The Key to the Brontë Works. John Malham-Dembleby
the child rolled from my knee; I lost my balance, fell, and awoke. "Now, Jane, that is all," put in Rochester. To which Jane Eyre replies, "All the preface; the tale is yet to come." On waking a gleam dazzled my eyes; … it was candle light. … A form emerged from the closet; it took the light and held it aloft. … I had risen up in bed, I bent forward, … then my blood crept cold through my veins. … It was not even that strange woman Grace Poole [the thick-set servant]. … It seemed … a woman … with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back. I know not what dress she had on: it was white and straight; but whether gown, sheet or shroud I cannot tell. The features were fearful and ghastly to me; … it was a savage face. I wish I could forget … the lineaments. … Just at my bedside the figure stopped: the fiery eye glared upon me—she thrust up her candle close to my face, and extinguished it under my eyes. "Now," says Rochester. "I'll explain to you all about it. It was half dream, half reality: a woman did, I doubt not, enter your room; and that woman was—must have been—Grace Poole [the thick-set servant]. You call her a strange being yourself."
Truly Montagu's description of the coarse-voiced, thick-set, country-bred servant, and his implication with the mystery of the lonely house had impressed Charlotte Brontë considerably. Whether she portrayed him as the Joseph of Wuthering Heights or, by her Method I., as the Grace Poole of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë respects the original associations of this character as they were figured to her by Frederic Montagu's little fiction of "A Night's Repose." Herewith have we evidence as to mental idiosyncrasy and elective-sensitiveness recognizable as Charlotte Brontë's—proof that her brain and none other was responsible for both the Wuthering Heights and the Jane Eyre versions of the midnight incident from Montagu.
CHAPTER III.
ORIGIN OF THE FOUNDLING HEATHCLIFFE AND HIS NAME IN "WUTHERING HEIGHTS"—ORIGIN OF THE INSANE LADY AND THE WHITE VEIL SCENE IN "JANE EYRE."
We have now seen that Montagu's book provided Charlotte Brontë with the idea for a lonely house of mystery—a mystery which should surround a host with a peculiar, harsh-voiced, uncouth, north-country servant, and I have shown how that idea was adopted by her for Wuthering Heights and afterwards for Jane Eyre. At one time Charlotte Brontë wrote the Tale of a Foundling, and she certainly read with interest a remarkable story told by Montagu of a foundling who, he tells us in the letter next before the Malham letter, was discovered by a shepherd on the top of a craggy "mountain," a circumstance which perhaps led her in making use of this foundling story to name the child Heathcliffe. I will place the substance of the two stories side by side:—
| Montagu. | Wuthering Heights. |
| On the top of a craggy height a male infant "was found by a shepherd, who took it to his home, and after feeding and clothing it he had the child named Simon; being himself but a poor man he was unable to maintain the foundling," when was agreed to by his friends that the child should be kept "ameng 'em." The child was called Simon Amenghem. | In a wild, hilly country, a male infant was brought home by a farmer who had found it homeless. He brought up the child, and the rest of its career is the obvious "cuckoo story": the child ousts the poor farmer's family. It was called Heathcliffe. |
The cuckoo story derived obviously from the history Montagu gives of the foundling became thus the backbone of Wuthering Heights; but it is possible that the cuckoo story requiring the foundling should be painted with all the viciousness and cruelty of character necessary to his part, Charlotte Brontë found herself dissatisfied with the story. And portraying herself in the narrative as Catherine Earnshaw, her hero became M. Héger. This naturally led to an awkward clashing. Whether the extreme "demonism" of Heathcliffe must be understood as being in the main due to his rôle as the "cuckoo," who was to oust the poor farmer's offspring "like unfledged dunnocks," to quote Mrs. Dean, I will not in this chapter inquire.
Turning again to Montagu's book, Charlotte saw a further suggestion that contained excellent "plot" possibilities. This was the question of lunacy being an exception to the objection against the separation of husband and wife, Montagu's relation being Barry Cornwall (to whom, by the way, Thackeray dedicated Vanity Fair), who was a Metropolitan Commissioner in Lunacy. To Charlotte Brontë, however, the subject came simply as a useful suggestion. She had no views upon it, and she desired only that her heroine would marry Rochester, the hero with an insane wife. At heart Charlotte was indifferent as to the vital point, even nullifying the very theme of the plot by making Rochester aver that if Jane Eyre had been the mad wife, he would still have loved and cherished her.
It would appear that in conjunction with Montagu's remarks on lunacy and the separation of husband and wife, an extract he gives from Shelley is also responsible for a wife's lunacy being the theme of the plot of Jane Eyre. The extract which Montagu quotes in the Malham letter is where the poet speaks of "The Waning Moon" as like—
"A … lady lean and pale
Who totters forth wrapt in a gauzy veil
Out of her chamber led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain."
Thus was evidently suggested to Charlotte Brontë the hanging up in the closet of the "vapoury veil" for the stage purposes of the "insane lady"; and in Jane Eyre Montagu's night-wandering, candle-bearing hostess became a lady who passed, after the manner of the lines he quoted,—
Out of her chamber led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain—
became Mrs. Rochester. Norton Conyers, a house near Ripon, it is said, is associated with the story that a mad woman was once confined there.[17] If Charlotte Brontë was familiar with this story, and we are told the interior is somewhat similar to the descriptions of Thornfield, we can understand that, perusing Montagu's book at the time when she was utilizing his narrative of the candle-bearing, hideous-faced, white-clad midnight visitant in a house of mystery, she would the more readily appropriate the further suggestions his work contained in regard to a wife's insanity, and the "veil-clad" apparition of a night-roaming insane lady. It is important to note, however, that the evidence of my preceding chapter proves indubitably the "mad woman" was but a secondary suggestion—the primary suggestion responsible for the plot of Jane Eyre being that of Montagu's midnight apparition. And just as the thick-set country-bred servant denotes in the question as to the origin and author of the candle-bearing bedside visitant in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, the "gauzy veil" likewise denotes as to the origin of the mad woman of Jane Eyre. So we read in the beginning of Chapter XXV. of Jane Eyre, that Jane leaves the vapoury veil in the closet:—
To conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained; which, at this evening hour … gave out certainly a most ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment. "I will leave you by yourself, white dream," I said.
Then farther on we read that:—
The moon shut herself wholly within her chamber, and drew close her curtain of cloud,
which is simply an antithetical paraphrase of Montagu's quoted verse on "The Waning Moon" which, like
A … lady … pale … totters forth wrapt in a gauzy veil, out of her chamber.
And in the same chapter of Jane Eyre we read finally that the insane lady, who has come out of her chamber,
" … took my veil from its place; she held it up, gazed at it long, and then she threw it over her head, and turned to the mirror … it removed my veil from its gaunt head, rent it in two parts, and flinging both on the floor, trampled on them."
CHAPTER IV.