What is 'Jane Eyre' About?

There’s a silly article by Tanya Gold in today’s ‘Guardian’ about ‘Jane Eyre'. The gist of her piece is deeply unoriginal. It is not exactly news that Mrs Gaskell’s biographical account of Charlotte Brontë is a travesty or that Haworth displays the cult of literary personality at its most fatuous. Nor is it a revelation that ‘Jane Eyre’ projects Charlotte Brontë’s fantasies about M. Heger, the headmaster of the school in Brussels where she worked. Just about everything that Tanya Gold says has already been said much more fluently and intelligently in this book.

Tanya Gold, writing in the over-heated style that masquerades as journalism in a newspaper with a circulation that continues to plummet, calls ‘Jane Eyre’ “the dirtiest, darkest, most depraved fantasy of all time”. Obviously Ms. Gold has never read the Marquis de Sade, let alone ‘Naked Lunch’. What bothers me is not her lack of originality or her attention-seeking slovenly style but her errors of fact and her failure to engage with the significance of ‘Jane Eyre’.

According to Gold: “Contemporary critics had been appalled by Jane Eyre's ‘coarseness’, but the public was thrilled and Charlotte was a celebrity.” This simply isn't true. Although there were one or two hostile reviews the overwhelming majority were very, very favourable.

At the end of the third edition of ‘Jane Eyre’ the ‘Opinions of the press’ were reprinted. They make interesting reading.

‘Fraser’s Magazine’ praised the novel for the plot and “the enchantment”. ‘Atlas’ gushed that it was “a book to make the pulses gallop and the heart beat, and to fill the eyes with tears”. ‘Critic’ adored the “riveting” plot. The ‘Economist’ praised the fresh style, characterisation, and gripping plot. The Catholic ‘Tablet’ liked its representation of the development of a mind, including “the restraint, direction, and subduing” and the “pearls of thought and sentiment” attached to the plot, concluding: “The reading of such a book as this is a healthful exercise, and we sincerely hope may prove as attractive as it must be profitable.” ‘Jerrold’s Newspaper’ concurred in finding the novel wholesome, remarking “it is edifying from its moral truth and beauty; and it is absorbingly interesting on account of the originality, vigour, and moral edification aforesaid.” ‘Jerrold’s Magazine’ liked the plot and characterisation. The ‘Morning Post’ liked the characterisation, plot and “thrilling interest…in each division or department of the story”. The ‘Observer’ thought that “The matter and the moral of the book are good” and that it was “truly of a most noble purpose”. The ‘Spectator’ applauded the “great power” of the writing and identified it as one of those novels “where minute anatomy of the mind predominates over incidents”. The ‘Sun’ thought that “the characteristic which is most deserving of commendation is the very admirable delineation and nice discrimination of power”. The ‘Morning Advertiser’ praised the intermingling of “fact and fiction, reality and romance” which maintained the novel’s “deep and unflagging interest”. ‘Era’ was thrilled to find “much of trial and temptation, of fortitude and resignation, of sound sense and Christianity – but no tameness.” The ‘Guardian’ liked the plot, the characterisation, the dialogue “and the mystery such as would baffle the keenest scented reader”. ‘Howitt’s Journal’ thought it “One of the freshest and most genuine books which we have read for a long time.” The ‘People’s Journal’ thought it an excellent read: “the moral sentiments are pure and healthy; and the whole work is calculated to rivet attention, to provoke sympathy, to make the heart bound and the brain pause.” The ‘Sheffield Iris’ applauded the novel’s style, dialogue and characterisation and its demonstration that “external beauty is inferior to loveliness of heart, and conventional accomplishments valueless contrasted with depth and originality of mind united to high moral purpose.” The ‘Nottingham Mercury’ thought that where the modern novel was concerned, “we have read few of a more thrilling, edifying, and purifying character than ‘Jane Eyre’. Without the slightest approach to cant it is eminently religious – without any strained attempts at sentimentality it is truly pathetic.” The ‘Church of England Journal’ called it “One of the best works of its class that has appeared for years”. The ‘Westminster Review’ hailed it as “decidedly the best novel of the season”.

