SOURCE: "'The Frenzied Moment': Sex and Insanity in Jane Eyre," in Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel, University of Wisconsin Press, 1978, pp. 13-37.

[In the following essay, Rigney maintains that in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Bronte suggests an association between sexuality and the loss of one's identity, and consequently, one's sanity.]

… the lunatic asylum is yellow.

On the first floor there were
women sitting, sewing;
they looked at us sadly, gently,
answered questions.

On the second floor there were
women crouching, thrashing,
tearing off their clothes, screaming;
to us they paid little attention.

On the third floor
I went through a glass-panelled
door into a different kind of room.
It was a hill, with boulders, trees, no houses.

… the air
was about to tell me
all kinds of answers.

Margaret Atwood's "Visit to Toronto with Companions," The Journals of Susanna Moodie

In the deep shade, at the further end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.¹

Charlotte Brontë presents this vision of desexed and dehumanized insanity in Jane Eyre as Bertha Mason, Rochester's lunatic wife. For ten years, she has been hidden and confined in a denlike room in the attic of Thornfield Hall, where she paces and snarls and howls her tragic and preternatural laugh. Her form is grotesque; her eyes are "red balls," her face "bloated" and "purple" (370). Madness has caused this metamorphosis from human into animal, for Bertha was once "the boast of Spanish Town for her beauty" (389).

Critical interpretations of Bertha's symbolic functions in Jane Eyre are varied and sometimes contradictory. For traditional critics who see the novel as a form of religious allegory, the mad woman represents the evil in Rochester's soul from which he must be purified by purgatorial fires and the ministrations of a devout woman in the archetypal pattern of sin, suffering, and redemption.² In Freudian terms, Bertha is the evil-mother figure who prevents Jane's sexual union with the fatherlike Rochester,³ or she is seen to embody the idlike aspects of Rochester's psyche for which he suffers symbolic castration, blindness being the punishment for sexual crime since Oedipus.⁴

However, Bertha is as much a doppelgänger for Jane as for Rochester: she serves as a distorted mirror image of Jane's own dangerous propensities toward "passion," Brontë's frequent euphemism for sexuality. Bertha embodies the moral example which is the core of Brontë's novel—in a society which itself exhibits a form of psychosis in its oppression of women, the price paid for love and sexual commitment is insanity and death, the loss of self. Female ontological security and psychological survival in a patriarchal Victorian age, Brontë maintains, can be achieved only through a strong feminist consciousness and the affirmation of such interdependent values as chastity and independence.

Many modern psychologists, like R. D. Laing, state that societies themselves can manifest symptoms of psychosis.⁵ The Victorian social system, as described by Helene Moglen in her biography of Brontë, reflects a collusive madness in its sexual politics:

The advent of industrialization and growth of the middle class was accompanied by a more diffuse yet more virulent form of patriarchy than any that had existed before. As men became uniquely responsible for the support of the family, women became "possessions," identified with their "master's" wealth. The status of the male owner derived from the extent of his woman's leisure time and the degree of her emotional and physical dependence upon him. Sexual relationships followed a similar pattern of dominance and submission. Male power was affirmed through an egoistic, agressive, even violent sexuality. Female sexuality was passive and self-denying. The woman, by wilfully defining herself as "the exploited," as "victim," by seeing herself as she was reflected in the male's perception of her, achieved the only kind of control available to her. Mutuality was extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.⁶

All male characters in Jane Eyre, to a greater or lesser extent depending on their area of influence, are agents of such a sexually oppressive system. John Reed, the Reverend Brocklehurst, Rochester, and St. John Rivers, each of whom is dominant in one of the successive landscapes which make up the novel's progress, become a single symbol of tyranny as they share a common conscious or subconscious desire to render Jane an object, a Bertha, something less than a human being. Brontë indicates that, were Jane to succumb, to allow her will to be usurped, she as a sexual and human identity would cease to exist, just as Bertha Mason has ceased to exist in both human and sexual terms.

