Introduction

            For many years, critics have disagreed about the feminist qualities of Charlotte Brontë's works. Some, like Lawrence Jay Dessner, have called her works, “an exhibit in the history of feminism,”¹ while others, such as Constance D. Harsh, have argued that, “At best feminism [in Brontë] . . . is a fragmentary affair.”² This is just a sample of the disagreements surrounding Brontë’s alleged feminism, with each critic drawing his or her own conclusions, and, in the process, questioning Brontë’s motivations. Even Brontë seemed confused, at times scripting her protagonists as critical voices of rebellion, yet in the same character foisting upon them the burdens of submissiveness. Perhaps, however, it is not simply a case of measuring Brontë’s opinions of women or their agency, or of merely examining the actions of her characters, but rather of looking at what there was in or about the society that Brontë lived in that was affecting her and her writing.

            Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature redefines the term "hegemony" as a combination of culture and ideology, calling it a “complex interlocking of political, social, and cultural forces.”³ The hegemony, as he defines it, is something that shapes the behavior and opinions of all under its influence:

Hegemony is then not only the articulate upper level of ‘ideology’, nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as ‘manipulation’ or ‘indoctrination’. It is a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world.⁴

            In the patriarchy that dominated Brontë’s world, the political, religious, familial, and educational systems all had a subtle, but profound, influence on her. Thus, Brontë did what she could, subject as she was to this hegemonic discourse. Viewed in this light, one can see that her characters were exercises in working through the issues of femininity and the place and purpose of a woman in the world; while Charlotte Brontë wanted agency as a woman, she found no place for it in her time. As Raymond Williams said: “To say that [humans] define and shape their whole lives is true only in abstraction. In any actual society there are specific inequalities in means and therefore in capacity to realize this process.”⁵ In other words, persons like Brontë, who did not belong to the dominant part of hegemonic society, found the capacity to craft their own decisions and opinions limited by the hegemonic discourse. In this instance, it was the hegemony of Victorian England. Nevertheless, in the give and take of agency in Brontë's female characters, one can see an exploration of freedom, a cry for independence; but, ultimately the acquiescence to a power structure from which she saw no escape.

            Accordingly, through the development of Brontë's characters, one can see a hegemonic discourse at work: a force which Brontë recognized in part, even if she could not name it. It is because of this confused frustration by the author that critics have had such difficulties in analyzing her work in a feminist context; they see only the effects of such hegemony without understanding the underlying apparatuses and distributions of power. With this concept of hegemony in mind, however, one can see that Brontë was doing all that she felt she could, given the historical and social conditions under which she worked. This is no more true then as evidenced in Jane Eyre and Shirley.

Jane Eyre

            Charlotte Brontë’s first published novel, Jane Eyre, is rife with the type of conflicts that critics and supporters of her work typify as feminist conflicts. Jane’s confrontations with John Reed, Mr. Brocklehurst, and Edward Rochester are the best examples. It is through these conflicts that one can see the reinforcing of the Victorian hegemonic discourse. As Arthur Pollard says, “[Brontë] realise[s] that feminine independence in a masculine world is no easy achievement. It is hemmed in by restrictions and prohibitions.”⁶ This "hemming in" speaks indirectly to the same hegemony that this essay is striving to illuminate. In the very beginning of Jane Eyre, Jane confronts this male authority in the child-form of John Reed.

            In this conflict, Jane’s only offense is "daring" to go off on her own and peruse one of the Reed’s books. Jane explains that John was her constant tormentor, of whom, “Every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of flesh on my bones shrank when he came near. There were moments when I was bewildered by the terror he inspired.”⁷ Her rearing at Gateshead had taught her this. While John Reed may seem an aberrant character of male authority, one consistently characterized in negative terms, and who ultimately comes to no good, he is nonetheless Jane’s first prolonged interaction (outside of books) with maleness. She never knew her father and Mr. Reed himself she can barely remember. The key is that John is not punished for his cruel actions. He can throw a book at Jane, causing her to bleed, but when Jane retorts with harsh words, he flies at her as if wronged. Moreover, when she then fights back, it is she who is punished. The representation of the situation is inverted in favor of the male character; as they are parted, Jane hears the words, “What a fury to fly at Master John!”⁸ Not only have John’s actions been condoned, which implies his status as an economic and gendered superior, but the entire blame has been shifted to Jane. As Helene Moglen says in Charlotte Brontë: The Self-Conceived:

