The Columbia History of the British Novel

READINGS of Jane Eyre changed the direction of English fiction in the nineteenth century and have charted the ways of discussing fiction in the twentieth. Charlotte Brontë called her book 'a mere domestic novel' lacking any 'subject of public interest.' Yet readers since its publication have been debating its politics, pronouncing on the extraordinary natures of its heroine and hero, and celebrating or questioning the political meaning of this 'mere domestic' fiction. Whether Jane Eyre is a woman's Pilgrim's Progress or a pilgrim's progress of feminism, whether its 'furious love-making was but a wild declaration of the 'Rights of Woman' in a new aspect' (Mrs. Oliphant) or the creation of a feminist myth, whether it exposes the angel in the house as a simpering construction of a male-dominated society or performs textual services for the very patriarchy it critiques, the novel stands as witness to the extraordinary and continuing ways a female writer working in the 1840s, amid revolutions in Europe and wretched poverty and Chartist protests in England, intervened in the lives of readers.

Charlotte Brontë's other novels have seemed simply to swell the progress of Jane Eyre, and the novels of her sisters to stand as curiosities-though in the case of Wuthering Heights, a curiosity of such genius that few texts outside of Shakespeare and the Bible can have provoked such vigorously different and compelling interpretations. Anne Brontë's novels are worth the reading; but, finally, they serve to represent what Charlotte Brontë challenged through the writing of Jane Eyre. Anne Brontë also presents women gazing at 'the dark side of respectable human nature.' But neither Agnes Grey nor The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, for all the harsh realism of the latter, escapes the kind of conventional fiction 'with a purpose' that Charlotte Brontë chose to produce, if at all, in a very different register. There is nothing like Wuthering Heights in Charlotte Brontë or in nineteenth-century English fiction. At once Romantic poem and realistic novel, it refuses to be a Victorian novel even as it often sounds like one-and by its end resembles one. In charting the readings of Currer Bell / Charlotte Brontë in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I will consider, at the end of this essay, Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights as commentary on the personal, political, and literary issues raised by Charlotte Brontë and her novels. -353-

Charlotte Brontë and the Condition of English MiddleClass Women

Readers need only consider the ways ideas about women and domestic life were articulated in nineteenth- century England to experience how radical Jane Eyre appeared to Charlotte Brontë's contemporaries. Mrs. Sarah Ellis, in The Daughters of England (1843), wrote: '[Love] is woman's all-her wealth, her power, her very being. Man, let him love as he may, has ever an existence distinct from that of his affections. He has his worldly interests, his public character, his ambition, his competition with other men-but woman centres all in that one feeling, and 'In that she lives, or else she has no life. '

The implications of this ideology for the novel were articulated frequently, especially after the publication of Jane Eyre, and are succinctly stated by E. S. Dallas in The Gay Science (1866). Declaring that 'woman embodies our highest ideas of purity and refinement,' Dallas offers two premises to define the work of women in fiction: (1) 'Woman peculiarly represents the private life of the race. Her ascendancy in literature must mean the ascendancy of domestic ideas, and the assertion of the individual, not as a hero, but as a family man-not as a heroine, but as an angel in the house.' (2) 'The first object of the novelist is to get personages in whom we can be interested: the next is to put them in action. But when women are the chief characters, how are you to set them in motion? The life of women cannot well be described as a life of action. When women are thus put forward to lead the action of a plot, they must be urged into a false position… This is what is called sensation. It is not wrong to make a sensation; but if the novelist depends for his sensation upon the action of a woman, the chances are that he will attain his end by unnatural means.'

