Sara Zadrozny on nature and emotions – some reflections

It was a real delight (as always) to attend the Brussels Brontë Group talks on 12 October. Joanne Wilcock’s presentation on her various trips to Brontë-related sites was thoroughly enjoyable, but I was especially interested in Sara Zadrozny’s fascinating look at landscape, weather and emotions in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 

Whilst Joanne’s talk – “In the Footsteps of the Brontës in the North of England” – filled me with enthusiasm and made me want to hop onto the next plane to northern Britain, Dr Zadrozny’s presentation transported me right back to what seems a lifetime ago, when as an undergraduate student in the early 1990s I would immerse myself in Victorian poetry and literature, revelling in the best works that the period had to offer, with their rich metaphor and imagery, and having nerdy eureka moments on a regular basis with my friends, who were just as agog about it as I was. 

Although those days are long gone, I felt the familiar stirrings of excitement and sheer pleasure as I listened to Dr Zadrozny. Quoting passages from the three Brontë novels, she highlighted the sisters’ “Romantic” use of landscape and weather to reflect the emotional and psychological states of the characters. The Brontë children had been exposed to Romantic poetry and literature all their relatively short lives and it is no wonder that many Romantic themes and devices are reflected in their works. Dr Zadrozny also explained how this fit in with the notion of pathetic fallacy, a term coined by John Ruskin in 1856, to describe the assignment of human feelings to inanimate objects or nature. 

The presentation was split into two main sections: Trees and Storms and Gardens. In both, Dr Zadrozny analysed passages from the three novels to show how these natural phenomena are used to foreshadow events, reflect mood or emotion, portray sexuality and beauty, and at times even reflect advancements in the plot. Her main point: The Brontës saw and used nature “as symbolic of human emotion” and conceptualised “the imagination as a more comprehensive and inclusive faculty than reason alone.” 

Although it would have been impossible to outline in a one-hour presentation all the instances in which trees are used symbolically in the three novels, much is made – and in my opinion, rightly so – of the split tree in Jane Eyre; the broken bough in Wuthering Heights; and (especially interesting to my mind) the shrubbery where Helen Graham realises that her husband is carrying on an affair right under her very nose in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I must reproduce the quote from The Tenant to give it justice: 

“There he stood before me; but I had not strength to confront him now: my tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth; I was well-nigh sinking to the earth, and I almost wondered he did not hear the beating of my heart above the low sighing of the wind and the fitful rustle of the falling leaves.” 

Reading this, what sprang to my mind was that Helen was “turning into” a tree. She was frozen, and yet she is metamorphosing, almost physically. Her marriage was over, it was the end of any illusion she may have had about it, and just as Daphne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses turns into a laurel tree in order to escape the reality of Apollo’s impending violation of her body, so I saw Helen becoming one with nature in her moment of dire realisation. 

Apollo and Daphne by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Villa Borghese, Rome

Far-fetched? Perhaps. But the Romantic poets were certainly not unfamiliar with the Greek and Roman myths, and I cannot imagine the Brontës were either. Whilst it was probably not a conscious reference on Anne Brontë’s part, this is the image it evoked for this reader. 

Another of the audience members suggested during the question session at the end of the talk that the split tree in Jane Eyre was also a metaphor for the fact that although Jane and Rochester are brutally separated for a while, their love for each other is still there at the base. She also reminded us of another important moment towards the very end of the novel when Rochester says, '"I am no better than the old lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield orchard..." and Jane replies, "You are no ruin sir - no lightning-struck tree: you are green and vigorous…” 

To illustrate the use of gardens and flowers, Dr Zadrozny used the passage where Helen lays a rose on Gilbert’s palm in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, virtually amounting to a marriage proposal – the giving of herself to him. Another illustration she pointed to was the younger Catherine getting Hareton to clear out Joseph’s beloved blackcurrant bushes in order to make room for a flower bed in Wuthering Heights – the symbolic casting aside of the old prickly and uncomfortable order, making way for the bloom and beauty of young love and the new order of things. 

“The Victorians were aware that floral ‘blooming’ was associated with a woman’s sexuality and beauty,” Dr Zadrozny said. This immediately brought to mind (well, my mind at least) Tennyson’s Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, from The Princess: A Medley. Published in 1847, the same year as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, it beautifully exemplifies the metaphorical use of nature to portray sexuality, particularly the female as the petals slumber, and the lily folds her sweetness up in order to lose herself in her lover: 

 

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; 

Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; 

Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font. 

The firefly wakens; waken thou with me. 

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost, 

And like a ghost she glimmers on to me. 

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars, 

And all thy heart lies open unto me. 

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves 

A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me. 

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, 

And slips into the bosom of the lake. 

So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip 

Into my bosom and be lost in me.

According to Dr Zadrozny, in Jane Eyre, Jane describes part of the gardens at Thornfield in terms which on one level could be read as erotic, and she walks about in an almost trance-like state until finally aware of the “warning fragrance” which of course heralds the presence of Mr Rochester. 

I was rather surprised that what I’ve always thought of as the “foliage speech” by Catherine in Wuthering Heights, and which I consider to be the quintessence of the subject of the presentation, was not mentioned. Here I quote part of it: “My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff!” 

Of course, as I mentioned above, time constraints made it impossible to cover all instances in the novel, and one might consider that the blackcurrant bush episode is more elusive and less “famous.” So perhaps that is why Dr Zadrozny chose it over its more famous counterpart. 

All in all, I left the auditorium and stepped into the grey autumn Brussels streets feeling that it had been a morning well spent, in excellent company and one which had set off lots of ideas which were then swarming about in my head. I knew that on getting home I would be having a good long think about Jane, Catherine and Helen. 

  Georgette Cutajar