Edward Rochester and the margins of masculinity in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea.

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 1994 by Kendrick, Robert

His wounds, meanwhile, are not so much the sign of a recently passed judgment or his castration as they are the signs of his final inability to hide the guilt and insufficiency that have been present since the beginning of the narrative, the outward manifestation of a preexisting inward powerlessness that has finally broken through the layers of dissimulation that he has constructed. He now has no choice but to represent himself as a figure for insufficiency, and as a result must, like Jane, articulate a position which will allow subjectivity without mastery, a position that will allow him to embrace contradiction and lack as the conditions under which one can choose which narrative strands to appropriate and which (partially) to reject, to re-imagine his relation to the dominant discourses of male subjectivity.

Though Rochester's conversion experience is what enables him to enter into a marriage with Jane in which he does not try to regain his lost patriarchal power, it would be a mistake to read this acceptance of God as a reaffirmation of a patriarchal discourse. As indicated earlier, Jane's faith appeals to a belief which runs "against the grain" of the Anglican structure, and though modern readers may be too quick to read the acceptance of religion in the novel as a capitulation to a dominant ideology, it should be remembered that for Jane, and for Rochester, belief becomes a means with which to create an oppositional self, not a means by which the self is "subjected" to the dominant social order. Peter Allan Dale notes that

Rochester, his own conversion to Christianity notwithstanding, calls to her as 'the alpha and omega of his heart's wishes' (p.572; cf. rev. 1:8), and she responds with her own resounding echo of Revelation: 'I am coming.' As the two are reunited, the language in which Jane describes their renewed relationship is really no less blasphemous than her earlier metaphorical association of their impending sexual union with the marriage of the Lamb. (125)

Their eventual marriage takes them not only away from the order of landed society, but away from traditional religious conceptions of the husband as master. Though Rochester has certainly retained some patriarchal power--Jane notes that he dictates letters to her, correspondence that may represent business dealings, and indicates that she is not carrying on all of their relations, public or private--he is at the same time her dependent. His voiced acceptance of Divine justice (450) amounts to an acceptance of a suspension of his own power, and a suspension of the decision of who exactly is to be the master in their marriage. This suspension of definite positions creates a just relation by virtue of the equitable sharing of domestic power between the two, and because their final identities will not come from intersubjective reflection, but from the divine decision that is yet to come, the "a-venir." Dale has noted that the speculative ending of the novel implies a partial rejection of "a particular historical structure of expectation" (129), and though he is referring to narrative structure in this instance, it is not unreasonable to conclude that this statement can refer to Bronte's relation to religious and "gendered" closure as well. The dominant imaginings of identity (of religion, class, gender, and the points at which these discourses intersect) no longer, in Dale's terms, "command implicit assent" (129), but neither can they be escaped. The result is Bronte's subjection of the subject to a "higher" code which suspends all "subjection" by earthly discourses. This solution is provisional at best, but it is nonetheless an attempt to articulate an identity that cannot be contained by the dominant narratives.