The Secret History of Jane Eyre

by John Pfordresher

  Thus, Jane Eyre finds herself two days later on a summer evening destitute, divorced from any tie with human society, absolutely alone. She is standing by a stone pillar. All around her are the great moors where the heather grows deep and wild, and four white, empty roads stretch out broad and lonely toward unknown distances. Charlotte Brontë knew this place from her own experience. She had lived some of the most vivid moments of her life in scenes just like this. Her sister Emily repeatedly used this same signpost in Wuthering Heights as an emblem of isolation and choice. Now Jane Eyre, who has never known a mother’s love and has no one to turn to, decides in her solitude to turn to “the universal Mother, Nature” resolving to “seek her breast and ask repose.” Finding a place to hide, a womb-shaped hollow deeply furrowing the brown moor side, she feels that “Nature is benign and good” and that “she loved me, outcast as I was.” Being now a woman who could only expect from other people “mistrust, rejection, insult,” she clings to nature with filial fondness.

  Charlotte Brontë recalls in these pages her childhood when, having lost her mother Maria, she turned to the moors, which stretched for seemingly limitless miles beyond the Haworth parsonage as a place of freedom, delight, and security. Ellen Nussey, who visited there in 1833, was later to remember the interplay of place and emotion vividly alive in all the Brontës. It seemed to her as if they did not live “ ‘in’ ” the house, except for eating, drinking, and resting. Instead, they lived in the free expanse of moorland, with its purple heather, its dells and glens and brooks, delighting in the beauty and the isolation, sharing a seclusion enjoyed by “intelligent companionship and intense family affection.” It is the highly personal character of these experiences Brontë is remembering. The moors were a strange, new territory for Jane. She had lived within the sometimes imprisoning, sometimes sheltering confines of Gateshead, Lowood, and Thornfield. Nevertheless Jane seems to trust in the notion of nature as Mother, so instinctive and natural to Charlotte, unaware of the dangers that face the lonely individual cut off from the supportive society of family and friends.

  Charlotte was to say of her sister Emily what was exactly true for herself as well: she “loved the moors.” For both, flowers “brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath.” Their minds could “make an Eden” out of the sullen hollow in a livid hillside. Both found in this bleak solitude many delights, and “not the least and best-loved was—liberty.” In later years, the Brontës continued to wander freely. Remembering her time with them, Ellen writes of delightful rambles on the moors and down into the glens and ravines. There was always “a lingering delight” in these spots. Every moss, every flower, every tint and form, were noted and enjoyed. Emily and Anne would lead to a place they called the “Meeting of the Waters” It was a small oasis of emerald green turf broken here and there by small clear springs. Seated there, “we were hidden from all the world,” with nothing to see but miles and miles of heather. So blissful could these memories be, that in Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë gives her heroine Catherine Earnshaw this dream: She has died and is in heaven, but she is not happy; “heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.” The novel’s narrator, Lockwood, seems to implicitly understand. In its last lines he visits Catherine’s grave site, lying next to those of Edgar Linton and Heathcliff, and tells us that he lingers under “that benign sky” watching the moths flutter, listening to the soft wind breathing through the grass. And he wonders “how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.” There is no need for another heaven.

  But Jane wakes the next morning hungry. With a rude suddenness she realizes that the moor is in fact “a golden desert.” And she as a human being “had a human being’s wants.” What follows are some of Jane Eyre’s most painful days. Her father’s poetry anticipated the outcome that Charlotte Brontë now so carefully develops.

  But Summer’s gone, and Winter here,

  With iron scepter rules the year—

  Beneath this dark inclement sky,

  How many wanderers faint and die!

  In his “Winter—Night Meditations,” Patrick depicts the dangers of the moors when the weather changes and suddenly death threatens. It is this dark turn of fortune Charlotte finds necessary. Though happy to return to memories of childhood pleasures in the moors, she now drives home the point that nature is not a mother; that mother, like Maria Brontë, is no longer there to nurture and protect her solitary daughter.

  “Hopeless of the future,” Jane Eyre wishes to die so that she might be absolved by death from further conflict with fate. In this despairing moment, she imagines her body decaying quietly, mingling “in peace with the soil of this wilderness.”

