A Dialogue of Self and Soul:

Plain Jane's Progress

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

I dreamt that I was looking in a glass when a horrible face—the face of an animal
—suddenly showed over my shoulder. I cannot be sure if this was a dream, or if
it happened.

— VIRGINIA WOOLF

Never mind.... One day, quite suddenly, when you're not expecting it, I'll take a
hammer from the folds of my dark cloak and crack your little skull like an egg-
shell. Crack it will go, the egg-shell; out they will stream, the blood, the brains.
One day, one day. . . . One day the fierce wolf that walks by my side will spring
on you and rip your abominable guts out. One day, one day.... Now, now, gently,
quietly, quietly....

— JEAN RHYS

I told my Soul to sing—

She said her Strings were snapt—

Her bow—to Atoms blown—
And so to mend her—gave me work
Until another Morn—

— EMILY DICKINSON

If The Professor is a somewhat blurred trance-statement of themes and conflicts

that dominated Charlotte Brontë's thought far more than she herself may have
realized, Jane Eyre is a work permeated by angry, Angrian fantasies of escape-
into-wholeness. Borrowing the mythic quest-plot—but not the devout substance
—of Bunyan's male

____________________
From The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-
Century Literary Imagination.© 1979 by Yale University. Yale University Press,
1979.

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Pilgrim's Progress, the young novelist seems here definitively to have opened
her eyes to female realities within her and around her: confinement, orphanhood,
starvation, rage even to madness. Where the fiery image of Lucia, that energetic

1
woman who probably "once wore chains and broke them," is miniaturized in The
Professor, in Jane Eyre ( 1847) this figure becomes almost larger than life, the
emblem of a passionate, barely disguised rebelliousness.

Victorian critics, no doubt instinctively perceiving the subliminal intensity of

Brontë's passion, seem to have understood this point very well. Her "mind
contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage," Matthew Arnold wrote of
Charlotte Brontë in 1853. He was referring to Villette, which he elsewhere
described as a "hideous, undelightful, convulsed, constricted novel," but he might
as well have been speaking of Jane Eyre, for his response to Brontë was typical
of the outrage generated in some quarters by her first published novel. "Jane
Eyre is throughout the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined
spirit," wrote Elizabeth Rigby in The Quarterly Review in 1848, and her
"autobiography . . . is preeminently an anti-Christian composition.... The tone of
mind and thought which has fostered Chartism and rebellion is the same which
has also written Jane Eyre." Anne Mozley, in 1853, recalled for The Christian
Remembrancer that "Currer Bell" had seemed on her first appearance as an
author "soured, coarse, and grumbling; an alien ... from society and amenable to
none of its laws." And Mrs. Oliphant related in 1855 that "Ten years ago we
professed an orthodox system of novel-making. Our lovers were humble and
devoted . . . and the only true love worth having was that ... chivalrous true love
which consecrated all womankind . . . when suddenly, without warning, Jane
Eyre stole upon the scene, and the most alarming revolution of modern times
has followed the invasion of Jane Eyre."

We tend today to think of Jane Eyre as moral Gothic, "myth domesticated,"

Pamela's daughter and Rebecca's aunt, the archetypal scenario for all those
mildly thrilling romantic encounters between a scowling Byronic hero (who owns
a gloomy mansion) and a trembling heroine (who can't quite figure out the
mansion's floor plan). Or, if we're more sophisticated, we give Charlotte Brontë
her due, concede her strategic as well as her mythic abilities, study the patterns
of her imagery, and count the number of times she addresses the reader. But still
we overlook the "alarming revolution"—even Mrs. Oliphant's terminology is
suggestive—which "followed the in

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vasion of Jane Eyre." "Well, obviously Jane Eyre is a feminist tract, an argument
for the social betterment of governesses and equal rights for women," Richard
Chase somewhat grudgingly admitted in 1948. But like most other modern
critics, he believed that the novel's power arose from its mythologizing of Jane's
confrontation with masculine sexuality.

Yet, curiously enough, it seems not to have been primarily the coarseness and
sexuality of Jane Eyre which shocked Victorian reviewers (though they disliked
those elements in the book), but, as we have seen, its "anti-Christian" refusal to

2
accept the forms, customs, and standards of society—in short, its rebellious
feminism. They were disturbed not so much by the proud Byronic sexual energy
of Rochester as by the Byronic pride and passion of Jane herself, not so much
by the asocial sexual vibrations between hero and heroine as by the heroine's
refusal to submit to her social destiny: "She has inherited in fullest measure the
worst sin of our fallen nature—the sin of pride," declared Miss Rigby.

Jane Eyre is proud, and therefore she is ungrateful, too. It pleased God to make
her an orphan, friendless, and penniless—yet she thanks nobody, and least of all
Him, for the food and raiment, the friends, companions, and instructors of her
helpless youth.... On the contrary, she looks upon all that has been done for her
not only as her undoubted right, but as falling far short of it.

In other words, what horrified the Victorians was Jane's anger. And perhaps
they, rather than more recent critics, were correct in their response to the book.
For while the mythologizing of repressed rage may parallel the mythologizing of
repressed sexuality, it is far more dangerous to the order of society. The
occasional woman who has a weakness for black-browed Byronic heroes can be
accommodated in novels and even in some drawing rooms; the woman who
yearns to escape entirely from drawing rooms and patriarchal mansions
obviously cannot. And Jane Eyre, as Matthew Arnold, Miss Rigby, Mrs. Mozley,
and Mrs. Oliphant suspected, was such a woman.

Her story, providing a pattern for countless others, is—far more obviously and
dramatically than The Professor—a story of enclosure and escape, a distinctively
female bildungsroman in which the problems encountered by the protagonist as
she struggles from the imprisonment of her childhood toward an almost
unthinkable goal of

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mature freedom are symptomatic of difficulties Everywoman in a patriarchal

society must meet and overcome: oppression (at Gateshead), starvation (at
Lowood), madness (at Thornfield), and coldness (at Marsh End). Most important,
her confrontation, not with Rochester but with Rochester's mad wife Bertha, is
the book's central confrontation, an encounter—like Frances Crimsworth's
fantasy about Lucia—not with her own sexuality but with her own imprisoned
"hunger, rebellion, and rage," a secret dialogue of self and soul on whose
outcome, as we shall see, the novel's plot, Rochester's fate, and Jane's coming-
of-age all depend.

Unlike many Victorian novels, which begin with elaborate expository paragraphs,
Jane Eyre begins with a casual, curiously enigmatic remark: "There was no
possibility of taking a walk that day." Both the occasion ("that day") and the
excursion (or the impossibility of one) are significant: the first is the real
beginning of Jane's pilgrim's progress toward maturity; the second is a metaphor

3
for the problems she must solve in order to attain maturity. "I was glad" not to be
able to leave the house, the narrator continues: "dreadful to me was the coming
home in the raw twilight ... humbled by the consciousness of my physical
inferiority" (chap. 1). As many critics have commented, Charlotte Brontë
consistently uses the opposed properties of fire and ice to characterize Jane's
experiences, and her technique is immediately evident in these opening
passages. For while the world outside Gateshead is almost unbearably wintry,
the world within is claustrophobic, fiery, like ten-year-old Jane's own mind.
Excluded from the Reed family group in the drawing room because she is not a
"contented, happy, little child"—excluded, that is, from "normal" society—Jane
takes refuge in a scarlet-draped window seat where she alternately stares out at
the "drear November day" and reads of polar regions in Bewick's History of
British Birds. The "death‐ white realms" of the Arctic fascinate her; she broods
upon "the multiplied rigors of extreme cold" as if brooding upon her own
dilemma: whether to stay in, behind the oppressively scarlet curtain, or to go out
into the cold of a loveless world.

Her decision is made for her. She is found by John Reed, the tyrannical son of
the family, who reminds her of her anomalous position in the household, hurls
the heavy volume of Bewick at her, and arouses her passionate rage. Like a
"rat," a "bad animal," a "mad cat," she compares him to "Nero, Caligula, etc." and
is borne away to the red-room, to be imprisoned literally as well as figuratively.

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For "the fact is," confesses the grownup narrator ironically, "I was [at that
moment] a trifle beside myself; or rather out of myself, as the French would
say.... like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved ... to go all lengths" (chap. 1).

But if Jane was "out of" herself in her struggle against John Reed, her experience
in the red-room, probably the most metaphorically vibrant of all her early
experiences, forces her deeply into herself. For the red-room, stately, chilly,
swathed in rich crimson, with a great white bed and an easy chair "like a pale
throne" looming out of the scarlet darkness, perfectly represents her vision of the
society in which she is trapped, an uneasy and elfin dependent. "No jail was ever
more secure," she tells us. And no jail, we soon learn, was ever more terrifying
either, because this is the room where Mr. Reed, the only "father" Jane has ever
had, "breathed his last." It is, in other words, a kind of patriarchal death chamber,
and here Mrs. Reed still keeps "divers parchments, her jewel-casket, and a
miniature of her dead husband" in a secret drawer in the wardrobe (chap. 2). Is
the room haunted, the child wonders. At least, the narrator implies, it is
realistically if not Gothically haunting, more so than any chamber in, say, The
Mysteries of Udolpho, which established a standard for such apartments. For the
spirit of a society in which Jane has no clear place sharpens the angles of the
furniture, enlarges the shadows, strengthens the locks on the door. And the

4
deathbed of a father who was not really her father emphasizes her isolation and
vulnerability.