‘Jane Eyre’ met with the approval of the bourgeoisie, across a wide spectrum of publications. It touched a chord. It was their idea of what a really good novel should be like. Tanya Gold tries, as she puts it, “to exhume the real Charlotte - filthy bitch, grandmother of chick-lit, and friend.” It’s not a new argument that ‘Jane Eyre’ is about sex, but it is NOT about sex as subversion. Notoriously, Mr Rochester has to be punished for flouting Victorian morality – symbolically castrated, in effect.

There is nothing subversive about Jane Eyre’s attitude to sex. In Vol. III, Chapter One, Mr Rochester urges Jane to be his mistress and to go off and live with him in the south of France. She rejects him. Sex outside marriage is utterly unacceptable to Jane. What Charlotte Brontë succeeded in doing was effectively and dramatically to express the values of the middle class. ‘Jane Eyre’ prizes chastity before marriage. The novel upholds religion, but it’s a middle of the road Christianity – nothing too extreme, like the type represented by the Calvinist, St John Rivers, or that of Mr Brocklehurst. Mr Rochester is punished - mutilated! - for his sexual waywardness and his first wife is killed off, clearing the way for his second marriage, to Jane.

‘Jane Eyre’ was a novel written and published at a moment of great crisis for the European bourgeoisie. The Chartist movement was its height, and soon revolutions broke out across Europe. ‘Jane Eyre’ dramatised a voice that spoke of the injustice and unfairness in society - but it was a voice that sought not the overthrow of that society but assimilation within it. ‘Jane Eyre’ is ultimately a novel about control and self-restraint. Jane seems to articulate the voice of rebellion: “it seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their utterance: something spoke out of me over which I had no control.” But that absence of restraint only occurs at the start of the novel. Later, Victorian values become her weapon against those who breach them.

‘Jane Eyre’ is about starting out as an outsider and finding your place in bourgeois nineteenth century English society. In that sense the novel replicated the actual journey of Charlotte Brontë’s own father, Patrick. He was the eldest of ten children, born to a pair of Irish peasant farmers in County Down. The children were raised as Protestants and Patrick Brontë’s journey into bourgeois acceptability went from being appointed to the post of assistant school teacher at 16, then tutor to the sons of a local vicar and then acceptance into St John’s College, Cambridge. It was at St John’s that Patrick Prunty reinvented himself as Patrick Brontë – apparently after his hero Nelson, who was created Duke of Bronté by the King of Naples in 1799. He was, in short, seriously upwardly mobile and keen to absorb the values of the bourgeoisie. He seems to have cut himself off from all contact with his family back in Ireland. Patrick Brontë ended up as a parson – a paid servant of the ruling ideology, employed to transmit it. (Nowadays he’d be working for BBC news.)

Jane starts out as “an uncongenial alien” but by the end of the novel she becomes a respectable, affluent married woman, with servants. A central aspect of the narrative is that it’s about a plain, ordinary, poor girl who succeeds in marrying a rich property-owner – a popular fantasy template which is still around today, in modern form, in modern mass entertainments like ‘Notting Hill’or ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’.

Ideologically, it promotes the idea that to join the elite in capitalist society all you need is love – not inherited wealth, property, land or business interests. Romantic love is represented as a force that supercedes social status, education, accent, behaviour, experience, expertise, knowledge, social connections, or all the other various components of class privilege. In ‘Jane Eyre’ a plain Jane, without substance, an airy nothing (Jane Air, in fact), becomes a woman of substance with a social identity

The ‘Examiner’ praised the novel for showing “how intellect and unswerving integrity may win their way, although oppressed by that predominating influence in society which is a mere consequence of the accidents of birth or fortune…in the end, the honest, kindness of heart, and perseverance of the heroine, are seen triumphant over every obstacle.”

