The Secret History of Jane Eyre

by John Pfordresher

  Taking Jane aside toward the end of the evening, Rochester asks if she is “a little depressed”? Would a few more words “bring tears to your eyes . . . ”? This calculated cruelty, and his relishing of Jane Eyre’s unhappiness, stems directly from Charlotte’s Zamorna. Here is just one example from High Life in Verdopolis. By now the irony of that title is quite clear. In one scene Zamorna tortures his faithful and loving wife Mary Percy. They’re in the middle of a lavish party. Zamorna expels a guest who has been spending too much time with Mary and then turns to look at his wife with a “cold & haughty smile,” while the gloom that comes across his forehead suggests something far different. Mary, turning “white as death & sick with agitation” collapses in a nearby chair. “Are you better?” he asks coldly. Tears swell in her eyes, and she looks reproachfully at the “disdainful & jealous Despot.” Taking the hand of a nearby young and beautiful woman, Zamorna turns his back on Mary and leads the other woman onto the dance floor. Mary remains in an alcove burdened with “the heaviness of a sorrowful heart.” Seeing her melancholy from a distance, Zamorna returns to his wife for a fond and intimate conversation as he confesses, “I am infernally jealous.” And then abruptly orders her, “Leave your husband . . . to find his own faults if he has done wrong, & never either by inference or direct assertion show him where they lie.” Charlotte as the young author of such scenes seems to have found Zamorna’s ruthless dominance exciting. But by the time she writes Jane Eyre, she is far more fully aware of how cruel her heroes can be. At the same time, in the scenes with Blanche we see emerging a quiet victory not only over her but also over Rochester. Yes, he wants to hurt Jane into love. But it is he who keeps finding moments to leave the crowd and, like Zamorna, solicitously ask how she is reacting. It’s her silent endurance that is winning him. The little governess is made of sterner stuff.

  Blanche doesn’t stand a chance against Jane, but there is another woman with a strange, pervasive presence at Thornfield Hall. During Jane’s first day, as Mrs. Fairfax shows her the third story, she hears her curious laugh—“distinct, formal, mirthless.” This woman will constitute the climactic trial or test for Jane Eyre’s time at Thornfield. It’s now time to get to know her better and to inquire how much Charlotte Brontë knew about her. And why Charlotte might consider that knowledge something she prefers to keep secret.

  8

  The Fury

  The mysterious female figure who haunts Thornfield Hall comes from the traditions of gothic fiction. There is no direct evidence that Charlotte Brontë ever read the classic gothic novels of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk, or the novels of Ann Radcliffe. Instead, she makes clear in a letter to Hartley Coleridge that she reveled in writing from this tradition that she found in “ladies magazines,” often reading them in secret “with the most exquisite pleasure,” and she playfully suggests that had she been older she might have written stories with fanciful titles such as “Count Albert or the haunted castle—Evelina or the Recluse of the Lake—Sigismund or the Nunnery.” One recurrent characteristic of many texts from this tradition is that the specters and monsters that terrify are in the end fully explained in rational and materialistic terms. So in Jane Eyre the reader eventually learns that what haunts Thornfield Hall is a real woman, and in meticulous detail Brontë accounts for her presence, her physical characteristics, and her motives. The Creole daughter of a rich Anglo-Jamaican family, Bertha Mason attracts the young Fairfax Rochester when he is sent to the Caribbean to make his fortune. After their marriage she quickly degenerates into loathsome bestiality. Unable to tolerate life with her, Rochester takes her back to the family estate in England and locks his wife, now a raving madwoman, into the third-floor attic prison, from which she sometimes escapes to seek revenge.

  As with so much in this novel, what appears to be fantastic and improbable emerges from Charlotte Brontë’s past experiences as a writer and a woman. Bertha Mason turns out, as we will now see, to have striking kinship affinities to the woman who invents her.