Panicky, she stares into a "great looking glass," where her own image floats
toward her, alien and disturbing. "All looked colder and darker in that visionary
hollow than in reality," the adult Jane explains. But a mirror, after all, is also a
sort of chamber, a mysterious enclosure in which images of the self are trapped
like "divers parchments." So the child Jane, though her older self accuses her of
mere superstition, correctly recognizes that she is doubly imprisoned. Frustrated
and angry, she meditates on the injustices of her life, and fantasizes "some
strange expedient to achieve escape from insupportable oppression—as running
away, or, if that could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting
myself die" (chap. 2). Escape through flight, or escape through starvation: the
alternatives will recur throughout Jane Eyre and, indeed, as we have already
noted [elsewhere], throughout much other nineteenth- and twentieth-century
literature by women. In the red-room, however, little Jane chooses (or is chosen
by) a third, even more terrifying, alterna

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tive: escape through madness. Seeing a ghostly, wandering light, as of the moon
on the ceiling, she notices that "my heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound
filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me;
I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down." The child screams and
sobs in anguish, and then, adds the narrator coolly, "I suppose I had a species of
fit," for her next memory is of waking in the nursery "and seeing before me a
terrible red glare crossed with thick black bars" (chap. 3), merely the nursery fire
of course, but to Jane Eyre the child a terrible reminder of the experience she
has just had, and to Jane Eyre the adult narrator an even more dreadful omen of
experiences to come.

For the little drama enacted on "that day" which opens Jane Eyre is in itself a
paradigm of the larger drama that occupies the entire book: Jane's anomalous,
orphaned position in society, her enclosure in stultifying roles and houses, and
her attempts to escape through flight, starvation, and—in a sense which will be
explained—madness. And that Charlotte Brontë quite consciously intended the
incident of the red-room to serve as a paradigm for the larger plot of her novel is
clear not only from its position in the narrative but also from Jane's own
recollection of the experience at crucial moments throughout the book: when she
is humiliated by Mr. Brocklehurst at Lowood, for instance, and on the night when
she decides to leave Thornfield.In between these moments, moreover, Jane's
pilgrimage consists of a series of experiences which are, in one way or another,
variations on the central, red-room motif of enclosure and escape.

5
As we noted earlier, the allusion to pilgriming is deliberate, for like the protagonist
of Bunyan's book, Jane Eyre makes a life‐ journey which is a kind of mythical
progress from one significantly named place to another. Her story begins, quite
naturally, at Gateshead, a starting point where she encounters the uncomfortable
givens of her career: a family which is not her real family, a selfish older "brother"
who tyrannizes over the household like a substitute patriarch, a foolish and
wicked "stepmother," and two unpleasant, selfish "stepsisters." The smallest,
weakest, and plainest child in the house, she embarks on her pilgrim's progress
as a sullen Cinderella, an angry Ugly Duckling, immorally rebellious against the
hierarchy that oppresses her: "I know that had I been a sanguine, brilliant,
careless, exacting, handsome, romping child—though equally dependent and
friendless—Mrs. Reed would have endured my presence more complacently,"
she reflects as an adult (chap. 2).

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But the child Jane cannot, as she well knows, be "sanguine and brilliant."
Cinderella never is; nor is the Ugly Duckling, who, for all her swansdown
potential, has no great expectations. "Poor, plain, and little," Jane Eyre—her
name is of course suggestive—is invisible as air, the heir to nothing, secretly
choking with ire. And Bessie, the kind nursemaid who befriends her, sings her a
song that no fairy godmother would ever dream of singing, a song that
summarizes the plight of all real Victorian Cinderellas:

My feet they are sore, and my limbs they are weary, Long is the way, and the
mountains are wild;

Soon will the twilight close moonless and dreary Over the path of the poor
orphan child.

A hopeless pilgrimage, Jane's seems, like the sad journey of Words‐ worth's
Lucy Gray, seen this time from the inside, by the child herself rather than by the
sagacious poet to whom years have given a philosophic mind. Though she will
later watch the maternal moon rise to guide her, now she imagines herself
wandering in a moonless twilight that foreshadows her desperate flight across
the moors after leaving Thornfield.And the only hope her friend Bessie can offer
is, ironically, an image that recalls the patriarchal terrors of the red‐ room and
hints at patriarchal terrors to come— Lowood, Brocklehurst, St. John Rivers:

Ev'n should I fall o'er the broken bridge passing, Or stray in the marshes, by false
lights beguiled,

Still will my Father, with promise and blessing Take to His bosom the poor
orphan child.

6
It is no wonder that, confronting such prospects, young Jane finds herself
"whispering to myself, over and over again" the words of Bunyan's Christian:
"What shall I do?—What shall I do?" (chap. 4).

What she does do, in desperation, is burst her bonds again and again to tell Mrs.
Reed what she thinks of her, an extraordinarily self-assertive act of which neither
a Victorian child nor a Cinderella was ever supposed to be capable. Interestingly,
her first such explosion is intended to remind Mrs. Reed that she, too, is
surrounded by patriarchal limits: "What would Uncle Reed say to you if he were
alive?" Jane demands, commenting, "It seemed as if my tongue pronounced
words without my will consenting to their utterance: something spoke out of me
over which I had no control" (chap. 4). And

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indeed, even imperious Mrs. Reed appears astonished by these words. The
explanation, "something spoke out of me," is as frightening as the arrogance,
suggesting the dangerous double consciousness—"the rushing of wings,
something ... near me"—that brought on the fit in the red-room. And when, with a
real sense that "an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into
unhoped-for liberty," Jane tells Mrs. Reed that "I am glad you are no relation of
mine" (chap. 4), the adult narrator remarks that "a ridge of lighted heath, alive,
glancing, devouring, would have been a meet emblem of my mind"—as the
nursery fire was, flaring behind its black grates, and as the flames consuming
Thornfield also will be.

Significantly, the event that inspires little Jane's final fiery words to Mrs. Reed is
her first encounter with that merciless and hypocritical patriarch Mr. Brocklehurst,
who appears now to conduct her on the next stage of her pilgrimage. As many
readers have noticed, this personification of the Victorian superego is—like St.
John Rivers, his counterpart in the last third of the book—consistently described
in phallic terms: he is "a black pillar" with a "grim face at the top ... like a carved
mask," almost as if he were a funereal and oddly Freudian piece of furniture
(chap. 4). But he is also rather like the wolf in " Little Red Riding Hood." "What a
face he had. . . . What a great nose! And what a mouth! And what large
prominent teeth!" Jane Eyre exclaims, recollecting that terror of the adult male
animal which must have wrung the heart of every female child in a period when
all men were defined as "beasts."

Simultaneously, then, a pillar of society and a large bad wolf, Mr. Brocklehurst
has come with news of hell to remove Jane to Lowood, the aptly named school of
life where orphan girls are starved and frozen into proper Christian submission.
Where else would a beast take a child but into a wood? Where else would a
column of frozen spirituality take a homeless orphan but to a sanctuary where
there is neither food nor warmth? Yet "with all its privations" Lowood offers Jane
a valley of refuge from "the ridge of lighted heath," a chance to learn to govern

7
her anger while learning to become a governess in the company of a few women
she admires.

Foremost among those Jane admires are the noble Miss Temple and the
pathetic Helen Burns.And again, their names are significant. Angelic Miss
Temple, for instance, with her marble pallor, is a shrine of ladylike virtues:
magnanimity, cultivation, courtesy—and repression. As if invented by Coventry
Patmore or by Mrs. Sarah Ellis,

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that indefatigable writer of conduct books for Victorian girls, she dispenses food
to the hungry, visits the sick, encourages the worthy, and averts her glance from
the unworthy. " 'What shall I do to gratify myself—to be admired—or to vary the
tenor of my existence' are not the questions which a woman of right feelings asks
on first awaking to the avocations of the day," wrote Mrs. Ellis in 1844.

Much more congenial to the highest attributes of woman's character are inquiries
such as these: "How shall I endeavor through this day to turn the time, the health,
and the means permitted me to enjoy, to the best account? Is any one sick? I
must visit their chamber without delay.... Is any one about to set off on a journey?
I must see that the early meal is spread.... Did I fail in what was kind or
considerate to any of the family yesterday? I will meet her this morning with a
cordial welcome."

And these questions are obviously the ones Miss Temple asks herself, and
answers by her actions.