  Charlotte may have longed to run away while writing Jane Eyre to escape vicariously with Jane; her brother Branwell chose a different method of fleeing his problems. Regarding his forced separation from Mrs. Robinson as the consequence of a malign “fate,” he had already begun the self-abusive conduct that would lead to his early death. In his powerful poem “Penmaenmawr,” written in 1845, Branwell compares his despairing self “defenseless against human ill,” the victim of “ceaseless strife and change,” to the grim, black sublimity of the Welsh mountain, claiming a kind of kinship for his “heart worn down by care.”

  There is a kind of literary model or antecedents for all this. Branwell several years earlier had discovered a strange novel, the Private Memoires and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by the Scotch writer James Hogg, who was for many years a regular contributor to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Both Branwell and Charlotte became fascinated by the tragic course of its protagonist who thinks he is being pursued by a devil named Gil-Martin who has tricked him into murdering his brother. He calls Gil-Martin “Master.” Flight into the countryside does not enable him to escape this persecutor, and in his diary he writes in despair, in words that anticipate Jane’s, “My body being quite exhausted by suffering, I am grown weak and feeble.” He pictures himself, in language closely similar to Charlotte’s and to Branwell’s, as “the child of earthly misery and despair.” All that is left for him is to “wish myself in my grave every hour of the day.” Abandoning hope, this tragic figure hangs himself, and the local people bury him on a hillside, his suicide preventing his being interred in sacred ground. Branwell was drawn to this melodramatic precedent, and at first Jane Eyre is tempted to do the same. But she has to admit, in terms typical of Charlotte’s religiously inflected thinking and its strong sense of duty, that her life is “one of my possessions; with all its requirements, and pains, and responsibilities.”

  Driven by hunger, Jane begins to wander, choosing, for no particular reason, to walk down one of the four roads leading from the white pillar, while “apathy” clogs her heart. What follows is a series of remarkable scenes in which Brontë imagines what it must be like to be an outcast begging for work, for food, even for just a word of kindness. Jane wanders into villages, asking if there are any jobs available, trying to exchange her scarf or her gloves for a roll, “gnawed by nature’s cravings.” One of her difficulties is that her “character, position, tale” seem “doubtful” because she is dressed and acts like a middle-class woman and not a beggar. She finds it difficult to ask for help because she is “seized with shame.” At one point she approaches a parsonage, thinking it is the clergyman’s function to help, and is met with cold indifference by a servant. “Again,” she tells us, “I crawled away.” Later an old servant blocking a doorway tells her, “You should not be roving about now; it looks very ill.” Why do these simple, local people find her suspicious? What can they think she is guilty of?

  Charlotte Brontë drew upon her experiences in her imaginative construction of Jane’s dreadful wandering.

  First, as a witness. In November of 1840 the wife of a local cura
te came to the door of the Haworth parsonage seeking advice and help from Charlotte’s father Patrick. This was Mrs. Collins, coming to tell “a most melancholy tale of her wretched husband’s drunken, extravagant, profligate habits,” as Charlotte informed Ellen Nussey in a letter. The woman saw no future possibilities for herself—“there was nothing, she said, but ruin before them.” It was clear her husband was about to be expelled from his clerical duties because “his vices were utterly hopeless.” Her painful admission was that her husband treated her and her child “savagely.” Patrick’s advice was to leave him at once. Where she might go, what she might do, are not at all clear given the isolation of the small towns and villages in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Thinking over this tragic story, Charlotte wonders how Mrs. Collins ever got herself into this situation. She writes that she is “morally certain” that “no decent woman” could experience anything but aversion toward such a man, and she insists that from her first meeting Collins, she had instinctively hated him. Charlotte seems to blame Mrs. Collins for bad judgment, implying she too should have recognized from the start things would go poorly. Mrs. Collins seems to be guilty for what happened.

