The Paradoxical Masculine and the Violent Presence

Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley receives little critical analysis. Her Jane Eyre and Villette are much more widely read and appreciated. What little criticism there is on Shirley is either about this very phenomenon, by virtue of being about how its twin plots confuse or otherwise deter engagement from readers, or about the friendship between Caroline and Shirley. The latter, though often valid in its arguments, almost always ignores the novel’s masculine labor struggle, including some 157 pages (in the Oxford World Classics edition) before the beginning of “Fieldhead,” the chapter during which Shirley is introduced. I will not ignore either, and will, in fact, discuss how the twin plots (the masculine labor struggle and the feminine domestic romance plot) distract the reader from either one at any given moment, and how the intersections of those plots deconstruct gender.

I do not mean to disparage the scholars who prefer Jane Eyre and Villette to Shirley. They are quite justified in that preference: Shirley’s final paragraph reads, “The story is told. I think I now see the judicious reader putting on his spectacles to look for the moral. It would be an insult to his sagacity to offer directions. I only say, God speed him in the quest!” (Brontë 542). The text understands that it is annoying to read and that “the moral” is unclear, and it teases the reader by showing this understanding (Brontë 542).

I do, however, think there is something to be said for lack of attention. There is always a distracted reader in Shirley, and only partly because the twin plots distract from each other. The novel has a very distant third person narrator, and even within the romance plot it can be difficult to tell whether Shirley or Caroline is telling the story. Mrs. Pryor reveals herself to be Caroline’s mother, Shirley reveals her feelings toward Louis Moore — who himself is not revealed until quite late in the novel, though he is technically introduced in the flurry of introductions on page 55 — and Robert Moore confuses Shirley’s acts of friendship and business interests for romantic pursuits. The twin plots only exacerbate these distractions in ways specific to Shirley. Most other novels with plot twists do not distract its reader as much as Shirley does by virtue of having those plot twists.

Given the limited supply of critical scholarship and the way the text distracts its readers, I have decided to supplement my reading primarily with those of contemporary bloggers, and less so with those of literary critics. There is, however, an exception.

I. The Distracted Reader

Literary critic Jennifer Judge thinks quite highly of the distracting narratives, and in fact thinks that “[s]atire is perennially charged with inartistic disunity” (Judge 3). Judge thinks that there is more to the quick, neat, perhaps contrived endings to the marriage plots than meets the eye: “Thus, the seeming victory of domestic novelistic convention and Horatian satire permits the passage of the novel’s more ideologically disruptive and Juvenalian satire past the ‘violent censure’ (Forçade, qtd. in Allott 145) of critics, safely into literary history. Replete with Menippean themes, Shirley links the domestic and public social spheres in overarching ideological and social criticism, and conducts, through a subversively intellectual female friendship, a scathing satire of literary and social misogyny” (Judge 21). I am inclined to largely agree, though I would like to look closely at one piece of her historical evidence: a review from Fraser’s Magazine, from December 1849. Judge quotes the magazine calling Shirely “‘deficient in connexion and interest’ (Allott 153)” (Judge 3).

Indeed, the magazine stakes its claim that “a story in the narrative form … is required to concentrate the interest upon one person or one group, while regarding that person or group, as well as the subordinate groups, ab extra … Otherwise the reader’s mind will have to make a painful effort (a sort of squint) to see two or more distinct things at once” (New Novels 692). Shirley, on the other hand, has “[n]early a hundred characters to be disposed of” and “might as well have been called Caroline, or Helstone” (New Novels 692). Clearly, the writers of the New Novels column of Fraser’s Magazine had a major issue with the narrative of Shirley. Well, within the last few paragraphs they admit, “We like the book as a whole. On the whole, we like its spirit. The author does not, after the manner of some we could name, plead the cause of the poor by indiscriminate slander of the rich, nor advocate religious tolerance by a display of the bitterest sectarian hatred” (New Novels 694).

