{"id":145936,"date":"2020-07-06T13:22:20","date_gmt":"2020-07-06T17:22:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=145936"},"modified":"2020-07-06T13:54:08","modified_gmt":"2020-07-06T17:54:08","slug":"into-the-narrow-home-below","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/07\/06\/into-the-narrow-home-below\/","title":{"rendered":"Into the Narrow Home Below"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Branwell Bront\u00eb, The Bront\u00eb Sisters (Anne Bront\u00eb; Emily Bront\u00eb; Charlotte Bront\u00eb)<\/em>, ca. 1834, oil on canvas, 35 1\/2 x 29 1\/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

Well there are many ways of being held prisoner.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Anne Carson, \u201cThe Glass Essay\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Twenty years ago, the writer Douglas A. Martin was a student in my fiction workshop at the New School. He was in his early twenties then, an extravagantly gifted young man who sometimes wore a white feather boa to class, his face regularly shining with tiny bits of pink glitter. His stories about young gay men struggling for a place in this world, erotically and artistically, were shot through with a raw and supple longing.<\/p>\n

Martin often came to my office hours, where we\u2019d talk about books and films. I learned about his childhood in Georgia and his alcoholic father, a man he was estranged from and hadn\u2019t seen since he was little. In one of these discussions we talked about the Bront\u00ebs. I was doing research for a talk on Wuthering Heights<\/em>. I\u2019d been surprised, as Martin was, to hear the Bront\u00ebs had a brother. Branwell was a ginger, with \u201ca mass of red hair, which he wore brushed high off his forehead \u2026 to help his height.\u201d He fancied flowing white shirts and was both freckled and bespeckled. \u201cSmall but well formed,\u201d he was unable to control his emotions and had spells of what was called then hysteria. His friend, the sculptor Joseph Leyland, said Branwell\u2019s conversation, his \u201cbeautiful and flowery language,\u201d he \u201cnever saw equaled.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like his sisters, Branwell wrote poetry and he sent poems along with long, pleading, naive letters to the literary men of the day\u2014Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Coleridge\u2014asking for feedback, for affirmation, even for love. In one letter to Wordsworth, which the great man kept but did not answer, Branwell wrote: \u201cI most earnestly entreat you to read and pass your judgment upon what I have sent you, because from the day of my birth to this the nineteenth year of my life I have lived among wild and secluded hills where I could neither know what I was or what I could do\u2014I read for the same reason I ate or drank\u2014because it was a real craving of Nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Martin was drawn to Branwell\u2019s feminine qualities. \u201cThe idea that being a poet,\u201d Martin tells me, \u201cone could be fem.\u201d He did some research of his own and decided to write Branwell: A Novel of the Bront\u00eb Brother<\/em>. The Bront\u00eb siblings\u2019 intense circle fascinated him\u2014the way they bled into one another. In Wuthering Heights<\/em>, Catherine is<\/em> Heathcliff, and Branwell, it seems, was<\/em> his sisters, leaning into their gender and leading their literary aspirations. He was the first to publish poems in the local newspapers, first to cut the path toward a life of letters. The Bront\u00eb boy was grandiose, emotionally unstable, and eventually a drug addict, but his model of creative engagement opened up a dream space that Emily, Charlotte, and Anne walked into without him, an imaginary room his sisters eventually made their own. <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

What are People of the Book but irrepressible embroiderers of fetishized texts?<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Judith Shulevitz, \u201cThe Bront\u00ebs\u2019 Secret\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI see no reason not to consider the Bront\u00eb cult a religion,\u201d writes Judith Shulevitz. She calls the thousands of books inspired by the Bront\u00ebs midrash<\/em>, \u201cthe spinning of gloriously weird backstories or fairy tales prompted by gaps or contradictions in the narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n

