Women Telling the Truth
Charlotte Brontë used the pen name "Currier Bell" in order to be heard. Would she have to use it today?
I haven’t read a novel for a while. I keep picking up short non-fiction such as the New York Review of Books, or women’s essays from my shelf. I want reality.
In my reading I want to learn what’s gone wrong with civilization, and hopefully to find a clue about how to fix it. This focus of mine includes The Handmaid’s Tale, which, dear reader, I’ve just checked out of the library.
While I was there I added 10 more novels by women to my bag, the goal being as many as I could carry. Jane Eyre was one of them.
It’s the New York Public Library Collector’s Edition, a nice, compact 5-1/2 inches by 7-1/2 inches. It has opening notes and photos of Charlotte Brontë’s portable writing desk, a portrait of her father (why?), and a handwritten letter by “Currier Bell”, which was Brontë’s pen name. The initials “C. B.” fit either name.
Mysteries abound.
At home, when I first open this book I feel guilty that I’m not studying the recent brutal attack on Roe v. Wade, or figuring out how Democrats can appear to the press as formidable as we really are.
Then the frontispiece catches my eye. It’s a woman at a crossroads in a gale. I can relate!
The introduction describes how Jane Eyre was “a tremendous and popular success when it was published in 1847.” It goes on to say that 10 years later, shortly after the author’s death,
the novelist and journalist Mrs. Oliphant assessed the impact of the little governess who had so shocked the established authorities when Jane Eyre exploded on the scene. ‘Here is your true revolution,’ [Oliphant wrote in 1857]. ‘France is but one of the Western Powers; woman is half of the world.’
Nearly 100 years after that,
Rebecca West said that Brontë was a ‘supreme artist’ who told the truth about what ‘the whole civilization round her’ preferred to keep hidden and this did not sit well with Victorian England, which — as West put it, was ‘a man’s country.’
In 2019 on the floor of the North Carolina Legislature, Democratic Representative Deb Butler found a microphone that worked and said, “I will not yield.” I still hear her words when I work to try to set something right without expecting instant results.
In 2017 NC Secretary of State Elaine Marshall told women,
I have always seen boundaries that marked a ‘woman’s place’ and fought against them. Demand equality. Never let others define your limits. You were not made to live a timid life.
Sixteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg said to the United Nations in 2019,
How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.
What were some American men saying in the early 1970’s? Congressman Emanuel Celler argued against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). He said that women had never been equal to men and never would be; after all, there were no women at the Last Supper.
Congresswoman Bella Abzug quickly told him, “We may not have been at the last one, but we’re sure as hell going to be at the next one.”
Other women have told the truth, some recently. Today, in Washington U. S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Vice President Kamala Harris, Cassidy Hutchinson, Zoe Lofgren and (even) Liz Cheney are telling the truth.
At the core, these women’s assertions are not about women and men. They are about changing the social narrative. The Victorian novel in front of me now is about “going against the established order”.
I open Jane Eyre, “by Currier Bell”, to Volume 1, Chapter 1. The truth is, this book was written by Charlotte Brontë.
But if she had used her real name for her Victorian readers, would she have been heard at all? I think she herself answers this question with the novel’s first sentence:
“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. …”
Interesting thoughts and comments. Enjoyed it.
Now on to Handsmaid tale!!!!