‘No Coward Soul is Mine’: A Family Systems Analysis of the Bronte Family

Abstract

The Bronte family produced three major authors of the Victorian period, only one of whom, Charlotte, lived to enjoy her fame. Since the beginning, this family has elicited controversy, myth and speculation. The authors attempt an analysis of the complex dynamics of the Brontes, including its constituent 'family cultures: parent-child alliances, sibling bonds and rivalries, the traumatic effects of three early deaths, and the strong theme of secrecy and 'protection' in a family dominated by Branwell Bronte's instability and eventual alcoholism. The authors speculate on how this family might have presented for treatment, and invite readers to consider how they, as family therapists, might have responded.The three Bronte sisters -Charlotte, Emily and Anne -emerged suddenly in 1847 as outstanding writers, and subsequently their collective work has become a cornerstone of nineteenth century English literature. Yet only Charlotte lived to enjoy her own success: her younger sisters died before they could fulfil their potential. Their brother Branwell, younger than Charlotte but older than Emily and Anne, was as talented and ambitious as they, but published only a handful of poems, and also met an early death with his literary ambitions virtually abandoned. The father of all four, the Rev. Patrick Bronte, had had an ambition to write, and had published verse, and several didactic children's stories, but apart from frequent letters to the press on political and religious questions, had largely given up his literary efforts by the time his children were born.There is voluminous evidence for some aspects of the Brontes' lives and interactions, but very little for others, a situation which has given rise to much controversy and myth-making. Elizabeth Gaskell's early biography The Life of Charlotte Bronte was written by a contemporary and friend of Charlotte's, and its selective and biased account has coloured many later ones. Gaskell is largely responsible for the longstanding myth that the Bronte children grew up in almost total seclusion in a lonely, windswept house on the outskirts of a primitive, uncultured village, with only each other for company, and little opportunity to encounter people or ideas from outside the family. As Juliet Barker's recent, painstaking research has shown, this was simply not true. Haworth was a thriving, newly industrialised centre, with a flourishing political and cultural life, in which several of the Brontes participated; they had regular social contact with a number of local families, and, later, with others further Aeld (such as Charlotte's friends from boarding school). Gaskell is also largely responsible for the 'demonising' of Branwell, and for the implication that Patrick was a remote, frightening patriarch.The tendency to read the Bronte's novels, particularly