Martin\u2019s Branwell<\/em> dilates one such gap: the \u201cunspeakable acts\u201d Branwell was said to have committed at Thorp Green. In both Daphne du Maurier\u2019s 1962 The Infernal World of Branwell Bront<\/em>\u00eb and Martin\u2019s book, Branwell\u2019s claim of an affair with his employer\u2019s wife, Mrs. Robinson, is seen as a screen for a homosexual liaison. The scholar Richard A. Kaye calls Branwell<\/em> a queer speculative biography. He suggests that \u201cqueering the Bront\u00ebs often involves an imaginative disregard for the available evidence regarding Bront\u00eb\u2019s family secrets in order to take advantage of unresolved biographical cul-de-sacs.\u201d<\/p>\n

The less disputed biographical events in Branwell\u2019s life are mostly sad. His mother, Maria, died when he was four. \u201cFor seven months,\u201d Martin writes, \u201cshe suffered waiting only for Jesus to take her.\u201d His father, the reverend Patrick Bront\u00eb, tells his young son that his mother\u2019s holiness has been envied by their enemy, the devil, that this is why his mother yells out, swears, and is often incoherent. Two years later his older sister Maria, who had served as a surrogate mother, also died. Branwell remembered being lifted up so he could see her in the coffin. \u201cDown, down they lowered her, sad and slow,\u201d Branwell will write in a later poem, \u201cInto the narrow home below.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Bront\u00eb children\u2019s grief was channeled into what Charlotte would later describe as \u201cscribblemania.\u201d Anne, Emily, Charlotte, and Branwell had their own room on the top floor of the parsonage, known as the Children\u2019s Study. There they read the newspaper every day, as well as books about British history and Greek mythology. They perused literary magazines like Blackwood\u2019s Edinburgh Magazine<\/em> and church newsletters. They also created their own newspaper, The Monthly Intelligencer<\/em>, and published small books using stray paper. They covered these books with bits from sugar bags, parcel wrappings, and wallpaper, and developed a tiny script that looked like newsprint.<\/p>\n

\u201cChildhood,\u201d Martin writes, \u201cwas Branwell\u2019s kingdom to rule over.\u201d The Bront\u00eb children\u2019s sagas revolved around a set of toy soldiers that their father gave his son. In an early text written when Branwell was only eight, he creates an origin story from the point of view of the tiny soldiers. \u201cAn immense and terrible monster his head touched the clouds was encircled with a red and fairy halo.\u201d Branwell is the ginger-haired giant carrying the soldiers to his sister\u2019s bedroom.<\/p>\n

Martin\u2019s Branwell, as he moves into adolescence, is under pressure to move away from fantasy into the world of adult achievement. He is expected to make a name for himself as an artist or a writer and to eventually support himself as well as his siblings. \u201cThey will try to give him a certain status, as their real achievement.\u201d \u201cBranwell was to be the pride and joy of them all.\u201d \u201cThey\u2019d have to make something of him.\u201d The weight is constant, even haunting. \u201cHe can hear his father in the other room committing another sermon to memory. They are pinning their hopes on Branwell, all of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The narrative encloses Branwell in rising familial expectation while also exploring his vulnerability, grief, and bewilderment. The brother cannot break away from his witchy, powerful sisters. Even his first feelings of sexual attraction are mediated by them: \u201cIf Charlotte could see him, staring at the broadness of the chests of other men, she might make fun of him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Branwell\u2019s desire for men is in keeping with his sisters\u2019 desire for men, though unlike his sisters he cannot transpose that desire for men onto a story. His passion could not be elevated, transformed, and redeemed, as in Wuthering Heights<\/em> and Jane Eyre<\/em>, because for him to love a man physically in the early nineteenth century was to face not just ostracism and ridicule but possible death.<\/p>\n

In Queer City<\/em>, Peter Ackroyd reports that after the 1533 Buggery Act passed in England \u201cyou could die for deeds done in the dark.\u201d Between 1806 and 1835, more than eighty men were hanged for sodomy. After one large raid on the back room of the \u201cmolly house\u201d The White Swan, a mob gathered outside the building where the men were being held. When the prisoners were moved, \u201cbutcher boys threw dead cats, turnip heads and other garbage.\u201d One spectator reported that the men resembled \u201cbears dipped in a stagnant pool \u2026 their faces were completely disfigured by blows and mud.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I had woken in a small pool. Several cattle had wandered into my shelter after me and stood at the far side watching me as I woke and then rose.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Robert Edric, Sanctuary<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Life at the Black Bull bar, a masculine circle of storytelling and lively conversation, finally pulled Branwell from the world of his childhood. \u201cDrinking, he no longer acted like his sisters,\u201d Martin writes. \u201cBranwell, the minister\u2019s son, he\u2019s the wildest boy in town!\u201d His drinking leads to blackouts. \u201cA penniless debauchee rose from the floor of a rather sordid inn and realized this was where he\u2019d spent the night.\u201d<\/p>\n