Yet it is clear enough that she has repressed her own share of madness and
rage, that there is a potential monster beneath her angelic exterior, a "sewer" of
fury beneath this temple. Though she is, for instance, plainly angered by Mr.
Brocklehurst's sanctimonious stinginess, she listens to his sermonizing in ladylike
silence. Her face, Jane remembers, "appeared to be assuming . . . the coldness
and fixity of [marble]; especially her mouth, closed as if it would have required a
sculptor's chisel to open it" (chap. 7). Certainly Miss Temple will never allow
"something" to speak through her, no wings will rush in her head, no fantasies of
fiery heath disturb her equanimity, but she will feel sympathetic anger.

Perhaps for this reason, repressed as she is, she is closer to a fairy godmother
than anyone else Jane has met, closer even to a true mother. By the fire in her
pretty room, she feeds her starving pupils tea and emblematic seedcake,
nourishing body and soul together despite Mr. Brocklehurst's puritanical dicta.
"We feasted," says Jane, "as on nectar and ambrosia." But still, Jane adds, "Miss
Temple had always something . . . of state in her mien, of refined propriety in her
language, which precluded deviation into the ardent, the excited, the eager:
something which chastened the pleasure of those who looked on her and

8
listened to her, by a controlling sense of awe" (chap. 8). Rather awful as well as
very awesome, Miss Temple is not

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just an angel-in-the-house; to the extent that her name defines her, she is even
more house than angel, a beautiful set of marble columns designed to balance
that bad pillar Mr. Brocklehurst. And dispossessed Jane, who is not only poor,
plain, and little, but also fiery and ferocious, correctly guesses that she can no
more become such a woman than Cinderella can become her own fairy
godmother.

Helen Burns, Miss Temple's other disciple, presents a different but equally
impossible ideal to Jane: the ideal—defined by Goethe's Makarie—of self-
renunciation, of all-consuming (and consumptive) spirituality. Like Jane "a poor
orphan child" ("I have only a father; and he . . . will not miss me" [chap. 9]), Helen
longs alternately for her old home in Northumberland, with its "visionary brook,"
and for the true home which she believes awaits her in heaven. As if echoing the
last stanzas of Bessie's song, "God is my father, God is my friend," she tells
Jane, whose skepticism disallows such comforts, and "Eternity [is] a mighty
home, not a terror and an abyss" (chap. 7). One's duty, Helen declares, is to
submit to the injustices of this life, in expectation of the ultimate justice of the
next: "it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required
to bear" (chap. 7).

Helen herself, however, does no more than bear her fate. "I make no effort [to be
good, in Lowood's terms]," she confesses. "I follow as inclination guides me"
(chap. 7). Labeled a "slattern" for failing to keep her drawers in ladylike order,
she meditates on Charles I, as if commenting on all inadequate fathers ("what a
pity . . . he could see no farther than the prerogatives of the crown") and studies
Rasselas, perhaps comparing Dr. Johnson's Happy Valley to the unhappy one in
which she herself is immured. "One strong proof of my wretchedly defective
nature," she explains to the admiring Jane, "is that even [Miss Temple's]
expostulations ... have no influence to cure me of my faults." Despite her
contemplative purity, there is evidently a "sewer" of concealed resentment in
Helen Burns, just as there is in Miss Temple.And, like Miss Temple's, her name
is significant. Burning with spiritual passion, she also burns with anger, leaves
her things "in shameful disorder," and dreams of freedom in eternity: "By dying
young, I shall escape great sufferings," she explains (chap. 9). Finally, when the
"fog-bred pestilence" of typhus decimates Lowood, Helen is carried off by her
own fever for liberty, as if her body, like Jane's mind, were "a ridge of lighted
heath . . . devouring" the dank valley in which she has been caged.

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This is not to say that Miss Temple and Helen Burns do nothing to help Jane
come to terms with her fate. Both are in some sense mothers for Jane, as
Adrienne Rich has pointed out, comforting her, counseling her, feeding her,
embracing her. And from Miss Temple, in particular, the girl learns to achieve
"more harmonious thoughts: what seemed better regulated feelings had become
the inmates of my mind. I had given in allegiance to duty and order. I appeared a
disciplined and subdued character" (chap. 10). Yet because Jane is an Angrian
Cinderella, a Byronic heroine, the "inmates" of her mind can no more be
regulated by conventional Christian wisdom than Manfred's or Childe Harold's
thoughts. Thus, when Miss Temple leaves Lowood, Jane tells us, "I was left in
my natural element." Gazing out a window as she had on "that day" which
opened her story, she yearns for true liberty: "for liberty I uttered a prayer." Her
way of confronting the world is still the Promethean way of fiery rebellion, not
Miss Temple's way of ladylike repression, not Helen Burns's way of saintly
renunciation. What she has learned from her two mothers is, at least
superficially, to compromise. If pure liberty is impossible, she exclaims, "then ...
grant me at least a new servitude" (chap. 10).

It is, of course, her eagerness for a new servitude that brings Jane to the painful
experience that is at the center of her pilgrimage, the experience of Thornfield,
where, biblically, she is to be crowned with thorns, she is to be cast out into a
desolate field, and most important, she is to confront the demon of rage who has
haunted her since her afternoon in the red-room. Before the appearance of
Rochester, however, and the intrusion of Bertha, Jane—and her readers—must
explore Thornfield itself. This gloomy mansion is often seen as just another
Gothic trapping introduced by Charlotte Brontë to make her novel saleable. Yet
not only is Thornfield more realistically drawn than, say, Otranto or Udolpho, it is
more metaphorically radiant than most Gothic mansions: it is the house of Jane's
life, its floors and walls the architecture of her experience.

Beyond the "long cold gallery" where the portraits of alien unknown ancestors
hang the way the specter of Mr. Reed hovered in the red-room, Jane sleeps in a
small pretty chamber, harmoniously furnished as Miss Temple's training has
supposedly furnished her own mind. Youthfully optimistic, she notices that her
"couch had no thorns in it" and trusts that with the help of welcoming Mrs. Fairfax
"a fairer era of life was beginning for me, one that was to have its

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flowers and pleasures, as well as its thorns and toils" (chap. 11). Christian,
entering the Palace Beautiful, might have hoped as much.

The equivocal pleasantness of Mrs. Fairfax, however, like the ambiguous

architecture of Thornfield itself, suggests at once a way in which the situation at
Thornfield reiterates all the other settings of Jane's life. For though Jane
assumes at first that Mrs. Fairfax is her employer, she soon learns that the

10
woman is merely a housekeeper, the surrogate of an absent master, just as Mrs.
Reed was a surrogate for dead Mr. Reed or immature John Reed, and Miss
Temple for absent Mr. Brocklehurst. Moreover, in her role as an extension of the
mysterious Rochester, sweet-faced Mrs. Fairfax herself becomes mysteriously
chilling. "Too much noise, Grace," she says peremptorily, when she and Jane
overhear "Grace Poole's" laugh as they tour the third story. "Remember
directions!" (chap. 11).

The third story is the most obviously emblematic quarter of Thornfield.Here, amid
the furniture of the past, down a narrow passage with "two rows of small black
doors, all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard's castle" (chap. 11), Jane first
hears the "distinct formal mirthless laugh" of mad Bertha, Rochester's secret wife
and in a sense her own secret self. And just above this sinister corridor, leaning
against the picturesque battlements and looking out over the world like
Bluebeard's bride's sister Anne, Jane is to long again for freedom, for "all of
incident, life, fire, feeling that I ... had not in my actual existence" (chap. 12).
These upper regions, in other words, symbolically miniaturize one crucial aspect
of the world in which she finds herself. Heavily enigmatic, ancestral relics wall her
in; inexplicable locked rooms guard a secret which may have something to do
with her; distant vistas promise an inaccessible but enviable life.

Even more importantly, Thornfield's attic soon becomes a complex focal point
where Jane's own rationality (what she has learned from Miss Temple) and her
irrationality (her "hunger, rebellion and rage") intersect. She never, for instance,
articulates her rational desire for liberty so well as when she stands on the
battlements of Thornfield, looking out over the world. However offensive these
thoughts may have been to Miss Rigby—and both Jane and her creator
obviously suspected they would be—the sequence of ideas expressed in the
famous passage beginning "Anybody may blame me who likes" is as logical as
anything in an essay by Wollstonecraft or Mill.What is somewhat irrational,
though, is the restlessness and passion

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which, as it were, italicize her little meditation on freedom. "I could not help it,"
she explains,

the restlessness was in my nature, it agitated 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.

And even more irrational is the experience which accompanies Jane's pacing:

11
When thus alone, I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole's laugh: the same peal,
the same low, slow ha! ha! which, when first heard, had thrilled me: I heard, too,
her eccentric murmurs; stranger than her laugh.

