Jane Eyre and the secrets of furious lovemaking

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

In those days, however, there seemed to be no middle ground between the banal rhetoric of the pulp novelist who declared that "Jane Eyre is one of the most passionate of romantic novels" because "it throbs with the sensuality of a woman's growing love for a man; there is the deep longing of the lonely heart in its every line" (Nudd 140) and Adrienne Rich's stern insistence that "we believe in the erotic and intellectual sympathy of [Jane and Rochester's] marriage because it has been prepared by [Jane's] refusal to accept it under circumstances which were mythic, romantic or sexually oppressive" (Nudd 140). Indeed, to many of us the "deep longing" of a woman's "lonely heart" for the "brute, / Brute heart of a brute like" a man appeared to be a radical weakness-a neurotic flaw-in the otherwise talented and politically correct Charlotte Bronte. Hadn't such feverish yearnings for the love of a (bad) Byronic hero left her vulnerable to Thackeray's rude ruminations on the "poor little woman of genius! The fiery little eager brave tremulous homely-faced creature! I can read a great deal of her life as I fancy in her book, and see that rather than have fame, rather than any other earthly good or mayhap heavenly one she wants some Tomkins or another to love and be in love with" (Lerner 199).

Rich's classic (and still brilliant) essay on Jane Eyre is entitled "The Temptations of a Motherless Woman," and it focuses on the moment, not long after Rochester's seductive plea to Jane that she flee with him to France, when the maternal moon rose to reveal a "white human form" gazing at the tormented governess and gloriously admonishing "'My daughter, flee temptation!"' Bronte herself had had to flee temptation (though she had done so with considerable ambivalence) when she left Brussels and her adored M. Heger. And as a feminist critic in the seventies, I knew that I too had to flee temptation. I had to rigorously repress my own desire for Jane's and Rochester's "furious lovemaking" to reach a romantic-and more specifically a sexualclimax and undertake instead a weary journey across the moors to a political position where, along with Charlotte Bronte and Adrienne Rich, I could rejoice in our heroine's new life as "a village schoolmistress, free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England" (386).

Still, wasn't there an element of bad faith in this reading? If as Judith Fetterley so persuasively argued, we women readers had long been acculturated to identify against ourselves when we perceived the world (and in particular our own gender) from a patriarchal, male perspective, weren't we identifying against ourselves in another way when we refused to acknowledge the rebellious sexual passion driving Jane's assertion to Rochester that "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" (281)? Though we might quite properly scorn the cliches of those who saw the novel as primarily a romance that "throbs with sensuality" and a book that "only the lonely" could have written, oughtn't we to have conceded that something about the "furious lovemaking" in the book was what made it ragingly popular in the first place? Or at least that the "`Rights of Woman' in a new aspect" had as much to do with something about the lovemaking as did the more obviously feminist striving toward equality?