Martin has said that Wuthering Heights<\/em> had a profound effect on him as a teenager\u2014\u201cI became fixated on the color of my edition, this shade of pink\u201d\u2014but it was Jean Rhys\u2019s Wide Sargasso Sea <\/em>that brought the Bront\u00ebs\u2019 project to life and showed him how to lay his own emotional landscape on top of a fictional character. The novel tells the backstory of Antoinette, the first Mrs. Rochester from Jane Eyre<\/em>. Rhys, like Branwell, was an alcoholic; The Blue Hour<\/em>, by Lilian Pizzichini, describes how she once threw a brick through her landlord\u2019s window because his dog had killed her cat, Dr. Wu. How after a bottle of red wine, she\u2019d pin her husband\u2019s World War I medals on her nightgown and go into the streets shouting, \u201cWings up! Wings up!\u201d Rhys, Pizzichini explains, found \u201cinner peace\u201d whenever she was in crisis: \u201cat the bottom of the abyss was where she belonged \u2026 no one could push her down any further.\u201d<\/p>\n

As failures pile up for Branwell\u2014he blows all his money on a trip to London where he was meant to enroll in the Royal Academy of Arts; he gets fired from a job with the railroad for embezzling money, then fired again at Thorp Green\u2014he tries opium. Soon he is addicted. \u201cA wretched black bottle, their sister Charlotte says, has become his means of release.\u201d<\/p>\n

Opium was as common in Victorian England as spirits, and cheaper. In 1830, in the years just before Branwell tried the drug, British dependency on opium for medical and recreational use reached an all-time high, as 22,000 pounds were imported from Turkey and India. Still, addiction in Branwell\u2019s time was \u201ccold debauchery\u201d and \u201ca disease of the will.\u201d The bondage was recognized but not the fact that humans are bonding creatures\u2014Branwell could no longer bond with his sisters, so he bonded with drugs and alcohol.<\/p>\n

Charlotte had not spoken to Branwell for two years at the time of his death. Only Emily continued to care for her brother, helping him up the stairs when he came home drunk and sitting by his bed as he slept. Carolyne Van Der Meer suggests in her essay on the roots of Wuthering Heights<\/em> that Heathcliff may have also been an opium addict. She points to his \u201ctremors, loss of appetite, obsession with Catherine.\u201d Emily continued to care for Branwell even as paranoia set in\u2014he thinks a wolf trails him and is so convinced someone wants to kill him that he carries a knife in his sleeve. According to Van Der Meer, Emily \u201crecreated Branwell in the body of Heathcliff to give her brother, though a fictional portrayal, the dignity he lacked in life.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Branwell\u2019s last months, Charlotte wrote in a letter to a friend that \u201che leads papa a wretched life.\u201d Both the addict and their loved ones suffer. In the margins of Modern Domestic Medicine <\/em>by Thomas J. Graham, the Dr. Spock of the Victorian age, Branwell\u2019s father, Patrick, adds to the section on Insanity or Mental Derangement: \u201cdelirium tremens brought on sometimes by intoxication\u2014the patient thinks himself haunted: by demons, sees luminous substances in his imagination, has frequent tremors of the limbs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of Martin\u2019s most beautiful passages describe Branwell\u2019s drug use. Victorians did not get high or stoned but elevated<\/em>. \u201cNow things were more vivid, the presence of objects near more exaggerated, the outlines of people, places, things more distinct, as if lost a bit in golden mist, as he tried to pin the sun of a summer shining down \u2026 alone in his room, a world of wild roses opening up under the yellow.\u201d And: \u201cThe opium helps him feel his own suffering. It courses through him in dreams the opium helps bring, dreams that turn the tender look of Emily\u2019s face a bit softer \u2026 a bit more toward the motherly, like the skin of a peach.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I know only that it was time for me to be something when I was nothing.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014from Branwell Bront\u00eb\u2019s letters<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the last pages of Martin\u2019s book, as Branwell falls deeper into nothingness, he imagines a liaison between himself and his young charge at Thorp Green, Edmund. I have taught Branwell<\/em> for ten years in my literature seminar at the New School. Every year one of my students will take the Bront\u00eb son\u2019s reverie as reality and call him a pervert and a child molester. Martin addresses the readers\u2019 deep unease. \u201cDear Reader, you want to be told now that you\u2019ve understood. That he might be doing just what you think he might be, and in just what way, you want to be sure.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt makes a man a beggar,\u201d Martin writes, \u201cnot having the right words for his feelings.\u201d Branwell saw no reparative way forward. He could not, with his illicit inchoate desire, sublimate, as his sisters did, his life into art.<\/p>\n

