The fourteen-year-old Charlotte had anticipated these motifs in her 1830 tale titled “An Extraordinary Dream.” There the narrator, Charles Wellesley, overcome by the chills and burning fever of a strange illness finds himself suddenly unable to move or speak even though his senses remain keen. He watches as his family members weep over his rigid body, then cover it with a white sheet. Fears of “being buried with dead bodies amid stench and putrefaction” consume him as he is put into a “leaden coffin . . . the nails . . . screwed down,” and he is lowered into the family vault. “By degrees the sound of the multitude died away and not a voice or step echoed through the vast aisles which but to think of is unsupportable agony.” In 1836, while she was teaching at Roe Head, separated from her coauthor Branwell and unable to achieve any sustained writing, Charlotte must have felt buried alive in the remote school for girls. She speculated whether her brother, who was continuing to write back at Haworth, had killed off her favorite heroine Mary Percy, “Is she dead, is she buried is she alone in the cold earth . . . under the bleak pavement of a church in a vault closed up with lime mortar.” This provokes a series of “wretched thoughts.” “I hope she’s alive,” Brontë continues, “because I can’t abide to think how hopelessly & cheerlessly she must have died.” These experiences are analogous to how she feels when she describes her depression of 1838; although Charlotte asserts it’s even worse to be living what seems an ordinary life surrounded and closed in by a sensation where everything is as horrifying as a nightmare.
Jane Eyre in the locked, darkening red-room, suddenly terrified that Mr. Reed’s spirit might appear in the house, relives Charlotte’s feelings of psychological entrapment and anguish. During the profound despondency of 1838, as Brontë later recalled later to Elizabeth Gaskell, “She could not forget the gloom, could not sleep at night, nor attend in the day” and “that one night sitting alone . . . she heard a voice repeat” lines of poetry that she had never written. Her father, recuperating in Manchester while she writes, is also a “prisoner in his darkened room,” awaiting anxiously the medical verdict about his eyesight and whether he can keep his employment. All are trapped, just like Jane. The prisoner in the darkened room is a version of the man buried alive in a subterranean dungeon and the child in the red-room of ire, blood, and fire, threatened with supernatural visitations.
This shrouded world was nothing new for Brontë. Living at the edge of an early Victorian industrial town, with all the consequent health problems and short life spans for many people, death and dying were always close by. Consider, for example, the wet and rainy winter of 1833–1834 when Charlotte was seventeen. At Haworth there was “an unusual number of deaths in the village . . . the passing and funeral bells so frequently tolling, filling the heavy air with their mournful sound—and . . . the ‘chip, chip’ of the mason, as he cut the grave stones in a shed close by.” Visitors to the rectory at Haworth are usually struck immediately by the fact that its windows look out upon a graveyard, the sight of which greeted the Brontë children every morning. While today that place is shadowed by aged trees, when they lived there, there were no trees and the tombstones stood raw and isolated in an otherwise bare space. Charlotte told of seeing from her bedroom window “no other landscape than a monotonous stretch of moorland, a grey church tower, rising from the centre of a church-yard so filled with graves, that rank-weed and coarse grass scarce had room to shoot up between the monuments.” Inside that parish church was the funerary monument to the memory of her mother and two older sisters near to which Charlotte and her siblings would have sat and prayed. Writing from Haworth in March of 1845, a year and a half before beginning the writing of Jane Eyre, Charlotte says, “There was a time when Haworth was a very pleasant place to me; it is not so now—I feel as if we were all buried here.”
Brontë’s use of Bewick’s engravings evokes the dark side of living in Haworth: the dismal churchyard out her childhood window, the deaths of family and friends both long ago and recent. In ways easy to understand, the shared, fearful fascination of both the writer and her character regarding death and the spectral return of the dead expresses their conflicted longing for those who died. Jane locked in the red-room terrified at the possibility of the appearance of the guilt-filled uncle seems both a natural fear of the dead mixed with a desire for him to return and avenge his wife’s bad treatment of her.
