Jane and the Other Mrs.

Rochester: Excess and Restraint in "Jane Eyre"

Author(s): Peter Grudin
Reviewed work(s):
Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 10, No. 2, Tenth Anniversary Issue: II (Winter,
1977), pp. 145-157
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344783 .
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Jane and the Other Mrs. Rochester:
Excess and Restraint in
Jane
Eyre
PETER GRUDIN
lane
Eyre
is a didactic novel which subordinates the values of
passion
to those of
restraint. Its central and
readily
demonstrable moral doctrine is that individualism
must be
subjected
to time-honored human conventions and that romantic
passion
cannot be allowed to
usurp
the
prerogatives
of divine law. When
Jane
makes her
crucial decision and leaves
Rochester,
this
message
is
explicit
in her stated and
unqualified
rationale for
doing
so,
and it is
implicit
in the
shape
of the
subsequent
action,
which is
designed
to show that her decision was correct.
However, clarity
is not
persuasiveness,
and an
argument
that would forbid a romance as com-
pelling
as this one must be
persuasive
indeed. If the denouement of the
story,
Jane's enrichment, liberation, marriage,
and
maternity,
demonstrates the
prac-
ticality
of her earlier
decision,
the
validity
of the
principle
that underlies this
decision is never substantiated. The novel never
really justifies
its
premises;
it
merely
and
flatly
asserts that
Jane
is correct. Were assertion the
unique
rhetorical
mode of Jane
Eyre,
modern readers would be forced to
accept
a rather unconvinc-
ing
and limited vision.
However,
Charlotte Bronte's
opinions
on
passion
and restraint are not confined
to dictum and
transparent parable
as modes of
expression.
The
specific
substance
of her
argument
is such that it cannot be demonstrated
literally,
and thus she
must
present
it
figuratively.
Within a Gothic context rich in
symbolic potential
the novel
presents
a rhetoric that
supports
its fundamental
imperative,
and the
key figure
in this rhetoric is Rochester's mad wife, Bertha. A new twist on the old
Gothic motifs of dark
secrets,
family
curses,
and monstrous or
unearthly appari-
tions,
she exists within a tradition that subverts the decorum of verisimilitude,
and other conventions as well.' Within this less restrictive dimension she func-
tions to
communicate, through symbol, analogy,
and
example,
a rationale for the
moral bases of the novel. As the
figurative representation
of
something unspeak-
able and as a
projection
of Jane's own dark
potentials,
Bertha is used to show
why Jane
must act as she does and
why, despite
the
strength
of
opposing argu-
ments and
sympathies,
the
protagonist
must decide to leave her beloved when his
prior marriage
is revealed.2
1
This freedom to
depict
erotic
subjects
is
prominent
in such
early
Gothic narratives as The Monk, and the
tension between sexual
purity
and violation is a
prime
device in the novels of Radcliffe. In fact, Gothic
fiction became a
privileged
form. Since it
depicted
the exotic and the
imaginary
rather than the real, it was
able to articulate themes not to be found in the more realistic novels of its time.
2W. A. Craik sees Bertha as "the embodiment of
ungoverned passion"
in The Bronte Novels
(London:
Methuen, 1968), p.
97. Richard Chase sees her as a
polar
element in the
widely recognized
antitheses of
characterization the novel
presents.
With St.
John
she functions as an "alternate"
image
of Jane's soul; she
NOVEL WINTER
1977
I
The literal
expression
of the basis for
Jane's
decision is
unambiguous. Although
she is drawn to Rochester
by
romantic
love,
sexual
passion, empathy
for his
dilemma,
and fears for his
future,
she leaves because she knows it would be
wrong
to
stay.
The
struggle
between
sympathy
and "conscience" is
finally
decided
by principle,
and the
particular principle
involved shows that
Jane's
conscience is both Christian and orthodox. When all other
arguments
fail,
she
decides she must ". . .
keep
the law
given by God;
sanctioned
by
man . . ."
3
and thus she leaves Rochester because God's law
prohibits adultery,
even when
extremity
of circumstance would seem to
permit
it.
This
dependence upon
an a
priori principle
seems strained in a novel where
convention is
usually
subordinated to
feeling
and intellect and where the eleva-
tion of Helen Burns and the ironic treatment of Brocklehurst have
already
established a
relatively
heterodox and flexible form of
Christianity.
Moreover,
the immediate context makes this
principle unlikely
to win the reader's
sym-
pathies.
It seems
inadequate
to the
problem
it would solve and to the
suffering
Jane's decision must entail.
In
fact,
Rochester's
opposing argument
is more
attractive,
and this is not
only
because he is on the side of
individualism, romance,
and
passion.
As recent
witnesses to Bertha's homicidal assault on her
husband,
the "'sole
conjugal
embrace'"
society permits him,
we
might agree
when he
says
that
marriage
is a
"mere human law"
(p. 404),
and therefore
imperfect
and mutable. With the
privilege
of
hindsight
we can see that a more liberal set of
marriage
laws would
have eliminated his
problem.
He also asserts that while her desertion would cause
him
pain, Jane's living
with him would harm no
one,
and we can
accept
this
without
being guilty
of historical
provincialism.
A
contemporary
heroine, Maggie
Tulliver,
faces a similar
dilemma,
and she leaves
Stephen
Guest for the
very
reasons Rochester finds
hypothetically
valid;
because to
stay
with him would be
to inflict
pain
on her friends. It is not
necessary
to summon
up
Constantin
Heger
and G. H. Lewes to see
why George
Eliot's initial
response
to Jane
Eyre
was so
negative. Repelled by
the
allegiance
to a ". .. diabolical law which chains a man
soul and
body
to a
putrefying
carcase,"
4
she found Jane's decision and the
doctrine it
generates completely unpersuasive.
represents
the "woman who has
given
herself
blindly
and
uncompromisingly
to the
principle
of sex and
intellect." Richard Chase, "The Brontes, or
Myth Domesticated," Forms
of
Modern
Fiction,
William Van
O'Connor,
ed.
(Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota
Press, 1948), pp.
102-119. Also see
Jean Rhys,
The
Wide
Sargasso
Sea
(London: Trinity, 1966).
Adrienne
Rich,
in "Jane
Eyre:
The
Temptations
of a Mother-
less
Woman," Ms., II,
4
(Oct., 1973), 68-72, 98, 106-107, sees Bertha as
Jane's "opposite"
and her "alter-
ego,"
and Bertha's madness as
suggestive
of
potentialities
of
Jane's imaginativeness (p. 72). However, Rich
sees the sexual license
prior
to Bertha's madness and the
monstrosity
she becomes as
aspects
of a rhetoric
that is
essentially
different from the rhetoric I
perceive
in the
novel,
and we differ about the
significance
of
Bertha's link to
Jane.
3
Charlotte
Bronte, Jane Eyre,
An
Autobiography,
eds.
Jane, Jack
and
Margaret
Smith
(Oxford: Clarendon,
1969), p.
404. All
subsequent
references to the novel are to this edition and will
appear
within
parentheses
within the text. References to
chapters
follow the three-volume format of this (and the
first)
edition.
4
George Eliot,
"Letter to Charles
Bray, June," [1848], George
Eliot's
Life
as Related in Her Letters and
Journals, ed.
J.
W.
Cross, 25 vols.
(New
York: AMS Pr.
rpr. 1970), I, 163.
146
PETER
GRUDIN|EXCESS,
RESTRAINT & BRONTE
The
perepeteia
that forces this
unpersuasive
decision is
precipitated by
the
discovery
of Bertha Rochester's mere
existence,
and
yet
the
ways
in which
the novel treats the madwoman
suggest
that she is
something
more
complex
and
significant
than a narrative convenience. First seen
darkly
as a
ghost,
then as a
goblin,
as
vampiric
and
lycanthropic,
Bertha never
really
loses the
mysterious
qualities
that make her
very
humanness
suspect.
In a form of the Gothic which
presents
realistic
explanations
for
supernatural appearances, aspects
of Bertha
(unlike
those of the
ghostly
nun in
Villette)
remain
beyond
the reach of realism
and literal
description.
Even when
Jane
sees her with other witnesses and
during
the
day,
Bertha remains obscure and eludes realistic
categorization:
"In the
deep
shade,
at the further end of the
room,
a
figure
ran backwards and forwards. What
it
was,
whether beast or human
being,
one could
not,
at first
sight,
tell;
it
grovelled,
seemingly,
on all
fours;
it snatched and
growled
like some
strange
wild
animal . ."
(p. 370).
The narrator's
equivocation
is no more remarkable than is her bias. Even to the
relatively
charitable
Jane,
Bertha is
essentially
subhuman, terrifying,
and
disgust-
ing,
and if her
mysterious
nature is at odds with the realistic
perspective
dominant
elsewhere,
this uncharitable attitude towards her is at odds with the novel's
pre-
vailing liberalism,
which directs our attention towards
problems
of the
day.
Where snobbish attitudes towards honest
poverty
are
presented
so as to
generate
their
contraries,
and where the
charity
school is
presented
with a Dickensian
rhetoric
designed
to
produce reform, madness,
another cause for liberal concern
in the
forties,
is seen as
something
more
deserving
of annihilation than of
charity.
This is rendered all the more remarkable
by
what we know about Charlotte
Bronte's technical
understanding
and moral
allegiances.
Bertha's
pathology
is
clearly
modeled on a then recent scientific
theory,
the notion of "moral madness"
propounded
in the thirties
by
the
psychologist James
Cowles Prichard.5 Thus
Bronte's technical
knowledge
of this
subject seems,
strangely,
to have been far in
advance of her moral
understanding.
And if this is
strange
in
itself,
it is
stranger
yet
when we note that the novelist was a devoted
disciple
of Harriet
Martineau,
who in "The Hanwell Lunatic
Asylum"
had
sought
to eradicate the
very
kind of
attitude
implicit
in
Jane
Eyre.6
It is no wonder that the novelist was
obliged
to
6 v
James
Cowles Prichard,
A Treatise on
Insanity
and Other Disorders
Affecting
the Mind
(London:
Sher-
wood, 1835).
A shorter version of this is included in The
Cyclopedia of
Practical
Medicine, John
Forbes and
Alexander Tweedie, eds.
(London: Sherwood,
Gilbert and
Piper, 1833-1835).
Prichard's
theory
included a
state he called "moral madness" in which the
patient
demonstrated traits such as ". . . intense malevo-
lence, without
ground
or
provocation
actual or
supposed,
.. ."
(Forbes
and Tweedie, II, 30).
The insane
acts, according
to
Prichard, were
exaggerations
of
propensities
demonstrated before the outbreak of mad-
ness; the condition was often
hereditary
and could result in criminal
activity
and in ". . . moral
phenomena
of an anomalous and unusual
kind,
and of certain
perversions
of natural inclination which excite the
great-
est
disgust
and even abhorrence"
(Forbes
and Tweedie, III, 31).
The
patient
could retain control of
intellectual faculties in this
"folie
raisonnante." Prichard cites one case in which the
patient
from The York
Lunatic
Asylum
had
escaped
and tried to set fire to
Bishop-Thorpe
Palace
(III, 30).
That these
analogies
are
not mere accidents is
suggested by
Charlotte Bronte's
apology
for her treatment of Bertha,
in which she
sees sin and madness as
overlapping
conditions: "There is a
phase
of
insanity
which
may
be called moral
madness . .. ," "Letter 260, To W. S. Williams,"
The
Brontes, Life
and
Letters, ed. Clement Shorter, 7
vols.
(New
York:
Scribners, 1908), I, 383-384.
Subsequent
references to this work will
appear
as "Shorter."
6
v Harriet
Martineau,
"The Hanwell Lunatic
Asylum," Miscellanies,
2 vols.
