Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre– the novel – mixes a number of genres:
Autobiographical Elements
We can assume[1] that the story roughly[2] coincides with Charlotte’s life (1816 to 1847 publication)
- I have read suggestions that it takes place[3] at the beginning of the century but the absence of reference to the Napoleonic Wars makes this unlikely[4].
1821Charlotte’s mother, Maria Brontë, died of cancer. Jane is an orphan at 10.
1825Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily Brontë all at Cowan Bridge School.
When the two elder sisters died of TB[5] there and the unhealthy conditions became apparently, the younger two returned for home schooling.
Helen Burns is based on a composite of Charlotte’s elder sisters.
Cowan Bridge, like Lowood, seems to have been a place designed to inculcate a sense of humility and inferiority, not to educate.
1831Charlotte went to Miss Wooler’s Roe Head Schoolin Mirfield.Some of the more positive aspects of Lowood (especial Miss Temple) may come from this period.
1835she becomes an assistant teacher at Miss Wooler’s school.Jane plays a similar role at the end of her time at Lowood.
1839Charlotte visits Norton Conyers – model for Thornfield Hall – near Ripon. She hears about the legend of 18th-century ‘mad Mary’, the madwoman in the attic there. She may even have visited the secret attic room.
She turns down two proposals of marriage from clergymen.
Jane encounters Bertha Mason. She turns down St. John.
1841Charlotte worked as a governess in a home near Bradford.
Jane works as a governess at Thornfield.
1843Charlotte falls in love with her teacher, M. Heger (1809–1896), in Brussels. Biographer Claire Harman sees echoes of the Byronic Constantin Heger behind Jane Eyre’s “demanding, volatile, cigar-smoking, married employer, Mr Rochester. The likeness[6] between Charlotte’s fictional hero and Monsieur Heger is marked: under his moodiness[7], born of secret woes[8], Rochester is a man of fine sensibility and affection.”
1844Charlotte returned home to care for her almost blind father.
There may be echoes of him in Rochester’s final condition.
1840sCharlotte and her sisters tried to start a village school in the 1840s but couldn’t find enough pupils.
Jane teaches at the village school on the moors.
For more on childhood in Jane Eyre, watch:
Spiritual Autobiography
The title is: Jane Eye: an Autobiography
Jane is on a quest[9]for equality and selfhood: to discover her own identity.
- the novel can be seen as a feminized reworking of the traditional quest9 story in which the hero encounters a series of dangers, obstacles and ‘monsters’ in the course of seeking[10] his goal[11].
There is influence from Pilgrim’s Progress in the novel’s exploration of religiosity.
- Bunyan’s book Christianized the quest where Brontë feminizes it.
The novels of Charlotte (and Emily) Brontë treat the passions of women as uncharted territory
- to express feeling is a right women had been denied.
However, in her rejection of a missionary life with St John Rivers, Jane flouts the conventional ending of evangelical novels – marriage to aclergyman – and contemporary readers’ expectations.
Mediaeval Romance
The quest connections link Jane Eyre to mediaeval romance.
Coincidence is another element from romance.
- Jane stumbles across[12] her cousins, the Rivers, at Marsh Endin the middle of nowhere
- This allows[13] her to inherit wealth and a family, despite the fact that she apparently didn’t even know that she had cousins named St. John, Diana and Mary.
- Jane’s uncle John Eyre works for Richard Mason. They just happens to be together when Jane’s letter arrives announcing her plan to marry Rochester, Mason’s brother-in-law.
- When Jane is rich and can marry Rochester as an equal, his wife has conveniently died.
Rochester’s spiritual call for her to return represents another element common in romance.
Religion
Jane encounters three main[14] religious figures: Brocklehurst, Helen Burns and St. John Rivers.
- Each represents a model of religion that Jane ultimately[15]rejects as she forms her own ideas about faith and principle, and their practical consequences.
St. John Rivers is admirable in his public face but too cold in his domestic self:
Jane describes him as ‘a cold cumbrous column’ (alliteration!) of ice-cold white marble
- comparable to Mr Brocklehurst: ‘a black pillar’.
- the dowager Lady Ingram is also compared to a marble column.
