Jane Eyre begins, magnificently, with a clarion call for the rights of children. Jane, at ten years old, squares up to her Aunt Reed, who has signally failed to care for the orphaned child left in her charge.
‘I will never call you aunt again as long as I live. I will never come to see you when I am grown up; and if any one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty.’
No child in fiction ever stood up for itself like that before. Burning with injustice, the infant Jane, true child of the romantic period, demands love as a right: ‘You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness: but I cannot live so.’
Indeed, she specifies love as a precondition of existence. And not love in a vacuum, love as a selfless, unreciprocated devotion, either. There isn’t a trace of selfless devotion anywhere in Jane Eyre, unless it is the selfless devotion of the missionary, St John Rivers, to himself. After all, it is very easy to love, and may be done in private without inconveniencing the object of one’s affections in the least; that is the way that plain, clever parson’s daughters are supposed to do it, anyway. But Jane wants to be loved, as if, without reciprocity, love can’t exist. This is why, towards the end of the novel, she will reject St John Rivers’ proposal of marriage although he has half-mesmerised her into subservience to him. She rejects him because he doesn’t love her. It is as simple as that.
It is also exhilarating, almost endearing, to note that, in spite of the sentimental pietism which Charlotte Brontë falls back on almost as a form of self-defence against her genuinely transgressive impulses, she can also – see the entire treatment of Blanche Ingrams, Jane’s alleged rival for Mr Rochester’s affections – be something of a bitch.
Although the sober, The Professor, published posthumously in 1857, was the first novel that Charlotte Brontë completed, it is Jane Eyre that exhibits all the profligate imagination we associate with youth. However much it may have been written with a bitter ambition for fame foremost in the author’s mind, the novel remains firmly rooted in the furious dreams of a passionate young woman whose life never quite matched up to her own capacity for experience. It is the author’s unfulfilled desire that makes Jane Eyre so haunting.
The writing that the Brontë children had engaged in since childhood was of a very particular kind. They spent their adolescence constructing together a comprehensive alternative to the post-romantic world of steam engine and mill chimney they were doomed to inhabit. Charlotte and Branwell chronicled a territory they named Angria; Anne and Emily constructed the history of the island of Gondal. This alternative universe, ‘with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish’, just like the encyclopedic other-world in Borges’ marvellous story, ‘Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, was so intensely imagined that sometimes its landscapes and inhabitants pushed aside the real ones that surrounded their creators:
Never shall I, Charlotte Brontë, forget . . . how distinctly I, sitting in the school-room at Roe-head, saw the Duke of Zamorna . . . his black horse turned loose grazing among the heather, the moonlight so mild and exquisitely tranquil, sleeping upon that vast and vacant road . . . I was quite gone. I had really utterly forgot where I was and all the gloom and cheerlessness of my situation. I felt myself breathing quick and short as I beheld the Duke lifting up his sable crest which undulated as the plume of a hearse waves to the wind . . . 1
At nineteen, Charlotte Brontë had lost her heart to a creature of her own invention, the irresistibly seductive, sexually generous Duke of Zamorna, a Byronic homme fatal untouched by irony. It is easy to say that real life never could have lived up to this, that Charlotte Brontë’s wonderfully discontented art comes out of a kind of Bovaryism, a bookish virgin’s yearning for a kind of significance that experience rarely, if ever, provides. Jane Eyre, before her discontent is made glorious summer by the charismatic Rochester, who himself bears some resemblance to the Duke of Zamorna, often allows herself to ‘open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended – a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired, and had not in my actual existence’.
But Charlotte Brontë did possess a sophistication, a temperament, that could, perhaps, be equalled by her immediate family, but by precious few other Englishmen and women of the period. Thackeray, whom she admired, patronised her. ‘The poor little woman of genius! The fiery little eager brave tremulous homely-faced creature!’ he said, as if passion was, by rights, the perquisite only of those blessed with conventional good looks. But Europe was full of artists exhibiting the same temperament as Charlotte Brontë – Berlioz, Delacroix, De Musset. Charlotte Brontë herself admired George Sand. Yet she went to Brussels to study French, not Paris, and her Protestantism, which can amount to fanaticism, springs into operation as soon as she arrives in a Catholic country, as if to protect herself from giving herself away. Charlotte Brontë’s fiction inhabits the space between passion and repression. She knows she must not have the thing she wants; she also knows it will be restored to her in her dreams.
What would have happened if Charlotte Brontë really had met Byron? Although I doubt a spark would have flared between those two; Claire Clairmont and Lady Caroline Lamb had taught Byron to steer clear of women of passion. But Shelley, now . . .
Byron and Shelley were dead and gone by the time Charlotte Brontë was growing up in those dour, Northern school-rooms. Yet those James Deans of the romantic period burned their images of beauty, genius, and freedom on the minds of more than a generation. If the Byronic hero contributed in no small measure to the character of Edward Fairfax de Rochester, the man whom Jane habitually, in masochistic ecstasy, calls ‘my master’, he also contributed towards the ambitions of the young woman who invented Rochester.