(chap. 12)

Eccentric murmurs that uncannily echo the murmurs of Jane's imagination, and a
low, slow ha! ha! which forms a bitter refrain to the tale Jane's imagination
creates. Despite Miss Temple's training, the "bad animal" who was first locked up
in the red-room is, we sense, still lurking somewhere, behind a dark door, waiting
for a chance to get free. That early consciousness of "something near me" has
not yet been exorcised. Rather, it has intensified.

Many of Jane's problems, particularly those which find symbolic expression in her
experiences in the third story, can be traced to her ambiguous status as a
governess at Thornfield.As M. Jeanne Peterson points out, every Victorian
governess received strikingly conflicting messages (she was and was not a
member of the family, was and was not a servant). Such messages all too often
caused her features to wear what one contemporary observer called "a fixed sad
look of despair." But Jane's difficulties arise also, as we have seen, from her
constitutional ire; interestingly, none of the women she meets at Thornfield has
anything like that last problem, though all suffer from equivalent ambiguities of
status. Aside from Mrs. Fairfax, the three most important of these women are
little Adèle Varens, Blanche Ingram, and Grace Poole.All are important negative
"role‐ models" for Jane, and all suggest problems she must overcome before she
can reach the independent maturity which is the goal of her pilgrimage.

The first, Adèle, though hardly a woman, is already a "little

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woman," cunning and doll-like, a sort of sketch for Amy March in Louisa May
Alcott's novel. Ostensibly a poor orphan child, like Jane herself, Adèle is
evidently the natural daughter of Edward Rochester's dissipated youth.
Accordingly, she longs for fashionable gowns rather than for love or freedom,
and, the way her mother Céline did, sings and dances for her supper as if she
were a clockwork temptress invented by E. T. A. Hoffman.Where Miss Temple's
was the way of the lady and Helen's that of the saint, hers and her mother's are
the ways of Vanity Fair, ways which have troubled Jane since her days at
Gateshead.For how is a poor, plain governess to contend with a society that
rewards beauty and style? May not Adèle, the daughter of a "fallen woman," be a
model female in a world of prostitutes?

Blanche Ingram, also a denizen of Vanity Fair, presents Jane with a slightly
different female image. Tall, handsome, and wellborn, she is worldly but, unlike
Adèle and Céline, has a respectable place in the world: she is the daughter of

12
"Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park," and—along with Georgiana and Eliza Reed—
Jane's classically wicked stepsister. But while Georgiana and Eliza are dismissed
to stereotypical fates, Blanche's history teaches Jane ominous lessons. First, the
charade of "Bridewell" in which she and Rochester participate relays a secret
message: conventional marriage is not only, as the attic implies, a "well" of
mystery, it is a Bridewell, a prison, like the Bluebeard's corridor of the third story.
Second, the charade of courtship in which Rochester engages her suggests a
grim question: is not the game of the marriage "market" a game even scheming
women are doomed to lose?

Finally, Grace Poole, the most enigmatic of the women Jane meets at Thornfield
—"that mystery of mysteries, as I considered her"—is obviously associated with
Bertha, almost as if, with her pint of porter, her "staid and taciturn" demeanor,
she were the mad‐ woman's public representative. "Only one hour in the twenty
four did she pass with her fellow servants below," Jane notes, attempting to
fathom the dark "pool" of the woman's behavior; "all the rest of her time was
spent in some low-ceiled, oaken chamber of the third story; there she sat and
sewed ... as companionless as a prisoner in her dungeon" (chap. 17). And that
Grace is as companionless as Bertha or Jane herself is undeniably true. Women
in Jane's world, acting as agents for men, may be the keepers of other women.
But both keepers and prisoners are bound by the same chains. In a sense, then,
the mystery of mysteries which Grace Poole suggests to Jane is the

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mystery of her own life, so that to question Grace's position at Thornfield is to

question her own.

Interestingly, in trying to puzzle out the secret of Grace Poole, Jane at one point
speculates that Mr. Rochester may once have entertained "tender feelings" for
the woman, and when thoughts of Grace's "uncomeliness" seem to refute this
possibility, she cements her bond with Bertha's keeper by reminding herself that,
after all, "You are not beautiful either, and perhaps Mr. Rochester approves you"
(chap. 16). Can appearances be trusted? Who is the slave, the master or the
servant, the prince or Cinderella? What, in other words, are the real relationships
between the master of Thornfield and all these women whose lives revolve
around his? None of these questions can, of course, be answered without
reference to the central character of the Thornfield episode, Edward Fairfax
Rochester.

Jane's first meeting with Rochester is a fairy-tale meeting. Charlotte Brontë

deliberately stresses mythic elements: an icy twilight setting out of Coleridge or
Fuseli, a rising moon, a great "lion-like" dog gliding through the shadows like "a
North-of-England spirit, called a 'Gytrash' which . . . haunted solitary ways, and
sometimes came upon belated travellers," followed by "a tall steed, and on its
back a rider." Certainly the Romanticized images seem to suggest that universe

13
of male sexuality with which Richard Chase thought the Brontës were obsessed.
And Rochester, in a "riding-cloak, furcollared, and steel-clasped," with "a dark
face . . . stern features and a heavy brow" himself appears the very essence of
patriarchal energy, Cinderella's prince as a middle-aged warrior (chap. 12). Yet
what are we to think of the fact that the prince's first action is to fall on the ice,
together with his horse, and exclaim prosaically "What the deuce is to do now?"
Clearly the master's mastery is not universal. Jane offers help, and Rochester,
leaning on her shoulder, admits that "necessity compels me to make you useful."
Later, remembering the scene, he confesses that he too had seen the meeting
as a mythic one, though from a perspective entirely other than Jane's. "When you
came on me in Hay Lane last night, I ... had half a mind to demand whether you
had bewitched my horse" (chap. 13). Significantly, his playful remark
acknowledges her powers just as much as (if not more than) her vision of the
Gytrash acknowledged his. Thus, though in one sense Jane and Rochester
begin their relationship as master and servant, prince and Cinderella, Mr. B. and
Pamela, in another they begin as spiritual equals.

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As the episode unfolds, their equality is emphasized in other scenes as well. For
instance, though Rochester imperiously orders Jane to "resume your seat, and
answer my questions" while he looks at her drawings, his response to the
pictures reveals not only his own Byronic broodings, but his consciousness of
hers. "Those eyes in the Evening Star you must have seen in a dream.... And
who taught you to paint wind? . . . Where did you see Latmos?" (chap. 13).
Though such talk would bewilder most of Rochester's other dependents, it is a
breath of life to Jane, who begins to fall in love with him not because he is her
master but in spite of the fact that he is, not because he is princely in manner, but
because, being in some sense her equal, he is the only qualified critic of her art
and soul.

Their subsequent encounters develop their equality in even more complex ways.
Rudely urged to entertain Rochester, Jane smiles "not a very complacent or
submissive smile," obliging her employer to explain that "the fact is, once for all, I
don't wish to treat you like an inferior . . . I claim only such superiority as must
result from twenty years difference in age and a century's advance in experience"
(chap. 14). Moreover, his long account of his adventure with Céline—an account
which, incidentally, struck many Victorian readers as totally improper, coming
from a dissipated older man to a virginal young governess—emphasizes, at least
superficially, not his superiority to Jane but his sense of equality with her. Both
Jane and Charlotte Brontë correctly recognize this point, which subverts those
Victorian charges: "The ease of his manner," Jane comments, "freed me from
painful restraint; the friendly frankness . . . with which he treated me, drew me to
him. I felt at [these] times as if he were my relation rather than my master" (chap.
15 [ital. ours]). For of course, despite critical suspicions that Rochester is

14
seducing Jane in these scenes, he is, on the contrary, solacing himself with her
unseduceable independence in a world of self-marketing Célines and Blanches.

His need for her strength and parity is made clearer soon enough—on, for
instance, the occasion when she rescues him from his burning bed (an almost
fatally symbolic plight), and later on the occasion when she helps him rescue
Richard Mason from the wounds inflicted by "Grace Poole." And that these
rescues are facilitated by Jane's and Rochester's mutual sense of equality is
made clearest of all in the scene in which only Jane of all the "young ladies" at
Thornfield fails to be deceived by Rochester in his gypsy costume:

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"With the ladies you must have managed well," she comments, but "You did not
act the character of a gypsy with me" (chap. 19). The implication is that he did
not—or could not—because he respects "the resolute, wild, free thing looking out
of" Jane's eyes as much as she herself does, and understands that just as he
can see beyond her everyday disguise as plain Jane the governess, she can see
beyond his temporary disguise as a gypsy fortune-teller—or his daily disguise as
Rochester the master of Thornfield.

This last point is made again, most explicitly, by the passionate avowals of their
first betrothal scene. Beginning with similar attempts at disguise and deception
on Rochester's part ("One can't have too much of such a very excellent thing as
my beautiful Blanche") that encounter causes Jane in a moment of despair and
ire to strip away her own disguises in her most famous assertion of her own
integrity:

"Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and
heartless? You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you,—and full as much
heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should
have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am
not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, or even
of mortal flesh:—it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had
passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet equal,—as we are!"