Jane admires Helen Burns but her passivity and her death-willingness are not for Jane.
Rivers in some ways is a grown-up[16] version of Helen.
- he also represents Christian stoicism and is death-willing.
Where Rochester is too passionate in Volume II, Rivers is too rational and passionless.
Rivers rightly recognizes that Miss Oliver wouldn’t stand the life of a missionary’s wife
- but fails to[17] see that Jane wouldn’t stand being his wife.
Jane needs emotional as well as spiritual sustenance.
Catholicism is attacked in the fact that someone as cold and heartless – empty ritual – as Eliza Reed can become a nun and rise to Mother Superior.
- Charlotte Brontë had encountered Catholicism while studying in Belgium.
In the end Jane learns to form her relationship with her God on her terms
- not according to the dictates of others.
Fairy Tale
The basic structure of Jane Eyre is influenced by fairy tale, specifically Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast.
There is also the fairy tale of Bluebeard, which pervades Chapter 11
- A young wife is allowed[18] to enter any room she wants in her husband’s castle except one.
- When he leaves the castle on business one day, she takes the key and investigates.
In the room she finds the bodies[19] of his previous wives.
Jane describes the passageway[20] in Thornfield House as reminding her of
“a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle”.
The description of Mr Brocklehurst’s face
“What a face he had, ... what a big nose! and what a mouth! and what large prominent teeth!”
- clearly echoes Little Red Riding Hood’s description of the Big Bad Wolf.
When Rochester first appears to Jane she describes his dog and horse as ‘Gytrashes’ /gai’træʃiz/ – a northern dialect word for ghosts/apparitions encountered on lonely[21] roads – taken from the fairy tales that Bessie told her.
He later tells her that when this incident happened he thought she was a fairy.
- In fact, she has already identified herself as a fairy in the Red Room.
Like a supernatural being, Jane seems to have prophetic dreams.
Rochester dresses as a gypsy in a red cloak (Little Red Riding Hood, again?)
- In this role he gives Mason a magic potion.
Jane’s arrival at Ferndean is an inversion of the fairy-tale trope of the prince cutting his way through the forest to find the sleeping beauty.[22]
Bessie’s ballad of a poor orphan child wandering[23] alone on the moors (Chapter 3) foreshadows[24] Jane’s own experience (Chapter 28).
As in fairy tale, every character gets exactly what s/he deserves.
Romantics
Bewick’s History of British Birds (1804) is full of sublime images of shipwrecks, storms, Arctic wastes, high mountains, death and disaster.
Rochester is a Byronic figure:
brooding, apparently misanthropist, forceful, charismatic and independent.
- Heathcliff (in Emily’s Wuthering Heights) is also Byronic.
However, Charlotte undermines the Byronic archetype from the beginning
- no sooner do we see him being masterful on his horse than he falls off!
In the end Jane transforms him into a mild-mannered husband dependent on his wife for moral and intellectual guidance.
Jane is ultimately[25] the true Byronic heroof the novel, an example of rebellion and staunch individualism
- finally, it is Jane – not Rochester or St. John – who achieves the philosophical ideal embodied in that figure.
- in her passage through loneliness, isolation, intense suffering and temptation, Jane
- asserts her own individuality,
- forges a sense of identity and
- proclaims her freedom and independence of will.
The central theme of Jane Eyre is the essentially Romantic concept of the
self as individual and unique.
In Volume II, Chapter 8 there is an allusion to Keats’ To a Nightingale (and also to A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
In Volume III, Chapter 2 Jane recognizes God’s omnipotence and omnipresence on the moor[26] at night.
- This is reminiscent of the Romantic idea that Nature can teach morality,
e.g. in Wordsworth’s The Prelude.
Gothic
The first half of the novel is dominated by Gothic references to:
- a nursemaid who teaches her charge[27] about folklore and the supernatural, witches, fairies, sprites, incubus, imps, ghosts, vampires, eerie laughs, gypsy fortune-tellers and a mad woman.
- Gothic fantasies typically began with an ingénue arriving at an old gloomy[28] mansion.
Jane can be read as a Gothic ‘naif’.
