At the moment in Jane Eyre when her heroine receives a fortune, gives three-quarters of it away to her cousins—whom she repeatedly calls sisters and brother—and joyfully asserts she doesn’t wish to marry but rather to enjoy the fellow-feeling of her kindred, Jane seems to enact Charlotte’s values regarding money, family, and happiness. If Jane still thinks of the Mr. Rochester she has lost—and she does—so too does Charlotte think of M. Heger. But she’s finding a way to move on, to be a respectable, unmarried, and happy woman.
To affirm all of this, there now come the Christmas scenes. December holidays had been precious to Charlotte for many reasons. In recent years they had meant liberation from her duties as teacher or governess, a time when family members gathered at Haworth to reconstitute their small society and the pleasures of the past. So now, enabled by her new wealth, Jane reopens the recently deserted Moor House and with Hannah begins to “clean down” the place, polishing, arranging, cooking, and generally getting all ready for the return of Diana and Mary. St. John, ever the insensitive and serious one, faults her, insisting she “look a little higher than domestic endearments and household joys.”
Jane’s reply is the climactic conclusion to this whole section of the novel: these kinds of happiness are “[t]he best things the world has!”
St. John Rivers’ challenge to Jane Eyre’s love for home is prompted by his eagerness to make her his wife and take her with him when he travels to British India as a missionary.
When they first meet he is, by his own account, only “the incumbent of a poor country parish,” who sacrifices himself for the sake of his flock. Bad weather or lengthy distances never keep him from visiting the sick and poor. But he is not content. As Jane gets to know him better, he admits that he is an ambitious man and he confesses to her, “I . . . almost rave in my restlessness.”
In Rivers Brontë creates a second suitor for Jane who is as different as possible from Mr. Rochester. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, with colorless white skin like ivory and a profile like a Greek statue, he is a veritable Apollo. St. John, while reservedly affectionate to his sisters, always distances himself from them and from their intensifying relationship with Jane. He finds in Jane not a kindred spirit who inflames his passion, but the plain and sober helpmate he wants for what he considers a glorious life as a soldier for Christ. She finally agrees she will come with him as an assistant, but she refuses to accept the loveless marriage he offers. St. John finds this insulting and impractical. He will take her only on his terms.
Charlotte Brontë didn’t know anyone much like this character, who is perhaps the most fully invented person in Jane Eyre. However, she certainly knew clergymen, and there are suggestive aspects of her past that Charlotte wove together to fashion at least aspects of this strange man.
The small world of provincial Anglican clergy, of which Patrick Brontë and his children were a part, consisted of the incumbents, that is, priests appointed to specific parishes, and curates, recently ordained young men who assisted the incumbents until they obtained parishes of their own. It was assumed that the daughters of incumbents would be suitable matches for these young men, and as Patrick Brontë’s oldest daughter, Charlotte was, as it were, first in line for a proposal should one come along. This was a situation she didn’t like at all. Hence when Henry Nussey, brother to her good friend Ellen, sent a cool, reasoned letter to Charlotte proposing marriage early in March of 1839, suggesting that as his wife she might run a local parish school, he was acting very much as their world expected. Charlotte’s polite but decided rejection characterized the kind of woman who would be a good mate for him as mild and pious, with steady, cheerful spirits. Indeed, the kind of woman St. John Rivers would need for his work in India. Charlotte, however, sees herself as “romantic,” “eccentric,” “satirical,” and wrong for him. She rejects any implication that to avoid “the stigma of old maid” she would marry a worthy man she cannot hope to make “happy” and who would certainly not make her happy. In a letter sent to Ellen seven days later she explained her decision, declaring that for her marriage must be based upon an “intense attachment” to a man. And she adds, repeating her earlier letter to Henry, that he would think her “a wild, romantic enthusiast” who would “laugh and satirize and say whatever came into my head first.” It’s exactly this volatile, free spirit that later surprises and disturbs St. John Rivers when he sees it in Jane Eyre.
