Charlotte voiced this yearning during her exile in Brussels in her evidently autobiographical poem “The Teacher’s Monologue.” On a tranquil evening, the speaker, alienated in the “strange, coarse world” where she must work, and for the present moment alone, “still and untroubled,” remembers a home “where I am known and loved.” Both morning and evening she feels a changeless yearning for that other place. She recalls her happiest hours, lived among moors, before her life decayed into “dark anxiety.” The antithesis between her unhappy present contrasting with memories of her happy past provokes fear of the future. What if distant family members die? What if the home becomes empty? “What shall I do, and whither turn?” These thoughts and feelings from her long stay in Brussels lingered in Charlotte Brontë’s mind when she began writing Jane Eyre; indeed, they had become a constant in her thinking.
When Charlotte returned to Haworth in January of 1844, it was to a home far more troubled than the childhood closeness described in Emily’s 1834 Diary Paper. The parsonage had really become “our grey half-inhabited house.” Anne and Branwell were away as governess and tutor at Thorpe Green. Mr. Brontë’s eyesight was failing. Worse still, in the years to follow the home became haunted by the twin specters of “Sin and Suffering”—her father’s illness, her brother’s despair and self-destruction. This is the home Charlotte now sometimes wants to leave. But for what? She can never return to the place she most longs for: the same home, not as it is now, but rather as she remembers it from earlier, happier years. So at times, as it seems to the unhappy teacher in her poem, she despairs that this home may be “but a dream,” nothing more than “sweet thoughts I live on” that all too soon seem to “vanish into vacancy.”
Where could Charlotte Brontë escape to? Well, one of her solutions was, through a novel, to bring Jane Eyre to the place Charlotte yearned for and to make those evanescent “sweet thoughts” real again through an imaginative reconstruction of the Haworth of her greatest happiness. Brontë makes that place of her own, earlier remembered happiness Jane’s refuge. The destination for her brave and stalwart heroine, who like Odysseus and Aeneas, Swift’s Gulliver and Bunyan’s Christian, works through challenges and tribulations to reach a home, one that, importantly, Jane has never known, but which is at the same time a home that has always been hers in not only an instinctive but also ultimately, as we are about to see, in a strangely, deeply rooted way. In these chapters Jane Eyre thus continues to be a richly autobiographical novel. Though for as long as she was able, Charlotte Brontë maintained the illusion that it was not.
Jane finds a home, a family, financial security, and independence. Brontë uses the factual details of things that indeed had happened, and that were still present in her happy memories, transforming them into the fictive experience of Jane Eyre. In this way she is able through imagination to return to a Haworth purged of unhappiness, redolent of the “sweet thoughts I live on . . .”
The home Jane reaches through the rain is named for its location, Marsh End/Moor House. Much like the Haworth parsonage, it is solitary, at a distance from the village, and located just at the edge of the moors. Jane, desperate with exhaustion, peering through a small window sees a humble kitchen and an elderly woman, somewhat rough-looking but scrupulously clean, knitting a stocking. The servant, Hannah, resembles the Brontë’s loyal old Tabby, and both speak in Yorkshire dialect, calling, for example, the grown women of the family “childer.” As Ellen Nussey remembered from her 1833 visit to the parsonage, “We were all ‘Childer’ and “Bairns’ in her estimation.” Hannah’s vigilance at the door this evening replicates Tabby’s vigilance “jealously seizing” the daily post deliveries at the Haworth front door and carrying them off, as Ellen later remembers, “with hobbling step and shaking hand” to be delivered directly to Charlotte. Hannah’s efforts to keep Jane Eyre out this evening—“You should not be roving about now; it looks very ill.”—are exactly what Tabby would do. Her knitting, and, in later kitchen scenes, her baking bread and pies were Tabby’s daily chores.
