1Sixteen years separate two compelling glimpses of the Brontë sisters’ lived experience in the Haworth parsonage drawing-room: Emily Brontë’s 26 June 1837 diary paper and Elizabeth Gaskell’s report of an 1853 visit. The 1837 diary paper (Figure 1) includes a sketch of Emily—her back towards us—and her sister Anne writing together at the drawing-room table and Emily’s annotation, which begins: ‘A bit past 4 o’Clock Charlotte working in Aunts room Branwell reading Eugene Aram to her Anne and I writing in the drawing room – Anne / a poem beginning ‘Fair was the Evening and brightly the Sun—I Agustus—/ Almedas life 1st vol’. ‘[A]ll tight and right’, she says, with the buoyancy of teenage life and health.
Figure 1. Emily Brontë’s diary paper, 1837.
© Brontë Parsonage Museum.
2In 1853, Gaskell quotes Brontë family servant Martha Brown: ‘Since they were little bairns Miss Brontë & Miss Emily & Miss Anne used to put away their sewing after prayers, & walk all three one after the other around the table in the parlour till near eleven o’clock’ (The Letters of Charlotte Brontë 3. 200). Prayers were at eight o’clock, and so, if Brown is correct, the sisters walked in the parlour (also called the dining-room and the drawing-room) for more than two hours each evening.
- 1 A teenaged Charlotte Brontë reported to Ellen Nussey about daily life in the parsonage: ‘an accoun (...)
3What connection can there be between the focused, calm, and engrossed writers pictured in the 1837 sketch and the sisters’ habitual evening walks ‘one after the other around’ the very same table reported in 1853? Does writing relate to walking? This essay analyses the Brontës’ shared writing and walking practices in this room in order to explore how indoor walking may have influenced the composition and content of the novels that were written there in the late 1840s and early 1850s: Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, The Professor, Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Shirley, and Villette. Of course, the three sisters did many things in the shared space of this particular room: read, wrote, ate, entertained visitors, did needlework,—and did nothing. Anne Brontë reports on 31 July 1845, ‘I am sitting in the dining-room in the rocking-chair before the fire with my feet on the fender. . . . Little Dick is hopping in his cage’ (Letters 1. 410).1
4Materialist accounts of literary influence offer ways to connect these varied activities to writing, ways to connect the practices recorded in Emily’s sketch and Martha Brown’s report to the composition of the individual Brontë novels. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s description of ‘the contingent sprawl of “influence”’, which includes ‘the potential richness and messiness of our relations with one another, both on and off the page’ (4), suggests that we can think broadly about the ways in which activities in this room and beyond could plausibly act as forms of literary influence. Kevin A. Morrison’s Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture undertakes such a materialist analysis in its exploration of ‘how . . . [the] commitments to liberalism [of John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, John Morley, and Robert Browning] were shaped by or manifested through the physical spaces in which they lived or worked’ (3‒4). Such ‘physical spaces’, including the communal Brontë dining-room, may be understood in Thomas Rickert’s analogy as a ‘terroir’ for the texts produced there, terroir—‘the somewhereness of the earth’—being Rickert’s figure for how (in his argument) rhetoric ‘can and must be grounded in the material relations from which it springs’ (ix, x). Just as terroir names the specific climate, terrain, soil, and method of grape cultivation that, cumulatively, give wine a particular quality and taste, so a variety of specific ‘material relations’ can influence a form such as rhetoric, which is ‘traditionally taken as a discursive, intentional art’ (Rickert x). This essay considers the Brontë dining-room as a terroir for the Brontë novels; its ‘somewhereness’ includes the tangle of everyday lived experiences and intense creative activities, a rich and messy web of possible influences—literary, familial, material, and social—that are traceable in the Brontë oeuvre. Writing and walking in this room provide only one of many possible routes for a materialist analysis of the relationship of text, writer, place, and time. But the Brontës’ shared walking practice is well documented and can act as a focal point for their ‘spatial practice’: how they perceived, used, and made sense of a particular space in their everyday lives, including their lives as authors (Lefebvre 8).
