The Dryad

I've always had a fascination for tree dryads ever since my uncle died in 1994. It was about this time that he used to walk past a lightning-struck tree every few days on his way to collect fresh spring water - the village supply being pretty awful at the time to drink neat or as tea. Shortly before his death he noticed the tree one day when I met him at his stream, bottles in hand. He asked me about it and I gave him a brief account of its history, which was scant. A thunderbolt had taken a chunk off its crown and the locals called it a Noble Pine. The name of the tree is, I've since found out, a Noble Fir. It stands on the north of the Isle of Mull.
Just several days after our tree exploration, my uncle died suddenly of a heart attack. Strangely, I'd foreseen his death - by pure chance or 'synchronicity' - in the following manner:
One morning lying in bed, I had an ordinary dream of a vivid nature. I dreamt I was in a field with my uncle, both of us in the process of playing shinty - a Scottish game which is like a violent version of hockey. Whilst playing this game in the dream, my relative was knocked down, seemingly dead, by a thunderbolt of lightning. This last part of the dream was especially vivid: I woke up immediately after the dream feeling very alert and wide awake.
At the time of this dream my old relative was staying with me in my flat for a few days. About an hour after my dream I went through to the kitchen to find my uncle leaning on the sideboard doing a crossword puzzle. He complained slightly of having a tightness in his chest. He asked me various crossword clues, few of which I could answer. Then my uncle perked up at one of the clues and asked what weapon did Zeus use in Greek mythology.
I went through to the living room and returned with an encyclopedia of mythology. Imagine my astonishment when I found the answer - the Thunderbolt, and my further sadness when my uncle grinned at me and said, 'That's it, it fits.'
Although I was due to go to work that morning, I decided to bide time with my uncle instead, to go down to the 'docks' in the sun for a pleasant relaxing walk. It was the last walk I shared with my uncle, and I'll always be glad I got the message to take time out, for a last spin of his wild tales of the sea.
My uncle soon got the full check up for the tightness of his chest. Some days later however, he died quite suddenly, leaving everyone rather shocked. He was a well loved man. After my uncle died I used to think of him everytime I passed the lightning-struck fir tree, and I'd wonder at its squat, grotesque beauty.
Every time I pass the tree today I think its lowest giant branch looks like a tendril - like the arm of a tree dryad.
These thoughts always come to my mind when I read the Brontė's novels, especially those by Charlotte. I offer my own introduction here then to show the background of my interest in the Brontė's trees.

It is in Jane Eyre, Charlotte's first published novel, that she uses the tree symbol to good effect. It's here that she tests its branches for climbing and uses the symbol to describe a postponed marriage.
Jane Eyre is a governess who takes up residence in Thornfield Hall which has an ancient Horse Chestnut tree in its garden. It's there she falls for the master of the house, a Mr Edward Rochester. He proposes marriage and she accepts with a flurry of vivacious, playful dialogue. Alas though there is trouble ahead, as Mr Rochester already has a wife - a lunatic - who he keeps in the attic. The night before the marriage is due to take place, a storm breaks and blasts the ancient Conker tree, splitting it in half - an omen of bad tidings to come.
When the truth is revealed to Jane just minutes before her marriage, the proceedings are called off and Jane leaves Thornfield, destitute. Years later she returns to Thornfield having been called there by an audible hallucination of Edward Rochester, crying out for help. But when she reaches the Hall she finds it has been burnt down. A local explains to her that the lunatic has been killed in the fire. Living nearby is Mr Rochester, now blind and crippled. Jane offers him her heart but he declines whilst shedding a tear, claiming he is ugly, old and unworthy of her. He says:

"I am no better than the old lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield orchard and what right would that ruin have to bid a budding woodbine cover its decay with freshness?"

And she answers:

"You are no ruin, sir - no lightning-struck tree: you are green and vigorous. Plants will grow about your roots, whether you ask them or not...And as they grow they will lean towards you, and wind round you, because your strength offers them so safe a prop."

The couple become married and Jane Eyre goes on to have a child - a happy ending.

