SOURCE: "Breaking Out of Despair: Higuchi Ichiyō and Charlotte Brontë," in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3, 1987, pp. 251-63.

[In the following essay, Enomoto explores parallels as well as differences between the lives and works of Higuchi Ichiyō and Charlotte Brontë, maintaining that both were motivated by a "sense of powerlessness and loneliness" as women writers.]

This article will explore the striking similarities and differences between the lives and works of Higuchi Ichiyō and Charlotte Brontë, two leading women novelists of the nineteenth century. Ichiyō was often called "Brontë" by a contemporary Japanese critic, Hirata Tokuboku, and his friends in the Bungakkai (Literary World) group. The first and only work of Charlotte Brontë introduced to Japan during Ichiyō's lifetime was an abridged translation by Mizutani Futô of Jane Eyre, entitled Risô Kajin (An Ideal Beauty, 1896). While no evidence exists of Ichiyō's having read Brontë, Tokuboku noted one interesting affinity between the two. In an article entitled "Brontë and Kingsley," he observed that Ichiyō and Brontë's character Jane Eyre both have "a strong sense of honor" and a "defiant passion." Moreover, he wrote, "In the depth of their hearts, the people of this kind have tender feelings and longings for love, but their cool, willfull and rational disposition resists it. This conflict creates terrible suffering" [Hirata Tokuboku, Hirata Tokuboku Senshû (The Selected Works of Hirata Tokuboku) Shimada Kinji, Takezawa Keiichirô, Ogawa Kazuo, eds., 1981]. Tokuboku was not only Ichiyō's contemporary but also her friend, so I believe that it is worthwhile pursuing the relation between these two writers. Here I would like to base my discussion on Ichiyō's Nigorie (Troubled Waters) and "Wakaremichi" ("The Parting of the Ways") and Brontë's Jane Eyre and Villete.

Before examining their novels, however, I would like to consider some factors which may have contributed to the affinities between the writers. First, the two have numerous biographical similarities. Both were born into proud but impoverished families. Ichiyō's father was a governmental official who took pride in his past as a samurai; Brontë's father similarly took pride in being a clergyman of the Established Church of England. Both women had to support their families and tried to earn their living by writing. They also experienced unrequited love for their respective mentors, Nakarai Tōsui and Constantin Herger. Also notable are their physical similarities: delicate in health, both suffered from chronic insomnia and migraine, and both died rather young.

Another set of similarities is found in the social background of their times. Ichiyō was born in 1872, eleven years after Brontë's death, at the age of thirty-eight. The societies of Meiji Japan (1868-1912) and Victorian England (1837-1901) provided an oppressive environment for women, full of restrictions which confined them to their "proper sphere" and fixed roles. The twelve-year-old Ichiyō who was at the top of her class had to leave school because of her mother's firm belief: "Too much education spoils a young girl's future; she should learn sewing and help with the housework." In Shirley, Brontë has Reverend Helstone speak in a similar manner to his niece: "stick to the needle—learn shirt-making and gown-making, and piecrust-making, and you'll be a clever woman someday."

Ichiyō and Brontë both rebelled against this generally accepted trend, this ordinary, commonplace way of life. Early in their lives they became aware of their great potentials and fervently wished to fulfill them. Ichiyō confided in her diary: "Since I was about nine years old, I had loathed to live and die in obscurity. Day in day out, I wished to surpass others even by an inch."

Brontë had a similar aspiration. When she was nineteen years old, she wrote to Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, with whom she had no previous acquaintance, and asked him to comment on her and her sister's poems. Southey admonished her not to have literary ambitions:

Literature cannot be the business of a woman and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, and the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and recreation. To these duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity.

