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

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

It is for this reason that his imagined solutions to what he regards as his problem--not having a wife who will recognize him as an authoritative subject--cannot succeed. Taking Jane as his illegal wife or as his mistress is an attempt to erase Bertha and the "problem" she represents for Rochester--the problem of his own representation vis a vis others within the dominant fictions. Bronte, and her heroine, will not allow for any sort of closure to occur within the dominant narratives, and this would include the closure created by Edward's attempted elimination of both Jane's and Bertha's problematic status by co-opting the former as his mistress so that he may forget the latter. Bronte's Jane, like Rhys's Antoinette, exists to sustain narrative disjunctures, rather than to cover them up.

Though she says that she will eventually forgive Edward for his attempt to trick her into revealing herself to him while he is disguised as the gypsy, she does not answer his question, "what does that grave smile...signify?" (205), and as a result nothing is revealed and resolved except that Edward has once again demonstrated the limits of his own power. A similar pattern occurs during their other exchanges while she is at Thornfield. During one of the most important of these, the discussion about the nature of laws, Edward proclaims that "unheard-of combinations of circumstances demand unheard-of rules" (141). This is, ironically, both his presumed justification for confining Bertha and attempting to take Jane as his illegitimate wife and the eventual justification that will underlie his future "just" marriage to her. The difference between the two "unheard-of" solutions is that in the first case, Rochester does not defer to any other authority. His transgressions, in the form of the mercenary marriage and subsequent abuse of Bertha, and his attempt to marry outside the codes that sanction marriage, are not so much violations of the patriarchal norm as they are exaggerations of it so that it exceeds its original boundaries. What makes his reimaginings unethical is that they are efforts of mastery and control rather than negotiation, moves that simply exaggerate and exacerbate his previous acts of domination. It would appear that Bronte's Jane, like Rhys's Antoinette, holds a concept of justice similar to Derrida's--if, according to Jane, "the human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely entrusted" (141), and that the limit of human judgment is "lay it be right" (141), then the just decision is impossible, always yet to come because it is the judgment of the Divine. Though Jane feels "the uncertainty, the vague sense of insecurity, which accompanied a conviction of ignorance" (141) after this exchange, her "ignorance" proves to be her wisdom. Rochester is ignorant in that he believes he can decide for himself, and justly.

Jane's appeal to the Divine has been read by Roy as an acceptance of the dominant ideology of the church (725). This is mistaken for two reasons. First, Roy critiques Bronte's novel for being unable to present a unified ideological view, a counter-narrative to the dominant narratives it is obliged to rehearse (724).This critique seems to assume that there is such thing as a space outside of the dominant narratives. This, as mentioned before, is an impossibility--first, because ideological narratives themselves are not unified, but overdetermined and inextricably intertwined with each other (Laclau and Mouffe 104-105), and second, because the discourses of the dominant narratives are the means by which we articulate our relation to the imagined real (Silverman 40). Finally, if Jane's "may it be right" suggests that it is not within any human's power to judge, including the representatives of the Church of England. Her God would appear to function as a force which always dictates that human judgment or ordering be, "always-already," suspended, and as such it would suggest that her Christian belief is not a force of closure but one of postponement. As such, her belief functions as a revision of the function of Christian belief within the dominant ideological narrative.