Jane first learns about female powerlessness from her guardian's son, who is also her cousin, John Reed. Like most of Brontë's male characters, he is the sole male in a female community, the members of which accept the role of self-abnegation deemed rational for women by society, and accordingly pamper and indulge their male relative. Jane, for a time, grudgingly assumes the traditional role, as John summons her to receive punishment for an imagined crime:

Habitually obedient to John, I came up to his chair: he spent some three minutes in thrusting out his tongue at me as far as he could without damaging the roots: I knew he would soon strike, and while dreading the blow, I mused on the disgusting and ugly appearance of him who would presently deal it…. (7)

But Jane is not always "rational" and must retaliate against such obvious sexual threats: "Wicked and cruel boy! … You are like a murderer—you are like a slave driver—you are like the roman emperors!" (8) She bloodies John's nose and is punished, just as Bertha is later to be punished for analogous acts of revenge, by confinement. During her imprisonment in "the red room," significantly a color associated with passion and a place associated with her uncle's death, Jane experiences a "species of fit" (16), a temporary madness and loss of consciousness. Jane's own reflection in the great mirror which dominates the room contributes to her hysteria.

Moglen describes this episode as one in which "the principle of irrationality is given concrete form,"⁷ and in which Jane "loses her sense of the boundaries of her identity."⁸ Mrs. Reed tells Jane that she can be liberated only "on the condition of perfect submission and stillness" (16), that is, on the condition of "sane" behavior.

Reverend Brocklehurst is also a lone male oppressor in a female society, that of Lowood Institution. Jane's first impression of him is one of tremendous phallic impact: he was "a black pillar … a straight, narrow, sable-clad shape standing erect on the rug: the grim face at the top was like a carved mask, placed above the shaft by way of capital" (33). For the second time, Brontë associates male sexuality with cruelty and even death. But unlike John Reed, who only seems to Jane to be a murderer, Brocklehurst is in fact guilty of indirectly causing the deaths of numbers of his charges at the school. He starves their bodies, chastizes their souls with threats of damnation and hellfire, symbolically desexes them by cutting their hair, and generally forces them into submission. Jane escapes the contagious typhoid which kills many of the debilitated inmates of Lowood by a self-imposed isolation in the surrounding woods and valleys.

An analogous withdrawal, and also self-imposed, will again save Jane from annihilation, this time psychological, in the next phase of the novel. Thornfield Hall is dominated by the Byronic figure of Rochester, again the only male in residence. In spite of the fact that Rochester is at times gratuitously cruel in his attempts to provoke Jane's jealousy, that he lies on a number of occasions, and that he is attempting the social and religious crime of bigamy, Jane is profoundly tempted to surrender her very self to the magnetism, the sexuality, the male charisma that is Rochester. Brontë has frequently indicated that Jane's longing for love is so intense as to be self-destructive. Jane has confided to her friend Helen Burns:

… if others don't love me, I would rather die than live—I cannot bear to be solitary and hated, Helen. Look here; to gain some real affection from you, or Miss Temple, or any other whom I truly love, I would willingly submit to have the bone of my arm broken, or to let a bull toss me, or to stand behind a kicking horse, and let it dash its hoof at my chest…. (80)

Brontë's own letter to the beloved Monsieur Heger bespeaks a painfully similar state of emotion.

I know that you will be irritated when you read this letter. You will say once more that I am hysterical (or neurotic)—that I have black thoughts, etc. So be it, monsieur, I do not seek to justify myself; I submit to every sort of reproach. All I know is, that I cannot, that I will not, resign myself to lose wholly the friendship of my master. I would rather suffer the greatest physical pain than always have my heart lacerated by smarting regrets. If my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely I shall be altogether without hope; if he gives me a little—just a little—I shall be satisfied—happy; I shall have a reason for living on, for working.

Monsieur, the poor have not need of much to sustain them—they ask only for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table. But if they are refused the crumbs they die of hunger.⁹

Similar images of hunger and starvation recur throughout Jane Eyre. Margot Peters, in Charlotte Brontë: Style in the Novel, sees such references as indicative of Jane's sexual and emotional deprivation.¹⁰ Frequent references to cold and the desire for warmth serve the same function. But the fire that is Rochester's passion, and Jane's as well, becomes volcanic in its intensity: like Brocklehurst's hellfire, it consumes rather than warms and is thus perceived by Brontë as ultimately dangerous.

