Jane Eyre and the secrets of furious lovemaking

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 1998 by Gilbert, Sandra M

There were, however, a few Victorian responses to which I paid less attention. I don't think, for instance, that I quite knew what to make of the clause that preceded Mrs. Oliphant's description of the "alarming revolution" that ensued after "the invasion of Jane Eyre": "Ten years ago we professed an orthodox system of novel-making. Our lovers were humble and devoted." And still less was I certain how to treat her further description of the book's distinguishing characteristic as its portrayal of "furious lovemaking"-a kind of lovemaking that she thought constituted "a wild declaration of the `Rights of Woman' in a new aspect." To be frank, seventies feminism was uneasy in the presence of the erotic, torn between Erica Jong's notorious celebration of the "zipless fuck" and Kate Millett's not unrelated claim that "there is no remedy to sexual politics in marriage" (147). Commenting on the writings of two contemporaries she much admired, Sylvia Plath and Diane Wakoski, Adrienne Rich noted in her influential "When We Dead Awaken" that "in the work of both ... [the] charisma of Man seems to come purely from his power over [woman] and his control of the world by force, not from anything fertile or life-giving in him," and this because of "the oppressive nature of male/female relations" (35-6). Within a decade, Andrea Dworkin would declare that (hetero)sexual intercourse virtually by nature entails a tyrannical master/slave relationship between male and female, with the man "communicating to her cell by cell her own inferior status ... shoving it into her, over and over ... until she gives up and gives in-which is called surrender in the male lexicon" (Dworkin 100). And such a diagnosis of desire would seem to have been a logical outcome of Plath's embittered "Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you" (Plath 223).

"Furious lovemaking" in Jane Eyre? Well, the oxymoronic phrase could be at least in part understood if one factored in the ferocity with which the novel urged "the 'Rights of Woman' in a new aspect." But from the born-again perspective of seventies feminism that new aspect had more to do with Jane's declarations of independence from Rochester than with expressions of erotic feeling for him. To be sure, I saw Jane's story as ending with a vision of egalitarian marriage that was a consummation devoutly to be wished, if only a utopian one. But how were we to understand the complex, at times tyrannical or even sadistic "lovemaking" that led to a fantasy of such bliss? When in moments of what sociologists call "introspection" I analyzed my own earlier responses to the relationship between Jane and her "master," I had to admit to myself that in my teens I'd wanted more than anything for her to run off with him to the south of France, or even indeed to the moon, where at one point he had playfully promised to bring her to "a cave in one of the white valleys among the volcanotops" (295). And why, after all, shouldn't politically astute readers wish that she and her lover had at least eloped, if not to the moon, to France? Such reallife literary heroines as George Sand and George Eliot had done as much! Why did feminist critics, of all people, have to accept the marriage-or-death imperatives built into what Nancy Miller called "the heroine's text"?