A similarly flawed character with a European and Catholic background appears in Jane Eyre, again in an intriguing transposition. When Jane takes up her role as governess, she describes her new pupil, Adèle, a child of seven or eight years, chatting freely in French but “disinclined to apply” herself to her studies since she had not been systematically educated. Asked about her parents, she recalls her mother taught her “to dance and sing, and to say verse.” She recalls parties in which “[a] great many gentlemen and ladies came to see mamma, and I used to dance before them, or to sit on their knees and sing to them.” Jane accepts Adèle’s offer to perform, and “folding her little hands demurely before her, shaking back her curls, and lifting her eyes to the ceiling she commenced singing a song from some opera. It was the strain of a forsaken lady, who, after bewailing the perfidy of her lover, calls pride to her aid.” Jane observes, “The subject seemed strangely chosen for an infant singer; but I suppose the point of the exhibition lay in hearing notes of love and jealousy warbled with the lisp of childhood; and in very bad taste that point was: at least I though so.” “Rotten to the core” was the judgment Brontë made of her fellow female students in Brussels, and she clearly intends Adèle to represent yet another victim of continental decadence. As Mr. Rochester is later to put it, feeling sympathy for the destitute child of his French lover, he “took the poor thing out of the slime and mud of Paris” hoping to save her “to grow up clean in the wholesome soil of an English country garden.” The scene which the child recalls is indeed prurient. The little girl asked to sit on the knees of her mother’s adult male callers and sing songs of perfidy in love, trained—we see this in the folded hands, the tossed curls—to exploit the frisson of a sexualized child performing within the context of a morally corrupt Parisian setting. Charlotte Brontë’s righteous Protestantism rings loud and clear in this scene, and the challenge for Jane as governess is going to be not so much the obstreperous resistance of Agnes Grey’s writhing pupil Tom and his pen knife or Charlotte’s demanding charges at Stonegappe as it will be to somehow lead Adèle toward a healthier and more natural childhood; or, as Jane’s advertisement phrased it, “a good English education.”
Before leaving for Thornfield, Jane Eyre admits to “a private fear,” that she is running the risk of something she cannot openly mention. All she can do is hope that “the result of my endeavours” as a new governess will be “respectable, proper, en règle.” Her anxiety is based upon a very real threat. Typically, a Victorian governess was an educated young woman who came from the same middle-class social rank as members of the family but lacked money. While house servants were not safe from the male sexual predators in a family, the governess, thanks to her class and relative poverty, was in particular danger. On the other hand, unmarried—or even married—men in the family might become so taken by the attractions of a governess as to offer marriage. William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, which was appearing monthly as Brontë wrote Jane Eyre, satirically presents exactly these issues as Becky Sharp flirts with and fends off both Sir Pitt Crawley and his son Rawdon.
During her time as a governess, Charlotte had written to friends about the dominant men in both the families she served. Of the first she told her sister Emily that on a particularily pleasant afternoon she followed after Mr. Sidgwick on a stroll with his children and found herself admiring him: “with his magnificent Newfoundland dog at his side, he looked very like what a frank, wealthy, Conservative gentleman ought to be.” Of the family at Upperwood House, she noted to Ellen Nussey, “I like Mr White extremely—respecting Mrs White I am for the present silent—I am trying hard to like her.” As we have noted before, and will discuss at length in Chapter Seven, she was soon to fall dangerously in love with Madame Heger’s husband in Brussels. For all of her taut observations of and anger at the women of these establishments, Charlotte Brontë clearly felt strong sexual attraction toward the men. Her vivid erotic imagination is evident in the fantasy narratives she had been writing since early adolescence, and she was herself, evidently, always on the lookout for her own opportunities. Jane Eyre, too, setting out to be a governess, is haunted by the erotic possibilities that lie ahead, to which she primly, and frequently, alludes.
On the first morning as her meeting with Adèle, when Mrs. Fairfax makes reference to a Mr. Rochester, Jane is frankly astonished. Mrs. Fairfax is only the “manager.” Thornfield has a master.