(chap. 23)

Rochester's response is another casting away of disguises, a confession that he

has deceived her about Blanche, and an acknowledgment of their parity and
similarity: "My bride is here," he admits, "because my equal is here, and my
likeness." The energy informing both speeches is, significantly, not so much
sexual as spiritual; the impropriety of its formulation is, as Mrs. Rigby saw, not
moral but political, for Charlotte Brontë appears here to have imagined a world in
which the prince and Cinderella are democratically equal, Pamela is just as good

15
as Mr. B., master and servant are profoundly alike. And to the marriage of such
true minds, it seems, no man or woman can admit impediment.

But of course, as we know, there is an impediment, and that impediment,

paradoxically, preexists in both Rochester and Jane, de

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spite their avowals of equality. Though Rochester, for instance, appears in both
the gypsy sequence and the betrothal scene to have cast away the disguises that
gave him his mastery, it is obviously of some importance that those disguises
were necessary in the first place. Why, Jane herself wonders, does Rochester
have to trick people, especially women? What secrets are concealed behind the
charades he enacts? One answer is surely that he himself senses his trickery is
a source of power, and therefore, in Jane's case at least, an evasion of that
equality in which he claims to believe. Beyond this, however, it is clear that the
secrets Rochester is concealing or disguising throughout much of the book are
themselves in Jane's—and Charlotte Brontë's—view secrets of inequality.

The first of these is suggested both by his name, apparently an allusion to the
dissolute Earl of Rochester, and by Jane's own reference to the Bluebeard's
corridor of the third story: it is the secret of masculine potency, the secret of male
sexual guilt. For, like those pre-Byron Byronic heroes the real Restoration
Rochester and the mythic Bluebeard (indeed, in relation to Jane, like any
experienced adult male), Rochester has specific and "guilty" sexual knowledge
which makes him in some sense her "superior." Though this point may seem to
contradict the point made earlier about his frankness to Jane, it really should not.
Rochester's apparently improper recounting of his sexual adventures is a kind of
acknowledgment of Jane's equality with him. His possession of the hidden details
of sexuality, however—his knowledge, that is, of the secret of sex, symbolized
both by his doll-like daughter Adèle and by the locked doors of the third story
behind which mad Bertha crouches like an animal—qualifies and undermines
that equality. And though his puzzling transvestism, his attempt to impersonate a
female gypsy, may be seen as a semi-conscious effort to reduce this sexual
advantage his masculinity gives him (by putting on a woman's clothes he puts on
a woman's weakness), both he and Jane obviously recognize the hollowness of
such a ruse. The prince is inevitably Cinderella's superior, Charlotte Brontë saw,
not because his rank is higher than hers, but because it is he who will initiate her
into the mysteries of the flesh.

That both Jane and Rochester are in some part of themselves conscious of the
barrier which Rochester's sexual knowledge poses to their equality is further
indicated by the tensions that develop in their relationship after their betrothal.
Rochester, having secured Jane's love, almost reflexively begins to treat her as
an inferior, a

16
 -80-

plaything, a virginal possession—for she has now become his initiate, his
"mustard-seed," his "little sunny-faced ... girl-bride." "It is your time now, little
tyrant," he declares, "but it will be mine presently: and when once I have fairly
seized you, to have and to hold, I'll just—figuratively speaking—attach you to a
chain like this" (chap. 24). She, sensing his new sense of power, resolves to
keep him "in reasonable check": "I never can bear being dressed like a doll by
Mr. Rochester," she remarks, and, more significantly, "I'll not stand you an inch in
the stead of a seraglio.... I'll [prepare myself] to go out as a missionary to preach
liberty to them that are enslaved" (chap. 24). While such assertions have seemed
to some critics merely the consequences of Jane's (and Charlotte Brontë's)
sexual panic, it should be clear from their context that, as is usual with Jane, they
are political rather than sexual statements, attempts at finding emotional strength
rather than expressions of weakness.

Finally, Rochester's ultimate secret, the secret that is revealed together with the
existence of Bertha, the literal impediment to his marriage with Jane, is another
and perhaps most surprising secret of inequality: but this time the hidden facts
suggest the master's inferiority rather than his superiority. Rochester, Jane
learns, after the aborted wedding ceremony, had married Bertha Mason for
status, for sex, for money, for everything but love and equality. "Oh, I have no
respect for myself when I think of that act!" he confesses. "An agony of inward
contempt masters me. I never loved, I never esteemed, I did not even know her"
(chap. 27). And his statement reminds us of Jane's earlier assertion of her own
superiority: "I would scorn such a union [as the loveless one he hints he will enter
into with Blanche]: therefore I am better than you" (chap. 23). In a sense, then,
the most serious crime Rochester has to expiate is not even the crime of
exploiting others but the sin of self-exploitation, the sin of Céline and Blanche, to
which he, at least, had seemed completely immune.

That Rochester's character and life pose in themselves such substantial

impediments to his marriage with Jane does not mean, however, that Jane
herself generates none. For one thing, "akin" as she is to Rochester, she
suspects him of harboring all the secrets we know he does harbor, and raises
defenses against them, manipulating her "master" so as to keep him "in
reasonable check." In a larger way, moreover, all the charades and masquerades
—the secret messages— of patriarchy have had their effect upon her. Though
she loves Roch

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ester the man, Jane has doubts about Rochester the husband even before she
learns about Bertha. In her world, she senses, even the equality of love between
true minds leads to the inequalities and minor despotisms of marriage. "For a
little while," she says cynically to Rochester, "you will perhaps be as you are

17
now, [but] . . . I suppose your love will effervesce in six months, or less. I have
observed in books written by men, that period assigned as the farthest to which a
husband's ardor extends" (chap. 24). He, of course, vigorously repudiates this
prediction, but his argument—"Jane: you please me, and you master me
[because] you seem to submit"—implies a kind of Lawrentian sexual tension and
only makes things worse. For when he asks "Why do you smile [at this], Jane?
What does that inexplicable . . . turn of countenance mean?" her peculiar, ironic
smile, reminiscent of Bertha's mirthless laugh, signals an "involuntary" and subtly
hostile thought "of Hercules and Samson with their charmers." And that hostility
becomes overt at the silk warehouse, where Jane notes that "the more he bought
me, the more my cheek burned with a sense of annoyance and degradation.... I
thought his smile was such as a sultan might, in a blissful and fond moment,
bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched" (chap. 24).

Jane's whole life-pilgrimage has, of course, prepared her to be angry in this way
at Rochester's, and society's, concept of marriage. Rochester's loving tyranny
recalls John Reed's unloving despotism, and the erratic nature of Rochester's
favors ("in my secret soul I knew that his great kindness to me was balanced by
unjust severity to many others" [chap. 15]) recalls Brocklehurst's hypocrisy. But
even the dreamlike paintings that Jane produced early in her stay at Thornfield—
art works which brought her as close to her "master" as Helen Graham (in The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall) was to hers—functioned ambiguously, like Helen's, to
predict strains in this relationship even while they seemed to be conventional
Romantic fantasies. The first represented a drowned female corpse; the second
a sort of avenging mother goddess rising (like Bertha Mason Rochester or
Frankenstein's monster) in "electric travail" (chap. 13); and the third a terrible
paternal specter carefully designed to recall Milton's sinister image of Death.
Indeed, this last, says Jane, quoting Paradise Lost, delineates "the shape which
shape had none," the patriarchal shadow implicit even in the Father-hating gloom
of hell.

Given such shadowings and foreshadowings, then, it is no won

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der that as Jane's anger and fear about her marriage intensify, she begins to be
symbolically drawn back into her own past, and specifically to reexperience the
dangerous sense of doubleness that had begun in the red-room. The first sign
that this is happening is the powerfully depicted, recurrent dream of a child she
begins to have as she drifts into a romance with her master. She tells us that she
was awakened "from companionship with this baby-phantom" on the night Bertha
attacked Richard Mason, and the next day she is literally called back into the
past, back to Gateshead to see the dying Mrs. Reed, who reminds her again of
what she once was and potentially still is: "Are you Jane Eyre? . . . I declare she
talked to me once like something mad, or like a fiend" (chap. 21). Even more
significantly, the phantom-child reappears in two dramatic dreams Jane has on

18
the night before her wedding eve, during which she experiences "a strange
regretful consciousness of some barrier dividing" her from Rochester.In the first,
"burdened" with the small wailing creature, she is "following the windings of an
unknown road" in cold rainy weather, straining to catch up with her future
husband but unable to reach him. In the second, she is walking among the ruins
of Thornfield, still carrying "the unknown little child" and still following Rochester;
as he disappears around "an angle in the road," she tells him, "I bent forward to
take a last look; the wall crumbled; I was shaken; the child rolled from my knee, I
lost my balance, fell, and woke" (chap. 25).

