Though in many ways the novel seems divided against itself, it isn’t easy to categorize or align the divisions as, for instance, passion versus duty or Nature versus Christianity, because such divisions cut across each other in complex ways. For example, both Helen and Brocklehurst promulgate self-denying Christianity, as does St. John Rivers, yet Helen and St. John’s Christianity of love and goodness is clearly meant to contrast favorably with Brocklehurst’s ultimately righteous and cruel imposition of deprivation under the hypocritical name of Christian self-restraint. To complicate matters further, Helen’s admirable self-restraint under oppression and St. John’s cold denial of feeling differ from each other and therefore can’t simply be lumped together as “the Christian view.”
Because to this point the novel seems to endorse Jane’s Christian attack on Rochester’s “natural” morality of love, Jane’s view does appear at first to be aligned with the values of Helen, Brocklehurst, and St. John. On the other hand, it should be noted that all three of these characters also devalue Jane’s selfhood in some way—that is, her right to physical comfort and childlike pleasure (Brocklehurst), her earthly attachments and need for love as “thinking too much about the love of others” (Helen), and the rightness of strong feeling, including romantic love in its legitimate setting of marriage (St. John Rivers). Moreover, all three speak from a Christian and moral view: “Don’t cling so tenaciously to ties of the flesh,” St. John admonishes Jane, echoing Helen (p. 453). For this reason, Jane herself does not have a unified and consistent view of this denial of self. As fiction Jane Eyre constructs a version of the world that invites opposing categories, labeled with various terms at different points in the story, as well as by different critics at changing points in the novel’s history—for example, passion versus duty, romance versus reason, and so on. But a close reading of the book’s structure reveals that its heroine flows back and forth among competing values in shifting patterns, more like a wave than a particle bouncing between two clearly inimical states.
As the novel approaches its final phase, Brontë attempts to tighten this ambiguous scheme and bring her heroine into realignment with a conclusion clearly meant to satisfy the reader as well as the heroine. After another intervention of plotting—Jane’s telepathic summons by Rochester after he has been left alone by the fire that has destroyed his house and mad wife—Jane returns to him at Ferndean, a new residence that is less grand than Thornfield, and closer to nature in a removed, peaceful spot. Much critical controversy has centered on this conclusion to Jane’s moral dilemma. The sticking point is that after vigorously arguing against staying with Rochester while he is still married, the novel then implies the rightness of Jane’s return to him before she knows he is now free. To put it another way, the benevolence of the just universe and the coincidence of plotting spare Jane the difficult final choice between morality and passion. In the conflict between “Nature” and “Grace,” the novel achieves resolution of its competing value systems through plot closure. We might say that through the grace of nature is revealed the nature of grace.
Perhaps even more problematic for critics, including feminist critics, is Jane’s discovery that Rochester has lost a hand and an eye in the fire that destroyed the scene of their courtship. Because Rochester is now blind, crippled, and helpless, needing Jane physically rather than dominating and tempting her with his sexuality, some have argued that Brontë was perpetrating a kind of unconscious “castration” of his masculinity. In other words, Jane’s selfhood, including the ability to express and satisfy her sexual and romantic desire, seems to be achieved only at the expense of Rochester’s passion, which was the key to her sense of his “mastery.”
When Jane finds Rochester again she is touched by the “powerlessness of the strong man” and his “avowal of his dependence” (p. 508). Does Jane need to control Rochester, or “serve” him in order to marry him? So much between the lovers has taken the form of a struggle for “mastery” and control both in courtship and afterward: “I love you better now,” she tells him, “when I can really be useful to you, than I did in your state of proud independence, when you disdained every part but that of the giver and protector” (p. 516). One way to look at the conclusion of the novel is that Rochester’s new physical disability, like Jane’s inheritance, equalizes the relationship so that it comes closer to Brontë’s ideal version of mutuality of power in marriage without resorting to open social challenge.
On the other hand, Jane’s intense desire to “nurse” Rochester in his debilitation can be related easily to the pervasive Victorian domestic ideal of the wife serving as helpmeet to the husband—that is, as a domestic expression of the Christian ideal of service. She “did not love [her] servitude” to St. John (p. 461), but the conclusion is that servitude in romantic love, if equal and mutual, allows for the integrity of the independent soul. It is true that in her “new servitude” (to recall her words early on when pining for new experience with limited resources), Jane is rewarded with a mutually satisfying relationship, but this might be seen as a wishful fantasy that spiritualized love in marriage can be made to reconcile the great rift in traditional and modern values, Christian duty and modern individualism, “rules and systems” versus romantic feeling, that has been so trenchantly expressed in the novel.
