Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a 170 year-old romance novel in which the protagonists are beautiful only on the inside, their outward unattractiveness being dunned into the reader’s poor brain at every opportunity. I have read only one other author’s romance novels heretofore — by accident (thinking they were mysteries) — and though I should like to not read another, I suppose I will have to read at least one more, let’s call it two more, in order to be fair to Charlotte’s sisters. (I do not include Jane Austen, who is sui generis, a polestar around whom lesser authors revolve.) After finishing my slog through the moors and woods in which Jane Eyre traipses, strolls, and reclines, I find that Miss Eyre is the strongest, most intelligent dunderhead I have ever read of.
I was a human being, and had a human being’s wants: I must not linger where there was nothing to supply them. I rose; I looked back at the bed I had left. Hopeless of the future, I wished but this–that my Maker had that night thought good to require my soul of me while I slept; and that this weary frame, absolved by death from further conflict with fate, had now but to decay quietly, and mingle in peace with the soil of this wilderness. Life, however, was yet in my possession: with all its requirements, and pains, and responsibilities. The burden must be carried; the want provided for; the suffering endured; the responsibility fulfilled. I set out.
Life … finds a way
The plot is easily told — the movies are probably better than the novel. The first five chapters exactly replicate (or is it the other way round?) the opening episodes of the initial Harry Potter book. Orphan lives with aunt’s family, which family is abusive and hateful towards our eponymous protagonist, who eventually escapes to a magical school and realizes an inner power beyond all expectations. Oh, wait. That’s the other book. This is the one with a crazy wife, in case you can’t remember which is which. [Spoiler Alert: … oops.]
Those of my (two) readers unable to get past Nathaniel Hawthorne’s opening frame story to get to the meat of The Scarlet Letter will likely not make it past Jane’s stay at the school of magic. I recommend the former. In Miss Eyre’s case, she stays at school becoming a teacher, leaves to become a governess at Thornfield Hall, suddenly must leave that place due to the crisis of the novel, is homeless for three days, then she isn’t, becoming a teacher again, and rich, receives an overly decent marriage proposal, has a vision — or whatever the word for an auditory vision might be — and then she goes off and, just like Odysseus, meets a dog that recognizes her (though, unlike the dog in The Odyssey, that in Jane Eyre doesn’t die [Spoiler Alert: … oops.]).
I fall into a sort of dream. Sometimes I think I am in Northumberland, and that the noises I hear round me are the bubbling of a little brook which runs through Deepden, near our house;–then, when it comes my turn to reply, I have to be awakened; and, having heard nothing of what was read for listening to the visionary brook, I have no answer ready.
Poor Helen Burns has auditory visions
Anyway….
Even the writer of the afterword in my edition admits the problematic aspects of Charlotte Brontë’s novel. I had no quibble with the improbable aspects of the plot (which my summary here elides), but the language …. Hmm.
Here is Helen Burns, a fellow inmate of the school of magic — sorry, the school for orphans — to which Jane has been sent at ten years of age, speaking of forbearance towards a harsh teacher (Helen is a ‘few years’ older than Jane).
What a singularly deep impression her injustice seems to have made on your heart! No ill-usage so brands its record on my feelings. Would you not be happier if you tried to forget her severity, together with the passionate emotions it excited? Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs. We are, and must be, one and all, burdened with faults in this world: but the time will soon come when, I trust, we shall put them off in putting off our corruptible bodies; when debasement and sin will fall from us with this cumbrous frame of flesh, and only the spark of the spirit will remain,–the impalpable principle of life and thought, pure as when it left the Creator to inspire the creature: whence it came it will return; perhaps again to be communicated to some being higher than man–perhaps to pass through gradations of glory, from the pale human soul to brighten to the seraph! Surely it will never, on the contrary, be suffered to degenerate from man to fiend? No; I cannot believe that: I hold another creed; which no one ever taught me, and which I seldom mention; but in which I delight, and to which I cling: for it extends hope to all: it makes Eternity a rest–a mighty home, not a terror and an abyss. Besides, with this creed, I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last: with this creed revenge never worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice never crushes me too low: I live in calm, looking to the end.
Helen Burns makes a singularly deep impression
I suppose I could or should give other examples, but instead I will tell you a secret. Everybody talks like this in the novel. And, since the book is a first-person narrative voiced by our Miss Eyre,* I must warn you that she, too, talks just like this. Sigh.
But … whatever. Some people (Philistines!) find the language of the incomparable Jane Austen off-putting. And a score of years has passed since the sesquicentennial of Jane Eyre’s first publication, and, one assumes, some changes to language are to be expected. So what other faults make the novel unattractive? Well, the obsession with unattractiveness, for one.