Patrick Brontë’s chronic fear of fire meant that Haworth had no drapes and only two carpets—most of the home had sanded stone floors—as Ellen noted always clean—as here at Moor House. The parlor is furnished much like the one in Haworth, with no superfluous ornaments and not one modern piece of furniture, save a brace of work-boxes and a lady’s desk in rosewood. A desk much like Charlotte’s.
But what most importantly strikes Jane Eyre, in this first glimpse through the window, are two young women who resemble her. They too are “pale and grave,” thoughtful almost to severity, “all delicacy and cultivation.” Instinctively she seems intimate with every lineament of their appearance. As indeed she should be, since though she doesn’t know it at the time, these are her cousins, their mother the sister of Jane’s father. They look like her. And though the novel does not say it, they look very much like Charlotte Brontë and her sisters.
Immediately Jane recognizes their minds and their values are hers as well. Diana and Maria are at the moment intent on translating a German tale and discussing how Franz tells Daniel about a dream from which he has awakened in terror. One responds: “That is strong . . . I relish it.” Emily and Charlotte had studied German in Brussels. They, too, have for many years been interested in the unconscious, and their novels feature strange and unnerving dreams—that they relished. Their aim, as is the aim of the Rivers sisters, had been to prepare themselves to open up their own school. Both the Brontës and the sisters Rivers have been forced to work as governesses, in families, by whose “wealthy and haughty” members, as Jane puts it, they were regarded as humble dependents. Opening a school looks like an escape. Jane Eyre, peering through the window sees not only cousins—she sees versions of Emily and Anne in a typical evening’s occupation at Haworth.
Brontë is clear on what has led Jane to this moment: “Sympathies.” Jane explains earlier in the novel, defining one of its crucial concepts, “Sympathies, I believe, exist: (for instance, between far-distant, long-absent, wholly estranged relatives; asserting, notwithstanding their alienation, the unity of the source to which each traces his origin),” and she acknowledges that the working of such extraordinary moments of instinctive connection “baffle mortal comprehension.” Charlotte had for many years delighted in stories that featured inexplicable “sympathies” that she read in Aunt Branwell’s complete set of the Methodist Magazine, which she characterizes in her later novel Shirley as “full of miracles and apparitions, of preternatural warnings, ominous dreams.” While to some readers it might be difficult to believe that Jane Eyre, fleeing Rochester, could get into a coach going she knows not where; wander through what was for her a completely unknown area of Yorkshire; and finally, thanks to the tiny light of a solitary candle glimpsed through the rain in the gathering night, come upon her only living relatives who are uncannily like her in almost every respect, to Charlotte Brontë this is simply a result of the inexorable attraction of genetic and psychic sympathies drawing Jane home. Her actual, real home. A home she has never known but has been destined to reach. And a place that is also Charlotte Brontë’s idealized home. The names of the two cousins are key. The older cousin, Diana, is named for the Greek goddess of the moon, protector of innocent women and herself virgin. In Brontë’s novel, as we have seen, she appears in crucial scenes from those depicting Miss Temple at Lowood school to Jane’s dream the night before she flees Thornfield. Consistently the moon suggests a protective female spirit watching over Jane’s arduous destiny. The younger cousin, Mary, takes the name of Charlotte’s mother, eldest sister, and Jane’s guiding teacher Maria Temple. These women have been deeply linked to both Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre throughout their lives.
In the days that follow her recovery to health, the Rivers family—including St. John, the brother, who admits Jane on that first evening—accepts her as one of their own. She is eager to help Hannah in the kitchen picking over gooseberries for a pie and is soon sharing in discussion
s about books and ideas in the parlor. This balancing of household chores with a shared and intense intellectual development had been familiar to Charlotte since her childhood. The young Brontë girls had been trained by their Aunt Branwell in needlework and prided themselves on their skill in sewing silk, “turning” old clothes to be reused, and mending. They made sheets, bolster-cases, towels, and every article of female apparel. On a daily basis they made their own beds, swept and cleaned the house, and helped with the cooking. In later years when Tabby became infirm, it was Emily who made all the bread for the family; and anyone passing by the kitchen door, as Elizabeth Gaskell recalled, might have seen her studying German from an open book, propped up before her, “as she kneaded the dough.” By 1839 Charlotte had admitted that to others the Brontës might seem “odd animals.” However, she notes, “Human feelings are queer things—I am much happier—black-leading the stoves—making the beds and sweeping the floors at home, than I should be living like a fine lady anywhere else.”
