{"id":347,"date":"2020-04-01T17:00:37","date_gmt":"2020-04-01T17:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=347"},"modified":"2018-07-03T15:24:16","modified_gmt":"2018-07-03T15:24:16","slug":"brontes-bonnet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=347","title":{"rendered":"Bront\u00eb\u2019s Bonnet"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Clothing very often holds a privileged position within house-museums dedicated to women writers. \u00a0Charlotte Bront\u00eb\u2019s old bedroom includes \u00a0two glass cases containing clothing either \u2018worn by\u2019 or \u2018carried by\u2019 Charlotte, as the captions point out. One cabinet, positioned in the centre of the room, consists of a dress draped with a shawl, a half-folded parasol, a pair of stockings, a pair of gloves, and a fan. In a separate case, located against the bedroom wall, is all that remains of Charlotte Bront\u00eb\u2019s wedding outfit: the wedding-bonnet and veil. In this, she married the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls in Haworth parish church on June 29, 1854. Bront\u00eb\u2019s first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, noted that locals described her as looking \u2018like a snowdrop,\u2019 in her white muslin dress topped off with this pale green-trimmed bonnet and white lace veil. The famously quiet wedding was followed by an unexpectedly happy marriage which was cut short by the bride\u2019s death from complications associated with her pregnancy. Faded and partially dismantled though it is, displayed in the bedroom in which she died on 31 March 1855, the wedding outfit is nowadays \u2013 and has been for some considerable time — one of the most celebrated items in the collections of the Haworth Parsonage Museum.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Along with the bonnet and veil, Bront\u00eb\u2019s lost wedding dress also finds representation in Charlotte\u2019s room. The white dress on show is a replica of the original sold by Arthur Bell Nicholls\u2019 second wife at auction after his death. The dress works not just to construct Bront\u00eb as a woman, but to insert her into the narratives and counter-narratives of her novels Jane Eyre <\/em>and Villette \u2013 <\/em>\u2018Reader, I married him\u2019 and \u2018Reader, I did not marry him\u2019 respectively. It performs her escape from daughterhood, sisterhood and spinsterhood into the status of achieving \u2018a home of her own\u2019 like her heroine Jane Eyre, while also describing a justified anxiety about the dangers of marriage, much like that experienced by the heroine of Villette<\/em> \u2013 Lucy Snowe.<\/p>\n

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Bront\u00eb\u2019s clothing has long carried a powerful charge. Virginia Woolf, for example, responded emotionally to the dead woman\u2019s personal possessions displayed then in the adjunct Bront\u00eb Museum, publishing this unsigned account under the title \u2018Haworth, November 1904\u2019 in The Guardian <\/em>on 21st<\/sup> December:<\/p>\n

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The museum is certainly rather a pallid and inanimate collection of objects. \u2026Here are many autograph letters, pencil drawings, and other documents. But the most touching case – so touching that one hardly feels reverent in one’s gaze – is that which contains the little personal relics of the dead woman. The natural fate of such things is to die before the body that wore them, and because these, trifling and transient though they are, have survived, Charlotte Bront\u00eb the woman comes to life, and one forgets the chiefly memorable fact that she was a great writer. Her shoes and her thin muslin dress have outlived her.<\/p>\n

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Woolf would not have seen the wedding bonnet, since the parsonage at Haworth did not acquire it until 1954. Nonetheless, the language of wedding seems to permeate Woolf\u2019s prose; the snow-bound landscape is likened to \u2018a vast wedding cake\u2019 and \u2018the earth was bridal in its virgin snow\u2019. The foregrounding of this language of wedding follows from the way that Woolf effectively describes Haworth as the site of a struggle between conceiving Bront\u00eb as a writer and Bront\u00eb as a woman. While the writing seems dead, \u2018pallid\u2019 and \u2018inanimate\u2019, the shoes and dress have \u2018outlived\u2019 the writer, remaining uncomfortably alive and able to bring the dead woman back to an uneasy and imperfect life, albeit in a latter-day glass coffin. Woolf is essentially troubled by a sense of disrespectful snooping. For her, the encounter with Bront\u00eb\u2019s personal items overshadows what it is that the museum ought to be memorialising: \u2013 \u2018the chiefly memorable fact that [Charlotte] was a great writer.\u2019 Luckily, a simple reading of any one of Charlotte\u2019s publications makes it impossible to forget that this is the case.<\/p>\n

Also on Charlotte Bront\u00eb see https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=202<\/a> and https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=195<\/a> and \u00a0https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=136<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clothing very often holds a privileged position within house-museums dedicated to women writers. \u00a0Charlotte Bront\u00eb\u2019s old bedroom includes \u00a0two glass cases containing clothing either \u2018worn by\u2019 or \u2018carried by\u2019 Charlotte, as the captions point out. One cabinet, positioned in the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[73,69,204,215,28,72,33,34,35,32,31,30,29,264,353,352,233,351,350],"class_list":["post-347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-arthur-bell-nicholls","tag-charlotte-bronte","tag-elizabeth-gaskell","tag-haworth-parsonage-museum","tag-history-of-reading","tag-jane-eyre","tag-literary-landmark","tag-literary-landscape","tag-literary-museums","tag-literary-pilgrimage","tag-literary-tourism","tag-literary-tourist","tag-love-of-literature","tag-nicola-watson-the-authors-effects","tag-victorian-woman-writer","tag-villette","tag-virginia-woolf","tag-wedding-dress","tag-wedding-bonnet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=347"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":350,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions\/350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}