The same ambivalence can be seen in the trajectory of Jane’s romance. Though the character Jane Eyre is a kind of antiheroine of romantic love—unattractive, humble, unfashionable, and retiring—Bronte’s novel is related to a certain kind of romance that harks back to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, a mid-eighteenth-century work(arguably the first true novel in the English language) that is still found in popular romances today: the story of a poor, spirited, but unappreciated heroine whose worth is finally recognized by her lover, a man of some wealth and social status who is in a position to give her a home and love. As in many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, virtue and inner worth are ultimately recognized by inheritance and through marriage, a rise in economic fortunes. In Pamela, Fanny Burney’s Evelina, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the resistance to ingrained values of authority and hierarchy seems contradicted at the end by the “reward” of the happy ending of romance, while Richardson‘s, Burney’s, and Austen’s novels’ proposed substitution of merit for blood superiority of rank is undercut by the absorption of the heroine into a better social class.
This explains some of the ambivalence that critics, feminists among them, have struggled with in understanding Brontë’s work (though her last novel, Villette, has provoked much less controversy) . In the end Jane Eyre is both a high romance and an antiromance, equally rejecting the conventions of femininity in the social paradigm of courtship and the destructive immorality and selfishness of illegitimate passion. On one hand, the romantic narrative of Jane and Rochester entails the political stance that she is a heroine worthy of his love, as well as the strong assertion of the legitimacy of feeling, the recognition that human love is vital to life and should not be repressed. This is St. John’s function in the novel, to conduct a dialogue that in the end weighs in favor of love, as Rochester conducted a furious argument in its favor, an argument that Jane also rejected. “I scorn your idea of love,” she tells her cousin; “the very name of love is an apple of discord between us ...” (p. 473).
But though Jane—and Brontë’s novel—claims love as a human right, a need, as opposed to St. John’s more-than-human ideal of self-denial celebrated at the conclusion, the whole nature of romantic love in Jane Eyre is redefined in a way that departs from the melodrama and romance in the Angrian sense of the Brontë juvenilia. It is removed from the passion of Brontë’s “dream” life, including the creative imaginings of her schoolgirl days, which she called in her journal “that burning clime where we have sojourned too long.” Instead, romance is revisioned as the agape of marital love, one partner taking care of the other. This version of love merges with the Christian concept of saving the soul from sin, and thus can be seen
as just reward, as well as constituting social and psychological maturity. The divine justice that punishes Rochester and rewards Jane “proves” a Christian benevolent universe, makes God’s love and will consonant with the desires of the person of integrity, and serves to redistribute the power balance between the lovers. “Some say it was a just judgment on him,” a character says of Rochester’s injuries. Nature itself, in the supernatural scene when Jane hears Rochester’s call from afar, seems continuous with both Romantic and Christian ideals. We may see Rochester’s maiming as the fulfillment of Christ’s words, paraphrased by Jane when she resolves to renounce her own temptation to illegitimate passion: “You shall yourself, pluck out your right eye; yourself cut off your right hand: your heart shall be the victim; and you, the priest, to transfix it” (p. 347).
Theorists of popular romance have noted that novels in that genre often feature intelligent and spirited women who are initially stifled, limited, bossed around, oppressed, or abused by dominant or powerful men of spectacular masculinity. Romance, the critic Janice Radway says, requires rousing as well as allaying women’s anxieties about men, encompassing both individual desires and power issues in complex ways. As the sociologists Stevi Jackson and Eva Illouz have pointed out, romance is also closely tied to social status and value, though it purports to be an entirely private choice. We may easily recognize all these elements in Jane Eyre. Yet Brontë’s novel is not merely a popular romance, in that it is a work of great linguistic virtuosity that makes artistic use of its equivocality toward romantic passion by dramatizing both sides of the issue. In one way Jane Eyre not only offers the popular romantic solutions of fantasy, but also criticizes them, appealing to feminists and other serious critics as well as to the public hunger for a happy and just ending.
Thus both Bertha, the intemperate exotic, an icon of selfish and unrestrained sensuality and madness, whose symbol is destructive fire, and at the opposite pole, St. John, with his “ice kiss,” who renounces personal happiness, are both eventually extirpated from the text. These two extremes are found wanting as models for Jane, who must find a way to accommodate “feeling” (including desire) within a Christian framework. Though Cinderella’s rescue from poverty by a prince who chooses her is often cited as a mythic source for Jane Eyre, on a deeper level the fantasy is the tale of Beauty and the Beast, in which the true lover rehumanizes the savage beast, as Jane saves the rake/sinner from sin, “guiding” and helping him as she does when she first meets him on the road, as well as at the end.