5Outdoor walking has long been claimed to have an intimate relationship with and influence on literary and philosophical production, in addition to associations with liberty and with nature. This essay begins with a consideration of these associations and whether claims about the meaning and influence of outdoor walking can simply be transferred to walking that takes place indoors. It then moves to consider what materialist claims add to the broader landscape of assertions about literary influence. Finally, scenes of indoor walking in the Brontë novels are analysed in order to test out possible links with the Brontës’ indoor walking practices. The essay ultimately argues that indoor walking—far from being indicative of freedom or a connection to nature such as that afforded by outdoor walking—is an occasion for the expression of entangled affective and intimate relationships, relationships that are also represented in the Brontë novels.
- 2 For a very different view of ‘Pedestrian liberty’, see Celeste Langan on Romantic vagrancy and her (...)
- 3 For example, Gros writes of Rousseau that walking provided access to ‘the man fresh from the hands (...)
6Writing and outdoor walking have a seemingly well-established connection, with such walking understood to provide a spur to literary and philosophical production, to influence what is written, and to offer an essential freedom to the writer. For example, William Wordsworth explicitly links outdoor walking to creativity and freedom: ‘Pedestrian liberty’ allows him ‘To muse, to creep, to halt at will, to gaze’, whereas he complains that travelling ‘in a carriage and four’ on his 1829 tour of Ireland ‘supplied my memory with so few images that were new, & with so little motive to write’ (‘In a Carriage, upon the Banks of the Rhine’, Sonnet VIII, 11–12; The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, 17).2 Charles Dickens, also known for his habitual walks, asserted in a letter to John Forster from Genoa that he could not write because he could not walk in London: ‘Put me down on Waterloo-bridge at eight o’clock in the evening with leave to roam about as long as I like, and I would come home, as you know, panting to go on’ (8 October 1844. Letters of Charles Dickens 4. 200). Jeremy Tambling extends this claim about walking as a spur to writing to a larger one of literary influence, arguing that Dickens ‘is not simply walking but writing “London”, which means he is writing about London, and, by writing, creating London’ in his works (1). And Frédéric Gros in A Philosophy of Walking makes larger claims about the affordances of outdoor walking, connecting the walking body and walking habits to the arguments of specific philosophers and to the experience of freedom.3
- 4 The walk to Keighley railway station is mentioned in Emily Brontë’s 30 July 1845 diary paper and i (...)
7The Brontë sisters’ regular outdoor walks may have been similar in motivation and effect. It is true that some of their outdoor walks were purely practical, for example, the four-mile walk to the closest railway station in Keighley.4 But the Brontës’ habitual moorland walks are as iconic as Wordsworth’s Lake District ramblings. Indeed, Charlotte Brontë’s comments on her August 1850 visit to the Lake District resembles Wordsworth’s claim regarding the creative advantages of walking: ‘If I could only have dropped unseen out of the carriage and gone away by myself amongst those grand hills and sweet dales’, she says, she might have experienced fully the ‘vagrant artist instincts [that] were busy in the mind’ (Letters 2. 453‒54). Deborah Lutz provides a wide-ranging account of the Brontës’ outdoor walks: these walks were, Lutz writes, an ‘aesthetic pursuit, . . . a taking in of nature to spur creativity’ which was ‘a practice they learned from the English Romantic poets’; and outdoor walks were practices of freedom, especially for Emily Brontë who left Roe Head school after only three months because she was ‘pining for liberty’, for ‘the unfettering of mind and body that came from setting out into the wide-open spaces of the moorland’ (74, 64).
- 5 Regarding the cold, see Charlotte’s letters: ‘the winter and even the spring seasons are remarkabl (...)
8The Brontës’ indoor walks do not appear to have these same associations and their motivation is obscure. Certainly, there was no ‘taking in of nature’ in the dining-room and its constricted space seems more indicative of limitation than of liberty. Although their origins are obscure, the dining-room walks may have started for purely pragmatic reasons. For example, walking indoors may have been a way of keeping warm on cold evenings; or, walking outdoors in the dark may have been dangerous given the location of the parsonage at the top of a steep hill; or, walking outdoors in the evening may have been inappropriate or unsafe for unmarried middle-class women.5 Yet whatever its initial motivation, indoor walking arguably became an ‘aesthetic pursuit’ in its own right. Tambling’s argument that Dickens was ‘not simply walking but writing “London”’ provides a suggestive analogy: in their evening walks and literary discussions, the Brontës were ‘not simply walking but writing’ a domestic space. They walked and wrote its essential discursive features; they paced out and modelled the occupancy of the domestic world, the space central in every Brontë novel. But the Brontë sisters’ indoor walks differ from the outdoor walks hailed by Gros and Dickens in one essential way: they were communal. As letters and other records document, the sisters walked together.
