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Catherine Lowell: The Madwoman Upstairs (Book Review)
Now I have a thing about the Brontes , I like clever meta fiction, especially with a sense of humor, and I loved A.S. Byatt's novel Possession (one reason why I disliked the movie version), which imprinted me on literary scavenger hunts. Which is why I expected to feel more for this book than I did. My reasons for not going from "like" to "love" are mostly nitpicky in nature, so I will discuss them beneath a spoiler cut.
But first, some above cut impressions: the book's premise quickly summed up: Samantha Whipple (love the name), fictional American last living descendant of the Bronte family (via one of Patrick Bronte's Irish siblings), comes to Oxford still traumatized by her beloved father's death, in between snark sessions with her new tutor gets mysterious messages via her father's supposedly burned copies of the Bronte novels being dropped off in her room by parties unknown, and has to figure out how it's all connected while dodging obsessed Bronte collectors and the press alike. It's a first person narrated novel (of course it is), playing with a lot of Bronte motives but completely accessible if you're not familiar with the novels, offers some refreshing twists to the expected heroine characterisation (for example: Samantha is a daddy's girl who idolized her late father and blamed her mother for leaving, but her mother is alive, not dead, and in the course of the novel Samantha comes to understand her far differently and better), and by picking Anne in particular as the Bronte sister to champion does its bit for Anne's by far not as neglected anymore as she used to be decades ago but still not as entrenched in the popular consciousness as the the others cause. I laughed at the in text digs at literary criticism and a certain type of collector and was very amused by Samantha's worthy-of-Victorian-sensation-novels theory about Anne and Charlotte. Samantha's final conclusion in that regard is progress for her within the novel's world, and the ending is - imo, though looking at reviews they seem to have taken it as literary true, which surprised me given all the in text discussions about unreliable narrators before - a clever twist on just that.
But here's what my inner nitpicker complaining throughout the book: For someone who supposedly was obsessed with the Brontes in her adolescence to the point of knowing which shoes they wore before getting jaded, Samantha comes across as entirely ignorant of, oh, only a century or so of both popular and literary reception and scholarship of and about them. She references "The Madwoman in the Attic" but appears to have read only the Jane Eyre related part of it, and no essay about Wuthering Heights ever in any volume, if she thinks that pointing out Wuthering Heights isn't a romantic love story and Heathcliff isn't meant as a romantic hero is new. (Ditto for the incest theory which her tutor springs on her, and Samantha is shocked, SHOCKED. Again, speculation that Mr. Earnshaw didn't just happen to stumble across an orphan in Liverpool is very old indeed.) And given that the incident where drunken Branwell almost died by setting his bed on fire is such a lynchpin in Samantha's theory about Anne and Charlotte, it's really weird that she claims not to know when exactly it took place, i.e. before or after the publication of Jane Eyre. It's not like, say, Juliet Barker's magisterial biography, available since the mid 1990s, deals with that in great detail... oh, wait.
This is as good a place to lay out said theory as any, which is wildly entertaining if not very workeable - and btw, I think Catherine Lowell makes it very clear that Samantha is projecting her own issues - : in Samantha's opinion, Charlotte "stole" Jane Eyre from Anne. It went thusly: Anne has Jane like experiences as a governess in Thorp Green, returns to Haworth, writes a first draft of a novel based on this while Emily writes Wuthering Heights and Charlotte writes her own first novel, the unpublished in her life time The Professor. Charlotte realizes Anne's story is the far better one, uses her authority as older sister to browbeat Anne into writing a much watered down and dull second draft, Agnes Grey as we know it, while she writes Jane Eyre based on Anne's original story. At some point when she realises this is going on, an outraged Anne tries to avenge herself by setting Charlotte's bed on fire. The whole incident is passed off as having happened to Branwell, because Branwell as a drunk would do stuff like this. Jane Eyre becomes a bestseller; Anne's second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, is Charlotte-uncensored when it appears and becomes a bestseller as well, but then Anne dies, and Charlotte (this part is true) makes sure Tenant doesn't get republished again (within Charlotte's life time, that is) because of ongoing jealousy.