This is actually to Judge’s point. She does not misrepresent the columnists. Far from it: They misrepresent themselves, by complaining for the first two-and-a-half pages of a three-page review about the narrative of a book that they “like … as a whole” (New Novels 694). As Judge quotes Forçade above, the satire does in fact escape the critics — at least those of Fraser’s Magazine — who see Robert Moore’s redemption and the theological conflicts (which we will arrive at) as a sort of gesture to a better past that supports a status quo. In the same sentence, the columnists “sympathize with the author’s general charity, with her” — they here assume that the author by the alias “Currer Bell” is a woman — “special love for the old country, the old Church, and the old Duke,” which I believe are genuinely part of the novel’s overwhelming sense that things used to be better, and “kindle with her fervid bursts of eloquence, and recognize the truth of her pictures from life,” which I believe means nothing at all (New Novels 694). However, after making such a lofty statement, the columnists conclude similarly to the novel itself: “As to the morality, it must be a very precise prude, indeed, who could ferret out an inuendo in Shirley” (New Novels 694).

A review of Shirley on dearauthor.com by a reader under the username “Sunita” communicates something approaching a similar opinion, but channels a similar reading into a different opinion: “In the end, there wasn’t really much about riots or social change. Brontë seems to favor the millowners over the displaced workers; she feels for the latter in the abstract, but she doesn’t show much empathy for the individuals she writes, or render them as unique persons (with a couple of exceptions)” (Sunita). The exceptions likely include William Farren, to whom we will return. There is a confusion in the plots that both Sunita and the Fraser’s columnists interpret as a kind of moderacy, but the columnists praise it as a resistance against a knee-jerk reaction to condemn one side while Sunita criticizes it as for over-empathizing with Robert via this moderacy! In fact, Suinta goes so far as to say, “Brontë was railing against the constraints women faced, but as I was reading her anger and motivations were overshadowed by what I felt were dismissive, one-sided portrayals” (Sunita).

I empathize with Sunita’s conflation. I don’t necessarily agree with her now, but I did on my first reading of the novel. The reason why the distracted reader is so crucial is that it calls into question which stories we feel need an external justification — a presupposition of the story’s responsibility. Because Brontë began the novel with violence and guns, I was constantly searching for them in the rest of the novel’s romance story. Likewise, at the very start of the novel I was not searching for anything but what I had already read — I was not ready to consider what the labor struggle was missing. By contrast, because the romance plot really does on its face seem not to go out of its way to communicate an interesting idea, I was very unconcerned that the labor struggle was ignoring some part of the romance plot, as if the romance plot had a responsibility to include the labor struggle, but the labor struggle did not have a responsibility to include the romance plot. To air my biases, I was incredibly partial to Moses Barraclough in particular. If there was nothing thematically important about the entire romance plot, then there was certainly nothing thematically important about him either — I just thought he was interesting on an aesthetic level: a cool character.

To return this to Sunita: It is so, so easy to read Shirley — to read its meandering plot that promises to discuss labor relations and then only does so sporadically, and even then only does so through the lens of a romance plot involving two women with some amount of class privilege (of course this is complicated by Caroline’s dependence on Mr. Helstone, but she nonetheless has some privilege) — and find a fairly uncritical defense of the status quo. This does, in fact, seem to be the default first reading.

I’ll content myself with one more blog post. Theresa C. Dintino of nastywomenwriters.com titles her post, “Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley: The Power of Female Friendship.” It is a largely unequivocal praise of the friendship between Caroline and Shirley. In my opinion, the praise is mostly justified, sometimes unjustified, and completely warranted: There is a reading similar to the default first reading I just discussed, in which Shirley’s hiding of Mrs. Pryor’s identity and her interest in Louise Moore from Caroline and Caroline’s depression over Robert’s rejection of her and over Shirley’s seeming interest in him communicates a type of competition between the two. There is a hint of competition between them, but because their friendship is incredibly represented in its flaws, not because they are fighting over a man.