It is from John Reed, the violent, spoiled, bullying son that she learns most painfully what it means to be poor and dependent in a world which respects wealth and position. It is from John that she learns the meaning of powerlessness, the meaning of being a female in a patriarchal society . . . Her justifiable anger, her pure assertion of self, is interpreted as unjustifiable passion. His unjustifiable cruelty is thought to be an appropriate assertion of his role of "master."⁹

            Still young and naïve, Jane recognizes the unfairness of such treatment, and even though she says such resistance is a “new thing” for her, she tries to complain of the injustice of it, decrying the remonstrance of the Reed's servant’s for striking the “young marster.” “Master! How is he my master? Am I a servant?” Jane asks. “No,” the Reed's servant replies. “You are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep.”¹⁰ The servant’s chiding is only a preface to Mrs. Reed’s, who in confronting her niece’s continued resistance says: “Silence! This violence is most repulsive!”¹¹ Thus, while the conflict originates in the child-form of the patriarchy, it is the adult women who act as ultimate agents of reinforcement of that paradigm: one a servant woman, the other a widowed landowner. The servant has been thoroughly inscribed with this hegemonic discourse where both the poor and females have their set roles and keep to them. For her part, Mrs. Reed teaches Jane not only that she is wrong in resisting such patriarchal and economic hierarchies, but that protesting the unfairness of them is in itself impermissible. The “violence” that she is referring to is no longer that of her physical fight with John, but the "violence" of her action: of her resistance. This is why the term “violence” is directly preceded by “silence.” Jane must be silent beneath this hegemonic discourse, whereby women have no voice, let alone one to resist the dominant influence of that discourse.

            Other critics have picked up on this motif of silence as well, both in this conflict with John Reed and Jane's impending trials at Lowood. Susan Fraiman has noted that, “To a child whose mode is interrogative . . . both [Mrs. Reed and Helen Burns] preach a message of quietism.”¹² This passivity and silence being inscribed upon her at Gateshead, and which will then be encouraged by her peers at Lowood, is an informal part of the hegemonic discourse, a continued renewing of societal values that is the legacy of the primary sources of dominant reinforcement, in which Lowood plays an integral role.

The school’s headmaster, Mr. Brocklehurst, makes his intentions very clear: “You are aware that my plan in bringing up these girls is, not to accustom them to habits of luxury and indulgence, but to render them hardy, patient, self-denying . . . I wish these to be the children of Grace.”¹³ As with John Reed, Brocklehurst is described with several negative traits; his end is also mired in shame and failure. In these depictions, Brontë seems to be fighting this patriarchy, whether consciously or not, realizing all the same that as despicable as these men may be, Jane can fight them no more than she can.

Further, through Brocklehurst’s association with Christian values, the novel, and Brontë’s inner struggle, become more complicated. Moglen says of Brocklehurst, that: “He cloaks his greed, selfishness, and vanity in the hypocritical vestments of religious principles, disguising fear and guilt with love of God.”¹⁴ Yet, here, Moglen errs. She differentiates Brocklehurst’s behavior from religion, believing the institution good, while its agent bad. But the Church, in any of its guises—be it the "Romish" Church that Brontë virulently opposed or her own Anglican Church—has always preached a code of misogyny, putting the female in direct submission to the male authority. It is important then to see this religious association as a fulfilment of such values, not its betrayal. In the very first book of the Bible, to say nothing of the rest, God says to Eve that, “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”¹⁵ Furthermore, in the Bible's succession of Jewish kings and their birthright to Israel, the authority of linear and titular succession is enforced above all, teaching submission to God and even to your enemies. No one exemplifies this more than a character who is depicted in a very positive light in Jane Eyre: Helen Burns.

Helen provides a counter to Jane’s impotent anger. Helen is a peaceful, quiet child, who believes in a ‘turning the other cheek’ philosophy. And while Jane says that she, “Could not comprehend this doctrine of endurance; and still less could I understand or sympathize with the forbearance she expressed for her chastiser,”¹⁶ Jane does come to love Helen. As Moglen observes, “She sees [Helen] as a martyr, noble and inspiring.”¹⁷ Yet at the same time, Moglen notes that “[Helen] participates in the power of the oppressor by accepting his punishment and assuming his blame.”¹⁸ So while Helen becomes Jane’s only friend at Lowood, she also typifies female submission to a patriarchal hegemony, specifically putting such submissiveness in religious terms.