Brontë's disappointment is echoed in her first novel, The Professor. William Crimsworth, the protagonist, tells us that on the threshold of youth he was "lost in vague mental wandering, with many affections and few objects, glowing aspirations and gloomy prospects, strong desires and slender hopes." Zoraïde Reuter, the headmistress in The Professor, sums up the general reaction of Victorian society against intellectual ambitions in women:

It appears to me that ambition, literary ambition especially, is not a feeling to be cherished in the mind of a woman; would not Mlle. Henri be much safer and happier if taught to believe that in the quiet discharge of social duties consists her real vocation, than if stimulated to aspire after applause and publicity?

Despite such social pressures, however, family circumstances did not allow Ichiyō and Brontë to live like other ordinary women. They could not afford to wait for marriage in leisure, learning sewing and helping with the housework. Before opening a kitchenware and candy store in Ryûsenji, Ichiyō wrote in her diary that she had told Shibuya Saburô, her former fiancé, "when you come to see me next time, I don't know what I will be doing. I may be selling green beans or delivering newspapers." This remark reveals how little work was available for women at that time.

Similar misfortunes affected the life of Charlotte Brontë. She lost her mother early, and when her father's eye trouble worsened, she had to earn her living and take care of her younger brother and sisters. In Victorian England, job opportunities were similarly limited. The only openings were in "teaching, sewing, or washing," as Brontë's friend Mary Taylor complained. Brontë herself became a governess and her letters to her friends reveal how the poor employment conditions left her mentally and physically exhausted.

From these correspondences in the external circumstances of the two writers emerge some inner links that connect the two: they were constantly aware of their situation as women and felt overwhelmed by the sense of powerlessness and loneliness:

Sitting at a writing desk with my cheeks on my hands and reflecting, I feel that if there is something I want to do, I don't know whether I should try to do it or not, because I am a woman.… As I cannot find anyone whom I can call my friend among the people whom I see day in day out, and as there is no one who really knows me, I feel as if I were born all alone in this world. I am a woman. If there is something I really want to do, I don't know if I should do it or not.

This passage from Ichiyō's diary expresses with deep pathos the grief and loneliness of being a woman, and in her diary the phrase "powerless woman" appears several times. Even after her novel received favorable review and her name came to be known, she remained pessimistic; she still felt that she was a woman:

Nine out of ten of my visitors are delighted just to see a woman; they swarm to me to see the unusual. Therefore, even if I write a mere scrap, they hail me as today's Seishô Nagon or Lady Murasaki. They are really unthinking people without depth; they are amused to see me only because I am a woman.

Similarly, Brontë was keenly aware of the fact that she was a woman and felt profound concern for the position of women in society. In her novels, she made her heroines protest against the fixed, traditional sex roles. Jane Eyre cries out her aspirations as a human being: "Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do." In Shirley, Caroline wishes she were a boy: "I should like an occupation; and if I were a boy, it would not be so difficult to find one. I see such an easy, pleasant way of learning a business, and making my way in life." The view Brontë ultimately held, however, seems to have been pessimistic. In her letter referring to the "woman question," she reflected with resignation that there was no solution to the problem:

One can see where the evil lies, but who can point out the remedy? When a woman has a little family to rear and educate and a household to conduct, her hands are full, her vocation is evident; when her destiny isolates her, I suppose she must do what she can, live as she can, complain as little, bear as much, work as well as possible.

She also suffered from loneliness as acutely as did Ichiyō. Brontë revealed the agony of her solitary life to her friend Ellen Nussey:

I might indeed repeat over and over again that my life is a pale blank and often a very weary burden—and that the future sometimes appalls me.… The evils that now and then wring a groan from my heart—lie in position—not that I am a single woman and likely to remain a single woman—but because I am a lonely woman and likely to be lonely. But it cannot be helped, and therefore imperatively must be borne—and borne too with as few words about it as may be.

Both Ichiyō and Brontë are said to be subjective writers, and they do in fact often project themselves into the protagonists of their novels. Let us then consider how their sense of powerlessness and loneliness is reflected in their works.