9Almost the whole poignant history of the Brontë sisters’ lives from 1848 to 1853 is encapsulated in Martha Brown’s moving description of the sisters ‘walk[ing] all three one after the other around the table in the parlour till near eleven o’clock’: ‘Miss Emily walked as long as she could; & when she died Miss Anne & Miss Brontë took it up,—and now my heart aches to hear Miss Brontë walking, walking on alone’ (Letters 3. 200). The particular details of walking in those years are also evocative. For example, Anne Brontë continued to walk well into her final illness. Emily Brontë had died on 19 December 1848 and shortly after that a doctor from Leeds determined that Anne Brontë’s ‘consumption had progressed too far for cure’; but, according to the visiting Ellen Nussey, ‘Anne was very lively in conversation in walking round the room supported by E[llen]’ and ‘in capital spirits for an invalid’ (Letters 2.158n3). Then, after Anne’s death in Scarborough on 28 May 1849, Charlotte describes her somber return home: ‘I left Papa soon, and went into the dining-room: I shut the door—I tried to be glad that I was come home. . . . I felt that the house was all silent—the rooms were all empty’ (Letters 2. 222). In the empty and silent dining-room, ‘Miss Brontë [continued] walking, walking on alone’ each evening, a fact confirmed by Gaskell in her report of her 1853 visit:
I found that after Miss Brontë had seen me to my room, she did come down every night, & begin that slow monotonous incessant walk in which I am sure I should fancy I heard the steps of the dead following me. She says she could not sleep without it—that she & her sisters talked over the plans & projects of their whole lives at such times. (Letters 3. 200)
- 6 See Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith’s ‘Note on the Text’ of Shirley (xxv-xxix) for an accou (...)
10Whether or not Charlotte Brontë too felt that her walks were haunted by ‘the steps of the dead’, certainly she resumed them as a seemingly essential continuation of and connection with the past. Gaskell later writes in The Life of Charlotte Brontë that, for Charlotte, ‘it was dreary to write without any one to listen to the progress of her tale,—to find fault or to sympathise,—while pacing the length of the parlour in the evenings, as in the days that were no more’ (316). The delayed composition of Shirley may be evidence of how difficult it was for her to continue ‘her tale’ and her ‘plans & projects’ without the company of her sisters.6
11Together, these accounts suggest that the Brontës’ indoor evening walks were vital and necessary: Anne, dreadfully weak and ill, continued to walk; Charlotte, alone, continued to walk. While one might be tempted to read indoor walking in a confined space as indicative of limitation or even claustrophobia, the Brontë evening walks clearly offered the sisters something creative and constructive. The evidence suggests that these walks were occasions for literary discussions and planning; for sororal intimacy, affection, and exchange—and memories of these exchanges; and, perhaps, for literary influence.
- 7 Biographical criticism is a long-standing approach in Brontë studies. As Miriam Allott writes, Eli (...)
- 8 Elizabeth Langland’s analysis of the influences of William Cowper and John Wesley on Anne Brontë a (...)
