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Rebecca started back, a picture of consternation. In the course of this history we have never seen her lose her presence of mind, but she did now and wept some of the most genuine tears that ever fell from her eyes.
“Oh, Sir Pitt!” she said. “Oh, Sir—I am married already.”
A chapter intervenes before we learn about the marriage to Rawdon.
How they were married is not of the slightest consequence to anyone. What is to hinder a Captain who is a major, and a young woman who is of age, from purchasing a license and uniting themselves at any church in this town? Who needs to be told, that if a woman has a will, she will assuredly find a way. My belief is, that one day, when Miss Sharp had gone to pass the forenoon with her dear friend, Miss Amelia Sedley in Russell Square, a lady very like her might have been seen entering a church in the city, in company with a gentleman with dyed mustachios. . . .
And so the passage continues. I find quoting it irresistible, forcing myself to break off with ellipses that at least might suggest its continuing build-up and gusto. The prose conveys Thackeray’s irony, his techniques of distancing, his clever coyness that is a way of telling us everything while seeming to withhold information, his tendency to resist the climactic, a contrast, of course, to Brontë, who builds to her earnest exclamation of “Reader, I married him.”
Perhaps a cynicism I have come by almost as an inheritance inoculates me against the charms of the unironic marriage plot. “I do hope Wendy will be happy in her marriages,” my mother once proclaimed to a friend. We laughed at her telling slip. Into my sixties I’d had only one marriage, yet I feel my choice as a young woman of a husband, as good a person as he was, seemed on some level arbitrary. In the early years of that marriage, I kept having a dream in which I knew I had married someone but couldn’t remember who this was. Various candidates flashed before me as my anxiety mounted. I knew it wasn’t x and I knew it wasn’t y. When I woke up, I was vastly relieved to remember I had married Donald Fairey. The marriage lasted quite a while though not forever.
Thackeray understands the arbitrariness of the heroine’s choice. If Becky can’t marry Jos, she’ll try for a Crawley. She settles for the son, but she could have had the old baronet. In social terms that would have been preferable. What’s love got to do with it? Amelia loves; her choice seems sacred. Yet the reader knows George Osborne is not bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. Even the marriage to Dobbin, which the least tender-hearted reader is hard pressed not to cheer, has no merging of bones and flesh. “Farewell, dear Amelia,” writes Thackeray sentimentally—and cynically. “Grow green again, tender little parasite, round the rugged old oak to which you cling.”
But if Thackeray is cynical about love and marriage and Brontë is not, on another key point they come back together: the curtailing of licentious male energy. In an essay I have always found very suggestive and useful, “The Brontës or Myth Domesticated,” Richard Chase argues that in Heathcliff and Rochester, Emily and Charlotte have created passionate, sexual, lawless Byronic heroes who mesmerize the heroines but at the same time must be tamed to achieve a socially and morally acceptable outcome for Victorian England. Hence, the story of Wuthering Heights replays in a second generation that is ultimately gentler and more malleable than the first (at the end of the book the second Cathy is teaching the unlettered Hareton to read). In Jane Eyre it’s Rochester himself who gets tamed. The man who enters the novel bearing down on Jane on his horse (and is unhorsed in prefiguring of change to come) ends up maimed and blind. Even regaining enough sight literally to recognize his son, he is a reformed, domesticated, some would say emasculated husband.
Extending Chase’s paradigm to Vanity Fair, I see a parallel domestication of the unruly male in Rawdon Crawley’s change from dashing gambling captain of the Guards to underemployed father trotting his son around on a pony in Regents Park. But if I can appreciate the need to curb the sexual license of a Rochester, I have to wonder about Thackeray’s good-hearted booby. Does the Captain really need this marital castration?
Nina Auerbach says yes in her chapter on “Incarnations of the Orphan” in Romantic Imprisonment. For Auerbach, the mythic force in these mid-century works is not the Romantic male but the female orphan/governess—an “angel/demon,” using her powers not just to reform and domesticate men but also to effect a revolutionary change in society. Here is Auerbach on Jane:
Throughout the novel she [Jane] talks oddly about her “powers.” She conquers every environment she enters, but her powers are most dramatically evident at Thornfield, one of the great bleak houses of English fiction, bastion of feudal authority and of nineteenth-century English fiction. . . . When Rochester’s opulent estate is reduced to rubble and his opulent body to a charred shell, Jane can return to him as little wife, rather than little witch, tending the ruins of the house she has passed through, cleaned up, and helped bring down.
