The Secret History of Jane Eyre

by John Pfordresher

  At this point the close parallels between the two desperate journeys break. Charlotte found herself welcomed by Heger’s wife. She returned to life as a teacher in the pensionnat. Jane finds something altogether darker yet more satisfying: Thornfield is a “blackened ruin,” and Bertha has killed herself.

  The fiery destruction of Mr. Rochester’s family estate is clearly revenge: the fulfillment of the Creole Bertha Mason’s frustrated erotic sensuality. Her efforts first to burn Rochester in his bed, and later to burn Jane’s now empty bed, leads to the destruction of the entire building, making real the novel’s concept of self-destructive Caribbean animal rage. The innkeeper who witnessed the scene remembers her as a “big woman,” with long black hair “streaming against the flames.” Brontë’s image makes vividly real the mythical, punitive fury bestriding the inferno of her own making. And, as we discussed in Chapter Eight, she is at the same time a cautionary warning to Brontë to beware of an inclination to become her own fury.

  There is in this moment a further curious and suggestive link to Brontë, and it causes us to return to our earlier discussion in Chapter Six of how she uses aspects of her father in the creation of her novel. There we considered Patrick’s sometimes scarcely governable anger. Now we need to consider the influence of this complex man on Charlotte’s imagination in two different and significantly related ways.

  Ellen Nussey on her first visit to Haworth noticed that, unusually, the family home had no curtains and only two carpets—most of the floors being sanded stone—and learned this was the consequence of “Mr. Brontë’s horror of fire.” The same “dread” was, as she wrote, “so intense” that he would permit his daughters to wear dresses only made of silk or wool. Juliet Barker notes that his anxiety was based upon fact: “the high number of fatalities” in the town of Haworth caused by burning in domestic accidents, and Patrick had written to local newspapers warning people of this danger. Growing up in the Brontë household, Charlotte witnessed and learned to feel this dread and would readily have linked it to her father’s fiery temper. As a novelist, she would have instinctively seized upon this interconnection between emotion and destruction.

  One of Patrick’s most powerful writings takes our exploration further. It deals with an event which took place on September 2, 1824. Swollen by heavy rain, two large areas of bog water, dammed up high in the moor land, burst open sending a seven foot wave of muddy water and peat sweeping down into the valley, tearing away stone bridges, overrunning fields and houses, and so polluting the local streams that the factories, which used their waters, were unable to operate for days. Patrick witnessed the oncoming thunderstorm, the heavens “blackening fast,” the “frequent flashing of the lightning,” and then heard “a deep, distant explosion” of the dams breaking and felt the parsonage itself trembling. Emily, Branwell, and Anne were out for a walk with the servant Sara Garrs at that very moment. The disaster, and the fact that his “little children” were unhurt, seemed to him “a solemn visitation of Providence.” An estimated ten thousand people came to the area during the subsequent days to witness the devastation. Patrick Brontë’s response to this event was to write both a poem, which he titled “The Phenomenon,” and a prose sermon, in which he describes and then construes the meaning of this—for the moment—celebrated event. He published both at his own expense.

  His poem begins as idyllic pastoral evoking evening bird song, the milk-maid and “sturdy swain” laughing with “rural joy.” In the distance however he sees a “red portentious halo” in the sky, and it causes him to consider that this scene, which seems to be like Eden, is actually deceptive. Humanity has been driven out of Paradise by “the flaming sword” of divine expulsion, and the poison from the forbidden fruit has led to “passions fell and fierce” making all humanity worthy of divine wrath, the “ire / Of justice imminent” threatening “quenchless fire.” Already we can see the parallels with the burning of Thornfield emerging. Patrick is consciously writing in the tradition of the prophet as visionary witness to the divine meaning found in earthly disasters. His poetic/theological preface leads to the kind of melodramatic nature writing that was so enticing to Charlotte and Branwell. The night before the bog burst, “reeling stars” shoot down “with slanting light,” and a “crackling blaze” hisses in the woods. A “bright halo” surrounds each cottage candle. Now, on the evening of the disaster, birds wheel in the sky, the sun sets in an ominous haze, a tempest with its whirlwinds and “frequent lightning red” bursts overhead, the once-solid ground suddenly begins to roll as if it were the ocean, and from the “riven mountain” erupts the flood. People flee, and it is only God who prevents further, overwhelming destruction. He draws the parallels with the world inundation at the time of Noah and the Ark, and he concludes by warning that the Christian vision of the end of the world will soon become real and then graceless souls will feel “a hell of dread” as “in the latest day of God’s hot ire, / The earth and heavens will sink in liquid fire.”