  There are elements to this situation that Charlotte was to replicate six years later as she wrote Jane Eyre. While it would be a mistake to push the parallel to an extreme, it is the case that Mr. Rochester too was, at least, emotionally abusive at times to Bertha, Céline, and even Jane. His sometimes angry temper and sexual appetite had, before Jane met him, damaged him, and during the action of the novel he does everything he can to persuade or force Jane into what she considers an illicit relationship, one she in the end must escape, much like Mrs. Collins, at the risk of her life. Penniless, homeless, without family or friends, beginning to starve to death, an “object of suspicion” as a “well-dressed beggar,” and in this respect perhaps even looking like Mrs. Collins, Jane seems to others unworthy of sympathy or help. She internalizes and accepts their suspicion and rejection. Quite unfairly, as in the case of Mrs. Collins, Jane feels a “moral degradation, blent with physical suffering” that “form too distressing a recollection ever to be willingly dwelt upon.” She accepts the role of abjection, expelled from acceptable society because an aspect of her past has made her guilty.

  Charlotte also had a more personal experience of desperate alienation one summer in Brussels, painful memories of which emerge in Jane Eyre’s wandering. In the summer of 1843 Charlotte had largely ceased her studies with Constantin and was again in the unhappy role of teacher for students she intensely disliked. And then the long summer holidays began, and all the students and the other teachers, save one, were gone. Charlotte found herself alone: “I have nobody to speak to—for I count the Belgians as nothing.” In her solitude she would wander from room to room in the pensionnat Heger finding that the silence and loneliness of the house “weight down one’s spirits like lead.” Everything about this experience anticipates Jane’s wandering: the emptiness, the hostility to anyone she encounters, the gathering depression, the helplessness. By August, Charlotte finds that “Earth and Heaven seem dreary and empty to me.” Like Mrs. Collins, and in anticipation of Jane Eyre, she too has a painful memory of baffled love and expulsion with which she must live. In one letter she notes Mme. Heger’s coldness toward her, and she confesses to Ellen, “I fancy I begin to perceive the reason of this . . . ,” which at times make her “laugh and & other times nearly cry.” It’s not at all difficult to infer that Heger’s chilly demeanor is because she suspects that this bright and favored student of her husband has begun to harbor feelings for him that are a danger to them all. Charlotte in Brussels in 1843, like Jane Eyre wandering starving through isolated Yorkshire villages, has a bitter story that she cannot tell, which leaves her pleading with Ellen to write back and “comfort a very desolate heart.”

  Indeed the solitude, sense of desertion, as well as feelings of secret, hidden guilt, led Charlotte to wandering, just as Jane was to do, to assuage her unhappiness. By September she writes, “I have tramped about a good deal.” In trying to protect herself from falling “into the gulf of low spirits” she would wander the boulevards and streets of Brussels sometimes for hours. Even the city fails to help after a while. And so she hikes out of town to the Protestant cemetery and looks beyond, seeing “nothing but fields as far as the horizon.” Here, we are very close to Jane’s experiences. In Charlotte’s letter she notes that she feels a repulsion to returning to the school “which contained nothing I cared for,” and so she wanders through the streets to avoid it. The absence of anyone to “care for” is surely an oblique reference to the prohibition she now feels in her caring for M. Heger. So troubled was Charlotte by her conflicted feelings of abandonment and guilt over her illicit desires that one afternoon this intensely anti-Catholic woman actually went inside the church of Ste. Gudule and entered a confessional. The priest opened the grill to permit her to speak, and she didn’t know how to begin. Later she was to tell Ellen Nussey, “I actually did confess - a real confession.” The real confession solved nothing. The guilt remained and her problems continued. The priest urged her to come to him for lessons in the Catholic faith, but of course she never did. Not having, as Mrs. ­Collins did, the sympathetic attention of the Rev. Patrick Brontë, Charlotte needed but could not turn to someone satisfactory for help during this crisis.

  Even after the return of the students and the recommencement of her teaching duties, Charlotte could not shake off the kind of “apathy” that Jane Eyre later feels. In October, still she was “completely alone” and observed: “It is a curious position to be so utterly solitary in the midst of numbers—sometimes this solitude oppresses me to an excess.”

