Sustenance and Balm: The Question of Female Friendship in Shirley and Villette

Author(s): Linda C. Hunt

Source: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature , Spring, 1982, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1982),
pp. 55-66
Published by: University of Tulsa

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/464092

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 Sustenance and Balm: The Question of Female
Friendship in Shirley and Villette
Linda C. Hunt

It stands to reason that women who do not expect to marry, especially

if other kinds of intimate relationships with men are closed to them, will
look towards strong attachments to other women as a source of emo?
tional sustenance. Charlotte Bronte s last two novels take up this subject
which, by the middle of the nineteenth century in England, must have
had considerable importance because of the presence of numerous
surplus women, spinsters who were likely to remain unwed, and who
often had to work to support themselves.1 Bronte explores, in Shirley as a
central theme, in Villette more peripherally, the potentialities and param?
eters of friendship between women.
In Shirley Charlotte Bronte vividly evokes the satisfactions a woman
can find in a close relationship with a member of her own sex, exploring
the idea that a deep bond between two women might be the solution to
the problem of how to survive emotionally as an unmarried woman in
Victorian society. She even probes the possibility that female friendship
could be a preferable alternative to romantic attachments to men. In
sharp contrast, Lucy Snowe, the protagonist of Villette, is not on in?
timate terms with any other woman.
Yet, as anatomies of female friendship, these two novels are not really
far apart. For the two heroines of Shirley, economic realities ultimately
dictate that the comforts of the intense bond they share are valuable as a
prelude to marriage rather than as a substitute for it. For Lucy Snowe,
close ties with other women are not possible for a variety of reasons, one
of the most important being that as a woman who must eke out a living
she has little in common with those whose lives take a more conventional
direction. Even more significant, Mme. Beck, the proprietor of the school
where Lucy is employed, cannot offer friendship. Contending in the male
economic arena, Mme. Beck has worked out a private way of defining
herself as a woman; the mode she has chosen precludes ties of trust and
affection. Lucy, who likewise violates social definitions of femininity by
supporting herself, must also grapple with the problem of female identity

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in her own individual manner, and it is clear that the mode she works
out, while different from that of Mme. Beck, will similarly set her apart
from others of her sex. In both Shirley and Villette Charlotte Bronte
shows that female friendship is inevitably defined and limited by woman's
economic position.
One of the two heroines of Shirley, Caroline Helstone, articulates what
her friend Shirley has come to mean to her:

"It flashes on me at this moment how sisters feel toward each other. Affection twined
with their life, which little quarrels can only trample an instant... affection that no
passion can ultimately outrival, with which even love itself cannot do more than
compete in force and truth. Love hurts us so, Shirley: it is so tormenting, so rack?
ing. .. in affection there is no pain and no fire?only sustenance and balm. I am sup?
ported and soothed when you-that is, you only are near, Shirley."2

The relationship between Shirley and Caroline is rendered unsentimen-

tally and yet with such power that the reader is encouraged to wonder if
men are not after all a disruptive intrusion in women's lives. Shirley
Keeldar expresses such a view when Caroline begins to withdraw from
their relationship because Robert is paying attention to her friend:

"I feel indignant; and that is the long and short of the matter," responded Miss
Keeldar. "All my comfort... is broken up by his maneuvers. He keeps intruding be?
tween you and me; without him we should be good friends. ..." (I, 288)

Again and again Bronte shows the attractions of friendship between in?
telligent women who live in accord with those "feminine" values of which
she approves. Shirley and Caroline offer each other durable affection,
emotional support, mutual appreciation of nature and books, and the
"sympathy" which almost all the men in the book?Reverend Helstone,
Mr. Yorke, even Robert Moore?either lack entirely or are deficient in.
When Caroline is depressed, she realizes she needs activity and tells her
uncle she wants to be a governess. He completely fails to grasp the
seriousness of her condition and, laughing at the whimsies of women,
assures her he will provide for her financially after his death and gives her
two guineas to buy a new dress. Caroline almost tells him that she wishes
he were more "sympathizing" but checks herself because her uncle would
"have laughed if that namby-pamby word had escaped her" (I, 212). Thus
Bronte calls attention to the connotations of "sympathy," a word which
by usage had become feminine, and which meant the willingness to im?
agine another person's perspective on life. Caroline and Shirley, so dif?
ferent from each other and in such different material situations, are per?
fectly capable of grasping each other's points of view and make a serious

