Anxious and uneasy, the period which passed in the drawing-room, before the gentlemen came, was wearisome and dull to a degree that almost made her uncivil. She looked forward to their entrance, as the point on which all her chance of pleasure for the evening must depend.
“If he does not come to me, then,” said she, “I shall give him up for ever.” 9
Darcy doesn’t come to Elizabeth then. Austen wants to make her readers squirm a bit longer. And we really would squirm if, the first time we read Pride and Prejudice, we weren’t reassured by our teachers or parents that “Jane Austen is a comic writer” or “ Pride and Prejudice is a great love story.” Imagine not knowing how this novel will turn out and reading those scenes that describe Elizabeth’s almost unendurable waiting. The whole fate of her life—indeed, whether she’ll even have what many of her peers would regard as a life—rests on whether this man Darcy looks at her; whether his gaze lingers; and whether he, once again, likes what he sees enough to airlift Elizabeth up and out of the limbo of Longbourn and off to the Cinderella’s castle of Pemberley.
Jane Austen is a comic writer, and Pride and Prejudice is a great love story. The terror of the marriage-market extreme-adventure scenes that abound in Pride and Prejudice, as in all of Austen’s other novels, is contained by her wit and her fondness for qualified happy endings. (The exception, of course, is her last novel, Persuasion, where the witty worldview slipped away, although the qualified happy ending hung on by its fingernails.) Austen is like the smart-ass Army private from Brooklyn who’s a stock character in virtually every World War II movie ever made. He takes in the carnage around him, but he’s tough: he reflexively cracks jokes to keep fear at bay. Maybe, because he grew up on the streets of Brooklyn, this guy never had high expectations of humanity in the first place. To extend this analogy, Charlotte Brontë is like the idealistic young kid, also a staple of the cinematic Army platoon, who breaks down because the horror, the horror, of war is too much to bear. Brontë and her heroines never take a single ironic step back from their situations. If there’s a funny moment in Jane Eyre and Villette, I’ve missed it, repeatedly. Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe have no defense mechanisms; indeed, it’s almost as if they have no skin. Their first-person narratives are frostbitten to the core. Both heroines recount their individual frantic attempts to escape from subzero existential solitude into the warmth of a sheltering marriage. The deadening cold of their Shackletonian slogs across the ice and snow of polar emptiness toward the elusive fires of human companionship permeates their voices, as well as their souls.
The opening pages of Jane Eyre warn us that we’re in for a rough trip across stark terrain. Indeed, chronology aside, those pages could have been cribbed from Shackleton’s own journal. The novel begins on a gloomy scene where the ten-year-old orphan, Jane Eyre, is whiling away the long hours of a wet November afternoon by looking at an illustrated volume called Bewick’s History of British Birds. She stares raptly at these paintings of lone sea-fowl who inhabit “the bleak shores” of the Arctic Zone, and those . . . regions of dreary space—that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights. . . . Of these death-white realms [Jane tells us] I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive.10
Brontë suggests here that Jane’s fascination with the blankness of the godforsaken Arctic region is the same fascination she displays a few pages on when she stares into a looking glass. Jane is transfixed by the book’s geographical representation of her own emotionally frozen personal circumstances: orphaned, friendless, without hope.
Jane fears being alone in the world, and her fear stirs up the very thing she most dreads. As she’s reading, her concentration is shattered by the taunts of her older cousin John Reed. Jane is unjustly punished for talking back to this thug by being locked away in the supposedly haunted “red-room.” As night casts its dark shadows into that moldy chamber, Jane ruminates on her outcast status as a dependent in her widowed aunt’s family: “I was a discord in Gateshead Hall; I was like nobody there; I had nothing in harmony with Mrs. Reed or her children, . . . If they did not love me, in fact, as little did I love them.”11 Jane’s terrifying and precocious awareness of what promises to be her extended sentence to emotional solitary confinement climaxes when she glimpses a ghostly gleam in the room. Because fortitude is one of the womanly virtues celebrated by the female extreme-adventure tale, I think it’s significant that Jane tells us at this crucial point in the narrative that: “endurance broke down; I rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate effort. Steps came running along the outer passage; the key turned, Bessie and Abbot entered. [italics mine]”12 But the nurse and the lady’s maid know which side their bread is buttered on, and they desert Jane to the cruel ministrations of her Aunt Reed, who promptly thrusts her into the red-room again and locks the door. At last, Jane (temporarily) escapes her prison via the tried-and-true method of Gothic heroines from Ann Radcliffe’s Emily de St. Aubert, star of the 1794 trendsetter The Mysteries of Udolpho, to the unnamed mousy narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: she faints.