(Boston: Hilliard, Gray
and
Co.), I, 230-248. She was
particularly
hard on those who shut
away mentally
ill relatives rather than allow-
147
NOVELIWINTER
1977
apologize
for the
message
a literal
reading
of her novel seems to
produce.7
These inconsistencies can be reconciled
by
the
hypothesis
that Bertha's
primary
function is not literal at
all,
but
figurative,
and the text offers substantial evidence
for this idea. When
Jane,
in a brief and
unique spasm
of
sympathy, challenges
this
inconsistency
and accuses Rochester of
being
"inexorable for that unfortu-
nate
lady"
who "cannot
help being
mad,"
(p. 384),
he
replies
that his hatred is
not caused
by
Bertha's madness but
by qualities
connected to that condition. He
hates her for the
particular
excesses that
precipitated
the outbreak of
hereditary
madness: "What a
pigmy
intellect she had-and what
giant propensities!
How
fearful were the curses those
propensities
entailed on me! Bertha
Mason,-the
true
daughter
of an infamous
mother,-dragged
me
through
all the hideous and
degrading agonies
which must attend a man bound to a wife at once
intemperate
and unchaste'
"
(p. 391).
The mention of Bertha's mother
suggests
that
insanity
is
not the
only hereditary
curse of the Mason
family. By
nature "'most
gross,
impure, depraved,'"
Bertha is
presented
as a woman who has
purposely
aban-
doned herself to sexual excess and indiscriminate
infidelity,
who has
leapt
rather
than fallen.
Thus madness is enclosed in a Gothic context and linked to
supernatural
horror
because the
specifics
it
really represents
are
literally
indescribable,
and
essentially
foreign
to the world of
"polite"
fiction. Madness is seen
through
an anomalous
moral
perspective,
because what it
really represents
is not
worthy
of this novel-
ist's
sympathy.
The
vague
correlations Rochester's
persistent loathing forges
between his wife's former condition and the acts that
precipitate
it
are,
within the
novel's
purview,
definite
analogues.
Both Bertha's license and her
insanity represent
the
tyranny
of
passion
over
intellect,
and for a mind like Charlotte
Bronte's,
which found all sin "a
species
of
insanity,"
8
the lack of restraint
proper
to each made the difference between them
only
one of
degree.
The
very
mode of Bertha's most
terrifying
violence reinforces
this
analogue.
Her direct attacks are
always
on
men,
and the murderous
hug
in
which she enfolds
Mason,
the homicidal
grappling
which Rochester terms "the
sole
conjugal
embrace"
permitted
him
are,
within Bronte's vision,
the
just
and
particularly appropriate consequences
of Bertha's earlier career. This form of
aggression
is the
metaphorical
vehicle for the
gesture proper
to her
sanity,
the
promiscuous
embrace of the erotomaniac.
The heroine never sees these connections.
Although
Bertha remains
beyond
the realistic
expectations
and
categories
of her
mind, Jane
never
pursues
this
mystery.
The
mystery
most
important
to her is
already
solved,
and she leaves
Rochester
simply
because the secret of his
prior marriage
has been revealed. She
ing
them the benefits of a modern institution. For a substantiation of the harshness of Bronte's treatment
see Kathleen
Jones,
Mental Health and Social
Policy (London: Routledge
and
Kegan Paul, 1960), pp. 20-21.
7
In the letter to W. S. Williams Charlotte Bronte admits that
"profound pity"
should have been the reaction
appropriate
to Bertha's affliction,
and she
regrets
that she had "not
sufficiently
dwelt on that
feeling" in
her treatment of the madwoman. However,
she then connects the idea of
insanity
to the idea of sin, and
helps
to
suggest
the real
meaning
of these
seeming
anomalies. Charlotte Bronte, "Letter to W. S.
Williams," Shorter, I, 383-384.
8
C. B., "Letter to W. S. Williams," Shorter, I,
383-384.
148
PETER
GRUDINIEXCESS,
RESTRAINT & BRONTE
must also remain
ignorant
of the
larger
and more
significant parallel
in which the
link between madness and
immorality
is
only
one element.
Although Jane
may
be
in the
right
all too often for modern
tastes,
the
analogues
fashioned to link her
and the madwoman show that she is
right
here for the
wrong
reason. These
connections between
Jane
and the woman she will succeed as "Mrs. Rochester"
must now be
posited. They
are the ultimate modes
by
which Jane
Eyre
demon-
strates the
validity
of its ethical
assumptions.
II
The initial connection between Jane and Bertha is
largely literary.
The
orphaned
governess
who comes to
stay
at the venerable and "vault-like"
country
mansion
has her relatives in The
Mysteries of Udolpho
and in The Turn
of
the Screw9 as
she
momentarily
ascribes the
strange laugh emanating
from a third-floor room to
a
ghostly agent.
Thornfield reminds us of
Northanger Abbey
as the romantic
heroine is deflated
by
Mrs. Fairfax's attribution of the
laughter
to a
tippling
servant. Of
course,
the final
explanation
lurks beneath this one. It is
something
more
frightening
and
pernicious
than
any
mere Gothic
ghost,
more malicious and
purposeful,
and
yet,
within this realistic
context, just
as
mysterious.
In
fact, Charlotte Bronte's "New Gothic" creates more
questions
than it
answers.10 If the murderous
psychotic
is the
reality
that
explains
the
supernatural
appearance,
what can
explain
the
"sympathy" through
which she can
discover,
quite
early,
that Rochester is in love with
Jane (and
not with
Blanche)
or her
ability
to
express symbolically
events that have
yet
to occur?
Jane,
for her
part,
clings (somewhat incredibly)
to the idea that Grace Poole is the
hysterical
and
incendiary occupant
of that sealed-off room. Yet she seems to be drawn to it.
