Rachel Trethewey
The Brontë sisters
portrayed in a recently identified watercolour PA
Exploring famous lives through objects is the
latest fashion in biography. “Material culture” or “thing theory” has become
the new formula used to enliven well-worn biographical snippets. At its worst this genre is less satisfying
than a full biography and brings little new to existing scholarship. However, at its best, as in Deborah Lutz’s
The Bronte Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects it can provide a fresh and
enlightening insight.
In Lutz’s version of Howarth Revisited we
become engulfed in the gloomy gothic atmosphere and get a real feel of what it
was like to live in the world of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte. The banality
of domestic chores ran parallel to their extraordinary imaginative lives. The image of Emily putting down her iron to
jot down an extract of Wuthering Heights on a scrap of paper, or of Charlotte
dripping ink from her pen onto her portable writing desk in her fervour to
write Jane Eyre are unforgettable pictures. This book is an exceptionally
intimate study of the three sisters, through it we look into the most private
corners of the parsonage. In Charlotte’s
sewing box snipped off finger ends of kid gloves jostle with a piece of
whalebone stay and a pair of black silk cuffs. In Anne’s box pebbles collected
on the beaches at Scarborough when she was a governess still remain.
After setting the objects in the Brontes’
biographical context Lutz then explores how similar items appeared in their
novels. Her knowledge of their writing
is comprehensive and like the Brontes’ carefully crafted needlework (which is
examined in detail), she seamlessly stitches extracts from their fiction and
poetry into the text. Each item is then
set in the wider context of Victorian culture.
Through the blackthorn walking stick used by Emily when she needed to
free her body and mind by walking on the moors, Lutz explores how the Brontes
drew on the Romantic poets Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s ideas of walking in
remote landscapes as part of the aesthetic education of writers. Haworth locals
became used to the eccentric Bronte girls striding out in their unfeminine
heavy boots. However, as Jane Eyre’s experience shows a woman walking alone
could be viewed with suspicion. It could be seen as a personal rebellion
against society’s conventions. A solitary female walker was associated with
sexual looseness, hence the term “streetwalker.”
Emily’s dog Keeper’s brass
collar provides the starting point for one of the most original sections of the
book. Unlike many Victorians who sentimentalised their pets, Emily was drawn to
fierce creatures with wild, unyielding natures. She relished Keeper’s ferocity
but forcefully established her dominance over him. Reserved with humans, she was more emotional
with her bull mastiff. One acquaintance
said that Emily “never showed regard to any human creature; all her love was
reserved for animals.” Lutz suggests that in Wuthering Heights Emily challenged
the settled boundaries between humans and animals. The novel portrays a savage world and
Heathcliff’s brutality reminds us of our ties to animals; the difference
between him and the dogs which weave in and out of the story is small.
The most poignant item in
the “cabinet” is the amethyst bracelet made from the entwined hair of Emily and
Anne. After her two sisters died within
a few months of each other in 1848-49, Lutz suggests that Charlotte probably
wore this bracelet to carry on a physical link with her sisters, as if to touch
them wherever they were. Hair in lockets
appears in Charlotte and Emily’s novels as a sign of everlasting bonds. Mourning jewellery made from hair became
fashionable in the Victorian era. Some people thought hair had an animal
magnetism, an invisible fluid which permeated the world allowing bodies and
objects to interact even when far apart.
Faultlessly researched and evocatively
written, In Lutz’s book the delight is in the detail. She uses material often discarded as not
relevant to the main plot by conventional cradle to grave biographers to create
a different, more physical recreation of the Brontes’ lives. It is a particularly appropriate genre for
Victorians who believed that material remnants could maintain a connection
between the living and the dead.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-bronte-cabinet-three-lives-in-nine-objects-by-deborah-lutz-book-review-10393551.html
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