

To Ellen Nussey, Brontë reveals a curiosity about them. On 5 September 1832 she writes:

The Story of the white hen seen at Mrs W?* [sic] Woolers funeral savours very much
of the supernatural. You seem to hint that there are suspicions that she was buried
alive, if so how agonising must be the feelings of her relations!56

The supportive notes explain that white birds sometimes presage disaster. On 29 October

1842, Aunt Branwell died. Five years later, the subject of omens re-emerges. On 24 March

1847 Nussey informs Brontë of an omen. Brontë responds: ‘Could Miss Ringrose have learnt

this superstition in Holland—? What superstition is it?’ In the follow up letter (4 April 1847)

Charlotte says:

Allow me to compliment you on the skill with which you can seem to give an
explanation without enlightening one—one whit on the question asked—I know no
more about Miss Ringrose’s supersti[ti]on now than I did before—what is the
supersti[ti]on—when a dead body is limp what is the inference drawn?57

The accompanying notes say ‘the inference is that there will soon be another death in the

same house’. Although these letters hardly suggest a superstitious thinker they point to a keen

interest. Brontë had told Gaskell that in her experience a misfortune was preceded by the

dream such as that conveyed in Jane Eyre. She relayed feeling pitiful for the:

Little thing, lying inert, as sick children do, while she walked about in some gloomy
place with it, such as the aisle of Haworth Church. The misfortunes she mentioned
were not always to her-self. She thought such sensitiveness to omens was like the
cholera, present to susceptible people—some feeling more, some less.58

55
Gaskell, p. 127. See also Shuttleworth, p. 235.
56
Smith, Letters 1, p. 117.
57
Smith, Letters 1, pp. 520-521.
58
Gaskell, p. 127.

72
As the quote above reveals, Brontë experienced ominous thoughts. She also makes much

more of the treatment of omens in Jane Eyre with Jane reflecting on the idea that ‘signs, for

aught we know, may be but the sympathies of Nature with man’ (p. 220). She remembers an

event in her childhood aged six years when she overheard Bessie tell Martha that:

To dream of children was a sure sign of trouble, either to one’s self or one’s kin. The
saying might have worn out of my memory, had not a circumstance immediately
followed which served indelibly to fix it there. The next day Bessie was sent for home
to the deathbed of her little sister. Of late I had often recalled this saying, and this
incident; for during the past week scarcely a night had gone over my couch that had
not brought with it a dream of an infant: which I sometimes hushed in my arms,
sometimes dandled on my knee, sometimes watched playing with daisies on a lawn; or
again, dabbling its hands in running water. It was a wailing child this night and a
laughing one the next: now it nestled close to me, and now it ran from me; but
whatever the mood the apparition evinced, whatever aspect it wore, it failed not for
seven successive nights to meet me at the moment I entered the land of slumber (p.
220).

On the second week, she is then summoned to Mrs Fairfax’s room only to find Robert

Leaven, Bessie’s husband, dressed in mourning clothes, informing her that John Reed had

died at his chambers in London. This news will serve to reinforce Bessie and Jane’s beliefs in

death omens. On another occasion, prior to their wedding, when Rochester is away on

business, Jane finds herself dreaming again, this time of ‘bats and owls’ as well as children,

interpreting them again as signs of impending doom. She says:

I was burdened with the charge of a little child: a very small creature [...] I dreamt
another dream, sir [...] wrapped in a shawl I still carried the unknown little child: I
might not lay it down anywhere, however tired were my arms—however much its
weight impeded my progress, I must retain it (p. 282).

He rebukes her by saying ‘I warn you of incredulity beforehand’ (p. 282). When she wakens

she is confronted with the nightmarish presence of Bertha Mason, whose image reminds Jane

of the ‘foul German spectre—the Vampyre’ (p. 284), as she witnesses Bertha tearing up her

wedding veil. Elsewhere, Charles Wellesley of the early tales fears the ominous sign of the

73
ravens and Frances Henri Evans of The Professor writes an essay in the style of ‘the old

Saxon ghost-legends’, conjuring old ominous beliefs:

A shadowy goblin dog might rush over the threshold; or, more awful still, if
something flapped, as with wings, against the lattice, and then a raven or a white dove
flew in and settled on the hearth, such a visitor would be a sure sign of misfortune to
the house; therefore, heed my advice, and lift the latchet for nothing.59

Prior to writing Jane Eyre, Patrick handed over a packet of faded letters to Brontë in

the presence of Nussey. A letter from Maria ‘to my dear saucy Pat’ (18 November 1812)

includes:

I really know not what to make of the beginning of your last: the winds, waves and
rocks almost stunned me. I thought you were giving me the account of some terrible
dream, or that you had had a presentiment of the fate of my poor box [...] On Saturday
evg about the time when you were writing the description of your imaginary
shipwreck, I was reading <the> & feeling the effects of a real one [...] the box was
dashed to pieces with the violence of the sea & all my little property, with the
exception of a very few articles, swallowed up in the mighty deep. – If this should not
prove the prelude to something worse, I shall think little of it.60

In her reminiscences of Brontë, Nussey interprets the letter:

Mrs Brontë had the inestimable blessing of a well-balanced mind, yet she <possessed>
‘was imbued with’ a degree of superstition, and Charlotte inherited its influence,
presentiments made deep impressions upon her, she gave <full bent> ‘the reins’ to
herself in this respect when she wrote “Jane Eyre”: its escape seemed to have done her
good, <’just’> as if she had braced herself up for ever after.61

Brontë inserts Maria’s reading material in Shirley. Caroline Helstone is seen reading:

Some venerable Lady’s Magazines, that had once performed a sea voyage with their
owner, and undergone a storm, and whose pages were stained with salt water; some
Mad Methodist Magazines, full of miracles and apparitions, of preternatural warnings,
ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism; the equally mad Letters of Mrs Rowe from
the Dead to the Living. (pp. 327-8).

59
Brontë, The Professor, p. 161.
60
Dudley Green, ed., The Letters of the Reverend Patrick Brontë (Nonsuch Publishing, 2005), pp. 330-331.
61
Smith, Letters 1, p. 609.

74
By the end of 1849 Brontë had lost all three remaining siblings, Branwell (19 December

1848), Emily (28 May 1849) and Anne (26 October 1849), within a ten month period when

Charlotte was aged thirty-three years. In a letter to Nussey (16 February 1850) she says that

her heavy moods are attributed to:

The weather—Quicksilver invariably falls low in storms and high winds—and I have
ere this been warned of approaching disturbance in the atmosphere by a sense of
bodily weakness and deep, heavy mental sadness—such as some would call
presentiment—presentiment indeed it is—but not at all supernatural.62

In this instance, Brontë is keen to allay any suspicion on Nussey’s part of Brontë’s interest in

the phenomena of second sight or the power to futurity. Having conveyed an intense curiosity

in death omens to Nussey years earlier, Brontë now makes a confession. In a letter to George

Smith (18 April 1850) Brontë writes:

On no account should you have dreamed that I was coming to Town; I confess with
shame that I have so much superstition in my nature as makes me reluctant to hear of
the fulfilment of any dream, however pleasant: if the good dreams come true, so may
the bad ones, and we have more of the latter than of the former. That there are certain
organisations liable to anticipatory impressions in the form of dream or
presentiment—I half believe—but that you—a man of business—have any right to be
one of these—I wholly deny.63

Rosengren and French state that superstitious behaviour is likely to occur under ‘conditions of

high stress and/or uncertainty and low levels of perceived control’.64 Superstitions, they say,

are thought to regulate anxiety and stress and ‘provide a general feeling of control in chaotic

or unpredictable situations’.65 Years later, to George Smith (19 January 1852) Brontë writes:

‘I have not heard a word from Miss Martineau and conclude her silence is of no good

omen’.66 A year later and Villette’s Lucy Snowe is afraid for the safe return of her lover

Monsieur Paul who is working abroad, Lucy cries out:

62
Smith, Letters 2, p. 346.
63
Smith, Letters 2, pp. 386-387.
64
Rosengren and French, p. 54.
65
Ibid., p. 54-55.
66
Smith, Letters 3, p. 9.

75
 ‘I know some signs of the sky; I have noted them ever since childhood. God, watch
that sail! Oh guard it! The wind shifts to the west. Peace, peace, Banshee—keening at
every window! It will rise—it will swell—it shrieks out long: wander as I may
through the house this night, I cannot lull the blast. The advancing hours make it
strong: by midnight, all sleepless watchers hear and fear a wild south-west storm’. (p.
495).

In April 1853 Brontë visited Gaskell in Manchester. Again, she confessed to being

superstitious. Gaskell was surprised at Brontë’s recoil and absolute horror at the thought of

hearing a dismal ghost story one bedtime, confessing that:

She [Brontë] was superstitious and prone at all times to the involuntary recurrence of
any thoughts of ominous gloom which might have been suggested to her.67

Brontë said that on visiting Gaskell, she had found a letter on her dressing-table from Ellen

Nussey repeating a lurid story about a ghost that haunted a house she was about to visit. This

information so preyed on Charlotte’s mind that she could not sleep, she was restless and woke

up un-refreshed and afflicted with another of her headaches. The house in question belonged

to Reverend Francis Upjohn, vicar of Gorleston. Brontë was particularly focused on Ellen’s

visit to Reverend Upjohn (whose wife was frail) at Gorleston Hall in Yarmouth, Suffolk,

because of Robert Clapham’s (Ellen’s brother-in-law) claim that it was haunted. To Nussey

(16 March 1853) she says, ‘I quite agree with Mr Clapham that ‘they [have raised] a certain

gentleman [in that] house, and can’t or won’t [put] him down again’. To Ellen (19 May

1853), Brontë is reassured that her friend will only stay at Gorleston for a month: ‘you surely

may be made comfortable—unless the house be really haunted as Mr Clapham supposed’.

Brontë, unnerved by its legend and by Ellen’s strange and unsettling visit there with such

67
Gaskell, p. 421.

76
‘strange and unhappy people’, prompted her to cancel the proposed visit.68 The ghost plot

becomes the central action of Villette.

There are clear connections between Brontë’s personal experiences of unofficial

beliefs and her writing. The intensity of their presence in her fiction seems at times to

correspond with her confessions in her letters. We can only trace Brontë’s experience of

ominous thoughts to the episodic references across her letters that span her adulthood. They

may have plagued her more or less. There is no concrete evidence to associate the staff at the

parsonage with these beliefs. It is only hearsay and assumption, initially, drawn from

Gaskell’s critical perspective of the working classes of Yorkshire (and of Penzance, the

birthplace of Maria Brontë, nee Branwell) in her biography. In 1850, Gaskell visited Brontë

after the death of her three siblings. She observed her friend’s inconsolable grief, loneliness

and insomnia saying that:

No one on earth could even imagine what those hours were to her. All the grim
superstitions of the North had been implanted in her during her childhood by the
servants, who believed in them. They recurred to her now—with no shrinking from
the spirits of the Dead.69

Gaskell also writes that ‘no doubt she [Aykroyd] had many a tale to tell of by-gone days of

the country-side [...] family tragedies and dark superstitious dooms’.70

Whether or not Brontë’s seeming belief in omens is deemed relevant, one cannot

ignore its prevalence and consistency as character trait in all of Brontë’s major heroines and

heroes. It is most pervasive in Jane Eyre. It is intriguing that although her characters embrace

enlightenment values in their rejection of fairies and ghosts, the belief in omens persists. Its

reference in her letters tempts us to read her fiction as psycho-biography. It is important to

stress that within the Anglican Church, the belief in any power beyond the Christian God was
68
Smith, Letters 3, p. 135, p. 166. See also Gaskell, p. 421, Barker, Life in Letters, p. 726, p.728.
69
Gaskell, p. 337.
70
Ibid, p. 94.

77
superstition. In Oxford Dictionary of Superstitions Opie and Tatem quote Henry Bourne,

antiquarian and curate of the Parochial Chapel of All-Saints in Newcastle upon Tyne of

Antiquitates Vulgares; or, the Antiquities of the Common People (1725). The sole intention of

his text was to protect his parishioners from ‘heathenism’ or ‘the Inventions of the Devil’.

Such opinions or beliefs were drawing his flock away from a perfect trust in God’s

providence. Bourne writes: ‘The Observations of Omens, such as the falling of Salt, a Hare

crossing the way, of the Dead-Watch, of Crickets, &c, are sinful and diabolical [...] For by

such Observations as these, they [the parishioners] are the Slaves of Superstition and Sin’.71

With this in mind, it suggests, perhaps, Brontë’s grappling with her nature, similarly to Jane

Eyre, at times or crises in her life, even if it meant going against Protestant doctrine. Patrick

might very well have sermonised on this topic. Whilst, in her fiction, some folklore allusions

are obviously in widespread use such as the banshee (which derives from Ireland), and some

literary based, others are region specific to Yorkshire.

In conclusion, it is likely that Brontë was familiar with the unofficial folk culture of

West Yorkshire and this provided a source for the narrative features in Shirley. Having

examined the local source of folklore, I now explore the influence of Walter Scott’s literary

use of folklore on the narrative development in Brontë’s Glass Town and Angria.

71
Iona Opie and Moira Tatem, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of Superstitions (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), p. viii.

78
 Chapter Two

Brontë’s Romantic Sources for Glass Town and Angria: Walter Scott’s
Narrative and Thematic Uses of Folklore

Scott’s sweet wild, romantic Poetry can do you no harm [...] For Fiction—read Scott
alone all novels after his are worthless.

Letter from Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey (4 July 1834).1

The influence of the Scottish novelist, poet, critic, historian, biographer and antiquarian,

Walter Scott (1771-1832) on the work of the Brontës, and particularly Charlotte’s Brontë’s

Glass Town and Angria stories, is widely recognised.2 The family owned copies of George

Allan’s Life of Sir Walter Scott (1834), The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1806), Tales of a

Grandfather (1828-31), The Vision of Don Roderick (1811) and Rokeby (1813), and as early

as June 1829, the Brontë children were familiar with Scott’s Life of Napoleon Bonaparte

(1827). Brontë completed a pilgrimage to Scotland to see his monument in East Prince’s

Street Gardens and his baronial home in Abbotsford. Brontë comments in a letter to W.S.

Williams (20 July 1850) ‘I always liked Scotland as an idea, but now as a reality, I like it far

better’.3 On the visit, Brontë would have seen Scott’s library, family portraits and collections

of armour and Scottish antiquities.

Critics are unanimously aware of Brontë’s exhaustive reliance on Scott’s narrative

uses for her three novels. Carol Bock, for example notes the similarity between Brontë and

Scott’s attempt to balance the actual and the ideal or the harmony between realism and the
1
Smith, Letters 1, p. 130.
2
Alexander and Smith, pp. 444-6; Carol Bock, Charlotte Brontë and the Storyteller’s Audience (Iowa University
Press, 1992); E.A. Kneis, The Art of Charlotte Bronte (Ohio University Press, 1969); W.A. Craik, The Brontë
Novels (London: Methuen, 1969); Florence Swinton Dry, The Sources of “Jane Eyre” (Cambridge: W. Heffer &
Sons, 1940). See also Florence Swinton Dry, The Sources of Wuthering Heights (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons,
1937).
3
Smith, Letters 2, p. 427.

79
romantic imagination. This resulted, she argues in ‘some of the most striking thematic and

formal elements in her later work’ such as the nature of introspective daydreaming in all three

novels and Gothic horrors like Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre and the ghostly nun of Villette.

Brontë incorporates them, she adds, into ‘contexts that are otherwise credibly mundane’.4 F.B.

Pinion describes Scott’s influence on Emily’s Wuthering Heights as ‘unmistakable, citing The

Black Dwarf (1816) as the source for Cathy’s delirious view of Nelly as an old witch

‘gathering elf-bolts to hurt our heifers.’5

With specific reference to Jane Eyre, Florence Dry identified Brontë’s imitation in

Jane Eyre of Scott’s Waverley, Guy Mannering, A Legend of the Wars of Montrose and Heart

of Midlothian. Brontë drew on these novels for plot, setting, descriptive detail and

characterisation. Her comparative analysis of Brontë using Scott as the predominant source

remains one of the most detailed studies to date. Rochester’s disguise as a fortune-teller

includes the elfin locks, red cloak and wide hat of Meg Merrilies, Guy Mannering. In the

wilderness Jane cries out: ‘that is an ignis fatuus [...] and I expected it would soon vanish’

which can be compared with Guy Mannering’s ‘it must surely have been a light in the hut of a

forester, for it shone too steadily to be the glimmer of an ignis fatuus’. In The Heart of

Midlothian, Whistler, the illegitimate son of Effie Deans and George Staunton, is described as

a ‘bedraggled lad with shaggy black hair descending into elf-locks giving an air of ferocity

and wildness’ providing material for Brontë’s image of Bertha Mason as the mad woman with

‘long dishevelled hair, thick and dark and a swelled black face’. Moreover, the following

examples testify to the relationship between Legend of Montrose and Jane Eyre. Florence Dry

compares Rochester’s melancholy and superstitious thinking of divine intervention at

Ferndean to Alan MacAulay’s proneness to depression and his belief in second sight. Bessie’s

4
Bock, p. 19.
5
Alexander and Smith, p. 445. See F.B. Pinion, A Brontë Companion (London, 1975), p. 207.

80
ballad with the refrain, ‘the poor orphan child’, sung to Jane, is most likely derived from

Scott’s ballad, ‘The Orphan Child’ which Annot Lyle sings to MacAulay to calm him down.

At Ferndean, Rochester’s ‘You mocking changeling, fairy-born and human-bred! You make

me feel as I have not felt these twelve months’ bear similarity with Annot Lyle, regarded by

MacAulay ‘as the most beautiful little fairy he had ever seen’.6

But I am especially interested in Scott’s influence on Brontë’s use of folklore in Glass

Town and Angria. Bock examines Scott’s influence on Brontë’s early narrative methods,

arguing that Brontë was influenced more by his craft as storyteller than the ideology and

content of his Waverley novels. Brontë modelled off Scott’s understanding of the relationship

with his readers. Bock adds that the Brontës ‘perpetually strike poses in their writing and play

games of identity with their readers’.7 Scholar Christine Alexander notes that the ‘manuscripts

of 1833-5 show that Brontë devoured the works of Scott [and Byron] with something

bordering on obsession’, and describes the High Life of Verdopolis (1834) as an ‘orgy of

Scottism’.8 For their Tales, Smith and Alexander are insistent that Brontë was indebted to

Scott’s concept of medieval romance, descriptions of regional realistic landscape, themes of

Catholicism and romantic love, plots of heroine abductions and Scottish clan warfare, poetic

devices, character and place names, German Romanticism, Scottish border ballads, Scottish

history and dialect, as well as the Gothic. Across Brontë’s Tales there are many references

and direct quotes from Scott’s poems and prose. The Waverley novels were particularly

influential on her juvenilia (the early tales). Christine Alexander links Brontë’s The Green

Dwarf. A Tale of the Perfect Tense (10 July 1833) to Scott’s The Black Dwarf (1816) in title

and in form, drawing also on the concept of historical romance and the theme of abduction.

6
Dry, Jane Eyre, pp. 30-83.
7
Bock, pp. 16-18.
8
Christine Alexander, ed., An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, 2, The Rise of Angria 1833-
1835 Part 1: 1833-1834, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. xxi.

81
Alexander points to Brontë’s constant allusion in her juvenilia to Scott. Alexander has Scott’s

Gothic in mind when she describes the juvenilia’s melodramatic plots, exotic settings,

violence, female victims and diabolical heroes.9 Alexander’s source explanations on Glass

Town and Angria point overwhelmingly to Scott. Brontë’s ‘The Green Dwarf’ (September,

1833), for example, imitates Scott’s Locksley alias Robin Hood of Ivanhoe (1819), but more

so, its character Bertha resembles Scott’s Saxon Ulrica of Font-de-Bœuf’s castle.

Alexander notes Brontë’s use of many other sources pointing also to the Bible,

especially Revelation, classical myth, Milton, Johnson’s Rasselas, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

Bunyan Pilgrims Progress and ‘The Story of the Amours of Camaralzaman’ in Arabian

Night’s Entertainments. Alexander states the influence of oriental romance on ‘A Romantic

Tale (1829 in which Brontë writes ‘tradition has it that there were giants on the earth who

went to the country of the Genii and were at war [...] these skeletons are evil genii chained in

these deserts by the fairy Maimoune’. In the ‘Tales of the Islanders Volume 2’, A Midsummer

Night’s Dream offers a backdrop for Glass Town’s fairy land in which the four inhabitants

‘had to obtain leave of Oberon and Titania’. In Angria’s ‘Something about Arthur’ (1834)

Brontë quotes ‘Sir John Barleycorn’ from Robert Burns Tam o’Shanter. In ‘Arthuriana: The

Tea Party’ (1833), reference to ‘cantrips’, described in the notes as a witch’s trick or any

mischievous, extravagant conduct of Scottish origin’ is attributed to the works of James Hogg

or Burns. In ‘Corner Dishes: A Day Abroad’ (June 1834) Brontë, instead, adapts the northern

English form of ‘boggle’ for ‘brownie’ and ‘bogle’, common Scottish forms, following Burns

in Tam, Hogg as well as Scott. In a similar vein, Brontë’s knowledge of Zoroastrianism across

the tales compares to Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh. Other references include Aesop’s Fables,

9
Alexander, Early Writings 2010, p. 19.

82
James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian, Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, and Coleridge’s

‘Christabel’ to name several.10

Clearly, Alexander recognises Brontë’s uses of a vast range of sources for Glass Town

and Angria from the literary canon with Scott (and Byron) as the most influential.

In the main, critics examine Scott not only in terms of his Gothic romance but as a

major source and influence on Brontë’s developing narrative skills. They do not assess his

writing as folkloric and tend not to discuss any ideological associations between Scott and

Brontë. However, their evidence strongly suggests Scott’s appeal to Brontë. When Alexander

refers to the terms fairy, bogle, brownie, cantrips and boggle, she does not describe the

material as folkloric. Biographer Juliet Barker notes a number of ‘irregular serials on

superstition and legends’ in the Brontë children’s favourite periodical, Blackwood’s

Edinburgh Magazine (1818) that provided material on magic and the supernatural for their

editions of ‘Young Men’s Magazine’. They include: ‘Remarkable Instance of Second Sight’

(April 1818), ‘Story of an Apparition’ (September 1818) and ‘On some Popular Superstitions

in Wales’ (May 1818). Welsh superstitions were divided into ‘Witch Stories’, ‘Stories of

Ghosts’, ‘Evil Spirits’, ‘Demons’, ‘Stories of Fairies’, ‘Dogs of Hell’, ‘Corpse Candles’ and

the ominous ‘Kyhirraeth’.11 The articles cited by Barker are, in fact, Scott’s work.

Blackwood’s also published extracts from James Hogg alias the Ettrick Shepherd including

‘Fairies, Witches and Brownies’ (February 1828) and ‘Fairies, Deils and Witches’ (April

1828) from The Shepherd’s Calendar, and ‘The Brownie of the Black Haggs’ (October 1828).

Also published were extracts from Thomas Crofton Croker Fairy Legends and Traditions of

10
Christine Alexander, ed., An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, 1, The Glass Town Saga 1826-
1832 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), Christine Alexander, ed., An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte
Brontë, 2, The Rise of Angria 1833-1835 Part 1: 1833-1834 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), Christine
Alexander, ed., An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, 2, The Rise of Angria 1833-1835 Part 2:
1834-1835 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), Christine Alexander, ed., The Brontës: Tales of Glass Town, Angria
and Gondal: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
11
Juliet Barker, The Brontës (London: Phoenix Giants, 1995), p. 160, p. 866.

83
South of Ireland (1825) such as ‘An Autumnal Night’s Dream in Ireland’, ‘The Legend of

Knocksheogowna’ and ‘Master and Man’ (1828). Scott’s material typified the Romantic

revival of folklore. These stories of fairy abduction, second sight, ghost encounters and

images of witchcraft would eventually find their way into Brontë’s tales. As broadly as she

read, it is clear that Brontë’s early reading material included Celtic sources. She read Hogg

and Burns, probably Crofton Croker and especially Scott. In her Tales, Brontë also alludes to

James Macpherson’s Ossian (1759).

Having re-framed Brontë’s narrative uses of the supernatural as owing as much to

folklore in Victorian prose fiction and Romantic-era poetry as to the Gothic in my thesis

introduction, in this chapter, I want to examine Brontë’s engagement with Scott’s literary

sources, and suggest that these too can be understood as folkloric in part. I examine critical

assessments of Scott’s folklore and compare Scott’s fiction (and his folklore sources) with

Glass Town and Angria. Moreover, I argue that not only does Brontë imitate Scott’s narrative

use of folklore but also his ideology in the study of rationalism.

Scott and the Folklore Critical/Scholarly Canon

As discussed in the Introduction, a number of folklore critics do examine Scott from a

literary folklore perspective, furthering my argument. Katharine M. Briggs recognises Scott’s

contribution to the Romantic revival of the fairy tradition rating highly his treatment,

collection, authority and creative impulse. She adds that Scott shows the depth of knowledge

of local folklore through his Lay of the Last Minstrel and of the ballad ‘Alice Brand’, sung by

Allan-Bane of The Lady of the Lake (1810). Although Coleridge and Hood alluded to fairy

lore in their poetry, they could not compete with the depth and scale of their Celtic

84
counterparts. Only Keats showed real familiarity with the fairy traits.12 More recently, Silver’s

treatment of Scott’s fairy lore is still akin to Briggs. Scott, she states, epitomised the romantic

fairy poet. She develops his studies of fairy material, from his Minstrelsy of the Scottish

Border (1802-3) to his prose fiction and final Letters. Both the nature of fairies and their

origins permeate Scott’s fiction with the fairy changeling, Fenella of Peveril of the Peak

(1822), and the White Lady of Avenel, part banshee, undine, brownie, kelpie and sylph of The

Monastery (1820). His Germanic duergars (or dwarfs) appear as Pacolet in The Pirate (1822)

and Elshie in The Black Dwarf. As a child, Scott believed in fairies; as an adult he remained

open to the idea of seeing ‘things invisible to mortal sight including fairies’.13 Silver promotes

Scott as a historical realist or euhemerist in his analysis of the origin of the fairy superstition.

