The Secret History of Jane Eyre

by John Pfordresher

  Typical of her notes is an entry for February 4, 1836: “Last night, I did indeed lean upon the thunder-wakening wings of such a stormy blast . . . and it whirled me away like heath in the wilderness for five seconds of ecstasy.” Separated from the others, Brontë enters a rapturous trance, returning to the world that she and her brother Branwell had been imagining and writing about for years. It has for her a far more powerful emotional content than her daily experiences. The word “ecstasy” is not casually chosen. It reveals the strong sexual component of these private and secret reveries.

  Another time she describes a similar plunge into fantasy—quoted here at length as our first glimpse into the world of Angria:

  Never shall I, Charlotte Brontë, forget what a voice of wild and wailing music now came thrillingly to my mind’s—almost my body’s—ear; nor how distinctly I, sitting in the schoolroom at Roe Head, saw the Duke of Zamorna leaning against that obelisk, . . . the moonlight so mild and so exquisitely tranquil, sleeping upon that vast and vacant road, and the African sky quivering and shaking with stars expanded above all. I was quite gone. I had really utterly forgot where I was and all the gloom and cheerlessness of my situation. I felt myself breathing quick and short as I beheld the Duke lifting up his sable crest . . . and knew that that music . . . was exciting him and quickening his ever rapid pulse.

  In this utterly fictional Africa—immensely expansive yet tranquil—Charlotte sees her favorite character, the dark and immoral Zamorna, experiencing excitement in the music that she intimately shares. It is a strangely erotic moment. Insistently identifying herself—note how frequently “I” appears in this passage—Charlotte lives another life. Every element of this fantasy scene, later on, enters into Jane Eyre. The novel liberates her from the anxieties and unhappiness of home and her sexual longing.

  Aware of the danger and the power of these experiences, Charlotte writes in a letter of May 1836 from Roe Head to her close friend Ellen Nussey, “If you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; the fiery imagination that at times eats me up . . . you would pity and I dare say despise me.” While Charlotte admits the depths to which her imagination takes her, she also believes that her imagination’s unruliness is inappropriate for a young woman.

  In the first pages of the novel, then, Jane Eyre has, just like Brontë, created for herself a secret place where her imagination can run free. Jane has a book—a copy of which was in Charlotte Brontë’s father’s library—the popular and much admired History of British Birds illustrated with wood engravings by Thomas Bewick.

  This book is crucial in many ways. Think only of Fairfax Rochester’s later description of Jane Eyre as a “wild, frantic bird.” Bewick’s art is essential to Brontë’s descriptions—crucial to the emotional core of her novel. Its depictions of the solitary birds of the northern seas become, as we are about to see, key to Jane Eyre’s understanding of herself. Hence, as she picks it from the shelf, Bewick both takes this ten-year-old child away from the present, unhappy moment and yet forces her to look inward into who she is and what is happening to her.

  When Charlotte began Jane Eyre, Bewick and his birds had already played an important and unusual role in her inner life. In 1829 she had copied two of its pictures (when she was twelve and thirteen), “Cormorant on rocky coast” and “Fisherman sheltering against a tree”—the first, a single bird on wave-battered rocks; the second, a fisherman in a driving rain huddled next to a thick, aged tree trunk, a large mansion in the distance. Both pictures are filled with elements that will appear in her novel seventeen years later: cold, solitary figures in a hostile world of swirling wind and rain. Why did young Charlotte choose these two images for her typically deliberate and minute copying? She must have sensed that they represented an aspect of her inner plight that, further, anticipates the inner life of her future heroine—a defiant loneliness in a world which could sometimes seem full of cold indifference.