As for Dintinio’s praise, she describes Shirley as “bold, outspoken, happy, willful and independently wealthy. She reads the newspaper, keeping herself informed on political and social issues. She also understands financial markets and asserts her economic power within her community” (Dintino). I agree with the descriptions of her personality, but is she “independently wealthy?” (Dintino). Her wealth is inherited. She is if by “independant,” one means “free in this moment from men,” but less so if we take “independent” to mean “of one’s own making.” Likewise, Dintino says that “Caroline, though not as bold and brash as Shirley, is also a strong and willful person” (Dintino). I’m ambivalent regarding this description. I don’t find myself thinking that Caroline isn’t strong or willful, but those aren’t the first words that come to mind. “Caroline longs for a job,” sure, but Mr. Heltone and Shirley convince talk her out of that longing (Dintino).

All this is to say, there seems to be a default, confused reading of Shirley. Shirley encourages its readers’ confusion in its final paragraph. It seems that the romance is communicating very little outside of — as Dintino points out — its own representation of a good female friendship. I say all this, I bring up all these examples of confused first readings, to point to Dintino as an outlier. Dintino, though, does not have this default confused reading only because she ignores the labor struggle that causes the confusion in the first place! Even the blogger who was undistracted by the labor struggle, who was able to find meaning in the domestic plot, ignored aspects of the story by virtue of being undistracted. It seems that the only way one can derive any interesting meaning from the romance plot is by ignoring the labor struggle.

Dintino leaves us with the following: “In the end Brontë contrives (and it does seem a bit of a stretch) to have the two heroines marry brothers and so they shall remain close in their association and affiliation. We can be happy to know they will have one another to console and confide in, even rebel with. For women in the patriarchy, that is often the only redeeming thing that can save and assuage — the female friend” (Dintino).

Why, then, does it seem in the default reading that whatever Charlotte Brontë is communicating about gender in the romance plot is fairly unclear — bordering on vague? Let us answer that question in section IV, after a necessary close reading of a scene in which the masculine and feminine plots become inseparable.

II.   The Paradoxical Masculine

Shirley’s volume II, chapter VI, “The School-Feast,” begins: “Not on combat bent, nor on foemen in search, was this priest-led and woman-officered company: yet their music played martial tunes,” about which Mr. Helstone comments, “‘There is no battle in prospect … our country does not want us to fight for it: no foe or tyrant is questioning or threatening our liberty’” (Brontë 254). Not a full page later, Shirley identifies a “‘line of red’” moving toward them as “‘soldiers—cavalry soldiers … six of them’” (Brontë 255). Glimpses of the labor struggle within the domestic romance plot are increasingly visible, to the delight of readers distracted by the former and the surprise of readers captured by the latter. The soldiers then turn to avoid confrontation. A frightened Mr. Helstone takes his procession to a different path as well, “‘through Royd-lane, to reach Nunnely Common by a short cut’” (Brontë 255). This path is explicitly narrow, “so narrow that only two could walk abreast,” a figurative representation of lack of space for the twin plots to avoid each other (Brontë 255). Here, though, the train of women converge not with the soldiers in blood red, but with “‘The dissenting and Methodist schools, the Baptists, Independents, and Wesleyans, joined in an unholy alliance’” of people dressed in black, who, though described by Mr. Helstone as militant opposition, do not actually make up a militia and are not explicitly soldiers (Brontë 256). The moment in which Mr. Helstone moves the women past the faux militia, when he “ordered” his group like a general such that the opposition was, not beaten with clubs or shot with guns, but “sung and stormed down” by a musical performance of “‘Rule, Britannia,’” coded as both a patriotic soldier’s march and a domestic duty of the ideal good, church-going, and communally dedicated woman, is when the domestic and labor plots do not converge from separate places as they do during the battle which this foreshadows, but manifest in each other (Brontë 256). In other words, Shirley and Caroline do not only hear of or even directly observe Robert Moore’s hunting down of Barraclough and his accomplices (and Moore’s eventual redemption), but they perform femininity in a way that is coded as violent.

