“I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed
scattered on the wind then faintly blowing.
I abandoned it, and framed a humbler supplication; for change, stimulus…”
Me during quarantine.
Romping about the moors with your star-crossed jerk boyfriend, when all the signs, be they
supernatural or mundane, have gathered to tell you that this romance is… uh… kinda
messy.
Plus, spooky manors and constantly roaring winds…
We must be in the Bronte Zone.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte was there for the weird girls, the quiet ones who watched
and listened, the ones who pined away for someone to accept them in all of their weird,
dark glory.
But in the nearly 175 years since its publication, the collective definition of what it means
to be “a woman on the outside of society” has changed and expanded dramatically—and
yet here we are, still dissecting Charlotte Bronte’s words and gravitating towards Jane
as a protagonist.
For those of you who have never read Jane Eyre or enjoyed one of the 8000 films, television,
stage, or radio adaptations not to mention countless literary retelling here we go.
Written and published in 1847 under the pen name Currer Bell, Jane Eyre concerns the life
story of it’s titular heroine, from childhood up to her mid-20s.
Jane, an orphaned child left to the care of her wealthy but highly abusive aunt and cousins,
who verbally, emotionally, and physically torment her to the point where any self-defense
is labeled as her acting out.
She is sent away to an austere boarding school for girls, where the headmaster is equally
abusive and cruel, watching as her fellow classmates are also punished,near-starved
and, in the case of her best friend there, left to die from infectious disease.
Several years later, after reaching adulthood, Jane leaps at the chance to see more of the
world when she takes a governess position at the totally not creepy mansion, Thornfield
Hall, which is owned by the curmudgeonly Edward Rochester.
From there on, the story splits into two paths: the “I’m totally in love with this jerkface
boss who lies to me and plays mind games with me because I’m the help and completely below
his station” romance
And the “wait why do I hear creepy laughing and footsteps every single night AND WOW WHO
IS SETTING BEDS ON FIRE?”
Gothic mystery.
Spoiler alert: It’s Mr. Rochester’s mentally ill-wife, Bertha.
Also spoiler alert: Jane doesn’t find out Bertha exists until seconds before she almost
marries Mr. Rochester.
Real keeper of a guy.
We can fix him.
Will Jane and Mr. Rochester’s dark, torrid romance finally be realized?
Will Jane find the self-love and confidence to stand up for herself.
Will—wait.
He LOCKED a woman in an attic?
Like, this isn’t a joke??
Jane Austen this isn’t.
While immensely popular and beloved today, having sold hundreds of thousands of copies
in the last fifty years alone and translated into dozens of foreign languages (including
ESPERANTO!), it is perhaps for the best that Eyre was published under a pseudonym, as critics
were eager to rip it into shreds—for its comparatively dark, moody heroine and content.
Said prominent contemporary critic and historian Elizabeth, Lady Eastlake of the book:
"We do not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority
and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home,
is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.”
Damn.
But where Jane Eyre becomes important is its place in the tradition of the Bildungsroman—or,
simply, a novel about a person’s “formative years”.
While Jane Eyre is not the first novel told from a lower- middle class woman’s POV,
it is the first notable Bildungsroman that has one as its main subject.
It is also told in the first person, putting the reader directly into her thoughts and
forming world view across the years.
The idea of The Self as a priority in the text since Jane isn’t guided by heroics,
but what she thinks is good for her and what will keep her alive.
Towards the end of the book, Jane is presented with the opportunity to be a good, middle-class
English citizen when the stuffy, self-righteous minister St. John proposes to her and promises
to take her with him to India as a missionary.
#morecolonization.
But at the last minute, Jane takes a long look at him and is like, mmmm, nah, I’m
gonna go back to the crazy, philandering, lying bag of hammers that is Mr. Rochester.
Byronic men do be hitting.
Says professor of literature Sharon Locy:
“In this respect, Jane Eyre is atypical in its appropriation of the male pattern of
development for its protagonist.