  A couple of years later, on learning of Bewick’s death, the sixteen-year-old Charlotte wrote a poem celebrating his genius. To her, his art is remarkably “True to the common Nature that we see / In England’s sunny fields, her hills, and vales,” but also true to other nature scenes, such as “the wild bosom of her storm-dark sea / Still heaving to the wind that o’er it wails.” In these lines she marks the diversity of his work. Bewick was both a romantic and a realist. His book—essentially a catalogue of birds seen in Britain—offers individual entries for each species, depicted in half-page wood cuts with scientifically accurate details. But when an entry finishes before the end of a page, Bewick then includes “tailpieces,” decorative pictures of the England he knew. Living in Newcastle on Tyne, and loving the countryside, Bewick often depicts dense woods, lush undergrowth, and gently meandering streams. We see hunters and fishermen, and also local people, many of them working class, and even some impoverished beggars: a world very different from the barren, rolling moors beyond Haworth that had been Brontë’s landscape, and which may have made them attractive to her as a consequence. At other times Bewick turns to hilly, even mountainous landscapes, long roads winding toward distant villages, wanderers with bundles on their backs—far more a world Brontë knew. Far more like later scenes in Jane Eyre when, fleeing Mr. Rochester, Jane trudges solitary in dismal weather through the moors near death.

  Charlotte’s poem moves on to celebrate her youthful experiences of British Birds, reading the text, closely scrutinizing the engravings, and how it stirred her visual imagination. “Our childhood’s days return, again in thought / We wander in a land of love and light . . . Sweet flowers seem gleaming ‘mid the tangled grass / Sparkling with spring-drops from the rushing rill.” Charlotte admires Bewick’s more remote images as well, which have their grounding in his second volume with its sea birds and tailpieces frequently depicting people on the shore, rocky cliffs, and ships at sea. They are more like the later scenes in Jane Eyre: “There rises some lone rock, all wet with surge / And dashing billows glimmering in the light / Of a wan moon whose silent rays emerge / From clouds that veil their lustre cold and bright.”

  The poem’s narrator continues to turn the pages admitting, “I cannot speak the rapture that I feel / When on the work of such a mind I gaze.” The modern reader may find a similar experience in paging through Bewick, the rich variety of his scenes, his sensitivity to ordinary life—not only men plowing fields, women hanging out wash, but also a slightly desperate traveler urinating on a ruined wall, a wanderer fending off snapping guard dogs, a peg-legged beggar resting, an old man and a boy scrutinizing inscriptions on an ancient isolated pillar.

  And so when Charlotte has Jane Eyre pull down “a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures,” Charlotte seizes upon a book that is one of her favorites. She has it speak powerfully but secretively to Jane, who opens the second volume and, closely echoing Bewick’s text, finds herself drawn to his description “of the haunts of sea-fowl; of ‘the solitary rock and promontories’ by them only inhabited”—which is to say, her world. “Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive.” In a brilliant narrative move, Brontë brings the reader into the most private and remote parts of Jane’s inner life. Jane, like Charlotte the unhappy school teacher at Roe Head, has escaped into a world of imagination. There, free from the social and economic humiliations imposed on her by the Reed family, she can enter “a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting.” Jane scans and interprets these pictures much as Charlotte had. Close school friend Mary Taylor later recalled the short-sighted Brontë: “Whenever an opportunity offered of examining a picture or a cut of any kind, she went over it piecemeal, with her eyes close to the paper, looking so long that we used to ask her ‘What she saw in it.’ She could always see plenty, and explained it very well.”

  So important are these pictures to Charlotte
as well as to Jane, that Jane lists seven of them. Most can be quickly found on Bewick’s pages. All are desolate, such as a rock “standing up alone” in a sea of billow and spray—there are at least three versions of this scene in Bewick—others are depictions of tragedy seen at a remote distance, such as the moon breaking through clouds illuminating a sinking wreck, where a terrifying wall of rock shelves out, snow covered, into a stormy sea. More tranquil but no less ominous is a solitary churchyard with its inscribed headstone; its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its “newly-risen crescent, attesting the hour of eventide.” Jane omits the ominous inscription on that headstone, “Good Times / & / Bad Times / & / All Times / get over,” but the fearful sense of death’s menace is present in her description.

