SOURCE: “Jane Eyre: The Tale of the Governess,” in American Scholar, Vol. 65, No. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 263-69.

[In the following essay, Bell focuses on what she describes as Jane's intense desire for independence, which the critic argues is the heroine's prime “social fault.”]

Although Jane Eyre is a love story that ends in marriage, everything Jane says about herself is calculated to show that she is not the romantic heroine for whom the marriage ending is a foregone conclusion. To begin with, she is plain; her lack of the requisite beauty of such a heroine is stressed continually. She is puny, her features irregular—and her unpromising physical attributes never fail to be remarked upon by everyone she encounters, and by herself. Even as a child, her appearance contrasts, like that of George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver, with a cousin's “pink cheeks and golden curls [which] seemed to give delight to all who looked at her, and to purchase indemnity for every fault.” But she is also different from the romantic heroine in her rejection of the defect—seen as a grace—of female helplessness. She is threateningly intelligent, forthright to the point of bluntness, submitting herself mentally to no one, not even when she finally does improbably win a man's love. Her unsubmissiveness, her independence is her social fault.

With Rochester as with everyone an urge to independence of mind possesses her to a degree that would be a handicap to the conventional Victorian marriage. Such independence is a threat to the literary tradition of masculine heroism—and, indeed, it is not surprising that when she does marry him, he is literally a cripple, reduced in manly strength, maimed and blind, forced to lean on her, to accept her guiding hand. Brontë herself could not conceive of male heroism surviving in its full splendor at the side of such a mate. But the first meeting of this hero and heroine occurs when he falls from his horse and, limping, must lean on her shoulder to mount again. He collapses again upon her shoulder when he learns with dismay of the visit of his dangerous brother-in-law to Thornton Hall. It is she who rescues him when his bed has been set afire by the lunatic Bertha. Even in the time of their courtship when he is his full self, she makes it clear that though she calls him “master” (and she will always call him that) she will not be a helpless parasite. When she discovers his deception on the eve of a bigamous marriage, she rejects his assumption that she is helpless, a bird in the fowler's net. “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you,” she says.

Yet dependence is the essence of her condition in the economic meaning of the word when, as a little girl, she is orphaned and sent to live with unsympathetic relatives. She suffers not only from the weakness of femalehood but from the further insecurity of the poor person always threatened with a pauper's helplessness. Her insecure position between middle-class status and that of those coerced and confined absolutely by poverty is already signified by the history of her father, “a poor clergyman,” like the novelist's father, the Reverend Brontë. The Reverend Eyre already had represented that vulnerable gentility combined with poverty which is his daughter's portion. He and her mother have both died of the typhus he contracted while visiting among the poor in “a large manufacturing town”—in, that is, the nineteenth-century city, the major focus of the new capitalist society which was creating a proletariat underclass as the century got under way. He joins his impoverished parishioners in death, dying of the infection of poverty from which his negligible class advantage had not been able to protect him.

But Jane does not willingly give up the claims of the superior class to which she belongs by right of birth and upbringing. With the Reeds she suffers not only the dependency of childhood and of femalehood, but the excruciating humiliation of the poor relation, someone who has a claim upon those who shelter her but pays for that shelter in the coin of shame. She suffers precisely because she knows the value of caste; she may be poor, but she does not want to belong to the Poor. Little John Reed, finding her reading, says, “You have no business to take our books; you are a dependent, mamma says; you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen's children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mamma's expense.”

The small boy is allowed to abuse her, and when she strikes back, she is reproved by the nurse, Bessie, for her “shocking conduct” in striking “a young gentleman, your benefactress's son. Your young master.” “Master! How is he my master? Am I a servant?” cries Jane—clinging to her title of gentlewoman even at the age of eight—and is told: “No; you are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep.” When asked if she would like to find some of her other relatives, she replies, having heard that they are poor: “I should not like to belong to poor people.” She adds, “I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind; and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women I saw sometimes nursing their children or washing their clothes at the cottage doors of the village of Gateshead: no, I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.”

