many Victorian readers stressed Brontë's «masculine» or «virile» strength as a writer.) Jane's connection of her discontent to the 'silent revolt' of millions like her resonateed in 1848 with awful implications for gender boundaries and for social ones. The novel's first chapter, which Cora Kaplan calls Jane's 'primal scene,' does more than present the child in revolt. In forcing Jane to see that her orphanage is also a function of social and gender differences, it represents the power politics of a woman's life. We respond at once to Jane's challenging of John Reed when he damns her as a beggar. His desire to deny her his books, his window, and his mirror indicates how males as represented in Brontë are born into a world where not to control woman's imaginations and self- constructions-their places in the hierarchies of class and gender-is to be impotent, unnatural.
Yet as Jane notes when asked if she might live with 'low, poor relations,' she is 'not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.' It matters, essentially, to be middle class. Though this statement may be that of the young girl, the mature narrator reports with embarrassment the same beliefs when St. John Rivers secures her, then nineteen, a position as a teacher: -368-
I must not forget that these coarsely-clad little peasants are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of gentlest genealogy… I felt-yes, idiot that I am-I felt degraded. I doubted I had taken a step which sank instead of raising me in the scale of social experience. I was weakly dismayed by the ignorance, the poverty, the coarseness of all I heard and saw round me… I know [these feelings] to be wrong-that is a great step gained.
The change to the present tense here tells something about the class politics that place this novel in the social discourses of the 1840s and about how much this novel participates in those politics. Jane is not allied in her own mind, except in an abstract sense, with Carlyle's workless laborers. When she proclaims to Rochester that they are equal, she means it; and her later inheritance adds material confirmation to this asserted equality. When she strives to see her equality with poor female children, she cannot forget the class differences (which St. John Rivers emphasized when he offered her the position); and the inheritance allows her to escape contact with such poverty. Like Gaskell and George Eliot, Brontë cannot imagine a secure world outside of middle-class borders. Woman in Brontë remains 'the protectress of middle-class ideals' (in Deirdre David's words about Mrs. Gaskell).
Finally, Jane's individualism, which she defines as her need for home and hearthfires and the love they promise, mandates her place in the middle-class family. (Jane's use of the hearthfire as a symbol of love and security is one of the novel's recurring metaphors). Class and economic isolation and a woman's desire for wider experience, insisted upon at the novel's beginning, disappear, replaced by courtship and romantic love and a domestic hearth. The marriages at the novel's end-Jane's and those of the Rivers sisters-bespeak the secured spaces for independent, intelligent women, away from the workaday world, that this novel celebrates. Yet what purchases this security, some readers have argued, is a legacy from an uncle in Madeira and the monies Rochester has earned in the West Indies-both places of colonialism, slavery, and economic imperialism. For Gayatri Spivak, Kaplan, and other readers, Jane's individualism and her marriage constitute an apologia for British imperialism, a politics that, through the feminization and domestication of masculine ambition and individualism, tries to cleanse colonialism of its complicity in racism and slavery. The sources of the comfort in the novel and the foundations of the private life are found in colonialism. -369-
The madwoman, Bertha Mason, has become an especially powerful site of this argument. Where earlier feminist readers saw the madwoman as Jane's 'dark double,' 'the ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to repress ever since her days at Gateshead' (Gilbert and Gubar) and the warning of what she might become if she loses her self-integrity and control, readers now see Bertha as a sign of the economic agenda of the British middle- class world that allows Jane to make her progress and her choices. Bertha Mason is a white Jamaican Creole whose existence, mad or not, has become a function of patriarchal colonizers; her humanity is obliterated by the bourgeois will to power and control-control of women and of society. For Spivak, 'the active ideology of imperialism' propels Jane Eyre toward that 'community of families' of which she and Rochester form the center at the novel's end. This community must exile Bertha in order to preserve its distinct Englishness and the hierarchical order that gives the nation meaning (and sends St. John Rivers to reproduce its ideas in India).
For other readers Bertha's larger meaning resides in comments from Rochester about her 'giant propensities' and from Jane about the relation of law to madness: 'I will hold to principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad-as I am now.' Bertha becomes the image of desire ungoverned, of sexuality outside the domestic sphere and the law, terrorizing the order of the family and thus the nation. 'Bertha must be killed off, narratively speaking,' Kaplan has written, 'so that a moral, Protestant femininity, licensed sexuality and a qualified, socialized feminism may survive.' As Poovey notes, Rochester, in recounting his history to Jane after the aborted wedding, insists on
an absolute distinction between some kinds of women, who cannot be legitimate wives, and Jane, who can. This distinction is reinforced by both racism and nationalist prejudice: that Bertha is 'West Indian' explains her madness, just as Celine's French birth 'accounts for' her moral laxity. But Jane… sees… the likeness that Rochester denies: any woman who is not a wife is automatically like a governess in being dependent, like a fallen woman in being 'kept.'
Jane leaves Rochester to remain sane. She returns when she is independent, able to express her desires-for order, love, and home. Her comments while at Morton signal her control of desire:
Meantime, let me ask myself one question: Which is better? — To have surrendered to temptation; listened to passion;… to have been now living in -370- France, Mr. Rochester's mistress… Whether it is better… to be a slave in a fool's paradise in Marseilles… or to be a village school mistress, free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England?
The language of desire has subsumed the historical material that produced Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre. For Nancy Armstrong, who regards fiction 'both as the document and as the agency of cultural history,' the Brontës 'had more to do with formulating universal forms of subjectivity than any other novelists… because they perfected tropes to distinguish fiction from historically bound writing. These tropes translated all kinds of political information into psychological terms.' The monstrous woman, signifying in the 1840s the threat to gender distinctions that so exercised Victorians, becomes in Brontë's handling detached from 'place, time, and material cause.' The West Indies, a Jamaican Creole: both become figures of desire and its suppression. For Armstrong, the significance of both Charlotte and Emily Brontë as novelists of the 1840s is located in the processes by which 'their language of the self [becomes] the basis for meaning.' The political is the personal figured domestically. In the words of Adrienne Rich: 'A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.'
Even as these readings return Brontë's novels to the world that produced them, they also remind us of how crucial, even coercive, were the traditions of fiction Brontë inherited. Earlier I noted her use of the providential plot, with its figures of personification and allegory. Bunyan and an English tradition of moral writing stand behind her novels. What should be stressed is that this tradition mandated the progress toward order- achieved in heaven for Bunyan and in marriage and domestic harmony for those citizens of Victorian novels. Forçade noted in his review of Shirley that 'English novels are set before marriage, French novels after… We know that in England… the conventions endow young girls with an independence of character, of will and behaviour, which tends rather to be curtailed when they marry.' Charlotte Brontë in her 'plain Jane's progress' (Gilbert and Gubar) does not challenge this pattern, though she uses it with some irony. She insists that women who feel as men do must thus redefine and expand women's spheres of action even as they continue to patrol moral territories with a vigor equal to that traditionally exercised by males in the political world. But the territory remains moral and domestic (and, at Ferndean, very isolat-371- ed); it does not move into the larger world that a young Jane had imagined living in.
The novel itself, as a gendered form, thus demands Rochester's weakening at the end. He must himself make a moral progress so as to be worthy of Jane, so as to know indeed what it means to be dependent-like a woman. But more importantly, he must submit to Jane's moral superiority (which, the novel insists, is her power), and that submission is figured in his crippling and blindness, in his loss of power. Jane Eyre emphasizes the centrality-and the power-of women as moral agents in the 1840s. Elizabeth Rigby in her review grudgingly noted that ' Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength, but it is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law