During her first glimpse of Diana and Mary, Jane notes an old pointer dog is resting his massive head on one girl’s knee, while a black cat rests in the other’s lap. The Brontës loved and named their pets, many living in the parsonage itself. Emily’s Diary Paper for July 1841, typically, includes references to two tamed geese, Victoria and Adelaide—whimsically named after the queen and her aunt—her current favorite dog Keeper, and Nero, probably a hawk kept in a cage. If Charlotte confesses that she and her siblings are odd animals, they had, always, sympathy for other living creatures and sensed a kinship with them too.
The parsonage garden at Haworth was nearly all grass, with a few stunted shrubs and currant bushes. Similarly, the garden at Moor House has few flowers, and those only of the hardiest species. The Brontës never seem to have been interested in gardening. After all, paces from their door there were miles of moorland, and the Rivers would seem to agree.
On that first night, the Rivers family gathers around Jane, who looks thin, bloodless, almost like a specter. Quite reasonably, they begin to question her—Can they get in touch with friends? How can they help her? She invents an alias, Jane Elliott. As she begins to get warm, to take a little something to eat, she tells us that she begins to again “know myself.”
That Jane wishes to keep her identity secret to conceal her flight from Mr. Rochester makes sense, but it is intriguing that as she does this she begins to feel more herself. Jane seems to find the use of an alias, keeping her past life and experiences secret from these kindly people, makes her not only more herself, it also, in fact, makes her more akin to the Charlotte Brontë who is inventing her. We have seen how Charlotte and Branwell used pseudonymous narrators for much of their juvenilia. Similarly, in a very curious and revealing moment, Charlotte wrote to Hartley Coleridge, son of the famous poet and himself a literary man, in December of 1840, sending him some of her writing and asking his opinion. She makes much of the fact that she has playfully not told him her gender and expresses pleasure that he has not been able to figure out whether she is a woman or a man—“the soft or the hard sex” as she rather coyly puts it. As she closes she expresses her gratitude that he has been kind to “an anonymous scribe who had not even the manners to tell you whether . . . his common-place ‘C T’ meant Charles Tims or Charlotte Tomkins.” The teasing manner of her writing—which goes on at some length and is full of allusions to other writers and to periodicals of past decades—suggests the pleasure she is having in maintaining the secret of her identity. Charlotte and her sisters carried on this same kind of deception in the publication of their poems and novels, just as Branwell used the pseudonym Northangerland when his poems appeared in provincial newspapers in the last years of his brief life. This is the Brontëan paradox: they feel far more themselves adopting names and sometimes roles quite different from who they actually were. Jane, at this moment, is quite like them.
Jane Eyre soon becomes the new member of the family community, experiencing what she describes as pleasure arising from “perfect congeniality of taste, sentiments, and principles.” Diana, in sharing these feelings, tells Jane, “at home we like to be free, even to licence,” voicing a keen sense for the liberty that Charlotte and Emily had felt wandering the moors. Jane now learns, for the first time in her life, this same delight in the “swell and sweep” of the landscape, of it loneliness, its colors, and its changeable lights during different times of the day. Soon she is under its “spell,” which has already and for so long entranced her new found friends, just as for many years it had entranced Charlotte Brontë.