She does dare to imperil her relation with the Reeds, nonetheless: “I will never call you aunt again as long as I live,” she declares to Mrs. Reed, and though the time will come, in the romantic turnabout of the plot, when she forgives her former oppressor and calls her “dear Aunt,” her casting out into the snake pit of the Lowood Institution is an expectable immediate consequence. This school (like the real Cowan Bridge School for Clergymen's Daughters which Brontë attended) is an institution for orphaned and unprovided-for girls of “good” family, and the treatment of its inmates is punitive in large measure; they are punished for an economic “fall” which is as disgraceful as the Fallen Woman's surrender of moral status—and implies, indeed, that such ultimate disgrace may be in store for them.

But Lowood turns out to be not only a place of punishment for Jane. Such education as Lowood provides makes possible a way of independence through self-support. She finds at Lowood at least one admirable teacher as a model and begins her own career as a teacher. Teaching, of course, was one option for such a girl as it was for Charlotte Brontë and her sisters. It meant modest independence in the place of dependence on one's relatives or a marriage motivated by the need for support. At Miss Wooler's School at Roe Head where she had been a pupil, Charlotte, at nineteen, began teaching, a drudging, confining occupation which she hated but which gave her the idea that she and her sisters might themselves establish a school of their own. With this aim, Emily and Charlotte went to Brussels to train themselves in foreign languages at the pensionnat Héger, and Charlotte stayed on as a teacher.

How inadequate a fulfillment teaching might be for such women as the Brontë sisters is, of course, made obvious in the late chapters of Jane Eyre, when Jane accepts a post as a rural school mistress after her rescue by the Rivers family. And yet teaching was distinguishable from the only alternative mode of paying work available to them, which was governessing, by the greater independence and dignity it made possible. Jane observes of her position, “In truth it was humble—but then it was sheltered, and I wanted a safe asylum; it was plodding—but then, compared with that of a governess in a rich house, it was independent; and the fear of servitude with strangers entered my soul like iron; it was not ignoble—not unworthy—not mentally degrading.”

In teaching the children of the humble farmers and workers of a country neighborhood, moreover, she heals, a little, her fearful shrinking from identification with the poor, which is the consequence, as has been seen, of her attachment to caste superiority. She feels a democratic kinship with the young minds ready to grow and develop and to challenge the presumptions of privileged refinement: “These coarsely-clad little peasants are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of gentlest genealogy … the germs of native excellence, refinement, intelligence, kind feeling, are as likely to exist in their hearts as in those of the best-born.”

Although she finds some satisfactions in this meritorious occupation, her unique personal capacities are not called upon, as St. John Rivers observes. What he offers her instead is another form of the marriage-ending, an invitation to become a missionary wife in India. But Jane does not see such a discovery of vocation as necessarily connected with marriage. Missionary work attracts her; she is willing to go as his “sister,” his fellow worker; but he is right to insist that this would not be socially acceptable. There were no single female missionaries. It was not even teaching, however, but governessing, to which she had unfavorably compared it, that eighteen-year-old Jane reaches for when she places her advertisement in a newspaper after eight years at Lowood: “A young lady accustomed to tuition is desirous of meeting with a situation in a private family where the children are under fourteen. She is qualified to teach the usual branches of a good English education, together with French, Drawing, and Music.”

In going to Thornfield to care for Rochester's niece Adèle, Jane will try the only other approved occupation besides teaching for the unmarried poor gentlewoman. Despite the greater constriction and deprivation of the governess's life, it might seem to prove again what she had lost, the safe domestic enclosure of home and family. But even in the home of so good-natured an employer as Rochester, Jane's position as a governess illustrates the particularly poignant condition of the “gently bred” woman who, lacking or rejecting the refuge of marriage, is forced to work for her living. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century and to a degree even in later decades, a governess was likely to be someone who suffered what modern sociologists call “status incongruity” in being neither a member of her employer's class nor exactly a servant. As a girl of slender means who is of neither the servant nor the master class, the governess was poised precariously on the divide between, nostalgic for the lost security of her own family and her original social position, in danger of collapsing into working-class slavery or even pauperism if she was, as was often the case, summarily dismissed by her employers. The governess was more in peril of such a fate than the household servant, who was traditionally supported in old age or infirmity by the family that employed her.