The truth is out. The comforting hopes for a quiet life are ended. The situation is more complicated than she first expected. Jane is in for some kind of “scrape!”
6
The Master
Jane Eyre is a novel about, among other things, mutually shared, passionate love, something Charlotte Brontë had not yet experienced when she wrote the book. Indeed, she had little opportunity to even observe this kind of a relationship, having grown up in a relatively isolated home with her father a widower and her maternal aunt a spinster. And yet the romance between Mr. Rochester and Jane is one of Brontë’s greatest achievements as a writer of fiction. How did she do it?
In the pages that follow, we will explore some of the ways that Brontë drew upon her relationships to five men, including two fictional characters, who were central to her emotional life.
Fairfax Rochester himself suggests whom Brontë drew from when inventing his character, in another of those casually presented offhand moments when she obliquely and yet intentionally implies how intimately personal almost all the novel is to her. During one of his first conversations with Jane Eyre, he tries to analyze, in a sexually suggestive moment, why she is reserved and cautious with him. He thinks that she is too fearful to be herself—“to smile too gaily, speak too freely . . . in the presence of a man and a brother—or father, or master, or what you will . . . ” Significantly, Mr. Rochester embodies aspects of each one of these persons, and, in weaving them together, Brontë creates her own romantic hero.
For Jane and Rochester’s first encounter, Brontë evokes a twilight evening in January. Picturing is always crucial to her art, and here every detail tells us something. The earth is frozen still: solitary, leafless. The chill, the silence suggesting Jane’s frozen emotional life.
She is briskly walking the two miles from Thornfield to the nearby town of Hay to post a letter. It’s the sort of evening—the sort of errand—that’s very familiar to Charlotte Brontë, the “soft, grave” world of her actual experience.
Then Brontë’s imagination takes over. The absolute hush is violated by rude noise, a “tramp, tramp; a metallic clatter,” and the young Jane sees through the dim light an approaching horse and large dog. She thinks at once of the Gytrash, a frightful creature, sometimes lion-like, which haunted rural roads in Yorkshire legend. Jane’s servant nurse Bessie had told stories of this North of England spirit sometimes malevolent, sometimes benevolent, accosting solitary wanderers in the nighttime woods. It’s a prodigy and an omen, and also just a dog. It’s Rochester’s harbinger.
What Charlotte Brontë introduces is nothing less than the composite fulfillment of her own complex and often deeply unhappy secret history of longing and of love. As she often does in this novel, Brontë writes Rochester and his first meeting with Jane to be strikingly different from conventional expectations. In a deliberately antiheroic moment, his horse has just slipped and fallen on the ice, one of Rochester’s legs has been injured, and he finds himself forced to ask this plain, small woman he’s met in the half-light for help capturing his horse’s bridle. Jane reassures the reader that had Rochester been the typically handsome, heroic-looking young gentleman, she would not have known how to reply to his initial, gruff questions. She knew instinctively that such a man would not have had any “sympathy with anything in me . . .” That term—sympathy—is crucial. From this first moment she establishes that there is an equivalence between her and this stranger that she senses instinctively. She further emphasizes it with the language she uses to describe Rochester: he “had a dark face, with stern featur
es and a heavy brow; his eyes and gathered eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted just now . . . ” The giveaway, elegantly managed by Brontë, is “ireful”—suggesting the already sensed sympathy between the two. Overhead the moon rises, the symbolic presence of Miss Temple and Bronte’s ideal of protective motherhood lighting the scene, watching over Jane Eyre.
Everything about the man—who, fallen from his horse, makes her useful by laying “a heavy hand” on her shoulder—everything comes from Charlotte Brontë’s past experience of strong-willed, dominating men who attract her because they are her rivals in one way or another, who exercise an authority over her that she only accepts because there is a kinship bond, a sympathy, between them, and who also paradoxically need her help; men who are physically tough, abrupt, and commanding, powerfully sexualized and dependent on her. Here, distilled into this one man and this one moment, they lean upon her, limping, and then, having caught the bridle of the tall steed, “he mastered it directly.” The verb is key. He has regained control, as is chillingly clear in his next command:
“Just hand me my whip,”—which she promptly obeys.
