Unquiet slumbers
Dec. 29th, 2006 07:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smokingbootThis holiday hasn't felt magical at all; it felt like the collapse of two ill and exhausted people who like each other enough to relax totally in mutual dressinggowndom. The presents have been wonderful, the company gentle, the food fantastic, the champagne all too abundant, but something has been missing, and not all the cgi wonders of Narnia and a valleyfull of talking beavers could inspire me.
Then today, we decided to take our hacking cold racked bodies out onto the moors. We ended up at Haworth parsonage, one time home to the Bronte family and now a museum dedicated to the three authoresses, their father, and their brother, Branwell, a man unlucky enough to be merely adequate in a house bursting with genius.
It could have been a nasty attack of Salieri syndrome, made even more tragic by the family's belief in the only son, the special one; they doted on him, encouraged, believed in him, centred all their hopes on him.
Maybe there's a kind of genius that needs harsh confines to force it into shape. His were the opportunities, theirs the results. To him the art career that failed and the tutoring work that failed and the relationship with his employer's wife that failed, and the poetry that was occasionally approaching his sister's in intensity: to him the alcohol and an appetite for self destruction perhaps echoed in Emily's depiction of Hindley, or fueling Anne's Wesleyan diatribes against the demon drink in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. They expected so much of him, the jewel, the shining star of the family. But he was not the one. It was the plain girls with no life and no expectation, theirs was the gift after all that.
So what becomes of the mediocre? Easy enough when all the world around one is mediocre or worse, easy enough when all the world is Haworth. Unless one lived in Haworth Parsonage, and then it was not so easy. To be not only ordinary, but the only ordinary one. They tried to keep their successes quiet from him for they felt such knowledge would crush him. But it was a small house, and the rooms were close. How could he not guess?
I found myself awestruck at the drawing room where Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were written, where the three discussed their projects, where Emily eventually laid herself down on the sofa to die, having refused to get treatment for the TB that took them all. Upstairs we saw Charlotte's clothes and letters, her teeny shoes revealing her to have ickle dainty feet, and a photo of the ferociously mutton-chopped curate she eventually married, no Rochester by any stretch of the imagination.
Outside, the long slab gravestones form a carpet up to the door; old photos and snippets of the Babbage report show how appalling conditions were in the town, open sewage and offal channels, rubbish putrifying in the streets till rain washed it away, people living at cellar level, beneath all this filth; the wealthy of the town did not want to pay for improvements; disease and dirty water were the reward all shared for their parsimony.
And in this narrow world, the girls thought and dreamed, their creations more a part of my past than the places in which I grew up. We did not go into the crypt in the church where two of the three lie. It was that drawing room I wanted to see, where Heathcliff tumbled into life, falling out of Mr Earnshaw's saddle, where Edward Rochester's horse stumbled at the sight of an elf woman in the moonlight; Not far away I could feel the knockings at the door of the red room, the lights seen over at Gimmerton chapel. Even as I write it I feel a tingling; for a while I wondered if they followed us down the paved slope through churchyard to teahouse, but no. No unquiet slumbers here, for they were good women, doubtless in some methodist heaven. Haworth is so pretty now, but who comes to Haworth for its present or future? Only the dreams born in that shabby past make it special.
Today, in 1812, their father married the woman who would give birth to them all. We didn't know that before we got there, and quite why this resonates with me so much I don't know. But it has made the day meaningful in a quiet, hard to describe way.
Then today, we decided to take our hacking cold racked bodies out onto the moors. We ended up at Haworth parsonage, one time home to the Bronte family and now a museum dedicated to the three authoresses, their father, and their brother, Branwell, a man unlucky enough to be merely adequate in a house bursting with genius.
It could have been a nasty attack of Salieri syndrome, made even more tragic by the family's belief in the only son, the special one; they doted on him, encouraged, believed in him, centred all their hopes on him.
Maybe there's a kind of genius that needs harsh confines to force it into shape. His were the opportunities, theirs the results. To him the art career that failed and the tutoring work that failed and the relationship with his employer's wife that failed, and the poetry that was occasionally approaching his sister's in intensity: to him the alcohol and an appetite for self destruction perhaps echoed in Emily's depiction of Hindley, or fueling Anne's Wesleyan diatribes against the demon drink in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. They expected so much of him, the jewel, the shining star of the family. But he was not the one. It was the plain girls with no life and no expectation, theirs was the gift after all that.
So what becomes of the mediocre? Easy enough when all the world around one is mediocre or worse, easy enough when all the world is Haworth. Unless one lived in Haworth Parsonage, and then it was not so easy. To be not only ordinary, but the only ordinary one. They tried to keep their successes quiet from him for they felt such knowledge would crush him. But it was a small house, and the rooms were close. How could he not guess?
I found myself awestruck at the drawing room where Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were written, where the three discussed their projects, where Emily eventually laid herself down on the sofa to die, having refused to get treatment for the TB that took them all. Upstairs we saw Charlotte's clothes and letters, her teeny shoes revealing her to have ickle dainty feet, and a photo of the ferociously mutton-chopped curate she eventually married, no Rochester by any stretch of the imagination.
Outside, the long slab gravestones form a carpet up to the door; old photos and snippets of the Babbage report show how appalling conditions were in the town, open sewage and offal channels, rubbish putrifying in the streets till rain washed it away, people living at cellar level, beneath all this filth; the wealthy of the town did not want to pay for improvements; disease and dirty water were the reward all shared for their parsimony.
And in this narrow world, the girls thought and dreamed, their creations more a part of my past than the places in which I grew up. We did not go into the crypt in the church where two of the three lie. It was that drawing room I wanted to see, where Heathcliff tumbled into life, falling out of Mr Earnshaw's saddle, where Edward Rochester's horse stumbled at the sight of an elf woman in the moonlight; Not far away I could feel the knockings at the door of the red room, the lights seen over at Gimmerton chapel. Even as I write it I feel a tingling; for a while I wondered if they followed us down the paved slope through churchyard to teahouse, but no. No unquiet slumbers here, for they were good women, doubtless in some methodist heaven. Haworth is so pretty now, but who comes to Haworth for its present or future? Only the dreams born in that shabby past make it special.
Today, in 1812, their father married the woman who would give birth to them all. We didn't know that before we got there, and quite why this resonates with me so much I don't know. But it has made the day meaningful in a quiet, hard to describe way.
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no subject
Date: 2006-12-31 01:25 am (UTC)Hope to meet you and Suzette again in the new year. Here's to our creative sparks - may the flames rise in 2007!
no subject
Date: 2006-12-31 12:41 pm (UTC)