The plight of the unemployed governess poised in an acute form the problem of the “distressed gentlewomen” that aroused considerable discussion in the 1830s and 1840s, a period of worsening economic crisis and unemployment in England when gentlemen as well as others could suffer such loss of income as made it no longer possible for their adult unmarried daughters to depend on them. The unemployed governess became an embarrassment to the members of her class—as the distress of unemployed workers' daughters might not. It was a situation that led not only to the formation of a Governesses' Mutual Assurance society in 1829 but a Governesses' Benevolent Institution in 1841 that aimed to come to the aid of such unfortunate women. It led, also, to the beginning of higher education for them—the beginnings, really, of higher education for women—which might strengthen their professional qualification.

The possibility of pauperism raised an even more alarming spectre in the mind of the comfortable class: pauperism might lead literally to the ultimate in female degradation, prostitution, to which the unemployed woman, once a Lady, might be driven. This employment of her feminine attributes was an ultimate condition already dangerously intimated in her descent into the ranks of teachers and, even more, of governesses. More comprehensively than the teacher who teaches outside the home, the governess is paid to perform the motherly functions of protecting and caring for children and teaching them in their own homes, as the prostitute offers wifely sexual service for payment. In Jane Eyre the governess is the maternal surrogate for an orphan, yet governesses may be said to assume these roles even where the middle-class mother is present but has surrendered them.

The crucial issue was payment—the gentleman's wife was the proof of his affluence by never being involved in paying work, however diligently she might work in the home, as well as outside it in volunteer social service or religious organizations. The very definition of Victorian ladyhood included her completest abstention from the exchange of labor for pay. With the growth of a servant class and the prestige of visible idleness, female weakness and practical incapacity were the very signs of leisure-class femininity.

It was certainly paradoxical, just the same, that, though her status as a paid person degraded her, the governess was entrusted with the tenderest maternal function as inculcator of morality—which was why, of course, she had to be a Lady herself, so that the values of class would have been inbred in her. In her own childhood, when her own family had been more prosperous, she had herself had a governess. But the essential of femininity, the sexual, was denied her since she had the task of conveying to the middle- or upper-class child a behavioral code purged of sexual knowledge. For this reason she was, in a contemporary phrase, a “tabooed woman” for the gentlemen she came into contact with in the household in which she was employed, and also tabooed among those employed alongside of them in the same households. Nothing was more revolting than a fallen governess. There was literally nothing left for her, after her fall, than “the streets.”

Rochester's upper-class guests discuss governesses they have known, “half of them detestable and the rest ridiculous,” says Blanche Ingram, who, with her brother, recalls the nasty tricks they used to play on their own governesses, especially one who had fallen in love with the tutor. A governess's liasions even with a person of low class were held to present a “bad example to the innocence of childhood.” Perhaps in part because she herself is not definable simply as a working-class person, though she works, she “lowers herself” dangerously by violating the prohibitions against such class merger. And such social mobility suggests an even more dangerous possibility, her re-entry into her own class by an upward rather than a downward movement, by marriage to a man of the employer class. In Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, which is haunted by Brontë's novel, the undenotable evil of his governess's predecessor may be only that she has had a love affair with a servant, the valet Quint. But it may also be that she has been, like James's narrator herself, even more transgressive in falling in love with her Master.

Even the upper-class girls who seem so secure when they are first encountered at Gateshead by Jane are subject to the same anxieties of femalehood she has known. With the decay of the family, the profligacy of the elder son, the imminent death of the mother, the attractive Georgiana is more obviously an absurd, indolent person without any futurity unless she secures an affluent husband. Her more serious sister makes a telling indictment of female dependency and offers a prescription for rational living and the pursuit of the work ethic that, even within the middle-class household, enabled women to escape the vanity and uselessness of their lives, the endless make-work of repetitious chores, the busyness of hands always employed, even in useless needlework. This statement by a minor character in Brontë's narrative is important, irrefutable:

Georgiana, a more vain and absurd animal than you, was certainly never allowed to cumber the earth. You had no right to be born; for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength: if no one can be found willing to burden her or himself with such a fat, weak, puffy, useless thing, you cry out that you are ill-treated, neglected, miserable. Then, too, existence for you must be a scene of continued change and excitement, or else the world is a dungeon: you must be admired, you must be courted, you must be flattered—you must have music, dancing, and society—or you languish, you die away. Have you no sense to devise a system which will make you independent of all efforts and all wills but your own? Take one day; share it into sections; to each section aportion its task; leave no stray unemployed quarters of an hour, ten minutes, five minutes, include all; do each piece of business in its turn with method, with rigid regularity. The day will close almost before you are aware it has begun; and you are indebted to no one for helping you to get rid of one vacant moment; you have had to seek no one's company, conversation, sympathy, forbearance; you have lived, in short, as an independent being ought to do.