Secretly
dissatisfied with her life at Thornfield before Rochester
arrives,
she seeks
an
expanded
horizon
by climbing up
to the "leads" or roof of the old hall. When
she is
particularly agitated
or
restless, however,
she seeks relief elsewhere. "Then
my
sole relief was to walk
along
the corridor of the third
story
. .. and allow
my
mind's
eye
to dwell on whatever
bright
visions rose before it . . . to
open my
inward ear to a tale that was never ended-a tale
my imagination
created,
and
narrated
continuously; quickened
with
incident, life, fire, feeling,
that I desired
and had not in
my
actual existence"
(p. 132).
Gothic
imaginings give way
to
romantic
fantasy,
and
Jane's desires,
thwarted
by
her loneliness and
by
her role
as a
governess,
find their release here on the third floor. As if in
strange anticipa-
9
James specifies
the
genre
of his tale
partially through allusion, and alludes
directly
to The
Mysteries of
Udolpho
and
indirectly
to Jane Eyre
as
though
these two defined the Gothic Novel. "Was there a 'secret' at
Bly-a mystery
of
Udolpho
or an
insane,
an unmentionable relative
kept
in
unsuspected
confinement?"
Henry James,
The Turn
of
the Screw, iv. Does
James
see a connection between
Jane
and Bertha on the one
hand and his
governess
and Miss
Jessel
on the other? I see Miss
Jessel
as the
governess'
vision of the
guilty
fallen creature she would become could she actualize her desires for her
employer (whom, through
this lens of
guilt,
she sees as
Quint).
10
Robert Heilman, "Charlotte Bronti's 'New' Gothic," From Jane Austen to
Joseph Conrad,
eds. Robert C.
Rathburn and Martin
Steinmann, Jr. (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1958), pp.
118-132.
149
NOVELIWINTER
1977
tory
inversion of Bertha's
harrowings
of the second
floor, Jane
haunts the
corridor outside the lunatic's cell.
These
"bright
visions" alternate with dark ones.
Jane's
recurrent fits of
anxiety
provoke nightmares,
but these
enjoy
a life distinct from her "actual existence."
They
share the dark
symbolism
of her
paintings;
but
they
also
function, preter-
naturally,
as
prophecies
and in obscure connection with the
occupant
of the room
directly
above
Jane's
chamber. The
prophetic
element
operates
in two
ways.
Bessie's belief that to dream of a child
portends
disaster is validated when Jane
dreams of a child for seven consecutive
nights
and
then,
after the last
dream,
awakes to learn that
John
Reed had committed suicide seven
nights
earlier and
that Mrs. Reed is moribund
(II, vi).
The second
prophetic
mode is
graphic
and mi-
metic rather than
arbitrary
in its connection to what it
signifies.
Two
nights
before her
wedding
she dreams that Thornfield is
gutted
and that she is
carrying
a
wailing
child
up
to where the "leads" had
been,
to the
top
of the ruined wall.
From there she sees
Rochester,
a dark
speck disappearing
into the distance. Most
of this is a
simple representation
of what she will see when she returns to Thorn-
field
(III, x).
The
child,
repeatedly
used in the narrative as the
metaphoric
vehicle for her
fragile
and
supposedly subjectively generated hopes,11 symbolizes
the
dashing
of those
hopes
as it rolls from her
grasp.
The dream ends less
explicably
as Jane totters and then falls from the ruined battlements.
Her
waking
coincides with the
beginning
of an
experience
that is
just
as much
of a
nightmare
as the dream that
precedes
it but is more obscure in its
implica-
tions.
Jane
awakes to find a
strange
woman
emerging
from the closet that houses
her
wedding apparel.
As she recounts this to
Rochester,
some
twenty-four
hours
later,
she tells how she had tried to reconcile her visitant to
reality by addressing
her as
"Sophie,"
one of the servants. This is not
"Sophie,
. . . not
Leah,
...
not Mrs.
Fairfax;
. . ."
(p. 357).
Like
James' governess, Jane
is
privy
to a vision
that conflicts with the
givens
of her known world. The
apparition
is so
strange
that common
language proves inadequate:
"It
seemed, sir,
a
woman,
tall and
large,
with thick and dark hair
hanging long
down her back. I know not what
dress she had on: it was white and
straight;
but whether
gown,
sheet,
or
shroud,
I cannot tell
[my emphasis]."
It is no wonder that Jane
credits the
reality
of this
ghostly
visit
only
after she has found a
tangible vestige
of it the next
morning
(the
torn
veil)
and that Rochester can
ultimately
convince her that all that she
saw was Grace
Poole,
distorted
by imperfectly dispelled nightmare.
Although
Rochester's
explanation
is false and
self-serving,
his
perception
of
the traumatic
quality
of the
experience grants
an
important insight.
Jane's
experience
is more like the
subjectively generated
vision than it is like
objective
1 In the face of Rochester's
plan
to
marry
Blanche
Ingram, Jane suppresses seemingly
unfounded
hopes:
"And then I
strangled
a new-born
agony-a
deformed
thing
which I could not
persuade myself
to own and
rear . . ."
(pp. 305-306). Later,
her doubts
persist
even as she
prepares
her trunks for a
honeymoon as
"Mrs. Rochester": "Mrs. Rochester! She did not exist: she would not be born till tomorrow,
some time
after
eight
o'clock A.M.; and I would wait to be assured she had come into the world alive, before I
assigned
to her all that
property" (p. 347).
After the
discovery
of Rochester's
marriage
she tries to
bury
her
love for him and the
hopes
based
upon
it: "I looked at
my
love: that
feeling
which was
my
master's-
which he had
created;
it shivered in
my heart, like a
suffering
child in a cold cradle; sickness and
anguish
had seized it: it could not seek Mr. Rochester's arms-it could not derive warmth from his breast"
(p. 374).
150
PETER
GRUDINIEXCESS,
RESTRAINT & BRONTE
waking perception;
it is as
though
Bertha were a creation of her own subcon-
scious mind.