To make the weird scene weirder, we can grapple with theological implications. The narrow path could be interpreted as a reference to Matthew 7:13-14: “Enter ye in at the strait gate, for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (KJV). I won’t necessarily assume authorial intent, as a note at the back of the Oxford World’s Classics edition clarifies that a similar event occurred during Charlotte Brontë’s life in which a man tried and failed to block her father from taking children to Sunday school, but she was prone to making Biblical allusions. More strenuous but still plausible are the Satanic implications of the soldiers, dressed in a perhaps devilish red, six in number, and absent from the narrow path of Royd-lane. The narrow way, according to Shirley, involves competition, which derives in the labor struggle from limited resources and in the domestic romance plot from limited space. It bears mentioning that Mr. Helstone and the train of women celebrating Whit Tuesday are Anglicans — Protestants of the High Church — whereas each specific denomination mentioned in the opposing “‘unholy alliance’” — Methodists, Baptists, and Wesleyans — are Protestants of the Low Church (Brontë 256).

I dwell on theology to highlight the contradictory performances of Shirley and Caroline: they perform a violent-coded femininity, but the working classes of the Low Church seem much more masculine-coded than the Anglicans. The competition implied in the narrow path also implies cooperation: I would be remiss to dwell on an air of competition between the two young women, such as when Caroline believes that Shirley loves Robert Moore or when Caroline confronts Shirley about withholding information about Mrs. Pryor, without mentioning the much more prevalent support system they create for each other by simply developing a mutually enjoyed friendship.

The following chapter has a lengthy and funny title: “Which the Genteel Reader is Recommended to Skip, Low Persons Being Here Introduced” (Brontë 269). Interestingly enough, Caroline and Shirley meet these “low persons” while skipping church — but do they really meet them? Are the “low persons” really introduced? The prime example is William Farren, the man who begs Moore for employment during the initial confrontation involving the two of them, Barraclough, and others. In vol. II ch. VI, the labor struggle manifests in Caroline and Shirley’s paradoxical performances. If there is an inverse of this, a time during which the domestic romance plot manifests in the labor struggle, it is when Farren tells Moore, “‘wer families is poor and pined … I’m not for shedding blood … Invention may be all right, but I know it isn’t right for poor folks to starve’” (Brontë 117). As such, he relates to Shirley and Caroline — is familiar with them. Back in vol. II ch. VII, he is “introduced” (this is not an introduction: He was introduced a hundred-fifty pages ago) with, “it was our old friend, Farren. The young ladies approached him” (Brontë 272). This is in the narration, not the dialogue. The “our” is spoken by the narrator. I could not imagine a supposed introduction that presupposes more familiarity. Farren isn’t introduced, but rather re-introduced, and he may represent a sort of re-introduction of the labor struggle into the plot.

There is another implication of the odd chapter title, though. Just paragraphs before the re-introduction of Farren, “Silent and orderly, six soldiers rode softly by” in “martial scarlet” (Brontë 272). Shirley identifies them as “‘The same we saw this afternoon’” (Brontë 272). If we are to accept that Farren is introduced here despite already having been introduced, then we can assume the same of the soldiers, and by extension we can perhaps even assume that the soldiers are “lowly persons.” What interests me about this is, it is not a manifestation of some aspect of either the domestic plot or the labor struggle plot within the other. Rather, it is a genuine convergence of the two from separate places, a more blatant foreshadowing of the battle, and an implicit condemnation of the “lowly” violence.

If the “lowly persons” include both Farren, who refused to perform violence, and the soldiers, who are soon to perform violence, if there is a reading of Shirley that condemns both, then what is a poor worker to do? I posit that the converging twin plots of Shirley, and the moments in which one manifests in the other, take the widely acknowledged paradoxical nature of expectations of women and apply it to those of men. In the same way that so many texts say, Women are not allowed to be sexually promiscuous in general nor to be sexually reserved in this particular instance, are not allowed to seek work nor to be lazy, are not allowed to put too much nor too little effort into their appearance, and so on, and so on, Shirley says, Men are not allowed to be violent nor to be nonviolent, or at least applies that paradoxical expectation to men in an exaggerative way to discover how men would be punished by inevitably failing to fulfill that expectation.

