Into Miry Wilds: Fairies in Victorian Culture

Introduction

The word “fairy” is used nineteen times in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre; however, at least fifty references to fairies and fairy folklore are made throughout the novel.   Fairies, remnants of a Celtic pagan past, have haunted the British Isles since before the Anglo-Saxon period into the modern age.  Thought to be nature spirits, these mysterious and supernatural beings were especially paramount to agrarian English life before the Industrial Revolution.  By the dawn of the Victorian period, England was moving away from the agrarian society of old, and into a new age of science, industry, and innovation.  One might presume that the fairy would fade in light of such modern society, but this was far from the case.  Fairies play a special role in English literary history, and particularly in Victorian literature, art and culture.  Fairies often mirrored social anxieties of Victorian England.  Fairies had particular significance in Charlotte Brontë’s life.  In Jane Eyre, the motif of fairies demonstrate Jane as the “Other,” while simultaneously illuminating the fairy tale structure of the novel. 

Victorian Fairies in Literature, Art and Culture

In fact, Victorian literature, art and culture demonstrates a preoccupation or even obsession with fairies and related folklore.  As Sarah Rebecca Wakefield points out in her dissertation, Folklore Naming and Folklore Narrating in British Women’s Fiction, 1750-1880, fairies permeate the English Victorian novel.  This is particularly the case in the works of female writers, such as Sarah Fielding, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Anne Thackeray, and Jean Ingelow.  Additionally, fairy paintings are most closely associated with Victorian artists, such as Richard Dadd and John Anster Fitzgerald. 

Fig. 1. Richard Dadd working on Richard Dadd working on Contradiction: Oberon and Titania (1854/1858). Photograph by Henry Hering. "Richard Dadd." Wikipedia, 30 Oct 2019

Fairies also became a popular subject for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) artists, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais.  Keightley contends that fairies had such prominence in Victorian literature and art because of the strong belief in fairies amongst even the most educated English people (4).

Fig. 2. The Fairy Mythology, by Thomas Keightley, 1st edition, published 1828.  PickClick, 2019.

William John Thomas, another Victorian folklorist, wrote in 1846 that "belief in fairies is by no means extinct in England" (qtd. in Silver 1).  With so much cultural change at rapid pace, Victorians must have felt uneasy about letting go of their agricultural past.  It can be conjectured that the notion of fairies kept Victorians connected with England’s more rustic past.   

Fairies and Victorian Anxiety

            Furthermore, English writers and artists have a history of idealizing an Arcadian, pastoral way of life, especially during those difficult periods of history when escape might be desired.  Fairies, known by innumerable names and thought to bring good or ill luck to all that interact with them (Cavendish 901), certainly represent that Arcadian idyll.  The Victorian period was a time of great success and innovation in England.  Britain was becoming an enormous empire, and by the late nineteenth century, it is commonly known that a quarter of the world’s population was subject to Queen Victoria.  Innovations such as the steam train changed the landscape of England at great pace, and this was a time of much discovery in sciences such as astronomy, biology, and geology.  As fairies were pushed into the sea and underground according to Celtic folklore, the British were pushed away from village life and into cities like London.  Folklorist Carole G. Silver argues that fairies symbolize Victorian anxieties, such as sexual repression, imperialism, and the dramatically changing landscape of England (1).  Wakefield adds that fairies correspond to Victorian English anxieties, especially concerning the “Other” for white, upper class men (19).  Wakefield points out that fairies and folklore often serve as a metaphor for British Imperialism, as well as gender inequities in society (19).  Fairies functioned as an outlet to escape these social anxieties and look back to a simpler time.

