As Richard Handler and Daniel Segal argue, gratitude is ‘one of the most important civil exchange tokens … it is at once an acknowledgement of attentions received and a preliminary return that holds the promise of increasing returns in the future.’34 As such, it is an emi-nently respectable, even if not particularly thrilling, way for a young woman to find herself on the road to being in love, and it does so, almost as effectively as a first-sight love, without implicating the individual will.
When Arabella in The Female Quixote talks of an admirer providing ‘a testimony of his Love, which should oblige me to reward him with my Affection’, the key word is ‘oblige’. When Darcy first proposes to Elizabeth, she acknowledges that ‘the established mode is to express a sense of obligation for the sentiments avowed, however unequally they may be returned’ (p. 169) – or, as Handler and Segal put it, ‘in romantic matters, gratitude is the natural return for admiration, attentions, and affections’ and ‘even when those cannot be returned, they must be acknowledged with gratitude.’35 But Elizabeth cannot ‘ feel gratitude’ for a good opinion that she has never desired and that has been bestowed, Darcy has implied, ‘most unwillingly’ (p. 169). Later in the story, however, he is in danger of giving her too much cause for gratitude, his financial assistance in expediting Lydia’s marriage placing Elizabeth under an obligation of which a gentleman might not wish to take advantage.36 Hence his insistence that it be kept secret. But between these two extremes lies the sense of gratitude that ‘obliges’ a woman to take the step that, as we saw in the previous chapter, Pamela and Arabella have to negotiate so carefully, that of ‘giving [a man]
Permission to love her’ ( FQ p. 137). In loving Darcy in gratitude for the testimony of his love, Elizabeth may be responding to the particular social pressures of her class and age, but she is doing nothing new; she takes the same path, in fact, that Sidney’s Pamela takes in Arcadia, where gratitude and esteem are also the foundations of her love for Musidorus. Once convinced that Musidorus is possessed of a nobility fit for a princess to esteem, Sidney’s Pamela allows gratitude to do the rest, arguing that it is her duty to return Musidorus’s love because of the sacrifice of dignity he is prepared to make by courting her in the
174 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre guise of a humble servant: ‘can I without the detestable stain of ungratefulness’, Pamela insists, ‘abstain from loving him who (far exceeding the beautifulness of his shape with the beautifulness of his mind, and the greatness of his estate with the greatness of his acts) is content so to abase himself … for my sake?’ ( NA, p. 247). It is not clear whether Pamela is here meant to be as disingenuous as she sounds – a little earlier she is certainly fulsome, even a little feverish (and, as Philoclea observes, tellingly ‘disjointed’) in her praise of Musidorus’s many excellencies – but it is an important reminder of how little the constraints on women’s behaviour have changed between Arcadia and Pride and Prejudice, and of how thoroughly conventional the strategies of negotiating them remain. It is a very old story that all these writers are telling, propelled by a dynamic that has less to do with the endorsement of patriarchal marriage than with the tactics of strategic surrender.
8
Agitating Risk and Romantic
Chance: Going All the Way with
Jane Eyre?
A central paradox of Jane Eyre is its enlistment in two antithetical traditions, as progenitor of the modern romance and ringleader of the feminist revolt against its stifling conventions. Jane Eyre always figures prominently in any genealogy of the modern romance, sometimes as the culmination of a process of feminization (and, implicitly, of trivialization) in which, as Barbara Milech observes, ‘the generic term
“romance” has shifted from meaning a courtly tale of masculine adventure to indicating a popular story of feminine fortune’,1 and sometimes as the forebear of a new breed of romance heroines who participate as much as men in the pursuit of an intense, overwhelming passion that, in Milton Viederman’s words, becomes ‘the grand organizer of the individual’s life … [so that] everything else takes a sec-ondary role’.2 In the former sense romance has come to mean little more than a popular love story embodying wish-fulfilling fantasies of sometimes spectacular contrivance. In the latter sense, romance retains some of the transcendent and regenerative aspirations of its chivalric ancestry, in which this supreme passion, typically but not definitively taking the form of love, is capable of recuperating and transfiguring a
‘fallen’ world. The ‘anti-romance’ strain identified in Jane Eyre – in, for example, a heroine who ‘breaks with the conventions of romance and feminine performance’3 – commonly derives from the reduction of romance elements simply to the formulaic love story, and in this context Jane’s relationship with Rochester is certainly not the kind of
‘delightful romance’ that Rosamond Oliver envisages when speculating about Jane’s past.4 But, ‘original’ though Jane Eyre may be, with ‘something brave in [her] spirit, as well as penetrating in [her] eye’ (p. 418), the perception of her as radically rebellious is generally accompanied by the assumption that earlier romance heroines had been resigned to 175
176 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre the constraints under which she chafes, when in fact they have mostly been just as busy as Jane, even if less openly truculent, in negotiating the terms on which their will could be legitimately exerted.