Whether male or female, the protagonists of Brontë's novels are invariably orphans. William Crimsworth in The Professor has lost his parents early in youth. He works in his brother's office, but suffering from alienation and loneliness, he abandons his country and goes to Brussels to seek employment. Frances Henri, who is to be his wife, is also an impoverished orphan, and she teaches sewing and lace-mending in Mlle. Reuter's boarding school. At the beginning of Jane Eyre, the ten-year-old Jane is a poor, sensitive orphan, living in loneliness as a dependent of the Reed family. In Shirley, Caroline Helston has lost her father in childhood and scarcely remembers her mother's face. Her foil, Shirley Keeldar, is blessed with wealth, beauty, and privileges in everything, but she, too, is parentless. In Villette, Lucy Snowe appears as a fourteen-year-old orphan who is unable to express her feelings.

Ichiyō's works contain a number of short stories in which the leading characters are orphans. "Kyōzukue" (A Desk for Sutras), "Akatsuki Zukuyo" (Moonlight at Dawn), "Yuki-no-hi" (On a Snowy Day), "Koto-no-ne" (The Sound of the Koto), and "Otsugomori" ("The Last Day of the Year"). In "Yuku Kumo" (The Passing Clouds), Onui has lost her mother and endures the cruel treatment of her stepmother. Oriki in Nigorie becomes an orphan in childhood, while Kichizô in "Wakaremichi" is an abandoned child who does not even know the faces of his parents.

In Villette, thrown out alone in the world, Lucy Snowe likens the change in her circumstances to the change from "a bark slumbering through halcyon weather, in a harbour still as glass" to "the sole survivor of a shipwreck in the storm." In her diary, Ichiyō repeatedly compares her existence to "a boat drifting through the whirlpool of life." The orphaned protagonists of the two novelists have neither parents nor home, no anchor to support and sustain them. These characters are outsiders who keep drifting spiritually, straying from their homes, which are supposed to give them peace of mind and a sense of security.

The protagonists of their novels are not only orphaned but also placed in a suffocating situation with no exit. The best known example in Brontë's novels is Gateshead Hall, and especially "the red room," where young Jane is confined as a punishment and passes out in fright. William Crimsworth in The Professor, who works under his domineering and merciless brother, feels that he is "imprisoned" in his office. In Shirley, Caroline Helstone has no prospect of marriage and is not even allowed to go out into the world as a governess. For her, "the prison" may be her uncle's rectory, where she idles her time away: "What was I created for, I wonder: where is my place in the world?" Lucy Snowe in Villette likewise finds herself in confined situations, such as Miss Marchmont's hot, stifling rooms or the boarding school during the long vacations, where she is left alone with a deformed, mentally afflicted child.

In Ichiyō's Nigorie, the brothel where Oriki lives is another example of this kind of enclosed world, while many protagonists in other tales are similarly placed under confinement. Oran in "Yamiyo" ("A Dark Night") lives in a large, ruined house, cut off from the outer world, after her father's suicide and her fiancé's betrayal. Midori in Takekurabe (Growing Up) is an attractive girl brought up in the licensed quarters, Yoshiwara; she can never escape her destiny of becoming a prostitute. Oseki in Jusan'ya (On the Thirteenth Night) is fettered by the family system. She suffers from the cruel treatment of her husband, a wealthy politician. But she is doubly bound by her love of her child and concern for her parents and brother who receive material help from the politician. She cannot divorce him even though her married life is unbearable.

All of the men and women who live like "a plant growing in humid darkness out of the slimy walls of a well," excluded from "the sunshine of life", are in despair and loneliness, and they struggle to escape from it. Yet the protagonists of Ichiyō's and Brontë's novels reveal some differences in the ways in which they seek to escape. Here I would like to consider how each of the protagonists in Nigorie, "Wakaremichi," Jane Eyre, and Villette acts when he or she is placed in a hopeless situation.

