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- [00:00]
A
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Jessica Campbell about her book titled the Brontes and the Fairy Tale, published by Ohio University Press in 2024. Surprisingly, for a book published in 2024, this is actually the first book, really, that examines the role of fairy tales and folklore in the works of Brontes collectively. All of them, really, all of them. We're going to talk about that. And I find this fascinating because in many ways, as a non literary specialist, it feels like there's all sorts of intriguing elements of fairy tales and folklore that are woven through the Brontes work. And yet, as this book helps us understand, that's not often the analytical lens we use for these works. But clearly, as the book demonstrates, it should be, because there's a lot of links to be found across the timeline of the work across all sorts of different kind of genres. Like yes, obviously we're going to be talking about Wuthering Heights, but not just Wuthering Heights. There is really quite a lot to get into here about these authors, about their works, about fairy tales in Victorian society generally. Clearly I'm quite excited to have this conversation. So Jessica, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:25]
C
Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here and thank you for that introduction.
- [02:30]
B
Well, I'm excited to have you, too. But before we let our excitement carry us away into all things fairy tale, can you please introduce yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [02:42]
C
Yes. Well, I am a literature scholar. I have a degree in English from Middlebury College and then a doctorate in English from the University of Washington. And I've always straddled the fields of Victorian studies and fairy tale studies. And. And one of the things I find fascinating about Victorian novels is how many of them clearly draw on fairy tales for their characters, their plot structures, their metaphors, even though at the same time we think of the Victorian period as the heyday of the realist novel. Making a real commentary on the world and using fairy tales were not contradictory for these authors. And in addition, I noticed that a lot of the scholarship on the period was only acknowledged fairy tales as possible influences on novels that ended happily. People weren't accounting for novels that had zillions of fairy tale references, but ended in a tragic or maybe a murky way. So that was something that I really wanted to address. My PhD dissertation was on fairy tales in Victorian novels in general. I looked at novels by authors including Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy. That's where the tragic endings were, and also Oscar Wilde, in addition to the Brontes. But then when the dissertation was done and the logical next step was to turn it into a book, I decided that focusing on the Brontes would make it easier to pitch to publishers. And I've always loved the Brontes, so it was very easy to decide to add more chapters on their works to the ones that I had already written.
- [04:13]
B
That is a very helpful introduction, both in terms of the kind of wider field and of course, also how this project developed. It's always interesting to kind of peek behind the curtain and think about, hear about sort of which chapters came first and how things developed. So thank you for that insight there. But to continue our conversation, I think we want to clarify something that we've both mentioned a few times already, which is, of course, the term fairy tale, as you've already helped us understand, this was a big thing for Victorian writers. And obviously it's still a big thing now. But sometimes that risks us assuming that what we mean today by a term is, is kind of what it meant back then. So to make sure we don't fall into any definitional traps, what did the term fairy tale mean in The Victorian period. What kinds of stories are we talking about?
- [05:00]
C
This is such a great question. And terminology is so fraught and always fought over in studies of fairy tale, fable, myth, folklore, legend and so on. These stories have a way of leaping over the boundaries that we attempt to use to divide them. And although my title simply refers to fairy tales, I write throughout the book of both fairy tales and folk tales, as those terms are generally understood today. So there's been a lot of scholarly debate about this categorization. But in essence, folklore encompasses all manner of stories, beliefs and customs transmitted and shared within a culture. Whereas this word fairy tale is the, in my opinion, very unfortunate English translation of the French conte de Ferreira Fae or tale of the fairies, which could either mean tale about the fairies or tale told by the fairies, even though many, many of the fairy tales in the English speaking world don't actually have any fairies in them. So what matters most for my purposes here is that the Brontes and the Victorians in general were just surrounded by non realist narratives, however they were categorized. And I think we think of the Victorians as having sort of a mania for, for taxonomy, Charles Darwin and so forth, but that mostly came later than the Brontes. They were almost more like romantics in a way. They were kind of more 1830s, 1840s, and in addition, folklore scholars in the Victorian period, even later on, never adopted this mania for taxonomy as much as scientists did. So scholars have always applied the terms fairy tale and folklore loosely. And I think the best way to understand the term fairy tale in the period, and for the Brontes in particular, is to look at the four uses of the term in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel. So the first time Jane refers to orally transmitted tales, she reports that when she was a child, a servant told fairy tales in the evenings. So that's one use of the word fairy tale. The next time, later in Jane's childhood, she registers some disappointment with fairy tales because she says that she herself has looked in vain for the elves all over the surrounding countryside. So this usage of the term fairy tale bears implications of local origin and supernatural creatures that we, I think, are more, more likely to associate with folklore. There's another great moment when Mr. Rochester says to Jane that when he first met her after a horseback riding accident, he was put in mind of fairy tales and wondered whether perhaps she had bewitched his horse. So events of this kind certainly take place, literary or written fairy tales and also oral folktales as we define them today. And Then finally, when she's on the brink of marrying Mr. Rochester, Jane tells him that she can scarcely believe that such complete happiness could really be achieved. She actually says it would be a fairy tale, a daydream. So this fourth use of the term clearly refers to some sort of tale that may or may not contain fairies, but certainly contains happy endings. A definition that would definitely apply to many of the best known European fairy tales that many of us continue to be familiar with today. So across these multiple mentions of the word fairy tale, Jane refers to supernatural creatures, to malicious magic and to happiness, and probably to a combination of tales that she would have encountered orally and those encountered in a written or literary form. So it's a very, very wide term in this period. I think wider than most people would think of it as being today.