Brontë's frequent use of fire symbolism to represent passion and sexuality also has psychological significance. Laing has written in The Divided Self that ontologically insecure people are in constant dread of what he calls "engulfment," the sense that one may lose one's self in the identity of another. This fear, writes Laing, is often expressed in images of both burning and drowning: "Some psychotics say in the acute phase that they are on fire, that their bodies are being burned up … [they] will be engulfed by the fire or the water, and either way be destroyed."¹¹ it is significant that both Brocklehurst and St. John Rivers threaten Jane with the fires of damnation, that Helen Burns dies an early and sacrificial death, and that Rochester frequently invites Jane to sit with him by the fire where both his touch and his glance burn like coals. Bertha Mason dies as the result of a conflagration she herself has set. Drowning, too, is a concern of Jane's: " … the waters came into my soul; I sank in deep mire: I felt no standing; I came into deep waters: the floods overflowed me" (375). Among Jane's paintings displayed to Rochester, presumably revelations of her inner feelings, is one in which "a drowned corpse glanced through the green water" (153).

It becomes increasingly apparent that what Brontë fears for Jane is that marriage with Rochester will not be a union of equals, but rather a loss of self, an engulfment in the identity of another, just as it was for Bertha Mason. Laing describes a similar fear, which he again attributes to the psychotic personality:

If one experiences the other as a free agent, one is open to the possibility of experiencing oneself as an object of his experience and thereby of feeling one's own subjectivity drained away. One is threatened with the possibility of becoming no more than a thing in the world of the other, without any life for oneself, without any being for oneself. In terms of such anxiety, the very act of experiencing the other as a person is felt as virtually suicidal.¹²

Jane's extreme sense of ontological insecurity, however, need not necessarily be labeled psychotic, as it is surely justified by Rochester's behavior during their courtship period. On hearing from Rochester that she is to become "Jane Rochester," to lose her very name, Jane states that "the feeling, the announcement sent through me, was something stronger than was consistent with joy—something that smote and stunned: it was, 1 think, almost fear" (325). Rochester becomes progressively more possessive, less cognizant of Jane as a human being with individual tastes and preferences. Despite Jane's remonstrances, he insists on extravagant gifts which serve to emphasize her economic powerlessness: "The more he bought me, the more my cheek burned with a sense of annoyance and degradation" (338).

The image of the slave, notable in Jane's encounter with John Reed, recurs frequently in her relationship with Rochester: "I thought his smile was such as a sultan might, in a blissful and fond moment, bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched…. "(339) Rochester threatens in response to Jane's withdrawal: " … it is your time now, little tyrant, but it will be mine presently: and once I have fairly seized you, to have and to hold, I'll just—figuratively speaking—attach you to a chain, like this (touching his watch guard)" (341). In the next chapters, Jane will witness Rochester seizing a violent Bertha and binding her with rope.

And, as in Jane's encounters with John Reed and Brocklehurst, Brontë again makes the association of sex and literal death. Rochester's love song to Jane intimates they will die together. Jane replies, "What did he mean by such a pagan idea? I had no intention of dying with him—he might depend on that" (344). Bertha's fate will confirm Jane's fear: Rochester paradoxically becomes both rescuer and killer as, in his very efforts to save Bertha, he precipitates her suicidal leap into the flames.