What are we to make of these strange dreams, or—as Jane would call them—
these "presentiments"? To begin with, it seems clear that the wailing child who
appears in all of them corresponds to "the poor orphan child" of Bessie's song at
Gateshead, and therefore to the child Jane herself, the wailing Cinderella whose
pilgrimage began in anger and despair. That child's complaint—"My feet they are
sore, and my limbs they are weary; / Long is the way, and the mountains are
wild"—is still Jane's, or at least the complaint of that part of her which resists a
marriage of inequality. And though consciously Jane wishes to be rid of the
heavy problem her orphan self presents, "I might not lay it down anywhere,
however tired were my arms, however much its weight impeded my progress." In
other words, until she reaches the goal of her pilgrimage—maturity,
independence, true equality with Rochester (and therefore in a sense with the
rest of the world)—she is doomed to carry her orphaned alter ego everywhere.
The burden of the past cannot be sloughed off

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so easily—not, for instance, by glamorous lovemaking, silk dresses, jewelry, a

new name. Jane's "strange regretful consciousness of a barrier" dividing her from
Rochester is, thus, a keen though disguised intuition of a problem she herself will
pose.

Almost more interesting than the nature of the child image, however, is the
predictive aspect of the last of the child dreams, the one about the ruin of
Thornfield.As Jane correctly foresees, Thornfieldwill within a year become "a
dreary ruin, the retreat of bats and owls." Have her own subtle and not-so-subtle
hostilities to its master any connection with the catastrophe that is to befall the
house? Is her clairvoyant dream in some sense a vision of wish-fulfilment? And
why, specifically, is she freed from the burden of the wailing child at the moment
she falls from Thornfield's ruined wall?

The answer to all these questions is closely related to events which follow upon
the child dream. For the apparition of a child in these crucial weeks preceding her
marriage is only one symptom of a dissolution of personality Jane seems to be
experiencing at this time, a fragmentation of the self comparable to her "syncope"
in the red-room. Another symptom appears early in the chapter that begins,

19
anxiously, "there was no putting off the day that advanced— the bridal day"
(chap. 25). It is her witty but nervous speculation about the nature of "one Jane
Rochester, a person whom as yet I knew not," though "in yonder closet ...
garments said to be hers had already displaced [mine]: for not to me appertained
that . . . strange wraith-like apparel" (chap. 25 [ital. ours]). Again, a third symptom
appears on the morning of her wedding: she turns toward the mirror and sees "a
robed and veiled figure, so unlike my usual self that it seemed almost the image
of a stranger" (chap. 26), reminding us of the moment in the red-room when all
had "seemed colder and darker in that visionary hollow" of the looking glass
"than in reality." In view of this frightening series of separations within the self—
Jane Eyre splitting off from Jane Rochester, the child Jane splitting off from the
adult Jane, and the image of Jane weirdly separating from the body of Jane—it is
not surprising that another and most mysterious specter, a sort of "vampyre,"
should appear in the middle of the night to rend and trample the wedding veil of
that unknown person, Jane Rochester.

Literally, of course, the nighttime specter is none other than Bertha Mason
Rochester.But on a figurative and psychological level it seems suspiciously clear
that the specter of Bertha is still another—

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indeed the most threatening—avatar of Jane. What Bertha now does, for
instance, is what Jane wants to do. Disliking the "vapoury veil" of Jane
Rochester, Jane Eyre secretly wants to tear the garments up. Bertha does it for
her. Fearing the inexorable "bridal day," Jane would like to put it off. Bertha does
that for her too. Resenting the new mastery of Rochester, whom she sees as
"dread but adored," (ital. ours), she wishes to be his equal in size and strength,
so that she can battle him in the contest of their marriage. Bertha, "a big woman,
in stature almost equalling her husband," has the necessary "virile force" (chap.
26). Bertha, in other words, is Jane's truest and darkest double: she is the angry
aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to
repress ever since her days at Gateshead.For, as Claire Rosenfeld points out,
"the novelist who consciously or unconsciously exploits psychological Doubles"
frequently juxtaposes "two characters, the one representing the socially
acceptable or conventional personality, the other externalizing the free,
uninhibited, often criminal self."

It is only fitting, then, that the existence of this criminal self imprisoned in
Thornfield's attic is the ultimate legal impediment to Jane's and Rochester's
marriage, and that its existence is, paradoxically, an impediment raised by Jane
as well as by Rochester.For it now begins to appear, if it did not earlier, that
Bertha has functioned as Jane's dark double throughout the governess's stay at
Thornfield. Specifically, every one of Bertha's appearances—or, more accurately,
her manifestations—has been associated with an experience (or repression) of
anger on Jane's part. Jane's feelings of "hunger, rebellion, and rage" on the

20
battlements, for instance, were accompanied by Bertha's "low, slow ha! ha!" and
"eccentric murmurs." Jane's apparently secure response to Rochester's
apparently egalitarian sexual confidences was followed by Bertha's attempt to
incinerate the master in his bed. Jane's unexpressed resentment at Rochester's
manipulative gypsy-masquerade found expression in Bertha's terrible shriek and
her even more terrible attack on Richard Mason.Jane's anxieties about her
marriage, and in particular her fears of her own alien "robed and veiled" bridal
image, were objectified by the image of Bertha in a "white and straight" dress,
"whether gown, sheet, or shroud I cannot tell." Jane's profound desire to destroy
Thornfield, the symbol of Rochester's mastery and of her own servitude, will be
acted out by Bertha, who burns down the house and destroys herself in the
process as if she were an agent of Jane's desire as well as her

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own. And finally, Jane's disguised hostility to Rochester, summarized in her

terrifying prediction to herself that "you shall, yourself, pluck out your right eye;
yourself cut off your right hand" (chap. 27) comes strangely true through the
intervention of Bertha, whose melodramatic death causes Rochester to lose both
eye and hand.

These parallels between Jane and Bertha may at first seem somewhat strained.
Jane, after all, is poor, plain, little, pale, neat, and quiet, while Bertha is rich,
large, florid, sensual, and extravagant; indeed, she was once even beautiful,
somewhat, Rochester notes, "in the style of Blanche Ingram." Is she not, then, as
many critics have suggested, a monitory image rather than a double for Jane? As
Richard Chase puts it, "May not Bertha, Jane seems to ask herself, be a living
example of what happens to the woman who [tries] to be the fleshly vessel of the
[masculine] élan?" "Just as [Jane's] instinct for self-preservation saves her from
earlier temptations," Adrienne Rich remarks, "so it must save her from becoming
this woman by curbing her imagination at the limits of what is bearable for a
powerless woman in the England of the 1840s." Even Rochester himself provides
a similar critical appraisal of the relationship between the two. "That is my wife,"
he says, pointing to mad Bertha,

"And this is what I wished to have . . . this young girl who stands so grave and
quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon. I
wanted her just as a change after that fierce ragout.... Compare these clear eyes
with the red balls yonder—this face with that mask—this form with that bulk."

(chap. 26)

And of course, in one sense, the relationship between Jane and Bertha is a
monitory one: while acting out Jane's secret fantasies, Bertha does (to say the
least) provide the governess with an example of how not to act, teaching her a
lesson more salutary than any Miss Temple ever taught.

21
Nevertheless, it is disturbingly clear from recurrent images in the novel that
Bertha not only acts for Jane, she also acts like Jane. The imprisoned Bertha,
running "backwards and forwards" on all fours in the attic, for instance, recalls
not only Jane the governess, whose only relief from mental pain was to pace
"backwards and forwards" in the third story, but also that "bad animal" who was
ten-year-old Jane, imprisoned in the red-room, howling and mad. Bertha's "goblin
appearance"—"half dream, half reality," says Roch

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ester—recalls the lover's epithets for Jane: "malicious elf," "sprite," "changeling,"
as well as his playful accusation that she had magically downed his horse at their
first meeting. Rochester's description of Bertha as a "monster" ("a fearful voyage
I had with such a monster in the vessel" [chap. 27]) ironically echoes Jane's own
fear of being a monster ("Am I a monster? . . . is it impossible that Mr. Rochester
should have a sincere affection for me?" [chap. 24]). Bertha's fiendish madness
recalls Mrs. Reed's remark about Jane ("she talked to me once like something
mad or like a fiend") as well as Jane's own estimate of her mental state ("I will
hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad—as I am
now" [chap. 27]). And most dramatic of all, Bertha's incendiary tendencies recall
Jane's early flaming rages, at Lowood and at Gateshead, as well as that "ridge of
lighted heath" which she herself saw as emblematic of her mind in its rebellion
against society. It is only fitting, therefore, that, as if to balance the child Jane's
terrifying vision of herself as an alien figure in the "visionary hollow" of the red-
room looking glass, the adult Jane first clearly perceives her terrible double when
Bertha puts on the wedding veil intended for the second Mrs. Rochester, and
turns to the mirror. At that moment, Jane sees "the reflection of the visage and
features quite distinctly in the dark oblong glass," sees them as if they were her
own (chap. 25).