- [08:48]
B
Which is of course why we want to discuss those definitions, so that we know what we're talking about. But the thread I want to pick up from there is the ways in which she's encountering these ideas, these stories. Because you demonstrate in the book that we're not just. Well, obviously to some extent we're guessing the ways in which the Brontes would have encountered this, but we're actually maybe guessing less than we think. We do actually have some amount of idea of like what kinds of stories the Brontes would have known about, right?
- [09:17]
C
Yes, absolutely. And it really, it really varies by story. And indeed some of my analyses in the book are a little speculative. While in other cases we know for sure that the Brontes were aware of a given fairy or folktale. So I can give some examples here. We know that Charles Perrault's 17th century French fairy tale Bluebeard is mentioned by name in several things the Brontes wrote. So they obviously knew that one. No doubt there. The same is true of several individual tales from the Thousand and One Nights, which was extremely popular in the Brontes time under the name Arabian Nights Entertainments. There are also explicit mentions in some of their works of various kinds of tropes and magical objects that come up in a lot of folk and fairy tales like magic rings, will of the wisps, also creatures like elves and mermaids. Most of the time we don't know what exact versions of stories the Brontes encountered. Some of my analyses in the book culminate in arguments about this. But what we do know is that they had access to circulating libraries and that many, many editions of fairy tales from all over the world in translation were available in book form at this time. We also know that they Religiously read several periodicals and as children, especially Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, which sometimes included various mentions of fairy tales and folklore. It includes reports of supernatural occurrences people claim they experienced, reviews of books of folklore that were recently published or theatrical productions based on fairy tales. So the upshot is that we know the Brontes were exposed to fairy tales a great deal. And it's from their own writings that we then have the best clues as to which specific ones. And that was one of the very fun projects that I was engaged in throughout this book.
- [11:08]
B
Yeah, that was a really exciting part to read about as a historian where so often we are searching for kind of sources that aren't there or try to piece things together. And so to see the kind of richness of what you were able to figure out well beyond the sort of famous novels was really cool. So thank you for telling us about some of those details.
- [11:26]
C
Thank you.
- [11:29]
B
Exactly in the same sort of vein, I wonder if we can again put aside for a moment the famous novels and talk about some of the Bronte's writing that's probably less famous. The things they wrote when they were younger. You know, we might call it Juvenalia. The name certainly would indicate that these are kind of scribbles, these are attempts, these are, you know, maybe not the final finished, polished things that become famous later. But you show that fairy tales and folklore are in these early texts and that actually some of them are pretty sophisticated. So I wonder if you can give us some examples. I, I admit I personally like the Charlotte examples you had in this section of the book. But can you tell us about fairy tales and folklore in their Juvenalia?
- [12:12]
C
Yes, I would love to. So indeed, the Bronte's juvenile writings draw on fairy tales a whole lot. And the juvenilia are also very extensive. Beyond what I think people appreciate. There are multiple large volumes of juvenile writings by Charlotte and by Branwell that survived. So we have a huge amount of material to draw from. It's almost overwhelming as a scholar to approach the juvenilia because it's so much. And it wasn't edited, it was never, it was never published during their lifetimes or anything like that. And so we just have this wonderful sort of exploding record of these literary experiments that they made when they were children, which is, which is such fun to see. Unfortunately, the writings by Emily and Anne did not survive in nearly the same volume as the ones by Charlotte and Branwell. But we have kind of this famous origin story for the Brontes of being pretty young, pretty young children. They were all kind of preteens around this time and beginning to create this fantasy kingdom together of Glass Town, which later became kind of a larger space that they called Angria. And this was a kingdom that they made up. And this is not without problematic elements because they set it in Africa, which is where the British were actually involved in colonial enterprises and doing all sorts of things they shouldn't be doing. But for the Brontes, this represented literary opportunity. And so they invented this fantastical land where there were giants and there were Genii, these wonderful supernatural creatures that unfortunately seem not to have survived much into our modern world. We have the. We have the genie in Aladdin. I think that's the closest version of this that most people know. But Genii in British folklore that the Brontes would have encountered were instead these magical beings that had a great deal of power over human beings. They could do. They could transport them magically by making them sail through the air and then having them wake up somewhere else. Things like. Things like that. They learned about these creatures from the Arabian Nights entertainment as well. And their fantasy kingdom was largely ruled by Genii, who represented the Bronte children themselves. And they actually write about themselves in the stories as, you