It is no accident that Dallas, like Oliphant, is writing about sensation fiction, that «criminaliziation» of women that earned so many readers for Mrs. Braddon and other writers beginning in the 1860s. Charlotte Brontë did ''protest' against the conventionalities in which the world clothes itself.' She damned angels-in- the-house, and produced in the governess Jane Eyre a female protagonist who takes to the road imaginatively as a girl and then literally as a young woman, with her only goal 'the real world… [and] real knowledge of life amidst its perils.' Jane Eyre is plain and outspoken and ambitious, a person of admit -354- ted 'volcanic vehemence.' She sees no essential differences between men and women except in the ways society confines women:

Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their effort, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer… It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

Jane Eyre also has no hesitation in describing her feelings, whether of hatred or of love, to the reader and to those in front of her. She cannot 'conform to nature,' whether the definer of that nature be her Aunt Reed and Reverend Brocklehurst, or her «lovers» Rochester and St. John Rivers. To avoid hell, she tells Brocklehurst, she will 'keep in good health, and not die.' Of Rochester's desire to dress her as a lady-angel, she tells the reader: 'I never can bear being dressed like a doll by Mr. Rochester, or sitting like a second Danae with the golden shower falling daily round me.' She rejects Rivers's commands to do her duty of selfsacrifice and become his missionary wife: 'If I were to marry you, you would kill me.' His reply: 'Your words are such as ought not to be used: violent, unfeminine, and untrue.'

In a nineteenth-century context, the words are unfeminine and violent because they are spoken by a woman. George Eliot at once admired Jane Eyre and wished that its 'characters would talk a little less like the heroes and heroines of police reports.' Others writers regretted the vogue of plain 'heroine governesses' that was inspired by the popularity of Brontë's novel. Some readers, forgetting Byron and George Sand and their influence (including on Charlotte Brontë), saw in Rochester the origin of 'women's men' in fiction by women, brutes from 'the school of Currer Bell.' These critics are not fools. Rochester does speak from a very different world (and bedroom) than Ivanhoe, and speaks to Jane with a familiarity about sex and mistresses astonishing to family readers. He enters the novel by falling off his horse as the heroine watches. Soon the two are discussing their lack of physical attractions. It is not long before his bed is afire, and Jane is throwing water over it to quench the «devouring» flames. The madwoman in the attic, whose laugh accompanied Jane's rebellious protest about the «custom» of confining women to sewing and calmness, soon appears (as if from a Goth-355- ic novel) as Rochester's wife, her 'giant propensities' and 'pygmy intellect' making her insane, 'a wife at once intemperate and unchaste,' and driving her husband to incarcerate her in England at Thornfield and to seek «renewal» in Europe. That renewal involves him with a European array of mistresses before he meets Jane Eyre. That he asks her to be his woman of the conduct books-purifying and redeeming him through her love-would offer Jane the woman's ideal role, except that his need demands of her both the dependence and the inferior status of a mistress, which she will not give: 'I care for myself.'

To Victorian readers of respectable fiction, Jane Eyre was like no other. Accustomed to seek 'moral signification' (Bulwer Lytton) in their narratives, and to find the moral allegory amid a novel's incidents, they confronted in Jane Eyre 'the strength of true feeling,' or what Mrs. Oliphant called 'the natural heart,' one who does right but gives God too little credit for her own self-sustaining nature. Jane's I is the I of Napoleonic individualism, spoken out of moral strength and yet against all socially inscribed conventional female morality of the period. ('Conventionality is not morality,' the preface to the second edition thundered.) Jane's voice frightened because it speaks against social order as readers knew it; speaks against the very gender roles women were ideally expected to want to perform. Early on, in the red-room to which the young Jane is exiled after her outbreak against the injustice of the Reeds, she sees herself, in the mirror, as 'half imp, half fairy.' Imp or fairy: these are the roles in which the novel's men imagine women, and condemn or desire them. These are the confinements which Jane refuses. Her 'I am not an angel… I will be myself' is a common refrain, nowhere given more compelling, and beautiful, illustration than in the passage in chapter 24 where Rochester tells his ward Adele that he 'is to take mademoiselle to the moon' and dress her in clouds. Adele's response: 'She is far better as she is… besides, she would get tired of living with only you in the moon.' Rochester's is the language of romance, as St. John Rivers's words are the language of religion. Neither thinks of Jane Eyre as she is, no more than does John Reed or Brocklehurst. They expect her to live in their scripts, to take a subordinate role in their lives. We ought to remember that the book's title, 'Jane Eyre: An Autobiography,' is ostensibly written by a married woman ten years after her