Devoted readers of Jane Eyre know the torments of spirit and tests of strength that follow, all of them having to do with Jane’s struggle to escape her own chill loneliness. Jane is eventually cast out of the Reed mansion and packed away to Lowood, a boarding school of dubious quality. There her hopes for the rescue of companionship are briefly satisfied—and horribly dashed—first, by her friendship with schoolmate Helen Burns, and then, by her adulatory apprenticeship with a teacher, Miss Temple. Helen approaches Jane after Jane has been publicly and unfairly branded as a liar by the ogre who runs Lowood, Mr. Brocklehurst. She tries to inspire Jane with an “Invictus”-like pep talk on the virtues of self-love. Here’s a bit of their dialogue:
“If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”
“No; I know I should think well of myself; but that is not enough: if others don’t love me, I would rather die than live— I cannot bear to be solitary and hated, Helen. Look here; to gain some real affection from you, or Miss Temple, or any other whom I truly love, I would willingly submit to have the bone of my arm broken, or to let a bull toss me, or to stand behind a kicking horse, and let it dash its hoof at my chest—” 13
Poor Jane sounds a little like what contemporary pop psychology has branded as one of those “women who love too much.” Stripped of its elegance, Helen’s response to Jane’s emotional vulnerability is to tell her to “buck up,” and the rest of the novel can be read as a kind of a basic-training manual in which Jane’s spirit hardens as she endures the twin rigors of tragedy and tedium until she finally learns to embrace her solitude—at which point, in this novel that’s essentially a Gothic fairy tale, Jane is rewarded with a soul mate in the shape of a reformed and blinded (and therefore, symbolically, less potent) Mr. Rochester.
But I get ahead of Jane’s ordeal by ice here. One of the many amazing things about Jane Eyre is how unflinching it is in the many trials it administers to its heroine. After delivering her advice to Jane, Helen contracts the swamp fever that periodically infests Lowood. One night she and Jane cuddle up in their “little crib” together and slumber, until Miss Temple comes upon the pair at dawn—Jane’s arms tightly wrapped around Helen’s cold corpse. In all of nineteenth-century fiction is there any more appalling image of the elemental human need for closeness, for warmth, cosmically denied? Then, a few pages on, in a much less traumatic episode, Miss Temple abruptly marries the Rev. Mr. Nasmyth and the numbed Jane tells us she spent the half-holiday the school grants in honor of the nuptials “in solitude.”14
That solitude hardens when Jane moves to Thornfield to begin her life as a governess—the ultimate in lonely occupations for an educated woman in the nineteenth century.