Moreover,
the
question
of
perspective
here has another
significant
element. The
ghastly
visitant
puts
on
Jane's wedding
veil. This is both a dim
lunatic rehearsal of her own desecrated
nuptials
and a charade
(parodic
of the
games played by
the
guests
at
Thornfield),
one which
Jane
cannot
read,
a
staging
of the cause
underlying
the
impending
abortion of Jane's
wedding. Admiring
herself in this
garb,
Bertha turns to the mirror. This is the medium
through
which
Jane
first
glimpses
those
veiled,
discolored features.
Turning,
Bertha rends the veil in
two,
advances on Jane and snuffs out a candle
under her
nose,
as Jane lies in the
very
bed Bertha will later
ignite
when she
burns down the hall. The mad woman has a
symbolic
sense.
Perhaps,
however,
the
symbolism
of the scene transcends her mad consciousness. The mirror has
obvious
symbolic possibilities,
and the end of the
episode suggests
a direction
that leads to some
explication
of this
symbolism.
As Bertha leans over
her, Jane
finds the horror of this
presence
unbearable and sinks back into unconsciousness:
".
. for the second time in
my life-only
the second time-I became insensible
from terror."
Jane's emphasis
is not
gratuitous,
but
suggests
a
parallel
without
which elements of her
prophetic
dream and traumatic
waking
would be
inexpli-
cable. The
implication
of a first such
fright
directs the reader to
return,
as
Jane
had
some months
earlier,
to Gateshead-hall-to
Jane's fright
in the red-room.
III
As soon as this direction is followed it becomes clear that
insensibility precipi-
tated
by
terror is not the
only
basis for
comparison
between the two
episodes.
The terror involved
is,
in both
cases,
caused
by Jane's perception
of an
unearthly
visitant, and,
in
fact,
both are variations of the old motif of the haunted room.
Whereas in the second
episode
Jane is haunted
by
a
prisoner
who has
escaped
incarceration,
in the first it is
Jane
who is locked
up,
and what she
eventually
learns is more
directly
related to a
knowledge
of herself than to a solution of
other
mysteries.
Locked in a room she believes to be haunted
by
the
presumably benign
but
nonetheless
terrifying ghost
of her
uncle,
the child is startled first not
by
a
ghost
but
by
her own reflection.
Returning [from trying
the locked
door]
I had to cross
before
the
looking-glass;
my fascinated glance involuntarily explored
the
depth
it revealed. All looked
colder and darker in that
visionary
hollow than in
reality;
and the
strange
little
figure
there
gazing
at
me,
with a white
face
and arms
specking
the
gloom,
and
glittering eyes of fear moving
where all else was
still,
had the
effect of
a real
spirit:
I
thought
it like one
of
the
tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp,
Bessie's
evening
stories
represented
as
coming up
out
of lone, ferny
dells in
moors,
and
appearing before
the
eyes of
belated travellers.
(p. 12)
151
152
NOVEL WINTER
1977
The child sees the mirror as another dimension and herself in
otherworldly
terms,
as
spectral ("spirit," "phantom"),
as demonic
(there
is
nothing
"cute" about an
"imp"
in the Bronte
lexicon)
and as
potentially
destructive: the final
image
is of
the
ignis fatuus
or
will-o'-the-wisp,
a
dangerous
creature of folklore that is used
with considerable added
significance
later in the novel.
What the child intuits and understands via these
metaphors
the mature nar-
rator
interprets
as social alienation.
Reviewing
the less immediate causes of her
punishment,
she finds her relatives
partially justified
in their attitudes. She
realizes that she was ". .. a discord in Gateshead-hall . . ." and that the Reeds
could not have been
expected
to love ". .. a
thing
that could not
sympathize
with one
amongst
them;
a
heterogeneous thing
... a noxious
thing, cherishing
the
germs
of
indignation
at their
treatment,
. . ."
(pp. 13-14). Through
mature
empathy
she understands how Mrs.
Reed,
bound
only by
a
promise
to her
dying
husband,
must have found the maintenance of "an
interloper
not of her
race,"
"an
uncongenial
alien intruded on her
family group,"
most irksome. It seems
appropriate
that this alien creature should
eventually
be shut
away,
where she
could not
damage
or infect the rest of the household.
Even if we
grant Jane
some
pride
in her
heterogeneity,
and discount some of
this mea
culpa
as
typical
of her
penchant
for self-doubt and self-condemnation,
her account of the
general
situation at Gateshead is valuable because it reminds
us that our
perspective
is
privileged,
that normal
people
like Mrs. Reed cannot be
expected
to
sympathize
with
Jane
as much as we do who are in her confidence.12
This
helps
to shed new
light
on the immediate cause of
Jane's
incarceration. She
is locked
up
because of a
provoked
and
largely justified
assault on her cousin
John
Reed.
However, justification
does not
mitigate
the force of irrational
fury
that makes her attack so
devastating:
". . . he had closed with a
desperate thing
. I received him in frantic sort. I don't
very
well know what I did with
my hands,
. . ."
(p. 8).
"The fact
is,
I was a trifle beside
myself;
or rather out
of
myself,
. . ."
(p. 9).
Bessie and Abbot are more direct: "What a
fury
to
fly
at
Master
John!
. . . Did ever
anybody
see such a
picture
of
passion!" (p. 8);
"She's like a mad cat"
(p. 9).
Even the
relatively sympathetic
Mr.
Lloyd,
who
examines her after her
"species
of fit" renders her insensible in the
red-room,
has
to concur with the
general opinion.
He
suggests
a
change
of air and scene because
Jane's
"'. . . nerves
[are] not in a
good
state'"
(p. 25).
This is the
apothecary's
diagnosis.
What would his
prognosis
have been had his
prescription
been
ignored?
This
picture
of the child
Jane
as
mentally
disturbed is
sharpened by
her own
conjectures
about what others
think,
and later
by
Mrs. Reed's
persistent
doubts.
The child thinks that her aunt must find her ". .. a
precocious
actress . . . a
compound
of virulent
passions,
mean
spirit,
and
dangerous duplicity
..."
