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" When I first began to write," Charlotte Bronte told George Henry Lewes," I restrained imagination, eschewed romance, repressed excitement."'This pattern of general reserve, a point of self-definition freely avowed both by Bront& as writer and by all of her major characters, is a pattern we have grown accustomed to think of as a tragic psychic compromise, a martyring of creative potential. Such reserve, by which I mean deliberate refusals of self-expression-refusals that ostentatiously dam up passion and desire-appear to us as hopelessly unhealthy, compelled both by outward oppression and deprivation, and by inward paralysis. But our sense of the limitations inherent in Bront&'s reserve depends very heavily on neo-Freudian psychology, which tends to equate the pressure of desire toward expression with the more authentic movements of selfhood-an equation our culture too readily ac-cepts as natural and …