Robert Moore is shot in revenge for Barraclough at the most convenient time, which is immediately after he realizes his moral failings. He laments to Mr. Yorke that he will repent (in a confession reminiscent of Catholicism — we see gender performativity coded through a sect of Christianity that Charlotte Brontë did not prefer) for his needless pursuit of the conspirators and sends Yorke on his way, and almost immediately “A fierce flash and sharp crack violated the calm of night … the four convicts of Birmingham were avenged” (Brontë 454). It seems that it would be unjust for Robert to not be harmed in some way for the harm he has done to others, and it would seem insincere for him to realize the injustice of the harm he has done to others only after being physically harmed and threatened. Thus, in terms of plot, he is shot at the perfect time.

There is another reading of the scene, though. Is it so unjust to want to escape violence? The text again presents the paradox: It is socially discouraged, violently discouraged, that men act violently and that men refuse violence. Robert Moore fails to fulfill this expectation, and is punished accordingly.

III. The Incest Exception

Now that the twin plots have yielded something interesting, perhaps we can glean something from the romance plot alone.

“I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers”

— Kurt Vonnegut (lithub.com) 

In one of his videos, Ian Cattanach of the YouTube channel Write Conscious uses the above quote to make the argument that “if you introduce a deep love story, it will remain, as Vonnegut says, at the forefront of the reader’s mind, and that will dilute all the other transformative elements that you are trying to infuse in your novel … if you kind of half-ass it and try to do everything at once, if you’re trying to do the soap opera stuff and continue kind of a linear love story, and then on top of that you’re trying to show us how you’re trying to critique capitalism or communism, or show that we’re all violent by design or whatever your actual transformative themes are, then it will all fail” (Cattanach 2:22 – 3:03). I believe the default reader of Shirley would agree. There are a number of pages of a sort of pure representation of the female friendship that Dintino praises, but that the default reader would prefer in a smaller quantity.

It’s worth noting, of course, that Dintino praises the friendship while Cattanach and Vonnegut criticize romance. Dintino even thinks that Shirley “passes the Bechdel test with flying colors” (Dintino). Perhaps this is my bias as a distracted reader, but I say that Shirley passes the Bechdel test just barely. Speaking both anecdotally but also from what appears to be what I have been calling the distractible and confused “default reading,” the labor struggle haunts the friendship of the girls, and there is in fact an expectation for marriage that Charlotte Brontë finds herself obliging. How well do the girls pass the Bechdel test if attention is drawn to the men they refuse to speak of? Does Shirley actually ignore Louise Moore by deliberately not telling Caroline about him? Does Caroline watching what she believes is flirtation between Shirely and Robert Moore disappear because she does not bring it up in conversation with Shirley?

No — the men are there in the distracted minds of the women who refuse to acknowledge them. I should admit that I am persuaded by Vonnegut that romance occupies the readers’ minds, but I think we can extrapolate that to occupations of friendships. We think of Shirley as having two plots — the masculine labor struggle and the feminine domestic romance plot — but what if the feminine contained two in itself? What if we thought of the friendship between Shirley and Caroline as a separate plot haunted by the other two?

Then I believe I would be making the same praises and ignoring the same aspects as Dintino, and I would be saying something useful, but not revolutionary.

There was another part to Cattanach’s argument: That “the idea of separation” (Cattanach 3:45) can circumvent the tendency of romance plots to annoy the “judicious reader” (Brontë 542) that Shirley taunts in its final paragraph, by letting the romance “[hover] in the reader’s unconscious” (Cattanach 5:46). Shirley is an interesting case study in the opposite, in which the labor struggle “[hovers] in the reader’s unconscious” while they read about a romance, or a friendship haunted by a romance, or two friendships haunted by two romances (Cattanach 5:46).

When I write it in those terms, it seems quite messy, reminiscent of a “taboo love,” which Cattanach says is another way of circumventing the focus on romance (Cattanach 5:52). The prime example, “incest,” lets you “dwell and mingle in both worlds — the love story and the thematic transformative story” (Cattanach 6:17 – 6:26).