know, chief genius Branny for Branwell, chief genius Charlotte, et cetera. So they have these. These wonderful Personas. They also wrote another set of fantastical, fantastical writings in which fairies are in charge of the kingdom. That's a different one, that's not set in the same African land. So there's a lot of examples, especially Charlotte. Indeed, we have a lot of individual writings by Charlotte. And she wrote several stories as a young teen that are obviously versions of folktales about encounters with supernatural beings like fairies. And the biggest difference is that whereas usually in the traditional versions, that doesn't end happily, say a hapless human man is wandering around outside, hears beautiful music, follows it, oops, he's kidnapped by the fairies, stays with them for seven years, and then when he comes back home, he's lost his mind. Well, Charlotte doesn't do this. She often gives her versions happy endings. She doesn't want the wonder and splendor of encounters with supernatural creatures to have to come at such a steep cost. So instead, she'll often have her protagonists live out their lives in some kind of Garden of Eden type paradise, maybe with one other guy who's in the same situation, even if they don't end up going back home. So she actually turns these unhappy folktales into happier stories of her own sometimes, which I. Which I find fascinating, but that's not the end of it. She also, and this is certainly true of Branwell as well, wrote many stories that were pretty realist in that they were attempting to create political narratives and romantic narratives about these human characters in their fantasy kingdom of Angria. But even in these stories, she often refers to supernatural creatures and objects and tales pretty often. Often more in sort of a metaphorical way. So we continue to see references to magic rings and things like that, maybe in more of a metaphorical sense. But it's interesting to me that her sort of what we consider her latest juvenilia. So things that she was writing before, just before her published novels actually have fewer references to the supernatural than the novels that she would go on to publish. So she. That was actually kind of the low point of her engagement with the supernatural, which she would then actually continue to draw on later as she got older. And I think that's not necessarily what people expect.
- [16:58]
B
Yeah, that is definitely interesting. I don't want to, however, just talk about Charlotte and ignore the others. So let's talk, if we can, please, about Emily and Anne and the ways in which the supernatural appears in their work. Maybe if we talk about their poetry in particular.
- [17:14]
C
Indeed. So one of my chapters covers the role of the supernatural in the poetry of both Emily and Anne, arguing that they both use references to supernatural forces and creatures in an attempt to explain crucial aspects of life in the world that frustrate explanations in ordinary language. So for Anne, it's usually about the religious supernatural. Anne was sort of the most overtly religious of all of the Bronte siblings. And many. Many of her poems refer to the powers of God. And so magic arises sometimes as an inferior counterpoint to this divine power, which I think is what most of us would expect to see. But then other times in her poetry, she actually uses references to magic as one way of articulating the power of God. So sometimes they're actually working sort of in tandem for her. For Emily, she's not as frequently talking about God, although sometimes she is too. But most often the supernatural provided a way to convey the human individual's experience of nature. So nature sometimes appears in her poems in the form of supernatural creatures or spells that intensify the human speaker's feelings or fear or longing, something like that. So often we'll see Genii again, actually, in Emily's poetry. So like the genius of a hillside side or the genius of a tree or something like that will appear and it will sort of personify this aspect of nature that perhaps the human speaker in the poem is having some kind of encounter with that is very difficult to articulate using everyday, realistic language. So the language of the supernatural helps her to do that. And again, both Emily and Anne use these strategies throughout their writing careers. There's no noticeable decrease in supernatural references as they grew older, which is something I really emphasized throughout the book. With Emily's poetry, scholars often sort of divide the works that exist into the Gondel poetry, meaning the things that she wrote that are related to the fantasy kingdom of Gondol that she and Ann invented as children when they got sick of angria and decided to break away from Charlotte and Branwell. So people divided into Gondal poems and non gondal poems sort of meaning. Well, here's the, you know, fantastical, juvenile poems that she wrote, and then here's the serious adult poems that she wrote. I don't do this because, for me, that distinction doesn't really make sense. And there are just as many supernatural references in the later poems. They're just not set in gondol. They're set in a different place. So this, you know, this emphasis, again, on the continuation of use of the supernatural is something that's really important in the book.
- [20:04]
B
Yeah. And I think it's worth maybe making a bit more explicit that the use of the supernatural isn't. I mean, yes, some of the instances you've given us are about kind of going off into fairyland, but it's not sort of either it's supernatural or it's really real. Right. These things are kind of in conversation and dialogue with each other. So given that we haven't talked about him as much yet, maybe we can use Branwell to illustrate ways in which the sort of real and unreal are intertwined.
