The Secret History of Jane Eyre

by John Pfordresher

  The jealous Reuter expels Frances as an inadequate teacher whose “sphere of life” is beneath that of her pupils. In desperation Frances writes to Crimsworth, and in this amazing and public reiteration of Brontë’s experience she writes him, as Brontë had written to Heger, that she is “heart-broken” to be separated from him. But quite unlike Brontë’s actual experience, this letter succeeds. William pursues Frances, finding her in a Protestant cemetery. When she realizes he has sought her out, an “animated flush and shining . . . light” appears in her face, and he recognizes in her the “love the courage of a strong heart.” Her first words to him are “Mon maître!”—“My master!”

  Many elements of the novel’s final pages anticipate Jane Eyre. Frances Henri accepts William’s offer of marriage: “Master, I should be glad to live with you always.” This time, there is no Mme. Heger, no Bertha Mason to stand in the way. However, again anticipating Jane, Frances refuses to be a financially dependent “incumbrance” on her husband, instead insisting that she will live “an active life,” and he agrees—“you shall have your own way.” Eventually the husband and wife return to England where they direct a prosperous school. She cares for the children of their institution, anticipating Brontë’s later Miss Temple: when a pupil is sick or longs for home, “the Directress spread a wing of kindliest protection,” and she summons those who are in need to her “salon to receive some little dole of cake or fruit . . . to be spoken to gently and softly comforted . . . and when bed-time came, dismissed with a kiss of true tenderness.” Every element here anticipates the parallel scene in Jane Eyre. Certainly this is Charlotte Brontë’s imaginative projection of what her life would have become had she won Heger’s heart; as a couple they would somehow be exemplars of learning, have sympathy for others, and mutual respect. One of the many problems with The Professor is the raw simplicity of it all. When Brontë began Jane Eyre she had learned that things are not usually this easy and that the imagination must be disciplined by reference to the bitter facts of ordinary life. Charlotte will meet Heger again, in the dusk, on the road to Hay, but there will be many problems, complications, and losses too before their final reconciliation.

  Jane and Rochester achieve their “cord of communion” through a series of tests. Rochester usually engineers them, acting as the master, but Jane Eyre is at the same time testing him. As their mutual love intensifies, he becomes progressively more dependent on her approval. This leads to scenes in which he outright begs for her sympathy and cooperation.

  But in their first evening conversation Rochester imagines he is in charge. Jane admits, “it was rather a trial to appear” before him, “formally summoned.” After a series of general questions, Rochester begins assessing her abilities, demanding that she demonstrate the kind of ladylike trivial skills taught at a typical school for girls like Lowood. Has she learned some music? There is the piano: “play a tune.” Jane puts up with this. Perhaps because she must. Perhaps because she’s enjoying his attention. It’s the first time in her life anyone like this has treated her this way. She performs. He judges—assuming he’s competent to do so—“You play a little . . . ” This is mockery, an echo of the verbal modesty all young women were expected to adopt in characterizing such a skill. She doesn’t demure at this. He’s probably right. But now, he’s in for something unexpected.

  Rochester demands to see her portfolio—sketches, watercolors. Another ladylike skill, which was practiced, as we have seen, by Charlotte Brontë, whose pictorial work was frequently cloying and tedious, typical of what was expected in boarding school. What follows is one of the most remarkable scenes in the novel, woven out of Brontë’s vivid past.

  As with the earlier exchanges this too is a test, in which Rochester puts himself up as judge assessing Jane’s work. That is to say, he steps into the role of M. Heger. In Brussels it was Heger who took up and read Charlotte’s assigned essays written in French. He scrutinized them in great detail. As Mr. Rochester glances at Jane’s pictures in this scene from 1846–1847, consider a comparison with Heger in Brussels reading and commenting on one of Charlotte’s devoirs from April 30, 1842. Unlike many of the topics Heger assigned, usually historical and religious in nature, this essay seems to be about something of Charlotte’s immediate interest. The twenty-six-year-old student has written a couple of pages on “The Nest.”