Becky, too, for Auerbach has extraordinary salutary powers. Reviewing how Becky’s marriage to Rawdon loses him his inheritance which passes to his brother who uses it to renovate their ancestral estate King’s Crawley, and how she accomplishes a similar destruction and renovation in the house of Sedley, weaning Amelia away from the dandified George and encouraging her union with the good Captain Dobbin and then finishing off Jos Sedley for good measure, Auerbach concludes:
Becky’s selfhood is less absolute than Jane’s, but her powers are the same: she transforms every great house she enters, and by the end of the novel has become an inadvertent catalyst of social revolution.. . . By the end of the novel Becky has directly or indirectly killed off all the dominant Regency bucks who obstructed the coming of the new Victorian era. . . The orphan with all her dangerous magic, has functioned as the agent of benevolent change.
I quote from Auerbach because I find her theories persuasive and also hope to show the rhetorical power of good criticism, the ways it can expand a work’s range of meanings. Over the forty years I have been professionally involved with Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair, part of the pleasure of rereading these novels has been the changing critical lenses through which they’ve been viewed. Especially in the case of Jane Eyre the successive approaches of modernist/new critical, second-wave feminist and third-wave feminist/postcolonial critics have radically altered readers’ understanding of this novel.
In the 1960s, the years of my undergraduate and graduate school education, Jane Eyre’s “stock,” as one of my grad school professors startled me by calling it, was way down, and it was accorded far less literary value than was Wuthering Heights. Neither work is included in F. R. Leavis’s “great tradition” of morally serious English fiction (his influential critiques appeared in book form in 1948), but the latter at least gets a nod for its idiosyncratic brilliance. Asserting in a one-paragraph “note on the Brontës,” that “it is tempting to retort that there is only one Brontë,” Leavis famously dubs Wuthering Heights “a kind of sport”—a work of quirky genius beyond the pale of tradition—while begrudging only “a permanent interest of a minor kind to Charlotte.”
Leavis himself was not afraid to be quirky, but be this as it may, his preference for Emily over Charlotte is echoed in most of the critics, writing from the twenties into the fifties, I was assigned to read. Kathleen Tillotson grants Jane Eyre a chapter in Novels of the 1840s, but Dorothy Van Ghent chooses Wutherings Heights as the Brontë novel to discuss in The English Novel: Form and Function, as does Arnold Kettle in Introduction to the Novel. Edwin Muir uses Wuthering Heights as his model of exemplary dramatic structure in The Structure of the Novel, deeming it “more impressive” than Jane Eyre because the balance in it “of freedom and necessity is held more tautly,” whatever that means! And then, of course, there is the influential judgment of Virginia Woolf in The Common Reader, from which I now quote at greater length:
Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre, because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote she said with eloquence and splendour and pas
sion, “I love,” “I hate,” “I suffer.” Her experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there is no “I” in Wuthering Heights. There are no governesses. There are no employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Emily was inspired by some more general concept. The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked out on a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it into a book.
The verdict seemed decisive: Jane Eyre is earthbound, Wuthering Heights transcendent; Jane Eyre is a work of power but also self-indulgent fantasy and emotion; the “impersonal” emotion of Wuthering Heights (remember T. S. Eliot’s authoritative pronouncement that art must be impersonal) achieves a higher level of truth. Wuthering Heights is also deemed superior because its passion is contained within the novel’s exquisite narrative double frame: the stranger Lockwood narrating the tale he has heard from the family servant Nelly, through whom we hear the aroused voices of Heathcliff, the Earnshaws, and the Lintons, loving and hating with their unbridled intensity. It was studying Wuthering Heights as well as the novels of Henry James and Ford Madox Ford that I understood the concept of the unreliable narrator. Wuthering Heights brilliantly confounds as a puzzle of enigmatic boxes within boxes, of rival subjectivities, thereby morphing into a modernist text, while Jane Eyre, its stock down on the modernist/new critical exchange, grows ever more awkwardly Victorian.
