isolation in the long vacation. But these women experience their alienation in a detailed and coercive social world that never submits to the will of the heroine. Indeed, the «web» (of heredity and environment) that is so stabilizing a force in George Eliot's novels makes the operation of such a will impossible. Like Brontë, George Eliot also confronted problems in using the marriage plot, and did not solve them. The drowning of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss has impressed few readers as a solution to the issues of a woman wanting a world of independent action outside of (or within) loving, nor has Dorothea Brooke's exile to London as the wife of a rising politician. Finally, the sense that a Brontë protagonist lives to say 'I feel, therefore I am' (as Patricia Spacks suggested about Emily Brontë's Catherine Earnshaw) marks a very different fictional world from those inhabited by Maggie Tulliver and Dorothea Brooke. George Eliot's subscription to certain essential differences inscribed by gender do not allow her the determined boldness of Bronte's representations. Maggie Tulliver's desire to 'learn for herself what wise men knew' grows out of -364- her social period and class, and also out of George Eliot's conviction that a woman, because she has 'a class of sensations and emotions-the maternal ones-which must remain unknown to man,' introduces 'a distinctively feminine condition into the wondrous chemistry of the affections and sentiments, which inevitably gives rise to distinctive forms and combinations' in art and literature.
The progress of Jane Eyre through the texts of novelists provides compelling witness to Brontë's power over her readers. From Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Braddon, and Mrs. Humphry Ward to Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, and Jamaica Kincaid, from filmmakers to contemporary romance writers, Brontë's women and their passionate feelings are discussed, critiqued, plagiarized, rewritten. Even a male character in Mary Ward's History of David Grieve (1890) falls into 'mental tumult' while 'measuring himself with the world of Shirley.' Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) offers a retelling of the madwoman's story from her own perspective and from Rochester's. Even though Mrs. Gaskell, in her biography, set out to portray a Charlotte Brontë who was the angel in the house, who never put writing before duty and service to others, the 'Jane Eyre' side of the author triumphed. E. S. Dallas, reviewing Gaskell's biography, noted that Brontë's 'power of analysis… was one of the principal causes that contributed to the popularity of Jane Eyre': 'It was a new sensation to see that class of feelings which regulates the relation of the sexes mercilessly and minutely laid bare upon the woman's side, and by the hand of a woman.' Rejecting the censures of Harriet Martineau and later of Virginia Woolf about the limitations of Charlotte Brontë's heroines (they live only for love, their author never noticing that women have other 'heartfelt interests'), writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have agreed with Dallas and seen in Brontë and her central protagonists the 'blows of a passionate realism' (Mary Ward) remarkable because the angle of vision is so assertively a woman's and the voice is one so determined to speak to other women, to represent them as they feel. The power of these representations Adrienne Rich aptly summarized in 1973: 'Other novels often ranked greater… But Jane Eyre has for us now special force and survival value.' The reason: Jane Eyre is a «tale» whose 'world… is above all a 'vale of soul making, and when a novelist finds herself writing a tale, it is likely to be because she is moved by that vibration of experience which underlies the social and political, though it constantly feeds both of these.' -365-
The meanings of this experience to women, whether as experience itself or as the sign of a woman writer doing revolutionary work, mark Brontë's special place in the lives of twentieth-century readers and critics. Indeed, the reading of Jane Eyre by critics signals a pilgrim's progress of feminism, though the nature of that progress has increasingly been questioned and even doubted. Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own: British Women Writers from Brontë to Lessing (1977) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic (1979) explore the crucial place of Brontë in the work of women writers, and it is a place that Jane Austen and George Eliot cannot occupy. They may speak what they think, but that thinking is always rigorously tethered to the dense social world in which their women must live, never liberated by the 'vale of soul making.'
