The Secret History of Jane Eyre

by John Pfordresher

  “What a fury to fly at Master John!” exclaims Mrs. Reed’s servant Abbot as she and Bessie drag Jane Eyre off to the red-room. As Jane mops the blood from the bite wounds of Richard Mason she wonders what “creature” could have done this. “Why had the Fury flown at him?” The Greek mythological furies to whom they both allude—to whom Brontë alludes—are female goddesses described, variously, as having snakes for hair, dog’s heads, coal-black bodies, bat’s wings, and bloodshot eyes. Their function is to avenge injustice. The most celebrated representation of them is in the Oresteia trilogy, plays by Aeschylus first performed in Athens in 485 BC, which describe how the queen Clytemnestra murders her husband Agamemnon and then is in turn murdered by her son Orestes in revenge. The crime, the killing of his mother, draws out from the underworld the furies who merciless pursue him. The uncontrolled anger of these demons reappears, according to the horrified servants at Gateshead, and later in the unspoken thoughts of Jane Eyre at Thornfield, as they witness women transformed by rage. Furies. Jane tells us that during her first day at Thornfield as Mrs. Fairfax shows her the third floor, she hears a “tragic” and “preternatural” laugh that “thrilled me.” What is the content, what are the implications of that “thrill”?

  In his famous 1919 essay on the “uncanny,” Freud describes the experience of this kind of sudden, unexpected, unnerving, indeed “frightening” response—that something is “uncanny”—as “that class of the terrifying which leads us back to something long known to us, once very familiar,” but now “concealed and kept out of sight.” The experience is of something that is neither new nor foreign but rather of “something familiar and old-established” in the mind that has been estranged from it by the process of repression. And so the uncanny is something that ought to have been kept concealed but which has nevertheless come to light. What thrills Jane in the preternatural laugh? Is there a kinship between twin furies Bertha and Jane? Does Bertha function in Brontë’s novel as the grotesque embodiment of that which Jane—and Charlotte who has made Jane in her image and likeness—knows lurks within herself, something fearful and shameful that she has tried to repress? Are there ways in which the murderous rage of Lady Ducie, the cruelty of Juanna, the savagery of Bertha express something suppressed in Brontë’s heroine and within Brontë herself? If we are looking for an autobiographical source for the grotesque figure of Bertha Mason, we must look deep within Charlotte herself, at one of her darkest secrets now brought to light. That is what stands behind the locked third-floor door.

  Twice Jane Eyre tries to see herself in a mirror. First, in the red-room. As her rage cools, she discerns in a great looking-glass, which shows a “visionary hollow,” a “strange little figure gazing at me.” She is “other” to herself. Years later, on the morning of her intended wedding, having seen the face of Bertha hanging over her two nights earlier, “her lurid visage” flaming “over mine,” Jane again sees herself in a mirror, seeming “almost the image of a stranger.” The first revelation precedes Jane’s terror at what she thinks is the apparition of her dead uncle, which throws her into “a species of fit.” The second follows the night when for the second and only other time Jane loses consciousness: observing in Bertha a horrific twin gazing down at her, she becomes “insensible from terror.” Brontë draws the reader’s attention to the interconnections. They lead us into this strange kinship.