(p. 16),
and that Abbot must
give
her credit for
being
". .. a sort of infantine
Guy
Fawkes"
(p. 26).
These
opinions
are
partially
corroborated and the
image
of
the
incendiary recurs,
less
facetiously, years
later when Mrs.
Reed,
on her death
bed, recapitulates
the first nine
years
of
Jane's
life: "'You have a
very
bad dis-
12
v Kathleen Tillotson,
Novels
of
the
Eighteen-Forties (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 301,
and Craik, p.
78.
PETER
GRUDINIEXCESS,
RESTRAINT & BRONTE
position,
. . . and
one,
to this
day
I feel it
impossible
to understand: how for
nine
years you
could be
patient
and
quiescent
under
any
treatment,
and in the
tenth break out all fire and
violence,
I can never
comprehend'" (p. 300).
In the tenth
year
of the second decade of
Jane's
life "fire and violence" break
out
again,
this time to
ignite Jane's
bed and burn down Thornfield Hall. Of
course, Jane plays
no
part
in this. She is far
away,
her
passionateness (the
one
flaw she confesses to Mrs.
Reed) partially quenched by
the
society
of the Rivers.
Despite
the limited
reliability
of sources like Mrs. Reed and
Abbot, however,
these
points
of view
conspire
to show that
Jane's "passionate"
nature has a
darker side.
Moreover,
the structure of the novel
presents
a set of
analogies
that
is difficult to dismiss. The loss of restraint,
the
extraordinary
force of
passion
that allows this diminutive child to
prevail physically
over a
larger antagonist,
the incarceration with its
implications
of
heterogeneity
and
alienation,
the
fright
brought
on
by
an
image
of an
other-worldly being
reflected in a
mirror,
the
dangerous
condition of the child's
nerves,
all of these
join,
with
shocking
incon-
gruity,
Jane
Eyre
to the
thing
in the attic at Thornfield.
Both the demonic
spectral
reflection that
frightens
Jane from the
"visionary
hollow" at Gateshead and the
fiendish,
ghastly, vampiric figure,
veiled and
reflected,
that traumatizes her at
Thornfield, although they
are
literally
distinct
enough,
function as
progressive stages
of the same
symbolic figure.
The child's
reflection is
potential,
the monstrous reflection is
actualization,
and
together they
form a
pattern
and a
meaning
that is sui
generis
but still
comparable
to other
nineteenth-century
creations. The
relationship
here is similar to that of Dorian
Gray
and his
portrait
or of
James' Spencer Brydon
and what he meets in the
vestibule of the
Jolly
Corner. Dorian sees the
picture
of what he has
really
become;
Brydon
meets the horror of what he
might
have been (and
this
horror,
like
Bertha,
is
dangerous
and
aggressive).
For
Jane,
Bertha is both
example
and
warning
of the
possible products
of what the
protagonist
holds latent within her.
A
primary figure
in the rhetoric of
Jane
Eyre,
Bertha Rochester is
exemplum
couched in
hyperbole,
the
grotesquely exaggerated symbolic
face of what Jane
herself could
possibly
become.
This connection creates an
incongruity
that is
shocking
but consistent with the
novelist's
penchant
for antithesis.13
Moreover,
the demure
governess
retains
tokens of that
passionate
and even violent child. She exhibits a kind of violence
even in restraint. She can fend off Rochester when he is
overly
amorous
by
employing passion
as its own
remedy;
she can crush his hand
"vigorously,
and
thrust it back to him red with the
passionate pressure" (p. 339).
Rare demon-
strations like this are reinforced
by
a choice of
imagery
that is
strikingly
vivid
even for the most unconventional heroine: ". . .
conscience,
turned
tyrant,
held
passion by
the
throat,
told
her, tauntingly,
she had
yet
but
dipped
her
dainty
foot
in the
slough,
and swore that with that arm of
iron,
he would thrust her down to
unsounded
depths
of
agony" (p. 379).
She can endure ". . . one vital
struggle
13
Margot Peters, Charlotte Bronte, Style
in the Novel
(Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1973), pp.
117-121. Peters extends the antithetical natures of Bronti's
style
to her
patterns
of characterization, but
makes no
special
note of Bertha's
place
in this
design.
155
NOVELIWINTER
1977
with two
tigers-jealousy
and
despair:
. . ." and have her "heart torn out and
devoured"
(p. 233).
Her
imagination expresses
the
suppression
of her
hopes
as
infanticide: "Then I
strangled
a new-born
agony,
a deformed
thing
which I could
not
persuade myself
to own and rear"
(pp. 305-306).
The violence
proper
to these
imaginative processes
rivals the actions of the monster that can
only growl
and
laugh. Although employed
in the service of restraint and
duty,
such rhetoric has
little
kinship
with
contemporary
fiction and finds
appropriate comparison
with
the
speeches
of
Lady
Macbeth.
Obviously,
Jane's
violent
propensities
are
sublimated,
and remain so. It does
not
follow, however,
that the abstract characteristic
underlying
both actual and
imaginative violence,
her
passionateness,
is not in
very
real evidence
throughout
the book. In
fact,
the conflict between this
quality
and her
strong
sense of moral
duty
forms the thematic crux of the novel
(her
decision to leave
Rochester),
and
the
specific grounds
for this conflict are
delimited,
once
again, by
the
relationship
between
Jane
and Bertha.
The
general significance initially suggested by
the motif of the mirror is nar-
rowed
by
the motif of the
wedding
clothes,
which Bertha tries on in
Jane's
chamber. As
Jane arranges
them,
the
day
after her
"nightmare,"
she seems
already
oblivious to all of the connotations
they
have
acquired
via Bertha's
infectious contact. To
Jane they represent only
her future
state,
a condition so
beatific that her
consistently
incredulous and
pessimistic
nature must find the
garments untrustworthy symbols. They signify
"Mrs. Rochester,"
and the latter
is a
being
who isn't "born
yet" (but
who
actually
is
alive, and,
after her
fashion,
well at
Thornfield).
Less obtrusive is a second
irony.