I apologize if it seems that I accept Cattanach uncritically. I do not, but he says a number of things that I do accept. There is, however, an incompatibility between his advice and Charlotte Brontë’s — the exact problem that Judge identifies — that Charlotte Brontë was forced to end the novel with marriage, to hide her satire under the acceptable romance plot.

Bearing this in mind, I think there is a decent argument to be made that Cattanach’s opinions on the romance plot do not criticize, but rather compliment the incredibly radical Shirley of 1849. I think Cattanach may as well be reading from Shirley itself, given the way he translates its strategies. Dintino makes the argument that, in marrying two brothers, Shirley and Caroline can live and “even rebel with” each other (Dintino).

Reader, Shirley and Caroline married into each other.

I believe that Shirley and Caroline have a friendship that is incestuous-coded. I won’t disparage their friendship by projecting a romance between the two, but I don’t think I need to. Firstly and most obviously, they quite literally marry brothers on the same day: “This morning there were two marriages solemnized in Briarfield church” (Brontë 541). Then, of course there is Mrs. Pryor, a mother figure to Shirley and the birth mother of Caroline. Less obvious, though, is the way the text is narrated.

There is a very funny joke on the first page of the first chapter, immediately following an opening paragraph that calls upon nostalgia for a pre-industrial time: “If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto” (Brontë 5).

Who says this? Certainly not Shirley, as she has not been introduced yet. Caroline, too, is not even mentioned until page 57 — “‘Ask Caroline Helstone.’ ‘Caroline! I ask Caroline? I consult her about my dress?’” (Brontë 57) — and does not appear until page 59, “wrapped in a winter mantle, the folds of which were gathered with some grace round an apparently slender figure.” (Brontë 59). We do not know her. In fact, when Caroline is first mentioned, the story is told through the eyes of her cousin Hortense: “Mademoiselle” — referring, confusingly, to Hortense — “had an excellent opinion of herself, an opinion not wholly undeserved …” and so on, and so on (Brontë 55). Here is our first sighting of Louis, as well, and it is in relation to Hortnese’s knowledge: “Louis … she knew less than of Robert … Hortense, when she mentioned Louis, described him as having what she called ‘des moyens,’ but as being too backward and quiet” (Brontë 55). Far be it from an omniscient narrator to introduce one character through the knowledge and opinions of another, but far be it from a close third person narrator to do this very thing from the perspective of a character we have just met.

What do we make of the oddity that begins, “Mr. Yorke, if a magic mirror were now held before you, and if therein were shown you your two daughters as they will be twenty years from this night, what would you think? The magic mirror is here: you shall learn their destinies” (Brontë 128)? This section has to be omniscient, but surely Caroline’s ability to convince the audience, to convince me, at least, of some truth to her “‘I am not cherishing love-dreams: I am only thinking because I cannot sleep: of course, I know he will marry Shirley’” is evidence of a close third person perspective (Brontë 218)? I was as surprised as Robert when Shirley rejected his proposal, when she indignantly asked, “‘“do you mean you thought that I loved you as we love those we wish to marry?”’” (Brontë 448).

It is difficult to know which sentences are from whose point of view, especially in scenes that involve both Caroline and Shirley. It is in those very scenes, however, that whose perspective we take almost doesn’t matter: The two meld. There is a taboo in their friendship. I understand that by calling it “insestuous” I am being provocative. That does not need to be the description, but there is a taboo in the half-freedom from romance that they enjoy in their friendship and the way that the narrator pushes them into the same space. Perhaps a close reading of another scene would best illustrate this.

IV. Ghosts at the Mill

We have discussed volume II, chapters VI and VII. We now move to chapter VIII: “A Summer Night.” The battle at Robert’s mill has been foreshadowed, and his attempts to keep Shirley and Caroline away from the conflict are about to fail — in a way. There is an interesting moment during which the militia “seemed actually to be passing the Rectory” in which Caroline and Shirley were hidden, and then stopped (Brontë 283). Some of them debate whether to find Helstone or to keep moving until they find Robert. They only decide that they need to leave when The Rectory dog barks, which they fear will alert him.

