A REVIEW OF JANE SATTERFIELD’S THE BADASS BRONTËS
The Badass Brontës, Jane Satterfield. Diode Editions, 2023. 80 pages. $18.00
by Corinna McClanahan Schroeder
Jane Satterfield’s newest collection of poems, The Badass Brontës, reimagines the lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, nineteenth-century sisters and authors who published under male pseudonyms and spent much of their short lives in their father’s parsonage on the Yorkshire moors. Often focusing on middle sister Emily, poet and author of Wuthering Heights, Satterfield’s poems probe our continued obsession with these sister-authors, lyrically exploring the details of their biographies and their cultural afterlives.
While the book’s three sections move in a generally chronological manner through the Brontës’ lives, the poems oscillate between the nineteenth century and the present moment of the contemporary speaker. These movements in time are one of the most inventive and rewarding aspects of The Badass Brontës, allowing Satterfield to collapse the distance between the Brontës and us and reveal their continued relevance. Not only does Satterfield frequently render the Brontës in contemporary language and summon them into the present through poems of direct address, she also effectively highlights connections between the Brontës’ world and our own, from environmental wreck to the spread of contagious disease. Using an array of forms and employing historical research that informs but never overwhelms the poems, Satterfield has built a stunning collection—one that breathes new life into these infamous literary figures and very real women.
Throughout The Badass Brontës, Satterfield reinvigorates the narrative of the Brontë sisters by bringing the contemporary to bear on their nineteenth-century lives. The title poem, for example, uses contemporary diction to highlight the sisters’ subversiveness in the context of Victorian England. In the poem, Anne, “irked past words with nannying” and her “coked-up” boss, has quit her job and returned home where she “leads / kitchen karaoke” and “canoodl[es] / in the crypts with her father’s curate” (25). Meanwhile, “Charlotte downs / a dirty chai to plot another romance novel,” her love letters to her former professor “full of pretty filthy stuff,” and Emily’s “an insomniac” who “works from dusk ’til dawn and still / finds time for pistol practice” (25). The poem ends with the sisters “go[ing] commando when / they can, in town or on the primrose path” (25).
With language like “coked up,” “canoodling,” and “commando,” Satterfield borrows the strategy outlined in one of the second section’s epigraphs, in which Abigail Burnham Bloom states: “Modern depictions of the Brontës become interesting when they reveal a dimension of the Brontës in a new way, even while departing from the truth in order to do so” (23). The Brontës may not have wandered around the moors “commando,” but the sentiment speaks to the ways that the sisters worked against the constraints of patriarchal culture, from publishing their own novels in a male-dominated industry to wandering the moors without male supervision. We see this same sort of lyric liberty at work in the poem “Emily, Inked,” where Satterfield imagines the tattoos Emily Brontë might have had, including:
a double-stumped
wind-gnarled fir tree,
stars clustered
in sisterly constellation.
A hawk kiting,
wings unfurled, holding
its position in the air. (30-31)
Emily’s skin may not have been “devotional // with decoration, porous / as a page,” but the poem’s imagined tattoos become a bank of images that help us more fully understand this “romantic sister’s” psyche and legacy (30, 16).
In addition to language and image, Satterfield uses form to help readers understand the Brontës’ lives. “Self-Portrait as Thunder and Lightning,” for example, is composed of mostly long end-stopped couplets, and the poem opens by describing Emily Brontë “stab[bing] at stitchery, affecting a fix with fine tucks” (16). The long end-stopped lines begin to look on the page like the stitches of the sisters’ sewing. The hard stops of the periods at the lines’ ends also contribute to the sense of patriarchal confinement, both physical and psychological, that the sisters faced and their frustration at such limits:
The corseted body is morally firm; the pretty heroine, artless.
Tight-lacers are rarely tempted to stray.
A new wife’s ease with her “duties” is signaled by her light-colored summer dress.
A ripping good yarn dresses up social critique.
Daydreams may induce a distempered mind.
Literature cannot be the business of women, and it ought not to be… (16)
The italicized line, as a note at the end of the book explains, is advice from Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, to Charlotte Brontë, who wrote to him when she was twenty-one seeking literary guidance. In Satterfield’s poem, the quotation serves as a reminder of what the Brontës were up against as authors, and at the same time, the quotation also functions as a turn into the final lines of the poem, which emphasize the sisters’ defiance of such directives. Drawing on the historical detail that Emily had a dress with a thunder and lightning pattern on it, the poem ends:
Far from the whirl of woolen mills, thunder and lightning
walk, indifferent to fashion’s flattery, the tyranny of trends,
quicksilver in the eyes of the fox,
in the flare and flame of the fox threading high hills with its ochre. (16)
It’s no mistake that the poem’s end-stopped lines give way to enjambment at the very moment that Emily Brontë—and, by proxy, her sisters—break free of the house that is “sometimes a prison” and enter wild space (16). Indeed, in these final lines of the poem, Emily Brontë seems to become wild herself—half animal and half weather. In this poem, and elsewhere in the collection, form and the line reinforce and expand the narrative that Satterfield is weaving, helping us understand the exhaustion of life in which “[t]he set task” is “sitting still” and also the joy of rebellion and escape (16).