For despite all the habits of harmony she gained in her years at Lowood, we
must finally recognize, with Jane herself, that on her arrival at Thornfield she only
"appeared a disciplined and subdued character" (ital. ours). Crowned with thorns,
finding that she is, in Emily Dickinson's words, "The Wife—without the Sign," she
represses her rage behind a subdued facade, but her soul's impulse to dance
"like a Bomb, abroad," to quote Dickinson again, has not been exorcised and will
not be exorcised until the literal and symbolic death of Bertha frees her from the
furies that torment her and makes possible a marriage of equality—makes
possible, that is, wholeness within herself. At that point, significantly, when the
Bertha in Jane falls from the ruined wall of Thornfield and is destroyed, the
orphan child too, as her dream predicts, will roll from her knee—the burden of her
past will be lifted—and she will wake. In the meantime, as Rochester says,
"never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable ... consider the resolute
wild free thing looking out of [Jane's] eye.... Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot
get at it—the savage, beautiful creature" (chap. 27).

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That the pilgrimage of this "savage, beautiful creature" must

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now necessarily lead her away from Thornfield is signalled, like many other
events in the novel, by the rising of the moon, which accompanies a reminiscent
dream of the red-room. Unjustly imprisoned now, as she was then, in one of the
traps a patriarchal society provides for outcast Cinderellas, Jane realizes that this
time she must escape through deliberation rather than through madness. The
maternal moon, admonishing her ("My daughter, flee temptation!") appears to be
"a white human form ... inclining a glorious brow," a strengthening image, as
Adrienne Rich suggests, of the Great Mother. Yet—"profoundly, imperiously,
archetypal"—this figure has its ambiguities, just as Jane's own personality does,
for the last night on which Jane watched such a moon rise was the night Bertha
attacked Richard Mason, and the juxtaposition of the two events on that occasion
was almost shockingly suggestive:

[The moon's] glorious gaze roused me. Awaking in the dead of night, I opened
my eyes on her disk.... It was beautiful, but too solemn: I half rose, and stretched
my arm to draw the curtain.

Good God! What a cry!

(chap. 20)

Now, as Jane herself recognizes, the moon has elicited from her an act as violent
and self-assertive as Bertha's on that night. "What was I?" she thinks, as she
steals away from Thornfield. "I had injured— wounded—left my master. I was
hateful in my own eyes" (chap. 28). Yet, though her escape may seem as morally
ambiguous as the moon's message, it is necessary for her own self-preservation.
And soon, like Bertha, she is "crawling forwards on my hands and knees, and
then again raised to my feet—as eager and determined as ever to reach the
road."

Her wanderings on that road are a symbolic summary of those wanderings of the
poor orphan child which constitute her entire life's pilgrimage. For, like Jane's
dreams, Bessie's song was an uncannily accurate prediction of things to come.
"Why did they send me so far and so lonely, / Up where the moors spread and
grey rocks are piled?" Far and lonely indeed Jane wanders, starving, freezing,
stumbling, abandoning her few possessions, her name, and even her self‐
respect in her search for a new home. For "men are hard-hearted, and kind
angels only/Watch'd o'er the steps of a poor orphan child." And like the starved
wanderings of Hetty Sorel in Adam Bede, her

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terrible journey across the moors suggests the essential homelessness—the
nameless, placeless, and contingent status—of women in a patriarchal society.
Yet because Jane, unlike Hetty, has an inner strength which her pilgrimage
seeks to develop, "kind angels" finally do bring her to what is in a sense her true
home, the house significantly called Marsh End (or Moor House) which is to
represent the end of her march toward selfhood. Here she encounters Diana,
Mary, and St. John Rivers, the "good" relatives who will help free her from her
angry memories of that wicked stepfamily the Reeds. And that the Rivers prove
to be literally her relatives is not, in psychological terms, the strained coincidence
some readers have suggested. For having left Rochester, having torn off the
crown of thorns he offered and repudiated the unequal charade of marriage he
proposed, Jane has now gained the strength to begin to discover her real place
in the world. St. John helps her find a job in a school, and once again she
reviews the choices she has had: "Is it better, I ask, to be a slave in a fool's
paradise at Marseilles ... or to be a village schoolmistress, free and honest, in a
breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England?" (chap. 31). Her
unequivocal conclusion that "I was right when I adhered to principle and law" is
one toward which the whole novel seems to have tended.

The qualifying word seems is, however, a necessary one. For though in one
sense Jane's discovery of her family at Marsh End does represent the end of her
pilgrimage, her progress toward selfhood will not be complete until she learns
that "principle and law" in the abstract do not always coincide with the deepest
principles and laws of her own being. Her early sense that Miss Temple's
teachings had merely been superimposed on her native vitality had already
begun to suggest this to her. But it is through her encounter with St. John Rivers
that she assimilates this lesson most thoroughly. As a number of critics have
noticed, all three members of the Rivers family have resonant, almost allegorical
names. The names of Jane's true "sisters," Diana and Mary, notes Adrienne
Rich, recall the Great Mother in her dual aspects of Diana the huntress and Mary
the virgin mother; in this way, as well as through their independent, learned,
benevolent personalities, they suggest the ideal of female strength for which
Jane has been searching. St. John, on the other hand, has an almost blatantly
patriarchal name, one which recalls both the masculine abstraction of the gospel
according to St. John ("in the beginning was the Word") and the disguised
misogyny of St. John

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the Baptist, whose patristic and evangelical contempt for the flesh manifested
itself most powerfully in a profound contempt for the female. Like Salome, whose
rebellion against such misogyny Oscar Wilde was later also to associate with the
rising moon of female power, Jane must symbolically, if not literally, behead the
abstract principles of this man before she can finally achieve her true
independence.

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At first, however, it seems that St. John is offering Jane a viable alternative to the
way of life proposed by Rochester.For where Rochester, like his dissolute
namesake, ended up appearing to offer a life of pleasure, a path of roses (albeit
with concealed thorns), and a marriage of passion, St. John seems to propose a
life of principle, a path of thorns (with no concealed roses), and a marriage of
spirituality. His self-abnegating rejection of the worldly beauty Rosamund Oliver
—another character with a strikingly resonant name— is disconcerting to the
passionate and Byronic part of Jane, but at least it shows that, unlike hypocritical
Brocklehurst, he practices what he preaches. And what he preaches is the
Carlylean sermon of self-actualization through work: "Work while it is called
today, for the night cometh wherein no man can work." If she follows him, Jane
realizes, she will substitute a divine Master for the master she served at
Thornfield, and replace love with labor—for "you are formed for labour, not for
love," St. John tells her. Yet when, long ago at Lowood, she asked for "a new
servitude" was not some such solution half in her mind? When, pacing the
battlements at Thornfield she insisted that "women [need] a field for their efforts
as much as their brothers do" (chap. 12), did she not long for some such practical
"exercise"? "Still will my Father with promise and blessing,/Take to his bosom the
poor orphaned child," Bessie's song had predicted. Is not Marsh End, then, the
promised end, and St. John's way the way to His bosom?

Jane's early repudiation of the spiritual harmonies offered by Helen Burns and
Miss Temple is the first hint that, while St. John's way will tempt her, she must
resist it. That, like Rochester, he is "akin" to her is clear. But where Rochester
represents the fire of her nature, her cousin represents the ice. And while for
some women ice may "suffice," for Jane, who has struggled all her life, like a
sane version of Bertha, against the polar cold of a loveless world, it clearly will
not. As she falls more deeply under St. John's "freezing spell," she realizes
increasingly that to please him "I must disown half my

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nature." And "as his wife," she reflects, she would be "always restrained . . .
forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, ... though the imprisoned
flame consumed vital after vital" (chap. 34). In fact, as St. John's wife and "the
sole helpmate [he] can influence efficiently in life, and retain absolutely till death"
(chap. 34), she will be entering into a union even more unequal than that
proposed by Rochester, a marriage reflecting, once again, her absolute exclusion
from the life of wholeness toward which her pilgrimage has been directed. For
despite the integrity of principle that distinguishes him from Brocklehurst, despite
his likeness to "the warrior Great‐ heart, who guards his pilgrim convoy from the
onslaught of Apollyon" (chap. 38), St. John is finally, as Brocklehurst was, a pillar
of patriarchy, "a cold cumbrous column" (chap. 34). But where Brocklehurst had
removed Jane from the imprisonment of Gateshead only to immure her in a dank
valley of starvation, and even Rochester had tried to make her the "slave of

25
passion," St. John wants to imprison the "resolute wild free thing" that is her soul
in the ultimate cell, the "iron shroud" of principle (chap. 34).