Perhaps this view allows us to see why Jane Eyre continues to be both a central text in the Western literary canon and a durable fantasy in the popular public imagination. Jane Eyre as heroine is best remembered for the strong will that bravely questions expected roles for women and asserts a woman’s right to love and pleasure. Though Brontë’s solution is Victorian and traditional, the novel is a unique and pivotal contribution to the modern view of romantic love and the problem of sexual desire for women, an attempt to endorse as well as regulate female passion.
Jane Eyre suggests emotional equality, “sameness,” “kinship,” and “likeness” of character as the basis of a new kind of mutual love and respect, in contrast to the social and economic inequalities that formed the nineteenth-century context of courtship and marriage. This view is not asserted in revolutionary form; no transformation of the social order is proposed. On the contrary, at the conclusion of the novel, the bond between Jane and Rochester allows the lovers to withdraw from an unsatisfactory society into a cocoon of protective love.
But the romance on which the dramatized versions of the novel focus is only a part of the narrative of Jane’s “autobiography,” the tale of how she grows into being fully human. In the end the experience of romantic love illuminates but does not wholly constitute female identity, so that passion itself is a metaphor for the drive to female selfhood and individuation, the key to a search for a larger meaning than that prescribed for women by cultural norms. Jane Eyre’s self-respect is integral to her understanding the full meaning of sexual love, even while love itself constitutes a necessary living energy, without which life has no light, fire, or air.
Susan Ostrov Weisser is a professor in the English Department at Adelphi University, where she specializes in nineteenth-century literature and women’s studies, and teaches frequently in the Honors College. Dr. Weisser’s Ph.D. is from Columbia University. She is the author and editor of three books in women’s studies. Her research centers on women and romantic love in nineteenth-century literature, as well as in contemporary popular culture.
To
W. M. THACKERAY, ESQ.
THIS WORK
IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED,
BY
THE AUTHOR
Preface to the Second Edition
A preface to the first edition of Jane Eyre being unnecessary,
I gave none: this second edition demands a few words both of acknowledgment and miscellaneous remark.
My thanks are due in three quarters.
To the Public, for the indulgent ear it has inclined to a plain tale with few pretensions.
To the Press, for the fair field its honest suffragec has opened to an obscure aspirant.
To my Publishers, for the aid their tact, their energy, their practical sense, and frank liberality have afforded an unknown and unrecommended Author.
The Press and the Public are but vague personifications for me, and I must thank them in vague terms; but my Publishers are definite: so are certain generous critics who have encouraged me as only large-hearted and high-minded men know how to encourage a struggling stranger; to them, i.e., to my Publishers and the select Reviewers, I say cordially, Gentlemen, I thank you from my heart.
Having thus acknowledged what I owe those who have aided and approved me, I turn to another class; a small one, so far as I know, but not, therefore, to be overlooked. I mean the timorous or carping few who doubt the tendency of such books as Jane Eyre: in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry—that parent of crime—an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth. I would suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions; I would remind them of certain simple truths.
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.
These things and deeds are diametrically opposed; they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them; they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is—I repeat it—a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.
The world may not like to see these ideas dissevered, for it has been accustomed to blend them; finding it convenient to make external show pass for sterling worth—to let white-washed walls vouch for clean shrines. It may hate him who dares to scrutinise and expose—to rase the gilding, and show base metal under it—to penetrate the sepulchre, and reveal charnel relics: but, hate as it will, it is indebted to him.
Ahab did not like Micaiah, because he never prophesied good concerning him, but evil: probably he liked the sycophant son of Chenaanah better; yet might Ahab have escaped a bloody death, had he but stopped his ears to flattery, and opened them to faithful counsel.1
There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears: who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society, much as the son of Imlah came before the throned Kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital—a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of Vanity Fair admired in high places?2 I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek fired of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the lev
in-brande of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time—they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Ramoth-Gilead.
Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, Reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognised; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day—as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things; because I think no commentator on his writings has yet found the comparison that suits him, the terms which rightly characterise his talent. They say he is like Fielding: they talk of his wit, humour, comic powers.3 He resembles Fielding as an eagle does a vulture: Fielding could stoop on carrion, but Thackeray never does. His wit is bright, his humour attractive, but both bear the same relation to his serious genius, that the mere lambent sheet-lightning playing under the edge of the summer-cloud, does to the electric death-spark hid in its womb. Finally, I have alluded to Mr. Thackeray, because to him—if he will accept the tribute of a total stranger—I have dedicated this second edition of Jane Eyre.
Currer Bell
Dec. 21st, 1847
Note to the Third Edition
I avail myself of the opportunity which a third edition of Jane Eyre affords me, of again addressing a word to the Public, to explain that my claim to the title of novelist rests on this one work alone. If, therefore, the authorship of other works of fiction has been attributed to me, an honour is awarded where it is not merited; and consequently, denied where it is justly due.
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