Thanks to the book’s temporal oscillations between the present of the contemporary speaker and the past of the Brontës, The Badass Brontës extends its attention from these sister-authors to their cultural afterlives. Indeed, there’s an impressive catalogue of contemporary Brontë-inspired phenomena in the book. “Which Brontë Sister Are You?” is inspired by internet quizzes which tell the test-taker which sister’s profile best matches their personality. Meanwhile, “Own the Charlotte Brontë” offers readers a tour of a single-family home model called the Charlotte Brontë in which the happy homeowner can “live like a Brontë”—that is, “minus the cruel wind, moorland damp, and factory smoke” (37). There’s also “The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever,” a villanelle about an annual gathering held worldwide in which participants recreate the music video for Kate Bush’s 1978 song “Wuthering Heights.” The villanelle’s repeating lines effectively mirror the bodies “synchronize[d] in dance” and the novel’s own “whirl of wind & weather” (38). In poems like these, it becomes clear that The Badass Brontës is a study of both the Brontë sisters and our gaze at them, exploring how cultural phenomena variously celebrate, mythologize, and commercialize the sisters’ lives.
In addition to allowing Satterfield to explore the afterlives of the Brontës, the book’s temporal movements also help her build compelling connections between the present of the contemporary speaker and the past of the Brontës. Often, these connections highlight the fragility of our lives and the natural world. The book’s first section, for example, opens with “Letter to Emily Brontë,” in which the speaker writes to Brontë from her home during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic:
I’m writing this from lockdown on a day
when the dogwood throws out its dose
of darker pink. The schoolyard
across the street is wreathed in yellow
caution tape. (11)
The speaker then addresses Brontë directly:
Emily, you were no stranger
to contagion in a town of trash heaps & overflowing
pits. A fog-bound pestilence vapored through
low-lying towns, typhus & TB ravaged
boarding schools[.] (11)
These parallels, such as outbreaks of contagious disease, help readers see interesting similarities between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twenty-first century, and indeed, there’s a wonderfully eerie moment at the end of “Gigan for a Pandemic Winter” in which “a glove thrown on the ground” functions simultaneously as an image of a Victorian women’s glove and a contemporary PPE glove (21).
But the parallels that Satterfield develops are also doing more than simply acknowledging similarities, as they make clear that the environmental wreck of the past and present result from the same destructive systems. In Terry Eagleton’s words (which serve as an epigraph to “Gigan for a Pandemic Winter”), the Brontës “were quite literally writing at the source of global industrial society” (21), and Satterfield’s poems in The Badass Brontës lyrically demonstrate that our own world of late capitalism and environmental destruction is part of the legacy of the Industrial Revolution. Take the opening of the poem “Emily Brontë’s Advice for the Anthropocene,” which begins by describing Haworth as it was when the Brontës lived nearby:
Haworth was a maze
of multiplying middens, mills, the pumped-up
clouds of industry, heathered moors a haven in
a century’s shrinking space. Tempting, yes,
to stick to chores, scrub the parlour carpet,
remain, in fact, remote. But as the saying goes,
there is no later. This is later—arctic ice melts,
shears off; strange calvings stun the circumspect
to speech. (22)
These lines start with a description of the past and then merge into a description of the present, and yet it’s hard to find the exact moment of temporal change. “This is later,” yes, but even the poem’s earlier point that it’s tempting to “remain […] remote,” scrubbing the parlour carpet, sounds much like the attitude of many middle- and upper-class Americans who have not yet been “stun[ned] to speech,” who can ignore climate change thanks to their ability to isolate themselves from its effects.
This thread of environmentalism is part of the book’s bold work in collapsing distance between the Brontës and us. Not only do the poems draw on the environmental realities of the Brontës’ lives and connect them with our own, but they bring the sisters into the present moment, asking, for example, “If Emily were here today, / what would she say?” and then answering: “Aim to take dictation—a rabbit / grooming in the grass calls down the watchful hawk, / the robin’s clutch in turn attracts the foraging crow” (22). Drawing on Emily Brontë’s love of animals and nature, Satterfield uses Brontë as a kind of conscience, instructing contemporary readers to witness the natural world and also to understand the ways in which the forces of capitalism and industrialization that shaped the Brontës’ lives shape ours too. In this way, the book powerfully melds lyric meditation on the world’s “story of time & / vanishing” with protest against environmental destruction (20).
“What good / are words if they don’t weave a web / that spans the centuries,” ask the Brontë sisters in the poem “Spellcasters” (44). This work of “weav[ing] a web / that spans the centuries” is the same work that Satterfield undertakes in The Badass Brontës. Far ranging and expansive, the collection not only breathes new life into the Brontë story but also helps us understand our cultural infatuation with these sister-authors and the many poignant parallels that exist between our worlds.
Corinna McClanahan Schroeder is the author of the poetry collection Inked (Texas Review Press, 2015), which won the 2014 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Poet Lore, and The Southern Review. She is the recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Poetry Fellowship from the Sewanee Writer’s Conference and an AWP Intro Journals Award in Poetry. Schroeder lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of Southern California.