Jane likes to sit on a stool, with her head on Diana’s knee, listening to the two sisters talk. Soon, Diana is teaching her German. In a remarkable moment, Jane uses the very same kind of language that Charlotte had used in describing her first months of study with Constantin Heger now adapting it to her cousin: “I liked to learn of her: I saw the part of instructress pleased and suited her; that of scholar please and suited me no less.” It’s as if Charlotte cannot forget that relationship and the sense of kinship it gave her, and so delights in creating echoes of it in her novel.
The uncanny sympathies that have drawn her to Moor House now intensify. If Charlotte has lost Heger and Jane has lost—at least for the moment—her Rochester, now they have found something else. A new family. “Our natures dovetailed: mutual affection—of the strongest kind—was the result.” Jane too begins to teach, instructing a grateful Maria in drawing, a skill of which both Jane and Charlotte were proud. Maria in turn is a docile, assiduous pupil. The hours, the days, by. Charlotte Brontë returns to memories of her happiest years at Haworth when the brother and three sisters studied, played, and wrote together in a kind of sympathetic community intensified by the isolation of their lives. In a letter of 1841, written while she was governess to the Sidgwick family, Charlotte explains to Ellen Nussey’s brother Henry, “my home is humble and unattractive to strangers” but is, to her, unlike any other place on earth, where she shared a “profound and intense affection” with siblings whose “minds are cast in the same mould, their ideas drawn from the same source.” Charlotte as novelist now makes that kind of happiness live for her wandering orphan and in a way for herself as well.
And then she crowns that level of joy-filled contentment with something that she had never known: a fortune. Throughout Jane Eyre, Brontë threads hints of a rich Uncle Eyre somewhere to the south. He leaves Jane everything—twenty thousand pounds. In Chapter One we considered how anxieties about financial stability haunted the Brontës—and perhaps affected Charlotte, who characteristically as the eldest daughter felt the most responsibility for the family well-being, more than any of the others. The Rivers family had experienced similar anxieties, finding that on the recent death of their father they have little left. But with Jane’s windfall, their concerns melt away. Jane will divide the money four ways. Their worries are at an end. And more to the point, for her, she can now affirm as fact what she had felt since the night of her arrival: She has found a brother and two sisters, what she celebrates as “wealth to the heart! . . . not like the ponderous gift of gold.” She claps her hands with joy. Speaking from an authority that new-found wealth now gives her, she tells St. John, “I will have a home and connections.” Imagining their shared future, she anticipates “delicious pleasure,” confessing the “craving” she has for “fraternal and sisterly love.” When St. John, who is already hatching plans of his own, asks if she doesn’t harbor hopes of marrying someday, she insists she never will, and that what she wants is “my kindred”—with them she enjoys “full fellow feeling.”
At this moment the novel echoes themes from an important, indeed revelatory, letter written perhaps a year before Charlotte created these scenes, a letter that comes about two-and-a-half months after she has sent her last, desperate message to M. Heger. It’s addressed to Miss Wooler, Charlotte’s old and trusted teacher and later employer at Roe Head.
Her first topic is money. The Brontë sisters have invested much
of what little they have in railroad shares, and recently there has been an investor panic and some people have lost everything. Charlotte is anxious to sell, but her sisters don’t wish to—Emily in particular. Charlotte is ready to yield to her views valuing a sister’s judgement because of their shared affection for each other. Just as with Jane Eyre later on, Charlotte thinks family love and mutual sympathy take precedence over financial matters.
She goes on to worry about Branwell. The faculty of “self-government” she fears, is completely lost in him. She remarks, “men are strange beings . . .” and wonders at the way her society permits boys to take risks never permitted to young women, finding her brother a sad example of this unreasonable gender inequality. Why shouldn’t women, who demonstrate self-government, be rewarded for their discipline? She celebrates the “retributive justice” that has awarded Miss Wooler with a good life earned by work and self-denial, and notes that she has been speculating on possible happiness for “a lone woman.” She has reached the point of considering that there is “no more respectable character on this earth than an u[n]married woman who makes her own way through life.”
The Secret History of Jane Eyre Page 17