Capitalist ideology is triumphant – helped along the way by fairy tale interventions like the apparition of Jane’s dead mother (who drops by to promote the importance of chastity before marriage) and the moment when Jane magically hears Rochester’s voice calling out to her in the night from far, far away. There is also the matter of her magical inheritance from an uncle in Madeira, who leaves her the staggering sum of £20,000. That fortune clearly comes from the slave trade, though the novel never acknowledges this. As feminism, this is akin to The Color Purple, where the route out of oppression is taken via setting up a business and inheriting land and property.

‘Jane Eyre’ is an authoritarian text in the sense that there is only one point of view – Jane Eyre’s. That was what so enraged Jean Rhys, who devoted the second half of her life to deconstructing the novel and rewriting it from the viewpoint of the supposedly mad wife. ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ challenges the iron certainties of Mrs Jane Rochester.

The title of this novel is challenging. Something is missing: the definite article. Shouldn’t it be ‘The Wide Sargasso Sea’? And where precisely is the Sargasso Sea? It’s remote from Britain. It sounds exotic. And even when you’re told where it is – “The sea is a tract of the North Atlantic Ocean lying roughly between the West Indies and the Azores, in the Horse Latitudes” – it’s still hard to get a mental hold on.

Which was the writer’s point.

Jean Rhys wrote a poem which represented the Sargasso sea as a zone of destruction and entrapment: ‘They say it’s strewn with wrecks / And weed-infested / Few dare it, fewer still escape.’ But nowhere in the novel is there any reference to the Sargasso Sea. The title is an enigma which the reader has to work out for herself.

The Sargasso Sea can mean many things. “It is a relatively still sea but it is at the centre of a great swirl of ocean currents.” It’s a zone of stasis. Columbus was becalmed in it on his first voyage. It removes (you could say) masculine power and energy. It threatens to render action inactive and mobility immobile. “Its name derives from the tracts of floating weed on its surface”. The weed is yellow. Portuguese sailors named the sea after their native sargassum weed, found growing in wells. A popular myth held that a sailing ship which became entangled in this weed would be trapped there forever.

Jean Rhys drew attention to the Afro-Caribbean colonial sub-text of 'Jane Eyre'and dramatised the point of view of the first wife. This was just one aspect of ‘Jane Eyre’ which Charlotte Brontë excluded.

There is another, which is not one I’ve come across in books or articles about the novel. ‘Jane Eyre’ was written against the background of the the Irish Famine of 1846-50, which killed as many as one million from hunger and disease. Shortly after the novel appeared, Sir Charles Trevelyan, the British civil servant in charge of Irish relief policy, published his book 'The Irish Crisis', which described the famine as “a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence”. (In fact the famine was entirely bogus in so far as there was plenty of food available to feed the starving Irish; notoriously, ships were exporting food to England from a land where the poor were literally dropping dead from hunger.) To Trevelyan, God was punishing the Irish for their inefficient ways. It was a view which slotted in neatly with the view of the English bourgeoisie that the Irish national character was defective and lacking in self-reliance. It seems to me there are strong parallels between the ideology of individualism in ‘Jane Eyre’ and the ideology that sustained the English bourgeoisie in their ruthless indifference to mass (and preventable) death in Ireland. In Vol. III, Chapter Two, Jane Eyre flees from Mr Rochester and wanders the countryside, hungry, outcast and desperate. Exhausted, she collapses, crying out: ‘I can but die…and I believe in God. Let me try to wait His will in silence.’ Providentially, her words are overheard by a man of God, she is given food and shelter, and finds Christian charity, friendship and employment. It’s a sentimental fantasy, and it’s surely no coincidence that the class which swooned with admiration over ‘Jane Eyre’ was the same one which regarded with equanimity the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Irish peasants.