How Did Jane Meet Rochester Again
George Smith did not know it, but he was about to meet the world'south most famous author. It was 1848. Currer Bell, author of Jane Eyre, was the most sought-after—and most mysterious—writer in the world. Fifty-fifty Smith, who edited and published the book, had never met the enigmatic author, a first-fourth dimension novelist who had nonetheless turned down his suggestions for revision, thanking him for the communication, then announcing the intention to ignore it.
Bell had been right, of course, and Smith wrong. The volume, and Bell'southward identity, was the talk of London. And now, a very small adult female stood before Smith, clutching one of Bell's messages in her hand. She was Currer Bell, she told him. She was the author of Jane Eyre.
If life were like literature, Smith would have fallen in dear with her then and at that place. Passionate, securely intelligent, outspoken, and charmingly unaffected—Charlotte Brontë was an arresting, complex adult female. If he did not love her already, he could larn: They would presently strike upward a lively and close correspondence that lasted years. And Charlotte was overjoyed by his good looks and his bright, open up personality. Simply Jane Eyre's diminutive author was no romantic heroine, and real life is not a romance.
* * *
Jane Eyre is, though. Correct? The answer to that question is up for fence.
It might seem like sacrilege to question the (small r) romanticism of Jane Eyre, a story that centers on the obsessive love of a teenage governess and her decades-older boss. Over the last 172 years, the volume has go a touchstone for passionate love, that once-in-a-lifetime spark nosotros are taught to long for. Even today, the book is the subject of swoony listsicles ("xi Romantic Quotes from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre") and essays that uphold information technology equally "a romance novel for the modern, intelligent woman."
Only when it was published, the bestselling book incensed readers even equally it seduced them. Information technology was condemned as immoral, unfit for women'due south eyes, all just fomenting revolution. And for modern scholars, its undercurrents of rage, motherlessness, colonialism, slavery, circus freakery, and fifty-fifty incest (!) are more than compelling than its caresses.
"The early reviews of Jane Eyre strike us today as naive and misinformed," writes Lisa Sternlieb. She lists off mutual critiques of the volume as anti-Christian and securely hypocritical, including 1 that said that "never was at that place a greater hater than Charlotte Brontë." "Notwithstanding I would argue that these reviewers hit on an element of truth in the novel," Sternlieb muses.
Hatred. Coup. Patriarchy. Not exactly romantic themes. Readers have ever picked up on the tension between the book's revolutionary subtexts and its uneasy human relationship with beloved. To twenty-kickoff-century optics, it shows a woman who fights for, nevertheless abdicates to, dearest. To nineteenth-century eyes, information technology showed a woman who should abdicate to, yet fights for, love. In either century, readers demand that Jane Eyre should practise cultural labor that it steadfastly resists. Its writer resists our attempts at that labor, too. For Charlotte Brontë, a woman whose life was steeped in stifled most-romance, refused to write love as ruly, anticipated, or safety.
* * *
Charlotte's life was not that of her heroine, and Jane Eyre is no autobiography. But by the time her well-nigh famous volume was published, Charlotte was 31 years former, and an expert in the strangling, diminishing kind of romance she bequeathed her heroine.
Information technology wasn't always that way. Equally a kid, she seemed marked for love. Information technology was office and parcel of the fantasy world that enveloped her everyday life: a fictitious kingdom called Angria, which she wrote into being with her younger brother, Branwell. In what amounted to a competitive literary apprenticeship, they wove their fantasy land into a identify of lewd thrills. Angria seethed with state of war, rape, rebellion, kidnapping, and revenge. It was a hotbed of the kind of love that could build a kingdom, then tear it to shreds.
That vision of love was so intense that information technology permeated into real life. When she was 23, Charlotte turned down a proposal from her all-time friend'south brother. "I had non, and never could take that intense attachment which would make me willing to dice for him," she wrote, "and if I ever marry it must be in that light of admiration that I will regard my husband." Besides, she wrote, her suitor would think her a "wild, romantic enthusiast indeed" if he ever actually got to know her.