Indeed the return of the vengeful dead, intent upon punishing injustice in the world of the living, had a particular attraction to Charlotte. In her poem “Gilbert”—written only months before she began Jane Eyre—we find a similar kind of action played out. Charlotte’s poem depicts the central character Gilbert recalling a sadistic relationship with a woman named Elinor and the days when he enjoyed watching her “kneel, / In bondage, at my feet.” Much as John Reed enjoyed Jane’s fall and wounding, Gilbert relished witnessing Elinor’s anguish and pain, but, then, he discards her. In despair she drowns herself. Years later, when he is prosperous, married, and supposedly secure, her specter haunts him. In the climactic, final scene, Gilbert comes home at midnight. The moon is out, and rain is in the air. At his door he knocks three times. The door opens to reveal “A woman, clad in white. / Lo! Water from her dripping dress / Runs on the streaming floor; / From every dark and clinging tress, / The drops incessant pour.” He attempts to brush past the specter, but she drifts ahead of him. He falls to his knees praying, but she will not move. Wildly, as if possessed by demons, he rushes up the staircase and into his room. He seizes a knife and cuts his throat. Through the gash “his outraged life / Rushed rash and redly through.” Elinor’s revenge on Gilbert is similar to the one that Jane wishes Mr. Reed would inflict upon his son and wife, the scarlet flow of his blood anticipating the drapery that conceals the young Jane in Chapter One, and the “deep red damask” that festoons the dead man’s bed in Chapter Two. At the same time, she imagines Mr. Reed as a fearful thing that she cannot control. Jane has become frightened that her rage and vengefulness might be turned against her. She looked in the mirror and saw a “tiny phantom” reflected back; the darkness and her fear push her to the brink of madness. Unaware of what she is doing, Jane cries out. The servants say, “What a scream” as they enter. Brontë transposes the darkness of her world into the literal and terrifying darkness of Jane’s in the red-room.
For Charlotte Brontë and for Jane Eyre much of their secret lives are lived on the borderline of madness, and there are moments of anguish when its darkness takes over. Jane will find that the Jamaican planter and merchant’s daughter Bertha Mason has succumbed to its allure and now lives in her own version of the red-room, a locked cell on the third floor of Thornfield Hall, little more than a pitiful, savage beast.
And then come consolations. The first, in the form of a quite different man than the ghost of the vengeful dead: the local apothecary Mr. Lloyd. His tender care and willingness to hear what Jane has to say makes her feel “sheltered and befriended.” He anticipates Mr. Rochester in his kinder moods. The second, and ultimately far more important, is the servant Bessie, offering Jane a tart on her favorite plate, decorated with a brightly feathered “bird of paradise.” She keeps Jane, whose nerves are shattered, company. Bessie is a kind of threshold figure. At Jane’s request she brings her a copy of Gulliver’s Travels and sings of “the path of the poor orphan child.” As such she has a kind of double function recalling Charlotte’s sisterhood with Emily and Anne: she nurtures, shares in a caring telling of story and song such as Charlotte loved in her life at Haworth, but at the same time recurrently seems to suggest that soon Jane, like Charlotte, will necessarily start on a journey that will challenge her.
Indeed, Jane must leave, “severed from Bessie and Gateshead: thus whirled away to unknown, . . . remote and mysterious regions.”
And so Jane embarks upon the “road of trials,” one of the earliest and most important story forms in European literature. Think: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Swift, Defoe. The traditional protagonist is a man—wily like Odysseu
s, self-disciplined like Aeneas, foolish like Robinson Crusoe, confused like Gulliver, divinely led like Dante. As he pursues his journey toward a distant goal—often enough it’s simply returning home—he meets challenges that threaten him. Each is a test.
It’s an aspect of Brontë’s genius that while working in this literary tradition she chooses to write about a young girl. Jane encounters the unexpected and the terrifying, just like those ancient heroes, facing whatever threatens her, choosing for herself, and never giving up.