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attempt (although they find it hard) to enter into the reality of the men in
their lives; they even try, far more than do the men, to enter into the
perspective of the discontented proletariat.
Bronte is not suggesting commitment to the world of "patterned young
ladies" whose lives consist of making things for the "Jew-basket," engaging
in ritualized social visits, and attempting to snare husbands. In fact, the
Misses Sykes, the Misses Nunnelly, and the Sympson sisters are satirized
so grotesquely that they appear as mechanical puppets in passages that
are very surrealistic. Bronte's satire is directed at the notion of a universal
female personality and so the proper young ladies in the novel come in
sets, act in unison, and think exactly alike. But women like Shirley,
Caroline, the York sisters, and Mrs. Pryor have sharply individualized
personalities and much to offer each other.
In all of Charlotte Bronte's work (and in Wuthering Heights as well) love
is viewed as the coming together of two halves of a previously severed
whole, in accord with Plato's story in the Symposium of the beginnings of
sexuality.3 Thus when the two heroines of Shirley recognize that the male
and female "spheres" are so far apart that they have little actual knowl?
edge of what men are like, it is a serious matter indeed. If it should turn
out that men are necessarily alien beings, they cannot be the missing
halves the two heroines seek. Caroline says:

"I often wonder, Shirley, whether most men resemble my uncle in their domestic
relations; whether it is necessary to be new and unfamiliar to them in order to seem
agreeable...." (I, 235)

They muse on the subject of what men are like, noting that at least before
marriage a woman tends to think the man she loves is an exception: "Of
sterling materials; we fancy it like ourselves; we imagine a sense of har?
mony" (I, 236).
Throughout the novel marriage is presented in a negative light.
Reverend Helstone rapidly lost interest in his wife and, even though years
have passed since her death, continually rants against matrimony; Mr.
and Mrs. York have a workable arrangement, but it is clear that they are
not soul-mates, and Mrs. York speaks bitterly about marriage; Caroline's
parents were wretchedly unhappy, and her mother, Mrs. Pryor, compares
marriage with a marsh: "a green tempting surface," with a "slough
underneath."
In contrast, as I have indicated, women are shown to be capable of
satisfying relationships with one another. We are told of Caroline and
Shirley: "The minds of the two girls being toned in harmony, often
chimed very sweetly together" (I, 245). Early in their acquaintanceship,

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they plan an excursion to the ancient forest of Nunnwood, a trip which
significantly never takes place but is rich in symbolic meaning. Caroline
says, "To penetrate into Nunnwood, Miss Keeldar, is to go far back into
the dim days of eld." She describes the dell in the center of the forest:

[A] deep, hollow cup, lined with turf as green and short as the sod of this common;
the very oldest of the trees, gnarled mighty oaks, crowd about the brink of this dell:
in the bottom lie the ruins of a nunnery" (I, 232).

