Charlotte Brontë's World of Death

by Robert Keefe

By the age of eight, Charlotte Brontë had lost first her mother and then her two older sisters. Later, in a second wave of deaths, her brother and two younger sisters died, leaving her a sole survivor. With subtlety and imagination, Robert Keefe examines Brontë’s works as the creative response to these losses, particularly the loss of her mother. Terrified and yet fascinated by death, struggling with guilt, remorse, and a deep sense of rejection, Charlotte Brontë found in art a way to come to terms with death through its symbolic reenactment. In her earlier writings she created a fictional world marked by devices that allow her to control or deny death. In her later works these mechanisms evolved into mature expressions of a profound psychological reality. Brontë’s preoccupation with death is seen in her fiction in the recurring patterns of separation and exile. Keefe traces the development of these motifs in the juvenilia and the four novels: The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette. Unique in its emphasis on the maternal relationships in Brontë’s life and art, this study also explores certain aspects of her life that have often puzzled biographers.

246 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Edwin John Moorhouse Marr · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book makes so many bold claims with nothing to back them up. Yet many of the claims are just bizarre, the fact that, according to Keefe, Charlotte visited her friend, Martha's, grave in Brussels not because her friend had recently died, but out of guilt for the death of her sisters and mother. Sure, deaths always remind you of everyone else that has gone, but to suggest the only reason CB would go was some unconscious guilt, feels ambitious at best. Unfortunately there are many examples like this throughout this book, a shame because I think death is an under explored area within Brontë criticism, and there are some moments of really illuminating analysis within this book, especially with regard to The Professor. Yet the vast majority of this book just felt un-evidenced and un-believable.