Jane's story begins, as theirs do, in her childhood, when she is ten.
[...] ... Female protagonists of the courtship novels mentioned above rarely ever leave home,
or do so only within the prescribed orbits of young women preparing to marry.
[…] Jane Eyre, on the other hand, moves through the world like a boy.”
But if we are gonna talk about Jane Eyre/Rochester and what this book has meant for feminist
literature then we need to talk about Bertha, Rochester’s wife that he kept in the attic
for over a decade because … women be crazy.
Bertha is the “trope namer” of the term “Madwoman in the Attic.”
Women in the 19th century were “confined” to make women either angels or monsters and
in that binary we have Jane and Bertha.
In their foundational criticism on Jane Eyre, The Madwoman in the Attic, authors Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar define this binary between the two women as the main confrontation
of the novel, calling it:
“a secret dialogue of self and soul on whose outcome, as we shall see, the novel's plot,
Rochester’s fate, and Jane's coming of age all depend.
[...] Bertha, in other words, is Jane's truest and darkest double: the angry aspect of the
orphan child, the ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to repress ever since her
days at Gateshead.
“
Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre is the evil ghost like woman who haunts Thornfield Hall,
only seen through the perspective of Rochester who views her as a toxic beauty.
“I thought I loved her.
… Her relatives encouraged me; competitors piqued me; she allured me: a marriage was
achieved almost before I knew where I was.
Oh, I have no respect for myself when I think of that act!
…. I never loved, I never esteemed, I did not even know her.”
Alexa, play the world’s smallest violin.
Rochester sees himself as a victim of the Mason family who didn’t tell him about her
mental state and when she started to deteriorate, Rochester locked her in the house for ten
years.
Which, I’m sure 100% had no side effects on her mental health whatsoever.
And we are supposed to root for this guy?
Bertha stands in the way of Jane and Rochester, because Rochester never “divorced” her
and so he would be a bigamist if he married Jane.
While Bertha’s “race” is and can be assumed to be white there is an implication
of otherness in how he compares Jane to Bertha due to Bertha being Creole (a white person
raised in the West Indies).
So she got a little too much seasoning for Rochester’s pallet.
When relating why he was picked by the Mason’s Rochester says “Her family wished to secure
me, because I was of a good race, and so did she.”
This could have many implications, including that Bertha’s family may have, somewhere
down the line, mixed with the Black population and were no longer fully white.
As Susan L Meyer, Professor of English at Wellesley College explains: “An interpretation
of the significance of the British empire in Jane Eyre must begin by making sense of
Bertha Mason Rochester, the mad, drunken West Indian wife whom Rochester keeps locked up
on the third floor of his ancestral mansion.”
Bertha is killed in the burning of Thornfield Hall, which also blinds Rochester.
She jumps to her death, freeing herself from imprisonment.
Good for her
How sympathetic Bertha was supposed to be in the 19th century is hard to understand,
since she is such a haunting figure.
But in a post-colonial sense, Bertha is utterly tragic.
Especially because Rochester basically says “it wasn’t me” in terms of taking any
accountability for the situation that caused them to be married.
Grow up dude.
Hence why we need to go to the greatest way readers can examine text: fanfiction with
Wide Sargasso Sea.
Written by white Dominica author Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea is a response to Jane Eyre
which tells “Bertha’s” story.
Bertha becomes Antoinette Cosway an heiress in Jamaica and the story is broken into three
parts that discuss her childhood, marriage to a “nameless English man,” and then
her fate in England as a captive.
Part One we see Antoinette’s childhood on a sugar plantation that has gone belly up
since slavery was abolished (yay, suck it).
Antoinette’s mother attempts to marry a wealthy Englishman in order to fix their money
problems.
The freed slaves end up burning down the plantation, which results in Antoinette’s brother passing
away.
The mental health struggles end up escalating for both Antoinette and her surviving family
members.
One of the most iconic scenes of the book is when Antoinette goes to a Black Jamaican
girl named Tia to try and escape the reality of her burning home during the small revolt:
“As I ran, I thought, I will live with Tia and I will be like her.