* * *
Jane Eyre may accept a wild, romantic streak, but its heroine's love counters everything readers accept been taught to desire. Neglected in childhood and traumatized at a school where she is humiliated and starved, Jane arrives at Thornfield ready to love. At first, it seems she'll go her chance: There are romantic promises, forbidden glances, anguished prayers. But though her story delivers sexual tension and an agony of will-they-or-won't-they that lasts into its final pages, nothing about Jane's love is what you lot'd wait. Brontë drapes her volume in the trappings of romance, so snatches them abroad, subverting our fantasies at every turn.
"Similar so many other (yep) romance writers," writes the literary critic Sandra 1000. Gilbert, "Charlotte Brontë created a heroine who wants to learn what love is and how to observe it, just as she herself did. Unlike most of her predecessors, though, Brontë was unusually explicit in placing that protagonist amid dysfunctional families, perverse partnerships, and calumniating caretakers."
Chief amongst Brontë'southward baits-and-switches is her hero, a brooding man readers—and Jane—are all besides ready to adore. Edward Fairfax Rochester is impolite and brutal. He engages his xviii-year-old employee in work talk that is the 19th-century version of #METOO employment investigation forage. He'd fit right in with the modern "seduction community," conducting a principal course in negging as he reminds Jane of her inferiority, and so compliments her wit. In one particularly repulsive episode, he messes with her mind by disguising himself as a Roma fortune teller.
Amore-starved Jane only realizes her "principal" loves her after he pushes her toward an bloodcurdling apex of emotional cruelty. He intends to marry her rival, he implies. Then he changes his heed. Finally, after all but forcing her to accept his sharp proposal, he takes her in his arms.
But Rochester's momentary tenderness is just that—momentary. While he's been playing dress-up and making out with a teenager beneath a tree in his Gothic garden, he'southward been guilty of unforgivable cruelty, property his first married woman captive for her "intemperance" and, Brontë implies, her race. The wedding ceremony is chosen off, and so Rochester makes one last bid for Jane's love, begging her to stay and live with him as his bigamous mistress. It is too much to bear.
* * *
The same year she turned down her showtime marriage proposal, Charlotte turned abroad from the illicit fantasies of Angria. Both she and Branwell were in their twenties now, and they had lingered together in their imaginary world for as well long.
"I have at present written a dandy many books," she wrote. "I long to quit for a while that burning clime where we have sojourned too long… The mind would cease from excitement & turn now to a cooler region, where the dawn breaks gray and sober & the coming day for a time at least is subdued in clouds."
Something else threw common cold h2o on her passions: A letter she received from Britain's poet laureate, Robert Southey, in 1837. Charlotte had sent the poet a verse form of her own, request whether information technology was worth pursuing her literary ambitions. But Southey didn't encourage her. Instead, he warned her against what he called "a distempered land of heed" that would render the mundane life of a adult female intolerable. "Literature cannot be the business of a woman'south life," he wrote, "and it ought non to exist." Charlotte wrote back, assuring him she'd try to write as little as possible.
A few years later, burned out on governessing and with no hopes of marriage, she continued her search for cooler climes. This time, she went to Belgium. Equally an adult pupil at a girls' schoolhouse in Brussels, Charlotte planned to acquire the "stop," and the fluency in French, that would qualify her to run her own school in England. What she really wanted, though, was a change of scenery, an antitoxin to her restlessness.
She learned more one language in that location. Constantin Héger, the married headmaster of the school, befriended her. He encouraged her to write, to speak her mind. For a woman who had been told there was no place for women in writing—past Britain'due south most respected poet, no less—his argumentative, effective criticisms in the margins of her essays must accept had the effect of a powerful aphrodisiac. Soon she came home again, this time fleeing her obsession with Héger.
In 1913, Héger'south children published 4 messages from Charlotte to Héger that they had discovered among their mother's things. Iii of the iv had been torn into pieces and discarded, then retrieved and carefully stitched together with paper and thread by his married woman, Zoë Héger. She likely saved the letters as potential testify; they might show useful if Charlotte fabricated trouble for the school. Instead, they are testimony of Charlotte's desperation.