- [20:32]
C
Yes, absolutely. And this is. You're right, this is absolutely crucial in the book. And I think it's very important in the world of the Brontes. And for Branwell, things are a little bit different because in his, as I said, extensive writings that exist, we see a fascinating combination of explicit disdain for the supernatural, which he came to associate with girly things and exotic things, and at the same time, a lot of deployment of supernatural references in his writing. So long after Branwell abandoned the fantasy kingdom and the chief genii and all of that, he continued to use supernatural references in his writing in order to do various things, sometimes to provide a counterpoint to the real, but other times to illustrate an experience of extraordinary power or intensity, and often to describe women as well. My favorite example of the Contradiction is in a passage in one of his stories in which Branwell as narrator says, I for one, will always fly from the sickly tales of mental concoctions or monstrosities, sentimental decoctions or airy fairyism and shadowy fancies of what has never been a barmecidial feast which can never satisfy my hunger. Okay, so we have a few, I think, little grammatical errors in there. We'll set that aside. The upshot here is that made up stuff is bad. Airy fairyism is bad. But to describe the way he feels about all this, he refers to a barmecidial feast, which is a reference to an illusory banquet in a story from the Arabian Nights entertainments. So even in the same sentence in which he's criticizing the use of the supernatural in writing, Branwell describes what he means by referring to what is probably the most famous supernatural story collection of all time. And I bring this up not really in order to make fun of Branwell, who I have a lot of sympathy for, so much as to emphasize how baked in fairy tales were. In early 19th century English culture, writers made these supernatural references sometimes without even seeming to realize that they were doing it. With all the Brontes, we see a lot of use of supernatural references in order to interrogate or explain what that writer believes to be some of the most important issues in human life. Things that are really hard to corral into language. Something feels like magic when we can't understand how it works. For Emily and Anne, God and nature are crucial examples of forces that often defy human explanation in this way. So I'm certainly talking about their poetry kind of in terms of realism, even though scholars don't usually use the word realism in reference to poetry Specifically, I'm seeing in their poetry, as well as in the adult novels of all the Bronte sisters, this trend of using tools that we've been trained to associate with the unreal, these fairy tale references, in order to address real experiences in the world that transcend the power of ordinary realism to articulate. So this technique is especially applicable to the expression of interior experiences, since conventional realism tends to focus on what's external, what's observable. And some people want to just call this psychological realism, which certainly deals with interior experience too. But it's most successful in giving psychological realism, is most successful in giving voice to kind of more rational thought processes that can be articulated in ordinary language. And what I'm interested in instead is this way that the Brontes have of reaching into the supposedly unreal in order to Convey the feeling, the experience of this vitally important real. That actually tends to escape language itself.
- [24:29]
B
Is there maybe an example or two of instances of this that you want to tell us about? To kind of, I suppose, make the. I don't want to say make this real. Right.
- [24:38]
C
That doesn't.
- [24:38]
B
That doesn't help with the discussion we're having. But to illustrate the point, I suppose.
- [24:43]
C
I think. I think that the poetry of Emily is a really. A really good example. And it's difficult to pick just one. But I think that the way she will often in her poems portray kind of. It'll be kind of like a little story rather than just a lyric poem expressing a feeling. Kind of a little story where a human speaker is out walking on their own. Maybe it's nighttime, maybe it's winter. We don't know. We may not know where they're going. We may not know why they're there, but they have some sort of encounter. Maybe they. Maybe they get lost, or maybe they feel like they're encountering some sort of spirit and they're sort of stopped in their tracks and need to process this mentally in some way. And the way. The way that they do it is kind of by focusing on the super. The supernatural aspect. But this is clearly kind of another way of talking about just what it feels like to be. To be out in nature and to be sort of at the mercy of the elements. And you're odd and you're excited and you're scared and you're all of these things at once, and it's very hard to articulate. So I think that's one example. And then certainly there are other ones in the novels that I think we'll be discussing later.
- [25:58]
B
Yes, I definitely do want to talk about the novels we have. You know, I've been putting them aside for a little bit, but they obviously deserve a place in our discussion. So I think perhaps the place to start is with Jane Eyre, because it does have actually quite a lot of references to fairy tales, which is really interesting, given what you were saying earlier in terms of the extent to which that is. Or more often isn't a lens of analysis that we take. So how did you decide to approach this? Given, obviously, it's a big book, there's a lot of things in it, there's a lot of fairy tales there. You could probably do a whole book just on that, but obviously there was a lot else to cover. So how did you approach the fairy tale elements of Jane Eyre and sort of make sure that you were. You know, fit Jane Eyre into this wider examination you're doing without making your book like a thousand pages long.