12To name the Brontë dining-room as a site of literary influence and the sisters’ communal walking as a practise of literary influence raises the question of what reasonably counts as ‘influence’.7 Although Rickert insists that creative work is ‘not just played out in an environment but [is] embedded complexly in and through it’ (254), Graham Harman cautions that an object is not ‘identical with the influences received from its environment, since some of these remain ineffectual while others prove decisive’ (Harman 2016, 9). Critics would ideally share, Ihab H. Hasan writes, a ‘common and coherent idea of influence’ and, more particularly, of ‘plausible influence’ (66). A narrow definition, such as that offered by Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, may be the most ‘plausible’: ‘Strictly, influence should refer to relations built on dyads of transmission from one unity (author, work, tradition) to another’ (3).8 Materialist accounts of influence are much less strict—perhaps frustratingly so. Rickert, writing that what is ‘salient must take part in and emerge from the ambient’, describes the ambient as ‘an ensemble of variables, forces, and elements that shape things in ways difficult to quantify or specify’ (Rickert xi, 7). How then ‘to quantify or specify’ particular elements in the ambience of the Brontë dining-room out of which a ‘plausible’ salient influence might emerge? The salience of this room for an analysis of literary influence between and among the Brontë sisters rests on a confluence of ambient features: its function as a space of intense and simultaneous creative work, of close familial relations, and of shared walking. Fundamentally, this room is one which the sisters were (as Tambling says of Dickens) ‘not simply walking but writing . . . and, by writing, creating’.
- 9 Barad’s account of ‘[t]he entangled, contingent, and changing material conditions of the shop floo (...)
13Yet identifying salient literary influences between and among the sisters does not erase or diminish the importance of each Brontë sister as an individual creative agent. Sharing a writing space and sharing indoor walks may have been at times, in Harman’s words, ‘ineffectual’ with regard to literary influence and, at other times, ‘decisive’. Karen Barad provides a valuable paradigm to distinguish between accidental and determinative interchanges, arguing that ‘interactions’ take place between ‘separate individual agencies’ while ‘intra-actions’ (her coinage) describe ‘the mutual constitution of entangled agencies’ (33). The Brontës’ evening walks were occasions for both interactions and intra-actions, for an ambience that yields no salience and for an entangling of creative agencies mutually constituting one another—as writers, as sisters, as women sharing the same space and encountering one another in myriad ways. Barad’s broader purpose, to account for the entangled agencies of the human and non-human, is beyond the scope of this paper. But her specific claim about intra-actions is germane to a materialist methodology since ‘the notion of intra-action constitutes a radical reworking of the traditional notion of causality’, in particular ‘the nature of the causal relationship between discursive practices and material phenomena’ (Barad 33, 34). This clarification of ‘causal relationship[s]’ arguably enlarges strict notions of influence, including literary ones. Together, Rickert’s and Barad’s propositions suggest that we can discover new, plausible, and salient literary influences through reading the ambience of domestic spaces and indoor walks in the Brontë texts and examining how ‘entangled’ agents are produced and act together.9
14Although previous Brontë critics have not used this terminology of ambience, salience, and intra-action, they have offered analyses of literary influence that draw on similar paradigms. Consider the familial relations of sameness and difference pointed out by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar at the beginning of their chapter on Emily Brontë in The Madwoman in the Attic. They ask:
Is it coincidental that the author of Wuthering Heights was the sister of the authors of Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey? Did the parents, especially the father, bequeath a frustrated drive towards literary success to their children? These are interesting though unanswerable questions, but they imply a point that is crucial in a consideration of the Brontës . . . [I]t was a habit in the Brontë family . . . to approach reality through the mediating agency of books, to read one’s relatives and to feel related to one’s reading (250).
15Although they state that the specific questions they ask are ‘unanswerable’, they insist on one salient point: that ‘the transformation’ of the Brontë sisters into ‘Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell was a communal act, an assertion of family identity’ (Gilbert and Gubar 250). These claims about the mutual and mediating reading of ‘one’s relatives’ and the ‘communal act’ of forming identities as writers are richly suggestive of familial intra-actions and of the salience of the creative environment in which they wrote. In a similar vein, Heather Glen writes that the Brontë novels ‘were written, literally, together: by three women living in close proximity’ and engaging in a ‘complex, creative dialogue with one another’ (2, 3). And Jill Matus offers this compelling metaphor to describe the specific relation of Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to the novels that preceded them: ‘It is as if each Brontë sister broke off a piece of the same large clump of creative clay and set to kneading and shaping it her own way. That clay is what we may call the common matrix of the Brontë texts’ (100). ‘Communal act’, ‘close proximity’, ‘dialogue’, ‘common matrix’: all are ways to name the intimate and entangled relationships between and among the Brontë sisters and all begin to winnow the ambient to reveal specific salient literary influences that might be at work.