  From her childhood Charlotte would have known this book, containing both the poem and the sermon to follow. Her father had intentionally written for young readers. The blackness of “that thick flood, that darkens, foams, and raves” becomes the terrifying blackness, the raving madness of Bertha’s midnight apparitions. The lightning and the burning woods in the poem connect with the archetypal divine punishment—the flaming sword of the expelling angel, the “liquid fire” of the world’s end—and become, in Charlotte’s imagination, Bertha amidst the flames punishing and destroying the sexually passionate Mr. Rochester. The striking coincidence of the rhyme that Patrick uses twice in the poem: “ire / quenchless fire,” and “God’s hot ire / liquid fire,” almost certainly lingered in Charlotte’s mind, sparking this remarkable series of interconnections: Patrick’s own rage, his vision of divine anger, and Bertha’s “fierce” fulfillment as the exterminating angel of Thornfield executing vindictive punishment on the once-savage Mr. Rochester, now “blind and a cripple.” All this ire is seething in Jane, and in Charlotte imagining Jane in this apocalyptic moment.

  Thornfield is now nothing but a “blackened ruin.” The same helpful innkeeper tells Jane that Mr. Rochester now lives in a remote house, Ferndean. Like all the place names in Brontë’s novel, this has meaning. “Dean,” a word used frequently in the north of England and in Scotland, comes from the Anglo-Saxon term for the valley of death, and became used for the deep, narrow, wooded valley of a small rivulet. Ferns, which have neither flowers nor seeds, reproduce by spores, and spread freely in light-deprived, damp environments, constituting some of the oldest surviving forms of plant life. Brontë wants all of these suggestive associations with darkness and death. Jane, ever impetuous, walks the last mile toward the house along a grass-grown track gloomy, damp, flowerless, and overarched by “close-ranked” trees. In the dim twilight she can barely make out the “deep buried” building, “so dank and green were its decaying walls.” She wonders if there can be any life in a place such as this. It seems a place where there is “no opening anywhere.” Indeed, Mr. Rochester seems buried alive, an eerie fulfillment of Brontë’s earlier fascination, discussed in Chapter Two, with this grim fate.

  As Jane Eyre halts at the edge of the woods a figure emerges from the house. At once she recognizes him: “my master.” At this moment Edward Fairfax Rochester still has the traits Brontë has derived from the important men in her secret life. His “erect port,” his “raven-black” hair, her idealized recollection of Contstantin Heger, are still there; his “athletic strength” and “vigorous prime” derived from Zamorna remain. But there has been a change. He seems now like a “wronged and fettered beast,” much like her shattered Branwell, trammeled now by self-pity and self-destructive addiction to the point where he describes himself as “a thoroughly old man—­mentally and bodily.” He has become exactly like Charlotte’s fictional Henry Hastings, a man who has “wasted his vigour and his youth in vice,” still though with a “dark, fiery eye,” but now under a br
ow marked with “the various lines of suffering, passion and profligacy.” In Rochester’s blindness now “all to him” Jane guesses, “was void darkness,” exactly the condition in which her father found himself as he first began to recover from his eye operation during those same months, fretting and festering at his inability to return to his clerical duties, an invalid stuck in the Haworth parsonage.

  Charlotte has Jane refuse to accept Rochester’s condition. While with mounting anger Charlotte found that her brother ignored all efforts to help him, her father Patrick was ready to be cared for and longed to get better. So when Jane tells Rochester that she is not the result of his own “sweet madness,” but a real woman, an “independent woman,” he accepts her willingness to be “a kind little nurse,” for whom he should entertain, as he remarks with bitter frustration, a “fatherly feeling.”

