Meagan O'ReillyMeagan O’Reilly
ENGL 502
Dr. Campbell
5 December 2012
Narrating Jane: Reading Jane Eyre as Feminist (Re)Vision
And the lady of the house was seen only as she appeared in each room, according to the nature of the lord of the room. None saw the whole of her, none but herself….None could tell the whole of her, none but herself.
~Laura Riding
(emphasis mine, qtd. in Gilbert 3)
From William Makepeace Thackeray’s praise of “the masterwork of a great genius” (qtd. in Oates) to The Christian Remembrancer’s denouncement of the author as a “soured, coarse, and grumbling [… ] alien” (qtd. in Gilbert 337), Jane Eyre elicited strong reactions upon its first publication in 1847. More telling, however, are the strong reactions Charlotte Bronte’s novel has continued to elicit. Taken up as a proto-feminist text by later female writers— to name a few heavy-hitters: Virginia Woolf in The Common Reader (1916), Adrienne Rich in “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman” (1979), Joyce Carol Oates in her introduction to the Bantam edition of the novel (1987), and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979)—Jane Eyre is often considered one of the first major feminist novels (Martin 93). However, a cursory glance at the plot of the novel may provoke another response: Why? Why is a novel about a woman who remains ensconced in the domestic sphere as a governess, falls in love with her master but refuses to be with him until they have a socially sanctioned union, and then lives happily ever after in matrimony read as a feminist text? The answer to this question lies in the delivery of the story. With the distinct and assertive voice of its narrator, Jane Eyre wields the power to bring forth strong and enduring reactions, hold the fascination of readers throughout generations, and make a strong statement of female agency
By agency I mean self-determination, the ability to make decisions that lead to action and choices that come to fruition. While a Marxist perspective measures agency in relation to a person’s ability to make decisions free from the influence of Ideological State Apparatuses (see Druxe for an exploration of this definition), this paper sticks to a less sociological definition. I felt this paper was unable to support the weight of a thusly complicated definition of agency. in the face of oppressive circumstances. Using terms from Structuralism in my analysis of the novel’s narration, I hope to add to the discussion of the novel as a feminist text by focusing on the position of the narrator and the act of narration.
Jane Eyre’s narrator speaks from a position of authority and wields great rhetorical power, structuring the experiences of her past selves into a triumphant journey that validates her choices and insists upon her agency—a supreme assertion of female agency in its own right. Even though Jane fulfills the only roles sanctioned for her by the patriarchal order—governess and wife—Jane performs an act of feminist revision by telling her own story. She retells the story of love and marriage within patriarchal society from the perspective of, in Oates’ words, a “stubbornly idiosyncratic intelligence” (vii)—a woman with agency. Providing her version of a story that may otherwise seem to conform to the social standard of a woman subdued into marriage and trapped in the domestic realm, Jane narrates her story as a triumph of her will over her circumstances.
Bronte wrote Jane Eyre during the Victorian Era, a time in which, as Helga Druxes observes in her book Resisting Bodies: The Negotiation of Female Agency in Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction,
This may appear to be an odd choice of reference since my paper is on a nineteenth century work, but Druxes accounts for the nineteenth century in her thorough introduction and her exploration of agency influenced my reading of Jane Eyre. “female social presence was associated with the private sphere, with the home and the family. This meant that a woman’s experiential world was more circumscribed and that she would be more prone to see herself in isolation rather than as participating in a systematic social critique” (Druxes). However, as Gilbert and Gubar note, the nineteenth century was also the first period of time in the history of written language that “female authorship was no longer in some sense anomalous” (xi). Female authors certainly produced popular works at this time, but they also faced the rebuke of (what I imagine to be) anxious and fearful wardens of patriarchal order who refused to see women as agents with authority. An often cited objection to female authorship, Robert Southey’s letter to Bronte demonstrates this resistance to women’s voices: “Literature is not the business of a woman’s life, and it cannot be” (qtd. in Gilbert 8). It was in this heady milieu of burgeoning female authorship and patriarchal denial and dismissal of women’s voices that Bronte wrote. Taken in this context, Jane Eyre displays a remarkable assertion of female agency, and the words of the narrator encapsulate the overwhelming impulse female authors must have felt at the time: “The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway, and asserting a right to predominate, to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last: yes—to speak” (emphasis mine 271). Bronte’s narrator reflects the woman in isolation Druxes describes, for she has no community to rally with and no knowledge of literary or political precedent for her desires.