[...]When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it.
I did not feel it either, only something wet, running down my face.
I looked at her and I saw her face crumple up as she began to cry.
We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers.
It was as if I saw myself.
Like in a looking-glass.”
The character of Tia is the foil for Bertha as a Black girl of the same age.
During the fire Bertha/Antoinette goes to Tia and Tia throws a rock at her because despite
Antoinette thinking they are the same, Tia knows she is the daughter of freed slaves
and Antoinette is the daughter of slave owners.
Just in the same way the English Jane is a perfect example of white superiority over
Bertha and her implied otherness.
Part Two: Rochester complains a lot about being in the Carribean.
“I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain.
I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret
I would never know.
I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness.
Above all I hated her.
For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness.
She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost
before I found it.”
It’s too hot.
It’s got too many bugs.
Man I miss England.
Also, I don’t respect or care about my wife’s mental health so I’m gonna mess around and
rub it in her face, because she may be “crazy” but I’m a man.
What we see in Rochester in this passage is a man who feels unable to deal with things
he can not control and what he can not control he loathes.
A sentiment that doesn’t seem so far off from the man we meet in Jane Eyre
Part Three: Antoinette’s transformation to Bertha is complete.
She has lost all sense of time, as you would when you are stuck, in an attic, for ten years.
“There is no looking glass here and I don't know what I am like now.
I remember watching myself brush my hair and how my eyes looked back at me.
The girl I saw was myself yet not quite myself.
Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her.
But the glass was between us—hard, cold and misted over with my breath.
Now they have taken everything away.
What am I doing in this place and who am I?”
Literary Theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Gai-uh-tree chaa-kruh- vor- tee spi-vuhk)
explains “In the figure of Antoinette, whom in Wide Sargasso Sea Rochester violently renames
Bertha, Rhys suggests that so intimate a thing as personal and human identity might be determined
by the politics of imperialism.
Antoinette, as a white Creole child growing up at the time of emancipation in Jamaica,
is caught between the English imperialist and the black native…
In this fictive England, she must play out her role, act out of the transformation of
her “self” into that fictive Other, set fire to the house and kill herself, so that
Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction.."
Wide Sargasso Sea is exhibit A about how fan fiction and metatextual examinations can have
real literary value … when copyright doesn’t get in the way
It doesn’t make Jane Eyre a weaker book, but highlights things that Bronte would not
have been aware of.
Bronte talks about the realities of poor working women and does great work of giving sad, awkward
brunettes a true heroine, but then you get Bertha.
A mentally ill woman who has been put into a horrific situation by her husband and the
book goes:
Jane what am I?
Responsible for actually getting to know the woman I’m going to marry?
This is the 19th Century.
She’s lucky I have money and am white.
In perhaps one of the most famous lines from the novel, Jane, thinking Mr. Rochester is
to marry a woman of society, cries out to her star-crossed lover:
“Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?
You think wrong!–I have as much soul as you,–and full as much heart! [...] it is
my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and
we stood at God’s feet, equal,–as we are!”
Jane Eyre the novel’s plea to the humanity of women, of the lower stationed, is both
its greatest staying power and one of its most glaring weaknesses, in how it manages
to advocate for acceptance while still creating an Other in Bertha, who is not extended the
same sort of compassion.
In many ways Bertha is a foil to Helen Burns, Jane’s childhood friend who dies young,
and is the perfect Christian.
Bertha is all the women that society saw as impure.
Impure in their race, impure in their mental health, and dangerous because of both.
It is racist and ableist Victorian b.s., but it has made Bertha a legend and her burning
Rochester’s house is one of literature’s best “good for her” moments.
And all this over a man who literally dresses in racist drag so he can manipulate two women
in hopes of making Jane jealous.
Justice for Bertha and good for Jane, for waiting until she secured her own bag to get
her Byronic husband, because sadly viewer, she married him.