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Sutherland_Jane_Eyre
Lecture Thirty-Five
Jane Eyre and the Other Bronte
Scope: Charlotte was the only one of the Bronte sisters to live long enough to build up a small body of work. Her book Jane Eyre was the most popular novel of the high Victorian period. This novel, which is a type of narrative known as a Bildungsroman, follows Jane from childhood to maturity as she relies on her intelligence, morality, and spirit to navigate a world dominated by men. Many elements of feminist thinking can be found in Jane’s story. In this lecture, we’ll explore that story in detail and ask if Jane Eyre has another heroine as well— Rochester’s mad first wife, Bertha.
Outline
I. Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Bronte (1816.1855), was the single most popular novel of the high Victorian period. A. What makes Jane Eyre so important to us as a novel today is its heroine, Jane, whom we follow from childhood through adolescence to maturity. She makes her way in a world dominated by men through sheer force of intelligence, high morality, and indomitable pluck.
1. In the mid-19th century, women did not have the vote or property rights. They were often treated by their male guardians as a higher kind of chattel or concubine.
2. In Jane Eyre, when Rochester offers to make Jane his mistress—after she learns of Mrs. Rochester in the attic—she runs away. To Rochester, there’s little difference between a wife and a mistress, but to Jane, the difference is clear.
3. The feminism at the heart of Jane Eyre is summed up in four words that are found at the novel’s conclusion: “Reader, I married him.” As the syntax and transitive verb insist, it is Jane who is in charge.
4. Much of what we now consider feminist thinking can be located thematically, if not as articulated theory, in Jane’s story.
B. The mid-Victorian novelists, including Charlotte Bronte, were fascinated by a form of narrative known as the Bildungsroman.
1. This word translates into English as “portrait novel,” or more precisely, the life-story of a protagonist from childhood through a series of trials to maturity. Such novels as Dickens’s David Copperfield or George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss are examples.
2. Like Dickens in Copperfield, Charlotte Bronte told her Bildungsroman, Jane Eyre, autobiographically, using “I narration.”
3. As later novelists, such as Henry James, argued, I narration can be somewhat crude. It ties down the point of view to one consciousness, and it renders suspense artificial. But I narration has what Charlotte Bronte particularly wanted: force and urgency.
II. Charlotte was the eldest of the Bronte sisters and lived longest of the six children, although she died at only age 39. Unlike Emily and Anne, she was granted sufficient years to build up her oeuvre, which consists of five fulllength novels and a quantity of lyric verse.
A. When Charlotte was four, her father, the Reverend Bronte, was appointed perpetual (tenured) curate at Haworth in Yorkshire. The parsonage in this large north England village would be Charlotte’s domestic center throughout almost all her life.
B. The Haworth parsonage was very close to the church graveyard, which meant that the Bronte children would have seen coffins and funerals as part of their everyday lives. We can only imagine what effect these sights had on the impressionable young sisters.
C. The Anglican Church was a significant influence on Charlotte.
1. The Christian missionary in Jane Eyre, Saint John Rivers, wants to marry Jane but is denied that fulfillment. He then goes off to India to convert its population to Christianity.
2. It is he who piously utters the last words in the book: “Jesus Christ.”
D. Charlotte’s father was not a conventional priest, and the household at Haworth cannot have been easy for him to manage.
1. Branwell Bronte was a particularly wayward son, whose wild character, dissipation, and sexual amorality feeds, we imagine, into Rochester and Heathcliff.
2. Charlotte’s mother died when she was only five. None of the children knew her well, nor was there any softening maternal influence in their lives. Jane Eyre, too, is a motherless child.
3. The eldest four Bronte girls were sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. Charlotte would later portray the school as Lowood in Jane Eyre; the abominable conditions there led to the deaths of two of the Bronte daughters.
E. When the girls were brought back to at the parsonage, they wrote sagas of the imaginary countries Angria and Gondal. These narratives chronicle the deeds of superheroes based on military figures of the day. The main literary influence seems to have been Sir Walter Scott.
F. At age 16, Charlotte spent a year at a different school where, like Jane Eyre, she taught for a while. She also served as a governess.
G. The transforming experience of Charlotte’s life occurred in 1842, when at age 26, she and Emily went to Brussels to work in a boarding house run by the charismatic Constantin Heger and his wife, Claire.
1. Charlotte remained in Belgium for two years, and her experience there is directly recalled in two of her novels, The Professor and Villette, and indirectly reflected in the romance plot of Jane Eyre.
2. In Belgium, Charlotte fell hopelessly in love with Heger. As far as we can tell, her feelings were not reciprocated.
3. Charlotte’s unrequited love inspired the longing relationships at the center of many of her narratives, not least Jane Eyre’s mad love for her employer, Rochester.
H. When she returned to England in the mid-1840s, Charlotte and her sisters produced a vanity publication of their poems, which sold only two copies.
I. At about the same time, fatal illness swept through Haworth parsonage. Branwell, the only son of the family, died of chronic bronchitis and alcoholism in September 1848. Emily and Anne both died of pulmonary tuberculosis in December 1848 and May 1849, respectively.
III. Only Charlotte would live to see the name Bronte become famous.
A. Her first novel, sent to the eminent London publisher George Smith, was politely turned down with the suggestion that she should write something longer, more exciting, and perhaps, more womanly.