Gilbert and Gubar call this a lack of “foremothers.” What she does have is her story, and she takes the first step of social critique by insisting on the primacy of her own experience and words in telling her story.
As a female and an orphan, Jane begins her story destined to hold the socioeconomic position of dependent. On the first page, the ten-year-old Jane experiences “a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority” (1). She feels both unloved by Bessie and inferior to her cousins. Her story starts with her deep sense of lacking both power and affection; living off the reluctant charity of her ungracious aunt, in a home where she has “less right to be than a servant” (20), Jane is at the mercy of a family that does not love her. She is without the ability to sustain herself yet powerless to change her circumstances. Thus, Jane’s story becomes a journey to find independence and love. While she achieves her goals in a way that eventually fulfills social expectations, the fact that her desires are explicitly expressed and that she makes the decisions that lead her toward her goal demonstrate her insistence on enacting her free will. Early in her story, the child-Jane proclaims, “I can never get away from Gateshead till I am a woman” (17). She links female adulthood to the possibility of attaining her goals. Being a woman signifies choice to the young Jane. The narrator is an older version of Jane, a woman, telling her story retrospectively after she has attained independence and love.
By constructing Jane Eyre’s narrator as a later version of the Jane who experiences within the plot of the story, Bronte begins with a fragmented character, with at least two versions—the past/experiencing Jane and the present/narrating Jane. Experiencing Jane, the protagonist of the story told by narrating Jane, is the focalizer. Using Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s definition as set out in Narrative Fiction, focalization “is the angle of vision through which the story is filtered in the text, and it is verbally formulated by the narrator” (43). In this way, the experiencing Jane, as the protagonist of the story, is the focalized subject, and, since the experiences in the text come from her point of view, she is also the focalizer. In the line, “humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority” (1), the experiencing Jane, the child, is “humbled,” but the words that express this experience are the narrating Jane’s. By wielding the primary power of language, the narrator intervenes by structuring the communication of the experiencing Jane’s experience.
At this time, a brief detour with Ferdinand de Saussure and company is necessary to tease out the intricacies of Jane Eyre’s narrator. According to Saussure, “Linguistics [and our narrator] works in the borderland where the elements of sound and thought combine; their combination produces a form, not a substance (emphasis original, 857). The form generated by the narrating Jane is a fusion of her past self’s experiences and her own retrospective bias. The story that ends up being communicated is close to the experiencing Jane’s story but is structured by the narrator’s language.
Another exciting implication of this theory is the way the reader’s understanding of the narrator’s language affects the story. Because language requires a community to communicate, this could affect whether Jane’s story is read as expressing feminist ideas or not. In their book Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction, Steven Cohan and Linda M. Shires define the position of the narrating Jane as the narrating subject, a “linguistic subject […] responsible for the telling as an enunciation” (Cohan 108). This narrator is responsible for communicating the sign of the story regardless of whether the experiencing Jane in the past acts as focalizer. Because the referent of the story—the experiencing Jane—is distanced by time, the psychological development of the narrating self, and the very necessity of telling the story through verbal communication, the reader encounters the discursive Jane, brought to us always through the filter of her later, narrating self. Cohan and Shires refer to this discursive Jane as the “narrated subject…produced through the double mediation of narration and focalization” (108). The narrative subject is “commutable to a signifier” that implies a theme, authorial viewpoint, or “(auto)biographical fantasy” (108). With this, Cohan and Shires describe narrating Jane’s ability to structure her story around the thematic quest for independence and love and to impose the autobiographical fantasy of an ordered life with a logical sequence of events leading her to her goals. If the narrator was another character or existed outside of the story, then access to the experiencing Jane would be even more limited and liable to distortion. As it is, the narrating Jane wields complete narrative control over her story. Rimmon-Kenan describes a narrator as having “many rhetorical strategies at his disposal” (85)
Note the gender Rimmon-Kennan gives the focalizer. Even though she writes of both female and male narrators before making this statement, the agent who has the power of perceiving, who owns the gaze, and who has “many rhetorical strategies at his disposal,” is gendered male. and the narrating Jane is well-equipped. The perceptions of both the Janes are part of her rhetorical toolkit. She reclaims her agency in the past—when she was a child and without control of her life—by retelling her story from her perspective as she experienced it, infusing her past self with the ability to make choices that eventually lead to the satisfaction of her desires. Whether she was able to make these decisions or not is questionable, since the reader has no access to the referent of the story, to what “actually happened.” Regardless, the narrating Jane is able to impose thematic unity, and it appears as if her life followed a path that always led to a companionate marriage to Rochester on equal grounds.
