Did You Know?
Though Jane’s strong sense of self-worth seems only natural to us, it shocked polite society of the time. The book was immediately attacked by critics for its insistence on the idea that personal fulfillment is an acceptable goal for a woman just as it is for a man. Mrs. Rigby, a popular columnist of the day, wrote of the orphan Jane Eyre:
“She has inherited in fullest measure the worst sin of our fallen nature—the sin of pride . . . and she is ungrateful too. It pleased God to make her an orphan, friendless, and penniless—yet she thanks nobody, and least of all Him . . . on the contrary, she looks upon all that has been done for her not only as her undoubted right, but as falling far short of it.” (Quarterly Review 84, December 1848)
Smell, sight, hearing, taste and touch. Bronte has called into play all of the physical senses, and were the scene to end here with our lovers entwined in an embrace, it would take its place as a great romantic scene. But it is here, seated in their own quiet Eden, that Bronte takes us onto a higher plane, as intellectual and even spiritual senses come into play. First, she employs that remarkable facility that separates us from the beast: human conversation. Jane and Rochester begin to talk. At first he tries to draw her out by pretending that he must marry Blanche Ingram and send Jane away, which causes her to drop her ever-present reserve. Her true feelings begin to pour out, and what was begun as an attempt to manipulate Jane’s emotions evolves into an intimate communication. As Rochester talks, Bronte captures one of the deepest expressions of human intimacy, what she calls “a cord of communion.” As they discuss their imminent parting, Rochester asks, “Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?” She is too emotionally overcome to respond, so he goes on:
“Because,’ he said, ‘I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.” (299)
This is a beautiful description of the feeling of kinship that exists between a man and a woman who are truly “in love.” They feel, in short, like a family even before they are one. We’ve gone way beyond the giddy, deceptive affections that have selfish gratification at their center. Jane and Rochester would instinctively understand that all the talk about people who love but can’t commit is silliness: there is no love without commitment.
In Bronte’s view, there can also be no love without equality; a very courageous view for her day. She has her heroine respond to what she considers insincerity on Rochester’s part with a stinging reminder of her own self-worth:
“Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless?—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. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh:—it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal—as we are!” (300)
A Rebel with a Cause
With no one to teach her the wrong ideas, Jane understands instinctively that lasting relationships are based on equality, and that there is no place in a true marriage for intimidation or fear. Though she calls Rochester her Master and rejoices in his masculine strength, he, in turn, avers that he is mastered by her and rejoices in her equal, yet deliciously different, feminine strength. This balance does not come immediately, but as a result of the (literally) fiery trials through which they pass together. Like most of us, these lovers only glimpse the possibility of true union in the moonlit orchard. There is much pain and sorrow between that beginning and their final happiness.
Though she mistrusts orthodox religion, Jane Eyre is a deeply spiritual person who longs for a life of usefulness and service. She is, however, unwilling to accept the harsh cruelty of her masters as treatment that is naturally due her as an orphan. She persists in believing that she should be treated on an equal level with others, and is willing to treat them in the same way. Above all, she longs for a spirit-to-spirit relationship with a partner who knows her as she knows him, with whom she can share a productive life. She does not wish to be owned, coddled or catered to, nor does she wish to sacrifice her life in serving a brutish tyrant. She seeks a partnership of mutual respect between equals. This was not what Victorian society prescribed, but it must have been what an overwhelming number of women really longed for, because Jane Eyre was embraced by the public immediately and has been an enduring favorite ever since.
Quotations taken from Jane Eyre. Penguin Classics Edition, London. 1996.
Talk About It
Jane Eyre struggles to be on an equal footing with the men in her life. She eventually becomes a caretaker for the man she loves, since he has been blinded and maimed. Is this really a happy ending? Have women today achieved equality with men?
About the Author: Charlotte Bronte
Charlotte Bronte was born and raised on a remote parsonage on the lonely moors of Yorkshire, England. Within this cold, austere home lived Patrick Bronte and his four surviving children: Branwell, Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Their mother died soon after the birth of the last child, and two older sisters died from tuberculosis contracted at the boarding school they attended, a school that would become the model for the dreaded Lowood Academy in Jane Eyre.
The Bronte children were very bright, artistic and deeply curious about the world. By contrast, Mr. Bronte was remote, severe, and largely ignored his children, so they turned to each other for companionship and intellectual stimulation. Over the years Charlotte and her sisters invented elaborate fictional worlds, writing stories and poems to entertain each other. Charlotte’s first novel, The Professor, was rejected for publication, but while caring for her father after a surgery, Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre, under the pseudonym Currer Bell. The novel was an instant success and Currer Bell was an overnight sensation. Who was he, or was he a she? No one knew for sure.