Scott she says, promoted the scientific model.

In The British Folklorists: A British History (1968) Richard Dorson is also helpful,

profiling in particular Scott’s synthesis of his psychology of ghosts in his Letters on

Demonology and Witchcraft (1830). Dorson regards these essays as the ‘full-scale treatise in

English on what before long would be called folklore [...] the Letters promptly took a place

beside Brand’s Popular Antiquities as an immediate authority and reference in matters

supernatural and archaic’.14 Crucially, Dorson describes the Letters as a story of the battle

between reason and unreason:

Scott writes as a rationalist and latitudinarian Christian, weighing the evidence for and
against apparitions, witches, and ghosts in the light of reason and with the guidance of
the church, but at too early a date to benefit from empirical science, ethnology, and the
Higher [Biblical] Criticism.15

12
Katharine M. Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1967), pp. 204-210.
13
Silver, pp. 10-13 (p. 10).
14
Dorson, p. 115.
15
Ibid., p. 115.

85
Yet, Coleman O. Parsons in Witchcraft and Demonology in Scott’s Fiction; with Chapters on

the Supernatural in Scottish Literature (1964) highlights contradictory elements in Scott’s

uses of folklore. Folklore combined mystery and fact, the artistic marvellous with common

sense, but ultimately, it also reflected Scott’s rhetoric of scepticism. Yet, referring indirectly

to Scott’s assertion that ‘the abstract possibility of apparitions must be admitted by everyone

who believes in a Deity and his superintending omnipotence’16 in Letter One, Parsons is

cognisant of Scott’s ambivalence towards certain phenomena such as second sight. Parsons

adds that Scott’s ‘allegiance to imaginative and rationalistic values is a fair reflection of the

man and of his contemporaries. In both, receptivity was crossed by doubt and scepticism by

glimmering conviction’.17 Scott’s inconsistent attitudes toward phenomena not only inhibited

his narrative presentation but also conveyed self-consciousness, rendering his fiction as

clumsy and uneven. J.M. Harris is also clear that Scott’s intention with his short stories on

second sight in ‘The Highland Widow’ (1827) and ‘The Two Drovers’ (1827) characterise

cultural enlightenment. However, similarly to Parsons, Harris notes evidence of ambivalence

in the two stories repudiating Douglas Gifford’s assertion that Scott as sophisticated writer,

relegated ‘brownies and wraiths, wizards and kelpies to the cottage and the nursery’.18

‘Ambivalence - not credulity or scepticism- seems to be the watchword of the Victorian

era’,19 as Harris says. Scott (and Burns and Hogg) ‘incorporated supernatural folklore into

literary works that did not altogether dismiss such traditions as “phantasms of the braine”’.20

16
Parsons, Witchcraft, p. 47. See also Coleman O. Parsons, ‘The Supernatural in Scott’s Poetry’, Notes and
Queries, 188 (1945), pp. 2-8, 30-33, 76-77, 98-101; Coleman O. Parsons, ‘Minor Spirits and Superstitions in the
Waverley Novels’, Notes and Queries, 184 (1943), pp. 353-363; Notes and Queries 185 (1943), pp. 4-9.
17
Parsons, Witchcraft, p. 136.
18
Harris, Folklore, p.199, See Douglas Gifford, ed. ‘Introduction’, The History of Scottish Literature 3
(Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), p. 7.
19
Harris, Folklore, p. 200.
20
Ibid., p. 7.

86
Although rationalistic in The Black Dwarf, Scott was not consistent in his presentation of

‘unequivocal scepticism’.21

Whilst acknowledging Briggs and Silver’s work on Scott’s fairy lore, I am more

interested in the conclusive evidence of Dorson, Parsons and Harris. They all point to Scott’s

main thematic role of folklore as a measure of Enlightenment Rationality. The critical

consensus is that for Scott as an enlightened cultural writer, folklore characterised the tension

between rationality and tradition, conveyed through the narrator or editorial voice. In doing

so, these critics acknowledge Scott as an ethnographer, social scientist and antiquarian, as

well as a poet and historian. I wish to argue that Scott’s deployment of folklore as an antidote

to the progression of civilisation stands out as the main ideological influence on Brontë’s uses

of the supernatural across the Glass Town and Angria. In all, these critics provide the

foundation for me to further Brontë’s imitation of Scott’s narrative and thematic uses of

folklore.

Scott’s Sources of Folklore

Scott owned and quoted from an enormous range of literary (British, Celtic, European,

Oriental), philosophical, historical and antiquarian sources22 positioning himself as the

cultural and scholarly authority on folklore to support his ballads, prose fiction and essays. He

relied on the folklore material of fellow Celt, ballad-writer and collector John Leyden (1775-

1811) for the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. The reference to mermaids in Lord of the Isles

is based on Leyden’s ballads ‘Macphail of Colonsay’ and ‘Mermaid of Corrievrekin’. In

Romantic nostalgic style, Scott recreates Christmas in Marmion (1808). He turns to

21
Harris, Folklore, pp. 198-200 (p. 199).
22
Walter Scott, The Catalogue of the Library at Abbotsford (Edinburgh: T. Constable, 1838)

87
antiquarians Francis Douce, Mr Ritson’s memoranda and Ben Jonson (1572/3-1673) for his

Court Masques to reconstruct chivalric culture at Mertoun House. Saying:

The wassel round, in good brown bowls, Garnish’d with ribbons, blithely trowls,carols
roared while in the ‘mumming see traces of ancient mystery, England was merry
England, when Old Christmas brought his sports again.23

Scott also adapted Marmion from literary antiquarian and ballad editor, Joseph Ritson (1752-

1803) in his A Selection of English Songs, Robin Hood: a collection of all the ancient poems,

songs and ballads now extant relative to that outlaw and Ancient English Romances. Scott

called upon medieval chronicler on folklore, Gervase of Tilbury, for his story of the fairy

knight. For the Goblin Hall, Scott relied on Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft (1665)

for the appearance of the magician or necromancer as the ‘wizard habit strange, came forth’.24

For the line ‘the wizard’s grave, that wizard Priest’s whose bones are thrust, from company of

holy dust’ Scott imitated James Hogg’s The Mountain Bard and Matthew Gregory Lewis The

Monk: A Romance (1796). Scott knew of will-o’-the-wisp or Robin Goodfellow and Jack o’

lantern in ‘better we had through mire and bush, been lantern-led by Friar Rush’.25

Medievalism and Merry England is characterised again in Lay of the Last Minstrel

(1805) where Scott relies on poet Michael Drayton’s (1563-1631) Poly-Olbion Song 26 for

his account of Robin Hood and his merry men. He refers to the early demonology of Delrio.

He draws on a number of sources for tales of enchantment and witchcraft including the

astrology and natural philosophy associated with Sir Michael Scott of Balwearie for ‘the

wondrous Michael Scott’26 in Canto Second. He also turns to Burns’ Tam o’Shanter,

Scandinavian poets and fictions of the Edda, the ‘Tale of the Fisherman’ in Arabian Nights,

23
Walter Scott, The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, ed. J Logie Robertson (London: Henry Frowde, 1913),
p. 152.
24
Ibid., p. 120.
25
Ibid., p. 127.
26
Ibid., p. 10.

88
and, again, Reginald Scot. For theories on the phenomena of immortality he turns to Joseph

Glanville’s Saducismus Triumphatus (1681). For elementals, Scott refers to Ariel of The

Tempest. Lord Cranstoun’s Goblin page or ‘the Baron’s dwarf27 was partly based on a local

legend of a man named Gilpin Horner. Scott based his metrical ballad on Southey’s Thalaba

and Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ both of which provided material for the fairy tradition.

The concept of the theme of second sight is covered in The Lady of the Lake (1810)

with ‘a grey hair’d sire, whose eye intent, was on the vision’d future bent’.28 Scott’s source is

Martin Martin’s Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (1716). The ballad ‘Alice

Brand’ in stanza 15: ‘Tis merry, ‘tis merry, in Fairy-land, when fairy birds are singing’ is

drawn from a Danish ballad published in 1591. Scott reminds his readers of his tale of ‘Young

Tamlane’ and illustrates his interest in the fairy faith with a translation of another Danish

ballad, ‘The Elfin Gray’. Scott’s: ‘who may dare on wold to wear, the fairies’ fatal green’ is

drawn from local Celtic superstitions of the Daoinshe’ Shie. He looks to the fairy romance of

Opheus and Eurydice for images of fairy land. Robin Hood appears again with a lengthy

description with Scott quoting from Ritson’s ‘Litil Geste of Robin Hood’. In all, the Lady of

the Lake reads like a dictionary of folklore with definitions of local superstitious phenomena

such as the belief in oracular power, or Taghairm, and beings including the ‘Urisk’,

resembling Milton’s Lubbar Fiend and the Scottish Brownie, the Kelpy, the ‘fatal Ben-Schie’s

boding scream’ and the Glaislich or female giant, to name a few.

In Rokeby (1813) Scott turns to Camden’s Britannia for the Roman legend of the

Magon, a giant or deity. In the Scottish set Lord of the Isles (1815), Scott recalls Coleridge’s

ballad ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1797) for the phenomena of the sailor’s Sea-Fire.

Scott writes: ‘awaked before the rushing prow, the mimic fires of ocean glow, those

27
Walter Scott, Poetical Works, p. 14.
28
Ibid., p. 213.

89
lightening of the wave’.29 Lastly, for the poem Glenfinlas (1803) Scott reads Dr Johnson’s

definition of the second sight, a recurring theme also of the narrative poems. In the poem he

refers once again, to ‘the seer’s prophetic spirit found’.30 Dr Johnson describes it as ‘an

impression, either by the mind upon the eye, or by the eye upon the mind by which things

distant and future are perceived as if they were present’.31

Scott’s presentation of folklore in his ballads and poetry seems to convey him less as

the enlightenment historian but more the medievalist, national and Celtic historian. The

material enhances narrative features rather than advances reason. However, Scott’s revelling

in the eerie, mystical, strange, romantic aspects of folklore is accompanied in the notes by the

omnipotent authorial voice of reason. Brontë could imitate his creative use of folklore and his

treatment of Merrie England. His ballads and poems provided sufficient material on the

origins and meaning of folklore. Scott’s sources for his historic romances were no less dense.

For Locksley, alias Robin Hood of Ivanhoe, Scott drew on antiquarian Joseph Strutt’s

Queenhoo Hall. For cabalistic philosophy, Scott probably referred to of the Nature of Things.

Nine Books: Written by Theophrastus, Of Hohenheim, Called Paracelsus (1674). In the

introduction to The Monastery (1820) Scott writes the:

Theory of astral spirits or creatures of the elements [...] known to those who have
studied the Cabalistical philosophy by the names of Sylphs, Gnomes, Salamanders,
and Naiads, as they belong to the elements of Air, Earth, Fire and Water.32

More so, the dichotomy between tradition and reason characterise Scott’s historical

romances. In The Monastery young Halbert Glendinning sets his visionary eyes on a female

clothed in white. The White Lady of Avenel was a composite of Prospero’s spirit or

elemental, Ariel, of The Tempest, Chaucer’s ‘Queen of faery’, Queen Mab of Romeo and

29
Walter Scott, Poetical Works, p. 417.
30
Ibid., p. 660.
31
Ibid., p. 686.
32
Walter Scott, The Monastery (London, 1830), p. xliii.

90
Juliet, Fouque’s Undine and Coleridge’s Geraldine of the ballad ‘Christabel’. Likewise, in

Scott’s Peveril of the Peak (1823), Julian Peveril will bear the brunt as the credulous

youngster in his irrational image of Fenella as a fairy changeling. The fairy changeling has

similarities to Goethe’s Mignon and is based on the Manx superstitions recalled in Waldron’s

Description of the Isle of Man (1731). Scott draws on Croker’s Fairy Legends and

Keightley’s Fairy Mythology for material on fairy abduction.

Scott’s characters are often witches, sybils or gypsies such as Ulrica of Ivanhoe (1819)

Meg Merrilies of Guy Mannering (1815), Madge Wildfire of The Heart of Mid-Lothian

(1818) and Norna of the Pirate (1821). For Scott, although witchcraft is a cultural

anachronism, it still adds to narrative interest. Scott owned critical exposés of early modern

witchcraft. Of one hundred and seven entries in Scott’s library on witchcraft, a number of trial

reports included The Extraordinary Life and Character of Mary Bateman the Yorkshire

Witch, executed at York (1809). In Letter Eight of The Letters, he mocks the credulity of

Edward Fairfax of Fayston (Fewston) in Knaresborough. Scott quotes William Collins’ Ode

on the Popular Superstitions of Scotland:

How have I sate while piped the pensive wind,

To hear thy harp, by British Fairfax strung;
Prevailing poet whose undoubting mind
Believed the magic wonders which he sung.33

For A Legend of the Wars of Montrose (1819), omens add to setting and atmosphere, Scott

adapting from Macpherson’s Ossian:

Birds of omen dark and foul

Night-crow, raven, bat and owl,
Leave the sick man to his dreams—
All night long he heard your screams.34

33
Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830) (republished Wordsworth Editions, 2001), p. 148.
34
Walter Scott, A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, ed. J.H Alexander (Edinburgh University Press, 1995), p. 49.

91
This time, the older Alan MacAulay has to grapple with his demons, believing in the second

sight. For the incident of the supposed apparition of Morton in Old Mortality (1819), Scott

looked to a story in Defoe’s An essay on the history and reality of apparitions: Being an

account of what they are, and what they are not; whence they come, and whence they come

not, also how we may distinguish between the apparitions of good and evil spirits, and how

we ought to behave to them (1727). In this novel, Lord Evendale mocks Edith Bellenden’s

credulity of the ghost of Henry Morton.

Scott went further back again in the Celtic literary tradition to medievalist John

Barbour’s (died 1395) study of astrology in The Bruce (1376) and Robert Henryson’s (1430-

1506) chronicles. Then onto the eighteenth-century verse of Allan Ramsay’s (1686-1758)

pastoral comedy The Gentle Shepherd (1725) with its reference to changelings, and Robert

Fergusson’s (1750-1774) supernatural poetry. Scott was indebted to Hogg’s pervasive use of

the Scottish brownie saying in Letter Ten: ‘of a meaner origin and occupation was the

Scottish Brownie—already mentioned, as somewhat resembling Robin Goodfellow in the

frolicsome days of Old England’. He goes on to state that ‘the last place in the South of

Scotland supposed to have been honoured or benefited by the residence of a brownie, was

Bodsbeck, in Moffatdale, which has been the subject of an entertaining tale by Mr James

Hogg, the self-instructed genius of Ettrick Forest’.35 Scott also held copies of Ludwig Tieck’s

Volksmärchen (1797), the Grimms’ Kinder Und Haus Märchen (1812) and their German

Popular Stories collected from oral tradition (1823) and the Scandinavian Saga, Eyrbiggia

Saga, as well as broadsides and chapbooks. Obviously, as a ballad revivalist, Scott also relied

on Bishop Percy’s (1729-1811), Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). He owned both

Hone’s works and Grose’s Provincial Glossary (particularly useful for the second sight).

35
Scott, Letters, p. 207.

92
 In sum, Scott was well placed to base much of his narrative poems, historical

romances and Letters on folklore. In his role as literary antiquarian, he graduated from

collector to quasi-scientist. Moreover, in Glass Town and Angria, Brontë could concentrate

Scott’s uses of folklore towards her theme of enlightenment. His Waverley plots provided her

with material to base the binary opposition of reason and credulity in the juvenilia.

Scott more than Brontë read widely for folklore sources. He collected lore from local

informants who had knowledge of the Scottish oral traditions, local Highland tales and old

chronicles.36 But they could both draw on local knowledge of haunted houses and ghost

legends. Brontë may have read Scott’s views on ghosts from the family copy of Allan’s Life

of Sir Walter Scott (1834). On a visit to Dunvegan Castle in 1828, Scott said, ‘I cannot say

that I am a believer in the return of departed spirits but I heartily regret the days when I did

entertain the very interesting opinion [...] ghosts are only seen where they are believed. But

[...] they are most interesting to the imagination’.37 After the death of his wife Charlotte, Scott

dreamt that she lay asleep beside him, believing that the ‘phenomena of dreaming are in a

great measure occasioned by the double touch which takes place when one hand is crossed in

sleep upon another’.38

Scott researched the legends and folk tales of the Border around Abbotsford. The bank

of the Tweed near to Abbotsford was reputed to be a place for fairy sightings. In 1822, Scott

had supervised repairs to the ruins of Melrose Abbey, the burial site of the wizard Michael

Scott (1175-1234) alluded to in Lay of the Last Minstrel. Scott voyaged further to the

Shetland Islands to learn of their lore, equipping himself for The Lord of the Isles (1815). For

narrative settings of spectre-haunted dwellings, Scott had heard of the castle of Hermitage and

slept a night in Glamis Castle in 1793. In the same way that Brontë was familiar with
36
Dorson, p. 109.
37
George Allan, Life of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Thomas Ireland, 1834), p. 96.
38
Ibid., p. 107.

93
Yorkshire spirits, Scott knew of the Highland Redcap, Brown man of the Muirs, Sidhe,

Glaistig, Water-kelpie, Boddach, Bean-Sigh, Brownie, Daoine Shie (the collective term for

fairies), Grugach and Urisk. Scott tells us that the Highland Urisk is a cross between a man

and a goat like the Grecian satyr and similar to the Scottish brownie.

Scott was able to develop his knowledge of folklore from literary, antiquarian and

local sources far more but in a similar manner to Brontë. Underpinning Scott’s fiction is both

a revelling in history and a commitment to social progress. His folklore material represents

the opposition to enlightenment thinking. To what extent Brontë imitates Scott’s theme

becomes clearer in the next section. Reading Scott, Brontë became versed in the literary

folklore canon, mediated not only through his works but through those Scott alluded to in his

notes and prefaces. Importantly, Brontë could engineer her fantasy tales to ideas of social and

cultural development. Scott’s research reflects and confirms a scholarly framework for the

aspiring literary antiquarian. In his footsteps, Brontë, too, could equip herself with the literary,

antiquarian, philosophical and oral material to develop her folklore in fiction. They both apply

this material for narrative and thematic functions. As in Scott’s fiction, imagined thinking

resonates as a key character trait in her fiction. Whilst Brontë was in no way a cultural

historian, she ordered Johann Wilhelm Meinhold’s romance The Amber Witch (1844),

advertised as ‘the most extraordinary Trial for Witchcraft ever known’, which was listed on a

cream sheet of paper among many other books requested from Smith and Elder on 18 March,

1850.39 Crucially, while for both writers, Gothic romance would feature in their reading, there

were many other major resources of folklore. Accepting Scott as a key resource, Brontë, like

her hero, could easily read creative adaptations of fairy and ghost traditions in the standard

works of the English literary canon. She as a quasi-student of folklore, and Scott as a literary

39
Smith, Letters 2, pp. 361-362.

94
antiquarian, it would be inconceivable for Brontë and Scott not to notice the permeation of

folklore throughout English literature. Obviously, as literary antiquarian, Scott, older, richer

and male, would have more access to past and present material. Yet, the range of sources

quoted in Brontë’s tales reflects the fact that not only was she as well equipped to engage in

literary folklore as her predecessor, but to an extent, she followed some similar reading

trajectories on literature and antiquarianism for folklore sources. Her allusions to Scott are

more frequent in Angria than Glass Town and Scott’s presence is felt also in her later Angria

tales, ‘Caroline Vernon’, ‘Mina Laury’ and ‘Stancliffe’s Hotel’ (1838-9). It is fair to say that

whilst all of these sources contain folklore, much of Brontë’s material was drawn from Scott.

Glass Town and Angria

With the theme of rationality emerging, I want to centre my discussion on Brontë’s

imitation and adaptation of Scott’s material for her artistic and ideological objectives of Glass

Town and Angria.

Dwarfs

In great detail, Finic, the dwarf of The Spell: Extravaganza (1834), is based on Scott’s

character Elshie of Elshender of The Black Dwarf (1816) (and Gilpin Horner of Lay of the

Last Minstrel (1805)). Brontë imitates Scott’s use of dwarfs for the atmosphere of terror,

excitement, horror and the vulgar. However, Scott more than Brontë was prepared to accept

the reality of the phenomenon of second sight dramatized in his character Elshie. Brontë

draws on Scott’s supernaturalism in the Glass Town and Angria tales. Brontë draws on

Scott’s elemental beings: Scottish bogles, brownies, black dogs, Scandinavian dwarfs or

duergars, English goblins and fairies. His list extends further though to Shetland drows or

trows, German kobolds and northern dobbie. In particular, Brontë imitates Scott’s dwarf,

95
Elshie, for her character Finic. Finic’s male malevolent antecedents are the goblin and

brownie. In Glass Town’s True Story (August 1829) two goblins are described as ‘not above

three feet high, their heads very large in proportion to their bodies and covered with a

profusion of black, shaggy hair’.40 They speak in an unearthly tone of voice. Although taking

the form of a goblin, the image fits with Jane Eyre’s image of Rochester as a brownie with his

‘shaggy black mane’ (p. 438), while Lucy of Villette similarly imagines Monsieur Paul as a

brownie, the ‘freakish, friendly, cigar-loving phantom’ (p. 343). This image develops in the

dwarf Finic, the mute faithful servant of the Duke of Zamorna, offspring of an affair between

Sofala, an African woman, and the eighteen year old Marquis of Douro (Duke of Zamorna)

and features at times in the Angrian kingdom.41 Seven months later in A Leaf from an

Unopened Volume (17 January 1834) Finic was supposed to be killed off, but by The Spell:

An Extravaganza (24 July 1834) he has resurfaced. Brontë’s treatment of him is as

unforgiving as Scott’s of Elshie. Finic appears yelling, contorting his hideous features. Mary

Henrietta Wellesley needs him in spite of his malevolence. Finic, similarly to Elshie, is

believed to have prophetic powers, foreseeing the death of Wellesley’s husband the Duke of

Zamorna. Brontë describes him:

The ghastly deformed figure of Finic glided into the light [...] forgetting that he could
neither hear, nor answer, I asked, gently as I could, what he wanted [...] he lifted his
huge head, and flinging back his matted locks so that the moonbeams had full leave to
pour their revealing radiance on each wild and exaggerated feature of his unearthly
visage [...] he fixed his eyes on mine [...] in his general moods he is sullen, ferocious,
misanthropic and malignant [...] I sat down and, patting his shaggy head in order to
soothe the morbid gloom of his temperament I again asked what he wanted, but this
time it was by signs, not speech. I can converse with him pretty readily in that way,
but then it’s by the ordinary and well-known method, not those occult movements
with which he and Zamorna hold communion in a manner intelligible only to
themselves [...]. The following conversation ensued in terms as concise as a
telegraphic despatch.42

40
Alexander, Glass Town Saga, p. 55.
41
Alexander and Smith, p. 197.
42
Alexander, Rise of Angria 2, pp. 182-183.

96
The response of the other characters to Finic is not to challenge or question his physicality,

his racial origins or the idea that he has prophetic powers. He is not the subject of theoretical

enquiry. The function of Finic is to shock and generate feelings of revulsion counterbalanced

only by Mary Henrietta Wellesley’s reliance on his prescience. Brontë is less concerned

whether or not Finic does have supernatural powers. She most likely imitated Scott’s

Elshender of Mucklestane-Moor of The Black Dwarf (1816), based on the real David Ritchie

(1740-1811). He was regarded as a misanthrope who lived in a cottage on the farm of

Woodhouse in the parish manor of Peebleshire, and was a man believed to foretell the

weather. Scott met him and was sympathetic about his physicality and social ostracism. Yet,

in Elshie he felt compelled to dramatize his theory of the fairy origins, linking the dwarf to the

diminutive Scandinavian Lapps, Letts or Picts. These people gained a supernatural reputation.

Scott intended to create a character of the uncanny. The similarity to Brontë’s creatures,

notably Finic, is evident with Elshie described as:

The being who he addressed raised his eyes with a ghastly stare, and, getting up from
his stooping posture, stood before them in all his native and hideous deformity.
His head was of uncommon size, covered with a fell of shaggy hair, partly grizzled
with age; his eyebrows, shaggy and prominent, overhung a pair of small, dark,
piercing eyes, set far back in their sockets that rolled with a portentous wildness,
indicative of a partial insanity [...] to which was added the wild, irregular, and peculiar
expression so often seen in the countenances of those whose persons are deformed.
His body, thick and square [...] was mounted upon two large feet; but nature seemed to
have forgotten the legs and the thighs, or they were so very short as to be hidden by
the dress which he wore. His arms were long and brawny, furnished with two
muscular hands, and where uncovered in the eagerness of his labour, were shagged
with coarse black hair [...] the person of a dwarf.43

In The Black Dwarf, Hobbie Elliot’s grandmother is sure that the dwarf is the ‘Brown Man of

the Muirs’. Brontë may have modelled on Baron Cranstoun’s Goblin-Page or Dwarf, ‘scarce

an earthly man’, of Lay of the Last Minstrel. He was developed from the real Gilpin Horner,

residing in another farmhouse among the Border mountain of Eskdalemuir, Dumfriesshire.

43
Walter Scott, The Black Dwarf & A Legend of Montrose, Waverley Novels 5 (London: Gresham, 1903), p. 23.

97
Another contender for Finic is the son of Norna of Fitful Head, Nick Strumpfer or Pacolet of

The Pirate. Scott drew on Zetland Dwarfs and ancient fairies called Trows and Drows.