The vaginal imagery of this passage is indeed striking, although it is

unlikely that Bronte was conscious of it. Certainly, however, she was
consciously using "Nunnwood" and the nunnery at its heart to symbolize
a mythic, matriarchal world, a very different use of the nun-image than
we find in Villette.
Bronte is raising the possibility that a woman's search for a counterpart
may be fruitfully conducted among members of her own sex, a notion
that is in fact in harmony with the Platonic myth of sexuality mentioned
before.4 Shirley and Caroline agree that if gentlemen, even of "the right
sort," were to go on the excursion to Nunnwood, the women would be
alienated from the worship of Nature, which in Shirley is the Great
Mother of matriarchal myth. At this point in the novel Bronte is cer?
tainly suggesting that Shirley and Caroline take each other seriously as
possible counterparts.
The Great Mother, the feminine principle, is also represented by the
moon, its traditional symbol.5 When Shirley angrily denounces Robert
for coming between Caroline and herself, she describes that intrusion as
"a perpetually recurring eclipse of our friendship. Again and again he
crosses and obscures the disk I want always to see clear" (I, 288). The
woman friend is the eclipsed moon. Again, in the scene where Mrs. Pryor
tells Caroline she is the mother who gave her up as a baby (a reunion
which puts Caroline on the road to recovery from her decline), there are
numerous references to the moon "lately risen" and "shining clear." When
Robert tells Mr. York of his cynical proposal to Shirley, an offer of mar?
riage motivated by love of her money not of her, the moon rises "with a
strange red glower" and looks at the men with "a scowl and a menace,"
evidently angry at this insult to womanhood.
Bronte suggests the possibility that her heroines can find fulfillment
through what Louis Moore refers to as "virgin freedom." Certainly
Shirley Keeldar, fearlessly riding her horse across the moors and through
the woods, embracing Caroline in sisterhood, brings to mind Diana the
Huntress who rode at the head of a band of free women, according to the
myth.

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 But in Shirley even the huntress is tamed. Louis, who subdues her,
recognizes what a violation of her nature has occurred: "She gnaws at her
chain; I see the white teeth working at the steel! She has dreams of the
wild woods, and pinings after virgin freedom" (I, 343). Shirley resists mar?
riage as long as possible, but the novel ends, of course, with the double
wedding of the heroines. Through using myth and symbol Bronte has
both de-sentimentalized female friendship and rendered it with tremen?
dous psychic power, but the excursion to Nunnwood cannot take place
because, as an answer to how to be a woman in the middle of the nine?
teenth century, such a vision offers no solutions that are useful in the real
world of "Monday morning" which Bronte is determined to inhabit in?
stead of the fantasy climes of her girlhood. Shirley and Caroline cannot
really be votaries in the sisterhood of Diana; in the actual world all they
can be is sisters-in-law. Bronte is acutely aware that the kind of friendship
Shirley and Caroline share depends for its existence on a masculine real?
ity grounded in economic fact. Caroline, at least, is not independent eco?
nomically. The leisured hours she spends with Shirley are made possible
by her uncle's guardianship. Bronte's continuing interest lies with the
woman who is searching for a way to earn her own living without sacrific?
ing emotional fulfillment and she recognizes that for the "redundant"
women of Victorian society, the masculine world cannot simply be
ignored. Significantly, it is in Shirley, the only novel where the focus is
not on a heroine who must earn her livelihood, that the psychic satisfac?
tions of relationships between women are most thoroughly explored.
Ironically, Shirley has the most conventional ending of all the novels.
Frances Henri becomes a career woman and wife, Jane Eyre achieves
(albeit through symbolic castration) a uniquely egalitarian marriage, and
Lucy Snowe, it is hinted, ends up the spinster headmistress of her own
school, but Caroline and Shirley accept social roles which would have
pleased Mrs. Ellis, the author of conservative advice manuals for women.
They submit to the authority of Robert and Louis Moore, content to run
a Sunday school and day-school for the children associated with the
estate and the mill and to have a humanizing influence on their
husbands.
There is another reason why Charlotte Bronte ultimately rejects female
friendship as a means to emotional fulfillment. Not surprisingly, given
the value women's fiction of the period placed on tranquility,6 Bronte
equates affection between women with repose. Shirley and Caroline ap?
preciate the sympathetic harmony of their friendship and hope that men
can offer them similarly soothing comforts, but ultimately they also want
more vigorous emotional satisfactions. Bronte's conception of the
psychically rich life is a dynamic one. She wants the continual clash of

