#46 Jane Eyre

 

A scene from Blackeyed Theatre's Jane Eyre, currently available to stream

Blackeyed Theatre’s production of Jane Eyre, wrote a reviewer last month, ‘has rejected the fashionable habit of presenting Jane as a rad-fem freedom fighter surrounded by grotesque male oppressors’.

I should hope so too. I’ve loved the novel ever since I first read it aged 11 or 12, and thankfully it’s never occurred to me to read it as men versus women. If it had, I would have enjoyed it much less. Such a reading would be part of ‘the steamroller of our cultural moment’, as blogger Maria Popova puts it, which levels the ‘beautiful, wild topography of personhood' into variations on identity politics, demolishing context, dispossessing expression of intention, and flattening persons into identities’.

Even an outline of Jane Eyre shows us that it is more complex than male oppression of women. It is Aunt Reed who locks Jane in the terrifying red room and sends her to an orphanage where children die from disease and semi-starvation. Rochester himself has been cheated and pressured into a tormenting marriage with Bertha Mason, his first wife. Jane’s cousin St John Rivers suppresses his natural instinct for love so he can work, single, as a missionary.

The ‘beautiful, wild topography of personhood’

But enough. This is too easy and is on the same level as the identity politics it rejects. What about the ‘beautiful, wild topography of personhood’? Where is that in the novel?

What about this, when Rochester, who wants Jane to marry him, is lying to her? He tells her she must leave his home Thornfield Hall to go to another governess post in Ireland before his chosen wife, Blanche Ingram, arrives. In doing this he nudges, even forces her, into a confession of her feeling for him:

‘It is a long way off, sir.’

‘No matter – a girl of your sense will not object to the voyage or the distance.’

‘Not the voyage, but the distance, and then the sea is a barrier –‘

‘From what, Jane?’

‘From England and from Thornfield; and –‘

‘Well?’

‘From you, sir.’

I said this almost involuntarily, and, with as little sanction of free will, my tears gushed out.

Strange reversal! That it is the moment when Jane loses most of her free will that is the honest one. And why does Rochester torture her by pretending she has to leave and by earlier flirting with Blanche Ingram? (Jane asks him this later and he replies that he wanted to make her jealous, which I don’t think gets to the heart of it – to me it is more like an angry conformance with what is conventionally expected of him). And is there not an undercurrent of humour, not just from Rochester but from Brontë, in her prospective new employer being ‘Mrs Dionysus O’Gall of Bitternut Lodge’?

Jane’s feeling here turns into a springboard for her declaration to Rochester later in the conversation that they are equal before God and that ‘I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.’ It is as though her involuntary outburst has helped her to progress and use a renewed, strengthened conception of her own free will which she can look at from the outside and verbalise. Later Rochester persuades her that he is not joking, and she consents to marry him. But looking back with her narrator’s omniscience from the end of the chapter, she says ‘I could not, in those days, see God for his creature, of whom I had made an idol.’

A wild topography indeed, and most of these strands are not resolved in the novel, though I love the moment towards the end when Jane is sitting on Rochester’s knee and shudders and clings closer ‘involuntarily’, without apology, at the suggestion she should leave him. Her instinctive reaction at last has a home.

Some of these strands then – love, passion, frustration, need for religion – and yes, sexual identity – are here, but as things that change moment by moment not as, say, a battle between women and patriarchy, or passion and religion, which would be a caricature of the Victorian era and of our own.

'The whole hog'

So I would say that approaching a novel – the only type of book which gets ‘the whole man alive’ according to DH Lawrence – through the lens of identity politics or with assumptions about the power relations you will find there – already limits it before you start, as presenting Jane Eyre as women against men would do. It is breaking down an organic form into ‘identity-fragments’, as Popova says, which cannot get the whole person – 'the whole hog', as Lawrence says.

But wait – wouldn’t we be missing out if there were no feminist readings of Jane Eyre? Isn’t it the case that she is a woman oppressed within a male-dominated society, first at the orphanage run by the horrible Mr Brocklehurst, then as a penniless governess, one of the very few professions open to women at the time? Isn’t it a stroke of genius to interpret Mr Rochester’s first wife Bertha Mason, now mad and living in the Thornfield attic, in psychological terms as the part of Jane she must shut off in order to continue her bounded existence?

Yes, but I would argue that this broad-brush, less nuanced understanding finds a better home in politics, even campaigning politics, then in literary study. Politically, Jane Eyre might become an illustration or heightened experience feeding into a campaigning call, for example – and would be very powerful there. But in my view the generalised assumptions and polarisations of politics translate poorly into the moment-by-moment life of individuals in which the novel specialises.

Literature is already on the other side of politics, and to interpret a novel like Jane Eyre in over-generalised political terms drags it back to a level it has progressed beyond. Literature is about individuals, and I would argue is primarily descriptive rather than critical or analytical.

But literature pays a price for this. Still thinking. More later, I hope, with reference to A.S. Byatt, Yeats and Auden.

Blackeyed Theatre’s production of Jane Eyre can be watched here.