‘influenced’, and ‘conquered’, Jane evades at least some of the implications of having a will of her own and exercising it, for her power over Rochester is essentially achieved by pleasing him – the complaisance that is the traditional source of a woman’s ‘special influence’. Jane’s capacity to stand up to Rochester, to vex and to tease him to the
‘extreme brink’ of provocation but no further, is all part of her charm, but it also means that she is all the more deliciously – and winningly –
pliant when she bends under his kindness. Were it not for the other
‘narrative possibilities’ that Jane Eyre explores – including her disinclination to exhaust herself in the village school, and her determination
188 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre to ‘enjoy [her] own faculties as well as to cultivate those of other people’ (p. 435) – Jane’s devotion to Rochester at the end of the novel might seem little better than her third-best wish for a ‘new servitude’.
As it is, even on the understanding that her will is consummated rather than effaced in service to Rochester – that ‘to yield … attendance [on Rochester] was to indulge … her sweetest wishes’ (p. 476) – the exercise of that will is still compromised by the nature of the ‘calling’ to which she responds.
A fairytale for a new age
In some ways a third-best wish would be a fitting climax for a young woman suspicious of fairy tale endings promising complete happiness and conscious also that the ‘calling’ she follows is that of the human voice rather than the divine. Earlier, when St John had asked Jane to marry him and go with him to India as his ‘help-meet and fellow-labourer’, a stunned Jane felt as if
the glen and sky spun round: the hills heaved! It was as if I had heard a summons from Heaven – as if a visionary messenger, like him of Macedonia, had enounced, ‘Come over and help us!’ But I was no apostle, – I could not behold the herald, – I could not receive his call. (p. 448)
The call she does receive and answer is ‘the voice of a human being’
(p. 467), though sanctioned by association with ‘the work of nature’,
‘a Mighty Spirit’, and ‘the will of Heaven’ (pp. 467–8). Rochester’s cry,
‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’, carrying across a distance it takes 36 hours to travel by coach, hovers on the brink of sacrilege in its analogous calling. It comes close on the heels of the ‘summons from Heaven’ and is linked in Jane’s response (‘I am coming! Wait for me! Oh, I will come!’) to St John’s embrace of his Maker in the letter that ends the novel, in which he tells Jane (in another dangerous echo of the man Jane calls
‘master’): ‘My Master … has forewarned me. Daily he announces more distinctly, – “Surely I come quickly!” and hourly I more eagerly respond, – “Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!”’ (p. 502).31 Analogy is not equivalence, and by giving St John the last word Brontë could be understood as putting Jane’s ‘soft ministry’ to Rochester in a larger perspective, though it is a reading against which the novel strains in Jane’s desperate resistance to the sacred ministry St John is asking of her.
Agitating Risk and Romantic Chance 189
But Jane’s resistance to St John’s mission also needs to be set alongside her earlier resistance to the fairytale script Rochester offered her, in that both invite surrender to a higher will that will spirit her away from stagnation and restraint. When Rochester, on the brink of marriage to Jane and impatient to be rid of the encumbrances of the past, threatens to send one such encumbrance – the child of a former mistress – away to school, he explains to the child, Adèle, that he is going to take Jane to the moon. There they shall live in a cave in one of the white valleys, he explains, and he will gather manna for her, and clothe her in pink clouds. Adèle’s protests are attributed to her ‘French scepticism’: ‘She is far better as she is,’
Adèle concludes, ‘she would get tired of living with only you,’ and, besides, ‘there is no road to the moon: it is all air; and neither you nor she can fly’ (p. 299). Adèle may be French, and a gross little materialist to boot, but in her scepticism she is not all that different from Jane, who superstitiously fears a future that promises to fulfill all her wishes. As she explains to Rochester after she has blushed and then paled at his naming the date on which she will become ‘Jane Rochester’:
‘It can never be, sir; it does not sound likely. Human beings never enjoy complete happiness in this world. I was not born for a different destiny to the rest of my species: to imagine such a lot befalling me is a fairy tale – a day-dream.’ (p. 290)
The tension here between superstition and commonsense – the resistance to fairytale solutions is, after all, as much superstitious as rational
– is typical of the continually shifting balance of power in the novel between realistic constraints and romantic potentialities, both within Jane and within a novelistic universe that permits the realistically
‘likely’ to be prefigured in providential irony. The marriage that Rochester is anticipating, for example, ‘can never be’, but instead, as he unwittingly foretells in his fairytale, he must go with his fairy ‘out of the common world to a lonely place’ for the fairy to make him happy.
When Jane eventually returns to Rochester, she makes her own way there, but her desire for Rochester is subsumed under the ‘will of heaven’, whose calling it is that she musters the will to obey.32 Jane Eyre effectively has it both ways: she is ‘a free human being with an independent will’ (p. 284), but at the crunch it is the spirit that is willing, with the authority and the power to act entrusted elsewhere.