She had taken an amiable caprice to me. She said I was like Mr. Rivers (only, certainly, she allowed, “not one-tenth so handsome, though I was a nice neat little soul enough, but he was an angel”). I was, however, good, clever, composed, and firm, like him.
Rosamond Oliver finds not even a tithe of beauty in Jane Eyre
I once had a co-worker who had a fine, prominent, aquiline nose. It was a thing of beauty forever, an ice-breaking prow of distinction which gave him a distinguished profile and a confident mien. Yet, alas! One day at work I was staring blankly in no particular direction — truth be told, dear reader, I was likely under the enervating effects of the devil’s cabbage, stood torpid and stupid in consequence of consumption of marihuana, my dull visage a vapid reflection of the benighted and turbid thoughts within — in short, I was stoned. As it happened, I suppose, my gaze must have been turned in the direction of the aforementioned workaday compatriot, for suddenly he startled me out of my listless loser’s reverie with the sharp announcement that “He knew! He knew what I was staring at! I just couldn’t keep my eyes off of his nose!” and with this angry and hurt pronouncement he stormed away from the sales counter and took himself away to assuage his wounded pride and regain his equable state of mind.
That day I learned an important lesson, one which I have forgotten many times since, but which occurs to me today — when it can do me no real good, as all such teaching seems to return — a lesson best noted by the immortal Robbie Burns, but which I might state thusly: people are really torqued by their own hyenas. For I had not been staring at my friend’s nose, had not even been looking at my friend, though I do not doubt my eyes were turned in that direction. I was probably thinking only of corn chips, cupcakes, and other such delights as occur to the habitué of the hookah, yet my friend of the fine figure was convinced I thought only of his nose, because he thought only of his nose. Thus a teener with a small dehiscing spot of acne believes that the entire world’s focus is upon his popped zit. Thus does a woman who hates her hair — curly or straight — believe that tout le monde sees the lustrous integuments of her head as a blot upon good taste, a foul stain against nature, and believes that all who see her are displeased and wish (as she does) that her hair were straight or curly, as the case may be.
This sort of nonsense (to which we are all susceptible, if I be honest, to greater or lesser degree) is baked into Charlotte Brontë’s novel just as an estivating insipidity was (ahem) baked into me on that long ago day manning the cash register with my friend of the Roman nose. For Ms. Brontë, or Miss Eyre at the least, cannot pass over any notice of the novel’s heroine without remarking that Jane Eyre is plain, unhandsome, unendowed with any features of beauty whatsoever. Without getting into the question of whether the eponymous protagonist engendered the term ‘plain Jane’,† we note that at every turn where her features are noticed, remarked upon, or even present in the stream-of-oh-so-consciousness narrative she spills out, Jane’s plainness is the prime axis around which the narration revolves. In this she (author or narrator, take your pick) shows the apophenia of one who has convinced herself that she is not and cannot ever be beautiful — not to say ugly — and now can think of nothing else. This rather sad idée fixe pervades the novel like fat through steak, though the reader must chew through this and much other gristle before reaching the end of Miss Eyre’s tale.
“Unjust!–unjust!” said my reason, forced by the agonizing stimulus into precocious though transitory power; and Resolve, equally wrought up, instigated some strange expedient 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.
Jane Eyre resolves to bravely run away
Thus after she first meets St. John Rivers and his sisters, and lies abed after the horrific episode which brings her hungry and faint to their house, she hears the young parson’s judgment that, though her physiognomy is not indicative of a lower nature, she is “not at all handsome”, that “Ill or well, she would always be plain. The grace and harmony of beauty are quite wanting in those features.” Without endlessly multiplying examples, I can aver that this opinion is held by every character in the novel who deigns to note Miss Eyre’s lineaments. Further, though we will eventually be dragged to the noble if insipid conclusion that ‘true beauty lies within’ over the course of this novel’s thirty-eight chapters and (in my edition) 448 pages, it is the outward signs to which Jane Eyre’s eyes always turn, as in the opening pages where she limns her cousin as “large and stout for his age, with a dingy and unwholesome skin; thick lineaments in a spacious visage, heavy limbs and large extremities.” Indeed, the climax of the novel compares a weak vision with “tempered judgment with mercy.” Mercy indeed.