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opposing impulses: imagination and reason, passion and self-control, ex?
citement and repose. Both sides of the dialectic are essential, and Bronte
sees male and female as essential contradictions.
When Shirley and Caroline discuss the picnic to Nunnwood, they envi?
sion an all-female excursion as "a day in old times surrounded by olden
silence, and above all by quietude." But a day in the woods with men
would offer "more elation and more anxiety; an excitement that steals the
hours away fast, and a trouble that ruffles their course" (I, 233). At this
state the heroines are afraid of the pain that can accompany the fire of
love, but Bronte cannot envision women offering one another "elation"
and it is not a feeling she is willing to allow her heroines to forego.
There is a self-consciously fictive quality to the ending of Shirley which
indicates the author's awareness that she has not resolved the major ques?
tion raised in her novel: what kind of life is possible for the woman who
does not marry? Throughout this last chapter Bronte plays with the
reader, acknowledging that she has been creating a fiction and teasing
that readers do not want the truth: "Are you not aware. . .that the un?
varnished truth does not answer; that plain facts will not digest?"
(II, 346). She disposes of minor characters, commenting, "There! I think
the varnish has been put on nicely" (II, 347). And so Caroline gets
Robert, and Shirley submits to Louis. We are distanced from this un?
satisfactory conclusion by the fact that at the very end we are suddenly
projected into the present, looking back to a far distant past. We even ex?
perience a shift in narrators so that our only glimpse of the four main
characters as married couples is through the eyes of a housekeeper we
have never heard of before, and to whom the Moores are "fine folk." The
last paragraph begins, "The story is told"; Bronte has not provided a
useful guidebook to women of her day and she knows it, and so she ad?
mits that, after all, she has simply told a story.7 In Villette she tries again.
Lucy's relationships with other women are very different from the
strong satisfying bonds we have seen in Shirley, and they are not given an
extra dimension of meaning by matriarchal symbolism. Ginevra Fan-
shawe and most of the foreign students and teachers may give us the
superficial impression that we are back in the world of The Professor where
all the women except the heroine are stupid, coquettish, vulgar or
mercenary. But in The Professor the negatively portrayed women function
very conventionally as foils for the superior heroine, as do the repulsive
Reed sisters and Blanche Ingram in Jane Eyre. The unattractive woman
characters also suggest, of course, the side of women's culture which
Bronte satirizes in Shirley: women so dedicated to social role that they
have become empty vessels who embody all the materialism, triviality
and ego-centrism Bronte deplores. In Villette, however, Lucy looks

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around at the women in her life and finds them inadequate sources of
emotional support even when she likes or admires them. One feels that
having explored the potentialities of love between women in Shirley and
having acknowledged the emotional power of this aspect of women's
culture, she is free to move beyond it in her next novel in order to show
that a redundant woman such as Lucy Snowe must work out a new iden?
tity which may place her in a position apart from other women.
Lucy is fond of several women but they cannot be to her what Shirley
and Caroline and Mrs. Pryor are to each other. Miss Marchmont is ad?
mirable in many ways and offers her affection, the commodity the world
of women can provide so generously, but her house becomes a microcosm
of the potential constrictions of feminine life: "two hot close rooms." The
old lady is crippled, a symbolically meaningful detail, because through no
fault of her own she is not a whole person. Society's expectations have
confined her to a life spent in empty dreams of a dead love. Miss March?
mont remembers the year of her romance as the only period in which she
was fully alive: "While I loved, and while I was loved, what an existence I
enjoyed!" (I, 45). During the thirty years which have followed, she has
merely marked time, awaiting her reunion with Frank, surely an object-
lesson in the dangers of the excessive romanticism women could drown
in when cut off from occupations and interests. To look to such a woman
for emotional sustenance is to join her, literally and figuratively, in her
sick-chamber. Miss Marchmont is presented as a temptress from whom
Lucy is lucky to escape, for amiable as she is, she has death-in-life to offer.
Ginevra Fanshawe is another important woman in Lucy's life, and
while it would be untrue to say Lucy likes her, there can be no denying
that she is drawn to her. She describes their relationship with some
bemusement:

I don't know why I chose to give my bread rather to Ginevra than to another; nor
why, if two had to share the convenience of one drinking-vessel, as sometimes hap?
pened?for instance, when we took a long walk into the country, and halted for
refreshment at a farm?I always contrived that she should be my convive, and rather
liked to let her take the lion's share, whether of the white beer, the sweet wine, or
the new milk: so it was, however, and she knew it; and, therefore, while we wrangled
daily, we were never alienated (I, 296).