  Birds are important throughout Jane Eyre, from the novel’s first scene in which Jane leafs through Bewick’s British Birds to the many later analogies that Rochester draws between its heroine and bird life. Jane has always been in a very real sense without a home, a nest, as she has been without a family, and so here the narrator of Charlotte’s French essay, in a very similar frame of mind, views with sympathetic delight “a Nest, and in the nest a bird, of what kind I do not know.” Her narrator sees only its head and its eye, large, moist, and brilliant with which it seemed to follow her every movement. The narrator looks closer and perceives two eggs, pure as two pearls. She reaches for them, and the small bird seeks to defend them by making efforts “to pierce me with its little beak.” Heger suggests altering this to “its resistance, feeble but intrepid, halted my movement and conquered my cupidity.” The narrator walks on, reflecting on the “courage in the heart of a creature ordinarily so timid and so fearful.” In his comments at the end of the essay, Heger suggests that Charlotte accentuate everything that sets the main idea in relief, so that the impression is colorful, picturesque. “It’s sufficient,” he writes, “that the rest be in its proper place, but in half-tone. That is what gives to style, as to painting, unity, perspective, and effect.”

  The relationship here, as often elsewhere in these school exercises, is of great importance. Charlotte, formerly a teacher herself, now receives specific instruction articulated with a sense of authority by a man she is falling in love with. As we’ve seen in one of her letters from Brussels, she actually likes this subservience. The essay’s subject, quickly seen to be analogous to Charlotte, the tiny bird in hiding with secret treasures that she wishes to defend from the touch of ­others, is handed over for Heger’s scrutiny and intrusive corrections, permitting him to change what she’s done according to his taste. And crucially in this instance it’s Heger who, recognizing the strongly visual aspect of Charlotte’s imagination, writes in his comments on the similarity between picture and text. The focused and detailed attention Heger gave to Charlotte’s essays had to seem to her the kind of attention her writing had never before received. He cares about her. He sees her talent, and she feels grateful for his recognition. Charlotte remembers what this feels like. The electricity of the moment returns as she depicts the scene in the drawing room at Thornfield.

  As Rochester sorts through Jane’s work, he sweeps away as useless all but three of her pictures. In doing this he chooses the Jane Eyre who interests him. The grilling recommences, perhaps much like the tutorial sessions in Brussels. Where was she when she made these pictures? When? And, most importantly, was she “happy” when she made them? To which Jane gives the most extraordinary response: to paint them “was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known.” Rochester tries to brush this aside, assuming there have been but few pleasures at all in Jane’s young life. But his observation is simply to feint away from what Jane is telling him, that she is an artist, and in making these pictures she wasn’t just “happy,” she was more intensely and pleasurably alive than in any other moment in her life. She adds, to the reader, using a term that she will later echo at the moment when she finally tells Rochester she loves him, that she first saw these pictures “with the spiritual eye” before she began to paint them. These moments of autobiographical confession echo and describe Charlotte Brontë’s earlier experiences as a writer of the Angrian chronicles and of the very scenes from Jane Eyre we are now exploring, written during a convulsive three weeks of unstoppable inspiration.

  The dynamic of the moment then is, crucially, this: Rochester instinctively finds the three paintings by Jane that
artistically depict the most intense, and private, aspects of who she is. They constitute a visual autobiography, and one that he immediately recognizes as “her,” even if he’s by no means ready to understand her at all. Still, the intimacy between them has suddenly increased. They are spinning the “cord of communion.”

  And what amazing pictures they are. While there are traces of the work of some of the painters and engravers Brontë knew—John Martin, for example—and certainly Bewick—these pictures are, if not without precedent, still strikingly odd and unusual for her time, and they anticipate in an uncanny way the work of Symbolist painters such as Odilon Redon, Arnold Böcklin, and Gustav Moreau from the end of the nineteenth century, three to five decades after Brontë imagined them. Her descriptions are long and deserve to be read in their entirety, but here I select just a few salient elements.

  In the first we see clouds rolling over “a swollen sea;” no land in sight. Nearby the mast of a half-submerged wrecked ship on which a cormorant, a sea bird proverbial for its gluttonous devouring of fish, is perched. In its beak, a golden bracelet. Sinking into the water, the “fair arm” of a “drowned corpse,” “whence the bracelet had been washed or torn.”

  In the second, against the backdrop of a distant hill and twilight sky, the bust of a woman with dark, wild eyes and streaming hair, and on her “dim forehead,” a star.

  In the third, distant flickering northern lights. In the foreground “a colossal head” rests against an iceberg. A sable veil, brow bloodless as bone, an eye hollow and fixed with despair. Above the head a fiery white ring.