  While Jane is physically small, there are moments when, overcome with rage, she becomes possessed by an emotional and, indeed, spiritual power that stuns and alarms her formidable foes, forcing them to retreat and capitulate. Weeks after the red-room experience, when Mrs. Reed declares her children should no longer “‘associate” with Jane, she shouts from the stairwell: “They are not fit to associate with me.” She astonishes herself; what she says seems to her as if her tongue “pronounced words without my will consenting” to the utterance: “something spoke out of me over which I had no control.” This something alarms Mrs. Reed, who stares at her as if she cannot be sure whether Jane is a child or a “fiend.” Through Jane, Brontë shows how this uncontrolled and unconscious ireful response—her very name points to this aspect of her nature—has a kind of fearful power. Her other self has momentarily taken over in response to the injustice done to her. When subsequently Mrs. Reed insults Jane in front of Brocklehurst, declaring the child is a liar, Jane again begins to experience “ungovernable excitement.” She trembles violently, feeling as if “an invisible bond had burst” and in “a savage, high voice” denies the accusation. Years later a dying Mrs. Reed still remembered this confrontation: “she talked to me once like something mad, or like a fiend.” She seemed like “an animal . . . with human eyes.” Here we are very close to Bertha Mason’s rage indeed. A fiend, a savage, an animal—all of these descriptors are echoed when Jane finally comes face to face with Bertha in her prison room. Jane’s—and Brontë’s—language utterly dehumanizes Bertha. “It snatched and growled like some wild animal.” Bertha tries to strangle Rochester and bites his cheek. “At last he mastered her,” Jane tells us, relieved as Bertha is tied down in a chair. Exactly as Bessie threatened Jane—“you must be tied down”—when she is dragged to the red-room—Rochester ties down Bertha. The fury, the alien outsider, must be mastered.

  At every turn, Jane Eyre’s narrative leads us to accept the interpretation that she is a victim, that her moments of unconscious rage liberate a power deep within her which cries out for justice. Bertha is not offered the same sympathy in the text. But Charlotte Brontë does at least offer the novel’s reader information that permits an alternative interpretation of what has happened to Bertha Mason—from her point of view. If Jane finds being locked into the red-room terrifying and infuriating, so too would a native of Jamaica accustomed to a life of luxury, admiring male attention, heavy drinking, and sexual adventure find her locked third-floor room and gloomy servant Grace Poole anything but pleasant. In the rare moments when Bertha is able to escape, she emerges as a vengeful spirit from Rochester’s past, a version of the ghost of Uncle Reed or of the specter Elinor from Brontë’s poem “Gilbert.” Silent, feeling her way through unfamiliar territory, armed only with a candle, she is determined to attack the man who has taken her life from her. Brontë deliberately creates the uncanny coincidences. Bertha tries to burn her husband to death in his bed hours after he confesses his sexual excesses to the virginal intruder Jane Eyre. When Bertha’s cringing and feckless brother suddenly appears in her rooms, she seems overcome by a Jane-like rage at his indifference to her unjustifiable imprisonment and his inability to do anything about it. Living on what seems to be a diet of sago gruel, cared for haphazardly by the alcoholic Grace Poole, never permitted to see the light of day or to breathe fresh air, it’s no wonder Bertha releases the same frenzied rage Jane experiences. But the kinship goes further.

  Consider this confessional moment from one of Charlotte’s letters written in 1836 to Ellen Nussey, in which she describes herself as a “coarse common-place wretch!” Brontë insists she has feelings which Ellen “can have no participation in” and that “very few people in the world can at all understand.” She confesses that while she strives to suppress them, these feelings sometimes “burst out” and then “those who see the explosion despise me and I hate myself for days afterwards.”

  Or this remark from December 1846 when she was in the middle of writing Jane Eyre:

  I daresay I should spit fire and explode sometimes . . . my humor I think is too soon overthrown—too sore—too demonstrative and vehement . . .

  Or this, written to Branwell in 1843, when Charlotte was in Brussels, describing her reaction to stupid students—she sometimes would get red-faced but “if I spoke warmly, as warmly as I sometimes used to do at Roe-Head they would think me mad . . .”

  There is an important pattern here. Charlotte Brontë acknowledges that her “humor”—which in traditional medical terminology as Charlotte understood it means a physically internal tendency or condition that she has not ch
osen but must live with—is an inclination to excessive wrath that sometimes bursts from her—uncontrolled, destructive, and hence fearsome. This makes her different from other people and only a very few “in all the world” can understand it. She does what she can to conceal these rages with what Freud calls repression. It’s clear they are dramatically different from the self-control and discipline expected of a young clergyman’s daughter. They make her despicable to others and herself. They are something to conceal, to hide away and lock up inside of her. In something like a psychological attic prison. She fears that naïve observers such as her stupid pupils witnessing such red-faced passion would think her insane.

