Becky’s selfhood is less absolute than Jane’s, but her powers are the same: she transforms every great house she enters, and by the end of the novel has become an inadvertent catalyst of social revolution.. . . By the end of the novel Becky has directly or indirectly killed off all the dominant Regency bucks who obstructed the coming of the new Victorian era. . . The orphan with all her dangerous magic, has functioned as the agent of benevolent change.
I quote from Auerbach because I find her theories persuasive and also hope to show the rhetorical power of good criticism, the ways it can expand a work’s range of meanings. Over the forty years I have been professionally involved with Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair, part of the pleasure of rereading these novels has been the changing critical lenses through which they’ve been viewed. Especially in the case of Jane Eyre the successive approaches of modernist/new critical, second-wave feminist and third-wave feminist/postcolonial critics have radically altered readers’ understanding of this novel.
In the 1960s, the years of my undergraduate and graduate school education, Jane Eyre’s “stock,” as one of my grad school professors startled me by calling it, was way down, and it was accorded far less literary value than was Wuthering Heights. Neither work is included in F. R. Leavis’s “great tradition” of morally serious English fiction (his influential critiques appeared in book form in 1948), but the latter at least gets a nod for its idiosyncratic brilliance. Asserting in a one-paragraph “note on the Brontës,” that “it is tempting to retort that there is only one Brontë,” Leavis famously dubs Wuthering Heights “a kind of sport”—a work of quirky genius beyond the pale of tradition—while begrudging only “a permanent interest of a minor kind to Charlotte.”
Leavis himself was not afraid to be quirky, but be this as it may, his preference for Emily over Charlotte is echoed in most of the critics, writing from the twenties into the fifties, I was assigned to read. Kathleen Tillotson grants Jane Eyre a chapter in Novels of the 1840s, but Dorothy Van Ghent chooses Wutherings Heights as the Brontë novel to discuss in The English Novel: Form and Function, as does Arnold Kettle in Introduction to the Novel. Edwin Muir uses Wuthering Heights as his model of exemplary dramatic structure in The Structure of the Novel, deeming it “more impressive” than Jane Eyre because the balance in it “of freedom and necessity is held more tautly,” whatever that means! And then, of course, there is the influential judgment of Virginia Woolf in The Common Reader, from which I now quote at greater length:
Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre, because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote she said with eloquence and splendour and passion, “I love,” “I hate,” “I suffer.” Her experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there is no “I” in Wuthering Heights. There are no governesses. There are no employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Emily was inspired by some more general concept. The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked out on a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it into a book.
The verdict seemed decisive: Jane Eyre is earthbound, Wuthering Heights transcendent; Jane Eyre is a work of power but also self-indulgent fantasy and emotion; the “impersonal” emotion of Wuthering Heights (remember T. S. Eliot’s authoritative pronouncement that art must be impersonal) achieves a higher level of truth. Wuthering Heights is also deemed superior because its passion is contained within the novel’s exquisite narrative double frame: the stranger Lockwood narrating the tale he has heard from the family servant Nelly, through whom we hear the aroused voices of Heathcliff, the Earnshaws, and the Lintons, loving and hating with their unbridled intensity. It was studying Wuthering Heights as well as the novels of Henry James and Ford Madox Ford that I understood the concept of the unreliable narrator. Wuthering Heights brilliantly confounds as a puzzle of enigmatic boxes within boxes, of rival subjectivities, thereby morphing into a modernist text, while Jane Eyre, its stock down on the modernist/new critical exchange, grows ever more awkwardly Victorian.
Then, on or about October 1973, all this changed. It was Adrienne Rich who flung down the gauntlet. In “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman,” she sets forth a totally different heroine from Virginia Woolf’s creature of self-delimiting passions. To Woolf’s ironic, arguably catty pronouncement—“always to be a governess, always to be in love is a serious limitation in a world which is full, after all, of people who are neither one nor the other”—Rich offers an indignant corrective: “Always a governess and always in love? Had Virginia Woolf really read this novel?” Not only is Rich’s Jane a complex alternative to Woolf’s pining impassionata; Rich also challenges Woolf on the basic grounds of what the self, especially the female self, should be and do. Jane Eyre is an exemplary heroine for Adrienne Rich precisely because she asserts a forceful self she is repeatedly tempted to sacrifice but chooses at every turn, in the face of every temptation, to be true to and to strengthen. “I would suggest,” writes Rich, “that Charlotte Brontë is writing a life story of a woman who is incapable of saying ‘I am Heathcliff’ because she feels so unalterably herself.” In fealty to this self, Rich’s Jane resists temptations besetting the traditional female heroine: of victimization and hysteria at Gateshead, self-hatred and self-immolation at Lowood, romantic love and surrender at Thornfield, passive suicide in her wanderings, and at Moor House marriage without love to St. John. The character we accompany on this journey, “a person determined to live, and to choose her life with