Charlotte's tree runs parallel to the thunder-struck tree, blasted at midnight in Emily Brontė's, Wuthering Heights. The thunder blast or accompanying wind brings a bough down onto the Heights house. Just as in Jane Eyre, the tree is used to describe the first major rift between the two main characters, in this case - Catherine and Heathcliffe. The tree returns later in the form of Cathy's ghost which manifests as a persistent twig of a fir tree which taps on Mr Lockwood's window. Unlocked by Lockwood, the narrator, the archetypal encryptian packs a lot of punch, for it is Emily who was finally remembered for her branch which turns into a human hand - something which made me literally jump back with a yelp when, as a child, I watched an old adaptation of it on television.
Less known is the tree which accompanies the news of Catherine's death, the morn of her difficult childbirth. When Heathcliffe hears the news he smashes his head repeatedly against a large knotted trunk until it is splashed with blood, like a wild pagan offering. No wonder that her spirit should feed off the blood to give form to her ghostly overseeing tree.

Charlotte returns to the tree symbol in a much grander way in Villette, her last novel. Here the tree turns up constantly as a symbol of mystery and thwarted love.
The tree itself is an ancient pear tree which sits in a garden, in a girl's school, in Brussels. The heroine of the novel - Lucy Snowe - is a teacher at the school. She's attracted to the tree by a local myth surrounding it - below the tree is said to be buried a nun who'd broken her vows in the past and was entombed there alive, for her sins.
Lucy becomes the recipient of a number of tender, friendly letters from a dashing young man, Dr John Bretton. But, tired of seeing her belongings rifled by the school mistress, Madame Beck, and having suffered as the relationship wanes and becomes one-sided, she buries the letters below the ancient pear tree. As Charlotte says in the novel,

"I was not only going to hide a treasure - I meant also to bury a grief. That grief...Must be interred."

After burying the letters in a sealed jar, a ghost of the nun appears in the moonlight. The nun is described as a dryad of the pear tree. This relationship now buried, Lucy Snowe goes on to court a M Paul Emanuel. The novel ends with a parting of the couple and hope for a happy reunion. The third last chapter is entitled, The Happy Pair.
Villette was Charlotte Brontė's last novel and by this time she was happy to use her writing openly as a tool to reprimand an adversary. For example, the slimy spy-rat in Villette, Madame Beck, has often been compared to the real cold-blooded school mistress, Madame Heger, who Charlotte encountered in the Pensionnat Heger. Most blatant of all however is the reference to a mother and son on board, The Vivid, Lucy's ship to the Continent. The two argue over a woman called, Charlotte, who the mother declares to be on the brink of a mismatched romance. The angry woman is described as loud, vain and vulgar. Charlotte (Brontė) describes her as likely having worked as a bar-maid.
The self-referential aspect to this scene - along with its humour - is so obvious as to invite the reader to view it as autobiographical. The loud lady is most likely a humourous joke on (or shared with) Mrs Elizabeth Smith, the mother of George Smith, Charlotte's publisher and close friend. In fact Mrs Smith opposed a marriage between the two as she viewed Charlotte to be too 'coarse' in her novels, in the Victorian sense of the word. How much jealousy played a part in her opposition is a moot point but George eventually went on to marry a more genteel woman and became a rich, successful publisher.
Having introduced such a strange biographical reference, it doesn't take long to see the same parallel occur later on in Villette. Dr John Bretton and his mother take on the role of George and the kinder side to Mrs Smith, while Lucy Snowe has strong similarities to Charlotte. The letters under the tree could be a reference to the loving letters between Charlotte and George (and possibly to earlier warm correspondence with M. Heger), even to the point where the Brontė biographer, Lyndall Gordon, has described Villette as the longest love letter embedded in English literature.
Even more fascinating is Ms Gordon's remark that Charlotte's own letters - from George - may have been buried below one or both of the two Corsican Pines at Haworth Parsonage. She came to this viewpoint quite independently from another Brontė biographer who suggested the same thing. Local legend has it that the two trees were planted in the Brontė's own lifetime. But does any evidence exist to back up such an hypothesis in Villette? Well, thinking on Lyndall Gordon's remarks of the buried letters, I searched in Villette for an encryptian close to the chapter called, The Dryad. And to my astonishment I may have found one:

If you travel down the chapter titles from The Dryad, and write down the last five letters of the next five chapters - The First Letter, M Paul Keeps His Promise, etc, all the way down to, The Apple of Discord - you'll get the word, 'Dreayd', by spelling out the last letters. Two dryads, one growing out of the other?

