Juvenalia: Angria & Gondal
Topic 23 · 16 responses · archived october 2000
~amy2
Tue, Aug 19, 1997 (23:31)
seed
Did you know that the Brontes had already written a wealth of material before they became published novelists & poets?
At first, they all created "Glasstown" when Branwell was given a present of 12 wooden soldiers by his father, and they invented "the Young Men's Plays" around them.
Then came Angria, an imaginary world invented by Charlotte & Branwell.
Did you know that Mr. Rochester owes more than a little to the Charlotte's Angrian hero, the Duke of Zamorna? That the prototype to Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Hastings, also began in Angria?
Emily & Anne had their own world -- Gondal. Many of Emily's published poems were written for Gondal but had the references edited out. Wuthering Heights uses many "Gondalian" themes, like: childhood lovers who are then separated; grieving over a beloved's grave; choosing an Earthly Paradise over Heaven.
Even in THEIR TWENTIES, Emily & Anne would still pretend to be Gondal characters when they took a train trip to York; and it so upset Charlotte that she couldn't write about her "infernal world," Angria, that she basically had a nervous breakdown while teaching at Roe Head & had to come home?
Many clues to the Brontes' later works can be found in their juvenalia.
~rochelle
Mon, Aug 25, 1997 (00:15)
#1
It's been a topic of debate for some time as to just how
much of Emily's poetry can be attributed to Gondal. At one
extreme it is believed that Gondal is responsible for all
her poetic output. Others limit the Gondal cycle to only those
poems she transcribed in her notebook labeled "Gondal Poems".
An interesting - and vexing - question is what happened to the
prose component of the saga. Did Emily or Anne destroy it themselves?
Or, as Edward Chitham and others have proposed, did Charlotte
destroy these works, along with Emily's unfinished novel, because
Emily was moving to a socio/political stance that shocked Charlotte?
~amy2
Mon, Aug 25, 1997 (10:46)
#2
Barker also makes this claim that Charlotte destroyed Emily's 2nd novel; however, she fails to back it up with a single fact beyond conjecture. I just can't imagine it, to tell you the truth -- she loved Emily so much & her death was just a loss & devastation to her -- would she then have destroyed a product of Emily's hand? She may not have wanted to see it PUBLISHED, but I have a really hard time picturing her putting the mss. to the fire. Unless he was out of her mind with grief & a desire to 'prote
t' her sister...
~Rochelle
Mon, Aug 25, 1997 (22:03)
#3
You're quite right about the conjecture - once more, we enter that nebulous
realm of inference that is fascinating and frustrating. I do believe that
Charlotte was capable of destroying those texts in order to defend her
carefully constructed version of Emily - to protect her sister, as you pointed
out. It was Charlotte who believed that an interpreter ought always to have
stood between Emily and the world. It's difficult to reconstruct just how
revolutionary Emily had become - Chitham makes a very powerful argument for
the influence of Shelly on her work, and suggests that she had been moving to
a "Shellyian" socio-political stance. We also know that Charlotte believed
Emily was a theorist, who came up with ideas not always (in Charlotte's eyes)
practical. As Charlotte conceded, Emily's reason often travelled a different
road from hers. And Charlotte certainly did find her sister's novel
disturbing. Those missing texts are one of the really frustrating points of
Bronte research. Maybe Arthur Bell Nicholls destroyed them? I imagine he went
through quite a few of his beloved wife's papers, and he did destroy the
"Gun Group" painting (thank God the Emily portrait survived).
~amy2
Tue, Aug 26, 1997 (10:31)
#4
I agree that Charlotte loved to have her own way, & Emily frustrated her by refusing to follow her lead, for the most part. But I have a hard time envisioning a writer who was completely commited to her Art destroying another writer's mss., especially a sister who meant so much to her.