Virginia Woolf, too, saw Rochester as a figure of devastation, attributing his characterization to Brontë's own personal suffering. Woolf writes in A Room of One's Own:

The portrait of Rochester is drawn in the dark. We feel the influence of fear in it; just as we constantly feel an acidity [in Brontë] which is the result of oppression, a buried suffering smouldering beneath her passion, a rancour which contracts these books, splendid as they are, with a spasm of pain.¹³

Brontë fears for Jane's psychological survival as she apparently feared for her own, as is indicated in a letter written to her friend Ellen Nussey:

My good girl, "une grande passion" is "une grande folie" … no young lady should fall in love till the offer has been made, accepted—the marriage ceremony performed and the first half year of wedded life has passed away—a woman may then begin to love, but with great precaution—very coldly—very moderately—very rationally—if she ever loves so much that a harsh word or a cold look from her husband cuts her to the heart—she is a fool—if ever she loves so much that her husband's will is her law—and that she has got into the habit of watching his looks in order that she may anticipate his wishes, she will soon be a neglected fool.¹⁴

It is possible that Rochester's need to reduce Jane to the state of object indicates an insecurity of his own. Jane's very virginity and inexperience are perhaps the qualities which most attract Rochester because he perceives them to be those most opposite to Bertha's. Bertha's sexuality, her capacity for passion, apparently presented Rochester with real difficulties. Bertha possessed, Rochester tells Jane, "neither modesty, nor benevolence, nor candour, nor refinement in her mind or manners" (389). She was "coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile" (390). "Her vices sprang up fast and rank," and she demonstrated "giant propensities," being "intemperate and unchaste." Her nature was "the most gross, impure, depraved I ever saw" (391). Rochester comes to despise Bertha's very geographical origin, its lush, tropical refulgence being associated with her sexual personality.

Adrienne Rich, in an article entitled "Jane Eyre: Temptations of a Motherless Woman," provides a possible explanation for Rochester's attitude toward his wife:

The 19th century loose woman might have sexual feelings, but the 19th century wife did not and must not. Rochester's loathing of Bertha is described repeatedly in terms of her physical strength and her violent will—both unacceptable qualities in the 19th century female, raised to the nth degree and embodied in a monster.¹⁵

Rochester further inadvertently reveals what might be seen as his own sexual inadequacy as he explains to Jane his chain of mistresses: "I tried dissipation—never debauchery: that I hated, and hate" (397). Moglen's psychosexual analysis of the Byronic hero in general is illuminating in Rochester's case: "Always intrinsically connected to man's insecurity concerning his own sexuality, the fear of women is particularly pronounced in the psychology of the Byronic hero whose need to prove his masculinity by sexual conquest drives him to extremes of behavior."¹⁶

To preserve his own sexual identity, Rochester must rob Jane of hers. He insists on associating Jane with the supernatural rather than with the natural, that is, the sexual. He refers to her repeatedly as "angel," "fairy," "elf," "spirit," and tells little Adele that he will take Mademoiselle to the moon to live in an alabaster cave. Even Adele is skeptical, knowing that a real Jane is preferable to an idealized image. Rochester also emphasizes the contrast between Jane and Bertha, the purity of one and what he sees as the result of gross sexuality in the other, as he calls upon assembled wedding guests to witness his justification for bigamy:

That is my wife…. And this is what I wished to have … this young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon. I wanted her just as a change after that fierce ragout … look at the difference! Compare these clear eyes with the red balls yonder—this face with that mask—this form with that bulk…. (371)

Bertha at this point, however, can hardly be seen as a sexual being, her very sexual identity having been lost with her claim to humanity. Jane later accuses Rochester: "You are inexorable for that unfortunate lady: you speak of her with hate—with vindictive antipathy. it is cruel—she cannot help being mad." Rochester counters, "if you were mad, do you think I should hate you?" and Jane responds, "I do indeed, sir" (384).

Nearly as complex and dangerous as Rochester is St. John Rivers, the clergyman master of Moor's End, yet another female community. St. John's masculine attractiveness, like Rochester's, poses a temptation for a sexually deprived Jane:

I can imagine the possibility of conceiving an inevitable, strange, torturing kind of love for him: because he is so talented; and there is often a certain heroic grandeur in his look, manner, and conversation (531).

But she also knows, from previous experience and from intuition, that love threatens the self:

In that case, my lot would become unspeakably wretched. He would not want me to love him; and if I showed the feeling, he would make me sensible that it was a superfluity…. it is better, therefore, for the insignificant to keep out of his way; lest, in his progress, he should trample them down (531).

