CHARLOTTE BRONTË: JANE EYRE, A WOMAN
OF WILL AND RESILIENCE.
„A chance encounter“ had to be – and indeed it was. Spain, 2010.
Akin to those meetings in a railway station, when eyes connect for a few
seconds, both man and woman considering the possibility of eternity, a
day-dream destined to vanish after a few minutes. I had to spend some days in a
flat in an almost deserted urbanization, not far away from the Mediterranean
coast. I could even glimpse at the peaks of the mountains of Morocco. Abandoned
in a shelf, and suffocated by dust, a few books were thirsting for a reader.
One of them was Jane Eyre (1847), of Charlotte Brontë (*1816- †1855), a paperback edition.
“It was about time”, I said to myself, who had been procrastinating
for years in his resolution to get a “better understanding” of the British femmes
de lettres of the 19th century.
I submerged myself into the opening, just to find, to my utter
amazement, that I could not abandon the novel until I had arrived at the last
page.
(Cover of the Penguin Popular Classics, left by an angel at
the Church of St. John, in Berlin,
Germany, on the 30th of April 2021. The cover shows a detail from Mending
the Tapestry (1835) by Daniel Pasmore (the elder), in the Library at
Springhill, County Londonderry.)
And a second “chance-encounter” had to be, as can only be expected
from someone who since 2010 had been
impregnated by the magic of that novel. Indeed it was. A few weeks ago, as I
started thinking about a contribution on Charlotte Brontë to the blog, I
wondered whether on earth did I lie that copy – or was it just left behind in
Spain? An hour afterwards I went out to do some shopping and visited, as usual,
the Church of St. John near dem kleinen Tiergarten. And there it was,
like the transformation of water into
wine at the Wedding of Cana, according to the Gospel of John
(2.3.-5.), on the very top of a pile of books deposited upon a pew outside the
church: A Penguin Popular Classics edition of Jane Eyre,
no doubt second-hand, yet very much presentable. The miracle continued, as I
noticed, once back at my flat, that the copy had been read meticulously by a
German woman (no doubt, whatsoever…), with a very good level of English, as
evidenced in the ample number of commentaries and summaries of the handling,
mostly in English, some in German.
To that angel (one of many…)
sent by St. John herewith my warmest thanks.
Published originally in 1847 as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography,
under the pen-name “Currer Bell”, the opus appeared in three volumes, which
roughly separate the three “blocks” (chapters 1-15, 16-27, 28-38) of the
novel. The second edition (1848) was
dedicated to William Makepeace Thackeray (*1811-†1863), who replied “this is the greatest compliment I have ever
received in my life”. It soon became a success, albeit some critical voices
were raised, pointing at some “unchristian” deviances in the portrayal of
intimate relations and of a young woman who was not afraid to defy conventions,
at all levels. Charlotte refuted wholeheartedly those accusations in the
prologue to the 1848 edition. Yet it needs only attentive reading to understand
that those “defiances” are not “deviances”, rather the expression of a will to
survive, which the young lady ranks as paramount within the Christian
view-of-the world.
We do not know whether the dedication to Thackeray took place before
or after he issued his dictum, Jane Eyre ought to be regarded as “the
masterwork of a great genius”.
Let us use a ready-available ranking of the novel, to set up the
framework for discussion, summa summarum:
“The novel revolutionised prose fiction by being the first to
focus on its protagonist’s moral and spiritual development through an intimate
first person narrative, where actions and events are coloured by a
psychological intensity. Charlotte Brontë has been called the “first historian
of the private consciousness”, and the literary ancestors of writers like
Proust and Joyce.
The book contains elements of social criticism with a strong sense
of Christian morality at its core, and it is considered by many to be ahead of
the time because of Jane’s individualistic character and how the novel
approaches the topics of class, sexuality, religion and feminism. It, along
with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, is one of the most famous
romance novels of all time.”
Let it all stand, and sound, as written, albeit to categorize anyone
as being the “first historian” of “anything” remains a risky, fragile,
tentative statement. Yet we need more, in particular the details about the
crafty techniques implemented by the authoress in constructing such an
achievement, to verify whether those accolades do hold. And whether the films
version – nowadays – do help us to
better appreciate the precious raw materials which had been processed into fine
art.