Charlotte wrote in 1849: (Anne's death)...�did not rend my heart as Emily�s stern, simple, undemonstrative end did. I let Anne go to God, and felt he had a right to her; I could hardly let Emily go - I wanted to hold her back then, and I want her back now.�
~Rochelle
Wed, Aug 27, 1997 (01:54)
#5
That passage Charlotte wrote about Emily is possibly the most moving in all her
correspondence, along some others on Emily's death. How incredibly painful it must
have been to her to suggest her sister's absolute absence - "Yes, there is no more Emily
in time or earth now". Her descriptions about how Emily reluctantly turned her dying
eyes from the sun are especially poignant.
Charlotte also wrote of Emily that she now and then "broaches ideas which strike my
sense as much more daring and original than practical; his reason may be in advance of
mine, but certainly it often travels a different road." Charlotte not only ommitted verses
of her sister's poetry when she published it, she also added her own lines and verses to their
poetry without identifiying them as her own, which would have been complete anathema to Emily.
Why did the poetry of the Juvenalia survive and not the prose? Why have none of Emily's other
papers survived? The candidates for their destruction are few - Emily herself, Anne, Charlotte,
their father (who would not have been able to read the "Bronte small script" and so would not
have known what he was destroying) or Arthur Bell Nicholls.
~amy2
Wed, Aug 27, 1997 (10:45)
#6
There's no doubt that Emily's death affected Charlotte as even Anne's could not. She just felt such an incredibly strong bond of love with her, & I think in some ways, she feared her "power." (reports from Brussels were that Charlotte let herself be ordered around by Emily).
As far as the Gondal prose...it IS puzzling that none has survived when we have so much Angria. Even those unscrupulous treasure hunters who talked Mr. B. out of the 'little books' surely would have sold them to the highest bidder.
We DO know that Nicholls destroyed most of Branwell's painting of the Brontes; and that he wanted Ellen Nussey to burn all of Charlotte's letters.
Charlotte's main literary crime was altering her sister's poetry -- she was trying to remove the Gondal references, but I agree that she went too far. Would it have been Emily herself? Would she have had any reason to destroy her mss. before her death? Or Anne, perhaps rent by religious melancholia?
~Rochelle
Mon, Sep 8, 1997 (02:51)
#7
It could have been either Emily or Anne, but I have a feeling that if either of them had
had been inclined to destroy their work, they would have gone all the way and destroyed the
poems as well. Nicholls was selective in what he destroyed, as we see in the "Gun Group"
portrait where he preserved the Emily fragment. Perhaps he felt Emily's paper's needed a
similar evisceration - something was so challenging in what Emily wrote that I feel someone
felt the need to destroy them. Had WH not been in print, I wouldn't be surprised if it would
have met the same fate. There probably weren't many personal letters Emily wrote save those to her
sisters. She wrote one to Ellen Nussey that a proper letter was a feat she had never yet
accomplished, which makes it fairly clear she had no intention of starting then.
She did write to her sisters and Branwell, because their correspondence refers to her letters.
Perhaps she imparted some of her phillosophy in these letters, and at some point
someone in the family thought it best to dispose of them. Letters are such private things, so
perishable even in an age that hoarded them. Think of the narrow escape Charlotte's Heger
letters had.
~amy2
Mon, Sep 8, 1997 (10:55)
#8
Yes -- it's incredible to think that Madam Heger actually SEWED THEM BACK TOGETHER AGAIN after Monsieur tore them up. Why? Was she a glutton for punishment? The loss of letters that really saddens me are Charlotte's to Mary Taylor. Ellen Nussey was C.'s "conventional friend," but C. probably would have poured out her heart to Mary -- about Heger, her views on literature, the Woman Question, etc. I think we would know so much more about C. if only Mary hadn't burned those letters! Oh well -- she was
ust trying to protect her friend's privacy. Her intentions were good.
~Rochelle
Tue, Oct 21, 1997 (00:01)
#9
There's a book I'd love to get my claws on, and would appreciate anyone who could
advise me on. "Gondal's Queen", by Fannie Ratchford (1955), one of the first serious
attempts to reconstruct the Gondal Cycle.