            Charlotte Brontë must have been aware of the presence of misogyny in Christian dogma. Despite the fact that Jane Eyre ultimately supports a variety of religious themes (Brontë ends the novel with words directly from the Book of Revelations¹⁹), Jane says as a child that she did not like the Psalms, nor find them interesting.²⁰ Within these one-hundred and fifty songs or poems, are detailed almost every aspect of an individual’s relation to their God.²¹ To find fault in those Psalms, one must find fault with the religious scheme; and in that, Brontë must have taken some measure of the influence of religion as problematic, recognizing, in particular—if unable to name it exactly—the hegemonic repression that was inscribed upon women through the apparatus of the Church. Yet it is also more complex than to say that she took issue with certain parts of the Bible. While Brontë is continually willing to represent agents of the clergy in negative lights, to show their hypocrisy and inadequacies, she adheres to most of the active principal beliefs of Christian faith. Brontë says in the preface to the third edition of Jane Eyre, that: “Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.”²² Thus, it appears that she still had an affintity for parts of Christianity; most likely she was endeavoring to interpret the Bible in a way to find her place in the world, and practicing her Protestant right of private judgment, (which she would later discuss explicitly in Shirley). What makes this religious issue problematic, however, is that Brontë still participated in a religious accounting of morality, which, in a sense, kept her contained in the hegemonic discourse perpetuated by that religion.

            Nevertheless, one can feel both Brontë and Jane struggling to be free. The speech Jane makes after arriving as governess at Thornfield Hall resonates with Brontë’s own pains:

It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.²³

This soliloquy may address whatever Biblical rebellion Brontë felt deep inside her: a need to do something more than cook and clean and be subservient to men. Clearly, Jane & Brontë are aware of a “custom” that enforces gender bias. As a reflection of the dominant culture, custom is an important aspect of hegemony. Recall that, by definition, the hegemonic discourse does not “indoctrinate” or “manipulate.” Rather, it presents certain "truths" to a culture, in which those "truths" are to be interpreted as "self-evident" or "obvious," which is precisely one of the reasons that a hegemonic discourse is so easily enacted. Without critical analysis, one cannot see the fictionalization that is at the center of such "truths."²⁴ A "custom" is something accepted as a type of social posterity, something which has as its authority tradition. It is precisely that tradition and its weight that is acting on both Jane and Brontë, and against which both bristle.

            Despite Jane's yearning for freedom, in the story’s resolution of her relationship with Rochester and the framework in which it is interpreted, Jane becomes reinscribed by the dominant hegemonic discourse, losing whatever agency she had. As Mogler argues:

Jane has escaped some forms of social conditioning and can identify and condemn the more obvious forms of social inequality. Still, the circumstances of her life have created in her a psychological need for the kind of symbiotic relationship which is essential to the stability of middle-class patriarchy, and is supported and justified by the romantic myth.²⁵

Jane’s sense of this “romantic myth” finds its object in Edward Fairfax Rochester. Yet this “myth” becomes just that in the sense that Jane falls in love with him as the man she can never have. Then, miraculously, he turns away from his beautiful, rich ladies to marry plain Jane Eyre. Yet, this love turns out to be a sinful passion when it is revealed that Rochester already has a wife. The resolution of this conflict is scribed in overbearing Christian terms: their sins are punished and for their repentance, they are forgiven. As Dessner says, the novel: “embodies a faith in a just although sometimes incomprehensible God, and a Puritan belief in the inexorable consequences of sin. The characters affirm or deny these principles, and, through the agency of the plot, reap reward or punishment accordingly.”²⁶ Dessner's analysis correctly details a hegemonic moral accounting.