Instead, Branwell served as muse. Not the traditional female muse who inspired the male artist with her beauty, her ethereal angelic soul as well as her sexual favors, but a dark and raging spirit, a drug addict in an endless struggle. A struggle that included scenes of raw need, bloody disappointment, a struggle that frustrated and even horrified his sisters, but one that also gave life to their most compelling characters: Emily\u2019s Heathcliff and also her Hindley, and the alcoholic husband Arthur Huntingdon in Anne\u2019s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall<\/em>, even Charlotte\u2019s wild women in the attic. In Jane Eyre<\/em>, Jane sees the fire in Mr. Rochester\u2019s bedroom but not the arsonist. \u201cTongues of flame darted around the bed: the curtains were on fire.\u201d In Wide Sargasso Sea<\/em>, we get to see Mrs. Rochester moving down from the attic, carrying her candle. She\u2019s made a life inside of loss. There are no more acts of self-love, only ones of desperation and violence. \u201cNow at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do. There must have been a draught for the flame flickered and I thought it was out. But I shielded it with my hand and it burned up again to light me along the dark passage.\u201d In Martin\u2019s book, Branwell also starts fires.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I used to think, if I could have for a week the free range of the British Museum\u2014the Library included\u2014I could feel as though I were placed for seven days in paradise but now really Dear Sir, my eyes would roam over the Elgin marbles, the Egyptian Salon and the most treasured volumes like the eyes of a dead codfish.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014from Branwell Bront\u00eb\u2019s letters<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Even as a boy, Martin told me, he understood his father drank because of the pressures on him. The weight. \u201cHe drank because he couldn\u2019t take care of us.\u201d Branwell could not take care of himself or his sisters, so in the Bront\u00eb parsonage the father Patrick cares for his dying son, taking him into his bed where he can watch over him and keep him safe. Branwell <\/em>shows Martin, the son, extending empathy to the alcoholic father. Failure is not to be judged and ridiculed but rather serves as a conduit to grace.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were only happy with Branwell when he\u2019d tried to please them,\u201d Martin writes. \u201cThe only feelings they\u2019d keep were the ones they wanted him to feel. He didn\u2019t dare hope for forgiveness, as fate became an increasingly darkening thing, didn\u2019t dare ask.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Darcey Steinke is the author of <\/em>Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life, the memoir <\/em>Easter Everywhere, and five novels: <\/em>Sister Golden Hair, <\/em>Milk, <\/em>Jesus Saves, <\/em>Suicide Blonde, and <\/em>Up through the Water. Her books have been translated into ten languages, and her nonfiction has appeared widely. She has taught at the New School, Columbia University School of the Arts, New York University, Princeton, and the American University of Paris. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2020 from the introduction to <\/em>Branwell: A Novel of the Bront\u00eb Brother<\/a>. Reprinted by permission of Soft Skull Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Douglas A. Martin\u2019s novel \u2018Branwell\u2019 dilates the biographical gaps in the life of the tragic Bront\u00eb brother.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1783,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nInto the Narrow Home Below by Darcey Steinke<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Douglas A. 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