There is, it seems, extrication of sorts from the miry wilds, but for the
190 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre
‘new kind of woman’, as Lyndall Gordon styles Jane,33 will without power still requires a fairytale solution.
Epilogue
For a fairy tale for the new age, and for young women like Jane and Adèle, we need look no further than Emily Henrietta Hickey’s ‘In a Nutshell’, which revisits a ‘fragment of a fairy tale’ from ‘Sidney’s fair romance’34 – Mopsa’s tale of two nuts from Sidney’s Arcadia – and in doing so illustrates both the persistence of romance conventions and their modification under the influence of changing social and historical conditions. The story is Mopsa’s tale of two nuts, given to a princess by her aunts as she wanders distractedly in search of her prince, having succumbed to the curiosity that it has done Jane no good at all to suppress. In Mopsa’s tale, the knight who has won the heart of the king’s fair daughter and carried her away has forbidden her to ‘ask him what he was nor whither he would’ ( NA, p. 311), for he has been brought up by water-nymphs who will make him vanish if he is asked his name. In Jane Eyre it is Jane who Rochester fancies has been brought up among the fairies, and it is Jane who ‘vanish’d quite away’
( NA, p. 311) when Rochester attempted, illegally, to change her name, but Hickey’s continuation of Mopsa’s tale (humanely aborted in Arcadia while the princess is still accumulating nuts) encapsulates the terms upon which Jane can answer Rochester’s call.
It is not ‘Mopsa’s end’ that Hickey writes, ‘Only an end that met the soul of one / Small singer of the nineteenth century’ (ll. 70–1) whose
‘heart burn[s] in her at the words’ that come with the nut. In Mopsa’s tale, the first nut carries the direction that it not be opened by the princess ‘till she was come to the extremest misery that ever tongue could speak of’ ( NA, pp. 311–2); in Hickey’s continuation, the second nut also carries directions – that it be opened only ‘when thou dost know there is no need / To break the other’ (ll. 80–1). The princess suffers misery upon misery but never reaches that moment of ‘extremest woe,’ even when she hears the prince’s tortured call and is powerless to help, because ‘extremest woe’ will never come while she has the will, even if not the power, to act. Once she realizes this – that suffering has
�
��quicken’d’ and not killed her, that ‘sharp regrets’ have pricked her on and ‘not stung to death’, that ‘great waters’ going over her have ‘washt clean, / Not drown’d’ – she is free to break the second nut, ‘Whose breaking was to be when thou wert sure / Thy woe should never be extremest woe’ (ll. 148–9).
Agitating Risk and Romantic Chance 191
The conclusion of Hickey’s reworking of Mopsa’s tale, like Jane’s, reunites seeker and sought, but the details are perfunctory: And so she brake the nut – and then – there came
That which I know not how to tell – great joy
And peace and strength – and came for both of them,
The seeker and the sought. (ll. 150–3)
The point is clearly to get the princess to the stage where nuts (and for that matter the prince) are not necessary to her well-being, since all she needs to find is within herself: ‘the will to help, if not the power’
(l. 137). But it is a curiously ambivalent message that the tale sends, and one that will be repeated throughout fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth century in which the female protagonist, in the absence of an adequate field for her endeavours, settles for the will to act, if not the power, for, where the end is self-knowledge, it is enough that the
‘great waters’ going over her have washed clean but not drowned her.
But settling for will without the power to act on it, while safeguarding the desiring woman from the aspersion of design, also smacks of the threadbare pragmatism of a virtue made of necessity, nowhere more deftly depicted than in that other novel of the third-best wish, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, in the Spanish proverb that stands as an epigraph to chapter 46: ‘Since we cannot get what we like, let us like what we can get.’35
Given that the texts in this study span a period of some 250 years, they reveal a surprising consistency in the constraints they impose on female behaviour at the same time as they demonstrate the degree of ingenuity, by both writers and fictional characters, expended in devising strategies that could circumvent them. From Arcadia to Jane Eyre, young men and women have continued to find themselves in love without knowing it, to have ‘fallen’ without conscious choice, to have loved across the barriers of class and caste and common sense and even, like Mr Darcy, against their will, reason, and character; and in the service of love, men have endured humiliating dependence, and women have tried not to look as if they were taking advantage of it.
Many of these conventions we might not have expected to survive the pressures of social realism, given that the fictional enterprise of love and courtship at times bears so little resemblance to actual social practice (in particular the phenomenon of being in love without knowing it). And we would certainly not have expected them to withstand the challenge to a prescriptive gender ideology pursued by feminism. Yet,
192 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre as Tania Modleski observes in Loving with a Vengeance, these conventions are still rife in modern popular romance, which, not so very long ago, was unaccountably advertising itself as telling stories about
‘people like us, who live, and love.’
Most of the business of falling in love in fiction, it seems, serves the function of testifying to the fact that love is freely given, but, paradoxically, in the case of women, that it is not actively desired or pursued.
