Branwell

The Bronte industry has churned out so many biographies, biopics, biofictions, film adaptations, plays, and tsotchkes that it has itself become an object of study.  Douglas A. Martin's Branwell: A Novel of the Bronte Brother fits awkwardly with the Bronte mythology, however; indeed, this brief novel is as much a targeted strike against the Bronte industry and the neo-Victorian novel  as it is a contribution to "Bronteana." 

I must admit upfront to struggling with the book, in large part because Branwell, like John Polidori (who has unaccountably managed to spawn two novels), is not particularly charming company.  He drinks; he takes drugs; he accomplishes virtually nothing; he seduces the Robinson family's young son (in Martin's version, that is).  In other words, Branwell manages to simultaneously disappoint his family and the reader.  At one level, of course, Martin's Branwell simply reiterates the now-mythologized Branwell's abject position within the Bronte household: the coddled son who disintegrated amongst a family of female geniuses.  He is one of the legendary disappointments of British literary history. But in taking Branwell as his subject, Martin develops an anti-Künstlerroman, charting the disintegration of the would-be artist under the weight of his own fantasies of brilliance.  (Even the poems Branwell manages to publish are pointedly dispersed among multiple newspapers; he cannot pull himself together, even in volume form.)

One of the most striking things about the novel is its style.  Or, to be more precise, its refusal to engage in the kind of pastiche that frequently characterizes the neo-Victorian novel.  Martin instead writes stark, minimalist prose, often relying on simple sentences.  (A random example: "The color leaves our cheeks towards morning.  But why.  Why must it" [85].)  He eschews the leisurely periods of Victorian prose style, along with the apparently endless paragraphs.  Martin goes to the opposite extreme by keeping his paragraphs short, sometimes as short as a single sentence or sentence fragment.   Offhand, I cannot remember a single colon or  semi-colon, although Martin does use the occasional dash.  There is virtually no dialogue; what little dialogue appears is abrupt, sometimes fragmentary, and often rendered in FID.  The occasional bursts of speech frequently sit by themselves on the page, as though the characters talk into silence instead of to each other.

Martin's unwillingness to indulge the reader in neo-Victorian lushness reappears in his unwillingness to indulge the reader in Brontean color, whether geographical or historical.  The narrator garbs characters in only the sketchiest of physical details; there's no attention to clothing, "manners," or much of anything else in the way of either literal or figurative costume.   Significant historical figures, like Charles Darwin, are mentioned in passing, but they do not register on the novel's mental landscape.  Nor does Martin spend much time luxuriating in descriptions of the famed moors.  Like J. M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg, Branwell's priorities lie with the artist's--or, here, failed artist's--subjectivity, not with the thick description that provides so much of the traditional historical novel's pleasure.

While Branwell treads well-established neo-Victorian ground in its sexual revisionism--Branwell transgresses by being homosexual, not by committing adultery with Mrs. Robinson--the novel maintains a coy reserve in these matters.  Indulging in one of the novel's very occasional references to Jane  Eyre, the narrator temporarily breaks the frame: "Dear Reader, you want to be told now that you've understood.  That he might be doing just what you think he might be, and in just what way.  You want to be sure" (129).  Instead of the assurance and certainty offered by Jane's famous addresses to the reader, though, this moment forces the "Dear Reader" away from Branwell, to contemplate instead his or her own motives for wanting the nuts-and-bolts (or, er, whatever) of erotic prose.  Martin cocks a hook at both Victorian codes of erotic expression and neo-Victorian erotic openness; Branwell's attraction to men, while an open secret between the narrator and the reader, cannot be put into language so long as Branwell himself cannot put it into language.   Unlike, say, Irving Stone's biographical epics, Branwell  pointedly does not claim to offer a more "organic" understanding of a historical personality by filling in gaps or erasures in the historical record. 

Branwell's relationship to language and storytelling throughout is, not surprisingly, problematic.  From one point of view, he is nothing more than a subject waiting to happen.  The narrator repeatedly calls attention to Charlotte's attempts to micromanage her family's afterlife, whether by editing or burning; after Branwell's writings from Thorp Green go missing, the narrator comments that "Language has been given to us to make our meaning perfectly clear, their sister Charlotte believes, and she doesn't understand why anyone would ever need to wrap their meaning in dishonest doubt" (222).  Martin's officious, pedantic, and somewhat needy Charlotte is not an original characterization; Mardi McConnachie' Bronte-esque Coldwater takes a similarly acerbic view.  In Martin's hands, though, Charlotte's attempt to erase Branwell's misbehavior simply amplifies the whole clan's efforts to "tame contrary emotions around him, to get him down safely into the pages that would become their books, each in her own way filling in the gaps in her knowledge with her imagination.  Their portraits distort, as they wrestle with the  sides of Branwell's increasingly jagged existence, the collapsing personality" (158).  This account of the Brontes' fiction raises the spectre of autobiographical interpretation, only to collapse it along with Branwell's personality: whatever "Branwell" emerges in the act of writing will not be the living Branwell, whose secret vices and rapid mutations alike frustrate the sisters' need for a unified subject. 

Branwell's most successful fiction is not himself (as one might expect from such a narrative), but his affair with Mrs. Robinson: "Branwell needs John Brown to believe he'd offered up not only his youth to this woman, with her position and all her money, but all his talents.  Everyone he tells her husband is dying, and how he'd seen him treating her horribly" (160).    One of the core elements of the Branwell Bronte mythos, this famous historical "fact" here turns into a brilliant novelistic detour from the unspoken "truth" (both sets of scare quotes are well-advised) about Branwell's affair with the son.   The affair with Mrs. Robinson, after all, is itself assembled from coincidence and hearsay; Martin's fiction calls our attention to the problematic nature of the authentic historical explanation.  But the novel's irony, of course, is that Branwell--that great failure--manages, ever so briefly, to successfully create himself as the kind of Byronesque sexual adventurer he has fantasized about all along.