Interestingly, Henry had, nine years earlier, written in his diary that if it was in God’s will, he would accept the calling to be a missionary. When Charlotte learned of this ambition, which Henry soon abandoned, she wrote Ellen, characterizing his notion as “amusing” and sardonically remarking that “he would not live a year” in the hostile climates of those countries where missionaries were needed. Certainly the memory of this lingered and helped contribute to Charlotte’s St. John Rivers.
While Charlotte did turn Henry Nussey down in 1839, there was an element of regret because, as the brother of one of Charlotte’s dearest friends, marriage to Henry might have led to a household in which her friend would also live. This was, in her own peculiar words, “a strong temptation,” and she conceded, “I thought if I were to marry so, Ellen could live with me and how happy I should be.” As she wrote these lines surely both she and Ellen recalled an earlier letter of September 1836 that Charlotte closes in this way: “Ellen I wish I could live with you always.” She continues, “I begin to cling to you more fondly than ever I did.” This is her dream: “If we had but a cottage and a competency of our own I do think we might live and love on till Death . . .” needing no one else. This declaration, written at the age of twenty when Charlotte was teaching at Miss Wooler’s school in Roe Head, is remarkable. While there is little to suggest that Brontë was consciously expressing same-sex affection and desire for Ellen, there is no escaping the “until death do us part” of the traditional marriage ritual she knew well, nor terms such as “fond” and “clinging.” At the very least, in this early letter Charlotte is already imagining the kind of sisterhood that she later evokes in describing Jane Eyre’s idyllic communal life at Moor House, and the economic independence she was to praise in considering the life of Miss Wooler.
Other clergymen then came into her life. Instinctively, it would seem, Charlotte disliked them all. In August 1839 a dashing young graduate from Durham, William Weightman, arrived at Haworth as Patrick’s curate. Charlotte found him “very fickle” and a “thorough male-flirt.” When he learned that none of the Brontë girls had ever received a valentine, he walked ten miles to a nearby town to post each of them an anonymous poem. His tenure was cruelly cut short. Visiting a parish resident, Weightman became infected with cholera and died during that tragic year of 1842.
Three years later, in May of 1845, A. B. Nicholls, a shy, robust man from the north of Ireland arrived as Patrick’s new curate. Soon, the rumors began and Charlotte treated them with disdain. “A cold far-away sort of civility,” she wrote, “are the only terms on which I have ever been with Mr. Nicholls.” She continued, in a characteristically waspish tone, that he and his fellow curates “regard me as an old maid, and I regard them, one and all, as highly uninteresting, narrow and unattractive specimens of the ‘coarser sex.’”
The asperity here, which spills over into her characterization of St. John Rivers in chapters from Jane Eyre written just a few months later, may have been exacerbated by an important holiday visit from the preceding July. Ellen Nussey and Charlotte had visited Ellen’s brother and Charlotte’s former suitor Henry, now the incumbent at a nearby town, Hathersage. He had married, in May, a woman from a wealthy family and was busy remodeling the parsonage before the happy couple moved in. Ellen and Charlotte’s visit was partly to make suggestions about this project. During their stay Charlotte was forced to confront what she had lost in turning Henry down, and her feelings, judging by Jane’s experiences at Moor House, must have been a complicated mingling of regret and a sparring justification for her decision.
That all these matters were of great importance to Charlotte Brontë clearly emerges in poems she published on these themes in May of 1846, just months before she commenced writing Jane Eyre.
In “Preference,” a woman rejects a man’s marriage proposal insisting she does not love him—exactly in the terms in which Charlotte first rejected Henry Nussey—and when he reproaches her for coldness she responds, as Jane does to Rivers’ demands she marry him, “My good-will is sisterly,” and she defies his anger, as Jane was to with Rivers, “Rave not, rage not, wrath is fruitless, / Fury cannot change my mind.”