- [26:49]
C
Yes, always a challenge, for sure. And yes, that's right. Jane Eyre is full of references to fairy tales in the supernatural. And it is the one Bronte novel that has received a lot of scholarly attention in terms of its use of fairy tales. And I wrote about this novel's use of fairy tales in my dissertation and published an article on the same topic. So I've been thinking about this one for a long time before the book ever came out. And there's no question that Charlotte Bronte deliberately uses fairy tales and other supernatural tales in a wide variety of ways in this novel. There are those four explicit uses of the term fairy tale that we talked about earlier in the interview. There's Mr. Rochester dressing up as a gypsy and pretending to tell fortunes. And there are references to mythological dogs and to elves. There's an explicit reference to Bluebeard. There's an almost explicit reference to Beauty and the Beast. And the whole thing is obviously built on a Cinderella model of impoverished childhood leading to marriage and wealth. The list goes on. So I think that all of this is true at once, and I think that that's fantastic. So I certainly was not attempting to kind of overturn any of the pre existing scholarly work on fairy tales in the novel in my own project. But one thing I did notice in the scholarship was that usually scholars picked a single tale and argued that that was the most important influence on the novel. And these are strong arguments. They mostly hold up quite well. But what really stood out to me about Jane Eyre was the way that the influences of multiple tales interact with each other. And in particular, it seemed to me that Beauty and the Beast and Bluebeard were both crucial to Jane's decision about what to do about Mr. Rochester, and that deciding between those fairy tale models was exactly what Jane was having to do. So Beauty and the Beast says, okay, here's this male figure. You could marry him, he looks menacing, but you should see beyond that and you should go for it. Bluebeard, on the other hand, says, here's this male figure, you could marry him, he looks menacing. And yes, actually he is menacing, so you should stay away. These are mutually exclusive takeaways. And the novel really goes back and forth in making Rochester seem more like a beast figure and more like a Bluebeard figure. And so while scholars had discussed both of these influences previously quite a bit, no one had really focused on their interaction in the depth that I wanted to and Ultimately did, in my analysis. It was a lot of fun. And I do think that the influence of those two tales really speaks to one of the major issues in the novel, which is what is Jane supposed to do about Mr. Rochester? How is she supposed to decide whether or not she should trust him, whether or not she should be with him? For me, these two fairy tales were a really great way into discussing that dilemma. Yeah.
- [29:44]
B
I mean, to some extent, if a dilemma can easily be solved by, like, oh, it follows exactly this one template. It's not that interesting of a dilemma. Right. So having kind of multiple pieces to draw on and entangle, you know, creates all sorts of intriguing tension and definitely helps make sense of those references in that particular novel. And in some ways, that's kind of an easy novel to start with in discussing this section of their work because, as you said, it does have so many kind of obvious fairy tale references in it. On the surface of it. Then turning to, for example, the novel Shirley, that would seem maybe to be kind of the opposite. Like, not really a lot of fairy tales there at all. And yet you talk about in your book, so clearly that's not quite right. Is Shirley the sort of diametrically opposed opposite to Jane Eyre?
- [30:31]
C
Yes, that's a great question. And I suppose what I didn't quite say in discussing Jane Eyre a moment ago was that the upshot is a happy ending. Right. Ultimately, in my terms, Beauty and the Beast kind of wins out. She gets this happy ending in which she has wealth, she has the man she loves, she seems content with the relationship they have come to, and they all live pretty much happily ever after. Shirley is a little bit more complicated than that. And it's not. It's not an exciting novel. Sorry, everyone. It's not exciting in the way that Jane Eyre is. So it seems on the surface like it should be the opposite of Jane Eyre. However, it's similar to Jane Eyre in that the references to fairy tales and supernatural creatures are constant. They are constant in Shirley. Scholars talk about this. No, this frequently in the case of Jane Eyre because it fits more obviously with the content of the novel and the fantastically happy ending. But literally no one had written about fairy tale references in Shirley as far as I could find. And I can only assume this is because Shirley is a fairly dry, realist novel. So it doesn't seem like those references could be doing anything very significant. The first page of the book actually claims that it's going to be as unromantic as Monday morning. And it does turn out that A lot of the book's content is pretty mundane, and yet here are all these super supernatural references, both in figurative language and in conversations that the characters have. One of the things I noticed in looking at these references and trying to find some patterns was how many of them were connected to this folktale type of the supernatural or animal bride. So Swan Lake is an example of this that many people are familiar with. Many stories about mermaids or selkies are another. The basic idea is that a mortal man encounters a superhuman or part human female, falls in love with her, captures her or convinces her to marry him, lives with her for a while, maybe has children with her, then loses her when she goes back to the realm that she came from. So this tale has nothing good to say about relationships between men and women. Throughout Shirley, supernatural creatures, including fairies and mermaids, are aligned with women against men and with nature against industrial development via numerous direct comparisons and sometimes plot events. But in contrast to Jane Eyre, in which Jane's fairiness is sustained and rewarded by the end of Shirley, the fairies, the women, and nature have all kind of been subdued. In this conclusion, the