Pacolet is described as:

A square male dwarf, about four feet five inches with a head of portentous size and
features correspondent—namely, a huge mouth, a tremendous nose, with large black
nostrils [...] blubber lips of an unconscionable size, and huge wall-eyes with which he
leered, sneered, grinned and goggles [...] hideous, misshapen figure [...] eyes fixed and
glaring.44

Even Geoffrey Hudson of Peveril of the Peak (1823) is portrayed as another physical oddity.

In Scott’s medieval romance The Talisman (1825), Sir Kenneth is contemptuous of the

dwarfish couple Nectabanus and Guenevra who remind him of gnomes with their hideous

bodies and shaggy browed faces. For Brontë and Scott these malignant beings embody horror.

Scott’s dwarfs are in bad taste and he has no interest in minimising their deformity.

Second Sight

But more explicit is her presentation of second sight. Brontë’s writing clearly

demonstrates her interest in the dichotomy between superstition or unreason and

Enlightenment thinking. The regular feature of supernatural phenomena operates as a plot

device, providing an acute sense of both atmosphere and character. For her interest in second

sight Brontë might have drawn from Scott’s The Black Dwarf, The Two Drovers (1827), The

Highland Widow (1827), The Lady of the Lake (1810), and Glenfinlas (1798). In addition to

Dr Johnson, Martin, and probably Grose, Scott drew on Kirk’s belief in the second sight as

depicted in The Secret Commonwealth and Reverend Fraser’s Treatise on the Second Sight in

Theosphilus Insulanus Like Scott, Brontë explores second sight with a healthy scepticism. But

the idea of prescience appealed to Brontë. In Military Conversations (2 September 1829), the

44
Walter Scott, The Pirate (London: Gresham, 1903), p. 291, p. 322.

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Duke of Wellington believes in second sight saying ‘You know that I could divine things

from my youth up’.45 Albion of Albion and Marina (12 October 1830), having heard the

common superstition that the prophetic words uttered by a friend on separating are ominous,

is reassured that Marina’s last words to him portend ‘nothing but peace’.46

In High Life in Verdopolis (20 March 1834) Brontë is keen to depict Warner Howard

Warner as a man with supernatural abilities. He exhibits the phenomenon of ‘second sight’47

He is a central presence in Angria, due to his roles as prime minister, barrister and head of the

oldest and most influential Angrian family of Warners, Agars and Howards. During the War

of Encroachment, Warner finances the Verdopolitan Government soldiers, supports the

casualties at the Battle of Little Warner and is given the prestige of becoming a member of the

Council of Six. Warner is based on Sir Robert Peel and as such is a prominent figure relating

closely to the Duke of Zamorna. He marries Ellen Grenville, is a Calvinist and lives

reclusively at his several manorial residences. In one notable scene, Mr Warner, in the

tradition of the seer,

Was seen to stop and look earnestly in the direction of a copse by the roadside. At that
moment a shrill and remarkable sound, almost like the cry uttered by a bird of prey,
rang through the valley. There was something appalling in it, something that chilled
the blood of every listener, and a simultaneous tightening of reins plainly revealed
how universal, was the feeling which it inspired [...] Warner remained still as a statue.
All now galloped up to him, and at once he was assailed with a thousand questions,
but he did not seem to hear one. His eyes were fixed like those of a corpse, his face
pale. Large drops of sweat were starting from his forehead, yet there was no
expression of horror in his still, mild countenance, but rather one of strange and
composed solemnity. ‘What can be the matter with him?’ was the general question. No
one could furnish an answer to it [...] at last Mr Charles Warner muttered, ‘He sees
something more than we do. The second sight is on him.48

In a collected tone, passing his hand over his noble head, Warner said: ‘This is a fatal gift’.

The party is now concerned with the whereabouts of the Duke. Prophetically, Warner has

45
Alexander, Glass Town Saga, p. 74.
46
Alexander, Glass Town Saga, p. 59.
47
Alexander and Smith, p. 530.
48
Alexander, Rise of Angria 2, pp. 47-72 (p. 48).

99
instilled fear of his potential death. The Duke’s wife urges Warner to communicate his

warnings. He reassures her that ‘my emotion, if I displayed any, arose from awe and not from

horror. I merely wished to communicate to the Duke what I have just now beheld or imagined

that I beheld’. Warner later states that his ‘supernatural gift is a[n] heirloom which has

descended to our family through many generations. Yet I could wish that the vision had not

fallen upon me in such a time and place!’ Warner is now afraid of the accusation of imposter

and vows to never speak of his visions again. On his outward journey he sees Zamorna in the

darkness and mist. As they ride together Warner utters, ‘this is the hour, this is the scene [...]

in which that disembodied spirit should have appeared to me. I could meet it now and

welcome it’.49 Zamorna asks, ’what spirit?’ Warner is reluctant to reveal the subject of his

vision. Sometime later a letter arrives addressed to the Duke. ‘Great God’, he exclaimed,

‘There are things on earth indeed not dreamt of in our philosophy! Warner, Warner I know

your secret!’ He urges Warner to return with him to Percy Hall but Warner is afraid of

Northangerland’s scepticism. The Duke insists he accompany him. ‘You saw only the shadow

of a vanished vision’. Warner’s mysterious claim of second sight is eventually resolved by a

guiding rational narrator.

In working out her position on second sight, Brontë‘s most likely influence was the

manifestation of the phenomena in Allan MacAulay of Scott’s The Legend of the Wars of

Montrose. It is clear that Brontë adapts second-sighted Warner Howard Warner of High Life

in Verdopolis (1834) from MacAulay. For Brontë and Scott, second sight (Scott also uses the

term deuteroscopia) adds to narrative drama as well as to the rhetoric of scepticism, yet it also

appealed to Scott’s interest in the psychology of depression and states of melancholy, and

people’s predisposition to it. Warner’s supernatural event is similar to Allan MacAulay. Allan

49
Alexander, Rise of Angria 2, p. 51.

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inherited this ‘constitutional malady’ from his mother and, like Warner, holds ‘communion

with supernatural beings, and can predict future events’. As Warner stares immobile, Allan

also fixes his eyes with a ghastly stare and utters his prediction: ‘Many a man will sleep this

night upon the heath, that when the Martinmas wind shall blow shall lie there stark enough,

and reek little of cold or lack of covering’. Eventually Allan recovers from his fit, saying, ‘the

mist hath passed from my spirit’. Northangerland’s scepticism is matched by Anderson who

puts the faculty down to imposters or enthusiasts, while Lord Menteith agrees that:

I think that he persuades himself that the predictions which are, in reality, the result of
judgement and reflection, are supernatural impressions on his mind, just as fanatics
conceive the workings of their own imagination to be divine inspiration.50

More than Brontë, Scott had the capacity to suspend disbelief if only to engage his reader’s

fancy, amusement and imagination. Yet, unlike Brontë, Scott could not fully adopt a

rationalist viewpoint on the second sight. As Parsons and Harris say of Scott’s folklore,

ambiguity was the watchword.

Astrology

Also up for ridicule and exposure is Manfred the magician or philosopher in Brontë’s

The Foundling (27 June 1833). Critics relate him to Byron’s verse drama Manfred (1816-17)

but he is also likely to be loosely based on Michael Scott, the wizard or necromancer of

Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel. For both Scott and Brontë, wizardry adds to historical

authenticity as well as narrative role. Magic for Brontë offers another route to the theme of

rationalism as well as characterisation and plot. It is also a pointer to Brontë’s Anti-

Catholicism and reassertion of the true faith of the Church of England. The Tales of the

Islanders Vol 2 (2 December 1829) is a satire on Roman Catholicism’s apparent historical

50
Scott, Legend of the Wars, p. 45.

101
affiliation with the science of necromancy. The Philosopher’s Island appears in The

Foundling (27 June 1833) with the great magician Manfred, philosopher and president of the

university’s secret society. The entrance of the white bearded old magician is a sight to

behold:

Iron lamps, suspended from the low arched roof, served to shed a dim glimmer on the
numerous masked and black-robed figures who appeared beneath, gliding with a
spirit-like tread through the surrounding gloom. Not a step or voice was heard, as they
slowly arranged themselves in a half-circle before a lofty throne, which stood in the
centre of the vault, on which sat an aged man who seemed to be more than a hundred
years old. He was of kingly stature; his forehead was bald, but a long beard as white as
snow flowed down lower than his girdle. In his right hand he held a sort of sceptre,
and a golden circlet glittered among his grey venerable locks.51

Manfred professes to have formed a secret liquid compound that links mankind to the other

world, to the soul. He teaches the children how to gather ‘rare herbs whose subtile juice

mingled in the celestial liquid, under what conjunction of the planetary signs to speak those

mystic words [...] I summoned my familiar spirit’. Brontë draws on the Verdopolitan

nobleman Hector Matthias Mirabeau Montmorency as the voice of reason: ‘We do not

understand the hypocritical jargon of superstition’. In his poetical verse Lay of the Last

Minstrel, Scott revives the famous thirteenth-century legend of scholar Sir Michael Scott of

Balwearie who was learned in Aristotle, natural philosophy, judicial astrology, chiromancy,

alchemy and physiognomy. Michael Scott was an ambassador sent to bring the Maid of

Norway to Scotland upon the death of Alexander III. As the stuff of legend, the wizard is

useful material:

In these far climes it was my lot

To meet the wondrous Michael Scott;
A wizard, of such dreaded fame,
That when, in Salamanca’s cave,
Him listed his magic wand to wave,
The bells would ring in Notre Dame!
Some of his skill he taught to me [...]

51
Alexander, Rise of Angria 1, p. 104.

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 Some saw a sight, not seen by all;
That dreadful voice was heard by some [...]
A shape with amice wrapp’d around,
With a wrought Spanish baldric bound,
Like pilgrim from beyond the sea [...]
It was the wizard, Michael Scott.52

Scott was intrigued in conjurors that were truly learned in the art. Obvious similarities can be

drawn from Michael Scott and Manfred, but magic occurs also in Scott’s short tale, My Aunt

Margaret’s Mother (1828) and the tale of enchantment in Count Robert of Paris (1832).

Omens

Now I turn to Brontë’s treatment of omens and dreams. As early as 1829, Brontë

mentions death omens of birds and dogs. In the First Volume of Tales of the Islanders (30

June 1829) Brontë writes:

Emily and me one stormy night were going through the wood, which leads to school
when we heard a familiar voice saying:
‘Arthur, what was that noise I heard? Listen!’
‘It is a raven, Charles. I am not much given to superstition but I remember hearing my
grandmother say it is a sign that something bad is coming to pass.’
‘If we were to die here tonight, and remember, Arthur, we came here by appointment
of two of our worst enemies, what would my mother do and my father?’
Here they both sobbed aloud, and we likewise heard strange and horrible noises weep
through the wood.
‘What is the matter with our dogs, Arthur? Are they dying?’
‘No, Charles, but that likewise is said to be a sound of death’.53

Glass Town’s Prince Leopold is also wary of the raven. Having created an atmosphere of

doom, the omen recedes into the background. In the second part of Strange Events (1830),

Lord Charles Wellesley tests his credulity in the form of a moon divination that foretells the

hour of one’s death recounted to him by an old man. The death of the old man confirms

Wellesley’s susceptibility to superstition. We can compare the witch-likeness of Bertha of The

52
Scott, Poetical Works, p. 10, p. 46.
53
Alexander, Glass Town Saga, p. 29.

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Green Dwarf to Scott’s Ulrica of Ivanhoe with both characters’ allusions to omens. Brontë’s

Lady Emily enters the ruinous tower to meet Bertha:

‘Well Bertha’, said the footman, ‘I have brought you a visitor. You must show her up
to the highest chamber, for I suppose there is no other in a habitable condition’.
‘No. How should there I wonder, replied the hag in an angry mumbling tone [...] there
is no good in the wind, I think
’Silence, you old witch’, said the man.54

The old crone Bertha orders Emily to stay with her, saying ‘You may lie till tomorrow if

spirits don’t run away with you’. In Ivanhoe, Rebecca, awaiting her fate, is led to a little cell

and finds herself ‘in the presence of an old Sybil, who kept murmuring to herself a Saxon

rhyme’. The old hag Ulrica cries out:

‘Ill omens dog ye both! [...] What devil’s deed have they now in the wind? [...] Thou
wilt have owls for thy neighbour, fair one; and their screams will be heard as far, and
as much regarded as thine own’.55

Brontë takes the topic of omens and divination seriously as evidence of supernatural

phenomenon. Scott deploys them to inject dramatic intensity and tragedy. They both tighten

interest by anticipating events. For Scott, the raven is the most potent representative of death

omens alluded to in The Bride of Lammermoor, The Highland Widow and Anne of Geierstein.

The raven links to Scottish witchcraft. In Ivanhoe it is the Saxons who bear the brunt of

superstitions whilst the Normans are profiled as educated. They manifest in many forms:

birds, dogs, weapons, rings, dreams and natural phenomena. Omens and divination emerge as

phenomena of the present time but equally attach to cultural heritage. In The Antiquary (1816)

Scott’s antiquarian Jonathan Oldbuck, mocking Lovel’s dreams, refers affectionately to the

formal study of them as the ‘oneirocritical science’.56

Scott’s omens and divination should not be taken seriously as they, like gypsy lore,

ghosts, fairies, magic and astrology, function as amusement and scepticism, relegating the
54
Alexander, Rise of Angria 1, p. 174-175.
55
Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (London and New York, 1910), pp. 248-249.
56
Walter Scott, The Antiquary (London: Macmillan, 1908), p. 168.

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unofficial belief system to the stuff of fancy and imagination. As we have seen, Brontë

adapted Scott’s folklore repertoire for the emerging theme of folk superstition versus

Enlightenment rationality as well as for narrative strategy. Time and again, throughout Glass

Town and Angria, characters’ credulity is tested. These folk beliefs operate as a barometer of

cultural progress. Brontë rejects those who profess second sight and magic as imposters and

crackpots.

Ghosts

On the subject of ghosts in particular, I want to suggest that in Glass Town, Brontë

adopts a very different position to Scott. Scott’s amusement of the topic is not matched by

Brontë’s serious study of ghosts. She adapts her own stance on these phenomena, setting the

scene for her characters’ magical thinking in the later novels. For Scott, ghost speculation was

yet another aspect of the national past and a resource for romance as well as an overriding

theme of Enlightenment rationality. On Scott’s consistent third person narrative accounts of

ghosts, Parsons says, whether they are decorative or ‘play havoc for a short time with the

hero’s imagination, or perform other tasks, Scott concentrates on metaphor, humour, local

colour, tradition, folk character, repressed and doomed lives, distortion of reality, and

psychological revelation’.57 Ghost stories and haunted houses abound in the juvenilia. In

Military Conversations after having heard the Duke of Wellington’s ghost story, Marquis of

Douro and Lord Charles Wellesley recount their experience of seeing a ‘form clothed in a

shroud [...] with its ghastly glazed eyes fixed on us [...] and gliding noiselessly to the bedside

it stretched forth one white death-like hand and touched us’.58

57
Parsons, Witchcraft, p. 121.
58
Alexander, Glass Town Saga, pp. 75-76.

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 In Brontë’s writing, however, the absence of the omniscient, rational and authorial

voice is notable in Strange Events (1 September 1830) and An Extraordinary Dream (4

September 1830). Of the many ghost encounters in Glass Town and Angria, Strange Events

stands out as the most complex and opaque, provoking much critical discussion. According to

Heather Glen, this tale is another witty imitation of ‘the quasi-scientific “anecdote” ’59 which

offered a rational account of a supernatural experience or dream like those she read in

Blackwood’s. The tale, influenced by Arabian Nights and Tales of the Genii in its elaboration

of the nature of the Genii, and referencing the idea of giants and creatures (echoing Gulliver’s

Travels), explores the actual nature of power and reality from the perspective of the

powerless. As in The History of the Year (29 March 1829), the dilemma inherent in the tale

(and in childhood) is the attraction to powers which are, in reality, denied. For theirs was a

childhood nurtured by ‘fantasies of power [...] spent in a time and place in which the cultural

celebration of power – whether of literary “genius” or military heroism or romantic conquest

– was extraordinarily compelling’. Alexander echoes Glen’s interpretation of the tale as a

‘parody of the insubstantiality of the imaginative world [...] we sense Charlotte’s adolescent

anxiety about the lack of real control she actually has as both child and female over her life’.60

However, I further Glen’s claim to argue that Strange Events represents an ongoing

theme of superstition versus rationality that characterises other tales of the Glass Town started

in the even earlier tale such as the play Military Conversations (October 1829), and finally

resolved adhering to Scott’s Enlightenment viewpoint (with Lucy Snowe seeing the light) in

Villette. Strange Events opens with the comment: ‘It is the fashion nowadays to put no faith

whatsoever in supernatural appearances or warnings. I am, however a happy exception to the

59
Heather Glen, ‘Configuring a World: Some Childhood Writings of Charlotte Brontë’ in Opening the Nursery
Door: Reading, Writing and Childhood 1600-1900 eds. Mary Hilton, Morag Styles, Victor Watson (London and
New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 215-232 (p. 224).
60
Alexander, Glass Town, Angria and Gondal, p. xxii.

106
general rule, and firmly believe in everything of the kind’.61 In his imagination, daydream, but

most likely impression, of death, Charles Wellesley describes the following experience:

It seemed as if I was a non-existent shadow, that I neither spoke, eat, imagined or lived
of myself, but I was the mere idea of some other creature’s brain. The Glass Town
seemed so likewise. My father, Arthur, and everyone with whom I am acquainted,
passed into a state of annihilation but suddenly I thought again that I and my relatives
did exist, and yet not us but our minds and bodies without ourselves [...]
I saw books removing from the top shelves and returning, apparently of their own
accord [...] I felt myself raised suddenly to the ceiling, and ere I was aware, behold
two immense, sparkling, bright blue globes within a few yards of me. I was in [a] hand
wide enough almost to grasp the Tower of All Nations, and when it lowered me to the
floor I saw a huge personification of myself – hundreds of feet high – standing against
the great Oriel.62

Colonel Crumps walks in and the apparition immediately ceases. Charles can only conclude

that:

Is it not the height, depth, breadth of metaphysical insight, enquiry, illumination,

science, knowledge, profundity, unsatisfactoriness or whatever else you can choose? I
think it is. Who after this will disbelieve in Ghosts? None but sceptics, deists, atheists,
infidels; or if anyone else do, here is another proof of my creed’s verity.63

Critics tend not to examine Wellesley’s evaluation of his bizarre experience. In this tale

Brontë contributes to the Christian eschatological debate on the existence of the afterlife.

Wellesley’s ghost encounter is less metaphorical and more a religious or philosophical

enquiry into the life beyond. Wellesley’s conclusion suggests a spiritualist or bygone

supernaturalism contrary to David Hume’s rationalism. Wellesley denounces Deism: the

rationalist belief in God’s interaction with the Copernican universe and laws of nature. Given

Wellesley’s explanation for this odd event, it does seem that the naive young narrator seems

to assert the belief in the return of the soul after death.

One might very loosely interpret Wellesley’s encounter as involving a poltergeist. If

so, it differs in form and intent to the encounter experienced by the Commissioners of

61
Alexander, Glass Town Saga, p. 256.
62
Ibid., p. 257.
63
Ibid., p. 258.

107
Woodstock (1826) who are driven out of Woodstock Lodge by the antics of Roger Wildrake.

He creates all the mayhem he can muster with:

the violent shutting of a door, driving of nails, sawing, a loud clap of thunder, the
rustle of silk, the mewing of a cat, growling of a dog, squeaking of a pig, puzzlingly
familiar voices, music, sudden gleams of light, a tussle in which a head is broken, the
overturning of Colonel Desborough’s bed and a tub of ditch-water to drench him with
the clash of fetters.64

Scott’s novel concludes with the hero Markham Everard’s ‘rock of scepticism after a period

of wavering’.65 In contrast, Wellesley refuses to temporarily suspend the natural laws of

nature, believing in the ghost phenomena with absolute conviction. Wellesley makes his

unequivocal position clear again in An Extraordinary Dream, committing to ‘further and

indisputable proof of what I have advanced’. In Albion and Marina (12 October 1830) the

confirmation of ‘supernatural agency’ is yet again endorsed with Albion deluded into thinking

he can see Marina’s wraith, witnessed at midnight on 18 June 1815. His vision is confirmed

two years later when a child leads him to Marina’s burial site. Seeing the same date chiselled

into the white marble tombstone, Albion, rousing from a deathlike trance, witnesses again the

spirit of his lost love murmuring ‘Albion, I am happy, for I am at peace’.66

Although Brontë presents magic and second sight as cultural archaisms and

divinations for horror and plot device, some Glass Town characters hold onto their beliefs in

omens and ghosts. However, in Angria, Brontë adheres to Scott’s increasing scepticism of

ghosts. Even though the Angria tales conform to Scott’s sceptic-led treatment of ghosts,

Brontë differs in her presentation. She imitates Scott’s rationalist framework in his tales of

wonder and awe, but her writing lacks his sly humour towards ghosts. With Scott’s stories of

superstition in The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte in mind, Brontë has Napoleon of The Green

Dwarf reject his ocular delusion of the ghost that had ‘entirely deprived him of the capability
64
Parsons, Witchcraft, p. 208.
65
Ibid., p. 209.
66
Alexander, Glass Town Saga, p. 297.

108
of either thinking or acting for himself’.67 In a similar manner, this is reflective of Samuel

Smith of Arthuriana: Brushwood Hall (1 October 1833). He is happy to return to Brushwood

hall ‘without fear of meeting any ghosts but such as his own bad conscience might raise’.68

The comparison between Scott’s Old Mortality (1816) and Brontë’s The Secret

(January 1834) is obvious. In The Secret, Marian Hume’s belief in her vision of Lieutenant

Henry Percy’s ghost (he is believed to be buried in the sea but is actually alive) is similar to

Old Mortality’s Edith Bellenden’s spectral apparition of Whig Captain Henry Morton’s ghost

(also found to be alive and well). Brontë’s Marian listens to Henry’s wraith:

Death and the waters of a vast deep chain me to my place; be happy and think of your
first love no more. The wraith then walked into air before me, and filled with horror, I
hastened back to the house.69

Scott’s Edith believes that Henry ‘came to upbraid me, that, while my heart was with him in

the deep and dead sea, I was about to give my hand to another’.70 Marian must accept Miss

Foxley’s conclusion that it is all illusion. Miss Foxley:

Endeavoured to persuade me that it was all the fruit of my own excited imagination,
but, finding my belief in the reality of the apparition fixed, and likewise my
determination to act according to its counsel, she grew angry and left me.71

Edith also refuses to accept Lord Evendale’s logical explanation that the ‘apparition was

down to the influence of an overstrained imagination [...] you let your imagination beguile

you; this is but some delusion of an over-sensitive mind’. In her rebuke she says, ‘you are

mistaken, Lord Evendale [...] I am not a sleep-walker, or a madwoman’. Evendale consults a

chaplain who as a ‘divine and a philosopher’ could neither accept nor deny the existence of

the spirit. The chaplain says that Henry Morton:

67
Alexander, Rise of Angria 1, p. 141.
68
Ibid., p. 231.
69
Ibid., p. 298.
70
Walter Scott, Old Mortality (London and Glasgow: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1910), p.470.
71
Alexander, Rise of Angria 1, p. 298.

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 Being still in rerum natura, had appeared in his proper person that morning; or, finally,
that some strong deceptio visus, or striking similitude of person, had deceived the eyes
of Miss Bellenden and of Thomas Halliday.72

However, guided by his own judgement Lord Evendale concludes that ‘the heated and

disturbed imagination of Edith had summoned up the phantom [...] and that Halliday had, in

some unaccountable manner, been infected by the same superstition’. Brontë could also draw

on many Waverley ghosts including those in The Bride of Lammermoor (Scott’s most realistic

depiction of a ghost), Ivanhoe, The Pirate, Rob Roy, Peveril of the Peak, St Ronan’s Well, The

Heart of Midlothian and The Fortunes of Nigel.

To conclude, Scott’s use of the supernatural helped to shape Brontë’s developing

skills and knowledge of narrative methods, third person narration and the art of storytelling.

Scott’s fiction, moreover, helped Brontë to examine eschatological debates on the existence of

an after-life. For Brontë, like Scott and the other Romantics, the supernatural world, its beings

and phenomena went further than the appeal of romance. Scott’s ghosts, especially, helped

Brontë progress to a position of cultural enlightenment. More than Scott’s desire to examine

early science, Brontë’s objective is also to examine religious truths. For Scott, the laws of

nature could be suspended for the sake of art. On second sight, Scott’s inability to completely

reconcile credulity with scepticism characterises Brontë’s ambivalence towards ghosts.

Certainly, in Glass Town’s ‘Strange Events’, Brontë is working out contemporary beliefs in

which character credulity lends itself to spiritualist thinking. Yet, Angria characterises the

rhetoric of scepticism. As a young adult, Brontë was unable to adhere completely to Scott’s

brand of rationalism. Glass Town is more resistant to Christian truths and the emerging

science, and her characters are susceptible to belief in ghosts. There is an underlying fear of

death in Brontë’s early writing on the supernatural not present in Scott. Fundamental

72
Scott, Old Mortality, p. 473.

110
Christian issues were to haunt her again in Villette as I examine in the final chapter. For Scott,

ghost belief provided a source of amusement and literariness. Although Strange Events is a

spiritualist enquiry as are some of her other ghost tales, Brontë’s writing will progress to the

discourse of Victorian science.

Perhaps, above all, what distinguishes Brontë’s folklore from Scott is the sense of

inclusion with which her characters seem to interact with the material (echoing also the later

Hardy). In her tales there is no hint of Scott’s stereotypical association of folk belief with the

less educated, the young and women. Brontë did not adhere to Scott’s class consciousness

accompanying his folk presentation, and neither was she influenced by religion or race.