St. John, like his predecessors, is seen as a potential murderer, both of the mind and of the body. On a literal level, St. John seeks to lead Jane to a missionary life in india, a place of such extreme climate, Jane feels, as to assure her an early death. "God did not give me my life to throw away," she tells St. John, "and to do as you wish me would, I begin to think, be almost equivalent to committing suicide" (528).

At the same time that he wishes to burn her body in india, St. John wishes to freeze her soul by denying her physical love. in his stern Calvinism, reminiscent of Brocklehurst's, St. John would deny Jane's sexual and human self by binding her in a loveless and presumably sexless marriage. "Would it not be strange," Jane asks herself, "to be chained for life to a man who regarded one but as a useful tool?" (531) As the predominant image for Rochester is fire, so St. John is associated with ice—both extremes threaten death or the loss of identity, sexual and psychological.

The slave image becomes associated with St. John as it has with other male characters. "His kiss was like a seal affixed to my fetters," Jane says (509). And again: "By degrees, he acquired a certain influence over me that took away my liberty of mind" (508). St. John, like Rochester, is seen in fact as threatening the self with engulfment:

I was tempted to cease struggling with him—to rush down the torrent of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there lose my own. I was almost as hard beset by him now as I had been once before, in a different way, by another. I was a fool both times (534).

Pushed to the extreme by St. John's insistence on marriage, Jane cries out, "if I were to marry you, you would kill me. You are killing me now" (526). St. John, reflecting his society's attitude that woman's role is to surrender to the male will, reproves Jane: "Your words are such as ought not to be used—they are violent, unfeminine…. " (526-27)

These very charges are those brought repeatedly against Bertha Mason. Critics have frequently seen her as "unfeminine"—as either androgynous or as a kind of parody of masculinity. Terry Eagleton in his study of the Brontës, for example, sees Bertha partly as a projection of Jane's psyche, yet, "since Bertha is masculine, black-visaged and almost the same height as her husband, she appears also as a repulsive symbol of Rochester's sexual drive."¹⁷ Moglen, for another, describes Bertha in this way: " … an androgynous figure, she is also the violent lover who destroys the integrity of the self; who offers the corruption of sexual knowledge and power—essentially male in its opposition to purity and innocence."¹⁸

Certainly Bertha's violent behavior—rending male antagonists with her very teeth—can be called "unfeminine." She has not, however, been masculinized, but rather desexed altogether, symbolically castrated in the same way that Jane's sexual self has been repeatedly threatened by Rochester and others. Bertha's opposition to "purity and innocence," too, is questionable. it is worthy of note that she attacks male figures, never her female keeper, Grace Poole, or Jane, though she enters Jane's room and leans above her sleeping form. it is on this night that Bertha tears Jane's wedding veil, which Jane herself has said is a symbol of "nothing save Fairfax Rochester's pride" (355). Finally, Bertha is the agent for Rochester's purification as well as his fall.

Perhaps Bertha's madness quite literally has a method, and, as Grace Poole has said, "it is not in mortal discretion to fathom her craft" (370). She behaves in such an "unfeminine" manner as many "feminine" people, like Jane herself, might find possible only in fantasy. Perhaps Brontë even suggests, with the depiction of the ebony crucifix on the cabinet door which hides the entrance to Bertha's den, an identification with the scapegoat aspect of the dying Christ (264).

But such an identification for Bertha is, at best, tenuous and possibly subconscious on Brontë's part. The figure of Bertha is, after all, a warning and not a model. A more sympathetic view of Bertha and a reinterpretation of her insanity occur in Jean Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea.¹⁹ Rhys has rewritten the mad sequences from Jane Eyre from Bertha's point of view, allowing her to tell her own story from the account of her childhood in the West indies through her marriage to Rochester and her eventual breakdown and confinement at Thomfield Hall. Rhys's Bertha, unlike Brontë's, is delicate in her appearance and feminine in her behavior. Even the name "Bertha," declared to be solely Rochester's appellation for her, is changed to the more musical "Antoinette." Rhys also dismisses the allegations made by Brontë's Rochester that Bertha's insanity is hereditary, and provides excellent alternative causes for both Antoinette's and her mother's psychoses. The mother has suffered a series of atrocities during a native uprising; Antoinette has undergone Rochester's prudish and cruel rejection of her passion for him. Rhys's Rochester is the unmitigated villain as he consciously inflicts the most insidious forms of mental torture.