Jane’s pupil, Adèle, is charming but narcissistic—the kind of child who constantly insists that adults “Look at me!” as she twirls and toe-dances around the parlor. No company for Jane there. Thornfield’s elderly housekeeper, Mrs. Fairfax, is pleasant but pedestrian, the type of person who talks a lot about the weather. The other inhabitant of Thornfield on hand to welcome Jane (in a manner of speaking) is Bertha Rochester, the master’s first wife, who has degenerated into a madwoman locked away in the attic. “While I paced softly on,” Jane tells us, recalling her tour of the upper rooms of the mansion house on her second day in residence, “the last sound I expected to hear in so still a region, a laugh, struck my ear. It was a curious laugh; distinct, formal, mirthless. I stopped: the sound ceased, only for an instant; it began again, louder. . . . It passed off in a clamorous peal that seemed to wake an echo in every lonely chamber.”15
The weird figure of the first Mrs. Rochester has inspired a lot of brilliant critical readings, first among them, a chapter in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s pioneering book on the female Gothic called, in tribute to Bertha’s centrality, The Madwoman in the Attic. Gilbert and Gubar see Bertha as a demonic double for Jane—a woman who destructively vents the anger that Jane herself has been struggling to repress ever since that wild tantrum in the red-room. As we learn by reading between the lines of Rochester’s eventual confession to Jane about his marriage, Bertha initially caught his eye because of her exotic sexual allure. Thus Bertha also serves as an erotic mirror image for Jane, who’s much more conventionally ladylike in this regard. No question these prevalent theories about Bertha are right, but I think she also embodies the dangers that can befall a woman who can’t translate herself, can’t make her truest self clear to those around her. That’s the reading of Bertha dramatized by a novel I otherwise don’t like: Jean Rhys’s turgid “prequel,” Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys focuses on Bertha’s “other-ness” (she is of Creole descent and was raised in the West Indies), rather than her inherited madness, as the ominous impediment to a blissful union with the young Mr. Rochester. The sex is good; they just can’t talk afterward.
To be linked for the rest of your life to a man who doesn’t “get you”: so many women’s stories dwell on this particular nightmare. To name two: Kate Simon’s Bronx Primitive—a nuanced memoir of growing up in the teens and twenties in New York City—contains a chapter called “Fifth Floor,” which catalogues all the “crazy ladies” who dwelled in Simon’s tenement. The crazy ladies are mostly immigrant women who’ve been disoriented by their transplant to the New World and whose husbands demonstrate a tone-deaf impatience with their anxieties. In Maxine Hong Kingston’s book The Woman Warrior (critical debate continues over whether this is a novel or a fanciful autobiography), similar stories about immigrant crazy ladies abound, along with a mesmerizing tale about a woman in China who wears a headdress that encloses her in mirrors, and whose failure to communicate with her fellow villagers results in her death by stoning. In Jane Eyre, I think that cautionary vision of utter emotional isolation, as much as the bars and chains of Bertha’s actual physical imprisonment, is what really terrifies Jane after her bungled wedding ceremony to Mr. Rochester and sends her running out of Thornfield and into the wilderness. It’s tricky to support this interpretation, because the cries from the heart about how lonely that first, star-crossed marriage was emanate from Mr. Rochester as he tries to explain himself to a devastated Jane: “I found her nature wholly alien to mine. . . . I found that I could not pass a single evening, nor even a single hour of the day with her in comfort; that kindly conversation could not be sustained between us. . . . I tried to devour my repentance and disgust in secret; I repressed the deep antipathy I felt.” 16
Our sympathies lie with Mr. Rochester, except that he’s not only misled but also “misread” Jane, and that’s a very bad omen for their future together. Right after Jane accepted his proposal, Mr. Rochester swept her off on a shopping expedition where he tried to dress her up in rainbow silks. No clotheshorse, Jane consents to a gray wedding gown. That Mr. Rochester even imagines, after their canceled wedding ceremony, that she’s the kind of woman who might agree to an “unholy” union indicates how wide of the mark his understanding of her is. So, Jane flees. But she has no one or nowhere to flee to. She winds up losing herself in a landscape almost as hostile to life as the Arctic one described in the novel’s first chapter.
By referencing that Arctic landscape, Jane Eyre consciously opened with an homage to male extreme adventures (after all, male explorers braved those polar climes to catalogue those birds) and signaled that, as a novel, it would be a female variant on those traditional tales. It’s significant, after all, that Jane, not her loutish male cousin, John Reed, is fascinated by those illustrations of far-off places. Furthermore, Jane Eyre is a standout in the canon of female extreme-adventure tales of the nineteenth century because, in a short but powerful digression from its main “woman’s story” about the torments of solitude and the struggle for psychic and economic salvation through marriage, it veers off into a conventional male physical-adventure narrative. I can’t think of another nineteenth-century female adventure tale that dares this kind of gender-role reversal, in which the hero, Mr. Rochester, stays home and “stands and waits,” while the heroine dashes off into the wilderness, camps out, and fights the elements.