- 10 Compare her comment on Wuthering Heights to Harman’s challenge to ‘object-oriented criticism’ to ‘ (...)
- 11 She is responding to W. S. Williams’s comments on similarities between Jane Eyre and David Copperf (...)
16Charlotte Brontë herself arguably offers a claim about the salience of location in textual analysis. In her Editor’s Preface to Wuthering Heights, she writes that that novel is ‘rustic all through . . . moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath’, which was ‘natural’ since Emily was ‘a native and nursling of the moors. Doubtless, had her lot been cast in a town, her writings, if she had written at all, would have possessed another character’ (325). The ‘nursling of the moors’ ‘natural[ly]’ creates a ‘rustic’ novel, a claim to the salience of moorland. An urban Emily Brontë would have written works of ‘another character’ altogether—or no works at all. While the exact difference made by an imagined urban setting for the author of Wuthering Heights is not named, Charlotte Brontë’s remarks suggest that she understood location to be salient.10 Indeed, she may have been aware of certain effects on her own writing from having her ‘lot cast’ in the first instance in a small Yorkshire village, as opposed to, for instance, the breadth of experience she imputes to the urban Dickens: ‘what an advantage has Dickens in his varied knowledge of men and things!’ (Letters 2. 251)11 Charlotte Brontë’s comment on her sister’s novel may thus be read as opening the field for both contextual and decontextual readings, an invitation to readers to consider what Douglas-Fairhurst calls the ‘richness and messiness’ of possible influences, of the connections that may be revealed through reading text, environment, and author together.
- 12 Jameson compares affects to ‘the system of the old named emotions’ (‘love, hatred, anger, fear, di (...)
17The Brontës’ indoor communal walks were shared, expressive, and affective experiences that then extended into their creative works. To turn from the indoor walks of the Brontë sisters to the indoor walks of characters in the Brontë novels is to see that the latter clearly foreground the complexities of affect and affective relationships. Affects, Fredric Jameson proposes, are ‘nameless bodily states’, nameless because of the ‘resistance of affect to language’; this resistance means that affect poses ‘new representational tasks’ for nineteenth-century writers who attempt ‘somehow to seize its fleeting essence and to force its recognition’ (Jameson 32, 31).12 As Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg write, affect may be ‘found in those intensities that pass body to body’; one of the specific ‘orientations’ to affect which they explore is its presence in the ‘fleeting and flowing ephemera, of everyday and every-night life’ (1, 6, 7). Scenes of indoor walking in the Brontë novels are ‘everyday’ staging grounds for the ‘fleeting’ experiences of affect and, especially, for affective connections between characters in which ‘intensities . . . pass body to body’. Far from being expressions of freedom or connections to nature, indoor walks in the novels highlight relationships between the subject moved to walk by an intense inner turmoil and the observer who witnesses the walk and then reads (or fails to read) its meaning and acts (or fails to act) in response. In order to interpret the meaning of an affective bodily state correctly, the sympathetic observer must be attuned to—and perhaps become entangled with—the walking body and its meaning. Within the domestic worlds represented in the Brontës’ novels then, observed indoor walks become testing grounds for the recognition of the new and complex affective relationships that are expressed there.
- 13 Compare a very different indoor walk in chapter 11 of Pride and Prejudice. Caroline Bingley asks E (...)