Such a desperate extreme of self-sufficiency is achieved within the bounds of the family at the cost of denying all dependencies of affection, however. After their mother's death, this pseudo-heroine of independence, completely washing her hands of any family claims, prepares to retire to a nunnery, renouncing marriage but also all ordinary social bonds. She and her sister are to be contrasted with those two other sisters who resemble Charlotte Brontë's own—the intelligent, generous-hearted Rivers girls who, when Jane first sees them, are studying German in order to prepare themselves as self-supporting single women, schoolteachers, or governesses.

The Rivers had been an old family, “gentry i' th' owd days o' th' Henrys,” as the servant Hannah says. But now they were poor. “Mr. St. John, when he grew up, would go to college and be a parson; and the girls, as soon as they left school, would seek places as governesses; they had told her their father had some years ago lost a great deal of money, by a man he had trusted turning bankrupt; and as he was now not rich enough to give them fortunes, they must provide for themselves.” And this, indeed, is what happens to Diana and Mary, with all the humiliating loss of dignity involved when they (daughters of the poorer north, like the Brontës) go to work for wealthy, fashionable families in “a south-of-England city, families, by whose wealthy and haughty members they were regarded only as humble dependents, and who neither knew nor sought one of their innate excellences, and appreciated only their acquired accomplishments as they appreciated the skill of their cook, or the taste of their waiting-women.”

Charlotte Brontë's ideal of female selfhood cannot be realized simply by the attainment of economic independence, however. To Jane, St. John's loveless proposal is shocking. Spinsterhood is preferable, even if urealizable in the vocation he offers her, that of a foreign missionary. But spinsterhood is not what she is made for—and even when she becomes an heiress we know that her story is not done, that she must be reunited with Rochester. From the start it is evident that her passionate nature can only be satisfied in love, however much (with her plain appearance and unsubmissive temper) she may seem a destined spinster. Brontë wants to show that Jane's nature can give and take most fully only in the ardor of a passionate and equal relationship. So she makes her seek some other sphere beyond Lowood. She wants her heroine to meet the hero.

Jane Eyre, of course, is a highly original variation upon a genre made popular in the nineteenth century by the real problem of the displaced governess, romantic “governess novels” which solved her situation by marriage. In some of these, the poor governess, who, unlike Jane, is as winsome as she is attractive, simply achieves by charm and niceness the appropriate reward of marriage to a man of wealth. But there were other novels in which the governess heroine's career is religiously conceived as providential, a pilgrim's progress through trial and temptation towards vocation, generally marriage to a clergyman. Thackeray, in writing Vanity Fair, mocked the design of the providential governess novel in his title, while exhibiting a wicked and clever heroine who climbed into high society by marrying into her employer's family. Brontë, who found herself unable to dispense with a marriage ending, also married her unique heroine to her employer, but complicated that outcome by richly altering her character and her aims. Jane may be regarded as a Christiana of a sort who experiences doubt, revelations, and spiritual trial, but she rejects the providential governess novel's outcome in the form of St. John Rivers's proposal. Hers is a quest for selfhood and not religious duty. Her religion is love.