In moments of anxiety Jane’s mind sees the face of Judas morphing into that of Satan in the panels on the door of the old cabinet.
The intense sexual magnetism that Rochester exerts over Jane is barely[29] understood by the young woman.
- She is in turmoil[30]due to[31] the struggle[32] between intense passion and a belief that such passion cannot go unpunished.
In the game of charades the word ‘bride’ is followed by ‘well’
- a bridewell was a type of prison for people who have committed minor offences.
Brontë was clearly influenced by Ann Radcliffe.
- For instance[33], in A Sicilian Romance, the strange occurrences[34] that terrify the sisters are the result of their mother having been imprisoned by her husband who declared her dead in order to marry again.
Moreover, as with all Radcliffe’s romances, most if not all of what seems supernatural in Jane Eyrehas a logical or a psychological explanation.
Robert Heilman has suggested that Brontë revised the Gothic mode
- using its conventions and motifs to symbolize the enigmatic parts of the human personality and the unconscious self.
Jane Eyre was the first work of fiction to use Gothic conventions to give imaginative expression to the emotional needs of a ‘real’ woman.
Bildungsroman
Jane Eyre also has much in common with the coming-of-age novel.
(e.g. David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Mill on the Floss).
As a bildungsroman we would expect to find an initiation that brings the protagonist closer to maturity
- the main character becomes dynamic and rounded through change brought on by a series of trials.
Jane Eyre presents a society in which a young woman’s secure place depends on:
- looks, wealth or family
Jane has none of these initially (though she acquires all of them to some extent[35]).
Remember that Jane has been educated for the benefit of others:
she can be a governess or a schoolteacher.
- she excels in her book-learning and conforms to the religion of her education but neither have a huge[36] impact on her inner life, which is largely[37] ruled by superstition.
The religious teaching she has received doesn’t relate much to her life,
so her own psychological references are to a much more naturalistic God.
Jane is on a quest to find out who Jane is.
She frequently doesn’t recognize herself:
- starting with her reflection in the mirror in the Red Room.
She has to remind herself of her identity:
- such as in the (self-)“portrait of a governess: disconnected, poor, and plain”.
Jane’s artistic self and her true self are closely linked[38].
→ Her name of the picture.
Jane frequently tells her story
- to the apothecary Mr Lloyd, to Helen Burns, to Miss Temple, to Rochester and to St. John Rivers
Telling her story becomes synonymous with knowing herself and establishing her identity.
‘Mothers’ and ‘Daughters’
Jane’s progress is guided by a series of substitute mothers:
- Bessie who offers consolation and a sensitivity to the supernatural
- Miss Temple who offers consolation and teaches self-control, and
- Mrs Fairfax[39] who teaches a sense of status as well as nurture.
- Diana Reed who teaches Jane to be independent and self-assertive.
Jane also has supernatural mothers:
- the white visionin human form (chapter 27) she sees on the night of her parting from Rochester and calls “mother”.
- the “universal mother, Nature” (chapter 28) when she is lost on the moors.
Jane is on a quest to find love but she insists on being loved without self-abnegation.
- she has spent too long finding herself to deny herself for someone else.
Jane also has a series of surrogate and supernatural children before having her own child
- the doll at Gateshead
- Adèle
- the tiny infant she carries in her dream (representing her orphaned self that she must nurture and bring to maturity).
- the young child in the dream about the ruin of Thornfield that prevents[40] her from leaving Rochester.
Bertha Mason catalyzes[41] the growth of Jane’s self-understanding.
Jane goes through a process of learning when to speak – to express herself – and when to be silent.
This is self-control but it is also controlling how she interacts with others
- controlling the image of herself she projects to others.
Jane must also learn to find the path of moderation between:
- moral duty and earthly pleasure
- her spiritual and her physical needs
By the end of the novel Jane has become a mature woman who
- knows her own mind and
- can resist convention.
Satire
Jane Eyre contains elements of satire such as
- the depiction of ‘charitable’ institutions like Lowood.
- upper-class society that is rigid and lacking in[42] human feeling.
The novel can be seen as a satire on institutionalized religion and high society.
Brontë dedicated Jane Eyre to William Thackeray – the satirist of Vanity Fair (1847-8).
