Jane Eyre (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Charlotte Bronte

  It did not last long. Within months she became severely ill and wasted, and died in March 1855. Though a local doctor linked her symptoms to pregnancy—and there has been much popular psychological criticism purporting to explain her death as an unconscious rejection of sex, marriage, and motherhood—there is no real evidence that she was pregnant, or if she was, that she died of a pregnancy-related condition rather than tuberculosis (like her sisters) or typhoid, which was rampant in Haworth in the nineteenth century.

  Because of the high drama of the Brontë family story, the almost mythic legend of the three isolated, eccentric, and repressed sisters in the lonely parsonage at Haworth soon grew in popularity. The literary reputation of the odd and complex Wuthering Heights, first seen as amoral if not “diabolical,” rose considerably beginning in the late nineteenth century. But twentieth-century critics such as Thomas Moser and biographers such as Helene Moglen tended to see Jane Eyre as a powerful but transparently neurotic outpouring of sexual frustration couched in Victorian moralism. Moreover, the novel’s improbable coincidences (so common in Victorian prose fiction), the attempt at Byronism in the portrait of its hero, and the moral stringency of its characters’ religious preoccupations all contributed to its lower status within the canon.

  This state of critical affairs changed with the feminist revolution in literary criticism, and especially with the publication of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s groundbreaking work The Madwoman in the Attic (1979; see “For Further Reading”) . Feminist critics stimulated a new appreciation of the ways in which Brontë forthrightly addresses the position of women and tries to revise the conventions of gender roles in romantic love. The result has been a more nuanced understanding of the paradoxical nature of Jane Eyre’s mix of rebellion with social and religious conservatism. Critics have always noticed the conflict of views and forces in the novel, labeling them Nature versus Grace, private versus public, passion and reason, romanticism and rationalism, and so on. A feminist reexamination of these divisions has allowed these competing categories to be recast in new and more complex terms.

  One way to understand the structure of Jane Eyre is to see it as a bildungsroman, the story of a young person’s moral and social education. Certainly we are encouraged to identify with Jane as heroine because, like Dickens’s David Copperfield, she narrates the tale of her own life. The novel is, to be sure, subtitled “An Autobiography,” though actually it begins in girlhood when Jane is ten years old and ends with marriage and motherhood, in conformity with the Victorian view that this trajectory completes the purpose of a woman’s life. But Jane is not an ordinary heroine : Though her emotional isolation as an orphan is a common motif, her physical smallness and plain features, as well as her sarcasm, outspokenness, and strong will, set her sharply apart from the sweet and adorable girls often found in Victorian fiction. We know that Charlotte insisted over her sisters’ objections that her heroine must not be beautiful, as convention required for romance; according to her biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, she told Emily and Anne confidently, “I will prove to you that you are wrong; I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours” (Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte, p. 215) . The rebelliousness of Jane’s childhood lies in her outspoken insistence on her right to be loved and valued as an individual, and her equally passionate resistance to the rigidly hierarchical social distinctions of class that informed Victorian society. To the modern reader she may appear as a champion of individualism when she fervently declares her own self-worth in opposition to the spoiled and privileged members of the Reed family: When her aunt calls her “not worthy of notice,” Jane counters, “They are not fit to associate with me” (p. 35). In a way, the entire novel seems to affirm Jane’s belief that one should not base human value on differences in social or economic rank, presenting a kind of argument for meritocracy against deeply ingrained values of authority and social privilege.

  Yet a careful reader will note that the child Jane’s outbursts are not endorsed by Jane Eyre as adult narrator: “Half an hour’s silence and reflection had shown me the madness of my conduct, and the dreariness of my hated and hating position.” Vengeance in the form of impulsive expression of rage, she says, had an “after-flavor metallic and corroding, [giving] me a sensation as if I had been poisoned” (p. 47). Though Jane’s need for affection and her indignation at the unjust conditions of her treatment as a loveless outcast are portrayed sympathetically, the “poison” of rebellion is not.

  The same ambiguity may be seen in the next phase of the novel, when Jane is sent to Lowood, the school modeled on the Clergy Daughters’ School of Charlotte Brontë’s memory. Here the loneliness and alienation Jane felt in the Reed household at Gateshead is continued, but in a setting where emotional deprivation is mirrored in the refusal of bodily needs. Hunger and cold become powerful metaphors for the denial of nature, as the pupils suffer from unreasonable demands and overly harsh discipline and physical conditions. Evangelical Christianity, in the form of Reverend Brocklehurst and his pronouncements, is aligned with this devaluation of nature, feeling, desire, and pleasure : “... we are not to conform to nature; I wish these girls to be the children of grace;” says Brocklehurst when ordering a pupil’s curls to be cut off (p. 77).

  But the character of Helen Burns, who suffers more than Jane does and rejects Jane’s bitterness and retaliatory anger in a saintly Christian spirit, belies the novel’s seeming endorsement of “Nature” and presents a model for a competing view: a Christian vision based (unlike Brocklehurst’s) on love and forgiveness as well as on submission and self-denial. Jane is impressed by Helen’s sorrowful “You think too much of the love of human beings” (p.83), though she herself does not feel capable—by nature—of imitating this young female incarnation of Christ. Actually, Helen’s early death signals that her martyrdom does not fit her well for the trials of experience in this world, any more than her rejection of strong human attachments invites its pleasures.