But of course one can forgive this superficial view of the world. Especially when it is flooded by the never-ending turbid stream of thought, counterthought, and repetition of the original thought that threaten to drown this book in a sort of Bizarro-world dialectic. Outward appearances matter, despite all the lip service that Jane Eyre can muster for the opposing view. Class distinctions matter, as well. Jane is threatened with poverty, and dreams up a bizarre vision of ‘honest poverty’ which almost mirrors La Rochefoucauld’s own impoverished idea of the happiness of the poor.‡ Mr. St. John Rivers will take the noble word of the Christian God to the Hindustanee, and remain uncorrupted by the untouchables he will find there.
I reflected. Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with the degradation.
Young Jane Eyre determines never to be poor, to always be rich in semi-colons at least
“No; I should not like to belong to poor people,” was my reply.
“Not even if they were kind to you?”
I shook my head: I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind; and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women I saw sometimes nursing their children or washing their clothes at the cottage doors of the village of Gateshead: no, I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.
Jane, for her own part, after throwing herself upon the mercy of complete strangers when driven almost mad with hunger (she had had only a bit of bread — oh, and some pig’s porridge — for the three or five days previous, see below), who give her a bed and bring her back to health over the course of several days, uses her first moments of restored well-being to upbraid the servant of the loving family who fed her, sheltered her, and even had her filthy clothes and shoes cleaned (by the same servant, natch). Rather than expressing thanks to the servant Hannah, Jane lays into her for her uncharitable, un-Christian attitude — for Hannah had advised the Rivers siblings to turn away the ragamuffin that came dying to their door. Hannah, is, of course, suitably chastened, recognizing her better in the proud denial of Miss Eyre to be a beggar, though that is exactly what Jane is and was. After berating the woman who cleaned her clothes, Jane announces, “That will do — I forgive you now. Shake hands.” And they do, “and from that moment we were friends.” And so ends the fateful flight of Miss Eyre from the insupportable situation she left behind.
This episode — the rash departure of Jane Eyre from Thornfield to end up practically dying on the doorstep of Moor House — this crucial episode also forms the crux of my problem with this ponderous and learned novel. I can forgive the high-falutin’ language as a voice from the past — a voice, I must confess, much more intelligent and erudite than my own. And I can forgive the mania over our heroine’s unhandsome looks. I can even forgive the snide way the poor and classless are looked down upon, which snideness is appalling to our protagonist when she receives the same from Hannah or Lady Ingram, but which Jane and her entire milieu demonstrate is entirely appropriate by every action, thought, and word. (Tsk, tsk, Jane.) All these things and more can be forgiven; the novel is beautifully written, the thoughts of the heroine are often noble aspirations to those higher things which, one hopes, eventually may raise us somewhat above the level of the apes (though one has one’s doubts). But —
It was a groveling fashion of existence: I should never like to return to it. Hiring a mistress is the next worse thing to buying a slave: both are often by nature, and always by position, inferior: and to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading.
Edward Rochester identifies the worst thing about slavery
You see, my problem is this. Jane Eyre leaves Thornfield Hall with twenty shillings and a penny, plus “some linen, a locket, and a ring” which she manages to forget in the coach that takes her away, and which loss leaves her “destitute”. Here’s the thing: Jane Eyre hails this coach and asks its destination, then asks to be taken there; upon being told that the cost would be thirty shillings, she then offers her entire fortune for the ride. I mean, … sure, she has no practice at being poor, but she has proven herself, and will prove again to be, quite a capable woman. Why does she not ask how far she can go for ten shillings? Or even for nineteen, which would have left her with twelve pennies (or thirteen, if we include the one penny she will mysteriously discover later). She will try to barter a handkerchief for food — not having the locket and ring which, I suppose, she had planned on using to start her new domicile in the distant town of —————. Jane then spends a wonderful night sleeping outside. The next day the pangs of hunger begin to derange her, and the third day leaves her prostrate and near death at the home of the Rivers kin. Sooooo…. Jane Eyre goes for perhaps five days (the coach ride takes two) with no food save for a roll and some bilberries, a begged piece of bread, and a portion of porridge destined for swine. And if she had not received succor at Moor House she would have died. Indeed, it takes several days for her to recover her wits and well-being. She sleeps outside for two nights — the first a delightful romp in her telling — and … she is so near to that bourne from which no traveller returns that it is only the godlike intercession of the Rivers that keeps her on this side of the worldly veil of tears. (Later her encounter chez Rivers will turn out to have been a bit of a deus ex machina, but let that pass.)