novel's two heroines, Shirley Kildar and Caroline Helstone, have both become engaged to be married. But the narrator provides this weirdly anticlimactic, businesslike report of the double wedding. And the last four paragraphs of the novel don't mention the heroines at all, instead musing on the fact that the fairies who used to populate the area have departed in the face of industrialization. So readers and scholars have long puzzled over this ending. Are we supposed to celebrate the marriages? Or do these weird concluding paragraphs point to some sort of darker interpretation? Usually, stories ending in marriage are likened to European fairy tales that end happily. But Shirley and Caroline are associated metaphorically throughout the novel, not with happily wed heroines such as Cinderella, but rather with supernatural creatures from folktales about failed romantic relationships, these fairy brides and animal brides. So these creatures are known both for their attractiveness to humans and their tendency to disappear abruptly from human view. So Bronte links these creatures to her heroines through a discussion between Shirley and Caroline about their degree of similarity to mermaids, through summaries of two fairy tales read by a minor character that would have been recognizable to 19th century readers as versions of a fairy bride tale and a mermaid or animal bride tale, and also through numerous direct comparisons of these women to supernatural creatures like fairies on the part of other characters and the narrator. So to develop these associations with tragic fairy marriage tales, and then to conclude the novel with a lament over the forced departure of the fairies in the face of the very industrial development being advanced by one of the heroine's new husbands emphasizes what is lost in these marriages rather than what is gained. So, in contrast to the usual expectation that fantastical references in a novel contribute to some sense of childhood innocence or marital happiness, I ended up arguing that such references and Shirley actually cast some doubt on this ostensibly happy ending that almost feels like it should be a Jane Austen, you know, double wedding conclusion. But it feels very, very different in the case of this novel.
- [35:37]
B
Yeah, and this goes back to what you were saying earlier about kind of how fairy tales in this period were not necessarily just like happy and shiny the way that we might tend to think more of them now. But thinking in fact, back to earlier in our conversation, we did mention folklore as well as fairy tales, and I want to make sure we don't lose that thread. So if we move to talking about Wuthering Heights, how might examining folklore help us sort of add nuances to our understanding, for example, of analyzing Heathcliff?
- [36:07]
C
Yes. Wuthering Heights is such a complex novel and it's so difficult to analyze because of that. I'm always dissatisfied with my conclusions about Wuthering Heights because I always feel like there must be more that I haven't fully grasped yet. Unlike Jane Eyre, whose major plot events can easily be aligned with those of several different fairy tales, Wuthering Heights doesn't really follow any pre existing narrative patterns, at least not as smoothly. But what it does have is a certain quality of the elemental and the ineffable that for me make it tonally in keeping with folktales surrounding the supernatural. And I noticed that in particular, characters in Wuthering Heights constantly compare Heathcliff to negatively connoted supernatural creatures from folklore while they are criticizing him. Demon, basilisk, etc. Isabella, who marries Heathcliff, you know, famously asks in a letter for some explanation of what she has married. She's not even sure he's really human because of the way he's been behaving. But the narrator never does this. It's only the characters who are using these negative supernatural references to describe Heathcliff. What the narrator instead is doing, on sort of a totally different note, is creating a subtle association between his endless mourning for Catherine with the struggle of human beings in folktales who are lured away, literally or figuratively, by creatures like fairies, pixies, and will o' the wisps. So taken together, these two facets of the supernatural in the novel are suggesting opposite conclusions about Heathcliff, underscoring the complexity of this character who has always been and continues to be the subject of a lot of critical debate. So these, you know, these tales of being pixie led that I refer to sort of similar to a type I mentioned before, but more specifically it will often be that a person is walking outside. Maybe there's a fog and so it's difficult to see. Perhaps it's dark as well. And this human gets lured away by, you know, some sort of creature with. With nothing, nothing good in its mind. And when, and if and when the human being gets to return to the world, they're never quite the same again. They'll often be insane or always dissatisfied, always longing to go back to this magical realm where they were, perhaps even very briefly with these supernatural creatures. And the way that Heathcliff behaves, especially toward the end of the part of the novel that he's alive for, is very reminiscent of a lot of the descriptions of these, you know, sort of hapless mortals returned from encounters with fairy beings. So we have this complicated sort of double sided use of the supernatural from folklore to illustrate what's going on with Heathcliff. So again, as with Shirley, I have argued that these supernatural tales are central to the novel, but in a way that has nothing to do with childhood and a lot to do with a pretty unhappy ending. So I know Wuthering Heights sort of has a happy ending for the younger generation at the end, but it's just not a novel that feels particularly happy while you're reading it. And actually the use of these unhappy folktales really contributes to that feeling.
- [39:35]
B
Yeah, that definitely helps make sense of kind of why it feels sort of depressing as one goes through. I don't want to though lose out on Anne. Of course, you mentioned earlier some of the things you found interesting about her novels as well. So can we talk a bit about that? I know we mentioned her Juvenalia, but how do fairy tales turn up in her adult novels?