Then, on or about October 1973, all this changed. It was Adrienne Rich who flung down the gauntlet. In “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman,” she sets forth a totally different heroine from Virginia Woolf’s creature of self-delimiting passions. To Woolf’s ironic, arguably catty pronouncement—“always to be a governess, always to be in love is a serious limitation in a world which is full, after all, of people who are neither one nor the other”—Rich offers an indignant corrective: “Always a governess and always in love? Had Virginia Woolf really read this novel?” Not only is Rich’s Jane a complex alternative to Woolf’s pining impassionata; Rich also challenges Woolf on the basic grounds of what the self, especially the female self, should be and do. Jane Eyre is an exemplary heroine for Adrienne Rich precisely because she asserts a forceful self she is repeatedly tempted to sacrifice but chooses at every turn, in the face of every temptation, to be true to and to strengthen. “I would suggest,” writes Rich, “that Charlotte Brontë is writing a life story of a woman who is incapable of saying ‘I am Heathcliff’ because she feels so unalterably herself.” In fealty to this self, Rich’s Jane resists temptations besetting the traditional female heroine: of victimization and hysteria at Gateshead, self-hatred and self-immolation at Lowood, romantic love and surrender at Thornfield, passive suicide in her wanderings, and at Moor House marriage without love to St. John. The character we accompany on this journey, “a person determined to live, and to choose her life with dignity, integrity and pride,” endows Brontë’s novel, Rich goes so far as to claim, with “a special force and survival value”—i.e., it helps its female reader to survive. The feminist apotheosis of Jane Eyre and its heroine had begun.
It was completed, I would say, in the 1979 work of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, whose Madwoman in the Attic secured Jane Eyre’s position, in one critic’s words, as “a cult text of feminism.” If Adrienne Rich’s Jane is heroically stalwart, the Jane of Gilbert and Gubar is heroically enraged. The co-authors, whose very collaboration stands as an alternate to singular patriarchal authorship, explore what happens to women whose voices are repressed. They focus on the incarcerated, incendiary figure of Rochester’s wife in the attic, Bertha Mason, and find in her an emblem of justified female madness and rage. This is the rage that consumes Jane, Charlotte, and all women whose lives have been circumscribed and voices silenced. It is the self-same rage Virginia Woolf had seen as a defect and Adrienne Rich had countered with her delineation of the heroine’s constructive quest. For Gilbert and Gubar rage is the truth that will out and the route to liberation. Powerful in its influence, Madwoman in the Attic established Jane Eyre as the voice of feminist anger, exploding to protest women’s oppression. Burn down the house, burn your bra, burn in righteous anger. Women, as Jane says, want action, too. Jane Eyre thus became the Brontë text white middle-class second-wave Feminists of the 1970s and ’80s had to read and teach and write about. As a committed white middle-class feminist myself, I was happy to put it on my syllabi, my enthusiasm to teach its themes overriding my personal failed connection to the novel. I have probably taught it more times than any other work of English fiction.
In the twenty-first century Jane Eyre is still prominent on my syllabi, but yet another paradigm shift has occurred. In recent postcolonial and global (third-wave) feminist readings, Jane has been reassessed as both racist and insufficiently feminist. She has been cast as colonial oppressor, a white woman marginalizing the Creole Bertha as she herself has been marginalized by a patriarchal culture; she has been castigated for her ultimate failure to break out of the bourgeois domestic sphere. One of my graduate students for whom the old feminist Jane Eyre clearly has Rich’s “special force and survival value” was so indignant that she wrote her masters thesis using the new historicist approach that seeks to ground a text in its times to rescue the heroine from these latter-day revisions. Jane, the student posited, is as much of a rebel as she can be and should be honored for her proto-feminist achievement.