Though in many ways St. John's attempt to "imprison" Jane may seem the most
irresistible of all, coming as it does at a time when she is congratulating herself
on just that adherence to "principle and law" which he recommends, she escapes
from his fetters more easily than she had escaped from either Brocklehurst or
Rochester.Figuratively speaking, this is a measure of how far she has traveled in
her pilgrimage toward maturity. Literally, however, her escape is facilitated by two
events. First, having found what is, despite all its ambiguities, her true family,
Jane has at last come into her inheritance. Jane Eyre is now the heir of that
uncle in Madeira whose first intervention in her life had been, appropriately, to
define the legal impediment to her marriage with Rochester, now literally as well
as figuratively an independent woman, free to go her own way and follow her
own will. But her freedom is also signaled by a second event: the death of
Bertha.

Her first "presentiment" of that event comes, dramatically, as an answer to a

prayer for guidance. St. John is pressing her to reach a decision about his
proposal of marriage. Believing that "I had now put love out of the question, and
thought only of duty," she "entreats Heaven" to "Show me, show me the path."
As always at major moments in Jane's life, the room is filled with moonlight, as if
to remind her that powerful forces are still at work both without and within

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her. And now, because such forces are operating, she at last hears— she is
receptive to—the bodiless cry of Rochester: "Jane! Jane! Jane!" Her response is
an immediate act of self-assertion. "I broke from St. John.... It was my time to
assume ascendancy. My powers were in play and in force" (chap. 35). But her
sudden forcefulness, like her "presentiment" itself, is the climax of all that has
gone before. Her new and apparently telepathic communion with Rochester,
which many critics have seen as needlessly melodramatic, has been made
possible by her new independence and Rochester's new humility. The plot device
of the cry is merely a sign that the relationship for which both lovers had always
longed is now possible, a sign that Jane's metaphoric speech of the first betrothal
scene has been translated into reality: "my spirit . . . addresses your spirit, just as
if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal—as we
are!" (chap. 23). For to the marriage of Jane's and Rochester's true minds there
is now, as Jane unconsciously guesses, no impediment.

Jane's return to Thornfield, her discovery of Bertha's death and of the ruin her
dream had predicted, her reunion at Ferndean with the maimed and blinded
Rochester, and their subsequent marriage form an essential epilogue to that
pilgrimage toward selfhood which had in other ways concluded at Marsh End,
with Jane's realization that she could not marry St. John. At that moment, "the

26
wondrous shock of feeling had come like the earthquake which shook the
foundations of Paul and Silas' prison; it had opened the doors of the soul's cell,
and loosed its bands—it had wakened it out of its sleep" (chap. 36). For at that
moment she had been irrevocably freed from the burden of her past, freed both
from the raging specter of Bertha (which had already fallen in fact from the ruined
wall of Thornfield) and from the self-pitying specter of the orphan child (which
had symbolically, as in her dream, rolled from her knee). And at that moment,
again as in her dream, she had wakened to her own self, her own needs.
Similarly, Rochester, "caged eagle" that he seems (chap. 37), has been freed
from what was for him the burden of Thornfield, though at the same time he
appears to have been fettered by the injuries he received in attempting to rescue
Jane's mad double from the flames devouring his house. That his "fetters" pose
no impediment to a new marriage, that he and Jane are now, in reality, equals, is
the thesis of the Ferndean section.

Many critics, starting with Richard Chase, have seen Rochester's injuries as "a
symbolic castration," a punishment for his early

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profligacy and a sign that Charlotte Brontë (as well as Jane herself), fearing male
sexual power, can only imagine marriage as a union with a diminished Samson.
"The tempo and energy of the universe can be quelled, we see, by a patient,
practical woman," notes Chase ironically. And there is an element of truth in this
idea. The angry Bertha in Jane had wanted to punish Rochester, to burn him in
his bed, destroy his house, cut off his hand and pluck out his overmastering "full
falcon eye." Smiling enigmatically, she had thought of "Hercules and Samson,
with their charmers."

It had not been her goal, however, to quell "the tempo and energy of the
universe," but simply to strengthen herself, to make herself an equal of the world
Rochester represents. And surely another important symbolic point is implied by
the lovers' reunion at Ferndean: when both were physically whole they could not,
in a sense, see each other because of the social disguises—master/servant,
prince/ Cinderella—blinding them, but now that those disguises have been shed,
now that they are equals, they can (though one is blind) see and speak even
beyond the medium of the flesh. Apparently sightless, Rochester—in the tradition
of blinded Gloucester— now sees more clearly than he did when as a "mole-
eyed blockhead" he married Bertha Mason (chap. 27). Apparently mutilated, he
is paradoxically stronger than he was when he ruled Thornfield, for now, like
Jane, he draws his powers from within himself, rather than from inequity,
disguise, deception. Then, at Thornfield, he was "no better than the old lightning-
struck chestnut tree in the orchard," whose ruin foreshadowed the catastrophe of
his relationship with Jane. Now, as Jane tells him, he is "green and vigorous.
Plants will grow about your roots whether you ask them or not" (chap. 37). And

27
now, being equals, he and Jane can afford to depend upon each other with no
fear of one exploiting the other.

Nevertheless, despite the optimistic portrait of an egalitarian relationship that

Brontë seems to be drawing here, there is "a quiet autumnal quality" about the
scenes at Ferndean, as Robert Bernard Martin points out. The house itself, set
deep in a dark forest, is old and decaying: Rochester had not even thought it
suitable for the loathsome Bertha, and its valley-of-the-shadow quality makes it
seem rather like a Lowood, a school of life where Rochester must learn those
lessons Jane herself absorbed so early. As a dramatic setting, moreover,
Ferndean is notably stripped and asocial, so that the physical isolation of the
lovers suggests their spiritual isolation in a

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world where such egalitarian marriages as theirs are rare, if not impossible. True
minds, Charlotte Brontë seems to be saying, must withdraw into a remote forest,
a wilderness even, in order to circumvent the strictures of a hierarchal society.

Does Brontë's rebellious feminism—that "irreligious" dissatisfaction with the

social order noted by Miss Rigby and Jane Eyre's other Victorian critics—
compromise itself in this withdrawal? Has Jane exorcised the rage of orphanhood
only to retreat from the responsibilities her own principles implied? Tentative
answers to these questions can be derived more easily from The Professor,
Shirley, and Villette than from Jane Eyre, for the qualified and even (as in
Villette) indecisive endings of Brontë's other novels suggest that she herself was
unable clearly to envision viable solutions to the problem of patriarchal
oppression. In all her books, writing ... in a sort of trance, she was able to act out
that passionate drive toward freedom which offended agents of the status quo,
but in none was she able consciously to define the full meaning of achieved
freedom—perhaps because no one of her contemporaries, not even a
Wollstonecraft or a Mill, could adequately describe a society so drastically
altered that the matured Jane and Rochester could really live in it.

What Brontë could not logically define, however, she could embody in tenuous
but suggestive imagery and in her last, perhaps most significant redefinitions of
Bunyan.Nature in the largest sense seems now to be on the side of Jane and
Rochester. Ferndean, as its name implies, is without artifice—"no flowers, no
garden-beds"— but it is green as Jane tells Rochester he will be, green and
ferny and fertilized by soft rains. Here, isolated from society but flourishing in a
natural order of their own making, Jane and Rochester will become physically
"bone of [each other's] bone, flesh of [each other's] flesh" (chap. 38), and here
the healing powers of nature will eventually restore the sight of one of
Rochester's eyes. Here, in other words, nature, unleashed from social
restrictions, will do "no miracle—but her best" (chap. 35). For not the Celestial
City but a natural paradise, the country of Beulah "upon the borders of heaven,"

28
where "the contract between bride and bridegroom [is] renewed," has all along
been, we now realize, the goal of Jane's pilgrimage.

As for the Celestial City itself, Charlotte Brontë implies here (though she will later
have second thoughts) that such a goal is the dream of those who accept
inequities on earth, one of the many tools used by patriarchal society to keep,
say, governesses in their "place."

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Because she believes this so deeply, she quite consciously concludes Jane Eyre
with an allusion to Pilgrim's Progress and with a half-ironic apostrophe to that
apostle of celestial transcendence, that shadow of "the warrior Greatheart," St.
John Rivers. "His," she tells us, "is the exaction of the apostle, who speaks but
for Christ when he says— 'Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself
and take up his cross and follow me'" (chap. 38). For it was, finally, to repudiate
such a crucifying denial of the self that Brontë's "hunger, rebellion, and rage" led
her to write Jane Eyre in the first place and to make it an "irreligious" redefinition,
almost a parody, of John Bunyan's vision. And the astounding progress toward
equality of plain Jane Eyre, whom Miss Rigby correctly saw as "the
personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit," answers by its
outcome the bitter question Emily Dickinson was to ask fifteen years later: "'My
husband'—women say—/Stroking the Melody—/Is this—the way?" No, Jane
declares in her flight from Thornfield, that is not the way. This, she says—this
marriage of true minds at Ferndean—this is the way. Qualified and isolated as
her way may be, it is at least an emblem of hope. Certainly Charlotte Brontë was
never again to indulge in quite such an optimistic imagining.

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Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Contributors: Harold Bloom - editor.
Publisher: Chelsea House. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1987. Page Number: *.

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