Perhaps also, writing in her youth, Brontë was guided by adolescent ideas of transformation,

escape, enchantment and power embodied in fairy motifs. Brontë’s use of language also

differed from Scott’s articulation of superstition as demonology. Likewise, she steered clear

of Scott’s interest in diabolism, witchcraft and German Diablerie. In Glass Town, first-person

narratives lend themselves to credulity but by Angria she is more ready to adopt the third

person narratives and progress in the narrative patterns of Scott’s Enlightenment.

As a national and cultural historian, Scott introduced the unearthly as a component of

the historical past. Brontë adapted his studies, tapping into the still-believing and pseudo-

scientific present of mid-Victorian England. In their occasional ambivalence they deviated

from late eighteenth-century rationalism. From their fictional presentation, Scott’s interest in

second sight was matched by Brontë’s ghost interrogation. Explaining his interest in the

supernatural in the Chronicles of the Canongate, Scott wished to ‘throw some light on the

manners of Scotland as they were, and to contrast them, occasionally, with those of the

present day’.73 To Scott, folklore was interesting ‘as chapters in the history of the human

73
Parsons, Witchcraft, p. 283.

111
race’. For Scott the unearthly presented a mirror on the past. Brontë, however, was interested

in contemporary religion and science. As an aspiring novelist first and foremost, Brontë’s

supernatural prose were narrative and ideological. Brontë imitated and adapted many aspects

of Scott’s literary uses of folklore in her early works. His novels and ballads, steeped in

antiquarian lore, provided a foundation in folklore studies. Scott’s Letters and his romances,

ballads and verse, provide a surviving collection of folklore beliefs and contribute to folklore

scholarship. In her tales, Brontë inherits Scott’s literary antiquarianism and Romantic legacy.

Not only did she develop as a writer from Scott but also as a student of folklore. Perhaps, too,

Scott helped to shape her philosophical interests.

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 Chapter Three

Jane Eyre’s Fairy Motif: Symbols of Physical Difference, Sexuality and Aspects

of Gender

It was a fairy, and come from Elf-land, it said; and its errand was to make me happy.

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (p. 267)

Brontë’s narrative use of imagery from Gothic, fairy tale, mythological, religious and nature

sources to represent issues of gender and sexuality in Jane Eyre is acknowledged in critical

studies.1 In particular, feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar examine Brontë’s use

of romanticized imagery to convey the novelist’s ultimate aspiration for spiritual equality

between the sexes. This is implied in the lovers’ initial meeting with Rochester associating

Jane’s bewitchment of him with fairy tales, and conversely, her association of his dog Pilot

with the spectral Gytrash. Gilbert and Gubar suggest that ‘his playful remark acknowledges

her powers just as much as (if not more than) her vision of the Gytrash acknowledged his’.2

They go on to say that although in one sense Jane and Rochester begin their relationship as

servant and master, in another they begin as spiritual equals. John Maynard in his persuasive

account of the novel’s major treatment of sexuality argues that social realism as well as

romance is needed also to carry through much of the novel’s moral dilemmas linked to the

theme of sex. He points to Rochester’s marriage to Bertha Mason, her incarceration and his

preparedness to commit bigamy. But Jane, he says, is guided by passion and love as much as

by reason and Christian faith. Brontë devotes the Thornfield and Ferndean sections to sexual

1
Alexander and Smith, pp. 260-263.
2
Gilbert and Gubar, The Mad Woman in the Attic (Yale University Press, 2000), p. 352.

113
awakening, courtship tensions, and sexual fulfilment. Brontë, he declares, precedes Hardy in

recognising the ‘restraints her society attempted to place on her freedom to present her vision

of sexual experience’.3 Contrary to the idea that Brontë’s interest in sexuality is marginal, or

at best subliminal, he argues that Brontë demonstrates a conscious understanding of the

subject and refines it in different narrative configurations.

Although the theme of beauty does not receive much critical appraisal, it is

noteworthy how explanatory notes, throughout her fiction, mention several Romantic images

to convey men’s idealization of femininity. The houri was a type of nymph used to describe a

voluptuous and seductive eastern beauty. The undine was a spiritually empty water nymph

who married a mortal to obtain a soul, having to endure all the penalties of humanity. In

Persian mythology, the peri was a beautiful, delicate, gentle spirit. Sylphs were Rosicrucian

spirits of the air denoting a slender, graceful girl. Whereas the terms undine, houri, sprite and

salamander were used more negatively, the Romantics applied the terms fairy, peri and sylph

to describe women who epitomised youth and beauty.4

To an extent, these interpretations (and supportive notes) of Jane Eyre resonate with

my reading of the novel’s fairy motif as a vehicle to examine issues of anxiety about physical

difference, sexuality, female power and equality. To these ends, the fairy motif carries much

ideological weight. It is pervasive throughout this novel. It has other functions but relates

primarily to themes associated with the love interest between the two main protagonists.

Folklore adds to the novel’s realism in that it informs Jane’s intellectual and sexual growth.

Jane’s self-development is in part her need to moderate her superstition and progress to

rational thinking. This is also conceived of in her imaginary ghost encounter and subsequent

questioning of Thornfield’s ghost legend. It is clear that the theme of Enlightenment

3
John Maynard, Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 93-144 (p.
148).
4
See explanatory notes in Brontë, Jane Eyre, Shirley, The Professor and Villette.

114
rationality is important for self-growth in Brontë’s protagonists across her fiction as well as of

philosophical interest to her.

In arguing for the symbolic role of fairy as a way to examine physical inferiority, we

need to delve deeper into wider critiques on beauty. In her study on physiognomy and

conventions of heroine description, Jeanne Fahnstock argues that it was hard for Victorian

writers to repel the pressure of idealizing female characters and deviate from character

descriptions of the ideal of ‘gentle, innocent, truthful womanhood’.5 Whilst most literary

heroines of the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century conform to this ideal, Jane Eyre is

among the very few complex and varied exceptions. The word ‘irregular’ may be a ‘knell of

doom’, but in their imperfect state, these heroines have the freedom of irregular conduct.

Fahnstock says that ‘they can act, make mistakes, learn from them and grow, exercising a

privilege usually only the hero’s’.6 The irregular featured heroines are allowed imperfection

and the face remains a mirror of the character. Although her focus is largely with Charles

Dickens’s little female characters, Lillian Craton’s examination of literary engagements of the

Victorian freak show also relates to images of Jane Eyre. Her study of physical difference and

the pervasive Victorian anxiety about human perfection resonates with Brontë’s creation of a

new type of heroine and the novel’s theme of beauty. Fiction, Craton states, ‘plays freely with

images of difference as it reflects and articulates Victorian values of the normal and ideal’.7

Beauty equated social status and reinforced the social order. For the Victorians, the body was

analogous to society. It ‘measured a collective culture, set norms of respectability and

provided a source for societal conformity or, transgression’.8

5
Jeanne Fahnstock, ‘The Heroine of Irregular Features: Physiognomy and Conventions of Heroine Description’,
Victorian Studies, 24: 3 (1981), p. 326.
6
Fahnstock, p. 331.
7
Lillian Craton, The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in
Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New York: Cambria Press 2009), p. 207.
8
Ibid., pp. 206-207.

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 One aspect of Jane and Rochester’s spiritual affinity is in their physicality, both unable

to adhere to the ideal of Victorian beauty. This is in part expressed in folklore imagery. Both

for Romantics and Victorians, fairies provided a coded discourse on cultural anxieties about

marriage, divorce and issues of difference. Folklore criticism is most helpful. Simpson

touches on several of these points, particularly the idea of Jane’s otherness and difference

from other women.9 Carole Silver argues that not only did Victorian folklorists study the

origins of the fairies but the many fairy bride tales written during this period ‘constituted a

socio-cultural history of the spectrum of Victorian attitudes towards women and marriage’.10

Silver recognises Hardy, Eliot, Brontë and Wharton’s adaptations of fairy bride tales. She

notes their use of fairy imagery to describe male attitudes to women (similarly to Brontë

critics), making reference to Jane’s sexual power, force and otherness, heightened by her

‘name that links her to the sylphs or spirits of the air’.11 This legacy of coding of cultural

definitions of Victorian femininity (found also in Romantic-era poetry and prose) resonates in

my examination of folklore in Brontë’s fiction, notably Jane Eyre. She also considers

fictional representations of the changeling motif for its symbol of Victorian anxieties of

difference in terms of class, physicality and race.12

Silver’s introductory comment on the pervasiveness of fairies and how ‘their lore

infiltrated and transformed mainstream Victorian culture on what the fairy presence hints at or

signifies [...] more often it is subtle, a matter of allusion, or metonymy or encoding’,13

particularly interests me. Fictional descriptions of women in fairy terms can be considered

within Joan Newlon Radner and Susan S. Lanser’s concept of coding in women’s folk culture

9
Simpson, The Function of Folklore, pp. 47-61.
10
Silver, p. 93.
11
Ibid., p. 107.
12
Ibid., p. 60.
13
Ibid., p. 5.

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and folk literature.14 Radner and Lanser describe coding as a ‘set of signals—words, forms,

behaviours, signifiers of some kind—that protect the creator from the consequences of openly

expressing particular messages’.15 Coding is necessary when audiences are likely to be

unsympathetic to or disapproving of the subject matter. This act of coding is a common

phenomenon for women writers who wish to highlight the historic trend of male domination,

suppression and marginalisation of women. Women condemned by men to a peripheral

position in society compelled them to create explicit coding to challenge cultural ideology.

The term appropriation refers to coding strategies that are adaptable to feminist objectives

that challenge male cultural images of femininity. Appropriation encompasses the notion of

symbolic inversion, broadly defined as an act of expressive behaviour which ‘inverts,

contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural

codes, values, and norms be they linguistic, literary, or artistic, religious or social and

political’.16 Arguably, we can consider Brontë’s subversion of conventional images of women

in folklore terms as an attempt to violate the ‘patriarchal designated feminine position’.17

Despite the fact that Radner’s focus is less with the Victorian novel her ideas underpin my

reading of the fairy motif in Jane Eyre.

This idea of coding fits well with Brontë’s presentation of fairy sexuality. At

Thornfield, moreover, the fairy image charts potential taboo territory of not only Jane’s sexual

awakening but Rochester’s male sexuality. In Maureen Duffy’s The Erotic World of Faery

(1972), fairies and fairyland symbolise ‘the realm of the unconscious, the dream world,

duplicated in the unconscious in childhood and erotic day dreams’18 and validates my reading

14
Joan Newlon Radner, ed., Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1993).
15
Ibid., p. 3.
16
Ibid., p. 25.
17
Ibid., p. 10.
18
Duffy, p. 74.

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of the fairy element in Jane Eyre. Duffy studies the close and consistent association between

fairy and the erotic in English literature, tracing its evolution in religious teachings. The

church considered fairies to be the spirits of un-baptized children, souls of the dead and all

things sinful. The fairy image as femme fatale began with the church’s (and St Augustine’s)

endorsement of fairies as either un-fallen or blessed, or fallen angels or devils or demons.

Fairies as fallen angels gained more ground and became embedded in the Christian psyche. In

the very early works on witchcraft, the Malleus Maleficarum (1486), two Dominican

inquisitors questioned whether children could be formed from incubi. Satyrs and fauns were

regarded as the fallen angels ‘now in devilish shape and have appeared to wanton women and

have sought and obtained coition with them’.19 The fairy association with witch trafficking

served to exacerbate men’s (and the church’s) image of women as sinful and carnal. Fairies

were seen as the guilty aspect of the defective imagination in their representation of ‘those

mainly erotic impulses forbidden by the church’.20 It did not take long for the fairy image to

be recast as the embodiment of sexual fantasy, eroticization, enchantment, temptation and

every conceivable taboo of sex and violence, bisexuality, transvestism, lust, incest, castration

and adultery. Yet, fairies communicated ideas of virginity, sexual liberty and women as

victims too. Duffy scans the development of fairy sexuality in the medieval lays and legend,

Renaissance, Augustan age, Romantic and Victorian period. Even the goblins, in their

animalistic representation in Christina Rossetti’s narrative poem, Goblin Market (1862), are

equated with fantasy sex.21 In short, the symbolism of fairies characterises the history of

misogyny and in the English literary canon, fairies encoded female sexuality. Duffy’s account

offers another interpretation of reading the frequent allusions to fairies in Jane Eyre. In her

later study of fairies, Diane Purkiss states that the fairy’s symbol of sexuality intensified in the
19
Duffy, p. 14.
20
Ibid., p. 22.
21
Ibid., p. 321.

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nineteenth century: ‘Fairies increasingly came to be seen consciously as symbols for what

could not be said’.22

This chapter will explore folklore and the fairy motif through three key themes.

Specific to Jane Eyre, it symbolises the anxiety of physical (and class) difference developing

the idea of Jane’s otherness. Secondly, it encodes sexual desire. Thirdly, on the theme of

gender, the motif is seen as a subversion of narrow cultural definitions of Victorian

femininity. It represents Jane’s power and, lastly, it marks Jane and Rochester’s spiritual

equality. My reading of folklore in Jane Eyre thus extends current analyses of the novel. I

define fairies, consider Brontë’s adaptation of Scott’s narrative use of fairies and examine its

ideological functions across Jane Eyre.

Fairies in Literature and Culture

In the 1960s and 1970s Katharine M. Briggs examined literary evidence of the fairy tradition.

Briggs surveyed both historical and fictional images of the fairy peoples and the belief in

witches’ reliance on fairies. Briefly, fairies were adapted from the classical mythological

nymph, faun, naiad, satyr, incubus and dryad. Changelings were one of the oldest aspects of

fairy belief referenced in the chronicles of Gervase of Tilbury (1150-1220). The earliest

written record of fairies occurred in Anglo-Saxon charms against elf-shot disease. Medieval

Arthurian romances describe the fairy lady, Morgan le Fay or Fata Morgana. The thirteenth-

century chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall writes of the mermen and the later Orfeo is set in

fairyland. Briggs refers to one of the earliest allusions to the demise of the fairy belief in

Chaucer, the revival of the elfin knight in romances, and covers Shakespeare’s fairy traditions

in her text The Anatomy of Puck (1959). During the Reformation, Milton’s Paradise Lost

22
Diane Purkiss, Those Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories (London: Penguin Books,
2000), pp. 244-5.

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fuses devils and fairies. Briggs’ literary focus is mainly from the eighteenth century on in

which the fairy tradition remained intact although often treated satirically as in Michael

Drayton’s Polyalbion. The Victorians inherited the obsession with fairies from the Romantic

counter-Enlightenment poetic and artistic revival of the fairy world.23 Unlike Duffy, Silver

and Purkiss, Briggs does not examine the fairy symbol of eroticization and sexual fantasy that

clearly permeates the English literary canon.

To an extent Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud’s study of the fairy tradition

provides a context for Rochester’s image of Jane Eyre. They state that the term fairies is

broad, covering a range of non-human yet material beings with mesmeric magical powers,

able to charm and cast a state of enchantment or glamour over the senses that rendered the

subject under the fairy will. Fairies were of human proportion but diminutive (no more than

three feet). Some were beautiful, often wore the colours of green or white. They were

associated with the dead, ghosts and the un-dead. They could be visible and invisible at will,

inhabited woods, water and caves. They shape-changed, some flew and some were friendly

giving luck while others were capricious. They were morally ambiguous, luck-bringing,

charmed pranksters and some were minor demons (according to Protestant and Catholic

clergy). They were outside the Christian church, regarded as too good for hell but too diabolic

for heaven. Fairies were also associated with witchcraft. Fairies were either solitary, attached

to a human household like the brownie, or social, living in fairy land and investing in feasting

and dancing. The Celts more than the English developed the theme of fairyland (or Elf-land),

a place of beauty and luxury underground, of feasting and dancing but believed to be

positioned alongside the human world and off-limits to humans, unless held captive. These

humans had stepped into a fairy ring or suffered abduction. Fairies were seen as un-baptized

23
Briggs, Fairies in Tradition and Literature, pp. 100- 210.

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infants or Wills-o’-the-wisp but also kidnapped un-christened babies designed to replenish

their dwindling stock, leaving a changeling in its place. The changeling phenomenon revealed

a sinister side to Victorian society. Changelings were lovely or wizened and failed to thrive.

Once baptized, the infant was assured of membership of the Christian Church and protected

from fairy abduction. Simpson and Roud are cognisant that folklore and folk tales are far less

preserved in England than in Celtic areas. Their preservation though is felt mostly in literary

portrayals, especially in medieval, Shakespearean and modern fiction.24 Victorian fantasy

artists depict fairies as both beautiful and very odd looking. Like literature, fairy painting

conveys ideas of the unknown and the unconscious, opposing elements of the psyche,

counter-enlightened retreat from science, the pursuit of the truth, and attitudes toward sex. In

so many of these phantasmagoria paintings, fairies are often strange and odd looking, dwarf

shaped, grotesque and sensual.25

All of these critical and scholarly studies show that Brontë’s treatment of fairies in

some way follows Victorian narrative treatments of fairies and her interest in fairies is part of

a long literary tradition. Furthermore, it is clear that she is intimately familiar with fairy

tradition and nature of fairies weaving this knowledge thoroughly to examine cultural

definitions of beauty, Jane’s sense of her physical otherness, the novel’s themes of sexual

desire and female empowerment and equality.

Scott’s Fairy Material

It is useful at this point to examine the ways in which Brontë might have adapted

Walter Scott’s knowledge of fairy traditions and traits and the link with changelings,

Christianity, the dead, the otherworld and witchcraft, as material for Rochester’s image of

24
Simpson and Roud, pp. 115-117.
25
Jeremy Maas, ed., Victorian Fairy Painting (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997), p. 11.

121
Jane as fairy-like. Moreover, Brontë might have imitated Scott’s loose adaptation of fairy

bride tales such are the similarities between Scott’s fairy Fenella and mortal Julian Peveril of

Peveril of the Peak and the White Lady of Avenel and mortal Halbert Glendinning of The

Monastery, and the fairy Jane and human Rochester. As a child Jane notes the primitive

landscape in ‘Bewick’s History of British Birds’ (p. 8). As a symbol of her feeling of

alienation her ‘suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla,

Iceland, Greenland [...] of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own (p. 8) might

relate to Scott’s materialist views on the historical origins of the fairy superstition. Scott

traced the fairies to the Duergars or dwarfs of Lapland in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border

(1802-3) and later in the revised Letters on Demonology of Witchcraft (1830).

However, less obliquely, I suggest that Rochester’s image of Jane as a fairy is based

partly on Scott’s Annot Lyle of The Legend of Montrose:

Her stature, considerably less than the ordinary size of women, gave her appearance of
extreme youth, insomuch that although she was near eighteen, she might have passed
for four years younger. Her figure, hands, and feet, were formed upon a model of
exquisite symmetry with the size and lightness of her person, so that Titania herself
could scarce have found a more fitting representative.26

Brontë could nevertheless draw on many of Scott’s romances. According to Coleman O.

Parsons, the fairy tradition dominates many of the romances, ballads and essays such as ‘The

Tale of Tam Lane’ of The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), preceding the ‘Essay on

the Fairies of Popular Superstition’, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, The Lady of the

Lake, The Fair Maid of Perth, Castle Dangerous, Rob Roy, The Pirate, Ivanhoe, Anne of

Geierstein, and Guy Mannering.27 Yet, the most detailed profiles of the fairy tradition are

encapsulated in Scott’s White Lady of Avenel of The Monastery (1820) and Fenella of

Peveril of the Peak (1823), and these are also likely sources for Jane Eyre’s fairy image.

26
Scott, Wars of Montrose, p. 49.
27
Parsons, Witchcraft, pp. 169-177.

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Scott’s Highland ‘White Lady’ is drawn from Baron de La Motte Fouque’s water-nymph

Undine, a fairy ghost, angel, and elemental sylph, one of the Race of Ariel, drawn from

Rosicrucian doctrine. Clad in white, she is both capricious and benevolent and endowed with

healing powers (as opposed to human feeling and reasoning), chanting in rhyming couplets:

What I am I must not show—

What I am thou couldst not know—
Something betwixt heaven and hell—
Something that neither stood nor fell—
Neither substance quite, nor shadow28

Compare this with the last line describing Rochester’s surprise at seeing Jane return from

Gateshead a month earlier. He asks:

‘What the deuce have you done with yourself this last month?’
‘I have been with my aunt, sir, who is dead.’
‘A true Janian reply! Good angels be my guard! She comes from the other world—
from the abode of people who are dead; and tells me so when she meets me alone here
in the gloaming! If I dared, I’d touch you, to see if you are substance or shadow, you
elf!’(p. 245).

Another likely model is Scott’s Fenella of Peveril of the Peak based partly on Johann

Wolfgang Von Goethe’s Mignon of Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre and partly on his

grandfather’s time spent with ‘Dumb Lizzie’, a girl troubled in some way, who appeared one

day at his door. Fenella, also described as the Elfin Queen, is also based on the Manx

superstition of the changeling tradition:

That the elves were in the habit of carrying off mortal children before baptism, and
leaving in the cradle of the newborn babe one of their own brood, which was almost
always imperfect in some one or other of the organs proper to humanity. Such a being
they conceived Fenella to be; and the smallness of her size, her dark complexion [...]
her supposed connexion with the ‘pigmy folk’ yet still her perpetually affecting to
wear the colour of green [...] They perceived her deafness and dumbness were only
towards those of this world.29

Uncommunicative with mortals, Fenella only whistles, writes notes or gesticulates with signs.

Julian Peveril ‘had scarce time to shudder at her purpose, as he beheld her about to spring
28
Scott, Poetical Works, pp. 786-788.
29
Walter Scott, Peveril of the Peak (London: Gresham, 1903), p. 177.

123
from the parapet, ere, like a thing of gossamer’.30 The following description of Jane bears

similarity with Fenella when Rochester attempts to break the news to Adèle of his intentions

to marry Jane:

It was as a little thing with a veil of gossamer on its head. I beckoned it to come near
me: it stood soon at my knee. I never spoke to it, and it never spoke to me, in words:
but I read its eyes, and it read mine; and our speechless colloquy was to this effect: —
‘It was a fairy, and come from Elf-Land, it said; and its errand was to make me happy:
I must go with it out of the common world to a lonely place’ (p. 267).

I have not located any other sources conveying this fairy and mortal communication. The

White Lady of The Monastery also says; ‘Look on my girdle—on this thread of gold—‘tis

fine as web of lightest gossamer, but there is a spell on’t, would not bind’.31

Scott’s literary fairies often represent the sexual ambiguity of the child-woman. Sexual

images projected in Scott’s elemental spirits reflect societal attitudes to un-wakened and

uncontrolled female sexuality. His female heroines are also allotted fairy descriptions such as

Lucy Ashton’s ‘sylph-like form’32 of The Bride of Lammermoor, conveying not only her

grace and sweetness but Scott’s idealisation of femininity with Master Ravenswood charmed

by her angelic looks and nature. When her latent sexuality develops Lucy goes mad and stabs

her husband. In The Abbot Scott describes Catherine Seyton’s duplicity as ‘rather that of a

Hebe than of a Sylph’. Scott later describes her as ‘having a light and lovely form’ like a

‘sylph or fairy’. But when his heroine is attired in men’s clothing to imply her cruelty (or

unnatural masculinity or alter ego), she is a ‘will o’-the wisp’. Amy Ashton as a virgin

‘possessed the form and hue of a wood-nymph, with the beauty of a sylph’. As ‘yon black-

eyed houri of the Mahometan paradise [...] Rosicrucian sylphid [...] Moorish sorceress and a

sexless little fairy’, Fenella’s sexuality is both denied and affirmed.33 Hence, folklore terms

30
Scott, Peveril, p. 179.
31
Scott, Poetical Works, p. 789.
32
Parsons, Witchcraft, p. 168.
33
Ibid., pp. 276-280.

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and those of classical mythology and Rosicrucian ideas provide a communicative tool to

examine masculine images of women. Scott’s use of the fairy motif expresses female

paragons of virtue and other non-threatening images of women such as those with childlike

physiques, virgins, and mothers, reflecting contemporary attitudes to women. Conversely,

Scott’s literal portrayal of witches like Aislie Macclure and Madge Wildfire of The Heart of

Midlothian and Ulrica of Ivanhoe, composites of witch, demon, heathen, goddess, evil angel

and sibyl, arguably depict the other side of woman as ugly, spinsters, old, lame and evil.34

Brontë may well imitate Scott’s sexist coding of women as witches as a counter-foil to

the ideal compliant and beautiful heroine. Not only does Brontë imitate Scott’s narrative uses

of fairies but she also transforms his material into a gender context. When Rochester

objectifies Jane, he describes her as ‘sylph’ but when displeased, he describes her as ‘sprite’

and ‘salamander’. Brontë is highlighting sexist images of women. By situating the ‘fairy’

motif within the context of Jane’s recurring rescue of Rochester, often occurring during the

development of their relationship, however, Brontë subverts its stereotypical use to visualise a

new kind of powerful woman.

Folklore Coding across Brontë’s Victorian Heroines

Stereotypical language (suggesting Brontë’s awareness of inherent Victorian sexism)

to describe women is evident across Brontë’s Angria tales. In The Spell (1834) the Duke of

Zamorna addresses his wife Mary Henrietta Wellesley as ‘my white witch, my seraphic

hypocrite’35 to convey his distrust of her. Likewise in The Secret (1833) Arthur Wellesley

accuses Marian Hume of lying, calling her ‘a vile old witch’ and in Lily Hart (1833) Lily’s

34
Parsons, Witchcraft, pp. 167-169, pp. 276-281.
35
Alexander, Rise of Angria 2, p. 193.

125
feminine perfection is revealed partly by her ‘small fairy-like feet and hands’.36 In Caroline

Vernon (1838) Quashia has his predatory eyes feasted on the very young Caroline Vernon

(she is not more than ten years at this point) as a potential wife. ‘I have it under her hand,

sealed & signed in legal form [...] this fluttering, fickle felicitous fairy, this dear delicious,

delirious morsel’. Caroline, apparently fat and dark-skinned, is another plain heroine. She

says, ‘I’m sorry I’m not handsome & that I wish a fairy would bring me a talisman like

Aladdin’s lamp that I could get everything I want’. The narrator adds ‘sometimes indeed she

ventured to think she had a nice foot [...] but then, alas, her form was not half slight & sylph-

like enough for beauty, according to her notions of beauty’. Later, the narrator questions

Caroline’s whereabouts, saying: ‘whether at this moment of time she was playing the houri or

the fiend—kissing or cuffing the earl’.37 Here, Brontë exposes the double nature of woman,

encoding the ideal in the form of the sylph, and the seductive dark-eyed dangerous type in the

form of the houri. Having revealed influences from Scott in Glass Town and Angria, Brontë

was also likely to adapt and transform the metaphorical use of fairies from Scott.

