Jane Eyre is the first novel I remember reading at college. I was 19 years old, and I remember being
struck by how enjoyable it was to read.
I made a concerted effort to engage with the text and underlined passages
and made marginalia throughout the book.
I know this not only because I have specific memories of doing so but because
I still have the book in my collection.
Even more enjoyable, Ann used the same book when she read the novel for
a graduate school class, so we have her marginalia layered on top of my
own. Rereading the novel now, together,
it is clear that she was the much more astute reader, not only because she was
much older when she first read it but because she is just a smarter literary
scholar than I.
It is ridiculous for me to give an analysis of the text, primarily because
the book has been analyzed by scholars throughout the 20th century,
but secondarily because I have already read the essay that aligns with my own
reading. In this Norton Critical Edition
is an essay by Adrienne Rich called “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless
Woman,” which was printed in Rich’s On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, Selected
Prose, 1966-1978. The unique and
important thing Rich does in her essay is look at the entirety of the
novel. That sounds like something every
reader should do, but she is right in her observations that most people only
focus on Jane’s time at Thornfield when discussing the novel, but Bronte has
nearly 150 pages that take place away from Thornfield, and it is only
reasonable to assume that those 150 pages are just as important to Bronte as
the rest of the novel. Every movie
adaptation I have seen runs through Eyre’s childhood as a quick overview, as
though it were unimportant. Helen Burns
is given a bare appearance, Bessie is almost always elided, and Ms. Temple is
more often than not overlooked. And when
Eyre gets to the heath, most movies focus on Eyre’s relationship with St. John,
giving her relationship with Diane and Mary short shrift at best. But all these relationships with other women
are critical to the story Bronte told, and to reduce the narrative to a love
story between Jane and Rochester is to only tell half the story. So if you’re
looking for an essay to make sense of Bronte’s choices, seek out Rich’s essay
and enjoy.
Instead I want to focus on a few things that struck me in this reading.
I remember thinking that Rochester and Jane’s relationship was fucked up
when I was 19. I couldn’t understand why
anyone would swoon over Rochester, Jane or Bronte or her readers. But damn, did it make sense this time, but
not because I found Rochester to be awesome.
What occurred to me on this read is that there is some soft domination
pornography going on in this novel. Ann
and I kept saying, “#NotMyRochester” in reference to the #NotMyChristian that
swelled up surrounding the film adaptations of Fifty Shades of Grey. I imagine that Jane Eyre was passed
around from reader to reader in part for the same reason Fifty Shades
was. If you were into the master-servant
dynamic existing between Jane and Rochester, I imagine the charged interplay
between them would ring with sexual energy and titillation. That was a fun thing to realize reapproaching
the novel as an adult.
I really like Jane as a character, even as there’s plenty about the novel
and the character that I find maddening.
Jane doesn’t take shit from anybody, and to see her passionate and aggressive
in defense of herself is incredibly satisfying.
Jane is no Helen Burns, even as she learns from Helen. She will not lay down and be a martyr as
Helen was. It felt in fact like Helen
was there to drive home that Jane is not that kind of character, whom we have
met as a heroine in other educational novels about how women were to
behave. So in all those respects, Jane
is awesome. On the other hand, Jane is
obnoxiously pleased with herself, her learning, and her behavior. To listen to her attitudes about her students
at the school in Morton is to strain my eyes with all the rolling.
More importantly, Bronte’s unending love for Britain’s colonial mission is
an unpleasant pill to swallow. Her
admiration for St. John’s desire to bring Christ to the heathens in India (and
to bring them liberty by getting rid of their caste system, no less) is
offputting, and Rochester’s tale of his time in Jamaica is disgusting, especially
when the thing that spurs him on is when the fresh European breeze blows upon
him, uplifting him from the oppressive ways of the native Jamaican people. I know criticizing Bronte for her belief in
the colonial project is nothing new, but the lack of novelty does nothing to
alleviate the displeasure I felt in moving through those passages. Gypsy racism is not cool either.
But if Bronte is unquestioning in her love of colonialism, she is
incredibly perceptive in the way we relate to each other as people. One of the most stunning passages to me was
Jane’s conversation in the moor with St. John when he proposes to her and asks
her to come with him to India. She analyses
St. John’s desires and her own internal pressures so beautifully that it put
into words the feelings I myself have felt when negotiating with a strong
personality. It’s wonderfully written
and incredibly insightful. And beyond
that particular passage, I really like the way Charlotte Bronte writes. It’s clear to me that she hears the music of her
language because her sentences are really easy to read out loud, even given
their 150-year-old sentence structure.
I was excited to revisit this classic, and I was not disappointed. And now I have the opportunity to reread Jean
Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which I have done twice before, but never in
proximity to Jane Eyre. So yay
for that.
