"If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends."
JANE EYRE portrays the evolution of a consciousness and a conscience, within a Christian framework constantly shaken by pagan notions, and symbols, and themes.
In the year 1800 Jane is an uneducated orphan child, miserably treated by relatives, who rouses to anger at a particular injustice and is subsequently punished not only by her cruel Aunt Reed but by her own superstitious terror when she imagines how the ghost of her late uncle might appear to avenge her wrongs. Terror makes her ill; illness very belatedly gains her the nursing care and maternal affection of a folklore-loving servant; her pivotal rebellion results in banishment to a school with harsh living conditions but high academic standards. There she meets a Miss Temple, who awakens her love of learning, and an older girl, Helen Burns, who explains the Christian ethos to her before -- quite literally -- becoming a martyr, whose death transforms the school into a decent place to live.
Subsequently, Jane becomes a teacher, governess, wealthy man's fiancee, homeless person, charity case, schoolmistress, family member, heiress, wife and mother. At each pivotal point in her life she is required to expand her awareness of the world, of herself, and of a moral choice to be made. At each point she chooses 'the Christian thing to do' -- or in one case, one of the Christian things to do! -- but often she is warned about or inspired toward change by arguably supernatural phenomena, and in the two greatest crises of her adult life she receives guidance from either her own subconscious or a Power of non-Christian origin.
Then there's the bolt of lightning, the source of which is really ambiguous, on the night that Jane becomes engaged ....
Charlotte Bronte's JANE EYRE is also a great, ongoing quarrel between reason and passion, resolved only after its anti-hero has suffered a strikingly Biblical punishment and its heroine has refused to become a missionary martyr.
This isn't your basic Gothic romance!
Yet its central story -- based on an actual scandal known to the author -- has been used as a template for such romances ever since. And it is the central story most of us think of first when we think of JANE EYRE, for it is a powerful one -- largely because of Bronte's genius in creating Edward Rochester as Jane's ideal mate, to whom her responses are strong, complex and charming. No one can read this love story and retain the impression that Jane is actually 'plain' in any way; shall I be the first to come out and say what everyone's been thinking? To put it precisely, Jane is cute: not pretty by conventional standards but extremely attractive to those who love her; Rochester is forever calling her names such as 'elf' and 'sprite'. Rochester loves her.
So do we.
Intelligent, passionate, creative yet possessing an affinity for order, sensible and observant, courageous and stubborn, with a wicked sense of humor, Jane is -- beneath the surface she must present to most of the world -- not only a better but a more interesting person than most of those she meets and most of those we are likely to meet in literature. Only her voice, telling the entire story in first person, could get us past the requisite melodrama, not to mention the Big Honking Coincidence! Only she could get away with repeatedly rescuing the hero, as-good-as proposing to him, and then rescuing him again, while maintaining a delicate and ladylike appearance, in 1847!
The book was nonetheless called "low, coarse, and immoral" in its day for its portrayal of a woman's sexual feelings -- as if the strength of those feelings were not the measure of Jane's virtue in resisting them....
Not everybody was thrilled with the depiction of Brocklehurst, the hypocritical clergyman, either!
Yet the book's finale is a tribute to an incorruptible missionary minister who has failed signally to win our sympathy as a human being.
The Christians win, but the pagans score: in the many references to folklore and the supernatural, in the powerful images found in Jane's paintings, in the Vision which echoes one such painting, in the Voice which Jane attributes to "Nature", in the staggering number of references (many, admittedly, matter-of-fact!) to the four elements, and finally in the strength of so many of the female characters. Helen Burns, Maria Temple, Diana Rivers, and Jane herself constitute quite a formidable line-up, with only Rochester and St. John Rivers to equal them for strength on the testosterone side! This is not a feminist novel in the sense of proposing any new roles in the world for women; it does however come down heavily in favor of a woman's right to use the faculties with which she is born.
Most of the characters' names are significant, with Diana and Mary representing aspects of the divine feminine, Temple referring to both religion and intellect, and Eyre serving as a pun on first 'err' and then 'air', as a family scapegoat rises above her tormentors. Reed, of course, shows weakness. I am not the first to observe an elemental paradox in Helen Burns' name -- while fire burns, 'burns' are British brooks, or streams -- but I have yet to see noted elsewhere the fact that the same paradox is found in St. John Rivers' name, for the British pronounce the Christian name 'singein''.
Place names are likewise significant and inclined to reference the elements. My favorite is Whitcross, perfect place to bury a vampire -- the entity to which Bertha, who is also Jane's dark side, is compared.
Four families share the same pattern of one male sibling and two females, as if Jane were living out Freud's idea of the 'repetition compulsion'. Both John and St. John attempt to subdue her using a large weighty book; in St. John's case the book is the Bible and the intended subjection figurative (and legal!) rather than literal; still, Jane says after their great quarrel, "I would much rather he had knocked me down."
Bronte's style -- or rather, Jane's! -- is eloquent, flowing, and by turns ironic, dramatic and even somewhat Biblical during crises. Much of the Gothic material involving night-time disasters is subtly undercut by a humorous tone. Jane and Rochester's conversation demonstrates their intelligence and wit; everything Jane writes reveals her ongoing growth as a person and a Christian. Psychological realism reigns supreme in this self-portrait of "the first anti-heroine" in literature, so much so that even the fairy-tale (or mythic?) aspect of that heroine's origins becomes believable. Jane would not lie to us! We know her....
There is some untranslated French, and some stereotyping of the French people, and some class snobbery which makes sense in the context of those fairy-tale/mythic origins previously mentioned.
JANE EYRE is probably the world's most-read novel, not only because so many have read it but because so many have read it so many times! Beginning in the secondary grades, it is interesting to read and re-read this "dangerous story of a good person" both for the subtleties of thought and conscience it increasingly reveals to us as our own perceptions expand throughout our lives and for the enjoyment of a cracking good story of integrity, love and justice, tempered with mercy and humor, in a world wider than even its heroine's perceptions, and infinitely mysterious.
~~ WIDE SARGASSO SEA, by Jean Rhys, is an imaginative retelling of Bertha's story, one not for children. The author cheats in making 'Bertha' her anti-heroine's middle name, presumably because it no longer has any sex appeal!
~~ And the fiction is continued in Emma Tennant's newly-published ADELE: JANE EYRE'S HIDDEN STORY, told from the viewpoint of Mr. Rochester's ward.
On my list of imaginary books may be found:
FUNDAMENTALIST SERMONS, by Helen Damme Nation, and
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