18Jane Eyre provides the clearest account of the dynamic of a character who walks and whose walk is observed by a sympathetic interpreter. Her indoor walks at Thornfield Hall are initially solitary, motivated, she says, by a ‘restlessness [that] . . . agitated me to pain sometimes’ and her ‘sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third storey, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot’ (109). Then Rochester arrives and ‘Thornfield Hall was a changed place: no longer silent as a church . . . a rill from the outer world was flowing through it’ (118). Jane’s indoor walks continue, but just as Thornfield is changed so are Jane’s walks too. The very day after Rochester’s arrival, as he tells her much later, ‘I observed you—myself unseen—for half-an-hour’ as ‘you betook yourself slowly to pace the gallery’ (313). He reads the affect evident in her walking body: ‘Now and then . . . you glanced out at the thick-falling snow; . . . and again you paced gently on and dreamed. . . . there was a pleasurable illumination in your eye . . ., a soft excitement in your aspect’ (313). Where once her indoor walks were expressive of solitary ‘restlessness’ and agitation, they are now witnessed and convey to the observer pleasure and ‘excitement’.13 Rochester’s ability to read Jane’s affect in her walk, her face, the disposition of the body, is the first stage in what later becomes their love relationship. However, the fact that Rochester watches her walk is only revealed much later, when the existence of his wife Bertha is known and he is attempting to persuade Jane to live with him outside of marriage. She, of course, resists. This resistance leads Rochester himself to walk: ‘walking fast about the room’, stopping to speak, and then recommencing his quick walk (302). And now it is Jane who reads his walk and sees in it an ‘impetus of frenzy’; yet she knows she can ‘control and restrain’ that ‘frenzy’ and this knowledge gives her, she says, an ‘inward power; a sense of influence [that] . . . supported me. The crisis was perilous; but not without its charm’ (302). This scene of indoor walking matches the earlier one in affording the lover the opportunity to read affect, but it adds to it in allowing Jane the opportunity for influence as well. These scenes are ‘intra-active’ in the sense that the agencies of Jane and Rochester become ‘entangled’ with one another as ‘intensities . . . pass body to body’; they mutually constitute one another in and through their developing passion. Or, in the language of the marriage plot, what is recorded in these scenes of observed indoor walking is a love relationship built, in part, on the ability of each to read the bodily affect of the other: to know, influence, and calm; and to be known, influenced, and calmed.
19The Tenant of Wildfell Hall also offers object lessons in intra-action and affect as a lover watches the beloved walk. In this case, the passionate Gilbert Markham watches ‘Mrs. Graham, through the open window, slowly pacing up and down her lonely room’ in Wildfell Hall and then enters hoping ‘to reassure her’ (118). She is not reassured, but rather, as he says, ‘agitated and even dismayed at my arrival’ and even more ‘agitated’ by his impassioned confession of love (118). He leaves, but then decides to return in order to ‘catch one glimpse of her’ again (123). But now, instead of witnessing yet again Mrs Graham’s solitary walk, he sees her walking with Mr Lawrence’s arm around her waist. A different storm of emotion follows. What frustrates the ability of this observer to read the affect of the observed correctly is the fundamental deceit that undermines that relationship. Markham does not know that ‘Mrs Graham’ is, in fact, the married Helen Huntingdon and that Mr Lawrence is her brother; these mistakes impede his ability to read the meaning of her walking body. But when mistakes are finally cleared away and her true identity is known, Markham has another opportunity to read her indoor walk, now with full knowledge and sympathy. He writes: ‘she paced twice or thrice through the room. I knew by the contraction of her brow, the tight compression of her lips, and wringing of her hands, that meantime a violent conflict between reason and passion was silently passing within’ (404). The resolution to their love relationship is still stymied at this point by the continuing existence of Arthur Huntingdon, but as in Jane Eyre, observing an indoor walk affords the would-be lover the opportunity to learn to read the bodily intensities and affect of the beloved.
- 14 This scene in Shirley also recalls Anne Brontë’s poem ‘To Cowper’ in which the speaker admits to h (...)
20Scenes of observed indoor walking are not limited to love relationships. Indeed, one scene of indoor walking in Shirley may well directly reflect the closeness of the Brontë sisters as they walked in the parsonage dining-room and discussed literature. The narrator introduces the scene by stating, of Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone, ‘The minds of the two girls being toned in harmony often chimed very sweetly together’ (225). Then in illustration of this ‘harmony’, Shirley is described watching Caroline while the latter, ‘withdrawn to the farthest and darkest end of the room, . . . was pacing to and fro, muttering to herself fragments of well-remembered poetry’ (225‒26). As darkness falls and at Shirley’s gentle urging, the pacing Caroline recites aloud all of William Cowper’s ‘The Castaway’.14 The detailed and intimate conversation about Cowper that follows is suffused with emotion: the ‘feeling—real feeling’ that is expressed in his poem; ‘the cry of despair’ followed by weeping which Cowper himself likely experienced; and the feelings he would have engendered in those around him, including a truncated impulse to comfort and love him (227). Caroline’s walk and recitation is an embodiment of these complex affective states, and Shirley is skilled at sympathetically watching, reading their meaning, and drawing out Caroline’s key unspoken emotional investment: her love for Robert Moore. Affect saturates this scene of Caroline’s literary reading and walking and of Shirley’s sensitive insight.