The plot.
Somewhere in Northern England, 1830s or 1840s…
Jane Eyre becomes an orphan after the
death – typhus– of her parents, thus living in Gateshead Hall with the family of her maternal uncle, Mr. Reed. She
is disliked, bullied and epitomised as a burden. To get rid of her, she is then
sent to Lowood Institution, a school
for poor and orphaned girls, where hardship would seem to be the only way of
life:
“During January, February, and part of
March, the deep snows, and after their melting, the almost impassable roads,
prevented out stirring beyond the garden walls, except to go to church, but
within these limits we had to pass an hour every day in the open air. Our
clothing was insufficient to protect us from severe cold; we had no boots, the
snow got into our shoes, and melted there; our ungloved hands became numbed and
covered with chilblains, as were our feet.”
The girls at Lowood Institution, about to break with their
mugs the frozen water in their small basins, so that they could wash
themselves.
There lurks Mr. Brocklehurst, who has
concocted his own handy-to-use, abridged and rustic theology, whose essence was
“...the more your body suffers, the more your soul shall rejoice...” Responding
to Mrs. Temple, who insisted the children could not just eat burnt-porridge and
remain fasting until dinner-time, he states:
“Madame, allow me an instant. You are
aware that my plan in bringing up these girls is, not to accustom them to
habits of luxury and indulgence, but to render them hardy, patient,
self-denying (…) … to His warnings that man shall not live by bread alone, but
by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God; to His divine
consolation, “If ye suffer hunger, or thirst for my Sake, happy are ye”. Oh,
madam, when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt-porridge, into these
children’s mouths, you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think
how you starve their immortal souls!”
The dreaded Mr. Brocklehurst would be restrained after typhus swamped the hospice,
killing dozens of girls, including Helen, Jane’s dearest companion, who died in
her arms. To be read: the dialogue between the two, as Helen senses that she is
to leave this world, a moving poetic monument which only a great artist could
avoid making it sound too lacrimosus.
Jane Eyre
becomes then a teacher at Lowood Institution, and having advertised for
a position as “governess”, she is invited to come to Thornfield Hall (not just
a simple name...), property of Mr. Edward Rochester. She is to educate Mademoiselle
Adéle Varens, ward of Mr. Rochester, de facto an unexpected “by-product”
of one of his Parisian amusements.
It does not take long to Jane Eyre to
realise that “something is aloof” in the manor-house, awkward signs during the
day, strange voices and bizarre noises at night, Mr. Rochester’s bed being set
on fire, not plausible as a mere accident.
Mr. Rochester exhales the allure of a Byronic landlord and
world-traveller, yet it does no take long to Jane Eyre to realise that he is,
in his innermost, an injured man, still bleeding scars of more than one faux
pax in his life:
“I have travelled all over the world, Miss Eye, and it is very
overrated”.
The dexterity of the authoress as a Flemish grand-master of
portraying is very much recurrent, as in the case of the “Dowager Lady Ingram”,
whose daughter is rumoured to be on her way to become Mr. Rochester’s wife,
adding a fine touch of irony:
“They were all three of the loftiest stature of woman. The
dowager might be between forty and fifty: her shape was still fine; her hair
(by candlelight at least); her teeth, too, were still apparently perfect. Most
people would have termed her a splendid woman of her age: and so she was, no
doubt, physically speaking; but then there was an expression of almost
insupportable haughtiness in her bearing and countenance. She had Roman
features and a double chin, disappearing into a throat like a pillar: these
features appeared to me not only inflated and darkened, but even furrowed with
pride; and the chin was sustained by the same principle, in a position of
almost preternatural erectness. She had, likewise, a fierce and hard eye: it
reminded me of Mrs Reed’s; she mouthed her words in speaking; her voice was
deep, its inflections very pompous, very dogmatical – very intolerable, in
short. A crimson velvet robe, and a shawl turban of some gold-wrought Indian
fabric, invested her (I suppose she thought) with a truly imperial dignity.”