Selfish, coquettish, unscrupulous, and competitive, Ginevra's character is

repulsive to Lucy, but she is nonetheless fascinated by powers she herself
does not possess. Ginevra is able to use her sexual charms to manipulate
men for her own purposes. While men are usually blind to Lucy's very ex?
istence, Ginevra can blind men to who and what she really is, making
them believe she is the embodiment of their dreams. The simultaneous

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rage and admiration which Ginevra elicits in Lucy surfaces in the play?
acting scene in which Lucy, playing a fop (the male equivalent of the co?
quette), fiercely courts Ginevra. The play provides her with a safe oppor?
tunity to express the latent attraction she feels for Ginevra's ruthlessness
by vying with her on her own terms; Lucy is acting out submerged fan?
tasies of power. The contempt she feels for the "sincere" lover in the play
reveals depths of anger at her own powerlessness and enforced sincerity.
If Lucy is acting out unconscious lesbian feelings towards Ginevra, it is
noteworthy that, unlike the latent sexuality between Shirley and
Caroline, Lucy's feelings are not part of a relationship of mutual love and
respect.
Lucy is drawn to Ginevra by unconscious feelings of admiration for
behavior which violates her deepest moral values, hardly the basis of a
satisfying bond. Their relationship is clearly charged with emotion, but
even if Lucy were willing to overcome her moral objections to Ginevra,
Ginevra herself is incapable of friendship because of her narcissism. Yet
Bronte is not willing to condemn her totally as she had condemned
Zoraide in The Professor; in Villette she shows that she has come to
understand the survival value of such ruthlessness for a woman attempt?
ing to triumph in a ruthless world. But Ginevra cannot be a friend to
Lucy nor can she be a model because Lucy completely lacks the physical
beauty essential if a woman is to find her place in life through exerting
power over men. Moreover, in the course of the novel the independence
of spirit which appears to be a natural part of Lucy's character even when
she is a girl grows into a consciously held value, albeit tempered now by
her recognition that a healthy human being requires emotional contact
with others; thus Lucy's concluding remarks on Ginevra, while tinged
with a certain wry appreciation for the girl's survivability, are laden with
such disrespect that it is clear Lucy would not pattern herself on Ginevra
if she could:

She had no notion of meeting any distress single-handed. In some shape, from some
quarter or other, she was pretty sure to obtain her will, and so she got on?fighting
the battle of life by proxy, and on the whole, suffering as little as any human being I
have ever known (II, 291).

Pauline and Mrs. Bretton, their own dependency notwithstanding, are

more likely candidates for friendship because they are thoroughly nice
women. However, since they exist as auxiliaries to the men in their lives,
Lucy, who has no man, cannot identify with them. Even as a child Polly-
Paulina centered her existence upon either her father or Graham, pour?
ing tea for her father, bringing Graham his toast, deriving her identity

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from their approbation. As a woman she has dignity, intelligence, and
strength of character, and Lucy both likes and respects her, but they can?
not really be friends because, as Paulina says of herself: "God has caused
me to grow in sun, due moisture and safe protection, sheltered, fostered,
taught by my dear father; and now?now?another comes. Graham loves
me" (II, 158). Lucy's experiences have simply been too different.
Similarly, Lucy realizes that Mrs. Bretton, her godmother, cannot
really understand her life:

[T]he details of what I had undergone belonged to a portion of my existence in

which I never expected my godmother to take a share. Into what new region would
such a confidence have led that hale, serene nature! (I, 227)

She compares Mrs. Bretton to "a stately ship cruising safe on smooth
seas," and herself to a lifeboat which only puts to sea in stormy weather:
"No, the Louisa Bretton never was out of harbour on such a night ... so
the half-drowned life-boatman keeps his own counsel, and spins no
yarns" (I, 227). Thus Bronte acknowledges the enormous gulf which
separates women like Lucy from women whose lives have been lived in
the protective shelter of men. The community of women had been rup?
tured by the presence of surplus women whose lives were not part of the
cycle of marriage and reproduction, a pattern which paradoxically
formed the basis of the world of love between women. Differences in
material situation do not cut Shirley and Caroline off from each other,
but both of them are single and idle.
The natural ally for a woman like Lucy would seem to be Mme. Beck,
who lives independently and supports herself. It is clear that Lucy would
like her to be a role-model; significantly she perceives her face to be
"motherly" at their first encounter. However, Lucy's employer Mme. Beck
is admirable but not warm. "Her mouth was hard; it could be a little grim;
her lips were thin" (I, 86). Madame is benevolent and rules mildly, but
sentiment never gets in the way of efficiency. Lucy is chilled but also
impressed:

