It would be easy to build a contrast between me and my glamorous Hollywood-columnist mother. Just imagine a typical scene: me on a couch in the corner of the beauty salon at Max Factor, idly thumbing through movie magazines, while my mother’s hair is lightened to platinum, then teased, and, finally, heavy makeup is applied to her face for a television appearance. Yet my mother underwent such transformations only for her work. At home she never wore makeup, and she didn’t drink or smoke. She got up early and worked hard. In a sense, she was plain, too. “Just a plain girl at home,” is how our old Swiss housekeeper remembered her when I sought this woman out for her recollections thirty years after she had left my mother’s employ. Perhaps in the artificial milieu of Hollywood, to be plain becomes the only possible expression of authenticity.
Jane Eyre’s plain external appearance, which the novel is very insistent in keeping before us, at once hides her inner self and reflects a Wordsworthian insistence on her “soul’s immensity.” The soul is camouflaged by that plainness; yet it also shines through it in a way that it could never shine through artifice. Thus, to look at and see plain Jane Eyre, as Rochester manages to do, is to penetrate to her authentic self. Meanwhile, the reader also comes to know Jane Eyre’s soul from the inside out, drawn in by means of the character’s intense first-person narrative to her desires and resentments, her dreams and her principles, her strategies for coping in inimical surroundings, her passions, and her self-restraint. I resembled Jane in my subjectivity as well as in my appearance. I resembled her in my own intensity, ferocity, and bluntness, in my reserve and discipline, and in my sense of deprivation I also resembled her in the solace I sought in reading.
Whereas Becky Sharp throws Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary out the carriage window, Jane Eyre is introduced reading Bewick’s History of Birds, though that very book is shortly thrown at her head by the nasty John Reed. Jane has taken refuge in the window seat of the breakfast room, drawing the red moreen curtain to ensure her seclusion as well as underscore her exclusion from the family hearth, while the clear panes of glass on her other side protect without separating her from the “drear November day.” The bird book paradoxically warms her by allowing her to escape in imagination into an Arctic realm—of frost and snow and a ghastly moon. She likes stories, having listened to the housemaid Bessie’s fairy tales and “passages of love and adventure,” drawn, she later understands, from the pages of Pamela and Henry Earl of Norland. Goldsmith’s History of Rome has taught her about Roman tyrants, thus giving her the frame of reference that allows her to denounce John Reed as unjust.
I was never excluded from my family hearth. Indeed, one of my fondest early memories is of sitting on a beautiful quilted sofa in the warmth of the gas jets of our artificial fire while my mother read to me from the pages of Black Beauty, a book I then completed on my own, the first full-length book I ever read independently. When I think of reading, both being read to and reading myself, I have an image of a river, of myself flowing into stories, empathic and unbounded. In my everyday life, though, I was stern and bounded. I was also quick to decry injustice. I defended the dog against Bow Wow. I defended my mother when with her I met Errol Flynn. He was rude to her over something she’d written in her column. Placing myself protectively in front of her, I glared at him with my serious dark-brown eyes. Errol Flynn threw back his double chin and laughed. “The cub defending its dam,” he said. I was then eleven.
My mother often took me along with her when she went to interview the stars. Some—including Ingrid Bergman and Marilyn Monroe—were nice. Mostly they didn’t notice me. It was my role to sit in the corner of, say, the Beverly Hills Brown Derby and to eat my filet mignon. How terrible is that, you might ask? Well, it’s terrible, even as a child, or maybe particularly as one, to seem invisible. Once we went in a limousine to a premiere at Graumann’s Chinese. The car drove up to the entrance. Fans strained behind the ropes to see who’d be arriving. “Who’s in there, who’s in there?” they pressed as I stepped in my Mary Janes and bobby socks onto the red carpet. Well, I’d been in there. But that didn’t count.
So I understand how Jane Eyre feels at Gateshead or at Thornfield when Rochester has all his fashionable guests, who hardly know if she’s in the room. I understand her loneliness and her rage. I understand her terrible, frightening sense of deprivation—and her indomitable sense of self-worth in the face of all the neglect she experiences. When she makes her passionate declaration of love to Mr. Rochester, it is driven by her conviction of radical equality. “I am not talking to you now,” she declares to the man she believes has spurned her, “through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had