I touched the heath: it was dry, and yet warm with the heat of the summer-day. I looked at the sky; it was pure: a kindly star twinkled just above the chasm ridge. The dew fell, but to me benign and good; I thought she loved me, outcast as I was; and I, who from man could anticipate only mistrust, rejection, insult, clung to her with filial fondness. To-night, at least, I would be her guest–as I was her child: my mother would lodge me without money and without price. I had one morsel of bread yet: the remnant of a roll I had bought in a town we passed through at noon with a stray penny–my last coin. I saw ripe bilberries gleaming here and there, like jet beads in the heath: I gathered a handful and ate them with the bread. My hunger, sharp before, was, if not satisfied, appeased by this hermit’s meal. I said my evening prayers at its conclusion and then chose my couch.
Jane sleeps outdoors, as one does
Beside the crag, the heath was very deep: when I lay down my feet were buried in it; rising high on each side, it left only a narrow space for the night-air to invade. I folded my shawl double, and spread it over me for a coverlet; a low, mossy swell was my pillow.
Look, hunger sucks. Poverty sucks. Sleeping outside sucks when one does it from lack of choice. But … leaving to one side the complete lack of knowledge shown of actual poverty and hunger and living bereft of all comfort, I still have to ask: Why didn’t she save a single damn shilling? If she can negotiate a price of two-thirds the going rate, why not try for 60%? Heck, try for 50%. Was she so hopeful that her lost locket and ring would fetch her enough to keep her in bed and board for weeks to come that she felt she could afford to rid herself of her entire supply of actual cash? Sigh.
Anyway….
And yet….
Who am I to gainsay the ‘plain Jane’ readers of romance their delight? Their fantasy? If lying sailors can have their wish fulfillment of a faithful wife back home while they are out catting around, as Kenneth Rexroth reimagined Homer’s tale of Odysseus, why then should not ‘unhandsome’ women with no prospects be given what they want in fictional form? Of course, since Charlotte Brontë is writing in the mid-19th Century, and since this is the naissance of romance, the climax of the genre is marriage and a kid, as opposed to modern romance, where the climax is (one presumes) an actual climax.
Not that sex is ignored in Jane Eyre; it just occurs offstage. Rochester (did you think I would forget him entirely?) has a dalliance with a French opera dancer who gifts him with another man’s child. Children are born through apparent acts of God (though I am assured that this happened only that one time), and both women and men feel themselves subject to urges that are never plainly spoken of.
Speaking of unspoken urges, for some time I suspected that St. John Rivers was gay. I can still entertain that suspicion if I read passages like the following:
It is hard work to control the workings of inclination, and turn the bent of nature: but that it may be done, I know from experience. God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate; and when our energies seem to demand a sustenance they cannot get–when our will strains after a path we may not follow–we need neither starve from inanition, nor stand still in despair: we have but to seek another nourishment for the mind, as strong as the forbidden food it longed to taste–and perhaps surer; and to hew out for the adventurous foot a road as direct and broad as the one Fortune has blocked up against us, if rougher than it.
St. John Rivers turns bent, and likes it rough
Setting aside this factitious musing to take up another, the relation between Jane and St. John seems quite sadomasochistic to my postmodern eyes. She sees in him “the pure Christian” whose actions towards her are “torture”.
All this was torture to me–refined, lingering torture. It kept up a slow fire of indignation, and a trembling trouble of grief, which harassed and crushed me altogether. I felt how–if I were his wife, this good man, pure as the deep sunless source, could soon kill me: without drawing from my veins a single drop of blood, or receiving on his own crystal conscience the faintest stain of crime. Especially I felt this, when I made any attempt to propitiate him. No ruth met my ruth. He experienced no suffering from estrangement–no yearning after reconciliation; and though, more than once, my fast falling tears blistered the page over which we both bent, they produced no more effect on him than if his heart had been really a matter of stone or metal.
Now Jane and St. John both get bent. Really, Jane, wouldn’t it be easier to be respectably poor?
Thus we can trace a direct line between Jane Eyre’s “pure Christian” and Mr. Christian Grey, and the bright description of the heath, moor, and woods from Charlotte Brontë’s pen wanes into a mere 50 shades of grey.
Nothing speaks or stirs in me while you talk. I am sensible of no light kindling–no life quickening–no voice counseling or cheering. Oh, I wish I could make you see how much my mind is at this moment like a rayless dungeon, with one shrinking fear fettered in its depths–the fear of being persuaded by you to attempt what I cannot accomplish.
Jane is confined within the dungeon
But again, how can I challenge an entire genre which has brought its fictive happiness to so many? How can I cast Miss Eyre and her seminal — oops — her fructuous narrative into the Valley of the Shadow of literary Death? Though I found Jane Eyre annoying and cloying, it is an annoying and cloying work of genius.
* Spoiler Alert: Not her actual name at time of narration.
† She did not.
‡ “Le travail du corps délivre des peines de l’esprit et c’est ce qui rend les pauvres heureux.”
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