She sees these clothes as
"wraithlike . . .
[a]
white dream . . ." and
they give
out a ". .. most
ghostly
shimmer"
(p. 347).
Is this
imagery
a subliminal
vestige
of the
figure
dressed in a
".
.. gown, sheet,
or shroud . .." the
previous night?
The medium of that
spec-
tral
vision, moreover,
returns to enrich and
strengthen
the
import
of the
wedding
clothes. Dressed in them before
descending
to breakfast on her
wedding day,
the
modest
governess
is
prevailed upon
to look at herself in the
glass,
and wonders
how she has been transformed into ". .. a robed and veiled
figure,
so unlike
[her]
. . . usual self that it
[seems]
. . . almost the
image
of a
stranger" (p. 362).
To the
stranger
who had robed and veiled herself in these
garments
earlier
they
represent, primarily,
the
past.
To
Jane they represent
the
future,
and within the
scope
created
by
the idea of the
wedding,
this
past
and this future become in-
volved with each other. The idea of sexual
impropriety
that lurks beneath Bertha's
madness is the essential element in the
temptation
Jane
is about to face. After
the
"impediment"
to the
wedding
has been
unveiled,
after she has seen the
"ghost"
by daylight, Jane
must confront a
devastating temptation
to
step beyond
the conventions
prescribed
for sexual behavior. Rochester
proposes
that she live
with him out of
wedlock,
and in a scene in which his actions and
impulses bring
him to the
verge
of actual
rape14
Jane's
passions
are aroused as well. It is at this
moment that she must close
with, subdue,
and then lock
away
her romantic and
14 v
Inga-Stina Ewbank,
Their
Proper Sphere (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard
University
Press, 1968), pp.
192-193.
154
PETER
GRUDINIEXCESS,
RESTRAINT & BRONTE
excessive
passionateness,
the side of her
make-up
incarnate,
with all its eventual
moral
degradation,
in Bertha.
The
message may
seem
cryptic,
but it is
merely oblique
and
quite
consistent
with the evasive tactics
provoked by
the strict
literary
decorum of the
period.
In
fact, given
this
strictness,
Jane
Eyre
is
really quite
a bold
novel,
and it is not
surprising
that some
contemporaries
found it "coarse." Its
very
frankness
grants,
because of the historical
context,
considerable
emphasis
to what it does
say
liter-
ally
about Bertha's
biography
and about
Jane's temptation,
and Charlotte
Bronti
would have found it not
only dangerous,
but
unnecessary,
to dot all of the "i"s
and cross all of the "t"s.
This is one reason
why
she cannot inform her
protagonist-narrator
of
meanings
available to the reader. Jane is an
open
narrator who tells us all she
thinks,
knows
and feels. Were she aware of the connections between herself and Bertha and of
their
meanings,
she would have to make us aware of them as
well,
and she would
have to do this
explicitly.
Thus she would
directly challenge
the
very
conventions
the novel's
relatively
obscure
symbolism
seeks to subvert.
Moreover, Jane
is the
heroine of a Victorian novel. She
may
be
unorthodox, bold,
and
intellectually
independent,
but the link with the
thing
in the attic is
beyond
her
imaginings.
It is
too lurid a
picture
for the
eyes
of a heroine who must retain some innocence
along
with her virtue. When faced with her crucial
decision, therefore,
she has to
rely
on an
argument
that seems
inappropriate,
if not forced and
inadequate:
an un-
considered, sudden,
and inflexible
allegiance
to a
historically
limited
interpretation
of divine law.
The novel itself has
posed
a far
stronger argument,
one that finds its
strength
in
depiction
rather than in
assertion;
and if this
argument
never reaches the
protagonist's consciousness,
it nevertheless does invade her
language.
The novel
insists that
principles
"sanctioned
by
man" do not
persist simply
out of mindless
repetition. Through
the
figure
of Bertha this book insists that when a woman
moves
beyond
the
parameters society
has established for sexual behavior,
she
steps
off into an
abyss, or,
as
Jane puts
it in
speaking
of
unrequited
love,
she
follows an
ignis fatuus
into ". . .
miry
wilds,
whence there is no extrication"
(p. 201).
As she leaves
Thornfield,
quite
oblivious to the
larger implications
of
her
figure
of
speech,
she insists: "I will hold to the
principles
received
by
me
when I was
sane,
and not mad-as I am now. . . .
They
have a worth-so I have
always
believed;
and if I cannot believe it
now,
it is because I am
insane-quite
insane"
(pp. 404-405).
IV
"What would
Jane Eyre
have
done,
and what would our
sympathies
have been
had she found that Mrs. Rochester had not been burnt in the fire at Thornfield?
This is rather an awkward
question."
15
Here Leslie
Stephen, writing
in 1877,
16 Leslie
Stephen,
"On Charlotte Bronte,"
The Cornhill
Magazine (December, 1877), pp. 723-729, as reprinted
155
NOVEL WINTER
1977
suggests by synecdoche
what
only idolatry
can
deny:
the
plot
of Jane
Eyre,
from
Jane's departure
until her
marriage,
is one of the most
mechanical,
improbable,
and melodramatic to be found in
any
admired and
enduring
novel.
Stephen
is also
saying,
of
course,
that
only
felicitous accident makes the
happy
resolution
possible
-that the
happy ending
is not justified. Where the letter
fails, however,
the
figurative pattern
succeeds. The extra-literal structures of the last
portion
of the
novel do create a
justification for the denouement.
This
pattern includes,
first of
all,
conventional and
relatively
available
symbolic
elements. As Jane leaves
Thornfield,
fire and
passion give way
to
ice, deprivation
and restraint.
Wandering
on the moors she almost dies of
hunger
and of
cold,
and
her
salvation,
by
St.
John Rivers,
turns out to be a
figurative
revival of these
sufferings.