The brothel where Oriki in Nigorie lives is compared to mugenjigoku, the most tormenting of the Eight Hells. It looks gay, but it is really a living hell isolated from the outer world; whoever has fallen in there can never escape. The women of the amusement quarters appear to lead merry lives entertaining their customers, but in the depths of their hearts, all hide pain and sorrow. For example, a barmaid muses as she stands in front of a mirror with tears in her eyes:

It is sad to be born as a woman. I cannot eke out a living by making match boxes, nor can I work as a kitchen maid, as I am not physically strong. This business is not pleasant either, but as it is not so trying for the body, I lead such a life. I am by no means frivolous, but my son will be sure to scorn me as a mother not worth mentioning. Today I am ashamed of my heavy coiffure which I don't mind at ordinary times.

Oriki, the most beautiful and strong-minded of the prostitutes, looks cheerful in appearance and betrays no weakness to others, but her nerves are just as sensitive as "a spider's thread which will break if one touches it." She works with the aid of a drink and has sad and dreadful things hidden in her heart. Her scholarly grandfather, who is well-versed in the Chinese classics, produced "a mere worthless scrap." When its publication was prohibited by the feudal government, however, he fasted to death in protest. Her father had a masterly skill as a metal worker, but too proud to be sociable, he died in extreme poverty.

Oriki, too, is painfully aware of the fatal discrepancy between what she is and what she ought to be. Her monologue after running out of the drinking bout in Chapter Five reveals the conflict within her mind. For Oriki, the place in which she lives, the amusement quarters, is a "dull, worthless, unpleasant, miserable, sad and hopeless" world which negates her pride and aspirations. She wants to escape from it, but on the other hand, she resigns herself to her fate: "Since I am in such a situation, doing such work, and having such a fate, I am not, to be sure, like other normal people no matter what I do, so it is no use troubling myself to think about normal things." She thinks that even if she longs to "rise in the world," she cannot fulfill her desire, and her resignation seems to be rooted in her fatalism. She believes that fate has governed her family for three generations. Both her grandfather and father died rejected by the world despite their high ideals, and she thinks that she, too, will have a similar fate: "Those who were born in a family such as mine can never become anybody. I can guess what will happen to me as well."

Since Oriki feels strongly that she is not placed where she should be and hates the world in which she lives, she wishes to escape. Her fatalism, however, represses her desire and drives her to crushing despair. Weary and irritated at the great gap between what she is and what she ought to be, Oriki faces the only means of escape left for her—madness or death. In "Utsusemi" ("The Ephemeral Life"), Ichiyô created a woman who tries to free herself from despair by way of madness. Yukiko, the female protagonist, distracted by a sense of guilt toward a man who fell in love with her and committed suicide, thinks "the inside of her house is a large field." Like her, Oriki feels as if "she were walking in a large, desolate, wintry field," when, in reality, she is walking on a brightly lit street which is alive with a row of stalls. A fear flashes through her mind—she may be going mad.

Oriki invokes death as well for her relief and deliverance. She ponders, "How can I go to an absolutely quiet place, where not a human voice, not a sound is heard—where everything including my mind is in a daze and I need not think of anything?" The quiet place where she longs to flee is the state of void, as desolate as "a large, wintry field." She can only go there by dying. In fact, she does escape from the amusement quarters through death, which is brought about byūgenshichi, one of her customers who was ruined by his love for her.

While Nigorie describes escape through death, "Wakaremichi" describes two people, one of whom escapes from confinement by other means, while the other remains in confinement. Ichiyô seems to project her two selves here: one into Kichizô, a boy who works in an umbrella shop; the other into Okyô, a beautiful but impoverished seamstress. Kichizô is a defiant but lonely orphan who is also physically handicapped: he is so short that he is nicknamed "Tom Thumb." The proprietress of the umbrella shop, Omatsu, saves him from the condition of a wandering street performer. When she dies, Kichizô continues to work at the shop. He does not like the present proprietor, but he has nowhere else to go. Kichizô is completely isolated from those around him because everyone teases him about his height, and he fights back with his fists. He can find no one to comfort him, and in the depths of his heart he thinks, "If there were someone who gave me a kind word, I would cling to him and never leave him." His sense of loneliness and alienation is so strong that he even thinks that he would rather "die now and be freed from care."