„...when eyes happen to be more explicit than words... “
Mr. Rochester (Toby Stephens) looking at Jane Eyre (Ruth Wilson),
2006, BBC.
...and vice-versa., shortly after she refused to accept a 50£ note,
demanding only 15£ corresponding to her salary. “I read as much in your eye
(beware, by the by, what you express with that organ, I am quick at interpreting
its language). “
Mr. Rochester will make
a marriage proposal to Jane, unexpected by most, though anticipated by the
beginning of Chapter 23:
“A splendid Midsummer shone over England: skies so pure, suns so
radiant as were then seen in long succession, seldom favour, even singly,
our-wave-girt land. It was as if a band of Italian days had come from the
South, like a flock of glorious passenger birds, and lighted to rest them on
the cliffs of Albion.”
„...no better
landscape in this world than the face of a woman in love...”
Ruth Wilson enacting a superb, enchanting performance of Jane
Eyre, in the BBC 2006 series, the morning following the marriage proposal
of Mr. Rochester.
“As I rose and dressed, I thought over what had happened, and
wondered if it were a dream (….) While arranging my hair, I looked at my face
in the glass, and felt it was no longer plain: there was hope in its aspect and
life in its colour; and my eyes seemed as they had beheld the found of
fruition, and borrowed beams from the lustrous ripple.”
Yet even the tiniest and the apparently just ornamental elements in
this novel do have a message, for now or later:
“Before I left my bed in the morning, little Adéle came running in
to tell me that the great horse-chestnut at the bottom of the orchard had been
struck by lightning in the night, and half of it split away.”
The marriage ceremony is organised in haste, perhaps even too
precipitously, with almost no invited guests.
There was a reason:
“Mr. Rochester cannot marry! He already has a wife...”, irrupts Mr.
Briggs, “a solicitor of_____ Street,
London“.
(2006) BBC, Mr. Rochester and Jane Eye, frozen by the fulminant irruption.
2011 ,
BBC, Jane Eye (Mia Wasikowska) and Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender) under a
state of shock. The priest, Mr. Wood, even more.
The “phantom” in the manor-house has now become a fully fleshy, bony
figure, hidden in the attic, the lunatic woman whom Mr. Rochester married in
the West Indies.
There is no other option for Jane Eyre but to leave Thornfield Hall,
rejecting all the alternative proposals advanced by Mr. Rochester, as they do
not comply with her Christian vision of the world.
Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska, BBC 2011)
alone at a cross-road, which promises four roads to nowhere.
“Whitcross is no town, not even a hamlet; it is but a stone
pillar set up where four roads meet, whitewashed, I suppose, to be more obvious
at a distance and in darkness.”
Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska), in the 2011
BBB film version, wandering across nature, not knowing whether any future may
still be possible.
“A mile off, beyond the fields, lay a road which stretched in the
contrary direction to Millcote; a road I had never travelled, but often
noticed, and wondered whether it led: thither I bent my steps. No reflection
was allowed: not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one
thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page
so heavenly sweet ‒ so deadly sad – that to read one line of it would dissolve my
courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank: something like
the world when the deluge was gone by.”
The last refuge, perhaps the only possibility of some answer:
“Not a tie holds me to human society at this moment – not a charm
or hope calls me where my fellow creatures are – none that saw me would have a
kind thought or a god wish for me. I have no relative but the universal
mother, Nature: I will seek her breast and ask repose.”
And that is the statement that confirms that we have in our hands a
product of the true Romantik.
Unable to find any job in a hamlet, and unsuccessful at trading her
handkerchief and gloves for food, she will sleep on the moor, to later arrive
at the home of the clergyman St. John (what a coincidence…) Rivers and her two
sisters, where she is first refused help, taken as a mad vagrant woman. St.
John Rivers will intervene, giving her food and lodging. Her new life will thus
begin, under still austere yet more tranquil auspices.