A second poem, “The Missionary,” anticipates still further, related themes. In Jane Eyre, St. John Rivers must repress his powerful sexual attraction for Rosamond Oliver, the pretty daughter of a local factory owner. In one telling scene, Jane watches St. John closely as Rosamond flirts with him. He has withdrawn his eyes from her and, looking down to a tuft of daisies, “he crushed the snowy heads of the closed flowers with his foot.” Clearly he is repressing his strong desire for Rosamond. His preference for Jane is based upon his presumption she would be a helpmate, not a lover, though Jane understands that marrying him she would be forced to “endure all the forms of love (which I doubt not he would scrupulously observe).” In “The Missionary” the same kind of man speaks of forsaking his home, taking up fearful challenges, and necessarily renouncing with “soul-felt pain” what he “wildly” wishes to retain, and he addresses the woman he is abandoning exactly as Rivers would address Rosamond, if he were to let himself say what he feels, remembering when “my heart most for thy heart burned.” Like Rivers, this future missionary feels compelled to take up “the glorious task” that he thinks is “for the progress of our race.” One wonders to what degree these boasts about British imperialism are, in Brontë’s rendering, ironic. Certainly Jane Eyre makes clear that Rivers lacks “that mental serenity, that inward content” she assumes should be a consequence of “sincere Christian” belief. Instead, in his Sunday sermon, what Jane hears reveals “troubling impulses of insatiate yearnings and disquieting aspirations.” What he seeks in India is a kind of vainglory, soon followed by death.
A third poem from this 1846 collection anticipates the dramatic end to Rivers’ efforts to master Jane’s will—that key term that Jane again uses to describe his efforts to dominate her. “Apostacy” describes a woman on her deathbed rejecting the religious demands of a Roman Catholic clergyman: “Point not to thy Madonna, Priest,— / Thy sightless saint of stone,” she cries defiantly. She has put her faith in her earthly love for a man, and “ ’Tis my religion thus to love.” In her last moments she hears his voice, springs up, and falls back dead.
Jane Eyre exactly replicates this rejection of religious fanaticism for romantic love, and the moment in which Jane breaks from Rivers uses the same dramatic device. The May moon is shining. Rivers is inexorably pressing his demands. Jane is “tempted” to yield. She seems ready for the sacrifice. “The dim room was full of visions.” She tells us, “I was excited more than I had ever been.” Then, like the woman in “Apostasy” she hears, somehow, a distant voice crying her name, and she knows it’s the voice of Rochester speaking “in pain and woe wildly, eerily, urgently.” In this dramatic instance of the “Sympathies” in which Jane, and Brontë, believed, the voice of the man she loves interrupts her at the moment when she is in danger of a final, binding decision that would have separated them permanently. She finds the strength to defy Rivers. Jane is sure: this “is the work of nature. She was roused, and did—no miracle—but her best.”
And so Jane Eyre must flee the happiness she had found at Moor House, abandoning the sisterly community of Diana, Mary, and Hannah, impelled by her need to soothe the pain and woe of the man she loves. In a curious paradox, like Rivers, and like the missionary in the poem of that name, she must reject what has turned out to be the lure of domestic happiness, which is not to be hers, and set out on the final stage of her journey—not toward some kind of specious glory, but instead toward compassion and love.
11
An Independent Woman
Writing to William S. Williams, the literary adviser to Smith, Elder early in 1848, Charlotte Brontë returned to the debate about realism and truth to experience versus the beguiling attractions of imagination and fantasy. She roundly asserted that in writing fiction she will never pretend to describe any “feeling, on any subject, public or private,” of which she doesn’t have real “experience.” As we now examine the sequence of scenes that close Jane Eyre, it’s again important to ask how Brontë was able to make such a claim. How, drawing upon her past, was she able to write about Jane’s return to Thornfield, her shocked discovery of the building’s ruin, of Rochester’s injuries, and her reconciliation with him in the remote country house called Ferndean? Again, in uncanny ways, Brontë proves able to transform her experience, some of it thick with emotion and significance she hid, into the lithe and dramatic elements of the novel’s happy ending. An ending that, at least at first glance, it would seem she had never enjoyed.