Mme. was a very great and a very capable woman. The school offered for her powers
too limited a sphere; she ought to have swayed a nation.. . . Wise, firm, faithless;
secret, crafty, passionless; watchful and inscrutable; acute and insensate ?withal per?
fectly decorous-what more could be desired? (I, 89)

What more indeed? At their first interview Madame looks at Lucy with
"never a gleam of sympathy or a stroke of compassion" (I, 78). The
qualities which society has assigned to women, many of which Bronte
values, are conspicuously lacking.

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 Lucy has much to learn from Mme. Beck, precisely because of her lack
of conventional femininity. When the headmistress offers to raise Lucy
from nursery governess to English teacher, Lucy declines, afraid she
won't be able to handle the job. One look at Mme. Beck's face changes
her mind:

At that instant she did not wear a woman's aspect but a man's. Power of a particular
kind strongly limned in all her traits, and that power was not my kind of power:
neither sympathy, nor congeniality, nor submission, were the emotions it
awakened. ... I suddenly felt all the dishonor of my diffidence?all the pusillanimity
of my slackness to aspire (I, 94).

Lucy clearly identifies herself with supposedly feminine virtues, and feels
the ability to wield power over others to be masculine, alien to her very
being. Yet as the English instructor she finds she can exert power over
unruly students and enjoys learning a new kind of strength from the ex?
perience. Villette may be the first English novel which deals with the
heroine's work as an integral part of her life. It is Mme. Beck, then, who
makes it possible for Lucy to broaden her notion of self: to recognize for
the first time that strength needn't be only the traditionally feminine self-
control but can be self-assertion, competence, ambition. But as Lucy's
sense of self expands, she must deal with the question of womanliness. Is
she becoming a man?
The difficult question of identity with which Lucy grapples is embodied
symbolically in the vaudeville scene in which she is asked to play a male
role. She is willing to play the part but at first she flatly refuses to be
dressed like a man. Compelled by life to play a role considered masculine
by society, she earns her own living and enjoys it, even aspiring to rise in
the world of work. But how far can a woman go without compromising
her womanliness? We have already seen that she has perceived Mme.
Beck, because of her love of power, as a man in woman's clothing. She
reconsiders the matter of how much men's attire she will wear and then
takes her stand: "'You do not like these clothes?' he asked pointing to the
masculine vestments. 'I don't object to some of them, but I won't have
them all'" (I, 173). Lucy goes on stage wearing a woman's dress but with a
man's vest, collar and cravat. She will expand her conception of feminin?
ity but she will not give up what she considers essential to her
womanhood. She will aspire to become mistress of her own school, like
Mme. Beck, but unlike her she will not regard such an achievement as en?
tirely fulfilling. She asks:

[I]s there nothing more for me in life ?no true home?nothing to be dearer to me
than myself, and by its paramount preciousness, to draw from me better things than

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 I care to culture for myself only? Nothing, at whose feet I can willingly lay down the
whole burden of human egotism, and gloriously take up the nobler charge of labour?
ing and living for others? (II, 140)