  When we next see Jane she is a young adult, and ready for the greater trial of pleasure and pain in the world outside school:

  My world had for some years been in Lowood; my experience had been of its rules and systems; now I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse to seek real knowledge of life amid its perils.... I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped ... (p. 102).

  If she cannot have liberty, she prays, “Grant me, at least, a new servitude!” (p. 102).

  Here, in the transition from girlhood to adult womanhood, is where Jane reflects most clearly on the real world of unequal opportunity, as she acknowledges women’s stifled desire for adventure and work in the wider world:

  Nobody knows how many rebellions, besides political rebellions, ferment in the masses of life which people earth. 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; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer . . . (p. 130).

  This is perhaps what led Mrs. Oliphant, a popular Victorian novelist, to say of Jane Eyre that it was “but a wild declaration of the ‘Rights of Woman’ in a new aspect” (Blackwood’s Magazine, May 1855).

  Though Jane secures a place as a governess, it isn’t very long before she falls in love with her master, Edward Rochester, the part of the novel most often dramatized in adaptations and for which it is best remembered. Rochester has many of the characteristics associated with the Byronic hero. He has a secret, dark past. He is an unloved outcast, like Jane; too unconcerned with society to be a typical gentleman, he is, like her, alienated from family, society, and love. Reminiscent of Brontë’s Angrian hero Zamorna, he is intensely masculine, sexual, full of unrestrained feeling, with an appeal beyond smooth manners or good looks: “He had a dark face, with
stern features and a heavy brow” (p. 135), “broad and jetty eyebrows . . . decisive nose ... full nostrils, denoting, I thought, choler; his grim mouth, chin, and jaw” (p. 143), “granite-hewn features” (p. 157), “unusual breadth of chest” (p. 158). Yet unlike the Byronic or the Angrian hero, he is not “heroic-looking.”

  In some important ways Rochester is “kin” to Jane’s kind; his lack of conventional handsomeness, his ability to be “natural,” and his contempt for social niceties all allow Jane to find a connection with him beyond what she earlier called “rules and systems,” here the social niceties of conventional male-female or master-servant relations. Jane too is a highly unconventional romantic heroine, not only in her plainness of appearance, dress, and manner, but also in her insistence on the validity of her own emotions, entirely contrary to the passivity and modesty required of respectable women: “The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway and asserting a right to predominate—to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last; yes, and to speak,” she says when she believes she must part from him (p. 295). Once more Brontë appears to affirm nature and feeling as important values when she sets Jane’s naturalness of speech and manner, the worth of her mind and heart, against the artificiality and hollowness of snobbish “ladies” such as Blanche (her supposed rival for Rochester’s affections) who are Jane’s social betters.

  When Rochester chooses Jane in spite of the social stigma of marrying “down,” romantic love appears subversive of the social order, indeed. Romantic love is defined as a harmony of minds, deeply “understanding one another,” and the transcendence of merit over conventional categories of bloodlines, class, and power, as in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It is not difficult to see why Jane Eyre is best remembered as a romance: The depth, spontaneity, and integrity of Jane’s romantic desire are continually contrasted with the superficiality and egoism of Celine, Blanche, and even little Adèle, females who sell themselves to men for their keep, depending on their feminine charm and good looks to please and flatter men.

  Nature, emotion, and expression overmaster reason and social convention in Jane’s daring declaration of love to Rochester:

  Do you think I am an automaton? a machine without feelings ? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? ... You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you (p. 296).

  But the story is not so simple, and its values not so easily derived from this most famous part of the book alone. (Not coincidentally, a similarly misplaced emphasis is often noted in the interpretations and adaptations of Wuthering Heights.) For as soon as Jane and Rochester are engaged to be married, the tone of the narrative changes again. The next phase of the novel reveals, with some comic alarm but also growing unease, Rochester’s possessiveness and desire for Jane’s dependency in love: “I mean shortly to claim you,” he tells her, “your thoughts, conversation, and company, for life” (p. 310). To Jane’s dismay he wants to lavish gifts on her as though she were a lady (or Cinderella), and calls her a fairy and an angel. Jane’s increasing anxiety is reflected in literal dreams foreshadowing disaster, as well as her statement to Rochester, “You, sir, are the most phantom-like of all; you are a mere dream” (p. 325).

  Brontë associates this dreamlike state of romance, which inevitably recalls Charlotte’s renounced visionary dreams in girlhood, with a sexuality that is heightened and uncontrolled. When Rochester looks lovingly at Jane, she notices his face is “ardent and flushed” (p. 326). This unregulated passion is not only antisocial, inimical to living by the real rules of the world, but also irreligious. As Jane says during her courtship, “My future husband was becoming to me my whole world, and more than the world—almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion.... I could not, in those days, see God for his creature, of whom I had made an idol” (p. 320).