Inheriting Scott’s Romantic legacy in her writing of Jane Eyre, there is a high

concentration of varying terms for fairies, especially in relation to Rochester’s regular

references to Jane as being ‘fairy’-like. The range of and terms used to apply to fairies and

other supernatural beings mentioned in the novel is striking: fairy, elf, changeling, sprite,

sylph, salamander, ignis fatuus, will-o’-the-wisp, peri, houri, mermaid, genii, pigmy, gnome,

giant, men in green, brownie, goblin, vampire, incubi, ogre, ghoul and imp. In all, there are

references to twenty-four different terms for fairies and other supernatural beings. In Shirley

there are references also to wood-nymph, Jack O’ Lantern in The Professor, and the banshee,

dryad, and undine in Villette. Yet Brontë also alludes to folkloric and mythological literary

36
Alexander, Rise of Angria 1, p. 299, p. 304.
37
Alexander, Glass Town, Angria and Gondal, pp. 256-262.

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figures across Jane Eyre such as Mustard-Seed of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s

Dream to describe Rochester’s image of Jane as a fairy. In Villette Lucy Snowe conveys the

ugliness of Madame Waravens in folklore terms as the evil fairy Malevola of Voltaire’s

Candide and the witch Sidonia of Meinhold’s Sidonie Von Bork die Klosterhexe.

This seeming acquiescence to conventional sexual coding of women continues in the

novels, with the character of William Crimsworth in The Professor (1857) measuring his

pupils according to male standards. Of Adèle Dronsart he says ‘she was an unnatural looking

being – so young, fresh, blooming yet so Gorgon-like’.38 Conversely, he says, ‘Caroline de

Blémont! Ah, there is beauty! beauty in perfection. What a cloud of sable curls about the face

of an ‘houri’.39 When Frances Henri Evans deviates from the feminine and hence cultural

norm—teasing and mocking him and thus threatening his masculine powers—she is relegated

to images of ‘white demon [...] elfish freak [...] sprite’.40 Yet when she behaves with delicacy,

Frances is no longer a ‘vexing fairy’ but a ‘submissive and supplicating little mortal woman’.

The alien nature becomes human again. But his friend Hunsden’s ‘ideal of a woman’ is an

‘Alpine peri’ to a ‘seraph’.41

In Shirley (1849), Robert Moore addresses Shirley and Caroline as ‘fairies’ and

Caroline combs her hair like a ‘mermaid’. Miss Mann’s ugliness is witchlike and she is also

described as ‘Medusa’ and like a ‘Gorgon’. The lovely young Caroline Helstone seems to be a

‘wood-nymph’ to the infatuated youth Martin Yorke and the beautiful Shirley Keeldar, ‘peri’

to Louis Moore. On Shirley’s ability to charm men, Moore’s young pupil Henry Sympson

questions whether she is a ‘white witch’. On the topic of sexist images of women, Shirley and

Caroline rely on the seductive image of mermaids to advocate that they are ‘neither

38
Brontë, The Professor, p. 129.
39
Ibid., p. 124.
40
Ibid., p. 276.
41
Ibid., p. 268.

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temptresses, nor terrors nor monsters’ (p. 207). In Villette (1853) Dr John Bretton regards

Paulina De Bassompierre as pleasing and non-threatening as a tiny woman or fairy. Adhering

to her femininity he revels in the softness and beauty of her ‘fairy’s dance’. Anna Braun

regards Paulina as a ‘dainty nymph—an undine’ (p. 303). Dr John is infatuated with Ginevra

Fanshawe, adhering to the image of ‘peri’ as the embodiment of female perfection. Miss

Walraven, the elderly woman is compared with ‘the chief figure—Cunégonde, the

sorceress—Malevola, the evil fairy’ (p. 389) and ‘that sullen Sidonia tottering and trembling

like palsy incarnate’ (p. 390).

Brontë’s objective is to challenge narrow cultural definitions of Victorian femininity.

Coding articulates deviations from the standard perception of female beauty. In Jane Eyre,

Brontë maintains her stance as a tool to express sexual development but subverts this coding

system by framing the fairy motif within the zone of female power and promotes Jane’s

physical difference as something positive.

Cultural Anxieties of Physical Difference

Initially, the fairy motif represents Jane’s journey to rational thinking. Jane’s own

preoccupation with fairies occurs mainly, and understandably, during her childhood when she

was endowed with a vivid imagination and exposed to Bessie’s fairy tales. When she gazes in

the mirror and sees a fairy/imp gazing back at her, we are made familiar with Jane’s feelings

of alienation. More so, Jane’s episodic lament for the loss of the fairies is a Romantic attack

on Enlightenment rationality, a theme more associated with the role of the ghost motif across

Brontë’s fiction. This sceptic/reason dichotomy begins in the red room when Jane, seeing her

fairy/imp image in the mirror, responds by saying:

Superstition was with me at that moment; but it was not yet her hour for complete
victory: my blood was still warm; the mood of the revolted slave was still bracing me

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 with its bitter vigour; I had to stem a rapid rush of retrospective thought before I
quailed to the dismal present. (p. 14).

Although Jane can suppress superstition, her Romantic imagination propels her to search for

the elves among ‘foxglove leaves and under mushrooms’ (p. 21), finally accepting their

exodus to countries less industrial than England. Yet, she will pick up some Arabian Tales.

Johnson’s Rasselas has no charm for her, having no fairies or genii to arouse the imagination.

Jane’s self development, then, is in part revealed by her need to pursue reason and common

sense. At Thornfield, Jane’s educational growth is briefly hampered by her image of a room

as a ‘fairy place’ (p. 104). She also subdues any notions of ghost tradition, legends or ghost

stories at the house, rejecting the goblin laugher saying she was a ‘fool for entertaining a

sense even of surprise’ (p. 107).

We can apply Silver’s idea that folklore provided rhetoric to express Victorian

experience of inferiority, subordination and dependence, to Jane’s use of folklore. We might

also perceive of Jane’s difference in terms of the other. At Gateshead, the child Jane

immediately informs her readers of her subordinate position in the family, saying that she is

‘humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John and Georgiana Reed.’

(p. 7). Jane is at a disadvantage, being shorter and less attractive. The imp analogy as

mischievous and ungovernable child makes sense given the attitude of Mrs Reed and the staff

towards Jane. But the suggestion conjured when Jane peruses the images in Bewick’s ‘History

of British Birds’ of ‘the bleak shores of Lapland [...] Iceland, Greenland’ (p. 8) might eerily

associate with Jane’s imagined origins of her fairyland birthplace. Perhaps Brontë is drawing

on Walter Scott’s euhemerist view, explained by Silver, that the Laplanders, considered

magical, were the sources of the original fairies, gaining their reputation as supernatural by

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predicting the weather,42 as well as acting symbolically for Jane’s sense of alienation from a

social group. Jane’s image in the mirror sustains the tension between superstition and reality.

She remarks:

All looked colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality; and the strange
little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and arms specking the gloom, and
glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit: I
thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessie's evening stories
represented as coming up out of lone, ferny dells in moors, and appearing before the
eyes of belated travellers. (p. 14).

In general, imps and fairies were commonly linked to mischievous but non-threatening

children. But Jane’s reference to imp also might carry a negative connotation as imps were a

distinctive feature of English witchcraft. They were believed to be familiars or minor demons

and/or servants to wizards.43 At any rate, she feels inferior to her half-siblings. Sarah Abbot is

scathing of Jane’s unattractiveness saying: ‘if she were a nice, pretty child, one might

compassionate her forlornness; but one cannot really care for such a little toad as that.’ (p.

26). In her physical difference and social isolation, Jane’s association with the fairy/imp

image represents the idea of the ‘other’.

Jane’s phantom likeness continues to link to her feelings as ‘a heterogeneous thing’

(p.16) and of a dissimilar ‘race’ to Mrs Reed. Is Jane racially other as Celtic and not Saxon?

The fairy motif represents Jane’s sense of otherness, physically and possibly ethnically. Had

Jane been, like her half siblings, ‘a sanguine, brilliant, careless, exacting, handsome, romping

child—though equally dependent and friendless’, Mrs Reed would have treated her better and

the servants would not have made Jane the ‘scapegoat of the nursery’ (p. 16). Brocklehurst

reiterates the idea of her otherness, asking ‘her size is small: what is her age?’ (p. 31). So tiny

is Jane that he is surprised at her being ten years. Bessie and Brocklehurst’s allusions to Jane

as ‘little thing’ and ‘little girl’ reinforce this image. Drawing also on Scott’s creative interest
42
Silver, p. 11, p. 47.
43
Simpson and Roud, p. 118.

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in the prototypes of fairies as dwarfs or duergars and cultural definitions of women, Brontë

sets the scene for the reconstruction of a heroine with irregular features.

A notable characteristic of Jane as both a child and young woman is that she has

irregular features. En route to her new servitude as governess at Thornfield, for example, she

checks her appearance and thinks:

I sometimes regretted that I was not handsomer: I sometimes wished to have rosy
cheeks, a straight nose, and small cherry mouth; I desired to be tall, stately, and finely
developed in figure; I felt it a misfortune that I was so little, so pale, and had features
so irregular and so marked. And why had I these aspirations and these regrets? (p. 98).

This passage describes Jane as short in stature with a pale complexion. She refers to her face

as odd or atypical, and noticeable, and the phrase ‘so irregular and so marked’ is emphasised

by the assertive ‘so’. This impression fits in with Jane’s formative description of herself as

fairy/imp in the red room scene upon seeing her reflection in the mirror. As she dresses, Jane

reveals her dissatisfaction with her looks saying ‘I ever wished to look as well as I could, and

to please as much as my want of beauty would permit’ (p. 98). Jane’s description of herself as

irregular featured might remind her of her imaginative conception as a fairy figure that had

symbolised her sense of otherness in childhood.

Crucially, in her developing adulthood, Jane has to contend with her own and others’

image of her as different from Victorian conceptions of ideal femininity. Subverting the ideal,

Rochester is enchanted at Jane’s physical otherness at their meeting in the dining room saying

‘I marvelled where you had got that sort of face’ (p. 122). Instinctively, he associates her with

‘fairy tales’. In her fairy likeness, Jane has the potential to move away from societal norms

and values of beauty. Seen through Rochester’s resolve to value inner rather than external

beauty, the fairy motif both adheres to and subverts idealised images of women. In his

desperate search for a new kind of woman, Rochester has finally met someone who is

‘intellectual, faithful, loving’ (p. 312). Brontë constructs a heroine who is physically

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unconventional but morally superior. My analysis fits in with Purkiss’ assertion that ‘fairies

are a kind of ultimate symbol of Otherness’.44 Purkiss muses on the idea of fairyland as a

place that represents an ‘alternative, unauthorised kinship structure; if you are outside human

kin relations, perhaps you can be inside something else, something more glamorous’. It may

have been Brontë’s intention to perceive of elf land as a parallel universe stripped of Victorian

cultural mores and conventions.

The irregular-featured heroine is in diametric opposition to the character, Rosamond

Oliver, conceived of as the novel’s ‘earthly angel’ or ‘Peri’ (p. 363). Jane’s description of

Rosamond as Peri reflects male assumptions of ideal womanhood. The novel delineates

between irregular and regular featured heroes and heroines, but endows the latter with internal

defections in their moral nature or disposition in some way. According to Fahnstock, by 1868,

the aesthetic of the imperfect heroine is endorsed with the classical tradition slowly going out

of fashion.45 By referring to Jane as a fairy (endowed with metaphoric power), Brontë

presents a new kind of heroine, and one who deviates from the cultural ideal. As fairy,

however, it is Jane’s non-normative physique that carries the ideological weight, exposing

society’s treatment of those marginal to the cultural norm of beauty. At Ferndean, Rochester’s

former butler describes Jane ‘as that midge of a governess’ (p. 428). According to Silver, the

term midget was coined in 1865 through analogy to a midge, fly or gnat.46 Midgets or living

dwarfs were often called fairies or elves. Silver says that tiny people were all mocked as

freaks of nature.

However, Brontë opts for the physicality of the fairy motif rather than the more

conventional use of the changeling creature (seen more in Silver’s account) to examine

44
Purkiss, p. 98. It may be that folkloric readings might benefit from literary concepts of Otherness such as in
Tabish Khair, The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from elsewhere (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009).
45
Fahnstock, p. 333.
46
Silver, p. 118.

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Victorian cultural anxieties of difference. Jane’s fairy image symbolises the outsider: the

alienated, physical other. Purkiss notes that for the Victorians, ‘fairy difference from mortals

became an emblem of female difference from the male’.47 But in her very physical difference,

Jane Eyre is also seen as a threat to the social order, conveying as Silver says of the

changeling motif, ‘an almost innate Victorian fear of the ‘other’, they are generally doomed to

a borderland existence’.48 In sum, the fairy helps in the construction of the new wave of

heroines and is clearly linked to Brontë’s awareness of society’s disproportionate value of

beauty.

Sexuality, Female Power and Equality

At Thornfield the fairy motif re-surfaces. More than in any other section of the novel, at

Thornfield the fairy motif as a symbol contributes to the debate about women’s right to

equality, represents a female zone of power and expresses the nature of sexuality. Rochester’s

perception of Jane as a fairy is crucial for the gradual development of their sexual

relationship. On the way to post a letter on Hay Lane, Jane says:

This lane inclined up-hill all the way to Hay: having reached the middle I sat down on
a stile which led thence into a field. [...] The din was on the causeway: a horse was
coming; […] I was just leaving the stile; yet, as the path was narrow, I sat still to let it
go by [...] I remembered certain of Bessie’s tales wherein figured a North of England
spirit, called a "Gytrash;" which, in the form of horse, mule, or large dog, haunted
solitary ways, and sometimes came upon belated travellers, as this horse was now
coming upon me. [...] the traveller, now stooping, felt his foot and leg, as if trying
whether they were sound; apparently something ailed them, for he halted to the stile
whence I had just risen, and sat down. (pp. 112-113).

Brontë may be alluding to a custom or love divination still practised in the nineteenth century,

that if a girl sat on a stile to welcome the new moon she would dream of her future husband.49

47
Purkiss, p. 247.
48
Ibid., p. 80.
49
Simpson and Roud, p. 244.

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At any rate, we must interpret the stile as a symbolic site used by Brontë to play with ideas of

power, sexuality and difference. The fact that this and other episodes take place on a field stile

might suggest a symbolic significance. The stile sets the scene for Jane’s sexual awakening

and his sexual desire for her. The stile on Hay Lane as a site for their first encounter is

important. This is the first of five references to the stile, chronicling its significance. This

scene can be discussed from an anthropological perspective. In Les rites de passage (1908),

anthropologist Arnold van Gennep developed the concept of boundaries or thresholds as

symbols of major life transitions or rites of passage to be passed through in the life of the

individual and the community from birth to sexual beginnings and courtship, betrothal and

marriage to death. Folklorist Hilda E. Davidson adapts his ideas to examine the significance

of boundaries at physical borders or between borders as places of enchantment, inspiration,

protection and healing. At these sites, ghosts were seen and witches and demons met.50 In folk

belief, the stile was a key site for boundary symbolism. Symbolically, the ‘threshold marks

the boundary between a household and the outer world, and hence, between belonging and

being an outsider and between safety and danger’.51 The stile as a boundary site could be

interpreted as symbolising may symbolise Jane’s position as an outsider in terms of

physicality as well as gender, class and possibly religion and race. It was believed that the

stile was a favourite haunt for supernatural creatures such as Cheshire boggarts in the form of

a fairy, ghost or demon ‘depending on the presuppositions of the storyteller’52 and as such,

stiles were thresholds between natural and supernatural states. Barbara Spooner explains that:

Boundaries between territories, like boundaries between seasons, are lines along
which the supernatural intrudes through the surface of existence [...] the fact that un-
baptized children used to be buried at boundary fences suggests that these lines, like

50
Davidson, Boundaries and Thresholds, pp. 7-12.
51
Simpson and Roud, p. 357.
52
Jacqueline Simpson, Folklore of the Welsh Border (London: Batsford, 1976), p. 87.

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 the un-baptized child, did not really belong to this world. Stiles were favourite perches
for ghosts.53

Here, the collision between the Otherworld and human world is played out symbolically to

emphasise Jane’s status as other.

Victor Turner advances van Gennep’s rites of passage in his study of traditional

culture. Liminality (the Latin term limen meaning boundary) signifies the passing through (or

transitional stage) of symbolic or cultural realms. Turner examines rites of passage in

traditional cultures within the context of status elevation and status reversal. At certain times

in the traditional calendar, people:

Who habitually occupy low status positions in the social structure, are positively
enjoined to exercise ritual authority over their superiors; and they, in their turn, must
accept with good will their ritual degradation.54

He argues that sex role reversal and status reversal/inversion occurs at designated calendar

events such as May Day. Halloween resonates with the trickery of hobgoblins, boggarts and

fairies on the human world and the power of disguised children over adults.55 Jane’s rescue of

her master might be read as status inversion. On ‘the first of May’ (p. 226), Jane finally

asserts her power over the dying Mrs Reed, bids farewell to her without shedding ‘a tear’ (p.

240). Coincidentally, again, on ‘the fifth of November’ (p. 370), St John, preferring Jane to

Rosamond, declares that ‘something else is as deeply impressed with her defects: they are

such that she could not sympathize in nothing I aspired to—cooperate in nothing I undertook

(p. 374).

53
Barbara C. Spooner, ‘The Haunted Stile’, Folklore, 79 (1968), pp. 135-139 (p. 139). See also John Rhys,
Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901).
54
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 167.
See Liminality and fairies in Regina Buccola, Fairies, Fractious Women and the Old Faith: Fairies in Early
Modern Drama and Culture (Sussquehanna University Press, 2006).
55
Turner, The Ritual Process, p. 172.

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 At their next meeting, Rochester develops the image of Jane as fairy, reminding her

also of her mirror image in the red room. He comments on Jane’s emaciation from years

residing at Lowood School:

‘No wonder you have rather the look of another world. I marvelled where you had got
that sort of face. When you came on me in Hay Lane last night, I thought
unaccountably of fairy tales, and had half a mind to demand whether you had
bewitched my horse: I am not sure yet. Who are your parents?’
‘I have none.’
‘Nor ever had, I suppose: do you remember them?’
‘No.’
‘I thought not. And so you were waiting for your people when you sat on that stile?’
‘For whom, sir?’
‘For the men in green: it was a proper moonlight evening for them. Did I break
through one of your rings, that you spread that damned ice on the causeway?’
I shook my head. ‘The men in green all forsook England a hundred years ago,’ said I,
speaking as seriously as he had done. ‘And not even in Hay Lane or the fields about it
could you find a trace of them. I don’t think either summer or harvest, or winter moon
will ever shine on their revels more.’
Mrs Fairfax had dropped her knitting, and with raised eyebrows, seemed wondering
what sort of talk this was. (p. 122).

Here, Rochester not only echoes the association between the stile and fairies but demonstrates

his sexual attraction of Jane through the mediation of fairy lore. In its embodiment of the

erotic and repressed desires, fairy lore is a chosen discourse for Rochester’s sexual trajectory.

He pulls out all the stops, focusing on fairy capriciousness, the colour green, elf land and the

diurnal time of moonlight for fairy appearances and fairy rings. According to Duffy, fairy

rings signal the hypnotic effect of the fairy’s dance on men.56 Jane’s response, however, is

less sexual but rational suggesting her coyness in responding directly to the codification of

fairy. She, instead, taps into the symbolic use of fairies to denote cultural progress. She is,

after all, governess to the master and knows her place. The fairy motif best expresses the

literality of his being spell-bound, captivated, charmed, transfixed and enchanted by Jane,

oblivious to the presence of Mrs Fairfax (who in fact does not understand this language).

56
Duffy, p. 85.

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Rochester may be unconscious of her power over him. Duffy states that enchantment offers a

valid image for ‘psychological phenomena’ and that fairy imagery is itself already a

projection of such unconscious states’57 and unconscious wishes. Duffy suggests that fairies

in Arthurian romances (and later Scott’s ‘Tam Lin’) evoke:

The dream atmosphere, that enables us to experience more deeply, because we have
initially suspended rationalization, and that the events which on the surface seem to
break conventional morality are acting as symbols for the breaking of a deeper
taboo.58

This resonates strongly with Rochester’s fantasy of his enchantment of Jane. All of

Rochester’s taboos or prohibitions are encapsulated in the fairy discourse. He is already

married, almost engaged to another, is Jane’s employer, and twice her age.

Bewitchment is a term used to describe sexual enchantment of white witches or

sorceresses, a term Rochester also applies to Jane. We can draw again on Victor Turner’s idea

of liminality with Jane, habitually in a low social position, symbolically raised to a position of

power in her fairy image. The ritual of status inversion emerges with the feminising

codification of Jane as ‘fairy’ (as opposed to other fairy terms) as well as the fairy/human

duality. To an extent, Gilbert and Gubar offer another example of this transposition in

describing Rochester’s impersonation of a female gypsy ‘or puzzling transvestism’ when they

say that ‘by putting on a woman’s clothes he puts on a woman’s weakness’59 The stile site

also reminds us of Jane’s crucial progression from girl to woman.

The coding strategy intensifies as Rochester describes Jane in a sexist way. When he

thinks he is being drowned by Jane, he cries out ‘in the name of all the elves in Christendom,

is that Jane Eyre?’ he demanded. ‘What have you done with me, witch, sorceress?’ (p. 148).

57
Duffy, p. 266.
58
Duffy, p. 73.
59
Gilbert and Gubar, p. 355.

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But later, realising that she is actually rescuing him, he says: ‘I have heard of good genii—

there are grains of truth in the wildest fable [...] my cherished preserver, goodnight’ (p. 151).

Time and again, we are brought back to the symbolic stile and its link with fairies.

Months later, during the hay making season they will reunite on that very stile after Jane

returns from Gateshead. This boundary site continues to signify Jane’s girl-woman transition

and her sexual awakening. This time, she has to cross two fields, a road, a gate and the stile.

Jane is reminded of the link between boggarts and stiles seeing Rochester seated there.

Continuing the seesaw power dynamic she says, ‘well he is not a ghost; yet every nerve I have

is unstrung: for a moment I am beyond my own mastery’ (p. 244). Yet again, the fairy

references reflect his increasing desire of Jane:

‘And this is Jane Eyre? Are you coming from Millcote, and on foot? Yes—just one of
your tricks: not to send for a carriage, and come clattering over street and road like a
common mortal, but to steal into the vicinage of your home along with twilight [...]
She comes from the other world—from the abode of people who are dead’ [...]
He did not leave the stile, and I hardly liked to ask to go by. [...]
‘Tell me now, fairy as you are,—can’t you give me a charm, or a philter, or something
of that sort, to make me a handsome man?’
‘It would be past the power of magic, sir’. (p. 245).

In her absence, his sexual feelings for Jane have increased, reflected in his extensive

knowledge of fairy tradition. He banters with her and teases her, conjuring the association

between fairies and the un-dead. Simpson says, ‘fairies were fitted into the Christian frame of

reference [...] they could be identified with ghosts—either of the dead in general, or of special

categories such as un-baptized infants’.60 In her power to change his life, Rochester is

relegated to child as Jane, as a fairy with the symbol of ‘power over life and death,61 ascends

to the parent figure in this fairy tale of wish fulfilment. The image of fairy becomes more and

more symbolic of his fantasy of winning the heart of this girl. Hay making is yet another

60
Simpson and Roud, p. 116.
61
Duffy, p. 258.

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symbolic time for status inversion. It is also a symbol of fertility signalling Jane being love-

struck by her master.

Brontë exploits the folkloric setting of Midsummer Eve. Known also as St John’s Eve

(24th June) it has a powerful association with love divination and magic, often set in or linked

to a garden (one of the key nights along with St Agnes’s Eve and St Mark’s).62 Again, the

date signals Jane’s sexual development for this is the official night of their betrothal to each

other. Brontë exploits Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream theme of love and

courtship. In the morning, Jane echoes Rochester’s fairy tale wish-fulfilment wondering if it

were all a dream, saying ‘I could not be certain of the reality till I had seen Mr Rochester

again, and heard him renew his words of love and promise’ (p. 257). Once betrothed to Jane,

Rochester dispenses with all former formalities. Folklore images are now preceded with the

possessive pronoun ‘Is this my pale little elf? Is this my Mustard-Seed?’ (p. 258). When

Rochester resorts to the stereotypical references of Jane’s ‘fairy-like fingers’ and ‘sylph’s

foot’ (p. 259) she challenges his objectification of her: ‘I am your plain Quakerish governess’,

but he retorts insisting that: ‘you are a beauty in my eyes; and a beauty just after the desire of

my heart,—delicate and aerial’. (p. 259). Jane will be no angel unlike Rosamond Oliver as

‘Peri’ (p. 363). The fairy image conveys Rochester’s adoration of Jane’s physical otherness.