Okyô is the only person on whom Kichizô, craving for love, depends for emotional support. She holds him as dear as her own brother and encourages him to "rise in the world." But she herself finds the life of poverty in a tenement house unbearable. Finally, she decides to get out of this "barren, dull world" by becoming the mistress of a wealthy man. She declares to Kichizô, who entreats her to change her mind: "But I am tired of washing and mending! I no longer care about anything. I will even become a kept woman. Things are so dull anyway; I would rather go through the world in a soiled silk kimono." She has made a desperate decision to escape from her plight, but she knows that there is no future for a kept woman. In other words, her present life of poverty is hopeless, but the condition of a kept woman is just as hopeless, and degrading as well.

Like Oriki, Okyô, and Kichizô, the heroine of Jane Eyre is hopelessly confined in disagreeable circumstances at the beginning of the novel. The ten-year-old orphan, Jane, is an outsider in Gateshead Hall, despised by Mrs. Reed and her children as a dependent and rejected even by the servants because she is plain and unsociable. She is habitually tormented by "the mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression." Her sense of alienation and despair is mirrored by the desolate wintry scenes outside Gateshead Hall and the illustrations of Bewick's History of British Birds, such as "the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray," "the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast," and "the black, horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows."

Jane's sense of isolation and despair intensifies when she is literally imprisoned in "the red room" because she defended herself against bullying by her cousin, John Reed. The chilly, silent, dark room covered with crimson curtains and carpets is a spare bedroom which the family seldom uses. It is the room where Mr. Reed died, and so it is closely associated with death. Jane fears that she might be taken into the world of the dead. She then sees a strange light gleaming on the wall and is driven temporarily insane: "My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down." She screams frantically and faints.

As critics have often noted, the fainting fit signifies temporary death in Brontë's novels, and those who have lost consciousness invariably awaken into a new state of being. Before she was locked up in "the red room," Jane was a timid and nervous child who tried to gain the favor of others, but while in the room, she examines the condition in which she is placed and asks herself why she is always unjustly accused and condemned. She finally decides to escape from "insupportable oppression" by some means, "by running away, or if that could not be effected, never eating or drinking more," and letting herself die. After awakening in "the red room," Jane is no longer a timid child, crushed by powerlessness. She no longer resignedly tolerates unfair treatment. She begins to assert herself; she fights off John's violence and tells Mrs. Reed what she thinks of her with sharp words. When Jane openly accuses her aunt, she feels that her "soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom of triumph, I ever felt. it seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty." Shortly afterwards, in fact, she escapes from Gateshead and starts for Lowood, where new experiences await her.

The heroine of Villette, Lucy Snowe, undergoes a similar experience. In the small, closed world of Mme. Beck's boarding school, she tries to repress her feelings and lives with reason alone in the role of an efficient teacher. Sometimes, however, she feels not quite satisfied with her present life and longs for "something to fetch" her out of her present existence, and lead her "upwards and onwards." When she is left alone in the deserted school with a physically and spiritually deformed child assigned to her care during a long vacation period, she faces a spiritual crisis.

Living with the unwanted child, Lucy feels as though she were "prisoned with some strange tameless animal." Deprived of the accustomed role of teacher in which she has buried herself, Lucy is forced to reflect upon her own life. Life seems to her "but a hopeless desert: tawny sands, with no green field, no palm-tree, no well in view," and she is often seized with "a despairing resignation to reach betimes the end of all things earthly." Like Oriki, she is attracted to death for deliverance and relief, and she succumbs to fatalism. She is convinced, "Fate was my permanent foe, never to be conciliated."