"Day and night, I notice neither rest nor peace," she wrote. "Monsieur, the poor exercise not need a great deal to live on. They ask only the crumbs of staff of life which fall from the rich men's table." Charlotte was ready to take whatever crumbs he had left to give.
* * *
The author may accept been hungry for crumbs, simply Jane Eyre is not. When she finds out her soon-to-be-husband isn't free to ally, she faces downwardly his betrayal with shocked forcefulness. When Rochester steamily suggests she motility with him to France, where no 1 knows or cares that he's already married, she refuses. Not that it'south not tempting. But the offering is a "silken snare," a luxurious trap.
"While he spoke my very censor and reason turned traitors confronting me, and charged me with criminal offence in resisting him," says Jane:
They spoke almost every bit loud as Feeling: and that clamoured wildly. "Oh, comply!" it said. "Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you practise?"
Yet dogged was the reply—"I care for myself. The more lonely, the more friendless, the more than unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.
Mayhap Charlotte's refusal to let her heroine sin with Rochester was a rebuke to herself. Or it may have been a reminder to move forward. Jane presses on, running away from sin and toward herself. If she cannot exist on equal footing with her partner, she will not have him at all.
In this sense, Jane's flight is as much from inequality as it is from sin. Even earlier he copped to his attic-leap madwoman of a wife, Rochester made it articulate that he wanted to own Jane. As his wife, she would have been his concubine: a petted plaything, but non an equal. Jane's furious opposition to that—her insistence on coming together him on equal footing—riled Jane Eyre'southward critics and appalled readers.
For the literary critic Nancy Pell, Jane's refusal of Rochester is role of a deep-rooted critique of social and economical institutions that echoes throughout the novel. Past the time she falls in love, Jane knows she can fend for herself. "Knowing that she can earn 30 pounds a year as a governess," Pell writes, "Jane rejects being hired every bit a mistress or bought as a slave. In one case once more she resolves to keep in good wellness and non die."
She does more than than refuse to die; she thrives. Jane escapes Thornfield and befriends the Rivers sisters and their intolerable brother, St. John, a Calvinist government minister who gives her a job as a instructor in an obscure village. Coincidence then teaches her that non only are the Rivers siblings her cousins, she is an heiress. She shares the wealth, enjoying the money that has raised her out of obscurity.
Jane has 1 more than obstacle to overcome: St. John's insistence that she marry him and go a missionary in Bharat. St. John is arguably even more sadistic than Rochester. He expects Jane to follow him to the ends of the globe, and to do and then with a common cold substitute for beloved.
"God and nature intended you for a missionary's wife," he tells her. "It is not personal, but mental endowments they have given you lot: you are formed for labour, non for dearest. A missionary's married woman you must—shall be. You shall be mine: I claim you lot—not for my pleasance, simply for my Sovereign's service."
His words could be construed as a kind of reassurance: Marital rape, he suggests, won't be part of his bargain. But his words fissure like a whip. They are the words of a homo who has judged a woman's body and found it lacking. St. John would never make out with Jane beneath a tree. If she left him, he wouldn't beg for her to stay. He wouldn't take her equally his mistress or take her to France. The principled minister finds no pleasure in his future wife.
* * *
Certainly, Charlotte had stopped thinking of herself every bit a wife past the time she wrote Jane Eyre. She was as well busy watching other people's children, tending her half-bullheaded begetter, and sewing shirts for her drug-addicted brother. When they were not governessing or teaching, all of the Brontë women labored alongside their servants, peeling potatoes and baking bread, disposed to the endless toil of daughters, sisters. But not wives.
"I'm certainly doomed to be an old maid," she wrote. "I can't expect another gamble—never mind I made up my mind to that fate ever since I was twelve years old."
Spinsterdom did take its uses: Information technology allowed Charlotte to write. Without a hubby to nourish to, Charlotte could spend the hours between her father's bedtime and her own with her pen. It could be a lonely bargain, but information technology was one that allowed her to create Jane Eyre.