In his admonishment of her protest, Rochester says: ‘I as a Christian, will soon give up the

notion of consorting with a mere sprite or salamander’ (p. 262). As fairy, Jane’s physical

tininess hardly matches her internal strength, an image that potentiates the fluid power

structure of the couple. When Jane goads Rochester to sing a song he expresses his

disapproval of her deviation from the cultural norm of feminine propriety, using folklore

terms such as ‘capricious witch’ (p.271), ‘malicious elf’ ‘sprite’ and ‘changeling’ (p. 274). All

62
Simpson and Roud, pp. 238-9.

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of these terms, though, are in contrast to Jane’s image of Bertha Mason as the ‘foul German

spectre—the Vampyre’ (p. 284). In literature, vampire symbolised corrupted beauty,

promiscuity, sexuality uncontrolled, flesh-eating and over-developed fecundity. Silver

suggests that this type of extreme evil fairy was seen as more threatening.63 Yet, it had

associations with the femme fatale and the dead similarly to fairies. The vampire image not

only reminds Jane of Rochester’s promiscuous sexual history but also his sexual desire of her

and possibly her anticipation of sex with him.

It is puzzling that once Rochester has secured the love of this woman and their

relationship is more equal, the fairy images do not cease. Rather, they continue for him

unabashedly and perhaps, for the very first time, Rochester’s image of Jane as a fairy is

appropriate given the audience of his young ward, Adèle. The fairy image comes in handy

when Rochester has to explain delicately to the child that they are to be married with the

implication that Adèle may go to boarding school. Rochester enters into a detailed re-enacting

of his reunion with Jane after she has returned from Gateshead. For the fourth time, we face

the stile. Rochester remembers sitting on the stile after he and Adèle have finished

haymaking. Rochester cleverly creates a sort of fairy tale, which of course it is to him. The

idea that a much older and unattractive man can appeal to a young girl is akin to a fairy tale.

He explains that he:

‘Sat down to rest me on a stile [...] when something came up the path and stopped two
yards off me. I looked at it. It was a little thing with a veil of gossamer on its head. I
beckoned it to come near me: it stood soon at my knee. I never spoke to it, and it never
spoke to me, in words: but I read its eyes, and it read mine; and our speechless
colloquy was to this effect:-
‘It was a fairy, and come from Elf-land, it said; and its errand was to make me happy:
I must go with it out of the common world to a lonely place—such as the moon, for
instance—and it nodded its head [...] I said I should like to go; but reminded it, as you
did me, that I had no wings to fly.

63
Silver, pp. 176-178.

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 ‘Oh,’ returned the fairy, ‘that does not signify! Here is a talisman will remove all
difficulties;’ and she held out a pretty gold ring’ [...]
‘Mademoiselle is a fairy,’ he said, whispering mysteriously (p. 267).

Rochester’s description of Jane as little girl is interesting. It illuminates their age gap. To

Duffy, the fairy/mortal union can encode the taboo of the Oedipal Complex.64 In Jane’s case,

by her hiring from the master, she is entering into a potentially explosive incestuous

daughter/father relationship. The fairy motif expresses the non-sacred, the culturally

unacceptable. She has a childlike fixation on this experienced father figure and conversely,

albeit illicitly, the bigamous Rochester is drawn to the daughter, virginal girl, uncorrupted

innocence. Once they are betrothed, he relishes the idea of her as a ‘young Mrs. Rochester—

Fairfax Rochester’s girl-bride’ (p. 258). Jane denies the possibility of such potential happiness

saying ‘I was not born for a different destiny to the rest of my species: to imagine such as lot

befalling me is a fairy-tale—a day-dream’ (p. 258). Duffy describes Elf-land as an irrational

world of fantasy where real or mortal time and all natural physical laws are suspended. As in

dreams, ‘fairyland is the realm of the unconscious, the dream-world, duplicated in the

conscious of childhood and erotic daydreams’.65 In Elf-land, wishes come true. It is the land

of one’s heart desire. Enchantment may be fleeting though and short lived. As a fantasy place,

Rochester envisions it above rather than underground (its more usual site close to the dead). It

conveys the idea of fairies as part of the dream world, manifesting things usually below but

here above and far beyond ‘the conscious level of the mind’.66

Finally, Rochester, now desperate to win Jane’s love, reflects on his first meeting with

her at the stile saying ‘It was well that this elf must return to me—that it belonged to my

house down below’ (p. 312). The idea of Jane as fairy has conveyed the sexual pattern of their

64
Duffy, p. 101.
65
Ibid., pp. 73-75 (p. 74).
66
Ibid., p. 76.

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relationship. It has expressed the idea of marrying Jane as a fantasy, a dream, a taboo, wish-

fulfilment and an ideal.

Jane arrives at Ferndean in search of her master. Bumping into his old butler she hears

her own narrative:

She was a little small thing, they say, almost like a child [...] Rochester was about
forty, and this governess not twenty; and you see, when gentlemen of his age fall in
love with girls, they are often like as if they were bewitched: well, he would marry her
(p. 427).

The dream-reality sequence recurs with Rochester, for the first time since Jane’s rejection of

him, able to feel a ‘delightful consciousness’ (p. 437). As he faces the reality of her presence,

he enquires, ‘You are altogether a human being, Jane? You are certain of that?’ (p. 437).

The folklore images resume with Jane saying:

‘Have you a pocket comb about you, sir?’

‘What for, Jane?’
Just to comb out this shaggy black mane. I find you rather alarming, when I examine
you close at hand: you talk of my being a fairy; but I am sure, you are more like a
brownie’
Am I hideous, Jane? (p. 438).

For the first time her allusion to brownie might articulate her sexual desire for her master as

much as his describing her as fairy. Their allusion to folklore indicates their spiritual affinity

within the context of their physical difference from others. When Jane deviates once more

from the feminine ideal, deferring his request for information, he calls her ‘mocking

changeling—fairy-born and human-bred! You make me feel as I have not felt these twelve

months’ (p. 438). This is the last folklore entry. After this, their power relationship is

expressed in nature imagery with Jane recognising his physical dependence on her ‘just as if a

royal eagle, chained to a perch, should be forced to entreat a sparrow to become its purveyor’

(p. 439). Folklore has contributed to the novel’s ultimate goal of spiritual equality. ‘No

woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and

142
flesh of his flesh’ (p. 450). The fairy signifies Gilbert and Gubar’s argument that ‘Brontë

could not logically define, however she could embody in tenuous but suggestive imagery’ that

which contributes to the ‘marriage of true minds at Ferndean’.67

Metonymic and encoded as Silver suggests,68 the fairy motif does seem to indicate

Brontë’s conscious desire for counter-societal ideas of femininity, to celebrate otherness,

explore gender equality and to express sexual politics. With Jane as fairy, Rochester, haunted

by his bigamous trap, can escape into the safety of the fantastic. His ‘unconscious is able to

play with the unthinkable, to express a forbidden desire’69 and that desire is in the form of

plain, orphaned, governess Jane. Throughout Jane Eyre, Brontë steers away from the image of

fairy as alien and unnatural. Positively, Jane’s fairy likeness is the projection of Rochester’s

desire of a new kind of woman. So frequent and extensive are the allusions to the fairy

tradition that one must conclude its importance to the author as a vehicle to communicate the

unmentionable. This study is in keeping with Maynard’s stance that the fundamental message

of Jane Eyre is the ‘continuity in concern with the strength of sexual forces in human life’.70

However, where Maynard focuses mainly on the heroine’s sexual journey, this study is

orientated also to the hero’s experience, mediated through the role of the fairy motif.

Moreover, this study reveals a darker side to sexuality. It raises issues about sexual taboos

such as father –daughter liaisons. It highlights Brontë’s foray into forbidden territory of the

relationship between a young girl and an older man. Despite divisions of class, occupation

and legal constraints, their love for each other surpasses all obstacles. The fairy signifies

Rochester’s dreams and fantasies. The fairy formula is a heady mix of the projection of

everything both desired and feared. As Duffy states, the faery world is simultaneously ‘most

67
Gilbert and Gubar, pp. 370-371.
68
Silver, p. 5.
69
Duffy, p. 300.
70
Maynard, p. 93.

143
dangerous and most alluring’.71 Relying so heavily on the symbolism of fairies, Brontë plays

out the novel’s ideas about otherness and physical difference, the dynamic of gender relations

and sexuality.

71
Duffy, p. 282.

144
 Chapter Four

Villette’s Ghost Motif:

Superstition versus Enlightenment Rationality and Christian Truths

Are there wicked things, not human, which envy human bliss? Are there evil
influences haunting the air, and poisoning it for man? What was near me?

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (p. 244)

My final study of folklore in Brontë’s work focuses on Lucy Snowe’s interaction with ghosts

in Villette. As is the case, Brontë critics situate Villette’s ghost motif within a tradition of

Gothic representation, which raises again my central argument about re-contextualising

Gothic as folklore in nineteenth-century literature (including Gothic fiction). In the

exploration of contemporary psychology across Brontë’s Villette, Sally Shuttleworth’s study

of ghosts is minimal but she argues that Lucy’s ghost is one that is fundamentally different

from conventional Gothic.1 Shuttleworth goes on to say that the novel’s anti-Catholic theme,

tied up with sexual fear and the legend of the nun buried alive for some sin committed,

triggers an association between nuns, ghosts and the theme of sexuality. Lucy’s sightings of

the nun also represent moments of sexual tension with the ghost embodying her ‘own

activities of self-suppression’.2 Michael M. Clarke agrees that Brontë’s use of the supernatural

contrasts with Lucy’s pro-rational and empirical-scientific Protestantism.3

More specifically, Marianne Thormählen’s examination of the Brontës’ ideas about

the afterlife argues that ‘in poetry and fiction all of the three Brontë sisters reflect the
1
Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), p. 220. See also See also E. D. H. Johnson, ‘”Daring the Dread Glance”: Charlotte Brontë’s treatment of
the supernatural in Villette’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 20:4 (1966), pp. 325-336.
2
Shuttleworth, p. 226.
3
Michael M. Clarke, ‘Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, mid-Victorian Anti-Catholicism, and the Turn to Secularism’,
ELH, 78:4 (2011), pp. 967-989. See also Rosemary Beattie-Clarke, ‘Fables of Rebellion: Anti-Catholicism and
the structure of Villette’, ELH, 53 (1986), pp. 821-847.

145
conviction that the passion of love is never simply bounded by the span of human life on

earth’.4 Their novels convey differing attitudes to life beyond earthly existence: ‘The death of

the body is never viewed as the end of a person’s life; but the conceptions of an afterlife vary

considerably, and the three authors explore them from different stand-points’.5 Moreover,

Thormählen is persuaded that there is a powerful streak of otherworldliness in their writing

pertaining to the world of spirits, death, the afterlife, eternity and the soul. All of the siblings

familiarised themselves with post-Reformation debates on ‘mortalism, annihilationism and

soul-sleeping’, regarded by orthodox Christians as heresies. Thormählen argues that the

exhortation at the beginning of chapter thirty-eight of Villette with its suggestion of a belief in

an afterlife bears some similarity to St John Rivers’ idea of gaining entry into heaven in Jane

Eyre. Yet, Lucy is more focused on the present life, accepting God’s great plan that some are

born to suffer. Lucy, Thormählen says, does not steady her gaze to Heaven like Helen

Huntingdon of Ann Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), or anticipate liberation in death

like Helen Burns. Speaking especially of Wuthering Heights, Thormählen notes the sisters’

shared reading or familiarity with nineteenth-century works on devilry and sorcery such as

James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and his

article ‘Fairies, Brownies and Witches’ in Blackwood’s Magazine, Daniel Defoe’s The

History of the Devil (1727) and his conception of the reality of dreams in The Secrets of the

Invisible World Laid Open, or A General History of Apparitions (1727), and Scott’s Letters

on Demonology and Witchcraft.6 Thormählen states that the Brontës’ allusions to earthly

heavens and hells relate to the authors’ explorations of the human soul into the general pattern

of spiritual enquiry that was so characteristic of their time. She concludes that by mid-

nineteenth century, ‘earthly existence was no longer primarily seen as a period of preparation
4
Marianne Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 90.
5
Ibid., p. 90.
6
Ibid., pp. 100-103.

146
for the hereafter; and it was acknowledged that this life and the next touch each other across

the grave’.7 Unequivocally, Lucy aspires to the concept of a loving and merciful God,

recognised as the ultimate source of human love, a commonplace theme throughout all of

Brontë’s novels, as Thormählen states. This viewpoint is in contradiction with Christina

Crosby’s idea that Brontë’s ‘most pressing concern is not the state of her heroine’s soul, but

the state of her mind’.8

Even more relevant is Michael Wheeler’s Death and the Future Life in Victorian

Literature and Theology (1990), with his examination of the Brontës’ treatment of Victorian

eschatology, the study of the last four things: death, judgement, heaven and hell. The

Victorian’s obsessive interest in death and the future life, described also as the Victorian ‘cult

of death’, focused particularly on the death bed and graveyard sites. Victorian writers

addressed the ‘double consciousness of faith’9 that embodied the conflict between this-

worldly and the other-worldly. Frederick W. Robertson describes this tension, ‘Talk, as we

will of immortality, there is an obstinate feeling that we cannot master, that we end in death;

and that may be felt together with the firmest belief of a resurrection’. Brontë describes death

as, ‘that dread visitant before whose coming every household trembles’.10 The Brontës’

Romantic writing, Wheeler states, was possibly influenced by Thomas Carlyle’s prophetic

and apocalyptic views and his reliance on the language of the Revelation. Their writing, he

argues, reflects the contemporary anxieties, sensitivities and controversies on the topic of the

afterlife. He considers the Brontës’ writing as a suitable context for the interpretation of the

dying process. Their novels particularly Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights convey the theme

of Victorian eschatology at moments of crisis. Brontë portrays orthodox Christian

7
Thormählen, p. 115.
8
Ibid., p. 247. See Christina Crosby, The Ends of History: Victorians and the Woman Question (New York and
London: Routledge, 1991), p. 133.
9
Wheeler, p. 27.
10
Ibid., p. 25.

147
commentary on death, heaven and eternity in the death bed scenes of Helen Burns and Mrs

Reed. As Jane fails to comprehend fully the words of Helen, she is reminded of Helen’s

previous introduction to the idea of ‘eternity’11 as a spiritual home. Jane is confronted later

with death as she is summoned to Mrs Reed’s death bed. In Jane Eyre, the demands of this

world and the next juxtaposes the ‘mundane and the supra-mundane’.12 Although Emily’s

conception of death is nature-based, she also tackles the interaction between this world and

the next. Helen Burns, Jane Eyre and Rochester, and Helen Huntingdon, all convey the

sisters’ (and Patrick Brontë’s) ambivalence towards hell and the fourth view of eschatology of

Universalism or Restorationism, the view that all men will be saved. Belief in purgation in a

future state extended beyond Catholicism, with Anne Bronté’s heroine saying that: ‘whatever

fate awaits it, still it is not lost, and God, who hateth nothing that He hath made, will bless it

in the end’.13

Whilst I agree with much of the criticism above, the pervasive presence of the ghost

trope across Villette warrants a fuller examination. The ghost motif is multi-functional.

Firstly, it conveys characterisation. As a metaphor it informs Lucy’s romantic imagination

and emotional, psychological and physical states. Secondly, the motif is thematic illustrating

Brontë’s engagement with key debates in contemporary mental philosophy (or early

psychology). Thirdly, we can re-read the nun ghost plot within the wider context of Victorian

eschatology. The ghost plot directs the novel’s central action with Lucy questioning, ‘are

there wicked things, not human, which envy human bliss? Are there evil influences haunting

the air, and poisoning it for man? (p. 244). Wheeler’s study is most useful in helping me to

situate the ghost motif within Protestant faith and debate. The subject of death permeates the

novel initially in the characterisation of Miss Marchmont and the death-bed scene, preceded
11
Wheeler, pp. 38-41, p. 42, p. 44.
12
Ibid., p. 41.
13
Ibid., p. 76.

148
by the detailed description of the death of her lover, Frank. On the subject of death, Miss

Marchmont confides in Lucy on the loss of Frank, thirty years ago. She says, ‘he was not

dead; he was not quite unconscious [...] I took my dying Frank to myself [...] ‘Maria’, he said,

‘I am dying in Paradise’ (p. 41). Lucy’s physiological description of her lady’s death state as

‘nearly cold, but all calm and undistorted’ (p. 42) might resonate with Wheeler’s observations

of Nelly Dean on Heathcliff.14 The thought of being separated from Graham Bretton leads the

child Paulina Home to quote Genesis 37:35: ‘If you were to die [...] I should refuse to be

comforted, and go down into the grave to you mourning’ (p. 29). But it is Villette’s

preoccupation with death that I am most interested in, notably Lucy’s nervous breakdown and

the subsequent nun-ghost plot. Intellectual debate centred on the philosophical belief that the

dead could reappear to the living. One argument was that this provided evidence of

immortality or the soul’s existence. The novel also touches on purgatory, a doctrine not

necessarily confined to Catholicism. One can easily track Brontë’s ghost belief trajectory

from the youthful anti-Deist spiritualist thinking of ‘Strange Events’ (1830) to the developing

scepticism of Jane Eyre in which Rochester cannot quite jettison his beliefs (or half belief) in

ghosts. By Villette, Lucy Snowe will finally reject her ghost seer. My study is not simply to

tease out the tensions between science and religion in Villette, but to suggest a more nuanced

approach to religious truths and secularist ideas. The conflict of interest in Villette between

superstition and reason might reflect R.C. Finucane’s idea that this ideological rupture

developed as a consequence of Victorian industrialism, leading people to oppose ‘sterile

rationality’ and resorting to the bygone era of ‘emotional Romanticism’.15 I intersperse my

commentary with Scott’s studies to highlight Brontë’s imitation and influence of his Letters

14
Wheeler, pp. 30-31.
15
R.C. Finucane, Appearances of the Dead A Cultural History of Ghosts (London: Junction Books, 1982), pp.
175-176.

149
on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830). In his Letters, Scott challenges several seventeenth-

century thinkers’ endorsement of the existence of the afterlife.

Victorians and the Supernatural

In addressing Brontë’s treatment of religious and philosophical debates on the supernatural in

Villette, the discussion needs to include the wider historical context of Victorian views on the

supernatural. The following studies provide a framework that validates my reading of ghosts,

beginning with a general survey and moving more specifically to doctrinal ideas on death.

This chapter also illustrates the benefit of inter-disciplinary approaches to my study of

Villette. Ghosts are itemised as a major area of folklore study. Simpson and Roud explain that

‘after the Reformation, in order to debunk Purgatory, some Protestants redefined all alleged

apparitions of ghosts as devils in disguise, but others thought this went too far’.16 Ghost

stories and supposed sightings coalesced into local legends, printed and oral. In the eighteenth

century, belief in ghosts was mocked, with Henry Bourne rejecting spirits as frightening and

grotesque and arguing that good Christians should discard the belief.17 The Victorian desire to

reconcile empirical science with religious truth is a hallmark of much of the literature of the

fantastic, as Harris states, ‘doctrine contended with popular beliefs, as well as scientific

evidence’.18 The Victorians, emerging from Enlightenment and immersed in the industrial

age, ‘epitomise this split between reason and superstition that characterises the human mind

[...] the Victorians projected, infantilised, and isolated magical thinking’.19 Harris quotes

Robert F. Geary’s idea of a ‘new synthesis merging science and supernatural’, and Jack

16
Simpson and Roud, pp. 142-143 (p. 142).
17
Ibid., pp. 142-143.
18
Harris, Folklore, pp. 7-8.
19
Ibid., p. 11.

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Sullivan’s ‘desire to have it both ways – to be both mystical and scientific – is the

characteristic of the supernatural fiction of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods’.20

Advocating the Victorian age of faith as well as the age of science, historian Frank

Turner revises the dominant secular world view on nineteenth-century intellectual history. He

characterises Victorian Anglican and clerical life as highly intellectual, interactive, existential,

political, social and moral. He argues that by 1800, religion rather than science influenced

advanced modes of thought. Moreover, ‘there was also little or no appreciation for the manner

in which popular interest in magic, superstition, religious ritual, mesmerism, and spiritualism

could shade into science or respectable religion’.21 R.W. Dale, the leading British

Congregationalist clergyman, writing in the 1880s, could still call ‘Every-day business a

divine calling’, conveying the world as God’s creation in which the divine will was to be

realised throughout secular as well as spiritual life.22 Turner argues that there was little or no

differentiation between secular and religious life. For the Victorians, religious convictions

resulted in civic action as well as direct personal morality and piety. Although studied as

forces of opposition, in reality, Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians and intellectuals

often shared progressive, secular, scientific and rational world views.

Richard Noakes also revises traditional historiography, arguing that the relationship

between spiritualism, pseudo-science and science was far more nuanced.23 His work is useful

in its specific focus on the rising tide of spiritualism in the 1850s. Noakes argues that both

spiritualist thinkers and Protestants debated evidence for the immortality of the soul, the

existence of the other world and eternal life. However, they were to part ways over the idea

20
Harris, Folklore, pp. 12-13.
21
Frank Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), p. 11.
22
Ibid., p. 3.
23
Noakes, pp. 23-27. See also Jen Cadwallader, Spirits and Spirituality in Victorian Fiction (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

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that spirits of the dead could reappear to the living, and the independence of spirit and matter.

Some Victorians argued that supernatural manifestations might derive from natural causes

(mental or physical) or from intelligences in the spirit world. Protestants lambasted the idea of

boundaries between the two worlds, and rejected eternal damnation and interactions with evil

spirits. Noakes argues that spiritualism was seen to endorse Christianity, combating atheism,

agnosticism, materialism and rationalism.24 We can identify this viewpoint in Brontë’s

youthful ‘Strange Events’ with Charles Wellesley prepared to endorse his ghost vision. But

Lucy will not compromise Protestant doctrine.

In The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul (2009), Robert Swanson raises

key fundamental questions in Christian faith. He asks, what happens at death? What happens

after and beyond death? Where do the dead go? What happens to them there? Can something

be done in this life to prepare for the next? Similarly in Shirley Caroline Helstone asks:

‘What can my departed soul feel then? [...] Can spirits through any medium,
communicate with living flesh? Can the dead at all revisit those they leave?’ [...]
‘Where is the other world? In what will another life consist?’ (p. 356).

Swanson examines the Protestant rejection of Purgatory as a doctrinal concept. For Swanson,

theological doctrines on the afterlife lie at the centre of Christian faith. To engage with the

afterlife and the fate of the soul is to engage with death. He says:

Accidental encounters with the dead, as visitors or exiles from the other side [...] and
deliberate attempts to establish contact with the souls of the deceased, enmeshed
Christians in a world- very much this world - inhabited by ghosts and spirits.25

The potential reality of such phenomena was debated throughout the nineteenth-century and

became integrated into ecclesiastical circles and authorities. Ghosts were by and large

incompatible with Christian faith. Yet, the desire for contact with the dead was reflected in

24
Noakes, p. 37.
25
Robert Swanson, The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul, ed. Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon
(Ecclesiastical History Society: Boydell and Brewer, 2009), pp. xvii-xxiii (xxii).

152
people’s need for confirmation of immortality and the fate of the soul. Brontë intimates at this

topic across her fiction. Lucy Snowe, especially, questions and then rejects the Catholic

prospect of purgation, considering Anglican issues on life after death. We find the very

religious Lucy seriously prepared to believe in the nun-ghost as evidence of the

interconnectedness of this life and the next. This is the context in which we need to examine

the ghost motif in Villette.

Ghost as Metaphor

More than any other of Brontë’s heroines, the ghost motif expresses Lucy’s over-

imaginative life. They are a marker of her journey to wisdom and self-hood beginning in

Bretton during a visit to her godmother. We can commend Villette as a modern and confident

novel written from the point of view of an insightful main heroine. As a successor to Jane

Eyre, we will come to associate Lucy’s imagination with magical thinking. However, it is

important to acknowledge from the outset that the cultural origins of Lucy’s superstitions (or

psychological realities) are less explicitly explained than those of her northern heroines, Jane

Eyre and Caroline Helstone. Brontë assumes the readers’ acceptance of Lucy’s cultural

knowledge of fairies, changelings, ghosts and omens. Far more important is to observe how

she navigates her religious identity within a Catholic and therefore opposing doctrinal

environment.

Right from the start, the reader is confronted with the complexities of Lucy Snowe. On

viewing little Polly she declares that:

I, Lucy Snowe, plead guiltless of that curse, an overheated and discursive imagination:
but whenever, opening a room-door, I found her seated in a corner alone, her head on
her pigmy hand, that room seemed to me not inhabited, but haunted (p. 12).

153
Our first impressions of Lucy are as a strange, over-imaginative young woman who describes

herself much later as having ‘a soon-depressed [...] easily deranged temperament’ (p. 315).

She perceives little Polly Home as unearthly and aged, pointing out her elfish features. Lucy

is unnerved when Polly rests her ‘elfish hand on her elfish breast’ and appears ‘instantly, like

a small ghost gliding over the carpet’ (p. 34). Graham Bretton reinforces the image of Polly as

a ‘changeling’. He describes her as a ‘perfect cabinet of oddities’ (p. 27). Both the ghost and

elfin references indicate Lucy’s unregulated imagination. Her innocuous image of Polly

foreshadows her more threatening response to the nun-ghost.

Back in the English countryside, Lucy becomes maid to the frail Miss Marchmont.

Lucy’s allusions to death omens reveal heightened anxiety more than magical thinking. The

‘long lamenting east wind’ reminds Lucy of the ‘legend of the Banshee’ (p. 38). Her sighting

of a ‘moving mystery—the Aurora Borealis’ (p. 43) is less an ominous sign and more a ‘new

power it seemed to bring’ (p. 44). Brontë might have drawn on Scott’s reference in Letter Ten

to one of the most beautiful superstitions, the Irish ‘banshie (or household fairy), whose office

it is to appear, seemingly mourning, to announce the approaching death of someone of the

destined race’.26 Scott adds that the subject is ‘beautifully investigated and illustrated by Mr

Thomas Crofton Croker and others’.27 Scott also points out ‘some uncommon appearance of

the aurora borealis, or the northern lights [...] a common and familiar atmospherical

phenomenon until the beginning of the eighteenth century’.28

We must understand Brontë’s ghosts as an aspect of the novel’s eschatological and

Anti-Catholic themes. Lucy clarifies her anti-spiritualist enlightened position, suggesting that

‘these are not the days of miracles’ (p.39) on hearing Miss Marchmont’s suggestion that a

miracle might reverse her ill-health. Noakes argues that the miracle debate was linked to mid-
26
Scott, Letters, p. 206.
27
Ibid., p. 206.
28
Ibid., p. 15.

