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entirely in earnest: Jane often resorts to vexing and teasing Rochester to keep his ardour in check and his hands to himself, and Brontë also admits towards the end of her letter to Nussey that she has not always been entirely serious throughout.17 But the kind of caution both advise is the received wisdom, not only of the conduct books that were fighting a rear-guard action against novels that were inculcating the everlastingness of romantic love,18 but also of writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft who were concerned less with propriety and decorum than with the education of women to responsible adulthood.
For Wollstonecraft, the effervescence of love is not only inevitable but profoundly to be desired: were women ‘rationally educated’, she argues, ‘could they take a more comprehensive view of things, they would be contented to love but once in their lives; and after marriage calmly let passion subside into friendship – into that tender intimacy, which is the best refuge from care’.19 But, taught instead that love is
‘the supreme good’, women are educated only to inspire it,20 and consequently they are ‘subjected by ignorance to their sensations, and only taught to look for happiness in love, refine on sensual feelings, and adopt metaphysical notions respecting that passion, which lead them shamefully to neglect the duties of life’.21 Now, Jane Eyre is no ‘Mary Wollstonecraft girl’ – certainly not to the extent that Jane Bennet is, according to Waldron, ‘a Dr Gregory girl’ – and it is unlikely that Brontë had even read Wollstonecraft, though she does share Wollstonecraft’s contempt for a love that is ‘excited by evanescent beauties and graces’, a ‘stalking mischief’ whose arbitrary dominion is used as an excuse for abandoning reason and morality.22 But Jane is given the opportunity to put the higher duties of life before passionate love in the proposition from St John Rivers to embark with him on a missionary career, and she does not like it. ‘Metaphysical notions’
respecting passion are more her style, though she is also clearly vulnerable to the crudely physical as well, experiencing love as a sensation that ‘throbs fast and fully’,23 physically racking her body with symptoms that she is helpless to control when, for example, she returns to Thornfield from her aunt’s deathbed and finds herself, at the sight of Rochester, ‘beyond [her] own mastery’, trembling and without the power of speech or motion. ‘What does it mean?’, she asks herself, and the answer she gives in her salute to Rochester – that she is ‘strangely glad to get back to [him] again’, for wherever he is she considers her home – is perhaps a conservative diagnosis of the symptoms. But even this much feeling is too much when we consider what Rochester is doing as he sits on the stile as she approaches the house. He is writing
182 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre in a book ‘about a misfortune that befell [him] long ago’ (p. 299) – that is, his marriage to the lunatic imprisoned on the third storey of Thornfield (p. 327) – and about which he does not intend telling Jane until they have been married a year and a day.
However much we might feel Jane deserves the happiness she finds for the first time at Thornfield, she has erred in loving, and letting that love be known, as she admits after discovering Rochester’s secret on the evening of their intended marriage: ‘how blind had been my eyes!
How weak my conduct!’ In part her self-condemnation arises from her blighted faith in Rochester: she believes that he will now want to
‘hurry [her] from Thornfield’, for ‘real affection, it seemed, he could not have for me; it had been only fitful passion: that was balked; he would want me no more’ (p. 331). But she is only half right: he does want to hurry her away from Thornfield, but as his mistress, and as such, she later concludes, he ‘would have loved [her] well’ but only ‘for a while’ (p. 402).24 Justifiably or not, Jane has made herself vulnerable to the shame and pain that generations of romance heroines before her have avoided, intentionally or providentially, by not declaring their hand before the stakes are in their keeping.
An undesigning mind
In many respects Jane Eyre does redraw the boundaries beyond which the romance heroine had previously hesitated to step – in particular, not simply by falling in love and voicing that love before an offer has been made, but also by twice offering herself to Rochester, the first time while still a governess at Thornfield, when she ‘glowed in the moon-light … and mutinied against fate’ (p. 294), claiming her rank as his equal, and the second time after she tracks him down at Ferndean (to which we will return later). But some limits still remain inviolable.
