It is her grittiness that saves her at Lowood school, where punishments are meted out unfairly and girls are sent to starve and sicken. Helen, who meekly accepts unjust punishments, dies. Jane survives because she does not accept them. In fact, it is remarkable how often Jane says the thing she knows she should not, as if overcome by an irresistible force. She is active where all her training tells her to be passive. She speaks the truth when she is supposed to flatter. She longs for the wide world when she is supposed to be content with her narrow lot. “I could not help it; the restlessness was in my nature,” she says, pacing “backwards and forwards” on the third story of Thornfield Hall. “Women feel just as men feel,” Jane says. “They need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts.”
When a book has been copied as much as
Jane Eyre,
has spawned as many bad imitations, as many movies and adaptations, it’s necessary to go back to the text and try to see it as if for the first time. What has usually been imitated about this novel is not the spirit of the heroine but the gloomy house with its dark secret, its glowering hero, and the star-crossed romance of its two principal characters. These strike me as the
least
important elements of the story. If Jane were a passive heroine, neither the romantic battlements of gloomy Thornfield nor the curmudgeonly charms of Mr. Rochester would capture us. But Jane’s bluntness, the modernity of her strivings for independence, invite us into the tale. From the first instant we meet Jane Eyre, we know she is a different breed.
As a novelist, what interests me most about
Jane Eyre
is the way Charlotte Brontë transformed autobiographical materials to create a myth that is larger and more powerful than any of its parts. Apparently Charlotte and her siblings
did
have a forbidding aunt who attempted without success to replace their dead mother. Apparently they
were
sent away to a harsh charity school not unlike Lowood. Apparently Charlotte
did
fall in love with a married man—M. Heger, the headmaster of the school in Brussels where Charlotte, for a time, taught. But the way Charlotte
changed
these materials is far more interesting than the way they agree with her autobiography. She sets the struggle not in a school in Brussels but in a foreboding North of England country house, where the restless master comes and goes. The house represents the fate of woman in the nineteenth century: enclosure, entrapment, no hope of escape. Not only Jane is captive there, but so is Jane’s alter ego, Bertha Mason, the mad wife in the attic. And the mystery revolves around the discovery of the mad wife whose existence is denied even when her rages threaten the lives of those in the house.
It was Charlotte Brontë’s genius to find a threefold representation of nineteenth-century woman: the feisty Jane, the animalistic Bertha, the mansion that is destined to burn down because of its incendiary contents. If Bertha is sexuality denied, then Jane is freedom denied, but they are both aspects of entrapped womanhood. Thornfield Hall itself represents the outdated rules imposed on women—which cannot endure any more than a house with a trapped madwoman can.
Surely all these symbols were unconscious with the author. Otherwise she could not have made them so convincing. But the unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.
Jane Eyre
takes the form of a pilgrimage in which a little girl who is old before her time, from being reared in the most constricted of circumstances, gradually finds a way to blossom. But first she must submit to many tests. She must reject a variety of hypocritical masculine figures who feel it is their right to rule her. She must reject the fate of being a female victim—the only model presented to her by other women. She must reject the entreaties of her potential lover until he has been transformed by his own purifying odyssey.
To be the equal of Jane Eyre, Rochester must renounce all other women, see his patrimony go up in flames, lose an eye and a hand, and become grateful where he once was arrogant. Only when he has been thus transformed can he and Jane have a happily-ever-after.
Charlotte Brontë’s brilliance was to create a myth that is the embodiment of female wish fulfillment. The universe of
Jane Eyre
operates according to female laws. Jane’s success as a heroine depends on her breaking all the rules decreed for nineteenth-century women. Outspoken where she should be submissive, bold where she should be grateful, Jane Eyre has apparently never been told that she is plainer than Cinderella’s stepsisters and has no business turning down a rich suitor before she knows she is an heiress herself. This is a fairy tale that reverses all the rules of fairy tales. No wonder it strikes readers as a burst of light into the heart of darkness.