But there is more to it than that. Mr Rochester’s name irresistibly recalls that of the great libertine poet of the Restoration, the Earl of Rochester – the ‘de’ is as elegant a touch as the umlaut in Brontë – and he is evidently libido personified. Not only is his a history of sexual licence but he is also consistently identified with fire and warmth just as Jane’s other suitor, St John Rivers, is associated with coldness and marble.
If Rochester is libido personified, then libido is genderless. He is not only the object of Jane’s desire but also the objectification of Jane’s desire. Jane Eyre is the story of this young woman’s desire and how she learns to name it. Name it, and tame it. Charlotte Brontë cuts him down to size – literally so. Rochester loses a hand and an eye as well as his first wife, that swollen, raging, purple-skinned part of himself, before Charlotte Brontë finally consents to mate him to Jane. But, in taming him, Charlotte is also taming Jane, domesticating her passions, banishing the Duke of Zamorna from the family hearth forever.
If Rochester is the id, however, then St John Rivers is the super-ego. The second of Jane’s suitors, this chaste and austere clergyman, attracts less attention than Mr Rochester and his unconventional ménage (which comprises not only a deranged wife but also a putative daughter). But he represents the opposite pole to Rochester; Rochester is love and St John Rivers marriage. He is the super-ego. And he is monstrous.
When Jane finds refuge with Rivers’ sisters at Moor House after she has fled Thornfield Hall, St John himself arrives as the perfect antidote to the squalor and mess of passion. Indeed, he is the antidote to the squalor and mess of life itself. There is an element of sadism in Rochester’s emotional teasing of Jane, in the bizarre episode where he dresses up as a gypsy woman and quizzes her about her secrets, for example. But St John Rivers is a different kind of sadist, one who regards his lust for domination as a God-given right.
Rochester is a libertine but, worse than that, a cad, as well. He exhibits his caddishness not only because of his actual treatment of the first Mrs Rochester, but – as Jane is quick to note – because of the way he talks about her.
It should be said that Jane is wise not to trust Rochester. She exhibits an exemplary perceptiveness, and, indeed, an exemplary female solidarity in her refusal to trust him. When Rochester finally confesses the truth about the existence of his hated but legal and living wife, Jane says, reasonably and also honourably, that the poor woman ‘cannot help being mad’:
‘If you were mad, do you think I should hate you?’
‘I do indeed, sir.’
One cannot imagine Emma Bovary, in a similar situation, saying that. Some things about life you can’t learn from books. Jane Eyre may burn with the longing for love, but that does not prevent her from making a bleak, clear-eyed appraisal of the realities of the situation. Rochester invites her to live with him in the South of France, not as his wife but as a companion; she turns down that offer with alacrity. She speculates that, when he is tired of her, he will dismiss her and, after that, talk about her in the contemptuous way he has told her about his other women. ‘I now hate the recollection of the time I passed with Celine, Giacinta and Clara.’ Yet he must have told each one of them he loved her, once upon a time, and Charlotte Brontë cannot think of a good reason why a libertine and sensualist like Rochester, who has fixed upon tiny, plain, uncanny-looking Jane because of her difference, should not, one day, some day, want a difference from that difference.
The fire burns his wife and burns his home and disfigures him and, after that, he ceases to be a cad and becomes . . . something else. A husband. A father. He loses the shaggy grandeur with which unfulfilled desire has dowered him. There is a dying fall, a sadness, to the last chapter, the one that begins so famously: ‘Reader, I married him.’ Marriage is not the point of their relationship, after all.
However St John Rivers is even worse than a cad; he is a prig. Turning his back on his own sensual response to the beautiful heiress, Rosamond Oliver, he concentrates all his energies on subjugating Jane, indeed, on killing her spirit. He succeeds in inspiring her with his enthusiasm for the mission field, although he seems the very type of missionary who, one hopes, will end in the pot. He virtually forces her to learn Hindustani. (‘Rivers taught you Hindostanee?’ says Rochester, when he and Jane are reunited, echoing the incredulity of the reader.) His intention is to bully this young woman into marriage. He says to her one of the nastiest things a fictional man ever said to a fictional woman: ‘God and nature intended you for a missionary’s wife.’ Jane would gladly accompany him to India as a companion; she foresees none of the same problems that would have arisen had she accompanied Rochester to Marseilles. But St John Rivers will admit of no such impropriety. He will marry her, without – and Charlotte Brontë is perfectly explicit about it – any kind of sexual feeling for Jane on his part, almost as if to mortify his flesh.
Yet Jane knows he would feel it necessary, once they were married, to perform his duty as a husband. She is fully aware of what this would entail and the prospect freezes her blood. She describes her idea of what their married life would be in a passage of chrystalline perceptiveness:
. . . yet, if forced to be his wife, I can imagine the possibility of conceiving an inevitable, strange, torturing kind of love for him; because he is so talented; and there is often a certain heroic grandeur in his look, manner and conversation. In that case my lot would be unspeakably wretched. He would not want me to love him; and if I showed the feeling, he would make me sensible that it was a superfluity, unrequired by him, unbecoming in me.