  Mrs. Collins returned to the Haworth parsonage in April 1847. By then Charlotte Brontë was making a fair copy of at least the first parts of Jane Eyre. She had echoed the woman’s sufferings in Jane’s. Now, she was to hear the happy ending of her story. Collins appeared at the door “pale and worn but still interesting looking and cleanly and neatly dressed,” her little girl at her side. Charlotte served her tea and heard of her new life, “her activity and perseverance.” She had “triumphed over the hideous disease”—almost certainly syphilis forced on her by her husband—and had regained “a decent position in society,” running her own lodging house in a respectable part of the suburbs of Manchester “and is doing very well.” Mr. Collins has disappeared, and of course she “can never more endure to see him.”

  A successful escape. And a very proto-feminist one. Now, ­Charlotte’s novel turns to imagining similar happiness for Jane Eyre.

  10

  Perfect Congeniality

  During the 1840s Charlotte Brontë sometimes felt a restless desire to leave Haworth. However, far more typical and persistent are her contrary feelings of love and intimate connection with home. During her months threading the lonely streets of Brussels, they became particularly intense. Brontë describes what she misses in a remarkable testimonial sent to Emily in October 1843. It’s written on a Sunday, and all the participants in the pensionnat Heger are at what she calls “their idolatrous ‘Messe.’” Sitting alone in the refectory, Charlotte is reminded of the kitchen at Haworth. She pictures herself there, “cutting up hash” with Emily who is standing by watching that she put in enough flour and not too much pepper. The pet cat Tiger is “jumping about the dish and carving-knife,” while Emily’s favorite pet dog Keeper “stands like a devouring flame on the kitchen-floor” as both wait for Charlotte to toss them the best fragments of mutton. Tabby, their nickname for the now elderly family servant, is blowing the fire to boil potatoes into “a sort of vegetable glue!” These are, for Charlotte, “divine . . . recollections.” There is something heavenly about this for her. Haworth and the Yorkshire moors are a kind of Brontaëan paradise. Wistfully Charlotte continues, admitting that while Brussels is “dismal to me,” she doesn’t feel free to return home without a fixed prospect of something to do, and she asks Emily whether she and “Papa” really wa
nt her to come home. Her need to be forgiven for the distance she has put between herself and her family is palpable.

  What Charlotte loves, what she yearns for, what is in a very particular way “divine,” are the simple details of ordinary life—household chores, the ever present pets, Tabby loved despite, or perhaps even because, of her bad cooking, a part of her sweet and lifelong devotion to the Brontë children, who are now adults. Charlotte ends praying God’s blessing upon “our grey half-inhabited house.”

  Readers interested in the Brontës—their fictions, their poetry, but more specifically their letters—soon become familiar with this small, ordinary, intensely loved world. You can see it in one peculiar form of record-keeping that became a habit for Emily and Anne, the so-called “Diary Papers.” Every four years they would sit down on their birthdays and write brief descriptions of the day, short lists of recent events, and speculations about the future. The page would then be folded up so it would be as tiny as a sixpence and put into a tin box. Four years later it was to be opened. A delightful example is Emily’s of November 24, 1834. It’s her sixteenth birthday. Charlotte was then eighteen. Emily has just fed the cats Rainbow, Diamond, and Snowflake as well as a pheasant named Jasper. Branwell arrives, announcing he has heard that Sir Robert Peel will stand for Leeds. Emily and Anne have been peeling apples for Charlotte to make apple pudding. Tabby wants them to peel some potatoes as well. The rather stern Aunt Branwell pops in to ask Emily if she’s sitting properly with her feet on the floor. Sally Mosley is washing up in the back kitchen. Emily confesses she has not tidied up her bedroom or done her lessons, but still she wants to go out to play. And she hasn’t done her piano practicing yet. Dinner is going to be boiled beef, turnips, potatoes, and apple pudding. Emily takes up a knife and begins peeling potatoes. Stuck in the middle of all this is a note: “The Gondals are . . . discovering the interior of Gaaldine.” This is a reference to the fantasy narratives Emily and Anne are writing. The casual interpolation of the remark illustrates how real and strangely ordinary for Emily are the developments in that world as well as in this one. Perhaps this quaint page might delight readers simply for its snapshot of a Yorkshire parsonage kitchen in November of 1834, but it acquires far greater significance when we consider it’s by the future author of Wuthering Heights. Home, and a very specific and particular home, is thus the object of desire for both Emily and Charlotte Brontë; the place where they have known the greatest happiness, and the place their characters long for.