  While Charlotte had to make do with her father’s thanks for her help, Jane will gain a happiness Charlotte did not experience. ­Rochester tells Jane of the terrible months after her flight from Thornfield. He remembers now the “hot tears” he “wept over our separation.” As she writes these lines Brontë may recall her own years since her forced separation from Heger. Still she and Jane can utter the same pledge: “All my heart is yours, sir, it belongs to you; and with you it would remain were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.” In Brontë’s case, fate has dictated exactly this exile, and no one sees, or cares, for her extraordinary fidelity. She knows what love in exile feels like. She knows its empty bitterness. Brontë’s assertion that the authenticity of the novel stems from her having experienced such moments rings true, even if she suffers only loss where Jane ultimately finds joy.

  As Rochester recovers partial eyesight he becomes more like Charlotte’s father. Groping, dutiful, submissive. Rochester’s happiness at Jane’s willingness to marry leads him to prayerful gratitude and the rhetoric Charlotte knew well from her father: “my heart swells with gratitude to the beneficent God of this earth.” In confessing that he once had treated her wrongly, Rochester begins to speak in the very same terms we find in Patrick’s “The Phenomenon.” Patrick intones that the wise man should be “thankful” that he is spared, and should “Despise not this merciful, but monitory voice of Divine Wisdom.” The good man must hear, and “learn to be spiritually wise,” lest the day come suddenly “when God ‘Will laugh at your calamity . . . when . . . your destruction commeth as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you.’” Now Rochester interprets for Jane their past in similar terms: “Divine justice pursued its course; disasters came thick on me . . . His chastisements are mighty . . . only of late—I began to see and acknowledge the hand of God in my doom. I began to experience remorse . . . the wish for reconcilement to my Maker.”

  Thus, in a peculiarly ironic return, Brontë has come to imagine Jane Eyre’s happiness in terms of the restricted life that family obligations have imposed on her. The Haworth parsonage, haunted by death and self-destruction, is nevertheless the home where she can restore her beloved father to a vital and effective life. Rochester, now very like Patrick, loves and depends on her. Never very interested in children, Brontë has Jane pass over with remarkable brevity Adèle’s transformation into a “pleasing” companion, “docile, good-tempered, and well-principled.” Jane’s son gets but a single sentence. While the sisterhood of Moor House is no longer hers, Diana and Mary, now married, visit Ferndean alternate years. Ellen Nussey shared similar visits with Charlotte, though both remain unmarried.

  Charlotte’s novel concludes in the same complex autobiographical manner that it began. If its depiction of happiness is not radiantly liberating, neither was her life. Brontë as author and as woman seems to have, for the moment, followed her father’s instruction and become “spiritually wise.”

  Epilogue

  Charlotte Brontë received her first six printed copies of Jane Eyre on October 19, 1847. Early reviews, as we have seen, were very positive, and the book soon was a best seller, going into second and third editions within months. Early in 1848 she told her father Patrick of her success. In July she went to London to tell her publishers at Smith, Elder that she was “Currer Bell.” This tiny circle remained, for some time, the only people who knew the identity of the novel’s author.

  Now, tragedy descended on the Brontës. Two-and-a-half months later, on September 24, Branwell died, almost certainly of tuberculosis. Soon thereafter Emily’s health began to fail from the same cause, and, sternly refusing medical aid until her last hours, she died on December 19. Both were buried in the family vault in the Haworth church, their names inscribed on the wall plaque along with those of their mother and older sisters. Charlotte and her friend Ellen Nussey took Anne, who was already showing symptoms of tuberculosis, to the seaside town of Scarborough, where she died a half-year later on May 28, 1849. Charlotte had her buried there. Grief almost overwhelmed her. On June 25 she wrote to Williams, “waking – I think – sleeping – I dream of them.” And this haunting was not the worst of it. She continues, “I cannot recall them as they were in health – still they appear to me in sickness and suffering.”

  In the end she did not give in. Instead, difficult though it was for her, she carried on with the writing of her third novel. Incredible as it seems, the book was published just a few months after Anne’s death on October 26 with a title page reading: SHIRLEY. / A Tale. / By / CURRER BELL, / AUTHOR OF “JANE EYRE”. Though Emily’s earlier demands that the Brontës publish under pseudonyms meant little now that her younger sisters were dead, Charlotte continued to insist upon one. Writing to Elizabeth Gaskell on November 17, who at the time knew that “Currer Bell” was a woman but nothing more, Brontë argued her chief reason for maintaining the pseudonym was the “fear that if she relinquished it, strength and courage would leave her, and she would ever after shrink—from writing the plain truth.” So there it is again, the insistence on fact. And, indeed, in Shirley, just as with Jane Eyre, Brontë created characters and situations immediately drawn from her experience, even though she set this novel early in the nineteenth century. Some of her characters’ sources were so clear that the victims of her satirical portraits of a group of local curates immediately recognized themselves, but, as she wrote Williams, rather than expressing indignation “each characteristically finds solace for his own wounds in crowing over his brethren.” The practice of secret history was thus continuing.