B. Under the pseudonym Currer Bell, Charlotte produced Jane Eyre in six weeks. Victorian readers at once apprehended that Currer must be a woman. The novel was a huge success; Charlotte was suddenly famous and remained so for the rest of her short life.
C. Charlotte continued to live on at Haworth, writing a string of successful works, including Villette and Shirley. She also had her sister’s novel Wuthering Heights published by a respectable firm.
D. In June 1854, Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate. A few months later, at the age of 38, she became pregnant. Her health declined rapidly during this time, and she and her unborn child died on March 31, 1855.
IV. As we have said, Jane Eyre presents itself as a recollection of the heroine’s early life, from childhood to marriage.
A. The narrative opens with an uncompromising straightforwardness, giving us our first picture of little Jane standing up for her rights.
1. When the orphaned Jane fights back against her bullying cousin, John Reed, she is immediately taken to the “red-room,” the room where corpses are laid out when someone dies in the Reed family.
2. Jane doesn’t take her punishment quietly. She fights “like a mad cat” as she is being carried away. Locked in the red-room, Jane thinks she sees a ghost and screams loud enough to wake the house.
3. This scene prefigures the central theme of Jane Eyre, that of the “madwoman in the attic” or, perhaps, the rebel woman.
4. It’s not just the Reed home that imprisons women it considers to be out of line; this is the condition of womanhood in the 19th century. Jane Eyre tells us that women must fight back.
B. Jane is ultimately sent to a hellish boarding school, Lowood. There, she befriends a girl named Helen Burns. Before Helen dies of maltreatment, she instructs Jane in the necessity of stoical suffering. Her message seems
to be that women must suffer if they are to endure.
1. Jane describes the brutal conditions at Lowood. Her persecutor there is the tyrannical evangelical minister Reverend Brocklehurst.
2. Brocklehurst believes that all children are the offspring of Satan and must be disciplined into Christian virtue by physical suffering. Jane’s only friend on the staff of the school is Miss Temple.
3. We later learn that Brocklehurst has been embezzling school funds to support his family’s luxurious lifestyle. As a result, the pupils are malnourished, freezing, and prone to dangerous illness.
4. A typhus epidemic strikes the school, killing many of the students, and the Reverend Brocklehurst is finally disgraced and removed.
C. Miss Temple’s gentler regime takes over, and as she passes through adolescence, Jane herself becomes a teacher. At age 18, she applies for a position as governess at Thornfield Hall.
1. There, Jane is charged with tutoring a young French girl, Adele, the illegitimate child, we assume, of the absent master of the house, Mr. Edward Rochester. Jane finally meets her employer in typically melodramatic circumstances.
2. The young governess is out walking, when she suddenly hears the sound of a galloping horse. The rider, Rochester, falls off the horse, sprains his ankle, and swears.
3. Significantly, this figure of manly strength needs the help of a woman to get back to Thornfield. The moment is powerfully symbolic and prefigures a pattern that will recur as part of the master narrative design.
D. Rochester plans to stay at Thornfield while he looks for a wife. Ultimately, he falls in love with the plain governess, Jane. Rochester proposes and Jane accepts.
E. Strange phenomena occur at Thornfield: screams, mysterious fires, and the destruction of Jane’s bridal veil the night before the ceremony. At the ceremony itself, a voice from the back of the church protests, “Mr. Rochester is already married.”
F. Rochester takes Jane back to Thornfield and up the stairs to the attic, where the first Mrs. Rochester, named Bertha, is confined in her madness. Rochester was tricked into marrying her when he was an innocent young man. The description of her is horrific.
G. Rochester then asks Jane to be his unmarried paramour, his mistress, but her virtue will never permit such an arrangement. She runs away, in a state of near breakdown.
H. By incredible coincidence, Jane collapses on the doorstep of an unknown relative, Saint John Rivers, a clergyman, and his sisters.
1. They take her in, and she discovers that she is not an orphan after all but an heiress, kept in ignorance by the villainous Reeds.
2. Saint John Rivers falls in love with Jane and asks her to join him in his missionary work in India. She is tempted, but late one night, she hears the voice of Rochester calling to her. I. Jane returns to Thornfield and discovers that Rochester’s mad wife has burned the house down and died in the fire. Rochester, like Samson, has been blinded and has lost an arm, like Nelson. Now that he is widowed and tamed, Jane can accept his offer. She utters the words “Reader, I married him.”
V. Two images remain in our minds after reading Jane Eyre: little Jane, locked and maddened in the red-room, and Bertha, locked and mad in the attic at Thornfield.
A. Women readers, particularly, have been astute in discerning that the real heroine of Jane Eyre is not just the narrator-governess but Bertha. Jean Rhys, a 20th-century novelist, wrote a novel on the subject called Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which tells the story of Jane Eyre from Bertha’s point of view.
B. Jane Eyre has survived and triumphed for 150 years, not merely because it’s a good melodrama, but because it is a great novel of womanhood, one that is both sympathetic to, and critical of, the age and society in which it was born.
Questions
1. What female qualities, on the basis of Jane Eyre, do we assume Charlotte Bronte principally admires?
2. Is the “madwoman in the attic” the true heroine of Jane Eyre?