In her imprisonment at Thomfield Hall, Antoinette is more pathetic than bestial, her periods of violence clouded by amnesia so that we never see her at her worst. She becomes more and more the lost child, the wronged innocent. Her fault, however, is the same as that of Brontë's Bertha—she has unreservedly surrendered to her passion for Rochester. Rhys's character, then, shares with Brontë's this basic similarity: they are both vehicles for the essentially feminist message that, whatever the sexual ethos, there is a danger of the loss of self when self-love and self-preservation become secondary to love for another.

In Brontë's novel Jane first sees Bertha's face reflected in a mirror, and a wall, after all, is all that separates Jane from Bertha in the setting for one of Brontë's most overtly feminist and didactic statements. Jane, like her double, paces the third floor of Thornfield Hall, longing for some unnameable form of liberty, experiencing a "restlessness" which would be deemed improper, even irrational, for the Victorian woman:

Who blames me? Many no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards….

It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. 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; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making purses and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex (132-33).

The next lines, which so disturbed Virginia Woolf in her reading of Jane Eyre and left her at a loss for explanation,²⁰ describe the laugh of the lunatic in close proximity: "the same peal, the same low, slow ha! ha! which, when first heard, had thrilled me" (133). Bertha, herself one of the "millions fermenting rebellion," longing for "action," and quite obviously suffering from "too rigid a restraint," perhaps laughs, along with Brontë herself, at Jane's naive understatement.

It is a similar kind of undefined restlessness to that Jane experiences which precipitates the temporary insanity of Lucy Snowe, the protagonist of Brontë's Villette, a novel which Kate Millett in Sexual Politics describes as "too subversive to be popular."²¹ Lucy is alone in a girls' school which has been abandoned for the summer vacation when she begins to experience extreme depression, "the conviction that fate was of stone, and Hope a false idol—blind, bloodless, and of granite core."²² Terrible dreams, Lucy says, "wring my whole frame with unknown anguish" and provide "a nameless experience that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the very tone of a visitation from eternity." Such dreams lead her to the realization that "my mind has suffered somewhat too much; a malady is growing upon it—what shall I do? How shall I keep well?"²³ Lucy, like Jane, does keep well, but only by an exertion of will and an affirmation of the self as indomitable. Kate Millett describes her in this way: "In Lucy one may perceive what effects her life in a male-supremacist society has upon the psyche of a woman. She is bitter and she is honest; a neurotic revolutionary full of conflict, back-sliding, anger, terrible self-doubt, and an unconquerable determination to win through."²⁴

Like Lucy, and like Bertha, Jane is, when driven, capable of "unfeminine" outbursts of temper and even of violence, and in these acts, at least partly, lie her survival. The Victorian adjuration to the female, "suffer and be still," is to Brontë's mind yet another weapon of patriarchal domination. Jane has, after all, punched John Reed, and she has told the subservient Helen Burns:

If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should—so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again (65).

The adult Jane has hardly changed:

I know no medium: I never in my life have known any medium in my dealings with positive, hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between absolute submission and determined revolt. I have always faithfully observed the one, up to the very moment of bursting, sometimes with volcanic vehemence, into the other…. (511)

Laing's observations on the feelings of the ontologically threatened person are perhaps relevant here. Hate, says Laing, can be a less disturbing relationship than love because it is somehow less engulfing. Liking a person, Laing writes in The Divided Self, can be equal to being like that person, or even being the same as that person, thus with losing one's own identity. Hating and being hated may therefore be interpreted as less threatening to the sense of self.²⁵

Margot Peters, in her biography, remarks on Brontë's own capacity for intense resentment and hatred. Peters quotes Bronte's self-description written in a letter to Ellen Nussey: "I am a hearty hater."²⁶ Certainly, within the scope of her novel, Brontë is capable of great vengeance. In order to preserve Jane's self from annihilation, Brontë annihilates the oppressors, systematically and thoroughly. John Reed dies a suicide as a result of his own excesses; Brocklehurst is socially discredited and disappears; and St. John, at the novel's end, is soon to find his martyrdom in death. These characters have been rendered strawmen by Jane's assertion of self.