A selected overview of the plot will satisfy this point. Jane has a fit after exerting her will against her cruel and abusive cousin (ch. 1-2); she then requests to be sent to school (ch. 3), and promptly goes to Lowood (ch. 5). Years later, becoming dissatisfied with her cloistered existence at Lowood, where she now teaches, and seeking stimulation and experience of the world, she advertises for a job as a governess (ch. 10). She ends up at Thornfield (ch. 11), employed by the man she will love and later marry (ch 38). Even in the basic plot, Jane is shown to make choices that come to fruition, and these choices lead her to the goals of independence and love. The most important choice Jane makes is to leave the man she loves and is engaged to after she discovers he is already married.
To the mad woman in the attic and a whole “Other” story. Gilbert and Gubar account for the “madwoman” and her performance of repressed anger as Jane’s doppelganger. In “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes an inspired and (in?)famous analysis of the first Mrs. Rochester as a colonized subaltern denied a voice for the sake of Jane’s.
Although she is sure of their mutual love—“not a human being that ever lived could wish to be loved better than I was loved; and him who thus loved me I absolutely worshipped” (300)
In retrospect, the use of the antifeminist notion of “worshiping” the romantic male partner in return for his love may be assumed under the umbrella of narrating Jane’s ultimate pronouncement of power. The experiencing Jane “worshipped” Rochester, and this feeling was interpreted by her as a sign of their relationship. However, their relationship is troubled and even the experiencing Jane makes this clear in the next scene described. She soon leaves this unbalanced relationship.—Jane flees the relationship and her position as governess. When Rochester tries to convince her to stay as his “real” wife (read: mistress), Jane performs her own semiotic analysis of the situation, showing an awareness of the structures at work in this situation: “Your wife is living…. If I lived with you as you desire—I should then be your mistress: to say otherwise is sophistical—is false” (289). She would be living with him out of wedlock, not in a socially sanctioned or protected relationship, thus inferior and vulnerable. There would be no laws or customs ensuring her stability, and when Rochester dispensed with her—as she anticipates he will (297)—she would have no recourse, having thoroughly marked herself as fallen. Through marriage to Rochester, Jane could become Rochester. She would take on his name and social status.
Of course, she would still be a woman and not Rochester’s social equal. My point here is that she would be assumed into Rochester’s higher class via marriage—a social absorption not possible by means of sexual intercourse alone. As his mistress, she would by definition be below his social class. The experiencing Jane makes her view of Rochester’s proposition clear when she distinguishes between her feelings for Rochester and what she knows to be right for her. Rochester says “It would not be wicked to love me,” and Jane replies, “It would be to obey you” (341).
I assume that all dialogue is transposed verbatim from the experiencing Jane to the narrating Jane. Jane deems the love Rochester offers unacceptable because it requires assuming a role of dependency and self-abnegation. A declaration of love from Rochester does not end Jane’s journey; she requires more from and for herself.