  As the list continues, Jane’s attention becomes attracted by two further images. Both come from the first volume of British Birds. These fearfully move on from the realistic to the supernatural. In the first a full moon hovers over a distant gate. In the foreground a man hauls a large, heavy sack by a strap pulled over his shoulders. The sack, tied at the top, is large enough to hold a dead body. Jane and Brontë name him a thief, but nothing in the picture demands this interpretation. Behind the man a black figure, much smaller than a man, with a pointed tail, bat wings, and horns springing from its head, jams a stick through the base of the pack and into a rock outcropping thus pinning it down. What this might mean is a matter of subjective inference. And that’s the point. Simple moralizing might read it as a depiction of guilt and punishment. The moonlit sky, the distant gate, the entrapment suggest a burden tied up in that sack, which the man struggles to carry while the demon holds him down with reckless glee. The very indeterminacy demands speculation that carries the viewer into unexpected reveries. Could this be a nightmare version of Jane’s feelings of entrapment? Of the burden of her difference?

  The second of the two, a tiny image, depicts the same sort of gleeful fiend perched on a rock and to the left far in the distance a crowd of dark figures surrounding a gallows on which a dead man hangs. Death by hanging seems to have fascinated Bewick. Among his woodcuts are pictures of suicide by hanging, execution by hanging, even cruel people hanging dogs. For Brontë and for Jane these pictures open up a world of terror, the fearful actions of people, and the immanence of the diabolical.

  These images possess a kind of magnetic attraction precisely because they are so horrifying. Jane cannot stop looking at them. They are not so much an escape from her present moment as a presentation and a confirmation of who she is and what she faces. She too is the solitary cormorant, the wrecked ship; she too struggles with that strange weight on her back as she staggers toward the moonlit gate. For the first chapter of Jane Eyre they constitute an apt prologue for the events to follow. Further, Jane’s obsessive curiosity about the uncanny in Bewick proves a remarkable presentment for her future terrors in the midnight darkened rooms of Thornfield.

  However, Jane, just like the youthful Charlotte, isn’t lost for very long in her dreamy, gothic fantasies. There is an abrupt and brutal interruption.

  At Roe Head, Brontë’s written reverie quoted above is interrupted. Reality, in the form of one of the school’s pupils, breaks in: “‘Miss Brontë, what are you thinking about?’ said a voice that dissipated all the charm, and Miss [Harriet] Lister thrust her little, rough black head into my face!” Charlotte’s effort at escape through fantasy images of Zamorna ends with comic irony. In just the same way, on another evening, as she is picturing Quashia, an enemy of Zamorna, a savage powerfully attractive with “his tusk-like teeth glancing vindictively through his parted lips . . . the dining-room door opened and Miss W[ooler] came in with a plate of butter in her hand. ‘A very stormy night my dear!’ said she: ‘it is ma’m’ said I.” Shattering Jane’s reverie and her personal haven.

  Jane Eyre’s reverie isn’t interrupted by curious or kind people. Rather, it is John Reed, her fourteen-year-old cousin, a boy of “dingy and unwholesome skin,” “thick lineaments,” and “heavy limbs.” This obnoxious lad comes from two earlier Brontë novels, one by Charlotte, one by her sister Anne, completed in the months before the composition of Jane Eyre. Charlotte’s The Professor, based on her experiences in Brussels, characterizes Belgian boys with “intellectual faculties [that] were generally weak, [but] their animal propensities strong.” Indeed, their natures were “dull, but they were also singularly stubborn, heavy as lead . . . having short memories, dense intelligence, feeble reflective power . . . ” John Reed also emerged from Anne Brontë’s first novel, Agnes Grey. When only a little more than eighteen years old, Anne served for nine months (April–December 1839) as governess for the Ingham family of Blake Hall, Mirfield, in charge of the two oldest children. In her novel based on this experience, Agnes’ new pupil Tom Bloomfield introduces himself by showing her his trapped birds, boasting “sometimes I cut them in pieces with my penknife; but the next, I mean to roast alive.” Completely undisciplined, Tom and his sisters Mary Ann and Fanny run wild behind the house where “they seemed to prefer the dirtiest places, and the most dismal occupations.” Tom refuses “to learn or repeat his lessons,” and when compelled stands “twisting his body and his face into the most grotesque and singular contortions.” Tom’s stupidity and cruelty become John Reed’s constant bullying of Jane Eyre, to the point where “every morsel of flesh on my bones shrank when he came near.” Reed exults over Jane’s social and economic inferiority and gloats over his possession, as the eldest male in the family, of the book in her hand. He snatches the copy of Bewick from Jane and in a kind of ritualized punishment forces her to stand “out of the way of the mirrors and window” so he can throw it at her face. Jane falls, cutting her head.