Even after her aunt takes away the deformed child, Lucy's sense of loneliness and despair increases, and she suffers from a strange fever, nightmares, and insomnia. At last it seems to her that the white beds in the long dormitory are "turning into spectres—the coronal of each became a death's head, huge and sunbleached." Unable to stand the strain any longer, she goes to a Catholic church, although she is a Protestant. She is comforted by just hearing the priest's voice and telling him how she feels. After leaving the church, Lucy loses her way and, battered by the rain and wind, swoons. But before losing consciousness, she becomes aware of the will to live within her: "My heart did not fail at all in this conflict; I only wished that I had wings and could ascend the gale, spread and repose my pinions on its strength, career in its course, sweep where it swept."

Here, as in Jane Eyre, the fainting fit signifies the end of the spiritual life which she has led up to that moment, and the experience makes her awaken into a new life. When she recovers her consciousness, she finds herself in the house of Mrs. Bretton, her godmother, who loved her in her childhood but who became estranged from her ten years ago. Lucy is to be under the care of the Brettons until she recovers from her illness, and the Brettons serve as the link between her peaceful childhood and her present hard life. The incident in the Catholic church and her subsequent fainting fit mark a turning point for Lucy. After these experiences, she realizes the importance of the feelings which she has repressed, and with the kind help of Mrs. Bretton and her son Graham, she finds "a new creed … a belief in happiness."

Thus, both Jane and Lucy are seized with a moment of madness or a regressive desire for death, and when they can no longer stand the strain of their circumstances, they even go through temporary death. Yet they are always brought to life from suffering and temporary death. When they awaken, they are already out of their spiritual crisis and are able to look at themselves and those around them in a new light, even though their circumstances have not much changed. The experience of suffering serves as a test of their inner worth, and the fainting fit prompts their psychological development.

In contrast to Jane and Lucy, Oriki and Okyô escape from the outer darkness where they actually live, but they are not freed from the inner darkness of their minds. As for Kichizô, he is left alone in despair and loneliness. Ichiyô feels constantly harried under the pressure of being the breadwinner of the Higuchi family, and she is obsessed with a sense of the powerlessness of being a woman. Suffering from tuberculosis, Ichiyô was also conscious of her approaching death. When she heard of the death of her cousin, Higuchi Kôsaku, she wrote in her diary, "A person near me came to a pitiable end. My own destiny, too, seems somehow doomed." The following passage from her diary reveals her ultimately pessimistic view of life: "It is enough for me if there is a good place to die in this weary world." Like the author, the protagonists of her novels cannot escape from their deep inner gloom.

Brontë, too, held a gloomy outlook on life. In The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Mrs. Gaskell writes that Brontë told her, "she believed some were appointed beforehand to sorrow and much disappointment.… and she was trying to school herself against ever anticipating any pleasure." Brontë, however, cherished strong longings for release and fulfillment; she wished to break out of her present sorrowful life and fly away to a wider world where she could lead a free, happy life. She wrote how she felt when she read a letter from Mary Taylor, an active feminist friend:

I hardly knew what swelled to my throat as I read her letter—such a vehement impatience of restraint and steady work. Such a strong wish for wings—wings such as wealth can furnish—such an urgent thirst to see—to know—to learn—something internal seemed to expand boldly for a minute—I was tantalized with the consciousness of faculties unexercised.… These rebellious and absurd emotions were only momentary. I quelled them in five minutes.

Brontë had to suppress her "wish for wings" when she faced the bitter facts of her own life, but the protagonists of her novels escape from their predicament through the mysterious experience of death and spiritual rebirth. Brontë probably tried to realize her unfulfilled dreams and aspirations through her works.

Both Ichiyô and Brontë, then, were caught in the double bind of their gender and their social situation. Yet they struggled to realize their potential as human beings, despite the enormous limitations of their circumstances. In the enclosure-escape pattern of their novels, we can see their tenacious struggle against their plight.