The ‘brazen miss’ may catch the attention, but mostly her behaviour is impeccable, and she certainly observes the most fundamental of all constraints on female behaviour by doing nothing to invite suspicion of inciting Rochester’s passion for her.25 Jane does not simply try her best to suppress her love – or, as she puts it, to strangle ‘a deformed thing which I could not persuade myself to own and rear’ (p. 274) –
but she also conducts herself with such decorum in Rochester’s presence that not even the scrutiny of a housekeeper wary of the ‘marked preference’ of the master for his governess can fault behaviour ‘so discreet, and so thoroughly modest and sensible’ (p. 297). Rochester himself hardly knows what to make of Jane’s feelings about him, and
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resorts to a range of subterfuges that betray principles at best ‘eccentric’
and at worst callously manipulative. Having seen her manner soften in his company, he then deliberately keeps his distance, as he admits later, to test his influence on her:
I wished to see whether you would seek me if I shunned you – but you did not; you kept in the school-room as still as your own desk and easel; if by chance I met you, you passed me as soon, and with as little token of recognition, as was consistent with respect. (p. 353) He is still left wondering what Jane thinks of him, or even whether she thinks of him at all, and so resumes his notice of her. But when she again warms to the attention, he is still unsure whether it is simply the human contact she craves or him in particular. So he tests her again, in the guise of a gypsy, to probe her feelings, but she reveals only the circumspection of a prudent woman who, like an Elizabeth Bennet and a Pamela Andrews, ‘will not be wishing’ ( P&P, p. 129). The gypsy episode is in fact crucial in extracting from Jane the information necessary to establish her integrity in the most conventional of terms, providing the reassurance of a lack of design that the first-person narrative cannot otherwise provide. Jane cannot herself reject the possibility of a future with Rochester without entertaining, however hypothetically, the possibility of such a future, but Rochester in the guise of the gypsy can analyze Jane’s reserve (and reassure the reader): ‘suffer as you may, you will not beckon [love] to approach; nor will you stir one step to meet it where it waits you’ (p. 222). And more to the point, he can raise the possibility of ‘some secret hope’ to buoy her up ‘with whispers of the future’, which Jane can promptly deny: ‘The utmost I hope is, to save money enough out of my earnings to set up a school some day in a little house rented by myself’ (p. 223).
The eccentricity of Rochester’s principles also extends to tormenting Jane with the prospect of his impending engagement to Blanche Ingram, which effectively protects Jane from harbouring her own hopes, but also, as Rochester intends, makes her as madly in love with him as he is with her (p. 295). It is Rochester’s ‘curious, designing mind’ that safeguards Jane’s innocence: she discovers love only by realizing that it can never be consummated. And we are left in no doubt as to the firmness of her belief that Rochester intends marrying Blanche, both by her insistence that provision be made for Adèle’s future elsewhere, as well as her own, and by her response to Mrs Fairfax’s assurance that, however strange the prospect of Rochester’s marriage to
184 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre Blanche, she ‘could no longer doubt that the event would shortly take place’: ‘“You would be strangely in
credulous if you did doubt it,”
was my mental comment. “I don’t doubt it”’ (p. 273). The certainty of Jane’s conviction that Rochester intends to marry Blanche also absolves her of at least some of the impropriety of ‘offering’ herself to Rochester. She speaks her mind in mutiny, as Rochester puts it, against her fate, but she does believe it to be her fate to leave him, and although Rochester later reminds her, ‘it was you who made me the offer’, and Jane agrees, ‘Of course, I did’ (pp. 294–5), both are investing the words with somewhat more audacity than they warrant. Jane succumbs to her propensity for ‘fierce speaking’, but she offers herself as a spiritual equal, not as a bride.
