Jane Eyre and the secrets of furious lovemaking

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

From one of the perspectives of the Victorian culture whose myths and anxieties Charlotte Bronte so eerily transcribed in Jane Eyre, then, to embody the feminine in Cinderella is to call attention to the physical, financial and emotional deprivation-in a sense, the diminution-endured by married as well as single women in a society where the "second sex" was politically, economically, legally, and erotically disempowered, a culture in which, according to the famous if apocryphal advice Victoria is said to have given one of her daughters, on her wedding night a good woman was supposed to "close her eyes and think of England!" Similarly, to embody the masculine in Bluebeard is to call attention not just to the public power but also to the often fatal private knowledge of sexuality attributed to men in a society that often claimed men were beasts-insisting that, as one of the post-Darwinian heroines of Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida put it, "a man is only a monkey shaved." And perhaps, in fact, because such images of the feminine and the masculine were both so pervasive and so troublesome for Bronte and her contemporaries, there is a sense in which all the female characters in the novel can be seen as variations on the theme of Cinderella, with special emphasis on the problem fleshly desire poses for that heroine, while all the men can be considered variations on the theme of Bluebeard's sexuality.

In this reading, then, the styles of what we now call "the feminine" available to Jane Eyre are variously represented in the stories told about a range of other female characters. The possibilities these subplots explore extend from extreme resignation to equally extreme rebelliousness, from suicidal self-abnegation to murderous passion.4 The angelic Helen Burns, for instance, is a kind of Cinderella who was abandoned, in effect "orphaned," when her father remarried. But her solution to what we might call the Cinderella problem deviates radically from the fairy tale ending. Opting for absolute repudiation of desire in the physical realm of the present, Helen consumes her own body (dying, indeed, of "consumption") for the sake of a spiritual afterlife. Similarly, though in a twist on the Cinderella plot that more closely evokes the traditional story, Miss Temple manages to escape the hardships of her job at Lowood through marriage to a Prince Charming. Yet her self-abnegation requires a rigidity that virtually turns her body to marble: by implication, indeed, she is repressing desire as well as rage when, in one famous scene, her mouth closes "as if it would have required a sculptor's chisel to open it" (95).

But there is yet another, even more disturbing mode of "the feminine" that Jane encounters on her desirous pilgrimage, and it is quite literally embodied in the slavish flirtatiousness that characterizes little Adele (Rochester's ward), as well as the hardheaded quid pro quo eroticism of the child's mother Celine (Rochester's French mistress), and even the practiced charm of Blanche Ingram (his supposed fiancee). As Jane clearly sees, each of these characters is eager to overcome her sexual helplessness in a male-dominated society by selling herself to the highest bidder. Prancing and flouncing like a living doll, Adele is plainly in training for the career of polished coquetry that in different ways shapes the destinies of Celine and Blanche, since if Celine openly prostitutes herself, Blanche is perfectly willing to sell herself on the marriage market. To Jane, who vehemently declares that "I am a free human being with an independent will" (282), all these modes of sexual slavery represent a degradation far more radical than the self-abnegation of the consumptive and the self-repression of the governess.