The master but at her mercy. The dominance, and the threat of pain to come—that she is ready to accept. This is the germinal moment of the novel’s love story. Unconventional, dangerous, and alluring. Already, Jane has an instinctive sense of the connection few other people would understand. Already, Rochester’s pretense of dominance over Jane has been established as a key feature of their relationship. This point is further driven home when finally Jane reenters Thornfield Hall and finds Rochester’s silent Newfoundland dog Pilot, which answers to her caress, and learns from a servant “He came with master.” Not even “the” here; just “master.” The term is twice more repeated in this brief conversation. The reader feels that everything has changed for Jane. Less obvious is the significance of Rochester’s arrival for Charlotte. In ways far larger and more complex than in her earlier creation of Helen Burns, she is about to bring out of the shadows of her past—often a very private and secret past—the specter of her desire, and through the evocative power of her imagination make him live.
Charlotte Bronte had observed Rochester’s physical vigor, determined will, passionate temper, and defiant courage since the earliest days of her childhood in her father Patrick Brontë. He readily became her first source for the novel’s hero.
In Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte, she depicts Mr. Brontë as physically vigorous even in middle age, a man of “strong, passionate, Irish nature . . . compressed down with resolute stoicism.” A fearless man who took whatever side in local or national politics appeared to him “right.” After making enemies of the machine-wrecking Luddites of Haworth when he sided against them in their bitter quarrel with factory owners, and so made enemies of them, he acquired the habit of carrying a loaded pistol. He kept it on his dressing-table with his watch. Ellen Nussey, recalling her first visit to the parsonage during July–August 1833, remembered uneasily that every morning she heard him firing the pistol from his room window, discharging the loading that he made every night. The first edition of Gaskell’s biography continues that as a younger man, when angered he would work off his “volcanic wrath” by firing pistols out the backdoor in rapid succession. Lying in bed upstairs, his wife would hear the quick explosions, and know that something was wrong. Soon after Jane Eyre’s arrival, she is to learn that Mr. Rochester too has bursts of volcanic wrath, and that when he found his Parisian mistress cheating on him with another man, he called him out for a meeting in the Bois de Boulogne, where he leaves a bullet “in one of his poor etiolated arms.” Earlier in his life, trapped on a Caribbean island, driven half-mad by the shrieks of his raving wife, Rochester was to unlock a trunk containing a brace of pistols, preparing to shoot himself in “exquisite and unalloyed despair.” He knew Patrick Brontë’s rage.
Ellen recalls that Charlotte used to relate the story of a mutilated dress as strong proof of her father’s “iron will.” Patrick objected to one of his wife’s dresses, which had been given to her as a present by someone else. To protect her from “‘feminine’ temptation,” he cut it into shreds. Nussey too sees this as illustrative of Patrick’s “will, which ran itself into tyranny and cruelty.” The first edition of Gaskell’s biography also tells of a nurse setting out “some colored boots” for the children on a rainy day while they were outside. Patrick burned them all thinking they were “too gay and luxurious” and would foster a love of dress. These stories of the dress and the boots, and elements of some of the other tales popularized by Gaskell’s first edition, which appeared March 27, 1857, were subsequently challenged by Patrick’s denials, the testimony of former house servants Martha Brown and Nancy Garrs, and a series of articles written by local author and friend of the family William Dearden, which appeared in the Bradford Observer shortly after the book’s publication. Such objections caused Gaskell to revise her text twice. The third edition—what we find now in most reprints—came out in August 1857. Significantly, Mary Taylor, one of Charlotte’s oldest and closest friends, wrote this telling assessment: “As to the mutilated” third edition, “I am sorry for it. Libelous or not, the first edition was all true.” That term, “true,” so crucial to Charlotte Brontë, rings clear in Taylor’s judgment. Memory, as we all know, plays strange games with us. In this case the memories of different house servants about events that had occurred decades earlier are in dubious contention. Mary Taylor would have none of it: Gaskell’s first version “was all true.” What remains is the picture of—as Patrick Brontë himself acknowledged—a somewhat eccentric, highly individual man insistent on going his own way. Nussey sums up Charlotte’s father as man of few “sympathies,” who in considering an issue never entered into details, who found feelings to be a weakness. Instead, he ruled his opinions by maxims that made “no allowance for idiosyncrasies.” In his rough-hewn independence of mind, self-reliant autocracy, and brisk maintenance of his views, Patrick served as a striking model for Charlotte’s Fairfax Rochester who will issue judgments and commands to Jane Eyre with rarely a pause to consider her views on an issue.
