- Brontë’s 1850 preface: defending the morality of Jane Eyre against critics (who must have thought it was immoral, or at least "coarse"), Bronte claims that the novel’s perceived immorality comes of its truthfulness; in saying the world “may hate him who dares to scrutinise and expose—to rase the gilding, and show base metal under it—to penetrate the sepulchre, and reveal charnel relics: but hate as it will, it is indebted to him” she’s making social/moral/documentary claims for Jane Eyre as if it were Oliver Twist or, more precisely, Vanity Fair:
There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears . . . who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital—a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of “Vanity Fair” admired in high places? . . . I have alluded to him, Reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognised; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day—as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things.”
- I’m surprised to see Jane Eyre, which is a Bildungsroman focusing on one character’s experience, not on a riotous cast of colorful types, and told in the first person, compared to Vanity Fair, and associated with the ambition of “social regenerat[ion]” and “restor[ing] rectitude to the warped system of things.” If Jane Eyre is a tool for social regeneration, how is it working? What does it want to effect? School reform? The Lowood section is the most like Oliver Twist, but on the other hand the problems of the school seem to be more obviously specific: as soon as someone from the outside finds out the school is bad they fix it (but Helen Burns has to die first.) Divorce reform? The reform of rakes, or of the double standard? Bronte explains that the people who object to Jane Eyre are those “in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry—that parent of crime—an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth.” So she’s talking about bigotry—against married men? Against strange women? Certainly the novel has a feminist message, and there are these moments of what Geoffrey Bennington calls sententiousness, where Jane makes a clearly reformist gesture:
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.
And certainly the horrors that Jane describes, to which critics of Jane Eyre presumably objected, are metaphors for or extreme cases of problems with education, marriage law, the double standard. I guess I’m so used to reading Bronte’s feminism through Gilbert and Gubar, or even through Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, as submerged and suffocated and only partially articulated, that I’m surprised to see she had political or social intentions. But on the other hand, maybe a feminism can be both intentional and imperfectly articulated; maybe that’s why I’m stalling at the suggestion that this is a social novel, and maybe that’s where Woolf’s claims of suffocation are coming from.
- I’m also struck by Bronte’s address of the Reader in her introduction: it’s identical to Jane’s (famous) address of the Reader in the novel, and breaks down the boundaries (masculine, or at least gender-neutral pseudonym; insistence on the novel as a tool of social regeneration) Bronte seems to want to set up against reading Jane Eyre autobiographically. If Jane and Charlotte are one and the same, what does that do to the idea of reading Jane Eyre as a social novel? David Copperfield kind of invites a biographical reading, especially because David is an author at the end, but Dickens’s preface doesn’t encourage you to keep thinking in this way: he makes it clear that David & co are beloved friends that Dickens totally made up. There’s certainly a tendency to read women writers’ works as autobiographical/confessional or at least _personal_--one example I’m thinking of is Romney’s accusation in _Aurora Leigh_ that women are only interested in specifics—and I’m curious to what degree Bronte might have been participating in this kind of reading of Jane Eyre, or even using that kind of reading to suggest a different, more personal, less crusading kind of social novel? David Copperfield doesn’t feel as reformatory as Oliver Twist, but is it intended to be, just in a different way? Is Jane Eyre intended to be?
- Jane’s sudden fits of rage as a child—compare to Oliver Twist. Are the causes different?
- “‘Unjust!—unjust!” said my reason, forced by the agonising stimulus into precocious though transitory power”—and her fantasies of resistance: “to achieve escape from insupportable oppression—as running away, or, if that could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die.”
- Her exultation when she resists Mrs Reed, followed by an accompanying dejection: Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty . . . A child cannot quarrel with its elders, as I had done; cannot give its furious feelings uncontrolled play, as I had given mine, without experiencing afterwards the pang of remorse and the chill of reaction.
- The strange treatment of race/skin color in the novel: not only are Bertha and Mason dark (their mother was a Creole) but also Mr Rochester (I guess also a character with a colonial connection) and Mrs Reed. And Blanche Ingram! With her ironic name! Mr Rochester’s darkness makes it harder to read these other dark characters as necessarily bad, or bad because of race (although they are all bad.) Mr Rochester’s contempt for Blanche is definitely connected to his disgust with Bertha (he desires Jane as a “change.”) But is it also a disgust with himself? I can’t read it that way, but I also can’t read the way color is working in this novel clearly.
- Retrospect: it doesn’t seem to be as strongly marked here as it does in David Copperfield or Bleak House or even Villette. Maybe because Jane makes relatively few references to her current position: she tells us “I could not answer the ceaseless inward question—why I thus suffered; now, at the distance of—I will not say how many years, I see it clearly,” but for the most part we experience things as she experienced them—her breaks into the present tense make this feeling of immediacy, of a real-time narrative despite our knowledge that this is retrospect—stronger. The only really noticeable moment was when she refused to tell us what she had seen that had upset her; she says “Stay till he comes, reader; and, when I disclose my secret to him, you shall share the confidence.” This, too, seems less forced to me than, say, Esther Summerson refusing to tell me the contents of the letter, perhaps because Jane has been framing this story so theatrically (“A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader . . .”) that we accept her desire to make things more dramatically satisfying.