  The uncanny thrill that Jane experiences when she first hears Bertha laugh, which mounts in terror and intensity as the madwoman gets ever closer to her, comes from their uncanny similarity, a kinship both secretly share with Charlotte Brontë who is imagining them.

  Rage structures the way Charlotte Brontë remembers key moments in her life, and it also structures the way she tells Jane Eyre’s life story.

  Now we can look back at just a few instances.

  First, anger and cruelty directed at her inspires consequences for her antagonists. At Cowan Bridge School the clergyman William Carus Wilson threatens the diminutive and fearful eight-year-old with sudden death and eternal damnation. She watches her sickly older sister bullied, manhandled, and shamed by her teachers. Charlotte typically responds with counterattacks. She voices rebellion and distain for Wilson depicting him as Brocklehurst, and for her teachers embodied in the “little and dark personage” Miss Scatcherd. As a teacher in Miss Wooler’s school, she describes her pupils as fat heads and dolts, picturing herself “in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at [their] idleness the apathy and the hyperbolical & most asinine stupidity.” Later, trying to help support her family, Charlotte as governess must endure Mrs. Sidgwick’s “black looks,” her zest for “scolding me,” using “a sternness of manner & harshness of language scarcely credible. ” Her son throws stones at Charlotte. Mrs. White also gives way “to anger in a very coarse unladylike manner . . . [that] is highly offensive.” A desperate and lonely Charlotte Brontë finds Mme. Heger coldly ignoring her during summer holidays in Brussels and seeking to bar her from her husband’s affections. Back at Haworth she finds that he distances himself from the desperate emotion of her letters, refusing to reply.

  Her reaction to many of the young men she encounters is disdainful rejection. Amelia Walker’s brother is a “Booby.” As for young clergymen, traditionally the most expectable possible future husbands for the oldest daughter of a priest: most “curates . . . seem to me a self-seeking vain, empty race.” When three appear for tea at Haworth one day “they began glorifying themselves and abusing Dissenters,” and “my temper lost its balance and I pronounced a few sentences sharply & rapidly which struck them all dumb.” The unexpected, unprovoked attack astonishes them. Very like Mrs. Reed’s reactions to Jane’s similar outbursts.

  This sketch of a very few selected instances is in no way intended to argue that Charlotte Brontë was a constantly irritable and angry person. She was merry and loving to her family members and deeply valued by her chosen friends over the course of many years. What it does suggest, however, is that like many people she could get very angry, that these moments of rage troubled her in retrospect, and she tended to conceal them as a dangerous propensity. When it came to inventing Jane Eyre—and Bertha Mason—her preoccupation with and fear of this rage were clearly influences, and she found it important to present and explore that propensity. Charlotte denied, of course, that her heroine was in any way based on her. A denial that is part of the mechanics of the uncanny as Freud describes them.

  Bertha’s silent intrusion into Jane’s bedroom two nights before the scheduled wedding, her tearing of the bridal veil, her close scrutiny of the terrified Jane Eyre, is indeed the Jamaican Creole’s assertion of her grim right to the Rochester who has imprisoned her. It is also—and here the uncanny nature of Bertha’s kinship with Jane comes most dramatically into view—a warning of what Jane instinctively knows is just about to happen, and what must happen. During the weeks before the wedding, Jane becomes progressively more apprehensive about marriage to a Rochester who seems not only recklessly willful but ever more unaware of Jane’s doubts and apprehensions. His jokes about seraglios and harem beauties have made her anxious about what married life is going to be like, and her passive acceptance of most of Rochester’s demands, along with her sense that her feelings for him have exceeded sensible limits, turning him from a fallible man into a substitute for God, lead her to speculating that the whole affair has become unreal. On the day of the marriage, Jane’s mirror shows her a “stranger.” Bertha’s tearing of the veil has become an unconscious act of sisterhood. Even before she learns that Rochester’s first wife still lives, Jane is alarmed at his frenzied energy and his willful ignorance of her feelings. The morning of the wedding his hand holds her “by a grasp of iron” as he hurries her along at a pace “I could hardly follow.” Instinctively, Jane knows the wedding should not take place. It’s wrong.