  For one thing, Bertha is a figure who from early on haunted Brontë’s imagination. Brontë’s juvenilia offer striking parallels. A figure like Bertha already dominates one of her earliest stories, “The Fairy Gift,” written when she was fourteen. The first-person narrator, an unremarkable, ordinary guy, tells a kind of fairy tale that begins with a diminutive man in green who appears with a magic ring which will grant his wishes. The narrator asks for beauty and the next morning he has become tall, slender, and graceful, with a peculiarly feminine loveliness. His transformed complexion is now of the “purest red and white;” his eyes swim in “liquid radiance” under the narrow dark arches of two exquisitely formed eyebrows; his mouth is of a “winning sweetness.”

  His new beauty attracts the attention of Lady Ducie, already middle-aged, who is wealthy, “fat and ugly” with “the reputation of being a witch.” Visiting her castle the narrator notes her “stout, lusty figure” and “her brawny shoulders.” Ducie anticipates the family wealth and over-size attractions of Bertha Mason, just as the narrator’s prettiness suggests the youthful and naïve Fairfax Rochester. She offers marriage, and, given her wealth and power, the narrator accepts. They wed three weeks later.

  He moves into her mansion marveling at its “vast halls and magnificent apartments.” But, much like the young Rochester, he soon grows unhappy. He becomes, in his ignorance, “lost in my own house,” a place with many passages and galleries he had never seen before. Alienated, like Rochester living in Spanish Town, he finds his wife’s “high-bred guests” despise him for his clownish manners. The servants insult him.

  As time passes a transformation takes place, similar to what was to happen to Bertha. Just as Bertha’s rage emerges, Lady Ducie’s temper shows itself every day more and more in the most “hideous light.” She becomes terribly jealous and will hardly permit him to leave her sight for a moment. The narrator’s flirtation with another woman, Cecilia Standon, prompts Lady Ducie to threaten revenge. That night, like Jane Eyre, he hears footsteps outside his chamber door. Through the darkness he follows Lady Ducie who is carrying a lighted candle in her hand, just as Bertha is later to prowl the second-floor corridor at Thornfield. She goes to the gothic tradition’s classic damp, subterraneous vault. Flames dart out of the earth, circling her “like fiery snakes,” and huge smoldering clouds of smoke roll over the slimy walls. Six “black, indefinable figures” appear bearing the corpse of poor Cecilia. The narrator screams in horror and Lady Ducie, enraged, seizes him by the throat and attempts to strangle him—just as Bertha attacks Rochester. However, as events reach a crisis, suddenly she crumples and dies. The fairy man in green wielding a bloody knife is seen. He has stabbed her “through the heart.”

  This extravagant early story, emerging from Charlotte’s youthful and unbridled imagination, significantly anticipates Brontë themes that Bertha Mason is to repeat—melodramatic differences between the rich and poor, the danger in being drawn into the control of the powerful, the mysterious palace, the physically dominant older woman, her lascivious degeneration, entrapment, violent attack.

  From the early tale to the adult novel, Brontë remains persistently interested in size. It’s her own, diminutive physical presence that makes her so aware of the bodies of others. The female enemies of her fictions are big women: Lady Ducie, stout, lusty, and brawny; Mrs. Reed, dark skinned, square shouldered, her “under jaw” prominent; the Dowager Lady Ingram, tall, of an “imperial dignity,” with a throat like a “pillar”; and her daughter Blanche, in her physical imperiousness much like her mother. Bertha is yet another of these. Charlotte wishes recurrently to stress the similarities. Blanche’s deceptive name doesn’t mask the fact that she is “dark as a Spaniard.” Rochester mockingly describes her as “a real strapper . . . big, brown and buxom,” with black hair just like the “ladies of Carthage.” When he finally reveals the truth about Bertha, he immediately note
s that when he first met her, she was exactly “in the style of” Blanche, tall, dark, imposing. When Jane first watches him struggling to subdue her, she sees a woman who is “big” with “virile force.” In a binary, these women are all the “not-Jane.”