(Sidenote: fun as this is, we happen to know in great detail just when and how Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre. It was after The Professor, together with Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights, had already been sent to and rejected by publishers, though her later publisher was intrigued enough by The Professor to write a rejection letter of the "if you have something else..." type. Charlotte had gone for weeks with her father Patrick while the later got his long delayed eye operation - he was almost blind at that point - and was recuperating from this; all of which gave Charlotte some unaccustomed spare time far away from the parsonage, which she filled with writing Jane Eyre. Again, for a supposed Bronte expert, the dates should be very clear. I already mentioned the date of the bed burning being easily available. As for it happening to Charlotte, not Branwell, Samantha's big argument for this is that Branwell afterwards in his few remaining weeks of life doesn't come across as sufficiently traumatized, whereas Charlotte was careful not to have any inflammable curtains around in her few remaining years of life. Um. Branwell was raving during his last weeks of life and Patrick was so worried about the incident repeating that he took to sleeping in the same bed with him. This isn't a nitpick, btw, because as I said, the novel makes it pretty clear Samantha is filling her own emotional need with the idea of Anne Bronte the Avenger and TRUE (not so) Mad Woman in the Attic, and ignores all that doesn't fit with this. )
Samantha through most of the novel is a big proponent of the "all writing is autobiographical" standpoint, and while this makes for constant arguments with her tutor, he amazingly never uses the term "death of the author" when refuting her and standing by his "authorial intention is irrelevant, let the text speak for itself" approach. At the end, when Samantha - BIG SPOILER ALERT - has found what appears to be an actual diary of Anne Bronte, she comes to realise he's right, or rather: the Anne she sees at a quick glance before she decides to stop reading doesn't match the Anne in her head, and the Anne in her head as well as her own interpretations of the Bronte novels are what sustains her. So she chooses the later and abandons the need to justify it via biographical backup. This is big progress for Samantha and works within the book, but again: for someone supposedly obsessed with literature, not just the Brontes, how come this whole debate between how to approach textual analysis has passed her by before coming to Oxford?
(Incidentally: one neatly and deliberately ironic aspect of the novel is that Samantha is so set on Charlotte as the villain and rejecting Charlotte as an author while actually living through a Charlotte, not an Anne plot, both in the sense of Charlotte the writer and in the sense of Charlotte's actual life; she falls in love with her tutor. And, that's my interpretation of the ending at least, does exactly what Charlotte did - she rewrites the real ending into fiction. The Madwoman Upstairs has Samantha earlier pointing out Charlotte fell for her professor in Bruxelles, Monsieur Heger, who never returned her feelings and didn't encourage her, so she rewrote this in her fiction into a mutual love (Samantha says in Jane Eyre, but it actually happened in Villette, and of course in The Professor. Now, at the end of The Madwoman upstairs Sam's tutor, Orville refuses to have a romantic relationship with her for a lot of sensible reasons (starting with her being his student). And then:
'I hope you know that you've left me no other choice but to become a writer,' I said.
'I beg your pardon?'
'Me. Writer. I will have to invent an alternative ending to this. I see no other solution.' (...)
A strange thing happened just then. Orville looked at me with a pain so deep that for a moment I wondered if I had conjured it on his face out of sheer will. He seeemed different somehow, like a portrait I had painted that was no stepping out of the canvas to show me my work. (...)
He kisses her and
As he tightened his arms around me, I felt bound to him by a strange, externally mandated and crushing inevitability. He broke away only to whisper something so soft and sweet that I thought perhaps I was narrating the scene myself. (...) Reader, I married him.
Now I don't know about you, but even without the famous sentence from Jane Eyre at the end, in a novel where reality versus fiction is constantly debated, as is the unreliable narrator and the changes of reality into fiction demanded by the need of audience and author, this to me was pretty clearly Samantha in text altering the ending from what it really was, as a last meta wink to the audience. Which is why I was so surprised not a single review doubted that this happy ending was just literally what happened. )
Then there's Samantha apparently not attending any seminars or lectures, just getting her individual tutor sessions. I don't know how they teach literature in Oxford these days, but on German universities, it doesn't work this way even if you're shortly before delivering your doctoral thesis, which Samantha definitely is not.
And lastly, silliest nitpick of them all on my part but there we are: Samantha early on says, re: her rooms, she wouldn't be surprised if she found an inscription on the wall made by Byron. Which led to yours truly indignantly exclaiming: "Byron was at CAMBRIDGE, woman! Get your Romantics straight. Shelley was the one who was at Oxford."
In conclusion: nitpicks aside, I had fun, but don't think I'll reread this the way I did Possession.