Wroth’s ‘Brittany Lady’, who goes much further than the ‘halfe way’ her lover demands, understands that ‘daintynes’ – the niceties of propriety –
would lose him, for a ‘free gift was what he wished’; and a preoccupation with femininity as a social construction can blind us to the value of the woman’s ‘free gift’ of herself within the courting economy. Moreover, the artless, submissive woman of the conduct books who is characterized by a fastidiousness of moral taste that renders her selfless and conscientiously will-less will inevitably be victimized, but as much by narrative dynamics as by patriarchal culture. There is not much scope in narrative for a heroine who abjures the self, since a story requires that someone wants something and is prepared to go after it, and the promotion of female characters to the status of protagonist imposes its own demands on the will. But if goal-directed action is the essence of narrative, goal-directed women, in fiction at least, have always struggled to determine the lengths to which they might legitimately go in pursuit of their desires, even with a goal like Dorothea’s in Middlemarch that is unexcep-tionable (even if rather vague) in its ambition – ‘desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would.’ Like Jane Eyre and Hickey’s princess, Dorothea is prepared to settle for the will without the power – not being able to do what she would – but even if in the end she might seem to be settling even for less, for a will that serves another’s goals and ‘a life filled with a beneficent activity which she had not the doubtful pains of discovering and marking out for herself’, she has gone as far as the epigraph to the first chapter suggests she is capable: ‘Since I can do no good because a woman, / Reach constantly at something that is near it.’ 36
It was the Brittany lady who first focused our interest on the question of how far a woman should go in pursuit of her own desires. A minor figure in Wroth’s vast tribe of characters, as well as marginalized by her widowhood, she nevertheless suggested a keen awareness of choices other than those dictated by the advice literature and gender ideology. ‘Brave’ as well as ‘discreet’, both ‘sweet’ and ‘grave’, the Brittany Lady, as a widow, is her own woman as few fictional heroines are, but, like her, the heroines we have been discussing are far from
Agitating Risk and Romantic Chance 193
being passive repositories of masculinist ideologies. From Arcadia to Jane Eyre and beyond female protagonists struggle to exercise their wills and pursue their desires in circumstances not of their own choosing, and in the process illuminate some fascinating contradictions as writers attempt to reconcile the conflicting demands of moral and narrative interests.
Notes
Introduction
1 Cited in Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 120. John Wardroper in Jest upon Jest (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970) gives the source as Oxford Jests, fifth edition, 1684 (compiled by Captain William Hicks), though identifies an earlier version in Wits, Fittes and Fancies, 1595 (Wardroper p. 163).
2 Mendelson and Crawford, p. 109.
3 Like Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss in Women, Texts and Histories 1575– 1760
(London: Methuen, 1992), our concern is not to produce an account
‘intended to be synecdochal of a complete narrative’ (p. 6), but rather to contribute to the debates about women’s agency as represented in fiction.
4 Jonathan Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 12.
5 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), p. xxix.
6 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 2.
7 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. xxix.
8 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 44.
9 Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 1, 3.
10 Dennis Kay, ‘“She Was a Queen, and Therefore Beautiful”: Sidney, His Mother, and Queen Elizabeth’, Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 43, No. 169 (February, 1992), p. 20.
11 Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women 1475– 1640 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982).
12 See for example, Christina Luckyj, ‘ A Moving Rhetoric’: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). The reappraisal of notions of passivity, in men and women, is examined in Scott Paul Gordon’s The Power of the Passive Self in English Lite
rature 1640– 1770
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
13 Gervase Markham, The English Housewife, ed. Michael R. Best (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986), pp. xxvii, xxviii. It must be acknowledged here that this activity is still located within a predominantly domestic sphere, rather than the world at large, but the distinction between public and private, domestic and politic, is often harder to sustain than it might seem. And anyway, the argument that women could be active only in the domestic sphere is part of a trivialization of women’s work that is endemic in patriarchal society.
14 In terms of Markham’s career more generally he does seem, as Michael R.
Best suggests, to have begun ‘his career as writer by trying his hand at most of the popular literary forms of the day’ (p. xii).
194
Notes 195
15 Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 33.
Whigham acknowledges here the influence of the Tel Quel group and quotes from Frederic Jameson, ‘Marxism and Historicism’, New Literary History 11 (1979): 57.
16 Whigham, p. 186. It should be said here that Whigham is predominantly concerned with tropes of Elizabethan courtesy primarily as they relate to the courtier and then the middle-class gentleman. He does, however, suggest that ‘gender is perhaps the last bastion of the Given’ (p. 186) in the sense that it is assumed to be natural rather than socially determined. To this one might add other categories, such as race and ethnicity.
17 Whigham, p. 39. Whigham refers to Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969).
18 Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650– 1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London: Longman, 1998), p. 18.
19 Shoemaker, p. 61. Humoral theory could also be invoked as the physiologi-cal basis of chastity. According to Valerie Wayne in ‘Advice for Women from Mothers and Patriarchs’ (in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500– 1700, ed.
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