  While Jane names the second the “Evening Star,” and the third “The likeness of a Kingly Crown,” these labels are altogether inadequate to convey the mysterious richness of the pictures described and the woman who made them. Rochester offers what is clearly an uncomprehending response, teasing Jane that they are “elfish,” and that they must have been—and here he is a bit closer to the mark—“seen in a dream.” To his question as to whether it took a long time to execute them Jane replies, “I sat at them from morning till noon, and from noon till night . . . ” Charlotte seems to recall one of her own experiences when she spent a great part of almost every day of a vacation visit to Bolton Abbey in drawing or painting, working, as Ellen Nussy later recalled, “for nine hours with scarcely an interval.”

  The obsessive dedication to the making of these images tells us that—for Jane who painted them and also for Charlotte who evokes them in prose—they are revelatory. All three depict allegorical female figures, and the first and third take us back to Bewick’s northern scenes of stormy seas, shipwrecks, icebergs, and isolated birds, a world the reclusive Jane and Charlotte instinctively felt to be theirs. Death’s horror dominates the first and third, while the second, moonlit scene, seems to depict a vatic, visionary woman whose eyes see something “dark and wild.” Nightmarish, yes, these are symbolic visions that invite virtually endless speculation, yet clearly indicate at least one thing: Jane Eyre and, certainly in this instance, her creator Charlotte Brontë see with a “spiritual eye” into frightful realms. They recapitulate and extend the novel’s initial discussion of Bewick rendering Jane Eyre’s inner life, her solitude, fears, vision of a death-filled and meaningless world.

  Certainly Rochester realizes even at this early moment that in Jane he is not dealing with just any governess. Discoveries such as this are the basis for the love story to follow. From the start it is of the spirit. Rochester has had more than his fill of blowsy superficial beauty that he has already swept aside. And, crucially, he likes, admires, and is becoming involved in “the shadow of your thought,” which he discerns in the pictures and in the sensibility of the enigmatic woman who expressed it. Heger’s comments on ­Charlotte’s “The Nest” essay are, typically for him, cool, cautious, professional. He offers advice on writing technique. Rochester’s remarks express a personal curiosity for and admiration of the spirit of the woman who has created them, something Heger may have been careful not to voice but Charlotte surely longed for.

  The house party scenes are Rochester’s next test. He tortures Jane through exposure and envy in an effort to strengthen the cord of communion that they both are starting to feel. And he succeeds. Wearily Jane concedes: “He made me love him without looking at me.” Her pain is closely akin to the torment which Charlotte Brontë describes in her desperate letters to M. Heger. But because Jane recognizes that this comes from a Mr. Rochester who wishes to test and manipulate her, the experience is paradoxically consoling and promising. Heger’s silence and distance become transformed into Mr. Rochester’s obtrusive scene setting and performing. He’s doing this all for her.

  While at first glance these chapters might seem remote from Charlotte Brontë’s past experiences, they are in fact woven together from much that she had seen and done—some of it recounted in Chapter Four in its discussion of Charlotte Brontë’s adolescent years—coupled ingeniously with elaborate fantasy imaginings about wealth, status, elegance, and decadence prominent in her youthful writing about “high society” in the world of Angria. Hence a great deal of what goes on in these scenes is just as autobiographical as the rest of Jane Eyre.

  Hiding in the “sanctum” or “refuge” of the schoolroom, Jane observes the guests arriving just as Charlotte, when a young governess at Stonegappe, found that house noisy with visits from friends and family members of her employers who “bewildered the shy governess” as she watched their arrival from her second-story room. Rochester knows their appearance will alarm Jane. Charlotte too had felt this way about encountering new people since her early visits to the Nussey family back in 1832. In trying to account for this, Ellen was later to remember that the young Charlotte was so painfully shy that one day on being led to dinner by a stranger she was trembling and near tears. Nussey had a wise explanation for this: Charlotte’s shyness was the consequence of her “not being understood.” She felt apart from others. This is exactly Jane Eyre’s subsequent reaction. Observing Rochester’s guests she says, “I had no sympathy with their appearance, their expression.” The reader of Jane Eyre knows its heroine/narrator quite well by this time. The alienation she feels at the arrival of these socialites is something the reader shares with her. There is no way, even if these people did wish to get to know her—which, as it turns out, they do not—that they could. Like Charlotte, she is too different from them. Charlotte understood this keenly when with the Sidgewicks on their summer holiday in June of 1839; she felt “the miseries of a reserved wretch like me.” She found herself thrown at once into the midst of “a large Family—proud as peacocks and wealthy as Jews,” at a time when they were particularly gay, the house was filled with company, and all of them “[s]trangers people whose faces I had never seen before.” She soon came to realize that a private governess “has no existence” for these people and “is not considered as a living and rational” person, except for the duties she was expected to fulfill.