  Just as the tension between Jane’s and Rochester’s views of love and marriage seems irreconcilable and Jane is in danger of losing her selfhood to the more dominant Rochester, the melodramatic revelation of Rochester’s hidden wife, Bertha, brings the wedding to a sudden halt. The Gothic plot line, in which the sequestered mad wife prevents the legal marriage of Jane and Rochester, allows Brontë to present the competing claims of an alternate system of values to romance and pleasure, which may conveniently be called Christian, traditional, and moral. The outsized and physically strong Bertha is the ultimate contrast with the ethereal Helen; Bertha’s mad avidity for drink and promiscuity represent the danger of flouting the Christian ethic of self-denial.

  But romantic love stands in an interestingly ambiguous relation to the Christian system of belief and the humanist value of individual feeling. So far, Brontë has strongly endorsed the right feeling of love as natural and good, and Jane’s reward has been the love she deserves in return. Yet Rochester’s behavior to her during their engagement, Jane’s own threatened loss of autonomy in passion, and the discovery of the mad consequences of indulgence in appetite all weigh against the conclusion that romantic passion is the answer to Jane’s search for meaning and dignity. On the contrary, what Jane takes away from this most often dramatized section of the novel is that unregulated or illegitimate emotion and sexual desire are threats to social harmony and order, as well as disobedient to the laws imposed by religion. Jane’s romantic interlude is meant to expose the antisocial and antireligious nature of uncontrolled self-will, which represents the breakdown of moral law and stability. This view, which deeply informs Jane Eyre, reflects the conflicted nature of the history of romantic love in the West, where the tradition of consuming, impossible, often adulterous passion is in marked contrast to the Christianized version of love, which regulates its subversive desire into marital devotion.

  The compelling scene in which Jane and Rochester struggle with each other emotionally after she has learned the truth about his marriage is the climax of the novel’s conflict regarding the evangelical Christian imperative to value Grace over Nature. Certainly there is a strong attraction in Jane Eyre, psychologically and aesthetically, toward what is “natural,” which sometimes seems to include romantic and sexual passion. At times Nature is aligned at once against reason and with imagination and feeling, impulse, aesthetic sensibility, nonconformity, and individualism. But is Nature “right”? And how do we know?

  When Rochester asserts the right of natural feeling over social conventions “It would not be wicked to love me.... Is it better to drive a fellow-creature to despair than to transgress a mere human law no man being injured by the breach?” (pp. 368-369), Jane denounces his argument as a mere rationale for the temptation of evil-doing, though Rochester’s speech distinctly echoes her own claim during their courtship to the right of feeling to reign over social custom. But Jane pleads “self-respect” as well as universal moral principles, without which life would have no coherence. Though Rochester’s argument that no one would be hurt by their living together outside marriage under these difficult circumstances may sound reasonable and socially acceptable to modern ears, the novel turns on our admiration of Jane’s ability to deny her own desire and feelings for the greater good of the traditional moral principles she assumes are universal. Though her cries “I care for myself” and “I will respect myself” have a distinctly feminist ring, it is easy to forget or dismiss that strict adherence to the Christian ethic of sexual purity, the “law given by God” (p. 369), is the framework for her self-assertion.

  To avoid temptation, Jane leaves Thornfield and is cast into the harsh and unforgiving world, orphaned once again from the temporary shelter she had found in romantic love. Many strands come together in this penultimate part of the novel: Jane finds independence in work, she finds out (with typically Victorian improbable coincidence) that her new
friends at Marsh End are her cousins, and she inherits money at the precise time that she can put it to good use (with the usual convenience of Victorian plotting). Most important, she encounters a new character, one who is both so like and unlike the others who have influenced (and reflected) her that he introduces a new element in the ongoing dialogue between romance and Christian submission.

  This character is, of course, her cousin St. John Rivers, still another minister, whose mission is to save souls, this time in India. St. John is handsome, unlike Rochester, but like a “prostrate column,” cold and rigid (unlike Rochester again). Though Jane admires him greatly, he represents danger of another sort: extreme repression of desire and self-denial, a sort of tyranny over the naturalness of human feeling. St. John wants to marry her only to complete his calling to missionary work. “Can I receive from him the bridal ring, endure all the forms of love ... and know that the spirit was quite absent?” Jane asks herself (p. 469).

  Here is where the novel best demonstrates its own capacity for complexity: Jane revolts against marriage for the higher purpose of serving God rather than as the natural outcome of romantic desire, and her struggle with St. John for the integrity of her selfhood mirrors her struggle with Rochester when she leaves him. Ultimately she rejects both suitors in turn until her own conditions, which are the legitimation of romantic and sexual love within the Christian and social sanctity of marriage, are met. Both Rochester and St. John violate the romantic love/marriage paradigm: Rochester wants love without marriage, while St. John wants marriage without love. Interestingly, both these temptations are seen as struggles between female will and male egoism, the latter of which includes a desire to exert power over women. Like Rochester’s possessive sexuality, St. John’s “ice kiss” is another kind of trap, as well as a temptation to “rush down the torrent of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there lose my own.” The two men are directly compared as dominating when Jane says, “I was almost as hard beset by [St. John] now as I had been once before, in a different way, by another” (p. 484).