Jane Eyre : an autobiography

Front matter

COLLINS « SCHOOL + CLASSICS

KEKE

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Introduction

T is amusing how anyone, of whatever age or sex, almost [ once on reading Jane Eyre identifies him-or her-self with the vehement little heroine. Such a result is an amazing feat for a not very mature novelist to have achieved ; and if we ask ourselves how it comes about, it would seem that we can merely say, helplessly, that it is Charlotte Bronté’s own vehemence that bowls us along into the character. Perhaps this is so because she herself, very much more than is usually the case, is the heroine. Believing in it all so utterly—as she must, seeing that the heroine is she—all sense of detachment, of standing away from the subject, disappears, and with it all need to build up realistic likelihood. Therefore we swallow quite easily the improbability of a woman of thirty remembering so clearly what happened to her when she was nine that she can report conversations: she persuades us by, we would think, the very clumsiness of her statement, as though she were saying: ‘Yes, I know; but I can’t be bothered to make it plausible for you, because, you see, it’s true.” Our identification is so complete, we feel it to be so obvious that this bottled-up nucleus of energy (which becomes you or me) simply has to tell the story, that we hardly notice that now and again we are addressed as ‘ Reader ’.

One cannot claim for Fane Eyre that it is a supremely great book, because a great book records, and is in itself, a fresh exploration of reality: but it is a very good book, one which has, after all, lasted through a century of evergrowing popularity, and may last a good deal longer, partly because it is as honest a self-portrait as can be, of a person by no means negligible; and partly because it so unfalteringly presents, as principles that work, the familiar values on which our civilisation is in the main founded, the Christian social values. The matter, however, is more complicated, more fascinating than that.

As far as we can make out in trying to disentangle the mysterious process of bringing into literary being, there are

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INTRODUCTION Il two creative crucibles in this book: the world of fantasy built up by, lived in, and written about by the Brontés, and which we can call generally ‘ Angria’; and what in vulgar psychological jargon we call wish-fulfilment. The latter, we know, fairly commonly provides the creative impulse with its base matter: the former, to the degree lived in by Charlotte and Emily Bronté, is a very rare, perhaps a unique experience. No doubt most children, at one time or another, possess a fancy world, but it can very seldom last as Angria did, to so advanced an age, and all the while so vividly, even with the force of an obsession. The figures of that world were as visible to her as those of the normal one, as we can judge from the fragmentary diary she kept when teaching at Miss Wooler’s school. One entry reads: ‘...I quite seemed to see with my bodily eyes a lady standing in the hall of a gentleman’s house as if waiting for someone. It was dusk, and there was the dim outline of antlers, with a hat and a rough great-coat upon them. She had a flat candlestick in her hand and seemed coming from the kitchen, or some such place...’ If it was largely her brother Branwell who wrote the history of Angria, it was Charlotte who saw what happened to the figures in it, saw with a terrifying clarity of physical vision she was able to transfer on to paper.

So equally much on the same level as her daily life was this world, that the two are mingled in her novels. Angrian figures—modified—appear in Jane Eyre: the Reeds, Adéle, Rochester himself, and, as two personalities merged into one, Rochester’s lunatic wife.* Certain scenes, moreover, are rehandled for her new purpose, among others Rochester’s ‘ teasing ’ of Jane when he lets her think that he is going to marry Blanche Ingram, and, later, her refusal to become his mistress. And into the proud, a-moral, scornful, semi-aristocratic world of Angria penetrates the insignificant-seeming governess, Miss Eyre: she breaks up this world, it crumbles before her, she conquers it. Thus Charlotte Bronté’s wish-fulfilment goes to the creation of another ‘series of values, which interpenetrates the

* Those familiar with Miss Fannie Ratchford’s admirable books, The Bronté’s Web of Childhood and Legends of Angria, will realise how much I am indebted to her for the content of these two paragraphs.

others. One could go on for hours speculating enthralled on this subject: but we must pull ourselves up, remembering that it is, after all, speculation. We catch glimpses, we grope at pointers, not knowing enough either about Charlotte Bronté or about the creative process, to dare affirm.