The
frigid imperiousness
of this
"iceberg"
of a man would
deprive
her
of all human
warmth,
and would
subject
all of her
passion
and her
very
sense of
individuality
to the
tyranny
of a
demanding
creed. She
nearly
succumbs to
this,
the most formidable assault she has to endure. In
fact, although
the
discovery
that
she has relatives and the fortuitous advent of an inheritance
may
make her inde-
pendent
and more
equal
to a weakened
Rochester,
she is no match for St.
John.
It takes the deus-ex-machina summons from Ferndean to save her from certain
defeat and
bondage
after the months
spent
in and around Moor-House have
helped
to
purge
her of her romantic individualism and willfulness.
The
figurative import
of Rochester's
sufferings
is more obvious. His
purgatory
is one of fire. We
may
choose to see him as
figuratively
castrated at the end of the
novel,l6
or see in the
cutting
off of a
hand,
the
plucking
out of an
eye,
a
punish-
ment
Biblically appropriate
to his
crime.l7
In
any
case he is
punished,
he is
humbled,
and he is rendered submissive to Christian law and a Christian God at
the end of a novel
which,
in direct
opposition
to
Wuthering Heights,18
seems to
end
by subjugating
romantic individualism and
paganism
to Christian doctrine.
However,
supplementary implications
are also at work. The
redemptive process
that ends with Rochester's conversion and reward
begins
with his mutilation and
with his active
participation
in a
Coleridgean
scheme. When Thornfield burns he
rescues the servants in accordance with noblesse
oblige
and the standards of
Byronic
heroism.
When, however,
he climbs
up
to the leads to save his mad
wife,
his action is
something
more than this: it is total
selflessness,
for he could
only
gain
from Bertha's death. This moral and disinterested act coincides with the
removal of the albatross
(if
not with the end of his
punishment)
as Bertha
leaps
from the
burning
wall and renders Rochester a
widower, eligible
now to
marry
Jane.
Bertha's final
acts,
like the
experiences
of
Jane
and
Rochester, carry figurative
in Miriam Allott, ed. The
Brontes,
The Critical
Heritage (Boston: Routledge
and
Kegan Paul, 1974),
pp. 413-423; p.
421. This is
Stephen's reply
to Swinburne.
16
Chase, p.
108.
17
Joseph Prescott, "Jane Eyre:
A Romantic
Exemplum
with a Difference," Twelve
Original Essays
on Great
English Novels, ed., Charles
Shapiro (Detroit: Wayne
State
University Press, 1960), p.
94.
18
Peter D.
Grudin, "Wuthering Heights:
The
Question
of
Unquiet Slumbers,"
Studies in the Novel, VI, 4
(Winter, 1974),
389.
156
PETER
GRUDINIEXCESS,
RESTRAINT & BRONTE
force,
and this
develops
not out of Biblical allusion or Freudian
interpretation
but
from the closed
system
of the novel's
symbolism. Finally
successful in her
pyro-
maniac ambitions, Bertha
begins by setting
fire to her own room and then to the
bed in the room
below,
a bed that is now
empty. Climbing up
to the battlements
of the
hall,
she is
finally caught
in the web of her own
crazy design,
and so
creates a
parable
of how license and violence must
eventually
turn
upon
and
destroy
their
perpetrator.
But there is a further and more
particular significance
here.
Bertha,
who must die so that Rochester can
marry Jane,
who lives and then
is
destroyed
as
Jane's perverse surrogate
in an inferno of fire and
violence, sig-
nals,
in her fatal
leap,
both the mode of her own moral decline and the
perfection
of
Jane's
moral
development.
Just as this
leap finally explains
the fall that had
ended
Jane's prophetic
dream and thus recalls the remarkable connections be-
tween
Jane
and
Bertha,
it also
symbolizes
the final destruction of all the
deep,
un-
recognized,
and
dangerous potentials
which it has become
Jane's destiny
to
quell.
With all this in view the criticisms
posited
at the
beginning
of this
essay
become irrelevant.
Despite
the realistic
expectations
set
up by
the Dickensian
treatment of Lowood and
by
the heroine's
very plainness,
realism ends and a
Gothic,
surrealistic and
symbolic
context
begins
when the novelist turns to
Bertha.
Questions of verisimilitude and liberalism are
inapplicable
to the treat-
ment of madness
here,
since madness is not at issue but is instead the
persistent
metaphor
for sexual license in a woman.
Moreover,
if the
discovery
of Bertha's
existence and her ultimate removal seem to be melodramatic conveniences, they
do
carry
thematic
weight.
If,
finally,
Bertha can be seen as the
hyperbolic
emblem
and ultimate
stage
of the adulteress'
progress,
she is most
effectively significant
in her
particular role,
that of
Jane's
"secret
sharer,"
a substitute self who realizes
and suffers for all the
dangerous potentials
of the
protagonist's
character.
This rationale for
Jane's
decision to leave Rochester
supplements
the "diaboli-
cal law" cited
by
Eliot. In the
end, however,
the new
rationale, despite originality
and
power
of
expression,
is almost as conventional as the old one.
Although
some
latitude and
potential
for salvation is offered to the
sexually
licentious
man,
Charlotte Bronte's
independence
of
thought
and
incipient
feminism do not ex-
tend such
charity
to the woman who
transgresses society's
code for feminine
modesty
and restraint. Sexual license in a woman is
unforgivable,
irreversible,
and
literally unspeakable.
It carries with it its own
wages,
effects so horrid that
the heroine can
only glimpse
them
through
a
veil,
one rent for the reader. How-
ever,
although
it shares these
prescriptions
for feminine conduct with most of
those novels we think of as
"Victorian,"
Jane
Eyre
differs from these in one
important aspect. Positing
a
respect
for the
power
of eros that more modern and
candid novels
simply
cannot
muster,
this book refuses to base its
emphatic
moral
doctrine
upon
untried
assumptions. By illustrating through
Bertha the conse-
quences
of unrestrained
passion,
and
by linking
Bertha to
Jane,
this novel
substantiates,
by
illustration,
the
premise upon
which its didacticism is built.
157