 |
| Charlotte, Emily and Anne |
BBC’s prestige drama To Walk Invisible, written and directed
by Sally Wainwright, was a pleasure to watch as it charted the evolution of the
Brontë sisters from homebodies with no prospects, concerned about what will happen
after their father dies as their house is tied (not a problem in the event as
he outlived them all) to published authors.
Admittedly it suffered from the common BBC problem of poor sound quality
at times, swelling music over-emphatically directing the viewer’s emotions to
the detriment of being able to hear what was being said. But there was much to admire, particularly in
the scenery (cgi very well used), faithfully recreating Haworth and the
surrounding moors, and reminding the viewer that the parsonage was not isolated
but was part of a thriving, and grimy, industrial district.
Characterisation was plausible, displaying
the mingled affection and irritation which comes from living in each other’s
pockets. Charlotte is the shrewd ambitious
one who nags a reluctant Emily, seeing how brilliant her poetry is. Emily though lacks confidence, hiding it
behind a facade of prickliness and undertaking the bulk of the household chores
while the other two write (there is a lot of the domestic stuff shown,
countering the assumption that writers lead rarefied lives while tending to
reinforce the grim-up-north stereotype).
Anne wants to keep up creatively yet is conscious, as is Charlotte, she
is not quite in the same rank as Emily and Charlotte; perhaps an unfair
depiction as Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall have been
reassessed in recent years and found to be surprisingly tough-minded. Useless alcoholic brother Branwell, with
delusions of talent, lacks application and is resentful because of it, knowing
he can get his own way if he is obnoxious enough. And father Patrick is long suffering, always naively
optimistic with no foundation that Branwell’s latest crisis will be a turning
point leading to his recovery, and taking the girls for granted despite his
affection for them. That he is
spectacularly unaware of their prodigious literary activities is brought home
when Charlotte enters his study and to his astonishment diffidently mentions
she is the author of Jane Eyre and it
is doing rather well.
The surprisingly deep bond between Emily
and Branwell is touching, evident when they sit on a five-bar gate with their
heads resting together looking at the moon before baying companionably. On a Sunday morning the sisters walking to
church find Branwell in the lane clutching a wall in a terrible state. They blank him and continue tight-lipped,
suddenly Emily stops and turns round, not to give him a deserved punch in the
kidney but to take him back. The film is
full of such touches: I especially liked the moment where Arthur Bell Nicholls
has helped to bring an incapable Branwell inside, losing his hat in the
passage, and he and Charlotte awkwardly stoop together to pick it up leaving
Arthur on his knee, foreshadowing their marriage; by contrast the homage to Henry Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton with Branwell
out of it was too studied and the effort to endow him with a tragic aspect unwarranted. The suggestion Branwell accidentally caused
Emily’s death from TB three months after his own by coughing blood into her
face as she nursed him is horrifying. He
never gave anything of value to his family, instead bringing chaos and pain
into it.
It struck me afterwards that it would be
possible to map Wainwright’s depiction of the siblings onto Enid Blyton’s
Famous Five (or at least four-fifths of the Famous Five, though the film’s
large but mysteriously little-seen dog obviously intended to suggest the model
for Pilot in Jane Eyre could stand in
for Timmy). So the go-getting and bossy
Charlotte is Julian. In-your-face Emily
is George. Branwell appropriately is
Dick, even if Branwell never follows Charlotte’s orders as Dick does
Julian’s. And pretty Anne Brontë,
dragged along in her sisters’ wake, doubles the feminine slightly drippy
Blytonian Anne. Where the Famous Five go
adventuring on Kirrin Island the Brontë sisters mount expeditions into their
imaginations.
However, the story is not about the
novels themselves, though there are glimpses of what inspired them. Primarily it is about the struggle of the
three sisters to make something of their lives in a world which does not look
favourably on independent female achievement, and attain on their own behalf
the financial security their father’s death would remove and Branwell could
never provide. In true Yorkshire fashion
creativity is allied to business sense, as the scene in which Charlotte, Anne
in tow, descends on her publisher George Smith in London indicates. If practical business also entails an element
of invisibility, such as assuming the pseudonyms Acton, Ellis and Currer in
order for their words to be judged rather than them, so be it.
After a bizarre episode on the moors
with the three sisters backlit – godlike – by a triple sun, an almost transcendental
experience presumably inserted to remind viewer that notwithstanding all the
talk of business their legacy is greater than something merely produced for
money, hackwork, the film more or less concludes with Branwell’s death, his
sisters’ fates relegated to a brief postscript.
Unfortunately, by stopping when it does it makes their sad ends seem subordinate
to that of their feckless and undeserving brother. If he was the centre of attention in life, there
is is no reason he should be in death.
We finish with shots of the parsonage as
it is now, concentrating on the shop selling trinkets which would surely have
made the Brontës’ toes curl. The old place
is certainly a lot cleaner than it was in the 1840s, and I was pleased to see a
healthy ethnic mix looking at the key rings and mugs; as I recall, during my
visit to Haworth the clientele was homogeneously white. But why suddenly insert tacky commercialism
into the moving story of this talented set of writers who have enriched our
culture so profoundly, botching the last moments of a fine two hours of
television?