- [39:57]
C
Yes, they do turn up in her adult novels, which I will emphasize as much as I can. They don't appear in the obvious way that they do in her sister's novels, certainly. And a little bit like Branwell, though not quite in the same way Anne seems like she would be opposed to to fairy tales. I really love the Hark of vagrant webcomic called Dude Watching with the Brontes listeners, please pause and look it up. You can Google it, you'll see it right away. Where basically the punchline is that while Charlotte and Emily are swooning over problematic but sexy Byronic heroes. Anne is standing to the side, frowning at their bottles of alcohol and crossing her arms. So all realism, all the time is sort of the way we think about Anne. However, as realist as Anne's two novels absolutely are, they're also structurally and morally extremely reminiscent of traditional European fairy tales. Her first novel, Agnes Gray, is very somber, very didactic, trying to teach a lesson. But it's in many ways a textbook Victorian Cinderella retelling, and uses the plot, the basic plot of Cinderella to provide a recognizable framework for a narrative whose primary purpose is to provide instruction and encourage moral behavior in her readers. It's very similar to the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella in particular, which has explicitly Christian moral themes, very much like Anne. So there's really no conflict there at all. They all want the same thing. In addition, we've got her second novel, the Tenant of Wildfell hall, which I read as a retelling of Bluebeard animated by contemporary concerns. I've mentioned Bluebeard a couple times. I don't think people are necessarily quite as familiar with Bluebeard as some of the other fairy tales, probably simply because Disney never adapted it. Bluebeard is a story in which a young woman marries this man who has a blue beard. She doesn't know a lot about him, seems pretty sketchy, but he's very rich, so she marries him and discovers that he is a serial murderer of wives. He has murdered many other wives before her, and she has to try to escape in order to avoid the same fate. So the Tenant of Wildfell hall contains the key thematic elements of Bluebeard, most importantly, a naive heroine's relationship with a dangerous husband, as well as some specific details, like a scene where her husband demands her keys, that suggest a deliberate allusion to the tale. This murderous husband at the center of Bluebeard makes this tale actually a perfect underlying structure for a very realist novel advocating for temperance and advocating for the right of women to divorce. This is a novel that's about why marriage can be a big problem for women. And there's probably no narrative that illustrates the extreme danger there as well as Blueberry. So even though the heroine's husband is not literally trying to kill her in other ways, he has a great. A great many similarities to Bluebeard. I can't point to any letter Anne wrote saying she intended this or anything like that, not least because her letters mostly didn't survive. But given what's in the novel, and given that we know Charlotte Mentioned the tale by name repeatedly. I feel pretty confident in arguing that the similarities to Bluebeard in this novel are not a coincidence. And this is not despite, but I think actually working in tandem with this passionate insistence Anne had, that you can really see if you read the preface to the novel that she published to the first or the second edition, that she is trying to reveal something that she knows to be true. Bad behavior among the aristocracy, in particular, that she noticed while working as a governess especially, and really wanted to expose in hopes that it would someday change.
- [43:45]
B
Hmm, that's really interesting. And kind of goes back to what we were saying earlier about sort of what sources are and are not there. Like, just because there isn't a letter saying this was because Bluebeard, it's like, well, all right, there's a whole bunch of clues there. So thank you for helping us understand how to piece that together. I do want to ask about one further novel before we conclude our discussion. Villette is often talked about as being very realist, as being sort of psychological. That tends to be the type of analysis that this novel gets. And yet you talk about it in your book about fairy tales. So what's the fairy tale lens for this novel? And is it in keeping with the psychological analysis we usually have, or are we kind of looking at something, you know, do you think we should be directing our attention elsewhere?