154
Victorian Christian preoccupation with the afterlife and the immortality of the soul. Feeling

undermined by higher biblical criticism, spiritualists’ faith in spirit manifestations (such as

ghosts) was seen as proof of the Scriptural miracles.29 At the Pensionnat, Lucy scoffs at a

Catholic text that contained the ‘legends of the saints’ and their invention of ‘these miracles’

(p. 117). In Letter One, Scott refers to ‘the Roman Catholics, indeed, boldly affirm that the

power of miraculous interference with the course of Nature is still in being; but the

enlightened even of this faith [...] will hardly assent to any particular case, without nearly the

same evidence which might conquer the incredulity of their neighbours the Protestants’.30

With a renewed strength and confidence, Lucy considers her options. Yet, still, she

relies on the ghost motif, metaphorically, to describe her state of mind, saying ‘a terrible

oppression overcame me’ and ‘all at once my position rose on me like a ghost’ (p. 46). The

ghost motif even reveals Lucy’s medical history when she explains her familiarity with the

hypochondrias experienced by the King of Labassecour (a condition familiar to Brontë,

herself):

There sat a silent sufferer—a nervous, melancholy man. Those eyes had looked on the
visits of a certain ghost — had long waited the comings and goings of that strangest
spectre, Hypochondria (p. 213).

On the boat across the channel to Villette, the naive Ginevra Fanshawe’s seemingly

irrelevant comment regarding her inability to distinguish between Protestantism and

Romanism is actually more significant in the light of the novel’s doctrinal tensions. She says,

‘into the bargain I have quite forgotten my religion [...] I don’t well know the difference

between Romanism and Protestantism’ (p. 54). At the Pensionnat De Demoiselles, Lucy

exempts herself from the Catholic rite of evening prayer but prays privately. Her initial

response to Madame Beck: ‘No ghost stood beside me, nor anything of spectral aspect;
29
Noakes, p. 26.
30
Scott, Letters, p. 49.

155
merely a motherly, dumpy little woman’ (p. 65) betrays nothing more than Lucy’s excessive

tiredness and sense of anxiety. Lucy tells her reader that she leans more to the artistic nature, a

point that becomes clearer in relation to her anti-materialist response to the spectral illusion of

the nun-ghost. Building on her initial disclosure of her ‘over-heated and discursive

imagination’ (p. 12), Lucy now reveals that she ‘seemed to hold two lives—the life of

thought, and that of reality; and, provided the former was nourished with a sufficiency of the

strange necromantic joys of fancy, the privileges of the latter might remain limited to daily

bread, hourly work, and a roof of shelter’ (p. 77). This comment reflects the tension she will

increasingly experience between the artistic or Romantic sensibility (life of thought) and the

scientific (life of reality). Surely this path will become a dangerous one to tread.

Mental Philosophy

The nun-ghost plot seems to fit into the contemporary debate on spectral illusion

theory. Lucy learns that the school was originally a medieval Catholic convent, her dormitory,

once nuns’ cells. Moreover:

Something had happened on this site which, rousing fear and inflicting horror, had left
to the place the inheritance of a ghost story. A vague tale went of a black and white
nun, sometimes, on some night or nights of the year, seen in some parts of the
vicinage [...] The legend went, unconfirmed and unaccredited, but still propagated [...]
the bones of a girl whom a monkish conclave of the drear middle ages had here been
buried alive, for some sin against her vow. (p. 106).

Simpson and Roud state that ‘some remarkable tales written down by a monk in 14th century

Yorkshire concern tormented souls who roam about in terrifying shapes’.31 The reader will

soon realise that Lucy cannot adhere to her initial dismissal of the ghost story as ‘romantic

rubbish’ (p. 106). Lucy’s sense of reason is tested in the attic where she is locked in whilst she

31
Simpson and Roud, p. 142.

156
learns her lines for a vaudeville to be performed at the fete. She is not troubled by the ‘rumour

affirmed that the ghostly Nun of the garden had once been seen here’ (p. 135).

Lucy’s terror of death surfaces during the long vacation. She describes an avenging

dream as ‘a nameless experience that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the very tone of

visitation from eternity’ (p. 159) after which consciousness returns. Imaginary overload

coupled with her psychological and physical state leads her to perceive that the ‘ghostly white

beds were turning into spectres—the coronal of each became a death’s head (p. 160).

Managing to get up and out of bed, Lucy seeks solace and support from a Catholic priest, Pere

Silas, having no-one else to turn to, and engages in the ritual of confession.

After her consultation with the priest Lucy faints at the steps of a building and again,

articulates her dream in the following way:

Where my soul went during that swoon I cannot tell. Whatever she saw, or wherever
she travelled in her trance on that strange night, she kept her own secret; never
whispering a word to Memory, and baffling Imagination by an indissoluble silence.
She may have gone upward, and come in sight of her eternal home, hoping for leave to
rest now, and deeming that her painful union with matter was at last dissolved. While
she so deemed, an angel may have warned her away from heaven’s threshold [...] I
know she re-entered her prison with pain, with reluctance, with a moan and a long
shiver. The divorced mates, Spirit and Substance, were hard to re-unite: they greeted
each other, not in an embrace, but a racking sort of struggle. (p. 165).

This passage echoes that of Jane Eyre and Rochester’s explanation of their divine inspiration

upon hearing each other’s voices miles away, she saying ‘it had opened the doors of the soul’s

cell, and loosed its bands—it had wakened it out of its sleep [...] independent of the cumbrous

body’ (p. 421). Rochester reinforces the idea, ‘in spirit, I believe we must have met. You no

doubt were, at that hour, in unconscious sleep, Jane: perhaps your soul wandered from its cell

to comfort mine’ (p. 448). In Lucy’s case, the reunion between soul and matter (although a

reluctant union) reflects Brontë’s progress towards Enlightenment thinking from a decidedly

more spiritualist view in Jane Eyre.

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 As aspects of early Victorian psychology (or Mental Philosophy), dream, sleep and

trance states were also serious areas of enquiry. Nicola Bown provides a useful commentary

on the subject. As in the ghost controversy, Enlightenment thinkers or sceptics such as

physiologists, physicians and those holding theological perspectives, vied with spiritualists

(including some members of the clergy), mesmerists and those with pseudo-psychological

views. On both sides fundamental questions were mooted. Were dreams supernatural or

physiological in origin? Did dreams originate in the soul or in the mind? Did dreams come

from outside the dreamer? Were dreams endowed with prophetic or divinatory powers?

Crucially, dreams (like ghosts) generated debates on the relationship between mind, body,

soul, spirit, consciousness and supernatural phenomena.32 Jane and Rochester’s response to

their experience seems to characterise the Spiritualist Reverend Thomas Millington’s A

Lecture on Dreams, Mesmerism and Clairvoyance (1852) in the belief that ‘during sleep, the

mind in its partial abstraction from the body learns from a higher, or at least a more

independent order of spirits those future events which it could not otherwise foresee [...] the

spirit which is immortal and therefore supernatural, is the source of all true dreams’.33

Initially, Lucy describes her soul traversing upward to heaven’s threshold and down again to

the corporeal body. In his On the Phenomena of Dreams (1832), Walter Dendy challenges

those who believe that ‘a dream may be the flight of a soul on a visit to other regions and its

observations of their systems from actual survey’.34 Ultimately, Lucy advocates the

materialist view but her interpretation is nowhere near as stringent as the robust theory of

dreams of Robert Macnish in The Philosophy of Sleep (1830) (known to Patrick Brontë). He

asserts that ‘dreaming, then, takes place when the repose is broken; and consists of a series of

thoughts or feelings called into existence by certain powers of mind, while the other mental
32
Bown, Victorian Supernatural, p. 159.
33
Ibid., p. 162.
34
Ibid., p. 161.

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powers which control these thoughts or feelings, is inactive’.35 Macnish’s theory was seen as

a satisfactory explanation of dreams.

Having become acquainted with the attic, this space, although creepy, becomes

paradoxically a private place for Lucy to read her letter from Graham. But there she will

witness the nun-ghost. Of course, what she sees is actually real (Count de Hamal in disguise

as the nun). The problem is how Lucy interprets the nun-ghost trick She is unable to repel her

credulity of the ghost as it appears to her literally, in the form of a hoax rather than as an

actual product of her imagination. Lucy personifies the Romantic ideals saying: ‘This hag,

this Reason [...] might be right; yet no wonder we are glad at times to defy her, to rush from

under her rod and give a truant hour to Imagination [...] Reason is vindictive as a devil’ (p.

229). Also: ‘Feeling and I turned Reason out of doors’ (p. 253). Lucy’s homage to the

imagination is akin to proselytizing. Her greatest test will be to accept the true laws of nature

rather than supernatural agency, and move towards the age of science whilst still pursuing

religious truth in the supernatural deity. She cries out:

Are there wicked things, not human, which envy human bliss? Are there evil
influences haunting the air, and poisoning it for man? What was near me? [...] Say
what you will, reader—tell me I was nervous, or mad; affirm that I was unsettled by
the excitement of that letter; declare that I dreamed: this I vow—I saw there—in that
room—on that night—an image like—a NUN. (pp. 244-245).

From a materialist viewpoint Dr John (Graham Bretton) makes his diagnosis:

‘How do you feel physically? [...] You are in a highly nervous state [...] you saw, or
thought you saw, some appearance peculiarly calculated to impress the imagination.
[...] I am not so sure that a visitation bearing a spectral character would not shake your
very mind. Be calm now. This is all a matter of the nerves [...] I think it a case of
spectral illusion: I fear, following on and resulting from long-continued mental
conflict. [...] Happiness is the cure—a cheerful mind the preventive: cultivate both’.
(pp. 247-250).

35
Bown, Victorian Supernatural, p.160.

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Lucy suspends judgement of his diagnosis. She refuses to speak further of the nun to Madame

Beck, a woman of sound rational judgement, lest she associate Lucy with ideas of ‘romance

and unreality’ (p. 252). But Lucy is prepared to believe both in the existence of ghosts and her

own nervous disorder, speculating ‘whether that strange thing was of this world, or of a realm

beyond the grave; or whether indeed it was only the child of malady, and I of that malady the

prey’ (p. 252).

After the ghost shenanigans Lucy will endeavour to follow the advice of Dr John and

pursue happiness. However, her comment, ‘Feeling and I turned Reason out of doors’ (p. 253)

strongly suggests her ongoing propensity to credulity should the apparition resurface.

I now incorporate Scott’s material on early psychology as a possible source for

Brontë’s ghost material. It is possible that Brontë imitated adapts Scott for ideological as well

as narrative features. Dr John’s diagnosis of Lucy’s ‘spectral illusion’ might be drawn directly

from Scott’s first letter in Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830). Nowhere is this

more articulated than in his first and last Letters. Notwithstanding Scott’s ambiguity about

second sight, the outcome of his ghost investigations is always based on common sense. We

need to focus on Scott’s contribution to science, and how Brontë imitates and advances his

study of mental philosophy by developing his position on the afterlife and ideas of

consciousness and dream states. Scott elaborates far more on ghosts than consciousness but of

dreams he speaks of people’s erroneous interpretation of dreams as spiritual communications

or of a mystical nature that leads them to believe in a ‘positive communication between the

living and the dead’.36 Scott’s Letters were the culmination of study into the supernatural,

worked out in the ballads, verse romance, and across the Waverley novels. Pointedly, Scott

interweaves into his ghost anecdotes examples of Catholic figures afflicted with apparitions,

36
Scott, Letters, p. 12. See also Louise Henson in Bown, Victorian Supernatural, pp. 44-63 for spectral illusion
theory and Dickens.

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setting up at times the crude opposition between Catholic medieval ignorance and modern

enlightenment. Scott refers to the ‘learned and acute Dr Ferrier of Manchester’ who assisted

in identifying the cause of the celebrated bookseller of Berlin, Monsieur Nicholai’s series of

‘spectral illusions’ tracing his illness to a ‘depression of spirits’.37 From Dr Ferrier’s diagnosis

of Nicholai’s ‘predisposition to see phantasmata’, Scott turns to Dr Hibbert’s philosophical

and medical enquiry into this subject. Hibbert lists a number of physical causes of spectral

illusion often associated with:

Febrile and inflammatory disorders—frequently accompanying inflammation of the

brain—a concomitant also of highly excited nervous irritability—equally connected
with hypochondria—and finally united in some cases with gout [...] In all of these
cases there seems to be a morbid degree of sensibility, with which this symptom is
ready to ally itself.38

Scott also discusses the manifestation of ‘optical illusions’39 in individuals with a certain

temperament or sudden temporary fever who experience deceptions of the senses. They differ

from that of Nicholai’s case in their shortness of duration and the fact that they constitute no

‘derangement of the system’.

Similarly, to Dr Hibbert, Brontë’s Dr John bases his diagnosis of Lucy’s spectral

illusion on his observations of her hypochondria, febrile state and depression of spirits. Lucy

will not see the paradox between modern science and religious truth. But for her, as with

Anglican reasoning, she will come to accept the supernatural in God alone. Ultimately,

Lucy’s goal is to accept Enlightenment rationality blended with Christian truths.

It does seem feasible to argue for Brontë’s imitation of Scott’s investigation into

ghosts.

Returning to the novel’s nun-ghost plot, prior to the evening of the theatre trip, Lucy

collects her crape from the attic. She sees ‘a solemn light, like a star, but broader. So plainly it
37
Scott, Letters, p. 20.
38
Ibid., p. 21.
39
Ibid., p. 30.

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shone, that it revealed the deep alcove with a portion of the tarnished scarlet curtain drawn

over it. Instantly silently before my eyes, it vanished’ (p. 256). Dr John mocks her, saying

‘Ha, the nun again?’ Lucy is ‘vexed to be suspected of a second illusion’ (p. 256). She says:

He was so obstinate, I thought it better to tell him what I really had seen. Of course
with him, it was held to be another effect of the same cause: it was all optical illusion
—nervous malady, and so on. Not one bit did I believe him; but I dared not contradict:
doctors are so self-opinionated, so immovable in their dry, materialistic views. (p.
257).

With her predisposition to the romantic life, Lucy guards against the materialistic invasion of

psychological theory, willing to accept a metaphysical explanation. She is prepared to accept

the spiritualist viewpoint. The stunt has to be elongated to represent Lucy’s gradual progress

to Enlightenment thinking and Protestant spiritual values. In actuality, Lucy does see a figure

dressed up as a ghost.

Brontë may adapt the structure of Scott’s comical ghost stories compiled in Letter One

and Ten for her idea of the nun-ghost plot. Scott’s ghost examples are either products of the

imagination or actual disguise or trickery. One of his ghost stories might compare with Lucy’s

second vision of the nun-ghost. In Scott’s story, a young lady and her father reside in a town

of some size. The daughter, enjoying the ‘romantic love of solitude’ until twilight and then

darkness, sits in a chapel garden and witnesses a ‘gleamy figure, as of some aerial being,

hovering as it were, against the arched window in the end of the Anabaptist chapel. Its head

was surrounded by that halo which painters give to the Catholic saints’.40 Her father kept

watch with his daughter the following evening and witnessed ‘the same shadowy form, the

same pale light around the head’.41

Lucy’s third sighting at the alley near to the ‘Methusaleh, the pear tree’ is near the site

of the original convent’s ghost legend. Having decided to bury the letter near to the pear tree,
40
Scott, Letters, p. 227.
41
Ibid., p. 227.

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Lucy now accepts that her love for Dr John will never be reciprocated. She again sees the

ghost image:

Whiter and blacker, it grew on my eye: it took shape with instantaneous

transformation. I stood about three yards from a tall, sable-robed, snowy-veiled
woman [...]
‘Who are you? And why do you come to me?’
She stood mute. She had no face—no features: all below her brow was masked with a
white cloth; but she had eyes, and they viewed me. [...] This time there was no Dr
John to whom to have recourse: there was no one to whom I dared whisper the words,
‘I have again seen the nun’. (p. 297).

Eschatology

The nun-ghost plot shifts to an eschatological enquiry. Lucy’s developing relationship with

Monsieur Paul reignites her critique of Catholicism and faith in Protestantism. Alone one day

together he confides in her: ‘I have seen, Miss Lucy, things to me unaccountable, that have

made me watch all night for a solution, and I have not yet found it’ (p. 366). Lucy becomes

excited. As she is leaving, Monsieur Paul asks:

‘Mademoiselle, do you Protestants believe in the supernatural?’

‘There is a difference of theory and belief on this point amongst Protestants, as
amongst other sects,’ I answered. ‘Why, Monsieur, do you ask such a question?’
‘Why do you shrink and speak so faintly? Are you superstitious?’
‘I am constitutionally nervous. I dislike the discussions of such subjects. I dislike it the
more because—‘
‘You believe?’
‘No: but it has happened to me to experience impressions—‘
‘Since you came here?’
‘Yes: not many months ago.’
‘Here? — in this house?’
‘Yes.’
‘Bon! I am glad of it
[...] ‘in former days a nun’s ghost used to come and go here’
‘Monsieur, what if it comes and goes here still?
[...] Monsieur, I, too have seen it’ (p. 367).

The apparition reappears and Lucy’s reality of it intensifies. Now the whole night feels its

presence. Then, for the fourth time, in the presence of Monsieur Paul and Lucy:

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 Instantly into our alley there came, out of the berceau, an apparition, all black and
white. With a sort of angry rush—close, close past our faces—swept swiftly the very
NUN herself! Never had I seen her so clearly. She looked tall of stature, and fierce of
gesture. As she went, the wind rose sobbing; the rain poured wild and cold; the whole
night seemed to feel her. (p. 368).

Lucy’s comments reflect contemporary debate on the afterlife and eternity. In the

hullaballoo of spirit obsession there were serious ecclesiastical historical discussions;

Monsieur Paul’s question and Lucy’s answer raises the complex phenomenon of the afterlife.

Adrian Chastain Weimer’s examination helps me to elucidate on Lucy’s response. She argues

that Protestant strategies for the afterlife were developed from models of holy living that

assured salvation. Heaven and hell were separate entities unlike the more complex concept of

Purgatory. Yet, Protestants still had to deal with the transition from death to judgement and

the issue of the fate of the soul. In what form that intervening experience took remained

controversial and much of the clerical world accepted the integration of the scientific

community to help them to resolve it. By the late seventeenth-century, theologians had to

consider the question of how ‘souls might fare in an afterlife potentially constrained by the

physical structure and limitations of an increasingly known Copernican universe’.42 Sasha

Handley explains how the ‘accepted hierarchy of authorities’ endorsed ‘Scripture, human

reason and the writings of the early Church fathers as more authoritative than extra-biblical

revelations’.43 By the early nineteenth-century, intellectual views and theories on the afterlife

were more varied as Lucy points out. Clearly, the nun-ghost plot is a deliberate ploy on

Brontë’s part to set up a test for Lucy. Having seen the material ghost, she is temporarily

poised to steer away from Enlightenment discourse. Among the range of belief, the Deists

believed in God as the creator of the universe. To them, God could not influence natural

42
Swanson, p. xxi.
43
Sasha Handley, ‘Apparitions and Anglicanism in 1750s Warwickshire’ in The Church, the Afterlife and the
Fate of the Soul, eds. P Clarke and T Claydon, (Ecclesiastical History Society, 2009), 45: pp. 311-323, (p. 314).

164
phenomena and the belief in divine powers was increasingly rejected. Ghosts and apparitions

were included in this model. No longer did many Anglicans believe that outbreaks of natural

phenomena were divine led. As Handley says, the wonders of God were reflected rather than

realized, in aspects of the natural world’.44 Although Lucy does not elaborate on these

theories, Mortalist philosophy gained ground in its thinking that the human soul was immortal

through Christ and the soul slept in the intervening period between death and the resurrection

to eternity. By mid-nineteenth century, Christian theology shifted to Universalism – the idea

that all humankind would be saved. The emphasis for Protestants was to follow the teachings

of the Prayer Book burial service (that embraced a sense of sin and assured judgement),

sermons and hymnody. Debates on the afterlife remained relatively unchanged but the focus

certainly had. Thus, Protestants prioritised the spiritual life of the living and not the state of

the departed. Spiritualist images did not offer intellectual weight but were seen increasingly as

a forum to discuss the afterlife.45 Lucy will progress to the Protestant spiritual ideal by the

end of the novel.

Lucy’s relationship with Monsieur Paul is intellectual as well as emotional. Coaxed

into reading a theological tract, she examines the fundamental debate on Purgatory. She says

of it, ‘the Protestant was to turn Papist, not so much in fear of the heretic’s hell, as on account

of the comfort, the indulgence, the tenderness Holy Church offered (p. 412). She also says:

I remember one capital inducement to apostacy was held out in the fact that a Catholic
who had lost dear friends by death could enjoy the unspeakable solace of praying them
out of purgatory. The writer did not touch on the firmer peace of those whose belief
dispenses with purgatory altogether; but I thought of this, and on the whole, preferred
the latter doctrine as the most consolatory. The little book amused, and did not
painfully displease me. It was a canting, sentimental, shallow little book. (p. 413).

On eschatology and judgement, Wheeler defines purgatory:

44
Handley, p. 317.
45
Ibid., p. 362, p. 370.

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 The view that Heaven, the final state of the blessed, and Hell, the final doom of the
accursed, there is a state wherein those souls are detained and punished which are
capable of being purified – an intermediate purification between death and judgment.46

He goes on to quote French historian Jacques Le Goff’s concept of Purgatory as an

intermediate place:

The souls there are as neither as happy as the souls in Paradise nor as unhappy as the
souls in Hell, and Purgatory comes to an end at the time of the Last Judgement. All
that remained to make it truly intermediary was to assign it a location between
Paradise and Hell.47

Originating in twelfth century doctrine, Wheeler states that essentially Purgatory was about

hope. Yet it retained the sense of catastrophe within a scheme of purification. Lucy rejects the

tract for its appeal to the senses and not the intellect. But this is a thorny subject between her

and Monsieur Paul. He believes in the tract as the ‘pure essence of faith, love, charity!’ (p.

417).

Paul questions Lucy’s belief system crying out: ‘But do you believe in the Bible? Do

you receive Revelation? What limits are there to the wild, careless daring of your country and

sect?’ (p. 418). Wheeler tells us that only the Book of Revelation describes the future life.

Jesus Christ, he says, took life after death for granted and so discussion on the afterlife in the

New Testament was minimal. The nebulousness of reference to what lies beyond in

Revelation obfuscated doctrinal clarity. The last days were open to interpretation,

figuratively.48 Lucy insists that they share religious commonality in their trust in God, Christ

and the Bible, of which the latter she ascribes as the absolute priority. Lucy, on her spiritual

quest, visits the three different Protestant Chapels of Villette: Presbytarian, Lutheran and

Episcopalian, concluding that one day they might be united in doctrine fused ‘into one grand

Holy Alliance’ (p. 419). Lucy accepts that Paul’s Romanism is pure and neither needs

46
Wheeler, p. 75.
47
Ibid., p. 75. See Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory trans. Arthur Goldhammer (University of Chicago
Press, 1986).
48
Wheeler, pp. 4-5.

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converting. Accepting its errors, Lucy clings to Protestantism. Despite her and Paul’s

differences, she acknowledges their shared devotion ‘to lifting the secret vision to Him whose

home is Infinity, and his being – Eternity’ (p. 421). Paul reaffirms this sentiment, aligning

them together in their ‘truth and faith of one mind according to the light He has appointed’ (p.

422).

Despite Monsieur Paul’s Romanism ‘touched with superstition, influenced by priest-

craft’ (p. 396), Lucy respects him for his piety, faith, self-sacrifice and charity. When Paul

points out the portrait of a nun he wonders if Lucy will associate the subject with her

apparition: You did not, nor will you fancy, pursued he, that a saint in Heaven perturbs herself

with rivalries of earth? Protestants are rarely superstitious; these morbid fancies will not beset

you? (p. 408). Lucy, increasingly sceptical of the nun-ghost, wonders ‘whether the “morbid

fancies,” against which he warned me, wrought in his own mind’ (p.408).

For Lucy, the road to Protestant truth is now ahead. After her debacle with Paul, she

seems to enter into spiritual introspection, a sign also of increasing unhappiness having learnt

of the impending marriage between Graham and Paulina de Bassompierre. Covering half a

page, she quotes fervently, with a deep devotion, the biblical language of the Puritan pilgrims:

Proof of a life to come must be given. In fire and in blood, if needful, must that proof
be written [...] Pilgrims and brother mourners, join in friendly company. Dark through
the wilderness of this world stretches the way for most of us [...]For staff we have His
promise, whose word is tried [...] Art thou not from everlasting mine Holy one? WE
SHALL NOT DIE! (p. 438).

Lucy’s meditation seems to compare with the elegy, prayer or catechism delivered by the

early Pilgrim ministers, the content of which embodied the glorious pursuit of heaven. It is

possible to compare Lucy’s sermon with Weimar’s study of an American Puritan minister,

Jonathan Mitchell who wrote in his journal about the quest for heavenly mindedness: ‘Heaven

is here begun upon Earth: shall I be Thinking on, and Talking with Christ, to all Eternity, and

167
not discourse with Him, one Quarter of an hour in a day now’.49 Lucy, too, suggests a sense of

permeability between this world and the next. Like these ministers, Lucy intimates her

experience of heaven on earth through her constant prayers and her devotion to Christ. Her

quest though is not to die but to live well on earth. The paradise afterlife is on her mind as is

the subject of Christ’s resurrection. In this lament and various others, Lucy quotes from

Matthew and Luke on the last days before the second coming. Wheeler argues that for

Christians the end-time was set for completion in the Parousia (or presence) and linked to the

second coming of Christ. Millenarians believed in the time between death (or the Parousia,

for those still alive at that point) and the last judgement. Christ’s second coming represents

the hope that Christ will reign upon earth and in Revelation 20 only the Christian martyrs had

the security of living with Christ.50

Lucy’s spirituality is not in question. Yet she must be clear of her position on ghosts.