            After the embarrassment of discovering that Rochester is married, Jane says to herself: “You shall yourself, pluck out your right eye: yourself cut off your right hand.”²⁷ To do so would be a classical Biblical punishment for adultery. Yet she never did covet a married man, thus her physical body is saved; it is only her mind that is tormented: her penance for being an accomplice, albeit unwittingly, to Rochester’s crime. Since it was Rochester who knowingly wished to become a bigamist and adulterer, it is he that is cursed with the loss of a hand and an eye, losing also the sight of his other eye, when he refuses to leave his burning home until everyone is out safely (or has leapt to their obvious death): thus, in a sense, causing the damage to himself.²⁸ Yet before this actual punishment, he confronts Jane, trying to explain himself and to attempt one last seduction. She says to him:

I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad–as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is not temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour.²⁹

Gone is the Jane that did not like the Psalms or who rejected Helen’s quiet solitude, passivity, and suffering.

            Slowly but surely, the hegemonic discourse has inscribed itself upon her; the agency she has in this scene is not hers but that of the discourse itself. She supports its values and, for that, is rewarded with strength: not personal strength, but that of all those who support her through support of the hegemony. Against that, even Rochester is impotent. As such, Jane's, and ultimately Rochester's, subsumption into the religious aspect of the hegemony is even further clarified in the redemptive nature of the novel’s resolution. The once heretical Rochester transforms:

You think me, I daresay, an irreligious dog: but my heart swells with gratitude to the beneficent God of this earth just now . . . I did wrong: I would have sullied my innocent flower . . . in my stiff-necked rebellion, almost cursed the dispensation: instead of bending to the decree, I defied it. Divine justice pursued its course; disasters came thick on me . . . His chastisements are mighty; and one smote me which has humbled me for ever . . . I began to see and acknowledge the hand of God in my doom. I began to experience remorse, repentance; the wish for reconcilement to my Maker.³⁰

This reformation completes the reclamation of all rebels into the dominant discourse, pulling both Jane and Rochester into a wedded union under God. Yet even that marriage has issues. It is not necessarily a commitment to the love that they once had. Indeed, Dessner argues that the marriage of Jane and Rochester is not: “a consummation of love grounded in mutual affection and respect. It is a "domestication" of a passion that represents a threat to established values and structures of society.”³¹ More than that, it places the two in an ambiguous power relation, in part causing again some of the ambivalence in analysis of Jane Eyre.

            Jane says things like, “I let him, when seated, place me on his knee.”³² There is a sense of agency in her saying that she "let" him act, yet look at the act itself: placing Jane on his knee, a rather childlike, if not submissive position for Jane to occupy. She also does not reveal the nature of her relationship with Rivers immediately, twisting the jealousy knife that Rochester once twisted in her over his other female interests. As she says, “I would not immediately charm the snake.”³³ She also says of Rochester that she, “Love[s] you better now, when I can really be useful to you, than I did in your state of proud independence.”³⁴ Although she seems more active than her crippled master, one must be careful about attributing too much importance to that contrast. As Susan Fraiman notes, “True, it gives her the physical advantage and the importance of being relied upon . . .[but] this role as interminable caretaker bears an uncanny resemblance to the maternal role women conventionally play in relation to men, and servants in relation to masters.”³⁵ Yet, there is a duality in Rochester's reduction. Beyond this traditional role simulation, there is a startling indication of the lengths of which Brontë had to go to to acheive even the possibility of parity. It is Moglen who again identifies this aspect of the conclusion:

Jane’s money and social status, even her confidence and self-knowledge, would not have offered her sufficient protection . . . would not have defended her against the arrogance and pride supported by society through its laws, its structures, its attitudes, its mythology . . . so strong are these external forces that the reduction of Rochester’s virility and the removal of them both from contact with society are necessary to maintain the integrity of the emergent female self.³⁶

It is precisely this structure, this hegemonic discourse, that will not allow Jane freedom, just the same as it will not allow Brontë freedom. For Brontë to find freedom for the woman, she has to create her own fictional situation in which she could as a dominant force, as a writer (in her own world), allow a woman to look for equality.

            The extremes to which Brontë had to go to allow a woman a semblance of equality and freedom demonstrates how hard it is to break away from the dominant hegemonic discourse. Yet, despite these difficulties, her search would not end with Jane Eyre. Brontë would try again, pushing the woman’s voice even further, though ultimately acquiescing again, in Shirley.

