A Tribute to Jane Eyre

This post is taken in part from my posts on a thread entitled “How many of you are obsessed with Jane Eyre?” at the Literature Network Forums. My wonderfully perspicacious friend kiki1982 and I (as L.M. The Third) have been having a lengthy discussion of all things JE in this thread – from why we love Mr. Rochester even though he's a conniving rascal, to the Christian themes of JE, and everything in between, including venereal disease and the color blue. I would encourage anyone interested in the novel or the theories I express here to check the thread out after reading this tribute.

Are you obsessed with Jane Eyre?

Who? Me? Guilty as charged. I first read Jane Eyre four years ago at age 14. (Arithmetic, you see, is useful. Without its aid would you have been able to guess my age?) Immersing myself in its insistent sensuality, pervading intertexuality and rebellious feminism, I was changed as a reader and a person. I've read it at least once a year since that first time, always with greater fascination.

Jane Eyre is a part of who I am as a reader and would-be academic, as a feminist, as a Christian and as an individual. It has shaped my thoughts, my feelings and my tastes. Its mighty sentences surge through my blood, sometimes chilling it, sometimes warming it until it tingles and thrills my whole frame. I suppose more than with any other novel, I think of its characters as though they were real, yet it also first introduced me to intertextuality, pastiche and literary criticism. I think it an inexhaustible store of literary themes, yet I turn to it as the best of “comfort reading”. It runs in my blood, blends with my brains and seasons the marrow of my bones.

I don't actually consider Jane Eyre a perfect novel (whatever that could possibly mean). As a Janeite I find its intense Romanticism simultaneously amusing and dangerous, and as George Eliot reader I sometimes find Jane's quick dismissals of other people's worth grating.

But, like Jane with Mr Rochester, "while I breathe and think, I must love" this novel. I think there is no hyperbole in declaring that Jane Eyre is the literary love of my life.

Pre-eminently Christian*

When I first read Jane Eyre, as a homeschooled teenager who had recently forsworn wearing pants, its emphasis on female-equality and feminist interpretations of the novel (Gilbert and Gubar, of course) set me on the path to becoming a self-identified feminist.**

But I'm first and foremost a Christian. For instance, when I say that I think JE addresses the problems of the modern Christian Patriarchy movement, it's not because it rejects Christianity. No, indeed! I say that because JE, riddled with Biblical references and saturated with faith, starts on the same Protestant premise as Christian Patriarchy: We must obey God rather than custom, convention or culture. Yet JE comes out with entirely different conclusions about the role of women and the marriage relationship.

Jane Eyre starts out as a rewriting*** of Pilgrim's Progress with a central character who is the lowest of the low – a penniless female child who is “less than a servant”. Here she is abused by wealth and patriarchy (in the form of the male heir) and she strikes back, in accordance with unregenerate human nature. Lowood school, to which Jane next goes, is a prime example of Protestant Evangelicalism at its worst and Jane unequivocally rejects this hypocritical “Christianity”. But it is in this oppressive environment that she meets the person who has the strongest influence on who she later becomes. Helen Burns (true to the meaning of her name: "torch" or "shining light") is Jane's light. It is she who introduces Jane to a God of love and grace, and teaches her the importance of forgiveness and self-respect. But Helen is an unearthly being, not meant to remain in this world. That she is “not of this world” is shown by her stoicism under the severe punishment of flogging and her abnegation of her feelings. She's described as not involved in her surroundings – her feelings are divorced. Jane is of this world. She is intensely passionate, but she must learn to incorporate Helen's other-worldly principles without losing her feeling, and to endure hardship without losing her sensuous delight in the good things of life.

At Thornfield, Jane meets and falls in love with Mr. Rochester, who views her as the instrument of his cure. Rochester is always very insistent on what he can do to change himself, as the works aspect of a Catholic vs. Protestant dichotomy in the book. (Just as he raises Adele "on the Roman Catholic principle of expiating numerous sins by one good work," so he wishes to "expiate at God's tribunal" by marrying poor and friendless Jane.)

Jane's declaration of the equality of their souls spurs on Rochester's proposal, but she then has to fight to keep her individuality and purity. Yet while on the surface she is able to keep him in "reasonable check", she has made him an idol. Arguably, even if Rochester were free to marry, Jane would still be chastised by providence at some point in the course of the novel for allowing Rochester to take the place of God.

(It's interesting at this point to compare Jane with Mina Laury, the mistress of the Duke of Zamorna in Charlotte's juvenilia. I'm quite certain this juvenilia was written before Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels and C. fell in love with Heger, but Mina displays the servile obsession with a man that Jane Eyre rejects. Mina takes a certain delight in Zamorna's possessive ownership of her, which may be hinted at in Jane's referring to Rochester as her "master" throughout the novel. While submission, obsession and female desire remain closely intertwined throughout all CB's work, the juvenilia soon shifted to present Elizabeth Hastings who avowedly "adores" a man more oppressive than Rochester, yet respects herself too much to become his mistress.)