The Bildungsroman
A “romance novel” no doubt, as defined within the Anglo-Saxon world,
depicting the relationship between a man and a woman, from which one has the
right to expect an “optimistic ending”. In German and Spanish, and possibly
many other languages, such a genre would be translated as a “Liebesroman” or
“novela de amor”. Many would tend to equate such a definition with a “romantic
novel”, but we shall reject the latter as a synonym of the former, and we will
come later to the consequent discussion.
Jane Eyre is, above all, as has been
duly noted by many, a Bildungsroman – but not only. Usually translated
into English as a “coming-of-age” novel (and film), that definition does touch
on some facets of the “Sich-Bilden” (the construction of “oneself”), but it
does not convey the fullest meaning therewith contained. It is not only an Entwicklungsroman,
which would be the equivalent of the “coming-of-age”. The world Bild
emphasizes the construction of a relevant “picture” of the world—and of the
individual role in it. It is a “coming-to-terms” with the world, but
emphasizing the subjective will, the possibility of constructing
your-own-world, yet within a religious, in this case a Christian ethical
framework.
Jane Eyre is also a carefully conceived
and craft-fully implemented thriller – perhaps one of the best in 19th
century English narrative, at least from a female perspective, containing some
features proper to a Gothic novel. Not a few people argued that the plot
concerning the “phantom” in the castle may be considered at least a little bit
too “far-fetched”. Granted, but it is not implausible, in particular for 19th
century social and family structures, to have someone who had been “deprived of
its senses” quasi-arrested, or at least isolated, in an attic. It starts as a
thriller in the “first block” of the novel, as we do not know whether the
orphan girl would survive the hardship and the bullying in her
“substitute-family”, even more so in the inhumane hospice.
Much more: A multi-layered novel, woven with quotes and references
of dozens of writers, sacred texts and artists, from the Bible to Shakespeare,
from Samuel Richardson to Friedrich Schiller, et al. It is also a
“romantic” novel, yet in the truest sense of Anglo-German romanticism, die
Romantik, which goes beyond the intimate connaissance between a man and a woman. It implies the upgrading of
the individual, of the sole soul, who can find soothing solace, and perhaps
even answers, in nature. Nature to be understood herewith as the repository of
God, “thither ye go”, to get balsam from the Waldeinsamkeit, a world which will unleash – much later ‒ the indestructible passion
between Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, at least as cinematographically
portrayed.
Translatable as “solitude in the woods (forest)”, the term captures the
possibility of both “being alone” and “accompanied” by the trees and all the
“spirits” kicking around, the latter neither elves or goblins, simply metaphors
for the souls of the cherished ones, on both sides of the time-barrier.
It is not aleatory that Mr. Rochester categorises Jane Eyre
since their first, accident-prone encounter, as an “elf”, someone out of a “fairy tale, who had
bewitched my horse”:
“A true Janian reply! Good angels be my guard. She comes from the
other world – from the abode of people who are dead, and tells me so when she
meets me alone here in the gloaming! If I dared, I’d touch you, to see if you
are substance or shadow, you elf! But I’d as soon offer to take hold of a blue ignis
fatuus light in a marsh. Truant! Truant!”.
Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska), BBC 2011, walking through Hay Lane, just
before Mr. Rochester’s horse were “to slip on the sheet of ice which glazed the
causeway...”,
and fall.
That is why Jane Eyre makes of a walk through the woods, or
through the moorland, or in the mountains, the most reliable therapy for any
turbulence of the soul, preferring, in many instances in the novel, to alight
from the carriage, two or three miles before destination, in order to feel the
earth underneath her shoes. She becomes
a “Waldgängerin”, a “forest-walker”, backdating a concept which a German writer
in the 20th century was to engrave as the title of one of his most emblematic
books
She might be alone, but not inevitably lonely – on the
contrary.
Jane Eyre, die Waldgängerin, the
“forest-walker”, the “bonny wanderer”
striding from Thornfield Hall to the manor-house of Ferndean, at the end of the
novel, to re-encounter Mr. Rochester.
(Ruth Wilson, 2006 BBC series version)
The films.
The richness of the text is such that it constituted an
inexhaustible diamond-mine for movie-makers. There are least 24 film- and
television-versions, since 1910, including three muted English films (1910,
1914 and 1921), and one German (1926).