To a remarkable extent, the novel relies on the heroine’s sensitivity to dreams and visions—as if the author were saying that only a woman in touch with her deepest dreams can be a strong survivor in a world so toxic to women. Dreams are crucial in
Jane Eyre.
The night before Jane is to marry the already married Rochester, she prophetically dreams “that Thornfield Hall was a dreary ruin, the retreat of bats and owls.” The house is reduced to “a shell-like wall, very high, and very fragile-looking,” and Jane wanders there with an unknown child in her arms.
Perhaps the child in the dream represents the innocence that she is soon to lose. At church the next day, the wedding is canceled when Rochester’s bigamy is revealed. Because he thinks of Bertha Mason as a “clothed hyena,” whom he was entrapped into marrying, Rochester has no qualms about betraying his mad wife. But Jane, though she loves him, refuses to be drawn into his error. He married Bertha for her money, and that falsehood is not so easily cured. In this female universe, a man is not forgiven for a cynical marriage even if it is the rule in his society. So Jane, though heartbroken, leaves Thornfield Hall. She wanders in the dark woods of her destiny, finds she is an heiress herself, is commandeered in marriage by another man (the dour parson St. John), while Rochester’s soul is being shriven.
Rochester may be arrogant and full of male entitlement, but he is not cold and calculating like St. John. In fact, it is St. John who evokes in Jane the certainty that she can marry only for love. He wants Jane because she will make a good missionary in India, not because he loves her. This Jane feels as an “iron shroud contracted round me.” She can’t allow herself to be with a man whose brow is “commanding but not open,” whose eyes are “never soft.” By refusing to marry him, “I should still have my unblighted self to turn to: my natural unenslaved feelings with which to communicate in moments of loneliness. There would be recesses in my mind which could be only mine.” As his wife she would become “the imprisoned flame” consumed from within.
Jane may be the first heroine in fiction to know that she needs her own identity more than she needs marriage. Her determination not to relinquish selfhood for love could well belong to a contemporary heroine.
Jane can return to Rochester only when she can say: “I am an independent woman now.” And she can surrender to him only when
he
says: “All the melody on earth is concentrated in my Jane’s tongue to my ear.” “The water stood in my eyes to hear this avowal of his dependence,” Jane says. And indeed she cannot marry Rochester until he knows he is as dependent on her as she is on him. Their odysseys have equalized them, Jane has become an independent woman, and Rochester has been cured of entitlement. Only that way can a woman and a man become equals in a patriarchal society.
We are drawn to those myths that speak the truth we know about our inner lives.
Jane Eyre
endures because it tells the truth about what makes a marriage of two minds possible. The shoe fits—far better than Cinderella’s glass slipper. Men must be stripped of arrogance and women must become independent for any mutually nurturing alliance to endure between the sexes. Charlotte Brontë’s unconscious was ahead of her time.
7
PRINCESS AS ICON
I have not laughed since I married.
—MRS. INCHBALD
I never knew Diana,
Princess of Wales, except as an icon (our new word for a megacelebrity of a wattage surpassing that of the Virgin Mary), but my life and hers ran parallel for almost two decades and I watched her as intently as I ever watched any famous woman.
She appeared on the scene the summer my third marriage was coming apart, and since she represented the delusion of happily-ever-after at just the moment in my life when such a delusion was most painful, I didn’t much like her. I was the mother of a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter and had staked my heart and soul on a union that now seemed irretrievable. Diana, meanwhile, was walking down the aisle in Saint Paul’s like an advertisement for everything I was losing. I spent the day of her wedding drunk on champagne and passed out on the guest bed of my English publisher’s thatched cottage in Berkshire. It didn’t help that I had been assigned by
Paris Match
to write an article on the royal match and
Paris Match
had turned my piece down because I had dared to wonder aloud why Diana’s virginity was so much of an issue in 1981.
Virginity?
It was a word we hadn’t heard since the era of Doris Day (about whom some wag supposedly said: “I knew her
before
she was a virgin”).