  Charlotte spoke of a similar experience. As a twenty-three-year-old governess working for the Sidgwick family, she was caring for one of the younger Sidgwick sons when the child’s older brother “tempted the little fellow into the forbidden place.” Charlotte followed and tried to persuade the younger boy to come away; but, instigated by his brother, he threw stones at her, and one of them hit her “so severe a blow on the temple that the lads were alarmed into obedience.” Throwing things at the governess seems to have been a bit of a Sidgwick habit. Earlier, a cousin threw a Bible at her.

  For Jane, John Reed’s throwing Bewick at her head has powerful symbolic resonance since this fourteen-year-old boy clearly doesn’t respect books at all while Bewick has just been a portal into the refuge of her imagination. Since her childhood Charlotte had been a writer of tiny, handmade books. She came from a family where books were not merely objects to possess but rather treasured emblems of learning and worth. In the library at Haworth, Charlotte had seen volumes Patrick Brontë had won at Cambridge when he was a student, special copies of Horace and Homer later bound in leather with the college arms on the covers and inside his own inscriptions such as, in the Iliad, “‘My Prize Book, for having always kept in the first class, at St John’s College—Cambridge.” Patrick instilled in his children the significance and value of books that John Reed defiles.

  The moment recapitulates in striking ways the earlier scene with the Sidgwick boy. Both depict a brutal male effort at dominance over an unjustly subordinated woman. To get along, Charlotte as governess decided not to report the event. She even fibbed the next day when at lunch she was asked about the bruise on her head. But when she wrote Jane Eyre her heroine was not so pliant.

  During the ensuing scuffle, Jane attacks her bigger and stronger male cousin with such frenzy that she no longer recalls, writing some thirty years later, what she did with her hands, but it shocks the maids who come to part them: “What a fury” one of them exclaims, alluding to a particularly fearsome Greek demon we will return to in Chapter Eight when we consider parallels between Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester’s wife, Bertha.

  Mrs. Reed arrives, barking out a peremptory order that again anticipates Bertha’s fate: she orders Jane locked up in a room. Mrs. Reed comes, as we have seen, from a galle
ry of powerful female opponents in Charlotte’s life. Jane’s rebellion on this darkening afternoon is the first, dramatic release of her “ire”—a term that serves to alert the reader at the beginning of the novel that her name echoes not only “eyrie,” which means the nest of a large bird, especially a bird of prey, but also the involuntary rage that sometimes overwhelms Jane as a form of liberation, which in a later scene seems to so alarm Mrs. Reed that she is unsure whether Jane is “child or fiend.” Now, like a “mad cat,” she is dragged into the room in which her former patron, the kindly Mr. Reed, died, the servants threatening to tie her down in a chair until she acquiesces to her imprisonment. This is a profoundly autobiographical moment for Brontë. As we will now see, it condenses a range and variety of her past, giving a sudden glimpse into her inner life.

  As Jane’s rage dwindles, she finds settling over her, her “habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression . . .” For the novel’s author, this is a particularly important autobiographical echo. Brontë was also prone to periods of intense despondency. In 1838, while still teaching in Miss Wooler’s school, she recalled, “My health and spirits had utterly failed me.” She described this crisis moment years later—significantly during the months when she was drafting Jane Eyre—as an anxious time when she felt a “most dreadful doom . . . far worse than that of a man with healthy nerves buried for the same length of time in a subterranean dungeon.” This nightmare imprisonment, being buried alive, was a crucial narrative element in the gothic fiction Brontë loved as a young reader. But now overwhelmed by depression in the late 1830s, she experiences a particular form of “anguish” that she considered even worse than this terrifying fate, during which a “preternatural horror . . . seemed to clothe existence,” making her life a nightmare. A time when “the morbid Nerves can know neither peace nor enjoyment—whatever touches—pierces them—sensation for them is all suffering.” Brontë didn’t need to read works such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) with Roderick’s exquisitely painful hypersensitivity alert to the desperate cries of his sister Madeline—buried alive beneath their house. The crucial elements of this description in Brontë’s letter all derive from earlier gothic fiction.