* * *
St. John's tempting bargain—Jane Eyre'southward second proposal of marriage—is the last thing that stands between her and happiness. Equipped with new knowledge and a new dismissal of the skim-milk version of love he offers, she decides that sin on her own terms is preferable to virtue on St. John'due south. Turning down her cousin and returning to a human being who, for all she knows, is yet married, is helped along when she hears Rochester calling her name. "But indeed, Jane doesn't only 'retrieve' of Mr. Rochester," notes Gilbert. "Rather, in a moment of mystically orgasmic passion she virtually brings him into being."
Jane, bolstered by her own fiscal security and her refusal to be diminished by a human who sees her only as a source of labor, is in a different position than she was when she left Rochester for the kickoff time. She is set for his call. She is set to go to him on her own terms.
That return has vexed readers for 172 years. Jane's seeming surrender—her willingness to re-enter a dysfunctional, if not calumniating, human relationship—infuriates scholars, as well, especially those immersed in feminist theory.
The book is a "patriarchal beloved fantasy," writes the literary scholar Jean Wyatt in an essay tellingly named "A Patriarch of One's Own." For Wyatt, Jane Eyre is an expression of "defiant autonomy" that nonetheless gives in to a dissentious fusion with a damaging man. Jane's eventual spousal relationship to her "potent oak of a man" dupes readers, Wyatt suggests:
The apparently revolutionary nature of Jane'south egalitarian marriage allows an old fantasy to get past the ideological censors of her readers, and then that nosotros all, feminists and Harlequin romance readers akin, can enjoy the unending story of having 1's patriarch all to oneself forever.
It makes for an "excruciating catastrophe," writes the sociologist Bonnie Zare. The completion of Jane and Rochester's love trajectory, she writes, is painful:
For subsequently being taken advantage of by Rochester's abusive tricks, Jane is supposed to reach ultimate fulfillment in a subservient human relationship with a husband whose devotion seems to spring mostly from his new state of physical vulnerability.
In his new married woman, Zare implies, Rochester has gained an all-too-willing flagman.
Just is Jane actually doomed to a life of subservience? Not exactly, says Pell. "'An independent woman now,' Jane reappears at Thornfield," she writes. "She has refused to be Rochester's mistress or St. John'due south mistress of Indian schools; at present she is her ain mistress and her proposal to Rochester is striking… Even their spousal relationship can inappreciably be considered typically Victorian. Jane possesses a groovy bargain of money in her ain correct, and although Rochester is far from the helpless wreck he is sometimes taken to be, he is dependent upon Jane 'to be helped—to be led' until he regains his sight."
Gilbert, too, rejects the premise that Jane Eyre demeans herself by returning to Rochester. "In a proud denial of St. John'south insulting insistence that she is 'formed for labor, non for love,' she chooses—and wins—a destiny of love's labors," she writes. "There can exist no question… that what Jane calls the 'pleasure in my services' both she and Rochester experience in their utopian woodland is a pleasure in physical likewise equally spiritual intimacy, erotic every bit well as intellectual communion."
In the 1840s, Jane'southward love for herself was and then destructive it bordered on revolution. In 2019, her love of Rochester is so shocking it borders on treason. In any era, its relationship to the love it explores is uneasy, volatile. Well-nigh ii centuries after it was published, Jane Eyre confounds every expectation.
* * *
Subsequently they met in person, Charlotte and her editor began a correspondence that can just be described as stimulating. She already knew that Smith loved her writing—when she sent him the typhoon of Jane Eyre, it captivated him so much that he read it through in one sitting, neglecting visitors and appointments as he rushed through the story.
It well-nigh seemed possible that their friendship was something deeper. When Charlotte visited London, Smith begged her to stay at his house. He treated her to every amusement the metropolis could afford. They traveled together, through London and fifty-fifty to Scotland, often chaperoned past his mother or sister. They fifty-fifty went to a phrenologist together, delighting in her anonymity and the practitioner's pronouncement that Charlotte's head was "very remarkable." She wrote him into one of her books as a handsome, good-natured dearest involvement. When they were autonomously, they wrote long, chatty letters, dissecting the literary news of the day.