Fairies and Charlotte Brontë

            Moreover, fairy lore was of particular importance to Charlotte Brontë’s childhood.  Brontë’s life informed many aspects of Jane Eyre.  Bessie Lee, the maid at Gateshead, fills Jane’s head with stories of fairies that linger in Jane’s mind even in adulthood.  Bessie is most likely a fictionalized version of Tabitha “Tabby” Aykroyd, a servant in the Brontë home.  According to Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Tabby “had known the ‘bottom,’ or valley, in those primitive days when the fairies frequented the margin of the ‘beck’ on moonlight nights, and had known folk who had seen them . . . ‘It wur the factories as had driven ‘em away,’ she said” (54).  Gaskell explains that Tabby would tell the Brontë children countless tales of the fairy folk, while Charlotte would listen wide-eyed.  This clearly resonates in Jane Eyre.

Fairies and Jane Eyre

Lastly, fairies have great significance in Jane Eyre, and serve as a powerful symbol throughout the book.  As a child, Jane often escapes the sinister Gateshead life by reading Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a novel filled with fairy-like creatures.  Jane is treated as “Other” during her life at Gateshead, forbidden to associate with her cousins and forced often into isolation.  The fairy motif used in the early part of the novel accentuates Jane’s “Otherness.” 

A significant part of the novel is when Jane first meets Rochester on the road near Thornfield Hall.  Jane imagines the frightening “Gytrash” fairy when she first hears Rochester approaching.  Simultaneously, Rochester imagines that Jane is a fairy in the same scene.  This foreshadows Jane’s somewhat mystical connection with Rochester, as he later identifies her frequently as a member of the “green folk” and constantly half-jokes that she is an elf, sorceress or fairy.  Additionally, this foreshadows the “fairy tale” nature of the entire book. 

Jane represents “Otherness” in the most negative way possible for Aunt Reed at Gateshead, but to Rochester, Jane’s “Otherness” is one of her most powerful appeals.  She is different from any woman he has ever met, completely separate from women like Céline Varens and Blanche Ingram.  Jane functions like a fairy in Rochester’s life, bringing him good fortune, as when she saves him from fire.  However, ill luck seems to inexplicably follow his interactions with her, considering Bertha’s increased aptitude for arson and George Mason’s unwelcome visit. 

In Chapter Sixteen of the novel, Jane becomes convinced that Rochester could never return her love.  In this self-deprecating scene, Jane reflects that if her “secret love” (190) were discovered, she would need to “lead, ignus fatuus-like, into miry wilds, whence there is no extrication” (191).  The word “fairy” is derived from the Latin fatuus, which means “enchanter” (Keightley 7), and in this passage, ignus fatuus means will-o’-the-wisp.  This passage foreshadows Jane’s flight later on in the novel, when she discovers Rochester is already married and runs away into the wilderness. 

Conclusion

            In sum, Victorian writers like Charlotte Brontë were understandably preoccupied with fairies and Celtic folklore.  Fairies represented the village life and pastoral society, which was very much dwindling with all of the advances of the Victorian age.  Reflecting on fairies allowed Victorians to hold onto their past, and not get too carried away by the future.  Fairies have been a constant motif of British literature for the past thousand years, and are unlikely to ever fully fade “into miry wilds.”

Works Cited

Brontë, Charlotte.  Jane Eyre.  1847.  Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003.

Cavendish, Richard, editor.  “Fairies.”  Man, Myth & Magic: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the

Supernatural, vol. 7, Marshall Cavendish Corporation, 1970, pp. 897-907.

Gaskell, Elizabeth.  The Life of Charlotte Brontë.  1857.  Wordsworth Literary Lives, 2008.

Keightley, Thomas.  The Fairy Mythology.  1828.  George Bell & Sons, York St., Covent

Garden, and New York, 1892.  Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/files/41006/41006-h/41006-h.htm

Silver, Carole G.  “Chapter One: On the Origins of Fairies.”  Strange and Secret Peoples:

Fairies and Victorian Consciousness. New York & Oxford, 1999.  The New York Times

on the Web, movies2.nytimes.com/books/first/s/silver-strange.html

Wakefield, Sarah Rebecca.  Folklore Naming and Folklore Narrating in British Women’s

Fiction, 1750-1880.  2002.  The University of Texas at Austin, PhD dissertation.  Texas Scholar Works, repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/1025.  Accessed 3 October 2019.