Subjectivity is often hailed as the great modernist innovation in literature. To place the “I” at the centre, to consider life as interpretable only through the subject, the beholder, not the beheld, to be True – that is the modernist project.
Yet Jane Eyre is the beholder of Charlotte Brontë’s novel of the same name of 1847, and Jane Eyre spends much time beholding Mr Rochester and he her.
There is an extended sequence in the middle of the novel where the protagonist is simply left to watch.
After abandoning Thornfield with no indication as to when his sojourn will end, Mr Rochester suddenly returns with an entourage of aristocratic guests: ladies, predominantly, not lords. These ladies dedicate themselves to days of diversion, plays and games. Somewhat cruelly, given Jane’s disposition and deep self-seriousness, Mr Rochester insists she be present for all, except she takes no direct part.
A desperate erotic tension pervades these scenes, reminiscent of any awkward adolescent’s experience of watching a dance floor and lacking the will-to-self-abandonment necessary to join in. Jane’s apartness is her subjectivity – her separateness is inseparable from the idea of the novel itself.
Jane Eyre today is considered to be a novel of blind spots. The most obvious of these is the so-called ‘Mad Woman in the Attic’. For those of you unfamiliar with the text, I would encourage you to go away, read it, and return.
[…]
You’ve returned, good. Mr Rochester, it is revealed, keeps an estranged(?) wife on the third floor of his ancestral home under lock and key, and the stewardship of his faithful, though occasionally boozing, servant, Grace Poole.[1] She is consistently referred to as “the maniac” and, often, even deprived of the dignity of a personal pronoun.
Her racial origins are somewhat ambiguous, but it can be reasonably inferred that she is of mixed ethnicity, and that that mix is likely African and European, though perhaps not first generation – she and Rochester were introduced to each other in Jamaica. In the pivotal Chapter 26, we have:
“Her mother, the Creole”
And further clues in—
“’Ghosts are usually pale Jane’ [Mr Rochester] […] ‘This, sir, was purple, the lips were swollen and dark. [Jane]”
Jane, the narrator, is directly callous towards Mrs Rochester, giving such descriptions as:
“The clothed hyena rose up and stood tall on its hind feet.” (338)
There is only one instance where Jane considers the possibility of empathy for Bertha on page 347 of the Penguin Classics edition:
“’She cannot help being mad.’
‘Jane, if you were mad, do you think I should hate you?’
‘I do indeed, sir.’” (347)
This passage is a glimpse into a text behind the text that enables it to be read against itself, beyond any authorial intention. And, indeed, it has been with a novel of the 1960s, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, re-imagining the events of the novel from Mrs Rochester’s perspective.
Really, though, Mrs Rochester’s role is symbolic. She has been seen as an anti-Jane, a physical manifestation of what she could fall into were she to give in to all the worst worldly temptations. Mrs Rochester represents all that is “intemperate and unchaste” (Chapter 27).
In this, there is a hint that her “excesses” and “giant propensities” go beyond partying and a taste for the finer things in life (though even this is never made explicit) and include a sexual component.
It is not possible for a novel of the 19th century to expand upon this. In some ways, though, it is the more powerful for its merely being alluded to. Viewed from the 21st century, it is not so difficult to imagine someone being considered “mad” due to their sexual identity or the way in which they conceive of and express their gender/sexuality. It would take a century (or two) for this idea to be explored more straightforwardly in print, however.
The perceived madwoman whose perceived madness/badness stems grossly from her promiscuity is an idea developed and ruminated on in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which is to a great extent a tribute to Jane Eyre and likewise masterfully plays with suspense (exceeding it in my opinion).
It also appears in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, also including an altar scene in which the existence of a secret spouse is revealed (General Blessington). In Gray’s novel, as with Brontë, the madwoman’s personality appears to have been irreparably severed (Bertha Mason/the “hyena” and Victoria Blessington/Bella Baxter).
Astonishingly, the novel has two further acts to play out before the conclusion and here we are offered another reminder of why this is no ordinary tale as Jane receives a kind of vision telling her, “My daughter, flee temptation” and she sets off across the moors with all her worldly possessions, which she promptly forgets in the back seat of the coach in her distress.
She is “absolutely destitute” in a sequence that recalls David Copperfield’s escape from wretched London employers in Dickens’ later novel of 1849/50. Some critics have seen the alleged influence of King Lear here in Act 3’s exposure on the moors…but nature is not all hostile. Jane’s first bed for the night is the heath itself “dry…yet warm with the heat of the summer day […] Nature seemed to me benign and good, I thought she loved me, outcast as I was […] Tonight, at least, I would be her guest.” (p372)
Act Four of the novel is, to me, where it becomes the most alienating to the 21st century reader. Its concerns are not our own, and it is charged with a religious seriousness that is very rare in modern media.
At first, we have a somewhat idealistic portrait of a domestic life in which Jane experiences the childhood she never had when she is taken in at the point of expiration by the Rivers family. She gains two adopted sisters and a brother, who seem to resemble the Brontë family unit of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell. Her existence is dedicated to reading and learning German; a language, I theorise, more suited to her nature than the superficial French of her governess days.
Jane’s tranquillity is challenged by the “Calvinistic doctrines” of her “brother”, St John, who turns out to be her cousin. She inherits a fortune from her uncle, lately of Madeira, which she divides between the “siblings”, and St John somewhat despotically turns her from German to “Hindusantee” and tells her, “A missionary’s wife you shall be and must be.” (464)
Her final flight of the novel comes after her realisation that “our natures are at variance” (471). Jane’s mind is not entirely made up, however. Ostensibly, what prevents her from moving to India with St John is her lack of closure surrounding Mr Rochester, whom she fears has gone to the continent and returned to the life of his apparently roguish youth.
Jane finds Rochester maimed and blinded by a house fire set by his estranged/incarcerated wife, who has perished in the blaze. He asks Jane to marry him, which she accepts partly, it seems, because she “like[s] [him] better now when I can be really useful to you than I did in your state of proud independence.” (513)
This is a somewhat disappointing ending to a text that seemed to present such a strong-willed female protagonist whose “mission” in life, for want of a better word, seemed greater than this marriage of seclusion from the world. Rochester gets some comeuppance for his treatment of Jane(?)/his wife(?), but his treatment of Mrs Rochester is never fully addressed beyond page 347.
Ultimately, the gaps in the text and significant allusions have had to be filled in by the criticism and the novels Jane Eyre has inspired.[2] Whether this is its weakness or its strength, you can be the judge.
[1] I believe the character of Jeyne Poole in A Song of Ice and Fire to be an oblique reference to her, or perhaps it is just a coincidence.
[2] My other theory about Jane Eyre is that it inspired Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. An orphan is treated abominably by her aunt and cousin, is imprisoned as part of this (Red Room/cupboard under the stairs), is sent to boarding school, where she doesn’t get to go home during holidays and ends up in an establishment where there is a mysterious presence on the third floor (corridor). I think it checks out.
Flett-cetera 