Yet we can legitimately, to some extent, follow out the wish-fulfilment, for it is in the treatment of that, we shall find, that the technical skill of the novel resides— there, and in the extraordinarily strong pictorial sense nourished, one would think, in the best tradition of English romantic painting. How, we ask ourselves, in spite of almost ludicrous naiveté, does Charlotte Bronté manage to grasp us by the scruff of the neck and force us to be Jane Eyre (irrespective, I repeat, of age or sex)? And the first crude answer would seem to be that from the very beginning she makes us so passionately hate what is opposed to Jane, hate it as an evil thing, that we long to escape from it. ‘ It’s so unfair,’ we feel: and all the way through, from the very first, it is the big, accepted, sentimental values that she appeals to.

So then, from the moment that David Jane Eyre flares out at Goliath Mrs. Reed, we are entirely on her side; we have already become her, and thenceforward identify ourselves with her. The business of living appears as a tremendously zestful bit of play. We (or Jane) may lose a trick or two, but Jane (or we) will finally win tke rubber. Here it is that the autobiographical method gains a great advantage—or, if you are rigorous, carries off a mean deception—because we know that unless everything was going to come more or less right in the end, the book, obviously, could not have been written in that tone. So the supporting ethos behind the whole story is the sense of life being a game—no, not a battle,—which we know we cannot lose: and we know it (here wish-fulfilment violently assaults Angria) because we stick to the rules, of integrity, fearless speaking out, attention to duty, humility, and so on, in fact precisely the rules so beautifully ignored in Angria, and for disregarding which the Angrians who have strayed into this book duly and lamentably suffer. The crushed orphan-governess has her day-dreams fulfilled by

- adherence to the rules, together with a great deal of luck, as she would be the first to admit. Yet however melodramatic the presentation in some ways is, the whole has to a high degree the validity of actual life, because an opposing set, or even differing sets, of values are implicitly acknowledged to exist. And beyond that again the supreme romantic value of, to use Keats’s phrase, the holiness of the heart’s affections is insisted upon.

That is the final triumph, the summit of the wish-fulfilment: to achieve, to experience, that value which is a thousand times worth all the others. And in its details, as it is worked out for Jane Eyre, how satisfactory it is! The commonplace wish-fulfilment, say the rich, handsome husband with his country mansion, would not have done, for Jane would still have been what Charlotte Bronté was desperate not to be, dependent. But now, with her own income, with herself, not ordinarily speaking very beautiful, physically superior to her maimed and blinded husband, she is at least his equal. It is not the morbid pleasure of self-sacrifice she enjoys; she was perfectly truthful when she told Rochester that she was sacrificing nothing.

The most profoundly interesting thing in the whole book is that she had been keenly tempted to sacrifice herself, in those great scenes with St. John Rivers, the greatest in the book, possibly, where the voice of genius is most plainly heard. It had been a tremendous temptation, for St. John had sensed in her, and he was partly right, ‘ a soul that revelled in the flame and excitement of sacrifice’: and she nearly, oh so nearly! succumbs to the idea, and to the strange cold beauty of the tempter. This is the most subtle point of art in the whole book; here, for a few pages, we are not Jane Eyre: we are detached, and watch with an infinite curiosity—and, surely, tenderness? It is thus we can realise that what made the temptation worse, as ‘ the analysis of his nature was proceeding before my eyes,’ was the discovery that he was not, after all, her superior. ‘I felt his imperfection and took courage. I was with an equal...’ It was after this revelation (the brilliant psychology of it makes one gasp) that her resistance nearly collapsed, would have collapsed but for the supernatural call,* since to be the equal of the dominating male, Rochester or Rivers, that was the glory. ‘It is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet equal—as we are!’ This was the way that Jane had proposed to Rochester, according to the latter. ‘ You showed in the cool moonlight last night, when you mutinied against fate, and claimed your rank as my equal. Janet, by-the-bye, it was you who made me the offer.” To which the astonishing Jane answers, ‘Of course I did.’

It must be clear to any alert readers what kind of wishes in their own selves are fulfilled in Jane Eyre; and since these come into play at the very beginning, and continue to the end, that is almost explanation enough of why the book is popular, But, of course, there is more than mere enticing subject-matter in any work of art, and one of the questions we have to ask ourselves is: how did Charlotte Bronté overcome the difficulties of the autobiographical form? How far does she manage to give us the illusion of truth—the essential illusion, however temporary— seeing that by her method we get only one report, of a person or of a scene, and a biased view of the narrator herself? Also, seeing that by this method everything is necessarily seen in retrospect, how does she get the poignancy without which much of the story would be dolefully insipid ?