So I was divorcing while Diana was wedding. Still worse, all the paraphernalia I and my contemporaries had spent our whole adult lives throwing away was back with a vengeance: ruffles, tiaras, hoop skirts, leg-o’-mutton sleeves, engagement rocks, and—good grief!—
virginity.
What the hell was going on? We had been shouting
No more alimony,
and meanwhile a new generation (born while we were marching against the war in Vietnam) was picking up our cast-off crinolines and strutting in them! They had discovered marrying for money as if it were an entirely new thing. We were hopelessly out of step with the times.
I was single and starting to enjoy it when Diana gave birth in rapid succession to the heir and the spare. We still didn’t know about the anorexia, the bulimia, or Camilla Parker-Bowles, so the photo ops of Diana, the Virgin Mum, continued to irritate. She looked thinner. The hats like flying saucers gave way to the hats like woks, which in turn gave way to the hats like cachepots, but still this disgustingly retrograde ideal of femininity was being paraded before us. A marriage like Diana’s was everything my generation had run away from, and now it was being displayed as a platonic ideal. The eighties were in full swing. Limousines were in style, and so were pouf skirts and masters of the universe. Who could make sense of it? I decided the world was mad and went on raising my daughter, writing my books, and paying my mortgage.
But by now the fairy tale seemed frayed around the edges. Diana and Charles were facing in different directions in the tabloids, if not yet on the tea towels. All was not well in paradise. She had two adorable boys to my one adorable girl, but she was starving herself and throwing herself down stairs. Virginity followed by sapphire rings and marital bliss didn’t seem to be working. Hello. What’s this? The Cinderella story is a myth? Do tell! The year was 1989 and I was getting married to my best friend, but Diana seemed to be on the verge of coming apart.
We were married in the Vermont woods by a female justice of the peace, and my engagement present was not a rock but a first edition of
Ulysses.
I read a poem I had written for him, and he said the Hebrew prayers for a marriage. Astonishingly, I married a man I never tired of conversing with, while Diana discovered she had nothing to say to her prince. Or he to her. The fittings and the fits continued. By the summer of ’92, when Andrew Morton published the beans Diana had been spilling, the fairy tale was revealed for the myth it was. The prince had a mistress. Under her mattress, the princess had a pea the size of Camilla’s horse. Diana’s vaunted virginity had availed her naught. All was wrong in the palace when the clock struck twelve.
Now began the war of the wedded. Once Shy Di rose to her full height as the woman scorned, Charles seemed utterly clueless about her rage. She had her diamonds and pearls; what the devil
else
did she want? Surely not love! Didn’t the silly Sloane Ranger know that love wasn’t
part
of the bargain? Apparently not. It seemed she’d
believed
the Cinderella story after all. How very retro of her. Even the queen was alarmed. And Philip, the perfect consort, faultless for photo ops but with a mind of his own when it came to mistresses, couldn’t believe it, either. Didn’t the girl know
the rules
? She’d made her bed and now must lie in it. What sort of princess complains about the size of her pea?
Diana disillusioned didn’t play as well as Shy Di the virgin. The press can deal with virgins and whores—but what about a princess who is neither?
The next period of Diana’s life was dicey. Her press got progressively worse as separation and divorce loomed. Diana had to do
something
to save the day. She had played Shy Virgin. Now it was time to assume the role of woman of the world. But that’s tougher for any woman to pull off, and Diana’s clip file shows its perils. Diana was pilloried for trying to have a love life, hounded both at the health club and at the eating disorders shrink’s. Her soul was stolen on film, and with each photo her spiritual center became more damaged. Even her friends the paparazzi tried to show her looking loony. No longer virginal, not willing to shut up and disappear like a good girl, she became a kind of media joke. And this is when, apparently, she took up humanitarian causes.
She looked so healthy and fit holding hands with AIDS patients, so long-limbed and lovely with a one-legged land-mine victim on her lap. These were the photo ops of a lifetime. These were the photo-ops the Benetton ads had tried but failed to create. Designer duds look so
good
against rags. All the fashion mags agreed. Were they so willing to exploit her photos that they’d write any sort of twaddle just to sell magazines? The answer was resoundingly yes.