Rochester presses Jane as hard as Mr B ever pressed Pamela to declare her hand, and, like St John Rivers later in the novel, seems to feel entirely justified in testing her mettle before offering her the chance to sacrifice herself in a ‘feigned union’ (p. 327) – in Rochester’s case, with a ‘defrauded wretch, already bound to a bad, mad, and embruted partner’ (p. 327), and, in St John’s case, with a man who has ‘no more of a husband’s heart for [her] than that frowning giant of a rock, down which the stream is foaming in yonder gorge’ (p. 450). We know what St John wants: proof of Jane’s mental and moral fitness as his missionary-mate. But it is not at all clear what Rochester intends to achieve: whether, when he ignores her, he is gratified or frustrated by her failure to seek him out; whether, when he taunts her with Blanche, he is gratified or frustrated by the resignation with which she accepts a future elsewhere – and by her preparedness to allow a week or two’s absence at her aunt’s bedside to stretch to over a month even though she believes that her time with Rochester is running out. The moodi-ness and unaccountability of the hero’s behaviour has become a staple of popular romance,26 and is certainly common in the earlier romances we have discussed, but not even Pamela’s Mr B can be accused of a motive quite as duplicitous and unsavoury as the one we might suspect Rochester of harbouring, since only a woman as madly in love as he tries to make Jane would be likely to forgive the treachery he intends revealing once they have been ‘married’ a year and a day.
The timely intervention of the mad wife’s brother forestalls that particular plan, and Jane is publicly absolved of complicity in hiding the
‘disgusting secret’. The wide ocean of ‘wealth, caste, [and] custom’
(p. 282) that she understands as intervening between herself and Rochester also protects her from the curiosity that, in fairytales at least, is a young woman’s undoing.27 Rochester’s anxieties about the crime
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he is preparing to commit – ‘For the world’s judgment – I wash my hands thereof. For man’s opinion – I defy it’ (p. 287) – are masked by Jane’s anxieties about their difference in social standing, so that not even when Rochester’s anguished self-communings are accompanied by a writhing chestnut-tree, roaring wind, livid flashes of lightning, and crashing thunder does Jane presume to suspect more is amiss than the understandable uneasiness of a man contemplating marrying outside his tribe.
‘Conventionality is not morality’28
Rochester’s unconventionality (which of course extends to principles far more eccentric than Jane can possibly imagine) in a sense licenses the stand that Jane had taken in speaking out against the necessity of leaving him when, as she saw it, the only ‘obstacle of custom’ standing between them was the one Mrs Fairfax later annoys Jane by expounding at length: ‘the equality of position and fortune’ that accounts for the fact that ‘gentlemen in his station are not accustomed to marrying their governesses’ (pp. 297–8). When spirit talks to spirit, and not ‘through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh’ (p. 284), Jane can claim her place as his equal, coming closer than any of the heroines we have discussed (even if not as close as they both pretend) to making of herself the ‘free gift’ that the Brittany Widow’s suitor sought in Urania, going ‘halfway at the least’ to meeting Rochester’s love. She goes even further later in the novel when she arrives at his doorstep in his self-exile at Ferndean and invites him to choose as a wife ‘ her who loves [him] best’ (p. 494) . On this occasion she still fears she may have
‘too rashly overlooked conventionalities’ – she has, after all, arrived unannounced, with her trunk, and has told the servants she will be staying the night, on the assumption that Rochester will ask her to marry him. But their entire relationship has been based on a mutual agreement to dispense with the formalities of convention, so much so that Rochester had persuaded himself to believe that Jane would eventually come around to accepting the fact that he was already married as just another ‘obstacle of custom – a mere conventional impediment’ –
that they were justified in ‘overleaping’ (p. 245). On this last occasion, even with the impediment removed, there are still limits to how far Jane can go in sealing the union – in speaking friendship, she means ‘more than friends, but could not tell what other word to employ’ (p. 493) –
but she leaves little for Rochester to do beyond coming to terms with his amazing good fortune in having his prayers answered.