Ratchford was a little indiscriminate in choosing what was Gondal verse and what
wasn't, but by all accounts it's a good read.
I've tried my hand at reconstructing Gondal, or even a bare chronology of the events
in the poems from the slight clues in the titles and poems themselves, and came
to two conclusions. (a) In spite of the efforts of several scholars since the poems
became widely available in Hatfields "The Complete Poems Of Emily Bronte" in 1941m
no completely plausible reconstruction has been completed and (b) such a reconstruction,
covering the various fragments of the story we have, is impossible.
It is entirely possible, even probable, that Emily and Anne experimented with
multiple, even contradictory, plot resolutions.
Do people believe AGA, Geraldine, GS and Rosina Alcona or any combination of the
above are the same person?
~amy2
Tue, Oct 21, 1997 (12:34)
#10
Elena:
I guess part of the problem is that the poems in the "A" and "B" books of Emily are not necessarily divided along straight Gondal/non-Gondal lines?
I read somewhere that Emily left us an 'atlas' of Gondal which she scribbed in the pages of a real atlas? This doesn't help with reconstructing the prose saga though...
~Rochelle
Mon, Nov 10, 1997 (23:06)
#11
Sorry Amy, my response to the above seems to have gone astray when I first sent
it. Anne did scribble some geographical names in an atlas, along with a few
descriptive lines, and it is one of the few clues we have. For example, we know
from this source that Gondal was a large island in the North Pacific and Gaaldine
was a large island in the South Pacific newly discovered and colonised from
Gondal. Emily left a list of minor Gondal characters with a description of their
physical appearance. Unfortunately, only one of the characters, Flora, appears
in the poetry.
The notebook question is a source of ongoing debate. Emily did designate one
of the books "Gondal Poems". The controversy is over the contents of the other
notebook - did she include Gondal poems in that one as well?
~amy2
Tue, Nov 11, 1997 (13:56)
#12
Right. That's what I had read -- how accurate was the distinction bet. her two notebooks? Speaking of which, how mad do you think Emily was when she discovered that Charlotte had read her poems? C. makes it sound like it created a major row & she had to do some heavy persuading (with Anne's help) to get Emily to come round to the publishing idea. I wonder if Emily ever would have published if not for the ambitions of C....
~Rochelle
Tue, Nov 11, 1997 (18:49)
#13
I don't think she would have published. I think she was absolutely and utterly
furious with Charlotte. You get these little hints about some of the disputes
they must have had - like the time Charlotte took Anne up to London to give
her publishers "ocular proof" that the Bells were three different people. She
inadvertantly let Emily's identity slip, and the letter she wrote after she
returned home and informed Emily of this seems to hint that Emily was utterly
and completely outraged.
Still, I think Charlotte was probably correct when she said Emily was not without
some "honourable ambition" when it came to getting published. If Emily had remained
utterly opposed to having her poetry published she would not have worked to
eliminate the Gondal references. If she really hadn't wanted to cooperate in
the project, I don't think any force on earth could have induced her to
change her mind.
~amy2
Wed, Nov 12, 1997 (11:18)
#14
Yes, the letter Charlotte wrote to Smith later about not letting Emily's identity slip in any further correspondence shows how furious Emily must have been. I do agree that if Emily didn't want to publish, than nothing or no one could have persuaded her. Considering how resolute she was in her final illness, I think we can safely say she wasn't amenable to persuasion...
~Rochelle
Thu, Nov 13, 1997 (18:32)
#15
Charlotte certainly understood that about her sister. If the context wasn't
so tragic, her comments in that letter to the specialist about Emily's final
illness would almost have been amusing. I don't have the lines in front of me,
but you know the remarks I'm talking about? Something along the lines of if
you want Emily to take up a position, don't try and persuade her into it. More
often then not, she was capable of arguing herself out of it.
~amy2
Fri, Nov 14, 1997 (13:29)
#16
Yeah, it went something like -- if you want her to come around to your point of view, then take the opposite tack...