  Charlotte Brontë was, by dramatic contrast, a tiny woman. Just like Jane Eyre. Very short, with, as Gaskell, who knew her well as an adult, tells us, a “slight, fragile” body, her hands and feet the “smallest I ever saw,” the touch of her hand like “the soft touch of a bird in the middle of my palm.” Her antagonists, the not-Jane, stem from the belligerent women of her past life: Miss Miller the abusive teacher at Cowan Bridge, Mrs. Sidgwick her imperious and dismissive employer at Stonegappe, and later Mme. Heger, represented in The Professor by Mdlle. Reuter. Some of these women were not the physically imposing foes of Brontë’s fiction, but Charlotte’s antagonism embodies in them their domineering natures. The Professor’s narrator Crimsworth depicts Reuter/Heger as a woman searching for the weak points in his character, applying now this test, now that, hoping in the end to find some chink, some niche where she could put in her firm foot and “stand up on my neck.” Violence is typical of these women. It articulates their inherent cruelty. Showing Bertha to the priest and the lawyer on the day of his aborted wedding with Jane, Rochester asks the two of them to compare the opposites of the binary: “this form with that bulk.” He speaks for Charlotte, who wishes the world to compare her tiny self with her adversaries.

  In creating Bertha, Brontë’s imagination works with what she considered to be the material realities of the early nineteenth century—the world that she had read about in books and magazines, and which she had already drawn into her earlier fictions.

  The Glasstown/Angrian fantasy writings are about the imperialist adventure—Europeans taking over and colonizing an invented South Africa, transforming it into a new and economically powerful country. Rochester’s life story recapitulates this narrative. The second son of an “avaricious” father, he is to inherit nothing and so is coerced to travel to Jamaica, the Caribbean English colony where since 1655 large fortunes had been made through the production of sugarcane on plantations farmed by slaves from Africa. By the early nineteenth century, the ratio of black to white in the island population was twenty to one. Brontë knows this, and her novel seems indifferent to the profound injustice of the colonial system. It is, however, fascinated by racial difference.

  In Rochester’s telling of his experiences, what matters about them is ethnicity. And in this the not-Jane gets a particular formulation. He heads to Jamaica anticipating an arranged marriage with the daughter of a wealthy merchant and planter named Mason, whose possessions were “real and vast.” Mason wants the wedding because, crucially, Rochester is of “a good race.” In Bertha he finds a young woman who lavishly displays her “charms” and is bewildered and “stimulated” by her. There is a strong erotic attraction in her dark looks. He never meets her mother and is misled into thinking she is dead. This is a ruse. The reason is that the woman is Creole, that is, of mixed race, and had degenerated into a drunkard and a madwoman. Herein Brontë’s use of difference becomes quite sinister. After marriage Bertha quickly changes: Rochester soon learns what a “pigmy” intellect she has—the adjective reflecting her African origins—what “giant propensities”—naming her animal absence of self-control. According to Brontë’s worldview, hereditary racial degeneration will out. With her mother in a lunatic asylum and one brother “a complete dumb idiot,” Bertha begins to indulge her vices, becoming “intemperate and unchaste.” The other brother, who comes to England to reveal the truth about his concealed and imprisoned sister, is soon to degenerate into madness as well.

  This lurid portrayal of ethnically inherited degeneration as Brontë imagined it—derived from African descent—had appeared early in the fantasy writings of her youth, centrally in a character she and Branwell named Quashia, of the indigenous Ashantee tribe. Uncontrollably passionate, lascivious, and treacherous, he recurrently appears in the Glasstown and later Angrian tales as the foe of the European colonizers. Brontë loved to entertain him in her fantasies. While trapped into teaching at Roe Head, for example, her journal there records one evening in which, escaping from her duties, she begins, in a dreamy reverie, to picture an idealized young and very European lady with a book in her hand, her head bent gently over it as she reads. This morphed version of herself, not poor, plain, and repressed but rather rich, attractive, at leisure, suddenly finds her “hallowed and shrine-like separation” violated by Quashia, seemingly attractive in his very animality: his sable hair disheveled on his forehead, his “tusk-like teeth” glancing vindictively through his parted lips, his brown complexion flushed with wine, his broad chest “heaving wildly,” his breath issuing in “snorts” from his “distended nostrils.”