There is much in Jane Eyre the novel that is radical and rebellious –
and it was certainly perceived as such in contemporary reviews. But there is also much in Jane Eyre the character that is so thoroughly conventional that it pays to look again at the nature of the passion that drives her and at the steps she takes – or are taken for her – in the pursuit of a transfiguring love that is all too easily confused with, and reduced to, the urgency of sexual desire. Reading Jane Eyre, not as a radical transformation of romance, but as a continuation of strategic interventions in a tradition that has a long history of accommodation to changing social and cultural conditions is not to deny the revolution that Jane herself threatens to incite, preaching ‘liberty to them that are enslaved’ (p. 302), but it does help to explain the contradictions in a novel variously interpreted as both profoundly reactionary and dangerously revolutionary, as both subversive and conservative, angelic and Satanic.5
So much of her own will
When Jane first takes up her position as governess at Thornfield, and prior to the master’s appearance, she quickly tires of the different kind of servitude that, after the misery of her childhood as the scorned dependent in her aunt’s home, and after the deprivations and discipline of a charity boarding school, she believes is all she is entitled to expect. With the departure of her head teacher and friend, Miss Temple, she had dreamed first of liberty, then of change and stimulus, before settling for ‘a new servitude’: ‘Any one may serve: I have served here eight years; now all I want is to serve elsewhere. Can I not get so much of my own will?’
(p. 100). But no sooner is she settled into her new position than the longing returns, and in moments of solitude Jane recalls indulging ‘bright visions’ of a more fulfilling life in ‘a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence’ (p. 125). A year later, after rather more of incident, life, fire (particularly fire), and feeling than she might have wished, she is newly instated as the village school-mistress at Morton, conscientiously performing a task that is again useful but dull, and the visions return, ‘charged with adventure, with agitating risk and romantic chance’ (p. 410) – though this time they have a recurring finale, in the arms, once more, of the master of Thornfield.
Agitating Risk and Romantic Chance 177
In the reviews that followed, and reacted against, the upsurge of
‘Jane Eyre fever’ when the novel was first published,6 it was Jane’s discontent that drew the most vir
ulent objections. Jane, it should be remembered, is an extraordinarily lucky young woman – lucky to survive the typhoid epidemic at Lowood school, lucky to get the job at Thornfield, lucky to escape by a hair’s breadth a bigamous marriage, lucky to fall into the lap of her long-lost cousins when there is not another person in the whole of England to whom she could turn –
and, as Penny Boumelha points out, she lives out an ‘extraordinarily wide range of narrative possibilities’:
In the course of the novel Jane has three jobs, five homes, three families of a sort, two proposals of marriage. If her travel is restricted, at least she nearly goes to the South of France, nearly goes to Madeira, nearly goes to India. She learns French, German and Hindustani. She lives alone, receives male visitors in her bedroom in the middle of the night and hears confidences of financial treachery and sexual profligacy. She saves a life, proposes marriage and gives away thousands of pounds.7
Yet, for all this, there is, in the words of one contemporary reviewer (and echoed by many others), a ‘pervading tone of ungodly discontent’
in the novel,8 betraying not so much the defects of a woman’s lot about which Jane protests, but rather a defect in the woman who is unable to appreciate ‘simple duties and pure pleasures’.9 Not only is the nature of Jane’s desires deemed improper – wanting a life of action, stimulus, change, fire, feeling – but even desire itself is unseemly in a woman, perhaps explaining why the reviewer in The Economist declared the novel (published under the androgynous pseudonym of ‘Currer Bell’) praiseworthy if written by a man but ‘odious’ if written by a woman.10
In their singling out of Jane’s unsatisfied desires as the well-spring of discontent in Jane Eyre, the reviewers have a point, regardless of whatever ideological agenda might be driving it. Jane Eyre is perhaps the hungriest of all fictional heroines; she wants everything – or at least everything that stories can give her. In terms of their basic structure, half-a-dozen stories account for most Western literature: the story of the foundling in search of family or home; the story of a hero or heroine’s testing, in the process of either acquiring maturity or proving it; the story of a quest, in search of the solution to an enigma or the key to a treasure; the story of a contest between what can loosely be
178 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre called good and evil; the story of a victim seeking rescue or release; and the story of love, either fulfilled or unrequited. These different stories frequently overlap – so that, for example, the story of love fulfilled is very often also the story of a hero’s or heroine’s testing or the story of a quest in which true love is the treasure.11 But each of these stories represents a different desire – a home, a place in the adult world, a treasure of some kind, a victory over warring elements, rescue, or true love
– and Jane wants them all.12
Read as a variation on the foundling story, for example, Jane wants a family or congenial home, her ‘natural element’ (represented schematically in the novel by a choice between the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water). Read as a story of a heroine’s testing, on the other hand, Jane needs to prove herself as an independent being, the equal of any woman or man, and accorded ‘the privilege of free action’ (p. 469). Then again, read as the story of a quest, Jane wants to surmount the hilly horizon surrounding Lowood and Thornfield and Marsh End, to leave behind a sedentary, sequestered life and plunge into the ‘real world’, ‘a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements … [awaiting] those who had courage to go forth into its expanse to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils’ (p. 99). Read as the story of a contest, Reason and Passion alternate in Jane as good and evil, but Jane wants, neither the triumph of one or the other – that is, not absolute submission to Reason nor the determined revolt of Passion – but a means of reconciling the dictates of both. And read as the story of a victim, Jane wants release from servitude – not, as she gets after she leaves Lowood, and again after she leaves Thornfield, a different servitude (exchanging one idol for another, Miss Temple for the Master of Thornfield for the saintly St John), but rather the liberty to be her ‘own mistress’ (p. 483).
