So I finished reading Jane Eyre. I also, consequently, finished teaching it as my AP Lit students are preparing to write Lit Crit essays about it. It was kind of a mind fuck.
So, I had never read the book before, but I had read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, which is like a 1960ish prequel to Jane Eyre focusing on Bertha (or Antoinette) Mason as she is betrothed to Rochester. I was assigned Wide Sargasso Sea in a college Lit Crit class and I read it (and lost to memory, apparently annotated the shit out of it) without really knowing much at all about Jane Eyre. So I already had a warped, twisted idea about Bertha and the secret that was hiding Rochester’s attic. I was vaguely aware of how Rochester is like this prototypical studly, arrogant Romantic Victorian character.
But after reading Jane Eyre and teaching the archetype of the Byronic Hero, I kind of feel like I understand Rochester in a personal way. He’s kind of an aloof, condescending dick. And I’ve spent a fair portion of my life as this same kind of phallic arsehole. Rochester thinks he deserves better and kind of subtly treats other people like crap. He thinks he’s the victim and locks Bertha up in the attic and just pays other people like Grace Poole a lot of money to keep it quiet. I have struggled with these personal blind spots for most of my life under the pretense of just being introverted.
I was really not very hooked in the first 15 chapters, and kept waiting for something interesting to happen. I knew the book’s reputation, but it was really the intense jealousy that Jane represses regarding Blanche Ingram that started getting me to sympathize with Jane more and caring for her character.
By the end of the novel, I was pretty compelled to figure out what exactly Jane is searching for. She spends so much of the book miserable and victimized and eternally in a never-ending and never-winning battle of comparing herself and comparing her circumstances to others, that it becomes unclear what exactly she wants. Finally, the fact that Rochester actually wants her, compels her to run back to him at the end of the novel. My students were mostly quite disturbed that it ended in such a conventional way. I have tried to explain the serialization of the book and how Bronte might have felt an obligation to tie everything up for a magazine publisher with a neat little bow (as was the custom of serialized novel of the time), so in hindsight, we want more experimentation with the ending but Bronte offers little (besides the curious religious epitaph for St. John on the last page, despite Jane’s prioritization of romance over religion).
Some of my students were criticizing the book in a Socratic Seminar yesterday stating that it is decidedly NOT a feminist novel, and that Jane running back to Rochester at the end negates any feminist framing of the novel. I just had to interject on behalf of sensitive feminists everywhere, and explain that this was clearly Jane’s choice at the end, and though they protested that she chooses to devote herself to caring for a man, I had to rebut that Rochester needs care and is crippled and blinded, thus giving Jane purpose in life in lieu of her new inherited fortune and mid-life crisis milieu.
In summation of the novel, the complexity of Jane’s choices and the inherent social issues regarding women’s roles in Victorian England are very interesting. I enjoyed emphasizing the characterization of Jane’s “plainness” and lack of remarkable “beauty” to my students, who are teenagers and quite concerned with beauty as a quantifiable value. Yet, overall, I feel the most lasting thorniness and problematic issues with the novel are the narrative subjugation of Bertha Mason and her one-dimensionality, as well as Bronte’s treatment of Jane’s religious skepticism and Rochester’s borderline narcissistic and Byronic behavior.
@katelucia, I honestly knew nothing about the novel when I started reading it besides that Rochester locked some woman up in his attic. I asked your opinion of how to approach it as a teacher with an honest ignorance and curiosity about how to draw students in, because in the first 15 chapters, I was honestly flailing for critical lenses.
The thing I’m most astonished by is the Bronte sisters mastery of the novel form at a time when novels were still not incredibly popular, marketable, or widespread. This is right along the timeline of Dickens and James Fenimore Cooper starting to popularize the novel, yet the Bronte sisters were already pretty refined in their mastery of narrative and long-form thematic storytelling. It’s a polished novel. I was expecting something more flawed and disjointed, I supposed considering the publishing date. Jane Eyre was published only 25 years after Frankenstein, so I find it’s merit and quality remarkable for the time. Thoughts on Bronte?