3
Injustice
As she planned out the novel, Brontë necessarily sought to invent for her heroine a challenging next step in her road of trials. Looking back upon her own experience she found nothing quite as suitable, which is to say painful and devastating, as her year-long enrollment in the Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge. This school, just opened, was a charitable concern intended to help poorly paid Church of England priests with their daughters’ education. With his wife Maria now dead, this must have seemed to Patrick Brontë an unexpected boon. He sent to the school his four oldest: Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Emily. He couldn’t have known much about the place when he sent them. Their treatment there was so horrendous that the next spring Maria and Elizabeth returned home to die, while Charlotte was physically and emotionally damaged for life.
Thus in framing the chapters that follow Jane’s departure from Gateshead, Brontë chose to write about Cowan Bridge for two distinct reasons. First, it would offer scenes of high drama as Jane faces new challenges that help forge her spirit. Second, it would offer Brontë the chance to indict the school and those who ran it. Helen Burns, Jane’s first and best friend at the school, is later to speak in surprise of Jane Eyre’s indignation at Mrs. Reed: “What a singularly deep impression her injustice seems to have made on your heart!” The same is true for Charlotte—she too seeks to attack past injustice and to do it in Jane’s way: to tell “the truth.” Few things could be more personally meaningful to Brontë than this.
Mrs. Reed wants to be rid of Jane. The child has no choice in what happens. And Mrs. Reed has a plan. In a scene enacted in Jane’s presence, she calls in a clergyman named Brocklehurst who runs a charitable school for orphans named Lowood Institution. She stages it in the breakfast room, the site for Jane’s earlier violent confrontation with John Reed. In doing this she dramatically illustrates that this will be her final vindication and triumph over this rebellious ten-year-old girl. Mrs. Reed explains that she wants Jane to have an education “suiting her prospects,” by which she means little money and no hopes for the future. Mrs. Reed wants Jane to be made useful and humble. Brocklehurst questions Jane’s past conduct, asking if she will “repent of ever having been the occasion of discomfort to your excellent benefactress.” The terms are clear from the outset. Jane is beholden to Mrs. Reed. Lurking behind this interrogation is the Reeds’ imprisonment of Jane in the red-room. Mrs. Reed wants to stifle any of Jane’s protestations in advance. She instructs Brocklehurst that “the superintendent and teachers [of Lowood school should] . . . keep a strict eye on her, and above all, to guard against her worst fault, a tendency to deceit.” She is trying to prevent Jane from telling others what happened on that day. His reply is to use the false, pseudo-biblical rhetoric to which he always resorts: “all liars will have their portion in the lake burning with fire and brimstone.” Before he leaves, he hands Jane a pamphlet, telling her, “here is a book entitled the ‘Child’s Guide’; read it with prayer, especially that part containing ‘an account of the awfully sudden death of Martha G—, a naughty child addicted to falsehood and deceit.’”
Brocklehurst is an exact copy of the clergyman Charlotte had to face at Cowan Bridge, the Rev. William Carus Wilson. Wilson wrote similar pamphlets that reveled in the gruesome thought of children dying young and which threatened their child-readers with divine punishment for what most people would regard as minor faults. For example, his Child’s First Tales (1836) features a story “Child in a pet” about a young girl who “would have her own way. Oh! How cross she looks. And oh! What a sad tale have I to tell you of her. She was in such a rage, that all at once God struck her dead . . . And oh! Where do you think she is now? . . . We know that bad girls go to hell when they die.” Remembering Wilson and his cruel hypocrisy, Charlotte now sends her heroine to be under his tutelage and control. In so doing, she now will tell readers the truth about her past.
