Jane Eyre and the secrets of furious lovemaking

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

That Jane Eyre introduced audiences to the "wild declarations" and egalitarian strivings of an unprecedentedly passionate heroine certainly explains why the novel has always had a special appeal for women, who tend to identifyand want to identify-with this compelling narrator's powerful voice. For the same reason, the work has often elicited different, at times less enthusiastic, responses from male readers, with some dismissing Jane as priggish (for refusing to succumb to her desires) and others disparaging her ferocity (in articulating those desires).3 Yet of course Bronte's novel broods as intently on the mysteries of male sexuality as it does on those of female eroticism, transcribing the fantasies of both sexes with uncanny clarity and (for its period) astonishing candor. To men as well as women, in other words, Jane Eyre tells a shifting almost phantasmagoric series of stories about the perils and possibilities of sexual passion. For indeed, as Elaine Showalter observed some years ago, a "strain of intense female sexual fantasy and eroticism runs through [even] the first four chapters of the novel and contributes to their extraordinary and thrilling immediacy" (Showalter 115).

To be sure, Bronte was working with plots familiar to many of her readers, who would have known, among other significant precursors, the Cinderella story Samuel Richardson told in Pamela and the Bluebeard tale of Anne Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho. But the author's genius in Jane Eyre consisted in the fervor with which she defamiliarized such received plots by putting them: together in a new way. In fact, as a number of comparatively traditional analyses have long since suggested, it's possible to summarize this novel's narrative with a National Inquirer headline: CINDERELLA MEETS BLUEBEARD! More particularly, a "poor, obscure, plain and little" but notably rebellious stepchild/orphan becomes the servant of a princely master, falls in love with him, and desires him intensely, even while finding herself used and abused by him. In fact, this not very acquiescent Cinderella sees her Prince Charming turn into Bluebeard, the jailor (and murderer) of wives, while she herself simultaneously toys with fantasies of seducing him and rebels against his sway by struggling to subvert his power. Bronte's book thus asks a number of crucial questions. For example, what if instead of wielding her broom Cinderella rages against (and amidst) the cinders? And what if Prince Charming is not just a charming aristocrat but a Bluebeard who elicits passionate desire in Cinderella? And at the same time, what if Bluebeard feels he has exonerating reasons for locking up his sexual past? Can, or should, a Cinderella like this one live happily ever after with such a Bluebeard?

To say that Jane Eyre "is" Cinderella and that Rochester "is" Bluebeard is of course to imply that they embody ideas of the feminine and the masculine in a particularly resonant way: an impoverished and orphaned dependent in a hostile household, Cinderella is, after all, condemned to a life of humiliating servitude from which she can only hope to escape through the intervention of an imperious man, and significantly, in the old tale, she finally achieves release through diminution. The ancient plot stresses not just her modesty (and the modesty of her needs), but also her physical daintiness-notably the tininess of her feet compared to those of her arrogant stepsisters, both of whom are literally as well as figuratively swollen with pride and ambition. As for Bluebeard, in the old tale he is depicted as a mysteriously predatory, dark ("blue"), even swarthy figure whose beard signifies an animal physicality frighteningly associated with his femicidal erotic past, and, more particularly, with the bloody chamber in the attic where he keeps the ghastly relics of past sexual conquests.