Plus, a Dutch one (1958) and a Greek one (1968). Not to be forgotten, a
Czech mini-series in 1972. To be noticed, a 1943 production with Orson Welles
as Mr. Rochester and Jean Fontaine as Jane Eyre.
It is not altogether impossible that the novel of Charlotte Brontë
may well the most filmed in the history of world literature. The screen cannot
possible aspire to reproduce the whole constellation of quoted authors and
artists, nor all the scenes and unexpected twists, but it can enhance the
portrayal of nature, which is the constant “personage” of the novel in the
background – and not only there. We refer in particular to the remarkable
screen-recreations of 2006 and 2011.
Yet the films can also give a more resounding version of the
dialogues.
The screenwriter of the 2006 film-version did a remarkable job in
summarising and rewriting the first stern conversation between Mr. Rochester
and Jane Eyre, respecting the substance of the original text (Pgs. 123-24), but
adding the necessary tightness and poignancy required by the dialogues in the
screen-version:
-
Where are you from?
-
Lowood Institution, Sir.
-
How long were you there?
-
Eight years, Sir.
-
I am amazed you survived.
You are so small. Did they not feed you?
-
No, Sir.
-
And how do you find yourself
here and not sill there?
-
I advertised, Sir.
-
Of course you did. What
about your family?
-
I have none, Sir.
-
None whatsoever? Friends?
-
None, Sir.
-
None at all?
-
I had a friend once but she
died a long time ago, Sir.
-
You are lucky, Miss Eyre. If
you do not love another living soul, then you are never going to be
disappointed.
-
Yes, Sir.
The legacy
There is an echoing, yet also contradictory and perhaps even ironic,
message permeating the whole substratum of the novel, which becomes only
explicit after coming to the end ‒and after having taken distance from the text. Had her body and soul
not been tested to the utmost during her years at the residence of her aunt,
and during her first years at Lowood Institution, Jane Eyre would
not have been able to survive the devastating shock of seeing the very ceremony
of her marriage being torn to pieces –leading, on top, to gruesome, almost
nauseating revelations. That is a stroke
of destiny that few human beings would be able to cope with.
The young lady who found refuge and solace on books about exotic
fauna and flora, and far-away countries, who used painting as her way of
reconstructing imaginary and real landscapes, and subtly positioning herself in
those sceneries, and who understood that her “only true home” was nature, above
all the forest, had – perhaps unconsciously – erected inside herself a thick
granite wall, to protect the feeble flame of her soul, to repel the most
ferocious onslaughts of the devil himself.
This Innerlichkeit is already striking, and augurs well, when
Mr. Rochester expressed his bewildered admiration for the water-colours (“yet
the drawings are, for a schoolgirl, peculiar. As to the thoughts, they are
elfish.”), in their first meeting at
Thornfield Hall. They are indeed highly symbolic:
“The first represented clouds, low and livid, rolling over a swollen
sea, all the distance was in eclipse (…) the second picture contained for
foreground only the dim peak of a hill (...)the third showed the pinnacle of an
iceberg piercing a polar winter sky...”
“-Where you happy when you painted these pictures? asked Mr.
Rochester presently. - I was absorbed, sir: yes, and I was happy. To paint
them, in short was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known.”
The young lady had already constructed her own “worlds”, both inside
and outside.
Jane Eyre survived, “built-herself”
thanks to a bullet-proof innermost, and achieved happiness. The tragedy is that
such a parcour was not to be bestowed upon the authoress of this
magnificent and moving novel. Charlotte Brontë died three weeks before
achieving the age of 39, with her unborn child, her health having been
permanently deteriorated by the poor environment of the school she went to
between 1824-25, where two of her sisters died. Thus depriving us, too early,
of one of the most gifted novelists of the English language in the 19th
century. But she shall not be forgotten.
For fifteen years after the death of Helen, Jane Eyre’s
beloved friend, “her grave in Brocklebridge Churchyard was only covered by a
grassy mound; but now a gray marble tablet marks the spot, inscribed with her
name, and the word: Resurgam.”
Jane Eyre was re-born and did not
forget.