The story after Jane leaves Thornfield involves some rather melodramatic plot elements—Jane literally stumbles upon family she never knew existed and conveniently inherits enough money to make her financially independent—but these events are assumed into Jane’s journey and supplement her quest for independence and love. While the felicitous inheritance may appear to undermine Jane’s journey to self-asserted independence because it comes from exterior forces rather than within her self, this financial independence only comes after she finds a job that renders her self-sustaining. Sitting in her cottage, she reiterates that to stay with Rochester as his mistress would have been “to be a slave in a fool’s paradise,” while as the schoolmistress
A mistress either way, but at least as education’s mistress she is beholden to no man. Such is life. she is “free and honest” (389). The money she inherits is only part of what renders her free and independent. As she later observes to Rochester when he suggests that she must have some “friends who will look after” her, “I told you I am independent, sir, as well as rich: I am my own mistress” (473). By becoming her own mistress
A mistress again, but this time her own. the experiencing Jane wields the full power of agency; she is—as the narrating Jane has been throughout the story—the sole arbiter of her life.
After being gainfully employed, living alone, receiving a large inheritance, and rejecting a proposal of loveless marriage from St. John, Jane feels ready to face Rochester again. Hearing a preternatural call—perhaps a projection of her awareness of the equality she can now have with Rochester
What with the first wife dead and the ancestral mansion incinerated. —Jane visits Rochester. She couches her decision in powerful language: “It was my time for ascendancy. My powers were in play and in force” (emphasis mine 457). With assertions like this, the narrating Jane makes it clear that returning to Rochester is an act informed by her empowerment.
Jane draws upon the power of expression to establish her agency. Judith Butler identifies the discursive nature of power that narrating Jane exercises: “There is no power that acts, but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence” (qtd. in Druxes). By reiterating her perception and her words, Jane adds her voice to the discourse circulating about what it means to be a woman and demonstrates female agency within a patriarchal society. As Butler writes, “agency [is] a reiterative or reactionary practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power” (qtd on Druxes 14). Jane is situated within a patriarchal society, and her feminist voice speaks from the isolation of nineteenth century women. Therefore, her agency must occur within a power structure greater than the agent; for Jane, that power structure is the patriarchal society that labeled her dependent and unworthy as a child. As she has no means of living outside of this pervasive social order, she must seek and find her goals of independence and love within it. Indeed, when Jane flees Rochester and escapes all society, wandering freely in a forest, she almost dies of exposure and inanition. Her means of establishing independence must be within the social realm if she is to survive. Her assertion in the last chapter situates her power within the preexisting social structure: “Reader, I married him” (emphasis mine, 488). Yes, she married Rochester, but she makes it clear who did the acting. At this point in the story, the narrating and experiencing Jane conjoin, and Jane’s discursive and perceptive powers are one; she is pure authority.
In her book The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms, Carla Kaplan makes the illuminating observation that Jane “never loses faith in rhetoric” (90). Narrating Jane must keep this faith because she knows that through the telling of her story she can reconcile the experiencing Janes of her past with the one she becomes. She can assume all her experiences into her present identity through the act of narration; by presenting her past selves as needing the position of independence and love she has achieved, she validates her former selves and their experiences as part of the journey to where she is whole and her desires are satisfied. By the end of the novel the narrating subject fuses with the focalizer, the narrating Jane is one with the experiencing Jane, and her discursive and perceptive powers—the highest powers a subject may attain in a written story—are centralized. Through rhetoric Jane wields the power to revise the story of a destitute orphan girl into that of a woman’s journey to independence and love. Even if this love is sanctioned through marriage, it is the marriage she requests, not her lover. Even if she binds her life to Rochester’s, she does so willingly after experiencing solitary life. Telling the story of her life with her experiences and her words, she offers a counter narrative, a revision of a story told many times for and to, but not by, women. She tells the story of her self by her self.
Works Cited
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre (1847). New York: Bantam, 2003. Print.
Cohan, Steven and Linda M. Shires. Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988. Google Book Search. Web. 20 November 2012.
Druxes, Helga. Resisting Bodies: The Negotiation of Female Agency in Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1996. Google Book Search. Web. 18 November 2012.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Print.
Kaplan, Carla. The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Print.
Martin, Robert B. Charlotte Brontë's Novels: The Accents of Persuasion. New York: Norton, 1966. Print.
Oates, Joyce Carol. Introduction (1987). Jane Eyre. By Charlotte Bronte. New York: Bantam, 2003. Print.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. New York: Methuen, 1983. Print.
de Saussure, Fedinand. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Riedlinger. Trans. Wade Baskin. (1916). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2010. 850-866. Print.
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