It is at Thornfield that Jane falls into a dream that denies the class barrier between herself and the man whom she, like the lower servants, calls “master” (she continues to call him this even when they have mutually admitted their love for each other). At the outset, Jane warns herself: “It does good to no woman to be flattered by her superior, who cannot possibly intend to marry her; and it is madness to all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown must devour the life that feeds it; and, if discovered and responded to, must lead, ignisfatuus-like, into miry wilds whence there is no extrication.” She tells herself to look honestly into her mirror and see there the type to which she belongs: “Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain.” The first two attributes are social and economic, and the third prohibits the hope of any escape from such disadvantages. She reflects: “He is not of your order; keep to your caste; and be too self-respecting to lavish the love of the whole heart, soul, and strength, where such a gift is not wanted and would be despised.” Later, when Jane is about to marry him, Mrs. Fairfax, the housekeeper who has a family connection with Rochester but seems to have accepted a lower-class status without complaint, tells Jane disapprovingly, “Try to keep Mr. Rochester at a distance; distrust yourself as well as him. Gentlemen in his station are not accustomed to marry their governesses.”

Yet as her feelings for him grow greater and his interest in her begins to be evident, Jane makes the romantic claim, to herself, that class need not separate them after all. His upper-class friends have no real relation that can be compared with her own natural affinity to him:

He is not to them what he is to me … he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine,—I am sure he is,—I feel akin to him—I understand the language of his countenance and movements; though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him. Did I say, a few days since, that I had nothing to do with him but to receive my salary at his hands? Did I forbid myself to think of him in any other light than as paymaster? Blasphemy against nature!

Of course, if it is blasphemy against “nature,” it is also the social reality of class separation that only the romantic imagination can—in a fantasy—transcend. Brontë wants to see this transcendence take place, though she knows the unlikelihood of its realization in the real social world in which she had herself grown up. Jane must leave Rochester in order to understand this—not merely because he has betrayed her trust by concealing his marriage, but in order that she may experience to the utmost what her quest for independence might lead to. That abject poverty is a conceivable danger for Jane is shown in those astonishing pages in Jane Eyre during which, in flight from Thornfield, she wanders in the countryside for three days, starving, unable to find work or charity, suffering acutely all that loss of self, that separation from the roles and categories of society by which, alone, the self finds form.

These pages are powerful because the reader is compelled to learn, with Jane, what are the inescapable conditions of the very poor, to identify with those who have always lived at the bottom of society, those whose sufferings are more literal than mere nostalgia for lost status. And she must realize the inefficacy of the romantic will that aspires to freedom from social role and that would deny the force of any limitations or conditions altogether.

In Charlotte Brontë's own life, the quest for independence defined a role for women that had had only a few precedents till she and her sisters created it—that of a novelist with the highest artistic ambitions who was also successful in the market. In the case of her younger sisters, very early death cut off any hope of an erotic union that might combine with their desire for self-expression. Charlotte survived to fall in love, imprudently, with her married Belgian school principal, and she married only after selfhood—and her power as a producer of her own income as a writer—had been established. Then she married her father's curate, a marriage totally without romantic excess, a marriage if not of convenience, then of comfort. And isn't this the marriage Jane settles for, after all? She does not now need to marry in order to survive economically; she has, in a fairy-tale way, come into an unexpected legacy. But the Byronic glamour of Rochester is gone when Jane accepts him at last. He has been submitted to that necessary chastisement that has purged him of class and gender arrogance. His chastised maleness will look very much like a crippling, as, indeed, he is literally crippled. He is unable to see his wife, made blind to the visible world so that he may see more inwardly.

Jane Eyre is a novel that daringly confronts social reality yet opposes it with the author's utopianism. Jane is a realist, yet also utopian, romantic. Her creator desires her heroine's achievement of the utopian ideal of union in which men and women, rich and poor, are no longer categories separated by iron barriers. Yet the writer's truth-admitting sense is so great that she cannot, after all, award her heroine an unqualified victory. Brontë's ending secures her heroine, grants her independence in the only way that society as well as romance sanctioned it. When she inherits an unexpected fortune from her uncle, she also immediately releases those duplications of herself, the Rivers sisters, from enslavement as governesses. And because fairy-tale cannot altogether die, she marries at last the upper-class gentleman with whom she had fallen in love. But perhaps he has become her providential destiny, too, her unforeseen duty. The subdued Rochester, broken in body and dimmed in spirit, will, with her help, regain some if not all of his former powers. But it may be that one can regard this “happy ending,” along with other arbitrary improbabilities in the plot of Jane Eyre, as less important than the character of the heroine in whom the will to independence persists to the end.