THE WOMEN IN JANE’S LIFE

Jane Eyre believes in her right to be a full and complete human being, to be treated as the equal of any other human being in terms of basic human rights. In the twenty-first century, this idea is commonplace. In Charlotte Bronte ¨ ’s time, however, it was quite revolutionary. Women were considered to be subordinate to men according to the laws of both God and Nature. Under the law, married women were unable to own property in their own name; they were not permitted to sue in their name or even to have legal rights to their own children. They were legally the property of their husbands, who could treat them as well or as poorly as they chose. A respectable woman was expected never to fall in love, but only to allow herself to grow to love the man she marries out of gratitude for his love of her. Respectable women were expected to service their husbands’ needs sexually and to give them children (preferably at least one son), but never to enjoy themselves sexually. To enjoy the pleasures of the body was considered coarse and disreputable for a Victorian woman. Nor were women expected to have a love of intellectual activity. In fact, most nineteenth-century doctors recommended against women receiving a classical education or reading in too much depth, claiming that it would make them “unwomanly.” Intellectual pursuits would, so it was believed, redirect a woman’s vital energies from the production of children and the maternal instincts. As a result, it was believed that her uterus and ovaries would atrophy, and she would not only be unable to have and/or to nurture children (the role a Victorian woman was supposedly born to play), but she would begin to act and look more like a man than a woman. For a woman like Jane Eyre, who felt and thought so deeply, such restrictions on feeling passion and thinking philosophical thoughts would be wholly intolerable.

In Jane Eyre ,Charlotte Bronte ¨ presents several women who represent one or another aspect of the early Victorian woman. Some coincide with the ideal of the “angel in the house,” a phrase coined by Coventry Patmore to describe the ideal Victorian lady. Others represent the shadow side of the Victorian woman, the energies and demeanors that must remain repressed if one is to be considered an ideal, or even respectable, lady. Not one of these singlefaceted individuals lives a fully productive or satisfying life. Only when all the qualities are combined and integrated into a single individual, the novel seems to say, can a truly satisfactory life result.

Helen Burns represents the extreme of amiability and selfdeprecation. She is the “good girl” who never has a bad word to say against anyone except herself. She is willing to accept any and all criticism of herself, believing that she is, in fact, a very slatternly and willful girl. She undergoes painful corporal punishment from Miss Scatcherd without a protest or a whimper, certain that she must endure the punishment in order to learn the lessons she is supposed to learn in life. She is continually shamed in front of the other students, often as punishment for circumstances beyond her control, and she takes her punishment in stride, as her due. Jane recognizes Helen’s essential goodness, but detests the fact that Helen refuses to stand up for herself. Such denial of one’s essential selfhood is beyond Jane’s understanding. It is also, the novel would seem to imply, something that cannot effectively be maintained for an entire lifetime. Helen dies young, seemingly too good for this world.

Blanche Ingram is another single-faceted individual in the novel, representing the antithesis of Jane in terms of wealth and beauty. Blanche is, outwardly, the perfect marital partner for Mr. Rochester. She is a dark beauty, solid and strong, a good horsewoman, and apparently a good match for him physically. She is also an heiress. She is born into his social class and would be able to bring her own fortune to his estate. She is, thus, exactly what a man in Mr. Rochester’s position is expected to desire in a mate. She is also, however, cold and haughty, especially where servants and children are concerned. She speaks in Jane’s presence of her opinion that all governesses are detestable women with nothing of substance to offer and of her determination to have Adele sent away to school the moment she becomes Mrs. Rochester. She displays no evidence of even the slightest warmth, human or compassion. In Blanche Ingram, Jane sees the kind of woman that society expects men like Mr. Rochester to marry. Similarity of vision, compatibility of character, and shared passions are qualities that Rochester shares with Jane, not Blanche, but they are not qualities that society considers to be important for a husband and wife. Since childhood, Jane has been told that she is nothing but a dependent, someone who will never be truly significant in anyone else’s life. In Blanche Ingram, she comes face to face with the kind of woman who is significant, according to the societal rules of the time, and finds her extremely distasteful. Jane finds Mr. Rochester’s apparent interest in marrying Blanche Ingram difficult to understand on a personal level, but she recognizes the practical and social aspects of such a marriage and assumes that he is behaving true to form for a gentleman of his time and class. In fact, he does not intend to marry Blanche, only to lead her on and, in the process, to try the heart and spirit of the woman he truly loves, Jane Eyre. But Mr. Rochester’s reluctance to marry Blanche Ingram does not come as a result of his intellectualizing about the possible problems involved in a marriage with someone so incompatible with his personality; it comes from actual experience. Rochester did, when he was younger, marry someone very much like Blanche Ingram, a woman of position and money with whom he had little in common intellectually or emotionally.