Henry James, decrying this form, * which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, and the cheap’; which “has no authority, no persuasive or convincing force,’ and lacks a strong and disinterested grasp of truth and reality, yet gave it validity in the fantastic and romantic, citing Zane Eyre as an example of its successful use. The implication is that the romantic and fantastic—there is a strong element of fantasy in this work—need not be vouched for. No: all that need be vouched for is the truth of the narrator’s feelings while telling the story. ‘I don’t give a fig for the hero’s report as an account of the matter,’ James says in another place. But then, what we are con-

_* An Angrian echo this; though the telepathic call exists in Eng” lish fiction as early as Moll Flanders, cerned with is the hero’s account; not of the matter, but of himself, of his attitude. So long as we can be well and truly trapped into identifying ourselves with the narrator, then everything is true, for all that matters is the emotions. We realise from the start that we are prejudiced, that the Reeds are not really so monstrous, the Brocklehursts so intolerable, the County folk at Thornfield so inexcusable, not even, possibly, St. John Rivers so bleak: but the prejudices are part of ourselves. Objective truth there is of no account; what do count are Jane Eyre’s feeling, her moral attitudes, her sense of herself—our sense of our selves as we read.

And if we look at the general method of the book, we see that it is basically, in structure and in treatment, an adventure story, with an indomitable heroine, who after undergoing various vicissitudes, ups and downs, terrors and triumphs, wins through in the end. There are no tranquil moments: even when the surface is calm we feel something brewing underneath. In fact there is no prosiness in the work. That is not to say there is no waste, for all the nineteenth century superabundance is there, with however plenty of vigour and intensity of sentiment, imparted by the comment as much .as by the event. *“ Come, Miss Jane, don’t cry,”’ said Bessie as she finished. She might as well have said to the fire, “ Don’t burn! ’?’ It is by that sort of touch that Charlotte Bronté gets over - one of the main difficulties of the autobiographical form —the dimming of sensations in the memory. In fact she surmounts this difficulty by the almost continuous use of the dramatic. Scene succeeds vividly realised scene, and there is, one would think, the minimum of narrative. Even when she is alone, Jane Eyre makes drama out of her soliloquies: external nature too provides its personages in the drama—a blood-red moon, a lightningriven oak. So the moments of tension recur with rhythmic frequency: the vehement heroine is there all the time anything is happening, except when Thornfield Hall was burnt, and then the tone of the story is very properly lower, though the excitement is still maintained because what happened there was so crucial. And, as one is apt to forget with a book one has often read, Charlotte Bronté continually uses the element of surprise. Anyone reading it for the first time is continually eager to see what will happen next, with usually the agonised feeling of ‘ Oh, poor Jane!’ which is so like ‘ Poor me!’ A fresh reader no doubt shares Jane’s shattering surprise when the gutted shell of Thornfield Hall—so carefully approached—presents itself to her vision.

Besides, Charlotte Bronté uses to the full the advantage of the autobiographical method. A narrator, when telling a story about himself, can string any number of events on it, events which may be unrelated except in so far as he took part in them. Thus emotion can be made to succeed emotion: and since in the last analysis the form of a work of art is the structure of the emotions created in the observer, with this method the author can make pity, triumph, fear, hope, despair, glory and what he will, succeed each other at whatever interval and at whatever intensity the author requires. Naturally there are tremendous risks—‘ the loose, the improvised, the cheap’; but there are great rewards if the temptations are abjured, and Charlotte Bronté nearly always denies herself the cheap, though here and there we feel ourselves to be perilously near it.

Of course no amount of structure is of any use unless words create the living flesh. In the end it is style which counts, style which is, as T.E. Hulme said, a method of subduing the reader. Charlotte Bronté’s is not a chastened or exquisite style: it rushes impetuously on, and is sometimes repetitive. It all seems a little overweighted. Yet how admirable the style is for just this sort of book, which deals, as suggested earlier, with the big, accepted, sentimental values. And though you do not feel that thought is seeking for words, rather that the words drive the thought along, drag it into the open, make it formulate itself, there is enough intellectual quality in the whole texture, enough precision in the words, to help offset the otherwise too strong melodramatic element, from which all the realism of certain scenes, and the ultimate pervading common sense, do not altogether save the book. Why one feels at the end that the book succeeds, more so than any other book of Charlotte Bronté’s (though Villette has its excellences), is because in Jane Eyre she found the perfect medium for what at that particular moment she most wanted to say. The prose and the plot combine admirably to express what at that stage Charlotte Bronté felt about .the exciting and difficult business of being alive.

BonAmy DosREE