  However, as the months passed, more and more people heard about or guessed that Charlotte Brontë was Currer Bell. Finally, on February 28, 1850, the Bradford Observer published a gossipy note: “It is understood that the only daughter of the Rev P Bronté, incumbent of Haworth is the authoress of Jane Eyre and Shirley,” adding that both books had appeared “under the name of ‘Currer Bell.’”

  By this time many of Charlotte’s immediate acquaintances knew that, unlikely as it might seem, this tiny and often reclusive woman from a small town in Yorkshire had written two major novels. She became sought after during her ever more frequent trips to London. Friends took her to the opera, to the Great Exhibition of 1851, to museums, even gaining an entry to the woman’s gallery to hear a debate in Parliament.

  This life of seeming celebrity and pleasure did not make her happy. She confessed to Ellen Nussey on August 25, 1852, “my life is a pale blank and often a very weary burden.” Rather than relishing an optimism based on her success, “the Future sometimes appalls me.” The reason, she asserted almost angrily, was “not that I am a single woman and likely to remain a single woman—but because I am a lonely woman and likely to be lonely.”

  Still, she persisted in writing. By October 26, 1852, as she was nearing the completion of her fourth novel she—quite incredibly—wrote her editor Williams, “My wish is that the book should be published without Author’s name.” Two days later she further explained to George Smith, the publisher and by this time a good friend of hers, “I should be most thankful for the sheltering shadow of an incognito. I seem to dre
ad the advertisements.” Of course Smith, Elder could not agree. To publish anonymously would be to almost certainly eliminate any hope for successful sales. In the end the book finally appeared on January 28, 1853, as “VILLETTE. / BY CURRER BELL, / AUTHOR OF ‘JANE EYRE,’ ­‘SHIRLEY,’ ETC.”

  Charlotte’s anxiety about the “truth” behind this book and her futile wish to hide behind the old pseudonym were well founded. All the central characters came from her life, indeed, from the most intensely emotional moments of that life. Again the reader is taken to Brussels, the scene of the earlier novel The Professor. Its central male character, Paul Emanuel, is modeled on Constantin Heger, while his wife Mme. Beck is based upon Mme. Zoe Heger. The book’s heroine Lucy Snowe is a thinly veiled portrait of Charlotte, her moods and depression drawn from Brontë’s during the months she was writing the novel. Doctor John Bretton closely resembles the handsome publisher George Smith, and Lucy’s feelings for him suggest that Charlotte was inclined to fall in love with Smith, a relationship which was never to be, Smith marrying another in 1854. So transparently autobiographical was Villette for the people portrayed, that when Mme. Heger came upon a pirated French version published in 1855, she immediately recognized herself, her husband, and the complex and dangerous emotions that had driven their former English pupil. When Elizabeth Gaskell arrived in late spring of 1856 to make inquiries as she researched her biography of Brontë, Mme. Heger refused to see her.

  Then, finally, the solution to Brontë’s loneliness unexpectedly appeared. Arthur Bell Nicholls had been Patrick Brontë’s curate since June of 1845, a raw young man from the north of Ireland. Charlotte’s early assessment to Ellen was the “narrowness of his mind always strikes me chiefly.” As time passed she largely ignored him, caught up in the excitement of her success as a writer and then the sudden tragedies she suffered as a sister. And so, in December of 1852, with the manuscript of Villette just sent to London, he astonished her by seeking to talk with her privately one evening in the Haworth rectory, speaking emotionally of the “sufferings” he had endured for a long time as he found himself drawn into loving her. Putting him off for the moment, Charlotte informed her father. Patrick responded in a rage: “Papa worked himself into a state not to be trifled with—the veins on his temples started up like whip-cord—and his eyes became suddenly blood-shot.”