Though only Charlotte'due south one-half of the correspondence survived, it is honest and remarkably open. At times it is sparkling and witty. It verges on flirty, and and then information technology falls autonomously.
It's not clear how Charlotte reacted in private when George Smith told her he was engaged to be married, but her choked response was not flirty or communicative or fun:
My love Sir
In cracking happiness, as in slap-up grief—words of sympathy should be few. Accept my meed of congratulation—and believe me
Sincerely yours
C. Brontë
Twenty-eight words, each smarting with disappointment.
* * *
A few months earlier, something strange had happened to Charlotte Brontë: She had become an object of unrequited love. The gentleman in question was Arthur Bell Nicholls, her begetter's curate. It was surreal to be the one pined for, the one whose crumbs were gladly gathered. When he declared himself, she told her begetter, who exploded. "If I had loved Mr. N—and had heard such epithets applied to him as were used," she told a friend, "it would have transported me by my patience."
But she did non dear him, nonetheless. It took years of moping and quiet persuasion—and mayhap Smith's spousal relationship—for her to decide to ally Nicholls, a man she had previously scorned equally stupid and unromantic. Finally, she agreed, though she had deep reservations. During a pre-nuptial conversation with two of her friends, the kind of conversation in which virgin women asked more experienced friends about their marital obligations, Charlotte confided that she worried about what marriage might cost her. "I cannot conceal from myself that he is not intellectual," she said.
Marriage did exact a toll. Though Charlotte Nicholls loved her husband, he constricted her. He was horrified past the personal issues she discussed in her longstanding correspondence with Ellen Nussey, a friend since childhood.
"Arthur complains that you do not distinctly promise to burn my letters every bit yous receive them," she wrote in 1854, iv months after her wedding. "He says you must requite a plain pledge to that outcome—or he will read every line I write and elect himself censor of our correspondence."
Nussey agreed, grudgingly. Then she disobeyed him. We owe her much of what we know of Charlotte Brontë.
"Faultless he is not," Charlotte wrote wryly, "merely as you well know—I did not look perfection." She loved her husband, loved the settled life they led together. Simply afterwards, she admitted that she had stopped writing: "My own life is more than occupied than information technology used to exist: I have not so much time for thinking."
Did Charlotte kill herself by handing over her intellectual and concrete well-being? Possibly. She died soon after, probable from dehydration following astringent morn sickness. Only her ix months of marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls were amidst the happiest of her life.
* * *
"There was only picayune feminine amuse almost her, and of this fact she herself was uneasily and perpetually conscious," George Smith wrote decades after. "I believe that she would have given all her genius and fame to take been beautiful. Perhaps few women ever existed more than broken-hearted to be pretty than she, or more angrily conscious of the circumstance that she was not pretty."
Those lines bound out from an otherwise respectful, even loving, memoir of his time with Charlotte Brontë. Smith certainly wasn't the kickoff person to notice that Charlotte's nose and oral fissure were large, that she was missing teeth and so nearsighted she crouched over books and papers. Simply his assessment—his supposition that Brontë's unease in public was due to discomfort with her concrete appearance instead of, say, being unused to city life or worried virtually beingness recognized past readers or fearful of meeting her critics in person—is disappointing.
In one case a Calendar week
In the cease, even George Smith, who had had direct access to so many of Charlotte's thoughts and feelings, and whom she admired then much, felt the demand to snipe about her appearance instead of assessing her legacy or engaging with her body of piece of work. Even those who cared about most Charlotte Brontë underestimated her, even subsequently they knew she had made a deliberate choice to write a disquieting story virtually a plain woman in beloved.
"I will prove to you lot that you are wrong," she reportedly told her sisters during a debate on how to write heroines. "I will show you a heroine as plain and as minor every bit myself, who shall be as interesting equally whatever of yours."
Source: https://daily.jstor.org/sorry-but-jane-eyre-isnt-the-perfect-romance-you-want-it-to-be/
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