Reader, it's Jane Eyre - Crash Course Literature 207 - YouTube (2)
And when she finds him, he's lost his sight, but of course, Jane has finally learned how
to see, to pay attention not just to what's in front of her, but also what's happening
beyond and beneath the visible world. So when Charlotte Brontë was young, she wrote
to the poet Robert Southey hoping for encouragement. He acknowledged her talent, but told her not
to waste any more time at it because, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life,
and it ought not to be.” Now Jane seems perfectly happy to give up
writing her autobiography in favor of having all of Mr. Rochester's babies and her declaration,
“Reader, I married him” is probably the most famous sentence in the book. But it's
important to remember that Jane doesn't marry Mr. Rochester until she can meet him
on an equal, if not superior footing. Like earlier in the book he has all the money
and all the power and all the secrets, right? By the end of the novel, she has money, and
also vision, both literal and metaphorical. Jane consistently rejects men who try to control
her and she shows a lot of perceptive critiques of gender dynamics, like a passage in which
she declares: “Women are supposed to be very calm generally:
but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field
for their efforts as much as their brothers do…and it is narrow-minded in their more
privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings
and knitting stockings.” Sorry, pudding lovers but this novel clearly
says to heck with pudding! I'm only making pudding when I can make pudding on my own
terms! Also, who would want to wear knitted stockings?
So I think you can read the novel as striking at least a soft blow for gender equality,
but many feminist critics, like Sandra Gilbert, sense that there's something a little more
disturbing going on in Jane's journey from abused child to perfect Victorian wife.
Gilbert focuses where very little of the actual novel does, on that mad woman in the attic,
Mr. Rochester's first wife, Bertha Mason. I mean, was Bertha really the fallen woman
that Rochester describes? Let's remember that Mr. Rochester freely admits to keeping
a lot of mistresses, but the novel never really scolds his sexual behavior.
Meanwhile, keeping mentally ill, inconvenient wives chained to the attic, which, by the
way, really happened in Brontë's day, is more or less approved of.
Now some read Bertha, who hails from a tropical island and has dark skin, as a commentary
on Britain's treatment of its colonies. But my favorite reading is to see Bertha as
a kind of dark mirror for Jane, of all the feelings and desires that Jane has to repress
in order to fit the mold of Victorian womanhood, a creature who “snatched and growled like
some strange wild animal” while Jane sews and teaches geography.
I mean, every time that Jane gets upset—like when Mr. Rochester talks about all of his
mistresses or fools her with that weird gypsy thing— it's Bertha who acts out.
And when Jane feels anxious about her marriage, Bertha comes to her room and rips the veil.
And let's not forget that it's Bertha—wild, untamed, sexual Bertha—who has to die in
order for Jane and Mr. Rochester to finally get married.
Jane has to lose part of her nature to fit into the expectations of her social order
and in that sense at least, this happily ever after ending isn't entirely happily ever after.
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