Clearly, all these stories in certain respects relate to each other, and, entwined as they are in a single narrative, parts of one story will also be pieces of another. Although it is as a love story, for example, that Jane Eyre is always remembered, it is as a foundling story that it begins, and it is the foundling story – the search for a home – that provides the underlying structure of the novel. Jane is not literally a foundling: that is, she is not a deserted infant of unknown parents. But as an orphaned child and the dependent of resentful relatives, she does feel abandoned, an alien in hostile territory, and as the story develops, Jane’s search is always for somewhere to belong, somewhere that she can feel at home. The resolution to the love story provides the climactic resolu-
Agitating Risk and Romantic Chance 179
tion to the story of a search for home – she finds with Rochester a place where she so thoroughly belongs that she lives
entirely for and with what I love best on earth … I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh. … we are ever together. … we are precisely suited in character – perfect concord is the result. (p. 500)
But this final affirmation of belonging also derives its persuasiveness and its sense of climax from the other stories feeding it. Before Jane can be, for example, ‘my husband’s life as fully as he is mine’, the story of the heroine’s testing has to work its way through: she has to establish herself as his equal and shed the relationships of submissive dependency that have dominated her life – at Gateshead where she had become, under John Reed’s tyranny, ‘a queer, frightened, shy, little thing’ (p. 48); at Lowood, where her need to be loved and her desire to please those she loved had made her an obedient supplicant at Miss Temple’s altar; at Thornfield, where Rochester had become her whole world and she so besotted that she could not ‘see God for his creature: of whom [she] had made an idol’ (p. 307); and at Marsh End, where her veneration of St John makes her contemplate martyrdom as his missionary-mate. The independence that she seeks is in turn the story of a war between elements within herself (the battle between reason and passion, for example, that knows no medium between
‘absolute submission and determined revolt’ [p. 446]). The ‘perfect concord’ that she eventually finds with Rochester is in part a reflection of the peace she has made with herself, and also in part the end of a quest to find a fulfilling vocation that is not simply ‘woman’s work.’
But ‘woman’s work’ it is, of course, that she eventually embraces, as housekeeper, nurse, and amanuensis to a disabled Rochester, in an ending that looks suspiciously like her third-best wish, at Lowood school, where she had wished first for liberty, then for change or stimulus, and then, if that were too much to ask, at least for a ‘new servitude’. That it does not feel like servitude – attending to Rochester’s needs is rather ‘to indulge [her] sweetest wishes’ (p. 500) – is small comfort to readers who have expected more of a heroine who has insisted that women, as much as men, deserve adequate ‘exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts’ (p. 125) – though Jane has also taken care to remind us that domesticity in itself is not the culprit.13 As Boumelha observes, ‘what is problematic [about Jane Eyre]
180 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre is primarily the ending of the novel, or rather, perhaps, the question of the relation of ending to beginning’.14 Boumelha goes on to argue that the ending ‘need not abolish the range of narrative possibilities intimated in the course of the text’ (and outlined above), highlighting in particular another story that is told, ‘the story that allows [Jane] to write her woman’s autobiography, not as “Mrs Edward Rochester” but as Jane Eyre’,15 but we should also be wary of assuming that Jane, any more than Adèle, subscri
bes to the belief that ‘a pretty gold ring’ on the ‘fourth finger of [the] left hand’ is a ‘talisman [that] will remove all difficulties’ (p. 300).
The madness of a secret love, or miry wilds whence there is no extrication
Seven years before the publication of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë wrote to her friend Ellen Nussey: ‘no young lady should fall in love till the offer has been made, accepted – … the marriage ceremony performed and the first half year of wedded life has passed away – a woman may then begin to love, but with great precaution – very coolly – very moderately – very rationally’.16 The advisability of a half-year cooling off period is also recommended by Jane Eyre in her warning to Rochester that she no more than he can expect ‘anything celestial’
from a partner:
For a little while you will perhaps be as you are now, – a very little while; and then you will turn cool; and then you will be capricious; and then you will be stern, and I shall have much ado to please you: but when you get well used to me, you will perhaps like me again, –
like me, I say, not love me. I suppose your love will effervesce in six months, or less. I have observed in books written by men, that period assigned as the farthest to which a husband’s ardour extends.
Yet, after all, as a friend and companion, I hope never to become quite distasteful to my dear master. (p. 292)
Given that Rochester later tells Jane he intends waiting a year and a day before revealing the contents of his Thornfield attic, even a half-year delay in ‘falling’ in love could not be considered overly cautious, though it is already too late for Jane – she is already in love and has already discovered she cannot ‘unlove’ Rochester (p. 210) – and few readers, we suspect, take seriously her prediction of the likely course of their affair. Neither Jane nor Brontë can be assumed, moreover, to be
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