  And it doesn’t. The moon, Brontë’s recurrent figure since Jane’s childhood at Lowood school for the mother as guardian figure, echoing Brontë’s yearning for her lost mother, appears to Jane in a dream, morphing into “a white human form” gazing down on her from an azure sky, whispering in her heart, “My daughter, flee temptation!”

  And she does.

  9

  Desolation

  Jane Eyre is a linear novel narrating a series of efforts by its heroine to escape. Ironically when Jane Eyre struggles to flee Thornfield her seemingly random journey—her only goal is to find somewhere Mr. Rochester has “no connections”—leads Jane to a place very nearly resembling the childhood home of Charlotte Brontë; the place Brontë longed to escape as she wrote this section. To get to that place, to cross a threshold into a new kind of security and happiness, Jane must first struggle through the most dangerous part of her road of trials.

  Jane’s series of escapes—from Gateshead, Lowood, and now ­Thornfield—mirror, in an intensely allusive, autobiographical way, Charlotte Brontë’s life and her frustrated efforts to break free from its limits. Angrily unhappy as a schoolteacher and governess, for years she hoped her writing would free her to enter the larger world she read about, glimpsed during her journeys to and from Brussels, but never really entered.

  The desperation Brontë faced in 1846, as she began writing Jane Eyre, is that of a divided self. Jane arises as a fictional manifestation of Charlotte’s lived desperation. Leaving Rochester after the terrible revelation of Bertha Mason, Jane finds that she, who had just been “an ardent, expectant woman,” has suddenly become “a cold, solitary girl again.” All now seems to regress: her life seems pale; her prospects “desolate.” The chance for a new life appears permanently denied to her. Matters were exactly the same for Brontë. She found herself thrust back from warm adulthood to a kind of frozen childhood, both cut off from the former delightful escape route of writing the Angrian chronicles with her brother and forced to leave Heger, the man she desired and could not have. Both women are thwarted, denied what they want.

  As early as 1815, Patrick Brontë had warned in his prefatory note to his long story The Cottage in the Wood, “The mind is its own place. Put a good man any where and he will not be miserable—put a bad man any where and he cannot be happy.” With crisp certitude ­Charlotte’s father argues his case. The reason, to him, is obvious: the bad man “carries his mind with him,” and this becomes the source of “unruly desires, vain expectation, heavy disappointment, and keen remorse.” Her father’s counsel bore down heavily on Charlotte in the months after she left Brussels for good.

  When Jane flees Thornfield she achieves something Charlotte Brontë could not. And she knew it. During the months when she was writing Jane Eyre she wrote to her close friend, “If I could leave home Ellen—I should not be at Haworth now
.” What keeps her at home are her duties and obligations to her father. She has bowed her head to the poet Southey’s dictatorial advice and has accepted her “proper duties.” Brontë has chained herself—through love and tenderness—to a domestic life she longs to leave. But the secret inner life of passionate engagement still calls. Even as a few lines later in the same letter, censuring herself in oblique language Ellen may not have understood, Brontë acknowledges that she had yielded to “an eager desire for release” and had returned to Brussels after her aunt’s death against her conscience, driven by “an irresistible impulse.” Now she realizes that she has been punished by two years empty of either happiness or peace. Her father’s early warning seems to have proved true. So through yet another wish-fulfillment in her fiction, Brontë lets Jane do what she cannot: run away—guilty, yes, of abandoning her master and weeping scalding tears—yet doing what she chooses. ­Charlotte’s letter in the same paragraph voices her darkest fears about the consequences of staying. She feels that “life is passing away” and bleakly foresees that when she’s finally free she may not be able to find employment. Now past the prime of life her “faculties will be rusted.” Still, her “Conscience . . . affirms that I am doing right in staying at home.” For Jane too, conscience affirms something, but in her case that she must leave. Charlotte, writing these conflicted pages, understands both her own wish to leave and her need to stay. Fixed as she is in Haworth, writing her novel in secret, she must find a way out for both her heroine and herself. This begins with Jane’s abandonment of self into the wild, which, in many ways, corresponds to her inner life. Bleak, vacant, desolate.