Postcolonial critical approaches make Jane Eyre more controversial, but still, they keep it at the top of reading lists. The novel, as I have said, is a serviceable text. Just as its feminist strains could be mined, it lends itself to postcolonial readings in the abundance of its colonial material. Critics can engage in what Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism calls “contrapuntal reading”—“reading a text with an understanding of what is involved when an author shows, for instance, that a colonial sugar plantation is seen as important to the process of maintaining a particular style of life in England.” Contrapuntal reading of Jane Eyre highlights that Rochester has enriched himself through marriage to a West Indian Creole, that Jane’s inheritance, securing her financial independence, derives from an uncle’s fortune made in Madeira, and that St. John Rivers joins the missionary arm of empire.
Postcolonial approaches also find textual metaphors that we had somehow overlooked before. It took Gayatri Spivak in her influential article “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” to show that Bertha Mason’s death could be read as an act of suttee: the third-world wife sets herself on fire, acting out of hate but serving the cause of love and empire. Bertha, Spivak argues, must “play out her role, act out the transformation of her ‘self’ into that fictive ‘Other,’ set fire to the house and kill herself so that Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction.” Another critic, Deirdre David in Rule Britannia, gives us a chastened Rochester, now a true widower cleansed of his sultanic excesses, reunited through the purgation of Bertha with the British heroine who has redeemed him for the colonizer’s mission. These readings set Jane and Bertha in opposition, Jane thriving at Bertha’s expense. But there’s also a postcolonial-era Jane who herself faces dangers of suttee and the seraglio, at least metaphorically. She will not join Rochester’s harem. She will not marry Rivers because that, she says, would kill her (though she is willing to go to India where she feels she would certainly die).
I myself—it’s part of my essential uneasiness with Jane Eyre—have always been disturbed by how much Jane Eyre seems to relish her metaphors of subjugation. “Do you think I can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips and my drop of living water dashed from my cup?” she asks. The dashing and the snatching have always seemed as vivid to me as Jane’s resistance to these violent acts. A way to engage this aspect of the novel, different from the postcolonial, is to filter it through psychonanalysis, a useful lens through which to explore Jane’s seeming masochism. One of my masters students, in an approach I woul
d call socio-psychological with an overlay of feminism, argued in her thesis that Jane’s “social masochism” serves as an effective weapon for someone powerless “to take possession of her own marginalization and use it as a narrative and social technique to ally readers with her plight.”
And so it builds: the list of competing and compounding interpretations in the ongoing reimagining of Jane Eyre. Modernist, new critical, feminist, Marxist, new historicist, psychoanalytic, psycho-social, psycho-biographical—the approaches proliferate, the bibliographies lengthen. Then, too, the text has generated postcolonial rewritings of itself: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, in which Jamaica-born Antoinette, the novel’s central character, gets sadistically renamed Bertha by her unnamed fortune-hunting new husband, the man we know to be Rochester, and her triumph is the burning of his English house; or Bharati Mukherji’s Jasmine, one of whose Hindu incarnations is as “Jane,” married to a crippled Iowa banker. One can only guess what’s to come. Surely tomorrow or next month or next year, the critical ground will shift and a new Jane Eyre, multiple new Jane Eyres will emerge. . . .
I realize that while my interest in Jane Eyre is in large part how it has been interpreted, Vanity Fair, though subject, of course, as well to shifting critical trends, seems somehow more constant, and I find myself drawn back into the sheer pleasure of rereading it. Adrienne Rich calls Jane Eyre a “tale”—something “between realism and poetry.” A tale can exist in its outline. It can be summarized and can signify. Vanity Fair compels my attention in a different way. While absorbing the good work critics have done on it—Lubbock, Tillotson, Said, Auerbach, and others, I want to immerse myself in its words—never too many for me—and see their writerly construction. I want to savor Thackeray’s wit. I want to think about particular moments in the text: Becky throwing the dictionary out the window, Dobbin defending Georgie at school, Rawdon and Becky getting married, Becky selling her horses in Brussels in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo. Such moments proliferate to endow the novel for me with the “special force and survival value” Rich speaks of in connection with Jane Eyre. I can understand why one of my colleagues, a professor of religion, chooses to reread Vanity Fair every time she moves. It’s a book that gives me, too, the courage to launch myself anew upon the world, the courage, if you will, to go on.