Over the next few years the Bronte sisters published their novels under pseudonyms and stayed hidden in their Yorkshire sanctuary. They did not realize that their home was a breeding ground for the disease that had taken their elder sisters, and both Emily and Anne died within a year of each other. Charlotte was devastated, and soon she married Arthur Bell Nichols, a curate and long-time friend. She became pregnant, and then succumbed to a long illness in 1855. Small of stature, pale and plain, Bronte resembled her heroine Jane in both spirit and body, though her life did not have the triumphant ending she could create in fiction. In the one hundred and fifty-four years since the publication of Jane Eyre, millions of readers have been grateful that, with all her tribulation, Bronte found the courage to exercise her tremendous creative talent.
Source: The Life of Charlotte Bronte, by Elizabeth Gaskell. Penguin Classics Edition, London. 1997.
Through a Glass Darkly:
A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster
The business of seeing is a strange process. We know that something mechanical occurs when light hits the retina of the eye, and images are communicated to the brain. That, however, is just the beginning of sight. From quite a young age, we also understand that sight is an inward process as well, and look beyond the surface of faces and objects for their spiritual significance. Perched precariously between the innocence of prewar England and the disasters to come, a young man named Edward Forster penned a novel about a young girl learning to see for herself, and poured into it all of his “insights” (a lovely word) about the clash between civility and nature, between keeping up appearances and living with a vision. He called it A Room with a View.
Synopsis
> Set in the turn-of-the-century English countryside, the novel recreates an idyllic world that is gone forever. Games of lawn tennis, tea in the garden, calls paid to neighbors and returned within ten days; all the conventions of genteel suburban life are chronicled here in delightful detail. There are the Emerson’s with their “anti-religious” views, and the snobby Vyse’s in London who give dinner parties attended by “the grandchildren of famous people.” We meet the ancient Miss Alan’s, who traverse the globe armed with Baedeker guides and plenty of digestive bread, the bitter, suspicious spinster cousin Charlotte, and a host of others, Italians and English, all drawn with careful, loving care by a master of characterization.
The central figure of the tale is Lucy Honeychurch, an average girl with a pretty face and an unusual talent for music. Mr. Beebe, the celibate clergyman who acts as intermediary between the disparate cast of characters at home and abroad, muses about what might happen if Lucy ever learns to “live as she plays.” Such a development would not be possible in England, but on a tour of Italy with her cousin, Lucy comes face-to-face, first with death, then with physical attraction, then with love, and finally with herself. She meets an eccentric man named Emerson, and is shocked when his son George arouses in her a feeling of immediate physical and spiritual attraction, a passion so foreign to her that she attributes it to her Italian surroundings.
Lucy’s first impulse is to flee Italy and her new emotional state, and soon, safely back in England, she replaces one chaperone for another; she becomes engaged to Cecil Vyse, snobby, controlling, yet socially desirable. But the winds of fate blow even as far as Windy Corner, and George turns up in her English neighborhood, as full of passion and primal energy as in Italy. Lucy must choose. Whether she will have the courage to bring her new viewpoint home with her, and whether she will be able to reconcile her youthful passion with social propriety becomes the focus of the story, told in a tone of comic irony remarkable in an author so young.
What Makes it Great?
E.M. Forster was raised in a setting very like Windy Corner, coddled by his mother and maiden aunts after his father’s death. He has a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, which makes it a pleasure to listen in on the Honeychurch’s at home, or the Vyse’s in their stuffy, London flat. Forster uses dialogue to help us see into the hearts of these people, but we must attend to the subtle shifts in conversation. No one will shout the message to us here, except old Mr. Emerson, who eschews all forms of “civilized” communication and wishes only to speak from the heart. (It is he who possesses the wardrobe upon which is inscribed this curious motto: “Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.”) His loud ranting offends everyone but Lucy, who sees in his indelicacy “something beautiful.”
The novel is organized rather like a play, with humorous chapter headings that describe the scene to follow. My favorite is Chapter Six, titled: “The Reverend Arthur Beebe, the Reverend Cuthbert Eager, Mr. Emerson, Mr. George Emerson, Miss Eleanor Lavish, Miss Charlotte Bartlett, and Miss Lucy Honeychurch Drive Out in Carriages to See a View; Italians Drive Them.” The two exceptions are titled simply, Fourth Chapter and Twelfth Chapter.
Did You Know?
E.M. Forster was only twenty-eight years old when he published A Room with a View, and its tone reflects the hope and optimism of a young idealist. Forster has been called the expert on spinsters, clergymen and “nervous old ladies,” and peoples his novel with the kind of people who raised him, in a nostalgic representation of an era disappearing even as he began to write. D.H. Lawrence called Forster “the last Englishman.”