Shirley

            Shirley begins as a historical novel, centered around the Luddite riots, but its politics quickly dissolve, revealing what would become classic Brontë themes: silence, agency, gender, and love. A story of men and women and the politics and philosophies that govern them, soon becomes a tale of two women, where Brontë’s discontentment as a woman surfaces through the voice of her two protagonists, Caroline and Shirley. The same hegemonic discourse that was so strong in Jane Eyre, however, would rise again and engulf both of these women as well.

            Shirley is the more vocal character, the wild rebellious woman, who dares confront men themselves: untamed much more than Caroline, whose loudest protestations are made either to herself or Shirley. Nonetheless, Shirley’s authority is hardly feminist. The very reason behind Shirley’s independence is the title, land, and money that should have went to a man, only there were no brothers Keeldar to make any such claim. Her only relative is her uncle, Mr. Sympson, who, while once her guardian, is now only an observer in her affairs (a would-be participant, but much less so through the defiance of Shirley). As the narrator says, “Providence had granted them only a daughter, [and] bestowed on her the same masculine family cognomen they would have bestowed on a boy.”³⁷ Furthermore, Shirley constantly refers to herself as a man. She says that she feels “quite gentlemanlike,” and the narrator describes her as such also: “Captain Keeldar was complimented on his taste; the compliment charmed him."³⁸ Such phrasings indicate a dependency of the female on the male, as a need for recognition. As Constance Harsh notes:

Her wealth and power, as well as her name, are not self-created but derived from a patriarchal system of inheritance. Her adoption of a masculine identity is ultimately not liberating. The very necessity of becoming a sort of man in order to experience the full advantages of her position is more than a little disquieting.³⁹

In a sense, this recognition seems to symbolize all of Shirley’s quest for female agency: a strong self-assertion, but ultimately one that is a reluctantly self-acknowledged pretense.

            One of the most curious attempts to invert the hegemonic discourse comes in Shirley’s attempted re-writing of mythology. In it, she tries to ascribe daring and vitality to women, in which Eve gave birth to the Greco-Roman gods known as the Titans, naming Saturn and Prometheus, among others, saying also that her Eve was heaven-born, not of Adam’s rib.⁴⁰ Yet, in this myth, there seems to be a playful element, as there is with most receptions of Shirley’s speeches: that her rebellion is no more than idle play. As Moglen says, this is: “the need for a female mythology, a religion which is not the product of the male imagination, not an extension of the patriarchal structure.”⁴¹ This certainly seems to have a modicum of validity. Shirley and Caroline obviously take exception to a religion which makes women second-class citizens—as their subsequent conversation with Will Farren and Joe Scott will prove. Their invocation of religion as a social authority, however—be it their female mythology or the patriarchy of Christianity—supports the concept of overlapping cultural apparatuses that perpetuate a dominant discourse. Addressing Shirley, Joe says:

"I’ve a great respect for the doctrines delivered in the second chapter of St. Paul’s first Epistle to Timothy."

"What doctrines, Joe?"

"Let the woman learn in silence, with all subjection. I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man; but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve."⁴²

And then Caroline asks:

            "You allow the right of private judgment, I suppose, Joe?"

"My certy, that I do! I allow and claim it for every line of the holy Book."

            "Women may exercise it as well as men?"

"Nay: women is to take their husbands’ opinion, both in politics and religion: it’s wholesomest for them."

            "Oh! Oh!" exclaimed both Shirley and Caroline.

            "To be sure; no doubt on ‘t." persisted the stubborn overlooker.

"Consider yourself groaned down, and cried shame over, for such a stupid observation,” said Miss Keeldar.⁴³

The women, especially Shirley, both speak for their independence, and speak with a confidence and strength. Monetarily, both women are above Joe and Will, factors that allow them such freedom of conversation, though note how it does not give them the authority to supercede Biblical or other hegemonic influences. In other matters, Shirley, who is rich herself, is granted through those resources—via the symbol of that which is typically a male inheritance—a resistance to male hegemony, symbolized by Mr. Sympson and her various suitors. Caroline, without her own prospects and dependent on her uncle, is not so fortunate.