Breaking free from St. John Rivers’ demands, Jane resolves to test the validity of her strange “inward sensation,” a shock of feeling like an “earthquake.” It seemed to be a kind of “privilege”—Brontë uses this term twice on the same page—that has liberated her spirit, and it has given her the opportunity for “free action.” Much like a moment of religious conversion, it marks the real beginning of Jane as an independent woman. Demonstrating a self-confidence and resolve, and after a quick conversation with her cousins Diana and Mary in which she not so much requests their approval as simply announces what she is about to do, Jane packs her trunk and sets out by herself for the trip by coach back to Thornfield.
In many ways, Jane’s decision to find Mr. Rochester repeats Brontë’s determination to return, by herself, to Brussels in January 1843—a trip that was a willful effort to rejoin Constantin Heger. In both cases, the young woman takes considerable risks, defying propriety as she asserts her own judgment.
When Charlotte first traveled to Brussels, in February of 1842, she was accompanied, as was then proper, by her father and Emily. Indeed two family friends Mary and Joe Taylor went with them as far as London to help them with travel plans. And when Patrick and his two daughters arrived in Brussels, they were met by the Episcopal clergyman Mr. Jenkins and his wife, who took them to meet the Hegers at the pensionnat on the rue d’Isabelle. Throughout the journey Charlotte was overseen, protected, and governed by others, specifically by older men.
By contrast, when Charlotte returned to Brussels after the funeral for her aunt Branwell, she traveled alone. She had inherited a small sum of money on her aunt’s death and may have used some of it to pay for her trip. This modest financial independence, somewhat amplified in the novel, permits Jane to pursue her married man. In Charlotte’s case she was allowed to do so without any reservations—so far as we know—being expressed by her family. What Charlotte was doing was, like Jane Eyre, unusual for her era in terms of proper female conduct and was, in addition, physically demanding and risky. Charlotte in January of 1843 took the 9:00 AM railroad from Leeds to London arriving at 10:00 PM. Immediately, she got a cab that took her to London Bridge Wharf. There, the cabbie summarily took his money and left, while some watermen quarreled over Charlotte’s trunk. Out on the water floating on a row boat near the Ostend packet there was a breathless moment when the deck crew refused permission to let her on the ship. Only through plucky self-confidence was she able to persuade one of them to let her board in the middle of the night. The packet sailed early the next morning and arri
ved in Ostend at 9:00 PM. Brontë stayed in a hotel overnight, on the next morning taking a train for Brussels arriving at 7:00 PM.
Jane Eyre tells the reader her trip to Thornfield took “six-and-thirty hours”—within an hour or so of the travel time—not counting her overnight in the hotel—of Charlotte’s solitary trip to Brussels. She knew, very well, what she was writing about, and indeed created for Jane an easier and safer journey. In this we have yet another example of Brontë not telling the reader a worse, a darker truth.
The deeply—and secretly—autobiographical parallels between these paired journeys continues as Jane Eyre arrives, her heart leaping at the thought that she is “already on my master’s very lands.” Certainly Brontë felt just the same as she approached the school where over the past year she had gone through such powerful feelings of passion and dismay. When Jane’s conscience tells her that because of his “lunatic wife” she fears that she has no possible future with Mr. Rochester, and that she should not speak to him, or see him, we can see the recklessness and indifference to the dangers and improprieties of her conduct that Brontë felt as she returned to encounter Heger after the passing of several months, now without her sister Emily. As Jane rushes through the woods eager to reach Thornfield in the early hours of the day, she voices the feelings that Charlotte must have experienced on the day of her return: “Who would be hurt by my once more tasting the life his glance can give me?” Who indeed, if not his wife.
The Secret History of Jane Eyre Page 18