These two chapters record events of deeper significance: the death of the Italian that brings Lucy and George together, and the swim in the “Sacred Lake,” where Freddy, George and the clergyman Beebe go “skinny-dipping” and encounter Cecil, Lucy and Mrs. Honeychurch in a hilarious clash between nature and civilization. Though Forster makes us laugh in these scenes, his message is serious: The trappings of civilization—our manners, civilities, customs and prejudices—keep us from truly connecting with each other and with the best that lies within us. Lucy, upon hearing that the Emerson’s will be moving to her neighborhood, rehearses over and over how she will behave when she again meets George. When, instead of meeting at church or a garden party, she stumbles across him, naked as Adam and whooping like an Indian at play in the bathing pool, all her rehearsal is in vain. She simply bows to him, Forster says, “across the rubbish that cumbers the world.” What a gorgeous sentence that is.
There is a bit of Lucy Honeychurch in all of us, isn’t there. It can be difficult as a young person, trying to establish a personal ideology, to get in touch with the essential requirements of our innermost souls. Lucy must travel to Italy to appreciate that her home is where she is most herself. Ironically, Cecil, though impeccably British, is hopelessly out of place in her home while George slips easily into the routine of things. In Windy Corner, Forster creates a haven of safety, flawed yet perfect in its way, as our own homes should be, with a loving family that helps us find our inner vision through acceptance, unconditional love and an occasional dose of the truth about ourselves. Forster uses the house at Windy Corner to personify the strength of a good family:
“Whenever Mr. Beebe crossed the ridge and caught sight of these noble dispositions of the earth, and, poised in the middle of them, Windy Corner,—he laughed. The situation was so glorious, the house so commonplace, not to say impertinent. The late Mr. Honeychurch had affected the cube, because it gave him the most accommodation for his money, and the only addition made by his widow had been a small turret, shaped like a rhinoceros’ horn, where she could sit in wet weather and watch the carts going up and down the road. So impertinent—and yet the house “did,” for it was the home of people who loved their surroundings honestly. Other houses in the neighborhood had been built by expensive architects, over others their inmates had fidgeted sedulously, yet all these suggested the accidental, the temporary; while Windy Corner seemed as inevitable as an ugliness of Nature’s own creation. One might laugh at the house, but one never shuddered.” (178)
The Craft of the Novelist
In A Room with a View, we are able to see the novelist’s development in process, as Forster was a young man at the time and just beginning to put his tools to use. It is a pleasure to turn from this early work to Howard’s End and then A Passage to India, and see this novelist working at the height of his craft. Forster is always concentrating on the most average of people, who, in his words, are “too confused to be wicked and too mild to be great. They are simply people.” People like most of us. But for Forster, their emotional lives are deeply important. In a climactic moment in the narrative, (once again seen through Mr. Beebe’s eyes) he mirrors Lucy’s mood with a description of the Surrey skies, dark and lowering, and paints a breathtaking image of light and dark in collision.
“The sky had grown wilder since he stood there last hour, giving to the land a tragic greatness that is rare in Surrey. Grey clouds were charging across tissues of white, which stretched and shredded and tore slowly, until through their final layers there gleamed a hint of the disappearing blue. Summer was retreating. The wind roared, the trees groaned, yet the noise seemed insufficient for those vast operations in heaven. The weather was breaking up, breaking, broken, and it is a sense of the fit rather than of the supernatural that equips such crises with the salvos of angelic artillery. Mr. Beebe’s eyes rested on Windy Corner, where Lucy sat, practicing Mozart. No smile came to his lips, and, changing the subject again, he said: “We shan’t have rain, but we shall have darkness, so let us hurry on. The darkness last night was appalling.” (166)
Forster’s own life was, to use his expression, “a muddle,” and he appears never to have achieved the happiness he granted to Lucy and George. In them he created a union of body and soul that symbolized the complete harmony of civilization and nature. It is “a consummation devoutly to be wished” and a beautiful expression of the heights attainable in the midst
of everyday realities. Once you gaze at the scenes in this little world, you cannot help but enjoy the view, and may gain some insight into the workings of your own windy corner.
Quotations taken from A Room With a View. Bantam Classics Edition, New York. 1988.
Talk About It
There is a lot of talk about nature in these novels. The moon follows people, lightning strikes trees and the wind carries voices. Do you think this strengthens the impact of the story or makes it less believable?
About the Author: E.M. Forster
E.M. Forster was raised in an idyllic English country house, much like those in his novels. He was born Edward Morgan Forster on January 1, 1879. His father, an architect, died soon after his birth, so Forster was raised by his mother, along with various aunts and governesses. A precocious boy, he started writing stories at the age of six and remained committed to the passion of writing throughout his life. He attended Cambridge and, after receiving an inheritance from a great-aunt, traveled the world with his mother.
Forster spent time in India and other regions of the Far East, which he chronicled in his last great novel, A Passage to India. He wrote for the London literary journal The Athenaeum. His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), set in Tuscany, was followed by The Longest Journey (1907), and then A Room With a View (1908.) While he started writing Maurice in 1912, it was not officially published until after his death in 1971. This novel deals with the treatment of homosexuals as criminals, which Forster deplored, and sheds light on his personal predilections.
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