But first, some above cut impressions: the book's premise quickly summed up: Samantha Whipple (love the name), fictional American last living descendant of the Bronte family (via one of Patrick Bronte's Irish siblings), comes to Oxford still traumatized by her beloved father's death, in between snark sessions with her new tutor gets mysterious messages via her father's supposedly burned copies of the Bronte novels being dropped off in her room by parties unknown, and has to figure out how it's all connected while dodging obsessed Bronte collectors and the press alike. It's a first person narrated novel (of course it is), playing with a lot of Bronte motives but completely accessible if you're not familiar with the novels, offers some refreshing twists to the expected heroine characterisation (for example: Samantha is a daddy's girl who idolized her late father and blamed her mother for leaving, but her mother is alive, not dead, and in the course of the novel Samantha comes to understand her far differently and better), and by picking Anne in particular as the Bronte sister to champion does its bit for Anne's by far not as neglected anymore as she used to be decades ago but still not as entrenched in the popular consciousness as the the others cause. I laughed at the in text digs at literary criticism and a certain type of collector and was very amused by Samantha's worthy-of-Victorian-sensation-novels theory about Anne and Charlotte. Samantha's final conclusion in that regard is progress for her within the novel's world, and the ending is - imo, though looking at reviews they seem to have taken it as literary true, which surprised me given all the in text discussions about unreliable narrators before - a clever twist on just that.
But here's what my inner nitpicker complaining throughout the book: For someone who supposedly was obsessed with the Brontes in her adolescence to the point of knowing which shoes they wore before getting jaded, Samantha comes across as entirely ignorant of, oh, only a century or so of both popular and literary reception and scholarship of and about them. She references "The Madwoman in the Attic" but appears to have read only the Jane Eyre related part of it, and no essay about Wuthering Heights ever in any volume, if she thinks that pointing out Wuthering Heights isn't a romantic love story and Heathcliff isn't meant as a romantic hero is new. (Ditto for the incest theory which her tutor springs on her, and Samantha is shocked, SHOCKED. Again, speculation that Mr. Earnshaw didn't just happen to stumble across an orphan in Liverpool is very old indeed.) And given that the incident where drunken Branwell almost died by setting his bed on fire is such a lynchpin in Samantha's theory about Anne and Charlotte, it's really weird that she claims not to know when exactly it took place, i.e. before or after the publication of Jane Eyre. It's not like, say, Juliet Barker's magisterial biography, available since the mid 1990s, deals with that in great detail... oh, wait.
This is as good a place to lay out said theory as any, which is wildly entertaining if not very workeable - and btw, I think Catherine Lowell makes it very clear that Samantha is projecting her own issues - : in Samantha's opinion, Charlotte "stole" Jane Eyre from Anne. It went thusly: Anne has Jane like experiences as a governess in Thorp Green, returns to Haworth, writes a first draft of a novel based on this while Emily writes Wuthering Heights and Charlotte writes her own first novel, the unpublished in her life time The Professor. Charlotte realizes Anne's story is the far better one, uses her authority as older sister to browbeat Anne into writing a much watered down and dull second draft, Agnes Grey as we know it, while she writes Jane Eyre based on Anne's original story. At some point when she realises this is going on, an outraged Anne tries to avenge herself by setting Charlotte's bed on fire. The whole incident is passed off as having happened to Branwell, because Branwell as a drunk would do stuff like this. Jane Eyre becomes a bestseller; Anne's second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, is Charlotte-uncensored when it appears and becomes a bestseller as well, but then Anne dies, and Charlotte (this part is true) makes sure Tenant doesn't get republished again (within Charlotte's life time, that is) because of ongoing jealousy.