- When Mr Brocklehurst asks her how she will avoid going to hell, Jane says “I must keep in good health, and not die.” This always struck me as a really important line. In the end this becomes a moral choice that Jane has to make—between thinking about Heaven and going to
- Jane’s negotiation of the terms of her freedom: “Grant me at least a new servitude!” She knows the “freedom” she longs for is unrealistic, but a new servitude isn’t. I’m reading Louisa May Alcott’s Work for another list, and I think the ways in which Jane is thinking about and negotiating freedom/a new servitude/a space for herself are similar to the way Christie is looking for ways in which to be useful and happy in Work (she becomes a servant, a governess, an actress, a companion, a florist . . . ) This restlessness of Jane’s forces her/allows her to exercise choice; even when the choices aren’t entirely voluntary, she seems to have some limited agency. All the images of Jane’s corded-up trunks support this sense.
- Also related to the “new servitude” passage: Jane’s conversations with herself, in which two sides of her nature debate some moral or practical question. The most literal and kind of hilarious moment is when Jane “order[s] [her] brain” to solve the practical problem of finding a job for her:
A kind fairy, in my absence, had surely dropped the required suggestion on my pillow; for as I lay down, it came quietly and naturally to my mind.—“Those who want situations advertise; you must advertise in the ---shire Herald.” “How? I know nothing about advertising.” Replies rose smooth and prompt now:— “You must enclose the advertisement and the money to pay for it under a cover directed to the editor of the Herald; you must put it, the first opportunity you have, into the post at Lowton; answers must be addressed to J.E., at the post-office there; you can go and inquire in about a week after you send your letter, if any are come, and act accordingly.”
Moments like this remind me a lot of Villette, where the brain, and parts of consciousness or conscience, are personified and anthropomorphized to the point that the drama becomes almost entirely interior. In Jane Eyre the drama is much more external; and at times these interior voices are exported to other characters (notably when Mr Rochester dresses up like a gypsy, but also in other moments of interrogation with Hannah the servant and St John
- Which brings us to Mr Rochester’s tricks: I never noticed before this reading how much he resembles not only a terrifying Gothic villain but also a Richardsonian rake: the gypsy move in particular made me think of Mr B dressing up like a woman servant to get in Pamela’s bed.
that something, I, at intervals, beheld still; and with throbbing heart, but not with palsied nerves. Instead of wishing to shun, I longed only to dare—to divine it; and I thought Miss Ingram happy, because one day she might look into the abyss at her leisure, explore its secrets and analyse their nature.
“Watch out for the abyss!” you want to tell her. “There is a madwoman in it!” But!
- Jane and
To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking.
She also says “no woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.”
- We can read this as the symbiotic (codependent?) relationship created when
- We can also read it as a version of the closeness of Heathcliff/Cathy in
- But I think there’s also something realistic and down-to-earth and everyday about Jane’s account of their constant conversation, something that suggests this is in fact a real marriage of two people who get along, and which is not fed by teeth-grinding and obstacles and trauma.
- Lying and teasing: When
- Jane the artist: I’m interested in her ability to render these interior states/solipsistic conversations material through drawing: the creepy dreamscapes, but also her use of portraiture as a kind of argument (trying to cure herself of her pretentions to Mr R’s love by drawing her own face and Blanche Ingram’s; tryig to draw out St John’s love for Miss Oliver with her portrait) and as a kind of invocation/companionship (drawing Mr Rochester’s portrait at the Reeds’.)
- Then there are the ways in which the drawings reveal Jane’s real identity to people: that she’s a lady with accomplishments (mostly to people associated with the Reed household); that she’s an interesting person and/or an elfin spirit (to Mr Rochester); and literally what her name is (to St John when he sees her name written on her piece of scratch paper, which is also blotted with all the colors she’s been using.) Throughout the novel people have difficulty recognizing or placing Jane (Mrs Reed on her deathbed; Rochester when he first meets her, and in his blindness; various characters who can’t reconcile her ladylike behavior with her poverty or her situation; the Rivers family because of her alias) and the pictures seem to be one of the truer indexes to her identity
- The hero narrative. In Writing Beyond the Ending Rachel Blau DuPlessis identifies two conflicting plots in nineteeth-century novels by and about women: the quest plot, in which the female protagonist is the hero, and the marriage plot, in which she is reduced to a mere heroine. The quest plot might sometimes be the same as the marriage plot, but in the end the quest plot—and the female hero—disappear, and the story dead-ends in the marriage and the establishment of the female hero as passive, married, loving heroine. Jane Eyre is a classic example, where all Jane’s restlessness and resistance and rebellion culminates in her as a contented wife and mother and helpmeet to her injured husband. This does happen, but for some reason I keep wanting to question classic feminist readings of Jane Eyre; in this case, I’m interested in thinking about how ambition is portrayed in the novel, as well as work and vocation and restlessness. Jane is depicted as restless, and
- The ending: Why does
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