- [44:39]
C
Yes. God, Villette is such a strange book. Maybe even stranger than Wuthering Heights, although I go back and forth on that one in my own mind. In any case, Villette revolves around Lucy Snow, this very strange person and a first person narrator who often doesn't confide in her readers. So realism in Villette is complicated. And one thing that's important to establish is that a whole lot of the novel is narrated in a very straightforward, traditionally realist manner. One of the things Bronte clearly wanted to do here was to provide a picture of the life of a working woman. Lucy Snow is this English woman who is pretty much without family, without resources, ends up going to a fictionalized version of Belgium where Charlotte and Emily once lived and worked themselves in order to have a job, to work as a teacher. So the mundane aspects of that are. Are very much a part of Villette. And yet many aspects of Villette feel larger than life or just simply off the language of the narration. Many of the events, many of the characters, both the opening and the closing passages of the novel are unusual and inconclusive. The characters are extreme, ranging from the exceptionally perfect Paulina to the theatrically Sinister Lucy reflects to the reader at one point, I seem to hold two lives, the life of thought and that of reality. And provided that the former was nourished with a sufficiency of the strange, necromantic joys of fancy, the privileges of the latter might remain limited to daily bread, hourly work, and a roof of shelter. So the strange, necromantic joys of fancy. It's hard to imagine that the heroine of a more average Victorian novel admitting that that is something that she wants to have in her interior life. So if Villette is a novel filled with both descriptions of observable facts and accounts of its first person narrator's subjective experience, then the obvious label for such a novel is psychological realism. And that is how a lot of readers and critics of the novel have described it. It. And I don't precisely disagree with them. I think that label works for large portions of the novel. However, to me, psychological realism means a realistic reflection of the psychological experience of the main character or narrator. That's not always what we get from Lucy Snell. Because Lucy actively withholds information from the reader, she'll sometimes tell us chapters later about a previous scene in which she deliberately did not tell us what she was thinking at the time. She's not always revealing herself and her thoughts to us. She actually constructs a stranger and more controlled impression of her past self for the reader. So I suggested in the book that we view some of narrator Lucy's stranger narrative techniques as a kind of enchantment that she performs on the reader, holding us at bay, conveying some real information about herself, but often in a way that is indirect or kind of jazzed up with fanciful language and imagery. So it's kind of like psychological realism. Plus, in a way, I liked the term enchantment because it comes from the Latin incantare, as in to sing into. And so I thought, okay, what are the moments where she's not just speaking, but sort of singing in a way, in this narration? Many of those moments have some sort of fantastical imagery associated with them. Villette is another book that Charlotte Bronte wrote that is just bursting with references to fairy tales, folktales, supernatural creatures and so on. There are a whole lot of different ways that one can approach those. And what. What I focused on here, because I was very interested in somehow dealing with the strange realism of Villette, was how those references in some cases are contributing to this. This strange, strange experiences of scenes that she describes, where we seem to be getting sort of a not entirely realist, something Somewhat to the side version of what really seems to have been happening to Lucy at the time. It's really hard to tell what she is literally experiencing, but it usually isn't that hard to tell how she feels about it. Enchantment in traditional fairy tales often actually reveals the truth. I'm thinking of stories where, you know, the. The girl who is kind spits jewels out of her mouth and the girl who is not kind spits frogs out of her mouth, that kind of thing. Where this magical sort of imposition is actually revealing something that is very deeply true about the character sometimes. That's what we have going on with Lucy in Villette as well. This was another difficult novel to write about, like Wuthering Heights, because it is very, very complicated. And I think I could read it 10 more times and not feel like I had figured out everything that's going on, which is a lot of fun. That's one of the reasons I really love this work.
- [49:51]
B
Yeah, there's really so much to get into here. And obviously I could keep you for another six hours discussing all of it, but I won't because I think we've gotten a sense of the many ways in which fairytales and folklore are intertwined throughout all the Bronte's work. It's not just one novel we could talk about. You have really showed us a range. So my final question really is sort of of where are you taking this next? Are you going to go read Villette 10 more times? What's coming up on your horizons?
- [50:20]
C
Well, I would love to read Villette 10 more times. I think that's an excellent idea. Yes. Other things on the horizon include, I'm going to be teaching a community college class for retirees on Wuthering Heights and its adaptations in the winter quarter. And I'm excited to go see Emerald Fennell's new film adaptation of the novel with them in February. I don't know if I'll love it or hate it, but I do love Emerald Fennel in general, so we'll see. I'm excited to have that experience. And one of the things I love about working on the Brontes is that they are very much still alive in popular culture. And it's wonderful to talk with people about these new adaptations and see how sort of new generations approach these works. I teach writing classes at a couple of colleges in the Seattle area where I live, and I often teach fairy tales as part of those classes, so. So I'll be continuing to discuss fairy tales with students on a regular basis. So that's always fun. I just finished a chapter on Elizabeth Gaskell for the forthcoming Rutledge Companion to Gaskell, so that'll be out before long. It's a little harder to find time for research now that I've kind of moved on and I no longer have any institutional support for it, and I do have a mortgage payment. But at the same time, I've kind of pivoted into queer studies a little bit since finishing the Bronte Book book. And I've published a couple of pieces that have to do with queer studies and fairy tales, actually. And I've begun work, slowly but surely, on a second monograph about relationships between women in novels, including Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, Henry James, Wings of The Dove, and E.M. forster's Howards End, and possibly also Charlotte Bronte's Shirley. Actually, when I was working on that novel, I read some fascinating articles about the relationship between the between the heroines that I would love to dig into a little bit more. I always have more ideas. I love participating in scholarly dialogue. I can do it all day. So I'm very excited to proceed with this project and see what comes next.
- [52:15]
B
You certainly have lots to be keeping yourself busy and intrigued. So best of luck with the teaching and the research.
- [52:22]
C
Thank you so much. And thank you for having me today. This was a lot of fun.
- [52:25]
B
Well, for any listeners who want more of what we've been discussing, they can, of course, read the book titled the Brontes and the Fairy Tale, published by Ohio University Press in 2024. Jessica, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [52:38]
C
Thank you.