- she considered him “the first social regenerator of the day” believing that his satire could help to correct “the warped[43] system of things”.
The serious purpose of Jane Eyre is to expose the hypocrisy, self-interest and the moral bankruptcy of her society and to help to change it.
Realism
The realism of the dialogues in Jane Eyre surpassed almost anything written up to that point.
Moreover, the psychological realism as Brontë explores the workings[44] of Jane’s mind was also unsurpassed at the time.
- it built on the introspective religious novels of the 1830s and 1840s.
However, Realism in literature means more than being realistic
- it implies a straightforward[45] causal sequence, an unproblematic representation of the world.
- realist literature does not question itself or refer to its own construction as problematic.
Jane Eyredoes give a detailed and concrete picture of Jane’s world (the weather, landscape, food, clothing, etc.)
- but many of the details have a secondary symbolic meaning.
Moreover, Jane Eyre is a self-reflexive text.
- we see Jane struggling[46] to compose her autobiography
- we are made aware[47] that what we are being offered is a written text that is not and cannot be a full, direct representation of the world.
Behind Brontë’s departure from realism is her conviction that human experience is too complex and profoundto be fully understood.
Symbolism
Fire represents: passions, anger, and spirit
- Rochester’s eyes
- Jane realizes[48] that as St. John’s wife she would be “forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low.”
- Bertha sets fire to Rochester’s bed, foreshadowing[49] the fire that will kill her and emasculate her husband.
Red is associated with fire, passion and sexuality in Brontë’s work
White with coldness and the absence of sexuality.
Ice represents: the oppressive forces trying to extinguish Jane’s vitality.
- Frozen breakfast at Lowood.
- St. John is compared to ice and cold rock; he casts a ‘freezing spell’[50] over Jane.
Jane and Rochester meet over ice.
Later the fires are lit at Thornfield when previously the grates had been empty.
After forgiving Rochester for his attempted bigamy Jane resolves that she “must be ice and rock to him.”
Jane will gradually melt and unlearn the icy reserve she acquired at Lowood
Rochester will gradually tame his lascivious passions and learn that
- relationships should be based on companionship, not just[51] sex
- marriage is about love, not profit.
Rochester’s disguises in the game of charades as bridegroom, emir and criminal foreshadow his real-life roles as bridegroom, despotic fiancé and attempted bigamist.
Bertha, Jane’s doppelgänger, wears and then rips in two her wedding veil
- a symbol of lost virginity or truth revealed.
Significantly, Jane first sees Bertha reflected in her own mirror, and she refuses to condemn her as Rochester does.
Rochester proposes under the great horse-chestnuttree.
- that night it is split in two by lightning suggesting a supernatural disapproval of the wedding.
At the denouement[52]thelunatic wife kindles[53] the governess’sbed two months after Jane’s departure, creating an image of pictorial Gothic as Thornfield is consumed in flames.
- Thus[54], thewronged wife perverts the fires of passion intovengeance against a philandering[55] husband and hisimprisoning home.
Nature
In the Lowood chapters Brontë dismisses the idea that Nature feels for humanity in any straightforward[56] way.
Nature can, however, be a symbol of what is true, innocent and renewable
- in contrast to the rottenness[57], artificiality and corruption of Thornfield.
Both Jane and Rochester are acutely aware of[58] nature and the changing seasons.
- both are steeped in[59] the pathetic fallacy.
- thing of “the band of Italian days” (i.e. sunny) when Jane returns to Thornfield from Gateshead, the lighting and the stormy weather in the month before the planned wedding, the desolate moor, etc.
There is a suggestion that at some deep, complex and unknowable level there is a connection between nature and humanity.
- rather[60] like Gerard Manley Hopkins a generation later, to be in tune with[61] nature is to be closer to God;
it is to know oneself and to resist the ill-effects of modern mechanical society.
Brocklehurst sees Nature as sinful[62] and seeks to[63] destroy it:
“we are not to conform to nature” (chapter 7).
- he symbolically has the girls’ naturally curly hair cut.
Medical books of the time suggested that children who did not learn to control their passions were likely to[64] descend into madness.