The clarity and strength of Charlotte Brontë’s observation and sensitivity is astonishing. She uses melodrama and excess to say what otherwise could not be said. Yet Jane Eyre remains an intensely personal novel, with a quality of private reverie about it, of a young girl’s erotic reverie, that disguises itself as romantic dreaming to evade discovery and self-censorship. There is a tender embarrassment about re-reading Jane Eyre in middle age; one wants the world to be kind, not to Jane, but to the girl who invented Jane, and, in doing so, set out so vividly her hopes and fears and longings on the page. We know the world was not particularly kind to her, that fame came mixed with grief and death. And her achievement is singular; in Jane Eyre she endowed a modern heroine, a young woman not dissimilar from Teresa Hawkins in Christina Stead’s For Love Alone, not dissimilar from the early heroines of Doris Lessing, with the power and force, the extra-dimensional quality, of a legendary being. If she had not died so young, the course of English fiction would have been utterly different. Anything would have been possible.
(1990)
• 31 •
David Kunzle: Fashion and Fetishisms
David Kunzle starts off thinking about corsets from an angle which, I’m ashamed to say, had never occurred to me. It may be described most simply, thus: that women, as a whole, are not silly and, when they do things that, at first glance, may seem to be silly, like wearing extremely tight-fitting corsets, or tottering along in stiletto-heeled shoes, there is, at base, an impeccable, if unconscious, logic to it; that these voluntary self-mutilations are a paradoxical expression of sexual defiance and gender self-esteem.
Kunzle doesn’t put it quite like that, but this is one message that may be drawn from his book, and it shocks me to think that, for so long, I went along with the standard feminist line on sexually specific clothing – that it showed women were the mere dupes of male fancy. How has it come about that feminists have picked up on the masculine notion that those women who aren’t self-confessed feminists don’t know what they’re doing, half the time?
However, Kunzle’s book is not an apologia for the corset but an argument, conducted with awe-inspiring sobriety, about the role of certain practices involving the distortion of the female (and sometimes the male) form that become exaggerated at certain moments in history. His historical range extends from the wasp-waisted athletes of ancient Crete (both male and female, and they all wore padded codpieces, too), to Mrs Ethel Granger, of Peterborough, who has latterly entered the Guinness Book of Records as the possessor of the World’s Smallest Waist (13 inches).
Nevertheless, the nineteenth century was the reign of Queen Corset, when everybody wore corsets, only some people wore them with more dedication than others. And this is the period in which Kunzle is able to elaborate most convincingly on his general predicate that tight-lacing was practised ‘by women, always the disenfranchised vis-à-vis men, aspiring to social power by manipulating a sexuality which the patriarchy found threatening’.
He is interested primarily in excessive corseting, when, as he says in his Preface, “‘Fashion” (the culturally dominant mode of dress) and “fetishism” (the individual or group redirection of the sexual instinct on to an aspect of dress) collide and merge in the unique phenomenon of tight-lacing’. A practice that has never, precisely, been fashionable, since exhibitionism is always beyond fashion, though corsets were a European universal until this century.
He also provides a running historical commentary on the related sub-class of excessively high heels, which make a woman look either a quivering sex object always deliciously about to fall flat on her face, an erotic spectacle in itself with all the connotations of the ‘fallen woman’, or else the epitome of sexual aggression, ready to trample some prone man underfoot.
These forms of ‘body sculpture’ – of modifying, sometimes dramatically so, the natural human shape – obviously fly in the face of nature and therefore cock an all-too-visible snook at that god in whose form we were created. The Christian pulpit, always quick to pick up hints of burgeoning female sexuality, has fulminated consistently against ‘unnatural’ dress, from the horned headdresses of the middle ages to toreador pants, and directed considerable ire against the close-fitting corset, although Kunzle illustrates an iron corset of the sixteenth century that looks like a penitential garment and perhaps was.
Suffering for God and being ugly in a hairshirt was all right, apparently; suffering for the devil with a wasp waist and frilly petticoats was not. The corset it is that makes a woman’s body an erotic hour glass, all tits a
nd bum, yet armoured with whale bone and impossible to get at without permission.
Repression gives birth to austere, solitary pleasures and, in the nineteenth century, extravagantly sexual forms of women’s fashions – the crinoline, the bustle, both emphasising a tiny, if not tiny-tiny, waist – blossomed in an atmosphere of general sexual repression, in which a particular veil was drawn over the reality of female desire. Kunzle quotes a shocked physician who discovered a young girl masturbating with the aid of her corset. However, there is rather more to sexual satisfaction than simple orgasm.
He provides extensive descriptions from practising twentieth-century tight-lacing fetishists as to the physiological satisfactions of the practice, the voluptuous palpitations, the ‘disembodied’, almost mystical feeling, the sense of mastery and achievement. These tally with letters to nineteenth-century women’s magazines elaborating on the painful pleasure of a 15-inch waist, the sensation of being erotically in control, as in horse-back riding, the correspondence between self-control, self-discipline, and the magical ability to control the world. He suggests a relation between tight-lacing and the current female plague of anorexia nervosa, in which the irritating female flesh is curbed by dietary methods, often by young women who feel there is more to life than the conventional female role but may not know precisely what that something more might be.
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