When Jane eludes Mr. Rochester’s illicit embrace and sneaks out of Thornfield in the dead of night, she skirts hedges, gets her shoes wet, and sleeps fitfully on the damp, brambly heath. She loses all her money and, starving, forces herself to beg and barter for food. Like other modest female adventurers, Jane is reluctant to boast of her exploits. Of her third day on the road, she only tersely tells us:
Do not ask me, reader, to give a minute account of that day; as before, I sought work; as before, I was repulsed; as before, I starved; but once did food pass my lips. At the door of a cottage was a little girl about to throw a mess of cold porridge into a pig trough.
“Will you give me that?” I asked.
She stared at me. “Mother!” she exclaimed; “there is a woman wants me to give her this porridge.”
“Well, lass,” replied a voice within, “give it her if she’s a beggar. T’ pig doesn’t want it.”17
This singular section of Jane Eyre reads like a Special Forces training manual. Like the typical male extreme-adventure tale, it’s heavy on physical challenges and discomforts, which take place in a wild, outdoorsy setting. It’s also an adventure of short duration. At the close of day three, Jane follows a light in the gloaming and discovers Moor House, where she’s taken in by the kindly Rivers sisters and eventually embarks on another extreme adventure—this one female—when she takes a job teaching village girls in the local school: “It was truly hard work at first. . . . Wholly untaught, with faculties quite torpid, they seemed to me hopelessly dull; and, at first sight, all dull alike.”18 She also resists the aloof advances of the brother of the house, St. John Rivers, who’s looking for a pliant dray horse of a wife to help him shoulder the burden of his anticipated missionary work. Thanks, but no thanks. Jane has learned that there is a fate more terrible than solitude: it’s solitude in the company of a husband who essentially misunderstands you.
Then, Brontë relents. She gives Jane that waking vision where she hears Mr. Rochester’s plaintive voice. Jane dashes back to her now widowed intended (recall that Bertha died in the fire that she herself maliciously set at Thornfield) and finds that Mr. Rochester has been punished for his earlier blindness to her true character by literal blindness. That affliction lifts after a few years of empathetic married life.
I’ve gone on at length about Jane Eyre because, as a female extreme-adventure tale, it pulls out all the stops—even, as I’ve said, digressing into a traditionally male adventure-tale plot that sends its physically delicate heroine off on an obstacle course where she climbs crags and competes with pigs for food. In its ruthless exploration of the female soul in solitary, no other nineteenth-cen
tury novel written by a woman bests Jane Eyre—except, of course, the last novel that Charlotte Brontë wrote: Villette.
Villette functions as an excruciatingly relentless version of a female extreme-adventure tale. One reason for the brevity of my tribute to Villette, Brontë’s greatest novel, is that it scares me too much. I love it, I’m awed by it, but I don’t want to spend extended periods in its world. About ten years ago I visited Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts. In the company of a guide and a small group of Dickinson admirers, I toured the parlor and dining room; then I climbed up the staircase to Dickinson’s bedroom. Her bed, her bureau, her night table, even one of her famous white dresses—they’re all there. You never know how these kinds of places are going to affect you; I’ve toured plenty of great writers’ houses that have felt as impersonal as museums. But I started to tear up when I stepped into Dickinson’s bedroom: something about its smallness and the defiant intensity of the woman who lived so much of her life within its walls shook me. I wouldn’t want to be in Dickinson’s house after dark. Whether ghosts roam those rooms or not, the atmosphere of the old homestead is too charged for my psychic comfort. I feel something similar about Villette. It’s a novel that so haunted my imagination after I first read it, I knew I would be compelled to pay short return visits to it every few years or so—during daylight hours. If I stay too long inside, however, night falls and I’m trapped. Better to stop in briefly and then scurry out and cross myself as I run off down the street.
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