  Rochester, knowing Jane’s antipathies, now forces her to join the guests in the drawing room where a large fire burns silently on the marble hearth, and wax candles shine amid exquisite flowers. The young Charlotte had gleefully imagined such a place in her 1834 High Life in Verdopolis where she had pictured a

  vista of proud saloons, glowing with brilliant fires & dazzling chandeliers, whose warm ruddy beams slept on rich carpets, silken sofas, cushions, ottomans, Gleaming groups of statuary, sideboard where the flash of plate & glass almost blinded the eye that gazed on them, ample tables covered with splendid engravings, portfolios, magnificently bound volumes, Gold musical boxes, enameled Miniature vases, Guitars of elaborate & beautiful workmanship, clocks & lamps of alabaster & ormolu, &c., &c., &c.

  Much of this litter of expensive and useless things is to reappear during the ensuing pages of Jane Eyre. Such ostentatious wealth delighted Charlotte Brontë as the youthful author of High Life, but now she is quite a different woman. After her visits with Amelia Walker and months with the Sidgwick
family, Brontë has come to assess the worthlessness of these objects and the way they function in the upside-down value system of the wealthy. She writes here autobiographically, from personal experience, and on this bases her judgments.

  Jane, from the corner of the drawing room, observes the ladies, dominated by the Dowager Lady Ingram. We already know her well. Her “fierce and hard eye,” Jane tells us, “reminded me of Mrs. Reed.” She is but the latest in Charlotte’s gallery of dominating older women, “very pompous, very dogmatical—very intolerable, in short.” She is Mrs. Sidgwick, and particularly Mme. Heger; rivals who instinctively distrusted Charlotte just as Mrs. Reed distrusted Jane because they are different in body, conduct, and spirit. Rochester forced her to attend to antagonize Jane and to introduce her daughter Blanche, Jane’s antitype. Blanche Ingram is much like her mother, “the same low brow, the same high features, the same pride.” Tall, robust, “dark as a Spaniard,” and, though Jane cannot know this at the time, remarkably like Rochester’s wife. These women are to interpose themselves in one way or another between Jane and the man she recklessly is coming to love.

  Brontë had been exploring for years the opposition between these two female types. In her Henry Hastings of 1838 she opposes the triumphant Jane Moore to the Elizabeth Hastings we have already met, the “pale, under-sized young woman,” who dresses as plainly as a Quakeress in gray. Charlotte pictures Jane Moore as quite the opposite of the later Jane Eyre, a young woman who “shone in blond and satin.” She displays her neck and arms knowing plainly enough that both were as white and round and statuesque “as if Phidias had got up from the dead to chisel them out of the purest marble.” Trappings of wealth set her off: pearls circling her neck and arms indicate that she had taste enough to be aware how effective was the contrast between the dazzling, living flesh and the cold, glistening gem. “She was a superb animal.” In contrast to Jane Moore’s ostentatious performance, Elizabeth’s features were masked. Her “movements were restrained and guarded.” Her reserve and caution anticipate Jane Eyre’s. Blanche Ingram is, like Jane Moore, “remarkably self-conscious.” She flaunts herself before the other guests, bent on striking them as “dashing and daring.” Seating herself at the piano she announces she will sing a “Corsair-song. Know that I doat on Corsairs; and for that reason, sing it ‘con spirito.” She looks and sounds ridiculous. It’s Byron’s poem The Corsair of 1814 to which the song alludes. Its protagonist Conrad is, like Byron’s Giaour, one of Charlotte Brontë’s sources for Mr. Rochester: “his dark eye-brow shades a glance of fire . . . Sun-burnt his cheek, his forehead high and pale . . . ” Soon enough Blanche realizes that her cumbersome and foolish rhetoric will fail to overcome the attractive power of silent Jane. She will overthrow this fine lady through a kind of integrity Blanche cannot even understand.