Haunted dreams : religious anguish in Charlotte Brontë's poetry
Date
1986
Authors
Cripps, Susan
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Abstract
Charlotte Bronte wrote four novels, three of which were published during her lifetime. But she also wrote hundreds of prose tales and poems before embarking on her career as a novelist . Of these early writings , Charlotte only collected and edited nineteen poems for publication in 1846. Many of the remaining manuscripts have been published since her death, but have received little or no critical attention. The poems in particular have been largely ignored . However, Charlotte's poetry i s worthy of closer attention , for it is mainly in her poems that she chronicles the agonizing religious conflicts which had so profound and so far-reaching an effect on her life and her novels.
Scholars tend to minimize the significance of Charlotte's religious crisis in 1836, frequently considering it only a symptom of the mental depression brought on by the mundanity and drudgery of teaching at Roe Head school. But Charlotte's life was shattered by her crisis, and although the intensity of her conflicts may have lessened after she returned home, she was never able to repair the damages.
The purpose of this thesis is to trace the development of Charlotte's attitudes towards the supernatural and the imaginary in her poetry. The poems of Charlotte's adolescence , for example , are characterized by bright d reams and visions, and Christian , mythological, and fairy tale themes and images arc incorporated into the magical fantasy world of Glass Town. Later, maturity and misery bring about a series of upheavals which firs t sift out the mythological and fairy - tale elements , then separate the Christian from the imaginary, and finally bring those two remaining force s into direct collision with each other. She could not repent of her idolatrous love for her dream world, and was horrified by the prospect of eternal damnation. But the conflict itself rapidly destroyed her dreams, and so she felt herself doomed to a lifetime of misery - unable to seek consolation in either imagination or religion. After the crisis, Charlotte found both her dreams and her Christian faith in ruins, and her final poems are characterized by themes and images of a cold , impassive, and merciless supernatural force. In her novels , Charlotte often recalls the supernatural and fantastic themes and images which abound in her poems, and a fuller understanding of the poems gives the reader greater insight into the novels.