When Caroline and Shirley first hear the mob in the darkness, “[t]hose who listened, by degrees, comprehended its extent. It was not the tread of two, nor of a dozen, nor of a score of men: it was the tread of hundreds” (Brontë 283). There is a motif of invisibility throughout the novel, but especially in the chapters I’ve focused on. Shirley and Caroline are not noticed in this chapter’s battle, characters fail to notice other characters at church — and thereby fail to be completely sure about who is absent — we didn’t care enough to wonder about Mrs. Pryor’s identity, and we didn’t pry at Shirley’s secrets to find Louis Moore. The last two are from the point of view of the default reading.

Just as chapter VI applies paradoxical expectations to men — in terms of violence — I think that this chapter applies female invisibility to men, despite how tempting it is to read the chapter in terms of Shirley and Caroline’s invisibility during the battle.

Firstly, I feel comfortable saying that the narrator has not earned my complete trust with all its teasing, and I feel comfortable saying that I just don’t believe it in this instance, that “those who listened” were able to estimate how many pairs of feet were making noise in the dark (Brontë 283). I don’t think that Caroline and Shirley would quite be able to differentiate between twenty and one hundred pairs of feet on the ground — I certainly don’t think I could.

They can hear so poorly, in fact, that Shirley takes the borrowed pistols and leads Caroline outside to hear the conversation. There is an odd, frightening line about this, that “Caroline would not have quitted the house had she been alone, but where Shirley went she would go” (Brontë 284). This is the incestuous melding within the narration to which I refer. The melding, however, does not only apply to Caroline and Shirley.

They can hear an approximation of the number of men? Then, clearly, the men are interchangeable. They are not seen in the dark at all, and they are not seen as individuals. Before, I argued that Shirley applies expectations of women to men. I think it does something similar here with identity. Caroline follows Shirley, is given courage by her presence, but later, at the sight of the battle, “Miss Keeldar clasped [Caroline] round the waist with both arms and held her back” from going to find Robert Moore to make some ambiguous gesture toward helping him (Brontë 287). Shirley is kind of correct to hold Caroline back, but she deprives Caroline of a certain agency. In this entire chapter, Caroline doesn’t really do anything of her own volition, and only acts via proximity to Shirley. We cannot give all the agency to Shirley, though, as, though it is her plan to go “‘for Moore’s sake; to see if [they] can be of use to him: to make an effort to warn him of what is coming,’” they arrive too late to warn Moore of anything (Brontë 286). Shirley doesn’t do anything, either.

Why, then, would Charlotte Brontë present them with a seeming opportunity?

The point of a paradoxical expectation is to set one up for failure. If men are not allowed to be violent, nor allowed to be nonviolent, then they must be presented with the opportunity for violence. Part of the soldiers’ dialogue that Shirley and Caroline hear goes, “‘Has he arms?’ ‘Fire-arms, allus,—and allus loadened.’ ‘Then you’re a fool to stop us here; a shot would give the alarm: Moore would be on us before we could turn round. We should miss our main object.’ ‘You might go on, I tell you. I’d engage Helstone alone.’” (Brontë 284). The paradoxical masculine in Shirley is not only an inability to do violence or to reject violence, but also a re-examination of what it means to reject violence. To reject violence is only to reject violence now: The soldiers forgo Helstone for Moore. To reject violence is to maintain a capacity for violence, to have been presented with the opportunity for violence that one could have accepted, and to maintain a violent presence.

V. Chartism, Capital, and Conclusions

There was a Victorian workers’ rights movement known as Chartism, which peaked in popularity in exactly the decade prior to Shirley’s publication, from 1838-1848. Many of its popular members were poets as well as activists, including the likes of Ernest Jones. His poem “A Song for the People” includes a twice-repeated refrain: “Then down to the dust—with titled lust, / And down with the gold king vile, / For the world shall see—that we will be free, / And free be the sister-isle” (Jones). The politics are not subtle.