If those vibrations of experience that Rich celebrates were the focus of Brontë's contemporaries and the reasons her work became a defining point for later women writers, the social and political environment that fed these experiences has increasingly commanded the attention of twentieth-century critics. Discussions of the political implications of Brontë's novels have rendered problematic, and sometimes compromised, the central place Jane Eyre has occupied in women's studies. From being a central liberating text, the novel has come to be seen by some as supporting the very social and gender organizations against which its protests raged, and which shocked or exhilarated earlier readers. Readers have come more and more to see that Brontë, even as she depicts the problems of women's lives in environments that allow them no independence, is through her langauge and the forms of her fictions inextricably connected to, and often complicit with, the very modes of cultural production that operate in any male-dominated society.
I started with Sarah Ellis and E. S. Dallas to indicate the challenges confronting Brontë, and to articulate, through their voices, the doctrines of 'separate spheres' that had such supervisory power over women as wives and writers in Victorian England. (Mrs. Gaskell's biography makes clear how sustained and controlling this power was.) We are now coming to see the novel as a central participant in cultural dialogues of the period of its writing, taking a role-albeit in a domestic setting-equal to that taken by a parliament or a monarch. As Mary Poovey has noted, women in Brontë's period were considered 'critical to social stability': -366-
If only women would remain in the home, men of all classes argued, work would be available to men who needed it and both the family wage and morality would be restored. The assumptions implicit in this argument are… that morality is bred and nurtured in the home as an effect of maternal instinct, and that if lower-class women were to emulate middle-class wives in their deference, thrift, and discipline, the homes of rich and poor alike would become what they ought to be-havens from the debilitating competition of the market… [Women were] moral and not economic agents, antidotes to the evils of competition, not competitors themselves.
This ideology is based on the image of the home as a sanctified and purifying sphere presided over by a maternal, nurturing woman who is untouched by the larger social and economic world. Women, after all, said Sarah Ellis, have no existence 'distinct from that of their affections'; they lack a man's world of ambition or competition with other men.
But Charlotte Brontë, in giving her women the ambition and the need to leave the home for work and in presenting them as unmarried governesses, challenged this very image of women as nurturers in the home. The governess was a middle-class, «redundant» woman, forced to work, like a man, in order to earn her living; yet she was not lower class like other servants in the house of her employment. Thus, as Poovey notes, she at once 'epitomized the domestic ideal… and threatened to destroy it.' Her work was that of a middle-class mother; her worker's position was that of a wage earner. For many readers she came to represent the dangers of women working, the 'sexual susceptibility' and 'social incongruity' of a figure crossing the boundaries of work and class and gender. (Chapter 17 of Jane Eyre, in which Blanche Ingram and other guests at Thornfield discuss governesses, perfectly illustrates this thesis, as do Victorian critics of the novel who deplored the influence such a woman might have in a home.)
What makes Jane Eyre so compelling as a cultural barometer of the 1840s, as Cora Kaplan has noted, are the ways her progress illuminates the instabilities of class and gender identities. Her 'Who am I?' and her endless questions challenge the role definitions accepted by Victorian society, question the confinement of the angel in the house, and even threaten the foundation of England. Mrs. Ellis voiced, in The Women of England (1839), a widely held belief: 'How intimate is the connection which exists between the women of England, and the moral character maintained by their country in the scale of nations.' The peo-367- ple who fear Jane Eyre, whether Mrs. Reed, Brocklehurst, Rochester, St. John Rivers, or Brontë's Victorian critics, are people who live, or want to live, in the context of unquestioned boundaries of class and gender. There is little difference, finally, among Mrs. Reed's complaint that Jane is 'unnatural,' Rochester's need to call her 'unearthly,' and St. John's label 'unfeminine.' Each adjective seeks to place her, to confine her to roles that she rejects. Each seeks to make her an angel, docile and compliant to established authorities.
Jane's individualism does not allow these confinements. She will choose for herself because she cares for herself, physically and metaphysically. It is this individualism as it is represented in the novel that now raises the most profound, and often troubling, social and political questions. The major Victorian novels are plotted as providential progresses; they depict an individual's progress toward an identity if one is male, or toward marriage as a confirmation of feminine identity and domestic stability if one is female. (Vanity Fair and The Woman in White, each with its two focal female figures, parody this tradition, and indicate how powerful it is.) Jane's insistence that 'women feel just as men feel' marks her individualism as 'unfeminine,' even masculine. (It is worth noting here that