Consider then the rebuke Caroline suffers after questioning her uncle about her parents:

"Caroline," said Mr. Helstone, bringing his hand slowly down to within and inch or two of the table, and then smiting it suddenly on the mahogany, "understand this: it is vulgar and puerile to confound generals with particulars: in every case, there is the rule, and there are the exceptions. Your questions are stupid and babyish."⁴⁴

Such orders not only invoke silence literally, but are harsh rejoinders which serve to perpetuate the doubt inside of Caroline’s—or any woman’s—head. As Moglen argues, Caroline and Shirley are “trapped by forces within, by their own feelings of inferiority, by their adoption, largely unconscious, of the values of their society and the fantasies which support them.”⁴⁵ Therein is precisely the point of the hegemonic discourse: that it does not have to "brainwash" one, but rather, that it works in such a way that one will internalize the discourse, convincing those under its influence that they are not oppressed by the dominant forces, but are naturally inferior to them: a fact which becomes an "obvious truth" to both dominant and subordinate classes. Despite the fact that this hegemony is incomplete, that parts of it are not always invisible or hidden, or that women such as Shirley and Caroline might question facets of it, the conversations that they have, even in objecting, where women are put down or put second, as with Joe and Will, stick in their heads like a psychological adhesive: corroding their confidence, while strengthening their insecurities, until their acquiesce to the patriarchal system is enough to at least silence them, if not make them complicit.

Evidence of this effect can be seen when Helstone forbids Caroline to see her cousins Robert and Hortense. She is especially pained over the separation from Robert, who she loves dearly. Caroline considers sending her cousin letters to explain why she no longer visits him, but does not. The one or two that she actually does write, she never sends, such as “shame and good sense forbade.”⁴⁶ This sense of shame is a largely female trait. Louis does not feel shame over his feelings towards Shirley or his willingness to write about them. Certainly Robert and Helstone do not either. If Robert feels any shame, it is a kind of Christian shame, based on the treatment of his workers, which he readily disposes of with his full repentance; however, he never feels shame over his feelings. This shame, the kind of Puritan self-flagellating behavior is instilled into women who cannot "control their emotions:" a part of the silencing hegemonic discourse, which is designed to be self-enforcing.

Further complicating female agency is the issue of Shirley’s various courtships. For all her self-proclaimed agency and willingness to stand up to the Joe Scotts and Mr. Sympsons and Mr. Donnes, she ultimately tells her uncle that, “I will accept no hand which cannot hold me in check.”⁴⁷ Her uncle is justifiably surprised, as she has turned down several suitors already and he was starting to wonder if she would even wish to get married at all. She further says of one particular suitor that, “He would expect me always to rule—to guide, and I have no taste whatever for the office.” Mr. Sympson wishes her husband to be a real tyrant, to which she says one could not hold her, “not for an hour.” ⁴⁸

Indeed, this is what she expects from he whom her fancy rests upon, Louis. Yet when the time comes to claim her as his, he backs off in the same way that she expected her other suitors would. Nonetheless, she seems to accept him, albeit reluctantly. Louis seems to realize this when he says, “I lost her.”⁴⁹ Only he seems to forget this fact and move on anyway, masquerading as that master. Shirley confirms this later, when she reports to Caroline that Louis: “Would never have learned to rule, if she had not ceased to govern.”⁵⁰ In all of Shirley’s behavior, there seems to be a sense of inevitable inescapability. Of this ending, Mogler says that it is an, “Almost parodic comic ending, Brontë seems to suggest the sad inevitability of female oppresion.”⁵¹ Indeed, one further interaction seems to secure this assessment: Brontë’s representation of Rose and Martin Yorke and their relation as gendered creatures to the world around them.

Rose tells Caroline that she would not like to be shut up in a rectory, reading and sewing, and never seeing the world; her whole speech resonates back to Jane’s protestations that women need action. Caroline then asks:

"Is change necessary to happiness?"

"Yes."

"Is it synonymous with it?"

"I don’t know; but I feel monotony and death to be almost the same."

Here Jessie spoke.

"Isn’t she mad?"⁵²

Perhaps Brontë needed to include this last line to try to appease or distract conservative forces that might be critical of such a discussion or call it ‘unwomanly.’ Regardless, in having Jessie make this comment, she invokes the power of the medical community to certify the ethos of the dominant discourse: calling the dissonant voices "mad." Nonetheless, Rose and Caroline ignore Jessie.

"But Rose," pursued Caroline, "I fear a wanderer’s life, for me at least, would end like that tale you are reading, -- in disappointment, vanity, and vexation of spirit."