186 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre Jane’s faculty of ‘fierce speaking’ also takes her further than her predecessors. She is considerably more confrontational than Pamela or Elizabeth, and what she lacks in their capacity for sarcasm she makes up for in her determination to pass ‘the outworks of conventional reserve, and … [cross] the threshold of confidence’ (p. 418). She speaks her mind with sometimes startling bluntness – on one occasion, objecting to St John Rivers’s professed shock at her suggestion that she accompany him on his mission to India but not as a wife, frankly challenging his sincerity: ‘Keep to common sense, St John: you are verging on nonsense.
You pretend to be shocked by what I have said. You are not really shocked; for, with your superior mind, you cannot be either so dull or so conceited to misunderstand my meaning’ (p. 460). Rochester’s delight in her plain-speaking in fact has its basis in the absence of precisely that affected punctiliousness that St John displays here in reproaching Jane for an impropriety (proposing that a single woman of her age accompany abroad a single man of his age) that she insists he knows she did not intend. What initially draws Rochester to Jane is a frank and sincere manner that abjures the conventionalities of decorum; ‘one does not often see such a manner’, he observes, but rather the contrary (as demonstrated by St John, though for reasons of his own): ‘affectation, or coldness, or stupid, coarse-minded misapprehension of one’s meaning are the usual rewards of candour’ (p. 153).
Jane takes Pamela’s boldness and Elizabeth’s ‘impertinence’ to another level, but she still seems to be participating in the same ‘courtship by conversation’ that plays such a large part in that ‘fantasy of the power of intelligence, wit, and critical attitudes’29 in the works discussed earlier. The scene in Pride and Prejudice where Elizabeth edgily spars with Darcy in an exchange whose tone and register Caroline Bingley is increasingly unable to gauge has its parallel in Jane Eyre, this time with a baffled housekeeper on the sidelines, ‘wondering what sort of talk this was’ (p. 139). Such exchanges, spiked with a nervous tension that carries a distinctly erotic charge, are no substitute, perhaps, for the sexual intimacy that the word ‘conversation’ once suggested, but they perform a similar function in establishing bonds of intellectual intimacy.30 They certainly provide Jane with an exhilarat-ing sense of mastery over a powerful physical presence (most notably in the confrontation with Rochester, always threatening to end violently, after the aborted marriage, where she feels ‘an inward power; a sense of influence’: ‘The crisis was perilous; but not without its charm: such as the Indian, perhaps, feels when he slips over the rapid in his canoe’ [p. 341]).
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If resistance to a man’s will is a measure of how far Jane has come, then the image of the pliable reed provides an insight into the na
ture of her power. As we saw in Chapter 5, the submissive female will imaged in Wroth’s ‘sweet Corne’ bending ‘humbly that way … it is blowne’ acquires more sinister implications when class as well as gender exact that submission as their right; as Mr B warns Pamela:
‘when you are so good as to bend like the slender reed, to the hurricane, rather than, like the sturdy oak, to resist it, you will always stand firm in my kind opinion; while a contrary conduct would uproot you, with all your excellencies, from my soul’ ( P, p. 462). In Jane Eyre, Rochester is also mindful of his prerogatives (though more so as a man than a master), but, so we are led to believe, he likes to feel conquered, and in particular likes the way her character ‘bends but does not break
– at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent’ (p. 292). There is a hint of deviant sexuality, perhaps, as he tells her of his pleasure in her ‘pliancy’ (‘I like the sense of pliancy you impart; and while I am twining the soft, silken skein round my finger, it sends a thrill up my arm to my heart’ [p. 293]), but he is also aware of the strength of the will that she chooses to bend to his pleasure:
‘A mere reed she feels in my hand!’ (And he shook me with the force of his hold.) ‘I could bend her with my finger and thumb: and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her?
Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage – with a stern triumph.
Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it – the savage, beautiful creature!’ (p. 357)
Throughout the novel Jane takes a buffeting; she bends but does not break and is clearly stronger in spirit and will than her frame and manner suggest. But in finding a man who likes to feel ‘mastered’,
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