For the family at Haworth, Patrick was the master. Too poor to ride his own horse, he still had his pistol, pictures of famous battle scenes on the walls of his study, and a commanding presence not only at home but also in his church and in the many community meetings where he fearlessly argued his point of view on matters of often intense and divided interest. In her letters Charlotte always revered her father for his religious faith and devotion, for his learning, and for his tenderness to his children. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, she became more and more dissatisfied with life at home and felt, like Jane Eyre, an inner restlessness, but still she stayed there, nursing her father—just as Jane does Rochester—taking on domestic responsibilities. It was only after Jane Eyre had been published, and received largely glowing reviews from the London press, that she told her father of the book’s existence. This quiet and respectful subservience to a powerfully dominant man, which Charlotte learned as a child in Patrick Brontë’s house, would recur in her later relationships with men both real and imagined. So when Rochester demands the whip, Jane finds it for him.
One aspect of this Church of England clergyman, which Victorian biographers and essayists sometimes pass over in discrete silence, is the fact that he sired six children in little more than six years. While Patrick may have been a bit of a hypochondriac, wrapping his neck in swathes of linen to keep out the cold and eating alone to calm his stomach from the risk of dyspepsia, he had a formidable sex drive. After the tragic and early death of his wife, he proposed in rapid succession to three women all of whom turned him down. It was only then that he settled into the vigorous widower who walked the moors alone. The abrupt, commanding man Jane Eyre encounters in the twilight, whose face she keeps thinking about “because it was masculine . . . dark, strong, and stern,” radiates a sexual energy Charlotte Brontë knew, daily, at Haworth.
The well-known
photograph of Patrick Brontë, taken in his later years, shows us a gaunt profile with high cheek bones, white hair ruffled like that of a bantam cock, his narrowed eyes peering through his eyeglasses, back still rigidly straight, his mouth pursed and pulled down. He died in 1861 in his eighty-fourth year. His wife and all of his children had died years earlier.
Charlotte’s brother Branwell constitutes a far more complex influence, as well as a second source, for Mr. Rochester. On the face of it, a very unlikely one, too. How could a short, nearsighted, skinny, red-haired kid be transformed into Fairfax Rochester? The explanation is strange but crucial for understanding Charlotte and her novel, and reveals much about the way in which Brontë’s imagination worked. From lively younger brother to demonic outlaw, to shattered, self-destroying family humiliation—we will now trace the arc of tragic descent in the life of a man she loved and, in dramatically changing ways, depicted in her fictions.
He was born just over a year after Charlotte (June 1817) and was the constant playmate of his sisters during their childhood. He was, in the biographer Winifred Gérin’s sympathetic characterization, “passionate and uncontrolled, violent in nursery games, but so inventive in his willfulness, so avid a reader, so quick a learner,” that Charlotte soon recognized him as her mental equal. While their father Patrick was the austere figurehead of the family, in Branwell Charlotte found a kind of fellowship rare in human experience, and she soon transferred to him “the heart’s allegiance,” once dedicated to her older sister Maria. Her need to love was compelling, and she made him “the focal point of her existence.” Together, through their shared writing of poetry and fiction, they created and lived in a world of their own making; note Gérin’s term “willfulness.” It was to become a key issue in Branwell’s relationship with his masterful father—and with his sister—just as “willfulness” was to create, for Jane and Rochester, a climactic crisis in their shared lives.
The Secret History of Jane Eyre Page 9