Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The year 1847 saw the publication of a remarkable trio of novels by an unlikely trio of young writers, the sisters Brontë. Anne's Agnes Grey, Emily's Wuthering Heights (reviewed here), and Charlotte's Jane Eyre all went into print that year. Blessed as the sisters were in literary talent, they were cursed in health; Anne and Emily would be dead within two years, Charlotte within a decade. With the longest life (38 years!), Charlotte also had the most prolific literary career, publishing three novels before her death in 1855 and one posthumously. Jane Eyre remains the best known and most well-regarded, and it rests alongside Wuthering Heights as a staple of secondary school syllabi.

The outline of the novel's plot is well known. Jane is an orphan girl, raised alongside three spoiled cousins in the home of Mrs. Reed, her unloving aunt by marriage. Despite possessing significant material wealth, Mrs. Reed does the bare minimum to feed and clothe her niece, and only offers this much because her husband made Jane's maintenance the subject of a deathbed request. The first section of the book covers her suffering in this household and her efforts to retain an independent spirit in the face of physical and emotional abuse:

What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon! How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought! I could not answer the ceaseless inward question-why I thus suffered; now, at the distance of--I will not say how many years, I see it clearly.

Jane's virtual imprisonment in the Reed household ends with her removal at age 10 to the Lowood Institution, a charity school run by Mr. Brocklehurst, a clergyman who hypocritically emphasizes privation as the path to salvation despite the luxuries of his own life. Despite the hardships, however, Jane finds the first friendly faces of her life in the superintendent, Miss Temple, and her fellow student, Helen Burns. Jane spends an eight year span at Lowood, including two as a teacher, and emerges a unique creature: possessed of neither wealth nor connections, yet independent and well-educated nevertheless. She takes a position as governess to a young girl housed at Thornfield Hall, and there meets the man who will change the course of her life:

Mr. Rochester, as he sat in his damask-covered chair, looked different to what I had seen him look before; not quite so stern--much less gloomy. There was a smile on his lips, and his eyes sparkled, whether with wine or not, I am not sure; but I think it very probable. He was, in short, in his after-dinner mood; more expanded and genial, and also more self-indulgent than the frigid and rigid temper of the morning: still he looked preciously grim, cushioning his massive head against the swelling back of his chair, and receiving the light of the fire on his granite-hewn features, and in his great, dark eyes; for he had great, dark eyes, and very fine eyes, too--not without a certain change in their depths sometimes, which, if it was not softness, remind you, at least, of that feeling.

Jane's experience at Thornfield is a study in contrasts, between the simple, quiet task of tutoring young Adele and the constant drama of being courted by Mr. Rochester. The latter is considered a prime example of the Byronic hero: moody, brooding, enigmatic. Just the sort of guy every teenage girl thinks they want to rescue and spend their life with. This is in decided contrast to Jane's subsequent suitor, St. John Rivers (her newly discovered first cousin), who seeks Jane's companionship in cold terms of religious necessity. Unlike Rivers or Heathcliff from Emily's Wuthering Heights, another oft-cited example of the Byronic archetype, Rochester exhibits genuine, credible affection for his beloved. Though both are depicted as being physically plain, even unattractive, their banter is filled with wit and affection, he takes incredible (if questionable) measures to win her companionship, and while devastated by her departure he does not succumb to madness or vengeance despite the hardships that follow.

While containing elements common to Victorian literature, the novel breaks from convention on key points. Of obvious significance is the protagonist's forceful feminism. Jane is well-educated and well-spoken, intellectually curious. She seeks self-sufficiency. She thinks marriage should be a partnership of equals. She is not willing to wholly subordinate her desires for companionship, whether it be Rochester's pleading or Rivers' moralizing. And she does not think custom should stand in her way:

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

Religion is another sensitive subject that Bronte does not hesitate to treat frankly. Jane navigates a middle path in the application of faith to her personal life. Suffering under austere conditions in her childhood school, caused by Brocklehurst's theories of Christian sacrifice, Jane neither accepts this harsh asceticism nor uses Brocklehurst's hypocrisy as a basis for wholly rejecting religious doctrine. Befriended by the angelic Helen Burns, Jane admires Helen's ability to forgive without emulating her passive acquiescence. Jane refuses to live as a mistress to Rochester both on practical and moral grounds, but will also not subordinate herself to St. John Rivers' loveless demand that she marry him and join his mission to India, despite his puritanical zeal that reeks of self-righteousness:

"I shall be absent a fortnight--take that space of time to consider my offer: and do not forget that if you reject it, it is not me you deny, but God. Through my means, He opens to you a noble career; as my wife only can you enter upon it. Refuse to be my wife, and you limit yourself for ever to a track of selfish ease and barren obscurity. Tremble lest in that case you should be numbered with those who have denied the faith, and are worse than infidels!"

Once again Jane refuses to submit. Jane accepts the power of divinity and even ends her tale with prayer, but does not concede she must reject all that makes her happy in this world in order to live a moral life.

As mentioned above, the novel does adhere to some conventions of Victorian and Gothic literature, some of which have aged poorly. Of particular note are the supernatural conversation that Rochester and Jane share despite great geographical distance ("Jane! Jane! Jane!") and the extraordinary coincidence that finds homeless, wandering Jane wash up on the doorstep of the cousins she never knew she had. Yet unlike Wuthering Heights, which drowns in its morbid Gothicism, Jane Eyre is more than simply a noted example of a literary period. It is the story of an original female protagonist who defies convention without denying society, refuses patriarchal submission without surrendering to spinsterhood, and resists religious zealotry without succumbing to atheism or immorality. Not bad for a book they try and make you read in high school.