Charlotte Brontë was enrolled in the Clergy Daughter’s School at Cowan Bridge on August 10, 1824, when she was a little over eight years old. Jane Eyre arrives at the Lowood Institution on the January 19 when she is ten. Brontë’s narrative in Chapters V to IX of Jane Eyre are the most literally autobiographical part of the novel. Responding to a certain anxiety expressed by the editors at Smith, Elder about these chapters, Charlotte Brontë replied, “Had I told all the truth, I might indeed have made it far more exquisitely painful,” but she preferred to avoid displeasing her more sensitive readers. While this is by no means the only part of the novel that raised questions about verisimilitude upon its first publication, it was certainly one of the central places where questions of accuracy and fairness emerged. Brontë was always insistent that her recreation of the school was factual. Her friend and first biographer Elizabeth Gaskell was later to recall, “Miss Brontë more than once said to me . . . there was not a word in her account of the institution but what was true at the time when she knew it.” As we have already seen, Charlotte Brontë’s insistence goes far beyond an author’s pride in accuracy. Because she cared so deeply about this question of “truth,” she was delighted when she saw a local clergyman reading Jane Eyre, and to overhear him saying “ ‘Why – they have got – School, and Mr. – here, I declare! And Miss – (naming the originals of Lowood, Mr. Brocklehurst and Miss Temple)’ ” and, adding to Charlotte’s satisfaction, that Brocklehurst “ ‘deserved the chastisement he had got.’ ” There is a note of triumph in her words.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, appearing two years after Charlotte’s death, fueled the debate. Its discussion of the Cowan Bridge scenes characterizes them as based on “[t]he pictures, ideas, and conceptions of character received into the mind of the child of eight years old,” which were “destined to be reproduced in fiery words a quarter of a century afterwards.” Gaskell’s account, for all its caution, almost immediately sparked a firestorm. The model for Mr. Brocklehurst, W. Carus Wilson, was still very much alive. His friends rallied around the Rev. Henry Shepheard, Wilson’s son-in-law, who published A Vindication of the Clergy Daughter’s School and the Rev. W. Carus Wilson. Stung by their angry critique, Gaskell issued two revisions of her biography, the third edition, in particular, muting some of the most critical remarks about Cowan Bridge from the book’s first edition. It should be added her initial assessments and characterizations were almost certainly correct. I will rely on them here.
The powerful and secret motives for Charlotte Brontë’s “fiery words” were, first, her certainty that her two older sisters died because during the months they were at the school they were treated so badly; and, second, that she was permanently damaged both physically and psychologically. Her bad teeth, her underdeveloped body, her reticence and secretiveness, her tendency to despondency bordering at times on mania, all could, with some justification, be seen as the consequences of her time there. Brontë had become the “avenging sister of the sufferer”—that sufferer being not only her sisters but also herself.
The question of truthfulness, then, debated by Wilson’s supporters, and raised elsewhere by some of the novel’s earliest reviewers and critics, was an intensely personal one for Brontë—and in the novel, even before its publication and subsequent reception, she anticipated the debate in Jane Eyre’s angry confrontation, after Brocklehurst’s departure, with Mrs. Reed. With “ungovernable excitement” Jane Eyre insists upon the accuracy of her narrative of the red-room, affirming “I will tell anybody who asks me questions this exact ta
le,” because it is “the truth.”
Brontë had experienced her own road of trials. Hers began early with the death of her mother Maria on September 15, 1821. Charlotte was only five years old. Her mother’s illness had been a long and painful one, and, given the relative closeness of the rooms at Haworth, the small child must have been aware of what was happening—the pain, the wasting away, the fear, the grief. Brontë was usually quiet about this first tragedy in her life. It was, however, to have an important influence on Jane Eyre. But immediately, for her, it meant a family home without a mother, with a father struggling to raise six small children and carry on his demanding work as a parish priest. When her father sent her off to the just-opened Cowan Bridge School for girls the shock of this second change in her life must have been overwhelming. She had grown up in a close family home. She wrote in later years of the “affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other . . . when they have clung to each other from childhood.” This clinging, this family closeness, was suddenly stripped from her, as was the routine of a daily life in which eating, playing, and the rudiments of learning and self-expression took place within a quiet domestic context. Intimacy and love, freedom and respect were suddenly replaced with an institutional life of rules and the ringing of bells to denote each activity, accompanied by hunger, cold, and a radical loneliness felt in the midst of rude and indifferent strangers.
The Secret History of Jane Eyre Page 4