Momentarily, Lucy must resolve her confusion that she is not witnessing the long-deceased

nun-ghost of Justine Marie resurrected, but the very living Justine Marie, heiress and orphan,

guardian to Professor Paul and relation to both the Becks and Walravens. Her baptismal name

is derived from the sainted nun who would have been her aunt had she lived. Rejecting

Romantic sensibilities, Lucy says:

Ah! When imagination once runs riot where do we stop? What winter tree so bare and
branchless—what way-side, hedge-munching animal so humble, that Fancy, a passing
cloud, and a struggling moonbeam, will not clothe it in spirituality, and make of it a
phantom? (p. 464).

Scott ends Letter One in a similar vein, stating that ‘imagination is apt to intrude its

explanations and inferences founded on inadequate evidence’.51 Scott’s Letter Ten concludes

49
Weimer in Clarke and Claydon, p. 260.
50
Wheeler, p. 2, p. 4, pp. 78-80.
51
Scott, Letters, p. 35.

168
that ‘tales of ghosts and demonology are out of date at forty years and upwards; that it is only

in the morning of life that this feeling of superstition comes o’er us like a summer cloud’.52

From her spiritual journey, Lucy’s magical belief in ghosts is over. She will reject

superstition for Enlightenment rationality, fact, reality and Protestant doctrine. Speaking in

simile and not metaphor, Lucy, sedated on opium and enthralled by the carnival, finally

accepts that the nun she sees at the fete is none other than Justine Marie, dressed up like the

nun of the attic clad in black skirts and white head-clothes. Lucy rejects the idea that she

looks ‘like the resurrection of the flesh, and that she is a risen ghost’ (p. 464). The crisis has

abated and she accepts that her spectral illusions are: ‘All falsities—all figments! We will not

deal in this gear. Let us be honest and cut as heretofore from the homely web of truth’ (p.

464). Lucy now embraces the power of ‘TRUTH’ saying ‘Truth, you are a good mistress to

your faithful servants! (p. 467). Referring to Lucy’s experience of the actress Vashti’s

performance, Thormählen confirms that the entire novel rests on Lucy’s ‘allegiance to truth

without which one’s whole life project must flounder’.53 Handley affirms that Enlightenment

discourse replaced Romantic claims for miracles, visions and wonders. Divine providence or

the wonder of God was no longer discerned in plagues but reflected in the natural world. The

way forward was the discourse of enlightened empiricism and civic humanism.54

Lucy upholds the idea that despite God as the Holy Ghost and an un-embodied spirit

sharing a kinship with disembodied spirits such as the idea of ghosts, only God is

supernatural. But, yet again, Lucy imagines that she sees the nun-ghost stretched on her bed.

Now equipped with reason, Lucy remains objective. The long nun proves to be ‘a long bolster

dressed in a black stole, and artfully invested with a white veil’ (p. 470). Her:

52
Scott, Letters, p. 232.
53
Thormählen, p. 115.
54
Handley, p. 320.

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 ‘Nerves disdained hysteria’, she ‘defied spectra [...] all the life, the reality, the
substance, the force; as my instinct felt. I tore her up—the incubus! I held her on
high—the goblin! I shook her loose—the mystery’. (p. 470).

Lucy ‘relieved from all sense of the spectral and unearthly’ accepts that the nun vision is all

illusion, as Dr John had originally said. She is so unafraid that she falls asleep with the stole,

veil and bandages underneath her pillow. Lucy, we assume, will now follow the true path of

Anglican worship of prayers, revelation and reason and the set forms of liturgy. She will

follow the moral and spiritual devotional life according to God’s providential will. Monsieur

Paul can continue his superstitions if he sees fit, but he ‘freely left me my pure faith. He did

not tease nor tempt. He said: “Remain a Protestant. My little English Puritan, I love

Protestantism in you [...] There is something in its ritual I cannot receive myself, but it is the

sole creed for Lucy” (p. 494). No longer is Lucy credulous to the supernatural, ghosts or

‘miracles’ (p.39), prophecy or any other extra-biblical revelations. Brontë intercepts Lucy’s

pivoting on spiritualism, steering her instead to spirituality. The journey to truth and faith has

been an important one for Lucy. The nun prank has helped her to re-process the conception of

death. Death is the point of entry into the afterlife, a seamless transition passing to the next

life. One is immortal but the soul does not reappear. It has also helped Lucy to modify her

love of the imagination. Any ghost vision must be allegorical, there for the pleasure only of

the imagination. Rather than rely solely upon theological arguments, Lucy turns to the

Protestant version of religious rationality for answers. She can now replace folk folly with

metaphysical truths.

Romantic Lucy has been too dismissive of science and she has had to pay the price.

She must now lay the groundwork for a less Romantic-led existence and live a more

Protestant, active, rational, practical life. Villette does not follow the trajectory of Victorian

spiritualism. The nun plot is framed comically, reflecting Brontë’s assured scepticism of

170
supernatural phenomena. Yet, it is central to the dramatic action of Villette. It has been a

vehicle for Brontë to reassert her empirical approach to the spirit world and to reinforce her

belief that the supernatural exists only in the conception of God. In her belief in divine

providence, only God can interfere with mankind with extraordinary signs, wonders and

warnings. The nun-ghost is a manifestation of Lucy’s appetite for the Romantic life of fancy,

imagination and the fantastic as well as a product of her emotional states. Yet, in terms of her

necromantic fancies, it takes on a more macabre aspect of her psyche. The imposition of the

hoax is an opportunity for Lucy to engage in a genuine enquiry into the afterlife.

How did Brontë intend her readers to respond to the ghost, and how seriously was she

treating the subject? Certainly, Lucy and Monsieur Paul engage in serious debate on religious

doctrine. The ghost motif is central to Lucy’s mental state, as is the nun-ghost plot to the

narrative action, the central relationship between Lucy and Paul, and the theme of

Enlightenment. Brontë’s intention was not to imitate the melodrama and terror of Gothic (as

Shuttleworth also says). The reader is spared a shocking and fearful experience. At the end of

the novel Ginevra comes clean in a letter to Lucy relaying the actions taken by her lover,

Monsieur de Hamal, in their pursuit of the nun-ghost joke conducted in the attic, twice by the

Methusaleh pear tree, and finally discarding the idea in the park. Ginevra writes: Nearly a

year ago, I chanced to tell him our legend of the nun that suggested his romantic idea of the

spectral disguise, which I think you must allow he has very cleverly carried out (p.474). Both

she and de Hamal congratulate Lucy and Monsieur Paul as ‘capital ghost-seers and very

brave’ (p. 474). Arguably, Brontë intended to entertain her reader with the ghost plot device

and to enquire into contemporary and wide-ranging debates on ghostly phenomena. In the

early 1920s Virginia Woolf wrote that:

We read Charlotte Brontë not for exquisite observation of character—her characters

are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy—hers is grim and crude not for a

171
 philosophic view of life—hers is that of a country parson’s daughter; but for her
poetry.55

Challenging the claim that Brontë’s novels are purely domestic, I argue that the role of

folklore in Brontë’s fiction takes the reader on a journey of philosophical enquiry into

eschatology and psychology (mental philosophy). Spanning twenty years or so, Brontë is seen

to work out her position from the impressionable ‘who after this will disbelieve in ghosts?’ in

the spiritualist thinking of ‘Strange Events’ (1830), to Lucy’s Protestant disbelief of ghosts:

‘All falsities—all figments’ (p. 464) in Villette.

Michael Wheeler’s inclusion of the views of northern visionary painter (and influence

of later fairy artists) John Martin (1789-1854) and reverend Frederick Denison Maurice

(1805-1872) on eschatology furthers my association of Brontë’s ghost motif with the subject

of death. They both figure in Brontë biography and scholarship. Martin certainly influenced

the Brontës. Indeed, Brontë saw one of Martin’s original works at the Royal Academy in

1850. The parsonage hung three of Martin’s prints: The Deluge, Belshazzar’s Feast, and

Joshua Commanding the Sun to stand still and a watercolour copy of his Queen Esther.

Rejecting his artistry, she maintained an emotional attachment to his visionary and

phantasmagorical designs.56 Martin’s subject matter of the last four things in Belshazzar’s

Feast, The Last Judgement, The Great Day of his Wrath (its original title was The End of the

World) and The Plains of Heaven appealed to apocalyptic tastes and those intrigued by mid-

nineteenth century millenarianism. His Paradise Lost evoked the hell of the industrial

revolution.57

If Martin was a formative influence on Brontë, in her later years, she had listened to

Maurice preaching in London in 1851. She was shocked at his dismissal as professor of

55
Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, 1 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984), p. 158.
56
Smith and Alexander, p. 319.
57
Wheeler, pp. 83-85, p. 112, pp. 197-198, p. 203.

172
theology at King’s College saying to Mrs Gaskell (27 December 1853): ‘When men—calling

themselves Churchmen condemn teaching like Maurice’s [...] Who that seriously anticipates

an Eternity of Torment for half his race—can keep sane?’58 As a liberal theologian and

Universalist, Maurice believed in universal salvation and rejected the idea that ‘sinners were

doomed to eternal punishment in the afterlife, claiming that it was contrary to the Christian

affirmation of a loving God.’59 Brontë’s Helen Burns advocates these beliefs, a point she

makes in a letter to Margaret Wooler on 14 February 1850. Wheeler cites Maurice as one of

the key thinkers on eschatology. His discourse on the fourth gospel touches on the

fundamental question, ‘after death, can light ever penetrate into the darkness?’ In his

Theological Essays (1853) Maurice wrote, ‘I sink into death, eternal death, if I do so’ and

prophesising his own death wrote ‘I am not going to Death...I am going into Life’.60 Newman

based his study of purgatory on the authority and theology of the Catholic Church. He also

rejected the translated bible as ‘the stronghold of heresy’.61 Clearly, Brontë, interested in

matters of the invisible world and biblical authority, noted the differing positions of doctrinal

thinking on these issues in Villette. Conclusively, Brontë was one of several Victorian writers’

engaging personally and creatively with the subject of the future life and the nun-ghost motif

provided a forum to explore it.

Bown et al explain that the controversy of the supernatural continued to reign in mid-

late Victorian intellectual circles, with John Eagles, in ‘A Few Passages Regarding Omens,

Dreams, etc’ in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1840) touching a nerve with the question:

‘How little, in fact, do we know of the material world, and how much less of the spiritual, and

nothing of the connection between them?’ As late as 1854, a year after Villette was published,

58
Smith, Letters 3, pp. 214-215.
59
Ibid., p. 215.
60
Wheeler, p. 27.
61
Ibid., p. 11.

173
John Radcliffe of Fiends, Ghosts and Sprites: Including an Account of the Origin and Nature

of Belief in the Supernatural was able to state that the belief in the supernatural existed

throughout history and among all nations. By 1859, definitions were in place to distinguish

supernatural from the preternatural. Certainly, the supernatural was not simply a metaphor for

the mind but represented another realm existing above and beyond the physical.62

Echoing Brontë’s theme of Enlightenment in Villette, Patrick Brontë writes of his

optimism that ‘True Religion and Science, with the lately invented, ready communication, by

the power of them, will under providence work, hard—and, in the end effectually—against

flimsy delusion, of whatever description’.63 He took up the cause set by his daughter in

writing to Martineau (13 November 1857). In the letter he comments on ‘your unfortunate

Book on Atheism and its implication that “there is no God.”’64 Martineau replied (5

November 1857) attacking Charlotte and Patrick for misinterpreting her and Atkinson’s

Letters, categorically stating ‘that it is not an atheistical, book & that I have never said ‘there

is no God’.65 Patrick replies (11 November 1857) to her letter reassuring her that he has

indeed read the Letters praying heartily that he is mistaken. In signing off, Patrick hopes ‘that

God may restore you to health and strength, and give you long life, and eternal salvation,

through Jesus Christ [sic] his Son and our Saviour, is the sincere wish and ardent prayer’.66

Lastly, Brontë’s vehement response to her friend Harriet Martineau and George Henry

Atkinson’s (1815-1884) atheistic-leaning work, Letters on the Laws of Man’s Social Nature

and Development (1850) might resonate with her interest in the afterlife theme of the nun-

ghost plot of Villette. Her attitude provides evidence of the anti-materialist Christian (and

metaphysical) world viewpoint later expressed by Lucy Snowe. To James Taylor (1 January

62
Bown, Victorian Supernatural, pp. 3-7.
63
Green, p. 262.
64
Ibid., p. 266.
65
Ibid., p. 267.
66
Ibid., p. 268.

174
1851) Brontë writes: ‘I cannot speak in terms too high without being able to share all her

opinions philosophical, political, or religious, without adopting her theories’.67After she

returns from her visit to Martineau in Ambleside, Brontë writes to Laetitia Wheelwright (12

January 1851), saying: ‘though I share few of her opinions, and regard her as fallible on

certain points of judgement—I must still accord her my sincerest esteem’.68 Brontë had

trembled at the idea of Martineau’s publication of the Letters. Eager to criticize Atkinson

rather than threaten her friendship with Martineau, Brontë says to Mrs Gaskell (22 January

1851):

She [Martineau] described him [Atkinson] as a combination of the ‘antique’ Greek

sage with the modern European Man of Science. Perhaps it was mere perversity in me
to get the notion that torpid veins and a cold, slow-beating heart lay under his marble
outside; but he is a Materialist; he serenely denies us our hope of immortality, and
quietly blots from Man’s future, Heaven and the Life to come. That is why a savour of
bitterness seasoned my feeling towards him.69

Then to James Taylor (11 February 1851) Brontë reiterated her contempt for the book:

It is the first exposition of avowed Atheism and Materialism I have ever read; the first
unequivocal declaration of disbelief in the existence of a God or a Future Life—I have
ever seen [...] Sincerely—for my own part—do I wish to find and know the Truth—
but if this be Truth—well may she guard herself with mysteries and cover herself with
a veil. If this be Truth—Man or Woman who beholds her but can curse the day he ‘or
she’ was born.70

Contrary to Martineau’s description of her, Brontë was not tolerant or liberal, but she

attempted a conciliatory tone to preserve their friendship. However, while maintaining a

kindly attitude towards her she found it difficult to assuage the feelings of disgust aroused in

her by Martineau’s work. To James Taylor (24 March 1851) Brontë says, ‘I deeply regret its

67
Smith, Letters 2, p. 543
68
Ibid., p. 552.
69
Ibid., p. 561.
70
Ibid., p. 574.

175
[Martineau and Atkinson’s] publication for the lady’s sake—it gives a death-blow to her

future usefulness—who can trust the word or rely on the judgement of an avowed Atheist?’71

As to the Catholic controversy, there is no doubt that Lucy’s love for Monsieur Paul in

Villette lessens critical assessments of Brontë’s antipathy to Romanism. Brontë says that

Catholics appear ‘as good as any Christians can be to whom it the bible is a sealed book and

much better than scores of Protestants’.72 Lucy’s love for the professor is based on the

author’s real love for M. Constantin Heger. Smith and Alexander go on to say that Brontë had

perceived the ‘beauty of some Catholic prayers even while she disparaged them’. And, whilst

Brontë accused the Pope’s promotion of the Roman Catholic prelate, Nicholas Patrick

Stephen Wiseman (1802-1865) to cardinal in 1850, describing him as ‘an oily, sleek

hypocrite’ and ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’,73 she not only went to hear him speak but attended

several lectures by theologian, poet, priest and cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890) on

Anglican obstacles to submitting to the Catholic Church in June 1850.

It seems then that Villette reflects Brontë’s complex and at times ambivalent views on

the Catholic faith. Moreover, the nun-ghost plot provided the forum for her to negotiate the

nuances of Catholic doctrine. Far from trivial, the ghost trope in Villette is significant as a

vehicle for Brontë to interrogate serious and controversial mid-Victorian philosophical and

religious debate as well as s metaphor for characterisation.

71
Smith, Letters 2, p. 589.
72
Smith and Alexander, p. 119.
73
Ibid., p. 545.

176
 Conclusion

The main aim of this thesis is to shift critical perceptions of Brontë’s Gothic to the framework

of folklore in her realist novels. In differentiating between Gothic and folklore, I have argued

that folklore is an older, orally transmitted belief system, with roots in the cultural primitive

past and linked to pre-Christianity. Gothic is a literary mode or genre. But fundamentally,

folklore is a primary source of the supernatural element across Gothic romance and realist

fiction. Folklore is adapted to the English literary canon. In revisiting the critical canon we

can conclude that Jacqueline Simpson and Robert B. Heilman both allude to folklore material

in Jane Eyre but with different objectives in mind. Heilman’s commentary on Brontë’s

transformation of the Gothic to new psychological heights gained ground. Simpson’s analysis

of folklore to convey the themes of love and ideas of difference or otherness and her analysis

of Emily’s study of ghosts in Wuthering Heights did not springboard into mainstream

criticism in the same way. Somehow it got overlooked in the critical canon. Now as then,

Gothic criticism predominates in Brontë scholarship. It is still unclear as to why the study of

Brontë’s folklore remains on the periphery. Given folklore’s previous critical reception as

something antique or ‘immoral, irrational, or unrespectable’1 as Harris says, perhaps literary

critics consider it as low rather than high culture. If this is the case, this thesis aims to

resurrect the reputation of folklore material.

I have argued for a new critical approach to the study of Brontë’s uses of the

supernatural, offered an account of Brontë’s sources of local and literary folklore, examined

the narrative and ideological functions of folklore in her novels and considered her letters in

the light of her fiction. In Brontë’s folklore, allusions to fairies in Jane Eyre symbolise ideas

of otherness, gender and sexuality. Brontë’s treatment of the fairy motif can be seen as

1
Harris, Folklore, p. 33.

177
undermining structures of cultural authority. The role of folklore as a sentiment of Merrie

England in Shirley suggests a love of romance and tradition. In Villette, Lucy’s engagement

with ghosts is both metaphorical and doctrinal with Brontë’s ultimate goal as the reassertion

of social progress. We can conclude then that Brontë’s use of folklore in the realist novel

echoes J.M Harris’ idea of the ‘divided mind’ in his interpretation of the literature of the

fantastic:

Science did not rout any more than industrialism altogether destroyed fantasy; in
literature, as well as occultism, science and reason interacted with popular belief [...]
Just as literary fairy tales melded traditional motifs and beliefs with ironic
sophistication that depended on a sense of reality, so too ghost stories evoked the
literary fantastic by posing folk beliefs against the conventions of rationality [...]
Dickens believed that the form of the fairy tale offered balance to a nation that in an
‘utilitarian age’, risked losing its imagination.2

Brontë was influenced especially by Scott’s use of folklore. Her and Scott’s writing embodies

the tension between scepticism and tradition. Brontë’s local environment provided a second

key source of folklore. I suggest that her inclusive treatment of folklore is distinguished from

Scott’s all-too-often critical class-based perspective.

This study has considered Brontë’s fiction in relation to her cultural world. This has

required a critical engagement with inter-disciplinary approaches in cultural history,

anthropology, psychology, and especially folklore studies. Frank de Caro claims that the

study of folklore and literature ‘has come to seem a bit of a scholarly backwater, an area of

study venerable, but lacking in the way of intellectual pizzazz’.3 Analysing Brontë’s literary

uses of folklore might go some way to redressing this inferred scholarly stagnation. This

project has attempted a critical enquiry on the interrelationship between folklore and Brontë’s

fiction. It therefore adds to cultural critical approaches within the Brontë literary canon.

2
Harris, Folklore, p. 33.
3
de Caro, p. 7.

178
Areas for further enquiry

Previously, in Jane Eyre I examined the idea of liminality in relation to the theme of

sexuality and difference. However, I propose liminality could be further investigated within

the context of rites of passage of death in Jane Eyre. In the dying scene of Helen Burns’

separation from life to death, Jane says:

‘You are sure, then, Helen, that there is such a place as heaven; and that our souls can
get to it when we die?’
‘I am sure there is a future state; I believe God is good: I can resign my immortal part
to him without any misgiving.’ [...]
‘And shall I see you again, Helen, when I die?’
‘You will come to the same region of happiness: be received by the same mighty,
universal Parent, no doubt, dear Jane.’ (p. 82).

In his study of eschatology, Michael Wheeler applies Victor Turner’s anthropological model

of liminality to death. Wheeler describes how the deceased moves from the fixed state of life

to the dying or liminal phase and on to the other fixed state of death. The deathbed is the site

of transition from a this-world perspective to the grave. He also applies the model to ‘the

“intermediate state” between the moment of death and the last judgement’.4 But Wheeler does

not apply this model to Jane Eyre. I suggest that we can apply Turner’s ideas about liminality

in relation to death and bereavement to Jane Eyre as well as to the subject of sexuality in the

novel.

In addition, we might describe Brontë’s allusion to nature as ‘Mother’ as animism. In

his discussion on judgement, Wheeler refers to Jane’s dream of a visionary figure after

Rochester has described his married life with Bertha Mason as the ‘bottomless pit of hell’.5 At

a moment of crisis Jane cries:

She broke forth as never moon yet burst from cloud: a hand first penetrated the
sablefolds and waved them away; then, not a moon, but a white human form shone in

4
Wheeler, p. 70.
5
Ibid., p. 114.

179
 the azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward. It gazed and gazed on me. It spoke to
my spirit: immeasurably distant was the tone, yet so near, it whispered in my heart—
‘My daughter, flee temptation!’
‘Mother, I will.’
So I answered after I had waked from the trance-like dream.6

Far from a Christian context, to Wheeler, ‘this moon resolves itself into a figure who

represents the “feminine principle” in the novel and who is akin to the “Great Mother”, the

lunar goddess of pagan religions’.7 We can interpret Jane’s communication with Mother

Nature as another element of traditional culture or animism. In her examination of fairies,

Duffy refers to an Anglo-Saxon belief in a mother earth goddess:

Hail to thee earth, mother of men

Be fruitful in (the) god’s embrace
Filled with fruit for the use of men8

Duffy describes the above as a ritual for restoring fertility to fields believed to be bewitched,

which combines Christian and pagan elements. Patrick Joyce describes an industrialising age

in which there prevailed ‘clear signs of popular beliefs expressing a kind of Animism, notions

that the natural world was full of spiritual forces with which “religion” had to deal’.9

Anthropologist Edward Burnet Tylor (1832-1917) applied the theory of Animism (as well as

the doctrine of survivals) to his study of fairies. Fairies, he argued, derived from animistic

perceptions of nature, and ‘primeval humans personified nature and perceived it as living’.10

Perhaps we might re-think early biographer Winifred Gerin’s description of Tabitha Aykroyd

as an ‘unconscious poet, filling the hills and woods and streams with an anthropomorphic

life’11 within the context of animism.

6
Wheeler, p. 114.
7
Ibid., p. 114.
8
Duffy, p. 25.
9
Joyce, p. 162.
10
Silver, pp. 44-45.
11
Winifred Gerin, Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 38.

180
 Interpreting liminality and animism in Jane Eyre further reinforces its folkloric

identity.

Secondly, having re-contextualised Brontë’s fiction as folkloric, I propose that there

are similarities between her texts and Hardy’s character and environment novels. I have

suggested that Brontë demonstrates folklore both as a cultural anachronism and a measure of

scientific development. Hardy’s novels also employ folklore to typify the pattern of tradition

and progress. Keith Wilson argues that in the plots of The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life

and Death of a Man of Character (1886) and The Return of the Native (1878), Hardy’s goal is

to ‘fulfil superstitions while implying their absurdity and providing alternative rational

explanations’.12 He notes the tension between the characters of Henchard embodying

tradition, superstition and community and Farfrae ‘figuring modernity, science, reason, mind,

the written word, calculation, and society’.13 In his study of cultural history, Bob Bushaway

points to Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) as conveying the pattern of continuity

and change in the rural social and cultural structure:

The recent supplanting of the class of stationary cottagers, who carried on the local
traditions and humours by a population of more or less migratory labourers, has led to
a break in continuity in local history, more fatal than any other thing to the
preservation of legend, folk-lore, close inter-social relations and eccentric
individuals.14

Yet Bushaway argues that Hardy’s view of folklore is characteristic. Hardy, he says, sees it is

as eccentric and melodramatic rather than as part of a general culture.15 Bushaway points to

the sentiment of nostalgia again in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), with Hardy feeling that

the rate of change is felt also inter-generationally between Tess and her mother:

12
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 352.
13
Ibid., p. xxv.
14
Bushaway, Popular Culture, p. 192.
15
Ibid., p. 192.

181
 Between the mother with her fast-perishing lumber of superstitions, folk-lore, dialect,
and orally-transmitted ballads, and the daughter with her trained National teaching [...]
When they were together the Jacobean and the Victorian ages were juxtaposed.16

More recently, Jacqueline Dillon points to Hardy’s ‘instincts of Merry England lived yet’17 at

Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native (1878). There does seem to be narrative and

ideological commonality in the treatment of folklore in the realist novels of Hardy and

Brontë’s northern novels, particularly Shirley. Despite attitudinal differences, their similarities

go some way to re-contextualising Brontë’s writing as folklore in the realist novel. This

comparison is beyond the scope of this project but it is a plausible sequel.

Lastly, another area of enquiry relates to Brontë’s literary sources of folklore. Whilst

Scott is a major source, there is much potential to examine more fully other literary sources

that Brontë alludes to frequently in her fiction such as Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s

Dream and The Arabian Nights Entertainments.

16
Bushaway, By Rite, p. 1.
17
Jacqueline Dillon, Thomas Hardy: Folklore and Resistance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

182
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