When Rochester's attempted-bigamy is revealed, Jane "keeps to the law given by God" even when "body and soul rise in mutiny against [its] rigour." I thought of this statement recently as I read an online discussion among liberal members of my own denomination about how the church should perhaps stop condemning premarital sex. Their argument was that in an age when most young people don't get married until their late twenties, it's just too hard to wait. While I see some validity in research on culturally and circumstantially-dependent principles in the Bible (what Christian today wouldn't use those words about Biblical pronouncements on slavery?), I still see this a matter of "laws and principles" and my protest rises in the words of Jane Eyre. "Laws and principles are not for times when there is no temptation... If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?"

But, while Jane's faith leads her to forgive the aunt she once swore to hate and leave the man whom she "absolutely worshiped", it does not lead her to confuse conventionality with morality. When St. John Rivers proposes that she marry him so she can accompany him to India as a missionary she rejects the prospect of being spiritual and emotionally stifled merely to satisfy conventionality. She does not reject the missionary's life; she rejects the idea of marriage to a man who sees her as a mere tool. St. John's subjugating, utilitarian marriage of convention is just as spiritually unconscionable as Mr. Rochester's offer of passionate and illicit love in "a villa on the shores of the Mediterranean". And Jane's insistence that she could go with St. John to India as a female curate or deacon was indeed subversive to conventionality and patriarchy. St. John himself says that he wants a wife whom he can "influence in life" and "retain absolutely till death". Jane declares her equality to St. John, just as she does to Rochester. Rochester, while a degenerated sinner, at first claims to accept Jane as his equal. St. John, whose sincerity and Christian devotion Jane consistently admires, refuses to accept her equality. Each poses a threat to Jane's Protestant need to have a conscience free from the dictates of man, yet bound by the Word of God.

Ultimately, Jane is proved right in saying that repentance, rather than reformation through human strength, is God's means of atonement. In the penultimate chapter, Mr. Rochester states that he has begun to "experience... repentance". Both he and Jane have reconciled with their Maker, and have built a firm foundation of mutual respect that will ensure the happiness of their union.

Perhaps the novel ends as an inversion of Paradise Lost in which Adam and Eve leave the home of their happiness and "hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow through Eden took their solitary way. ." After Rochester has humbly acknowledged his Redeemer he "stretched his hand out to be led... We entered the wood, and wended homeward." The next chapter presents their marriage which recalls an Edenic state of love, bliss and retirement.

But the outside world, marred by sin and bigotry, is not forgotten. The Christian must look forward to the day when "there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away."

Nor is St. John Rivers forgotten. In an ending that has perplexed some secular readers, Charlotte Bronte may perhaps be acknowledging that some who may never fully be able to differentiate between "narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few.. and the world-redeeming creed of Christ" are yet Greathearts.

And that's one reason I love Jane Eyre so much. It's an honest, intelligent and passionate dialog with issues that still effect my own Christian experience today. It is insistent upon a Christianity that transforms and elevates society, yet it does not say "'enough' on earth."

* I've titled this rant "Pre-eminently Christian" because in it I am arguing the exact opposite of the early reviewer who wrote, "The autobiography of Jane Eyre is pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition. There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor which ... is a murmuring against God's appointment." Of course I haven't even addressed begun to address that part of the novel's Christianity!

** I recognize that being a Christian and a feminist may be incongruous to some Christian readers, since feminism has been used to advocate things most Christians will reject. I use the term (albeit apprehensively) because I wish to emphasize principles of equality that some within Christianity have tried to expunge. I'm also not against everything associated with the Christian Patriarchy movement, but am deeply disturbed by its adherents who teach that women should not go to college or work, must be under the authority of all males in the household above age 13, and are rebelling against God if they do not always obey every directive of their husbands.

*** Perhaps it even starts as a cynical parody of The Pilgrim's Progress, since Gateshead has no benevolent figure like Goodwill of the Wicket Gate.

Recommended Reading (because there's always someone else who's said it better):
"Jane Eyre's Crown of Thorns: Feminism and Christianity in Jane Eyre" an essay by Maria Lamonaca (I recommend this tremendously, but it may not be available to most online. I found it in the EBSCO archives, through my library account. If you want a PDF, give me your email.)

More easily accessible is this blog post by Miriam Burnstein, The Little Professor, whom I will be referring to again when I get to the subject of adaptation:
http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/2011/03/the-moral-dangers-of-jane-eyre.html



This post got rather long-winded, but it's actually supposed to be the precursor to a post on the 2011 JE film adaptation, which I watched way back before Christmas. I invite any pyromaniacs reading this to burn me in my bed if I haven't posted my thoughts on the adaptation by next Friday.