(Sidenote: fun as this is, we happen to know in great detail just when and how Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre. It was after The Professor, together with Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights, had already been sent to and rejected by publishers, though her later publisher was intrigued enough by The Professor to write a rejection letter of the "if you have something else..." type. Charlotte had gone for weeks with her father Patrick while the later got his long delayed eye operation - he was almost blind at that point - and was recuperating from this; all of which gave Charlotte some unaccustomed spare time far away from the parsonage, which she filled with writing Jane Eyre. Again, for a supposed Bronte expert, the dates should be very clear. I already mentioned the date of the bed burning being easily available. As for it happening to Charlotte, not Branwell, Samantha's big argument for this is that Branwell afterwards in his few remaining weeks of life doesn't come across as sufficiently traumatized, whereas Charlotte was careful not to have any inflammable curtains around in her few remaining years of life. Um. Branwell was raving during his last weeks of life and Patrick was so worried about the incident repeating that he took to sleeping in the same bed with him. This isn't a nitpick, btw, because as I said, the novel makes it pretty clear Samantha is filling her own emotional need with the idea of Anne Bronte the Avenger and TRUE (not so) Mad Woman in the Attic, and ignores all that doesn't fit with this. )
Samantha through most of the novel is a big proponent of the "all writing is autobiographical" standpoint, and while this makes for constant arguments with her tutor, he amazingly never uses the term "death of the author" when refuting her and standing by his "authorial intention is irrelevant, let the text speak for itself" approach. At the end, when Samantha - BIG SPOILER ALERT - has found what appears to be an actual diary of Anne Bronte, she comes to realise he's right, or rather: the Anne she sees at a quick glance before she decides to stop reading doesn't match the Anne in her head, and the Anne in her head as well as her own interpretations of the Bronte novels are what sustains her. So she chooses the later and abandons the need to justify it via biographical backup. This is big progress for Samantha and works within the book, but again: for someone supposedly obsessed with literature, not just the Brontes, how come this whole debate between how to approach textual analysis has passed her by before coming to Oxford?
(Incidentally: one neatly and deliberately ironic aspect of the novel is that Samantha is so set on Charlotte as the villain and rejecting Charlotte as an author while actually living through a Charlotte, not an Anne plot, both in the sense of Charlotte the writer and in the sense of Charlotte's actual life; she falls in love with her tutor. And, that's my interpretation of the ending at least, does exactly what Charlotte did - she rewrites the real ending into fiction. The Madwoman Upstairs has Samantha earlier pointing out Charlotte fell for her professor in Bruxelles, Monsieur Heger, who never returned her feelings and didn't encourage her, so she rewrote this in her fiction into a mutual love (Samantha says in Jane Eyre, but it actually happened in Villette, and of course in The Professor. Now, at the end of The Madwoman upstairs Sam's tutor, Orville refuses to have a romantic relationship with her for a lot of sensible reasons (starting with her being his student). And then:
'I hope you know that you've left me no other choice but to become a writer,' I said.
'I beg your pardon?'
'Me. Writer. I will have to invent an alternative ending to this. I see no other solution.' (...)
A strange thing happened just then. Orville looked at me with a pain so deep that for a moment I wondered if I had conjured it on his face out of sheer will. He seeemed different somehow, like a portrait I had painted that was no stepping out of the canvas to show me my work. (...)
He kisses her and
As he tightened his arms around me, I felt bound to him by a strange, externally mandated and crushing inevitability. He broke away only to whisper something so soft and sweet that I thought perhaps I was narrating the scene myself. (...) Reader, I married him.
Now I don't know about you, but even without the famous sentence from Jane Eyre at the end, in a novel where reality versus fiction is constantly debated, as is the unreliable narrator and the changes of reality into fiction demanded by the need of audience and author, this to me was pretty clearly Samantha in text altering the ending from what it really was, as a last meta wink to the audience. Which is why I was so surprised not a single review doubted that this happy ending was just literally what happened. )
Then there's Samantha apparently not attending any seminars or lectures, just getting her individual tutor sessions. I don't know how they teach literature in Oxford these days, but on German universities, it doesn't work this way even if you're shortly before delivering your doctoral thesis, which Samantha definitely is not.
And lastly, silliest nitpick of them all on my part but there we are: Samantha early on says, re: her rooms, she wouldn't be surprised if she found an inscription on the wall made by Byron. Which led to yours truly indignantly exclaiming: "Byron was at CAMBRIDGE, woman! Get your Romantics straight. Shelley was the one who was at Oxford."
In conclusion: nitpicks aside, I had fun, but don't think I'll reread this the way I did Possession.
no subject
*ahem* Possession. Although Passion would fit, too, all things considered.
(I love that book. I think I've gone through three copies by now. It was what made me decide to study literature, as odd as that may sound. Maybe it was the thought of xeroxing old documents in someone's awfully decorated bathroom late at night? :) )
no subject
Freudian misrenemberance, clearly! The first time I did research in the British Library, I was so hoping for an accidental letter in my 19th century book...
no subject