Charlotte Bronte’s been in my head this
last month or so. The first novel I fell in love with was Jane Eyre. I
was fifteen or sixteen, I think. With parents who were terribly strict, I found
my escape in books and music, falling happily headfirst into worlds that
weren’t of this one. Bronte’s Victorian novel seemed, to me, to have it all: it
was written by a woman in a time when women writers weren’t really warmly
welcomed; there was a tenacious heroine who survived despite all odds, and who
was a bit of a spitfire; and, there was a little romance. I kind of thought I
could see myself in Jane back then—mostly in how she loved to read, and was
plainly spoken and truthful. She said things without filtering her thoughts.
She didn’t dice words and spoke up for herself. That she did that after so many
years of being silenced by abusive relatives and educators made me cheer for
her. She survived, and then she flourished. She even somehow found love along
the way.
I won’t lie. It might have been Mr.
Rochester who at first caught my eye, mostly because he seemed dashing,
handsome, and because he spoke smartly. He cared enough to raise little Adele,
too, which spoke to his heart and compassion, even if he didn’t really want
anyone else to see that more tender side of his personality. He played to the
archetype of a strong man in literature, all gruff on the outside but then marshmallow-y
on the inside. Most important to me, though, was that Rochester saw and admired
Jane for what she just couldn’t see in herself, so that always impressed me as
a gawky, outside-of-everything overweight teenage girl with wild, curly hair. I
also always liked that he actually saw her, acknowledging her when so
many people hadn’t seen her before that. She had been ignored for some time and
felt invisible. Despite their differences in social status and gender, Rochester
treated her as an equal. Jane spoke of their being able to speak ‘soul to soul,’
and of how all she only ever really wanted was to be considered an equal. This,
to me, seems groundbreaking in terms of the time period within which the novel
was written. Jane’s character is one that demands she be treated with equality,
with respect, and with attention to her thoughts and voice.
As I read through the novel, I liked Jane more
than I’d first thought possible. I imagined that I could wear fine Victorian dresses
and read good books. She and I could be friends, if it were possible, in some
alternate dimension. I could imagine that. She seemed to be as odd as I was, so
it was plausible. Escaping your own life, when it isn’t always bright, is an
age-old respite for kids who don’t fit in, or who have been bullied. As I got
older, Charlotte Bronte kind of grew on me. I read all of the other Bronte sisters’
works, and I liked them all right, but Jane Eyre resonated with me as
someone who didn’t feel like she ever really fit in. I still sometimes feel the
same way in my late 40s, and I still go to books for comfort and escape.
In university, I took Victorian literature
courses, and went through the standard canon, but Bronte always seemed to walk
alongside me. Jane Eyre was a feminist novel, even if Bronte had to take
a man’s name to have it published. The protagonist went against every bit of
what Victorian women were meant to do. Jane didn’t worry about getting married.
She just wanted to be free, to be independent, to think her own thoughts, to
speak her mind, and to be heard. She wouldn’t really have been for every man in
that era, either, if we’re honest about it. She would have likely been too challenging
for a suitor of that time because she didn’t fit into the archetypes of the
period.
What makes Charlotte Bronte’s Jane so
appealing? She’s spirited, for certain. She fights off the threat of poor
Bertha when she tries to set fire to Jane’s bed in the middle of the night,
jealous of Rochester’s strong attraction to the new governess at Thornfield. To
me, though, I’ve always read Bertha as being symbolic of the part of us that
wishes to be free, the part we might just sometimes thoughtlessly oppress because
of the social conventions that we’ve been taught by our parents as young girls.
As women, perhaps, we sometimes lock that part of ourselves away in an attic,
even try to deny that it might exist. It’s the part that is about truth,
passion, desire, and spirit. For how many years have girls been taught to be
quiet, sit silently, and listen carefully, and for how many years, still, have
men’s voices run roughshod over women’s voices in staff meetings, classrooms,
and family homes?
In some ways, you could also read the novel as
having Jane and Bertha as two sides of the same coin: they are perhaps two
halves of a more well-rounded woman who might have come into being, if the
novel were written now, away from the oppression of Victorian times and social
mores. They were binaries, reflective of the archetypal virgin-whore dichotomy
that is so common to that period, and for which Victorian writing is fairly
well-known. The other feminist part of the story, really, is to think that
Bertha Mason sets fire to Thornfield, burns it to the ground, as Bronte tried
to do with her novel, in presenting such a strong female protagonist as that of
Jane Eyre.
Let’s be clear here: it isn’t right that
Rochester put his ill wife in the attic and pretended that she didn’t exist.
The stigma of mental illness is present, but it needs to be read within the
historical context of Victorian England. So many families hid secrets in
attics, in metaphorical ways, and all family trees likely still have skeletons.
Bronte was also alluding to this notion, I think. One can read Jean Rhys’s
excellent novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, as a counterpoint and prequel to
Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and would be wise to do so. Since its publication in
1966, Wide Sargasso Sea has let scholars and readers reconsider the
power dynamics of race and gender.
Here’s the strong thing about Jane, though: she
doesn’t stay with Rochester after she finds out he’s still married to Bertha.
She goes off to find her own way in the world, even though she really loves him
and her heart is broken. She knows she needs to be her own woman first, and
won’t play second fiddle. Not many Victorian women protagonists would have been
that strongly written. Some could argue that the novel isn’t feminist because
Jane returns to Rochester after hearing him call out to her across the moors—rather
mystically and telepathically—while she’s living with the Rivers family. Some
could say that this is a weak female character, a woman who is too caught up in
the notion of love to ignore Rochester, but who has not ever been so deeply in
love and felt so inexplicably drawn to someone? The strength in Jane’s
character is that she educates herself, has her own profession, and that she
returns to Thornfield only as a whole and complete person, and not as someone who
is desperately looking for completion in a life partner.
When you visit the Bronte Parsonage Museum in
Haworth, you can be easily struck by its atmosphere. It is dark and damp, and
the views out the window are ones that look out onto the old, mossy graveyard.
You can imagine yourself standing there, being transported to an earlier time,
and feel a bit of what the Bronte sisters might have felt when they stood there
years before. You can also hear the words of Jane Eyre ringing in your ears if
you listen closely enough: “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free
human being with an independent will.”
From start to finish, I admire Jane’s spirit,
and her ability to embody this motto as she moves through her life. And, from
start to finish, I admire Charlotte Bronte for having written such a story in a
time when men like Robert Southey, the poet laureate of England, couldn’t even
bear to fathom a place for women writers in the literary canon. Ten years
before Jane Eyre’s publication in 1847, Southey wrote to tell Bronte, condescendingly,
that her dreams of being a poet and novelist were ridiculous: “Literature
cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.” That Bronte
went on to write and publish her novel would have likely shocked quite a few
Victorian men. Thankfully, Charlotte Bronte and her Jane Eyre marked a
spot that blazed a trail for future women writers to follow. We begin in
earlier places, and move forward to where we are today—travelers and explorers
always—speaking our minds and writing our words down on the page.
Kim Fahner was the fourth poet laureate for
Sudbury (2016-18) and the first woman to be appointed to the role. She has
published five collections of poems, including her latest, These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She blogs fairly regularly at
www.kimfahner.wordpress.com and her author website is www.kimfahner.com
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