  Brontë’s Englishness also found morally degenerate alien others in her only experience of a foreign country, Belgium. She came to detest her pupils in Brussels: she wrote to Branwell that they lacked “intellect” and “politeness or good-nature or good-feeling—they are nothing.” This, she was convinced, was the consequence of their ethnicity. She considered the Belgians without passion. The “phlegm that thickens their blood is too gluey to boil.” Blood is again the issue. Hence her time there in 1843 was intensely lonely. She had the same feelings for her fellow instructors such as Mme. Blanche whom she described as false and contemptible. “She perceives my utter dislike and never now speaks to me.” Brontë spurns the other.

  Worse still, from her perspective, is a female character, also linked to the tropics, who appears in The Professor as one of William Crimsworth’s students. Juanna Trista, of Belgian and Spanish origin, is born on an unnamed Caribbean island and comes to Brussels for her education. Pale-complected with dark hair and eyes, she has a “gaunt visage” and looked “fierce and hungry.” In class she makes noises with her mouth “like a horse” and “ejected saliva” as she “uttered brutal expressions.” Antagonistic to Crimsworth from the start, Juanna gathers a crowd of like-minded girls making a “swinish tumult.” She remains in Europe only long enough to repay by “malevolence and ingratitude” all who have ever done her a good turn. Then she returns to the Isles, exulting in the thought that she should there have slaves whom, as she said, she could “kick and strike at will.” Naturally she is the opposite of the pale, ­Frances Henri, the character so like Charlotte Brontë, with whom ­Crimsworth is soon to fall in love.

  Rochester’s bitter narrative of his relationship to the French opera-dancer Céline Varens becomes a further instance of Brontë’s persistent depiction of ethnic/racial difference. Her very smell, of “musk and amber,” is anything but “the odor of sanctity,” and soon he overhears her with another lover, a vicomte. Their conversation is “frivolous, mercenary, heartless, and senseless.” Hence, from Brontë’s perspective, as French as their decadent moral conduct, the “slime and mud of Paris.”

  Rochester condemns himself, in his conversations with Jane Eyre, for the naïve ignorance that seduced him into these previous relationships. He strives to exert English, masculine control over Céline’s daughter Adèle through Jane Eyre. She succeeds as a governess, as Charlotte Brontë had not in real life, in domesticating the little girl. Bertha Mason proves far more intractable—hence the third-floor prison.

  This was nothing new to Charlotte Brontë. From time to time she had heard about and even witnessed the practical questions of dealing with the insane. There were places she had visited: the attic rooms at Norton Conyers with their legend of an imprisoned madwoman, and, more importantly, the padded cell at North Lees Hall. Brontë visited this country house in 1845, a year before she began Jane Eyre. This ancient, battlemented hall was then inhabited by the widowed Mary Eyre, her son George, and three daughters. There Charlotte saw the Eyre monument in the local parish church and also the apostle cupboard, which makes a dramatic appearance in Chapter XX of Jane Eyre, on the night when Bertha Mason attacks her brother leav
ing him soaked in blood. The first mistress of North Lees, Agnes Ashurst, “reputedly went mad, was confined in a padded rom, and died in a fire.” Here Brontë may well have found the name of her heroine, some crucial elements of the country estate of Mr. Rochester, and the ultimate fate of the madwoman in its attic. Charlotte also frequently discussed with her close friend Ellen Nussey the plight of her older brother George, who was already seeking treatment for his mental health in 1843. He eventually became an inmate at a private institution in York where he remained until his death in 1885. In all the instances just considered, the troubled, mad, and sometimes even demonic woman or man is seen as “the other,” someone radically different from ordinary people. How consoling for Jane, and indeed for Charlotte, is the thought that they don’t come from the hot, bestial south, that they are small, reserved, thoughtfully cautious, and rational. Or are they?