Bertha is the wife of Rochester at the time Jane comes to Thornfield to live. Jane, unaware that Bertha lives in the attic, or even of Bertha’s very existence, allows to fall in love her as they discover their essential compatibility. Bertha, in her present state, represents the shadow side of the proper Victorian lady, for Bertha has become a madwoman, kept locked away from sight and public awareness. All of the of about the of Bertha Jane and Adele. For Adele, the knowledge is considered too adult. is not told because Mr. initially Mason Rochester living Edward Fairfax herself with employer inhabitants Thornfield know existence except Jane Rochester feared she might not stay to teach Adele if she knew. But no one at Thornfield is aware of Bertha’s exact relationship to Mr. Rochester. Some believe she may be one of his former mistresses who has gone mad and whom he has chosen to care for. Others believe that she may be a bastard half-sister, or even a former employee. Some may suspect the relation to be marital, but no one living at Thornfield knows for sure. All they know for certain is that she remains locked in the attic under the watch of Grace Poole, the coarse woman who serves as her caregiver. By the time we see Bertha in the novel, she has degenerated into a creature with animalistic characteristics. She continues, however, to have great human cunning, as is apparent on those occasions when she manages to sneak away from her keeper and wreak havoc in select areas of the house. She attempts to burn her husband to death in his bed one night, only to have Jane wake him in time. When her stepbrother, Richard Mason, visits her, she attacks him with both a knife and her teeth, sinking her teeth so deeply into his shoulder that he requires medical attention. She visits Jane’s room on the night before her wedding to Rochester is scheduled, and destroys the veil that symbolizes their imminent nuptials. As the shadow side of the respectable Victorian woman, Bertha displays the rage and violence that women were required to repress in Victorian life. She was discarded by her family, essentially sold to a complete stranger for her fortune, then taken, against her will, to England, a land so different in culture and climate from the Caribbean Island on which she was born and raised that, had she not already been exhibiting serious signs of mental imbalance, the move itself would have likely driven her mad. When finally forced into revealing Bertha as his wife, Rochester describes her heritage: Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family:—idiots and maniacs through three generations! Her mother, the Creole, was both a mad woman and a drunkard!—as I found out after I had wed the daughter: for they were silent on family secrets before. Bertha, like a dutiful child, copied her parent in both points. (355) Bertha’s madness reveals itself to Rochester after their marriage through her drinking, her irrational (in his opinion, at least) behavior, and her lustiness. No respectable and responsible woman could, according to the standards of Victorian society, act as Bertha acted unless she were mad. In fact, madness in women was often described in the medical articles of the day as a tendency toward drunkenness and lascivious desires. Bertha indulges her desires; therefore, she must be ill. Such was the logic of Victorian social mores and medical practices. Bronte ¨ does not show the reader a young Bertha, capable of winning Rochester with her dark beauty and her fortune. We do not know, therefore, how Bertha interacted with the world before her marriage, whether her impending madness would have been apparent to a wiser man than her husband or not. Nor do we know how quickly her illness progressed or what her husband may have done to accelerate the process. Bronte ¨ leaves those details to the imagination of the reader. One may freely accept Rochester’s version of the story, or one may look beyond it, blaming, at least in part, the very essence of Victorian culture for Bertha’s degeneration into the mad creature we meet in the novel. But regardless of the course of her illness and the reasons behind it, once Bertha is defined as mad and locked away from the world, her condition worsens, resulting in the animalistic creature Rochester displays to his thwarted wedding party:

In the deep shade, at the further end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it groveled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face. (356)

Bertha represents that part of the Victorian woman that is not to be seen, not even to be admitted to exist. She reflects the instinctive animalistic part of the woman’s nature, filled with violent rage at being repressed. The consequences for a woman of showing her deepest passions publicly in Victorian England were severe. A woman could be considered “unnatural” merely for allowing anyone, including her husband, to be made aware that she enjoys sex or that she feels intense anger or frustration. The respectable woman of this time was calm, passive, and subservient. The only aggression she was permitted to show was passive aggression— illnesses (real or feigned) that prevented her from meeting her husband’s expectations, or indirect manipulations that enabled her to get her way without others being aware that they had been manipulated. Such “feminine wiles” were permissible, though dangerous in that they could easily backfire. Bertha’s aggression, however, is far from passive. She is the most direct female in the entire novel. Her emotions and desires are clear in each of her actions. She is not passive toward others; she is active. And the actively aggressive woman in Victorian culture is, by definition, a madwoman. The character of Jane Eyre strives to be a fully developed human being, instead of a mere Victorian lady. She recognizes the need of a human being to take action in her life, not merely to be reactive. She believes that, as a human being, she has a right to want more than the proper Victorian lady is expected to want. “Anybody may blame me who likes,” Jane challenges her readers, That, now and then...I climbed the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim skyline:

that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen: that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach.... Who blames me? Many no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; itagitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it...to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended— a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence. (129)

Jane, in order to feel fully alive, in order to dream the dreams and have the visions that keep her sane, must go to the third floor and into the attic (the floor, though not the room, where the insane Bertha is kept) and out onto the roof (from which Bertha eventually leaps to her death) to look out and experience the world that has, thus far, been closed to her. She knows that “many” will condemn her for even the need to dream such dreams, but she must dream them. And, when the frustration of having her vision and actions so restricted gets the better of her, she paces, “backwards and forwards,” along the corridor, just as Bertha runs “backwards and forwards” within her cell. And, in case the reader misses that particular connection, Bronte ¨ encloses Jane’s entire speech about desiring so much more than is available to her within two loud laughs, laughs that we discover later in the novel originate from Bertha Rochester herself. Bertha would seem to be laughing at Jane’s dreams and desires, the knowing laugh of one who has experienced those dreams and desires herself, but who has found herself, because of them, to be more greatly restricted than she ever could have imagined by the very man with whom Jane will soon fall in love. The Victorian woman can be imminently respectable, like Helen Burns, but be victimized by those in power over her. She can appear to be perfect in appearance and social position, like Blanche Ingram, but be cold, aloof, and haughty. Or she can be completely disreputable like Bertha, indulging her desires to the point of madness (at least as it was defined by the Victorians). Jane wants to do what is right; she wants to do her duty and to remain a respectable woman. But she also wants to experience the fullness of her humanity, with all its potential action and excitement as well. To find a means of doing both, in Victorian society, was extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, for women.