"Does 'The Italian' so end?"

"I thought so when I read it."

"Better to try all things and find all empty, than to try nothing and leave your life a blank. To do this is to commit the sin of him who buried his talent in a napkin – despicable sluggard!"

"Rose," observed Mrs. Yorke, "solid satisfaction is only to be realized by doing one’s duty."⁵³

After this remonstration, Rose becomes angry with her mother. She claims that she “will not” do any of the chores or duties of a woman that her mother wants her learn as training for her ‘womanly’ future. On further insistence, however, she answers to her mother that she will do all those things, saying that she is only twelve, but that when she is older, she will again rebel.⁵⁴ Yet this will not happen. By then, she will have become more fully inscribed by the dominant hegemonic discourse.

Just as Helstone called Caroline’s questions “stupid and babyish,” so are Rose’s comments considered: the elements of youth, easily washed away with time and ‘wisdom.’ While Brontë might have wished to think of Rose Yorke as herself as a child, or at the very least as some kind of future hope for the agency of women, it is obvious that she realized the futility in such claims. Rose will come to no more than Caroline or Shirley; she may protest, she may rebel, but eventually, she will acquiesce. Rose will fail because as long as there are women like her to protest, there will be women like her sister Jessie to call her mad or women like Mrs. Yorke to rebuke her, women who have already been fully inscribed by that discourse, and who will re-inscribe their sisters and children, just as there will also be men like Martin Yorke to keep them down. In helping Caroline sneak about to see the injured Robert Moore, Martin says to himself:

"I made her sob, shudder, almost faint: I’ll see her smile before I’ve done with her: besides I want to outwit all these womenites . . . I have power over her, and I want her to come that I may use that power . . . if she fails to come, I shall hate and scorn her."⁵⁵

Indeed, Brontë dedicates a whole chapter to Martin’s scheming, misogynist mind. This is because she wants to show that even young boys are inscribed not only with a sense of power over women, but with a hunger for it, and that if women deny them the use of that power, then men will hate them for it.

It is not that Rose and Martin Yorke are overtly integral to the plot, but rather that they prove the completeness of the dominant hegemonic power, and show that though one may try to resist it, as Rose, one will ultimately fail: just as Caroline and Shirley did. The two women’s romantic plots, long having overtaken the political component of the novel, resolve in typical male-female relations, where Robert is to become the premier manufacturer of the land and Louis is involved in politics, with the women left at home. Robert, in particular, has a Christian redemption similar to Rochester’s in Jane Eyre, only not as pronounced or effective; between that and the marriages, the entire novel resolves in the normalcy it once sought to fight. As Harsh says, “Brontë has demonstrated throughout Shirley that there is no other way for women to exist in English society.”⁵⁶ Although, in Shirley, Brontë strove to find a sense of female agency, she ultimately failed, gave up, and resolved the novel with a conventional ending.

Conclusion

To some, Brontë was a tool of the hegemonic discourse discussed in this essay, to whom her characters’ failings represented a lack of effort on her part. Yet, with each closer examination, this seems to be a faulty argument. A close analysis indicates not that Charlotte Brontë wanted to give in to that discourse or that her writing did not act as an exploration for a way out of it, but rather that she simply could not find a counter to that dominant discourse. The male authority, so strong in her life—as well as in that of her characters’—stemmed from religion, law, tradition, family, and all other cultural facets. It was a combination of forces which she alone could not defeat.

The question as to whether Brontë was a feminist or not must be answered with a resounding yes. Some have used the term "protofeminism" and perhaps that is a better term. Brontë was able to deliver to the masses a female viewpoint, rife with female concerns and insecurities. Although it is one that failed to produce even a hope for female agency, the mere suggestion of it proved influential. Too often, even growing up in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, women are not afforded a direct point of view or even visible role-models. Most entertainment outlets are still male-centric, be they books, movies, television shows, sports, or even comic books. At the very least, Brontë provided that female point of view and engaged in an active effort to create a woman who was confident, brave, and successful. Even in her failure, she inspired others with the very possibility. In the end, the hegemony that worked against Brontë’s success could not keep her from succeeding merely by trying, nor from sharing those efforts with others. In that, she was a feminist. In that, Brontë did succeed by leaving a written legacy that helped penetrate the dominant hegemonic discourse.

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