21The scenes from Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Shirley discussed above all include a character that walks and a character that sympathetically observes and reads the meaning of the walk. But the Brontë novels also include those who walk without a sympathetic observer, without one to influence or calm, as was the case in Jane Eyre’s initial solitary walks. For example, after Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights, having heard Catherine say that it would degrade her to marry him, Nelly Dean reports that ‘Catherine paced up and down the floor . . . Catherine would not be persuaded into tranquility. She kept wandering to and fro . . . in a state of agitation which permitted no repose’ (74, 75). It is true that Nelly watches Catherine but she offers not sympathy but ‘expostulations’ (75). In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Gilbert Markham, in his jealousy of Mr Lawrence, ‘employed [him]self in rapidly pacing the chamber’ at night; his listening mother asks him why he does not sleep and so he stops walking, but the enforced stillness only torments him further (126). Or in Villette, Lucy Snowe watches an anxious Polly Home, awaiting the return of her father, ‘walk[ing] the drawing-room with [a] quite noiseless step’, a ‘velvet march’ (291). Lucy Snowe, the ‘mere looker-on at life’ (141), does not intervene, soothe, or influence—but given the affection Polly’s father and Graham shower on Polly, Lucy’s comfort is perhaps not required. While the embodied affect in each of these three scenes of indoor walking is evident to the reader and while each is potentially a scene of entangled intra-actions, all are marked by degrees of disengagement by the other characters.
22Seemingly worse than this lack of sympathy is being watched by a vindictive observer. When a distraught Lucy Snowe in Villette believes she has been abandoned by M. Paul, she describes herself ‘pacing a solitary room in an unalterable passion of silent desolation’ (449). Madame Beck understands the meaning of her ‘pacing’ and so secretly administers the ‘strong opiate’ intended to ensure that Lucy is ‘held quiet for one night’, in effect to imprison her (449). But the opposite happens. Far from making Lucy Snowe unconscious, the drug sends her out into the street, into the park, and ‘plunged amidst a gay, living, joyous crowd’ (452). In the crowd, Lucy observes a host of other characters but is herself unobserved as she discovers the truth about M. Paul. By contrast, the truly imprisoned indoor walker is Bertha Mason Rochester, held on the third floor of Thornfield Hall under the not-so-watchful and certainly not sympathetic eye of Grace Poole. Bertha does not ‘pace’ like Jane, but runs claustrophobically ‘backwards and forwards’ in the attic room ‘like some strange wild animal’ (293). No one calms or influences her. No one finds charm in watching her.
23Characters in the Brontë novels embody affects in their indoor walks. Some walks, like Caroline Helstone’s, are motivated by an understated but intense passion. Others, like Rochester’s or Bertha’s, are frantic. The observers of these walks are called to engage with the one who walks, to be drawn into a finely attuned relationship; those who walk alone or who are ignored are bereft, seemingly shut out from the consolations or rewards of a reciprocal or entangled relationship. In all cases, the indoor walk is compelled rather than chosen; one is brought to one’s feet and obliged to walk. Such may have been the states of the Brontë sisters as together they paced around the dining-room table each evening after family prayers, walking in states of companionable familiarity, emotional intensity, or inspired concentration. Walking indoors for the Brontë sisters was not a route to individual creativity achieved through liberty or a connection with the natural world. Rather, the novels suggest that in their walks the Brontë sisters learned to be keen observers of the affective states of those who walked with them—their pleasures, their reveries, their despondence. And their own walking left them open to a reading of their own affective states by those same sisters. Walks were thus occasions of entangled creativity, expressions of vitality and emotional depth, and opportunities for affective connections. The effects of the evening walks may have been ‘incalculably diffusive’—to quote from the last paragraph of Middlemarch—but the evidence of the novels suggests that these walks were salient influences on the Brontë novels and their representations of entangled relationships of intimacy, emotion, and mutual understanding.