The twin dryad theme is reminiscent of a fragment of poetry written by Emily Brontė many years before Charlotte's Villette. I think the poem is untitled:

'There are two trees in a lonely field;
They breathe a spell to me;
A dreary thought their dark boughs yield,
All waving solemnly.'

It may be pure chance that the Villette dryads sit side by side, but then again it may be a deliberate encryption referring to the two Corsican Pines. Lucy Snowe can't bear to burn her love letters from Dr John and likewise Charlotte must have felt it quite unbearable to burn her love letters from George Smith, for the sake of her last love and husband, Arthur Nicholls. The 'E' may otherwise be a salute to her late sister, and tree-lover, Emily.

Strangely, another word appears immediately above 'Dreayd' in Villette, with the last letters of the previous chapters. Working one's way down from the chapter, The Burial, you'll find the word 'slydel', which takes you to, The Dryad. (Lydel happens to be a surname, but no Lydels appear in the Brontė's recorded life.) So could 'slydel' be a reference to letters laid cunningly to rest in a dell? Remember, the word 'dell', also means a small hole in the ground. I wonder if that particular definition had more common usage in the mid 1800s?
If it did then we may be looking at a possible encryption of 'lie in the hole', or 'cunningly laid in a hole' followed by two dryads - I would guess, one tree for each sister.

Funnily enough 'Latnrie' appears directly above Slydel, and Edere immediately below Dreayd. Latnrie is an anagram of Latrine and Edere is, I think, Latin for eat. Whether the word Latrine was commonly used or not in Yorkshire in the 1800s doesn't matter too much as Charlotte spoke French. Perhaps then, the profanity of the Dryads was surrounded by the earthy humour of eating and excreting.
Emily Brontė is known to have finished (but not polished) a second novel which she'd informed her publisher about. It is generally accepted that this along with any later poems is likely to have been destroyed by Charlotte either independantly or as a death wish from Emily. (Charlotte nursed her sisters in their last months of illness.) So there is a chance that Charlotte's reference to buried material in Villette is a biographical guide to a pagan burial of Emily's last words. When writing about the unfairness of Emily's early death she said her sister was;

'Rooted up in the prime of her days, in the promise of her powers - like a tree in full bearing - struck at the root.'

Back with Villette Another cute example of word-play turns up in a page of frothy dialogue between the mature, but austere, Lucy Snowe and her frivolous, unbearable friend, Ginevra Fanshawe. At one point in the narrative Lucy tells her that Dr John has become so infatuated with Ginevra as to be mad as a March hare. When the over excited Ginevra refuses to leave Lucy's room, she orders her out with, 'March!'.
The funny buoyancy to the dialogue is startingly similar to the reconciliation of Hareton and Catherine (junior) in Emily's, Wuthering Heights (written many years before). The two young characters play out a balanced distillation of old brutish Heathcliffe and the late emotionalist, Cathy. But it is Hareton's gun accident in March which brings the big clown into Catherine's constant company in the kitchen. Is it just an accident that Emily shortly writes of Catherine pulling his hair for not learning his reading with more speed or did the Brontė sisters once double-up with laughter in their parlour while Emily shared a pun from her novel? The hare-hair motif continues as Heathcliffe, shocked at their intimacy, attempts to hold Catherine by her hair. It is the last time he touches her, for Hareton splits them apart. Soon after, the ghost of Cathy reclaims him to the heath.

Photo above - I like this photo of the noble fir - which turns up in the article - as it contains a rainbow distortion on the lens of the camera, a bridge of dreams.
If anyone feels a bit deja vuish when reading about my uncle and his thunderbolt, it turned up before in the early Sekhmet Hypothesis - 1995.

Return