Let us re-examine a line in the column in Fraser’s Magazine: “The author does not, after the manner of some we could name, plead the cause of the poor by indiscriminate slander of the rich, nor advocate religious tolerance by a display of the bitterest sectarian hatred” (New Novels 694).

Does Shirley contain the rich? There is Shirley herself, of course, one might say, and, though I agree that she has a level of privilege, “rich” is quite a loaded word. In volume II chapter IV, “Mr. Donne’s Exodus,” this Mr. Donne asks Shirley for a “‘subscription to a school’” with which he should “‘dispute the ground’” of a place called “‘Ecclefigg’” against a group of Baptists (Brontë 241). Shirley argues that she has “‘nothing to do with Ecclefigg,’” to which Donne appeals to her faith. Shirley eventually decided to “put her name down for 5l.: after the 300l. she had lately given, and the many smaller sums she was giving constantly, it was as much as she could at present afford” (Brontë 242).

I would like to repeat that the narrator is untrustworthy because any given sentence’s speaker is indiscernible. Up until this point, we have been led to believe that Shirley’s pockets are perhaps deeper than they are, from descriptions and revelations that took place during scenes of which Shirley was a part. If it weren’t for this scene of Shirley realizing that she perhaps cannot afford to be so flippantly charitable, we might have been led to make the same mistake Mr. Donne makes following what he perceives as an insultingly low donation: “‘The rich’ … ‘are a parcel of misers’” (Brontë 242).

The high and mighty Mr. Donne, however, does not strike me as a Chartist. Shirley, possessor of capital, is not rich. She is not quite Jones’ “gold king vile” (Jones). Though wealthier, she is not incomparable to Robert Moore. During chapter XI: “Briarmains,” he and Mr. Yorke discuss their situations. Yorke says, “‘You want capital — that’s all you want,’” and Robert responds, “‘Yes; but you might as well say that breath is all a dead man wants to live.’” (Brontë 140). Yorke admits that “capital is not to be had for the asking’” (Brontë 140).

We discussed how Robert cannot be violence, nor reject violence, and how he was punished with more violence for trying to reject that violence. We also discussed how the soldiers passing the Rectory embody the paradoxical masculine of rejecting violence being a maintenance of a violent presence.

Having capital is the equivalent of the soldier’s opportunity to attack the Rectory, not inevitable violence, but inevitable opportunity for violence. Why is it that Shirley is backdated. Could the events of the plot have happened some forty years later? The Napoleonic Wars blocking Robert Moore’s access to trade was specific to the time, but I think that Moore preempting the industrial boom is the reason why Shirley exists. He says to a pleading William Farren — with whom he later reconciles by offering work — “‘[I]f I stopped by the way an instant, while others are rushing on, I should be trodden down. If I did as you wish me to do, I should be bankrupt in a month: and would my bankruptcy put bread into your hungry children’s mouths?’” (Brontë 118).

The paradoxical masculine is a constant strive for an opportunity for violence that one will then strive to not use — necessarily competitively. The violent presence is not unlike a gold bar that collects dust, worth whatever the owner refuses to exchange it for.

I promise, I make a nonviolent argument. Yes, a person with a gold bar would be better off spending it than keeping it for its own sake, but violence is a more pure capital. I mean, violence can only be exchanged for violence, or the opportunity for violence. It cannot be used to buy material goods. It can only be used for the accumulation of itself. The paradoxical masculine that Shirley communicates is that Robert Moore is unable to rid himself of a violent presence — cannot exchange it for some other thing. The choice for him is not between violence and nonviolence, but between an immediate violent lashing out and a maintenance of the opportunity for this lashing out. The tragedy of Robert Moore is that he desperately wants to be non-violent. That is fine, but he cannot rid himself of his ability to choose violence. The violent present grows, dormant, and demands accumulation of capital — its own violent presence.

The genius of the twin plots and the incestuous narrator of Shirley is that it applies widely accepted paradoxical expectations of women and finds one of them that is applicable to men, not just for the sake of the novel’s thought experiment, to see how they would be punished for an inevitable failure, but to explore the one legitimate paradoxical responsibility of men: violence and its capacity.