Thus Lucy articulates values which lie at the heart of the nineteenth cen?
tury definition of womanhood, values to which she remains committed
despite the fact that she lacks anyone for whom to live and in spite of the
fact that she has come to value the autonomy which has been thrust
upon her by her isolation. The inherently hierarchical nature of hetero?
sexual love in the Victorian period means that the two facets of Lucy's
development ?her progress towards competent self-sufficiency and her
growing awareness of her need for emotional and sexual fulfill?
ment?clash head on, producing the novel's ambivalent and clumsy
ending.
Lucy is indeed in a difficult position. By the end of Villette she is
psychologically free to love and be loved by M. Paul, having relaxed the
fanatic discipline in which she has previously "held the quick of [her]
nature," but Bronte knows that marriage would have to diminish the part
of Lucy that has come to cherish independent adulthood. But emotional
satisfaction cannot come from women either: the women Lucy knows
will always be partial strangers. Yet Mme. Beck does become something
of a role-model, and regardless of the sinister part she plays in trying to
prevent Lucy's romance with Paul Emmanuel from prospering, there is
mutual respect and understanding between them. Bronte seems to be sug?
gesting that as women enter public life, feminine identity will be a difficult
problem which each woman will handle in her own individual way. Some
will wear only a man's hat, others will don only the vest, collar and cravat
which Lucy accepts, and still others like Mme. Beck, will not hesitate,
metaphorically, to garb themselves entirely in masculine attire. No longer
watching life from the sidelines (as Caroline and Shirley watch the attack
on Robert's mill), women will no longer form a coherent subculture, and
love between them will be more difficult. Lucy, at the end of the novel, is
economically successful but alone (the possibility that M. Paul will return
is offered only as a sop to those of "sunny imaginations").
Charlotte Bronte's picture of what the future holds for sisterhood is
prophetic. Middle-class women who entered public life as professionals in
the last years of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth
often condescended to women who adhered to traditional roles, or at
least felt alienated from them, and tended to view other women profes?
sionals as competitors, looking to men for intellectual and emotional
satisfaction.8 George Eliot was to write to Sarah Hennell in 1852: "I wish I
could throw myself heartily into the love of other women besides you and

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Cara, but somehow the male friends always eclipse the female."9 With its
echo from Shirley, her choice of a verb is certainly ironic!
Bronte, of course, was more old-fashioned. Rooted in the traditional
world of women herself through her close ties with her sisters and her
women friends, and by her domestic responsibilities, in Villette she never?
theless confronts with honesty her perception that deep affection be?
tween women, in spite of its psychic comforts, cannot meet the needs of
women who are not willing or able to lead traditional lives.

NOTES

1 Dinah Muloch Craik's chapter on "Female Friendship" in her handbook for spinsters
Woman s Thoughts About Women (1858), provides a glimpse of the idealistic fervor wh
female friendship sometimes evoked in this period. At the same time the chapter sugg
some of the ambivalence women evidently felt towards emotional intimacy wit
another. See Dinah Muloch Craik, A Woman's Thoughts About Women (New York: Fo
Foster and Co., 1864).
2Charlotte Bronte, Shirley, Vol. I of Shakespeare Head Bronte, ed. T.J. Wise and J.A.
ington (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1931-38), p. 289. All further quotations fr
Shirley (I) and Villette (II) will be taken from this edition and cited within the text.
3According to Aristophanes, the character in the Symposium who tells the story, hu
beings were originally complete in themselves but were cut in half by Zeus in a fit of a
sexuality is the search for the missing half.
4According to the story there were originally three wholes: all male, all female, and
drogynous" (male and female); thus each person seeking his or her other, original half m
be in search with equal likelihood for someone of the same or the other sex.
5Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (New York: Panth
Books, 1955), pp. 55-59. Adrienne Rich points out Bronte's use of the moon to symb
the matriarchal spirit in her essay on Jane Eyre. See Adrienne Rich, "Jane Eyre: The T
tations of a Motherless Woman," On Lies, Secrets and Silence (New York: W.W. No
1979), p. 102.
6Women's fiction of the 1840's and 1850's assumes the goal of life is "tranquility,"
"serenity," "repose," "peace"?the synonyms spring off the pages. See Mrs. Stirling, Fanny
Hervey; or The Mother's Choice (London: Chapman and Hall, 1849); Mrs. Burbury, Florence
Sackville; or Self-Dependence; Mrs. Gaskell's Mary Barton, and many others.
7For an excellent discussion of Shirley's unsatisfactory conclusion, see Sandra M. Gilbert
and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven &l London: Yale University
Press, 1979), pp. 395-98.
8The women's rights movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth century afforded
middle-class women who had entered professional life the opportunity to feel close with one
another.
9The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955),
II, 38.

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