Perhaps the greatest victory is that achieved over Rochester. Jane clearly surpasses her statement (which is also something of a threat) made earlier in the novel:

I have as much soul as you,—and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you … 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! (318)

Such a claim to equality, addressed in the Victorian age to a male and a male employer at that, is surely insurrection.

Ultimately, however, as Jane seeks out Rochester in the final chapters to find his house in ruins, his body crippled and blinded, his worst fears realized in the depletion of his powers of masculinity, she finds herself his superior rather than his equal. Rochester has leaned on Jane before: at their first meeting when he falls from his horse, later when Bertha sets fire to his bed, and at other intervals of crisis. Now he must formally avow his dependence, "just as if a royal eagle, chained to a perch, should be forced to entreat a sparrow to become its purveyor" (562). Significantly, Rochester now bestows on Jane his watch and chain, that very chain to which he had threatened to attach her during their earlier relationship.

Moglen maintains that, like Brontë's own blinded father whom she nursed as she wrote Jane Eyre, Rochester, at the end of the novel, is in need of a mother—not a lover. Jane can assume the role of what Moglen terms "the virginal daughter who has been magically transformed—without the mediation of sexual contact—into the noble figure of the nurturing mother."²⁷

Carolyn Heilbrun in Toward a Recognition of Androgyny provides a purely political interpretation of Rochester's fall:

Jane Eyre's demand for autonomy or some measure of freedom echoes politically in the cries of all powerless individuals whether the victims of industrialization, racial discrimination or political disenfranchisement. So we today begin to see that Rochester undergoes, not sexual mutilation as the Freudians claim, but the inevitable sufferings necessary when those in power are forced to release some of their power to those who previously had none.²⁸

Whether sexual, political, or psychological, it is a terrible justice which Brontë calls down upon Rochester. "My master" has become "my Edward" and Jane can aggressively announce, "Reader, I married him" (574).

More important than the victories over the male oppressors, and more difficult for Brontë, is the annihilation of the insane doppelgänger, the potential Jane-as-victim. She must be done away with both physically and as a shadow in the mind. Metaphors associating passion with madness, both of which Brontë sees as a loss of self and sexual identity, recur throughout the novel. Early in her relationship with Rochester, Jane warns herself that

it is madness in 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, ignis fatuus-like, into miry wilds whence there is no extrication (201).

In a world so dangerous to the sanity, so oppressive to the sense of self, one means of survival lies in being inaccessible; and chastity is a form of inaccessibility. Jane thus rejects the temptation to become Rochester's mistress:

I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by men when I was sane, and not mad—as I am now…. If I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane—quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot (404-5).

Peters describes Jane's chastity as "the source of that self-esteem which can keep her alive."²⁹ Jane celebrates her own physical and psychological survival:

… let me ask myself one question—which is better?—to have surrendered to temptation; listened to passion; made no painful effort—no struggle;—but to have sunk down in the silken snare; fallen asleep on the flowers covering it … Whether is it better, I ask, to be a slave in a fool's paradise at Marseilles—fevered with delusive bliss one hour—suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and shame the next—or to be a village-schoolmistress, free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England?

Yes; I feel now that I was right when I adhered to principle and law, and scorned and crushed the insane promptings of a frenzied moment (459).

Chastity, which Brontë often euphemizes as the "unmined treasure" of the body, and sanity, the mind's treasure, thus become synonomous.

In thus asserting chastity and self, rejecting the self-abnegating role traditional for women, Jane also rejects the authority of the male power structure. She seeks, throughout the novel, another kind of authority—that of the female. Adrienne Rich has suggested that Jane Eyre is the story of a search for a literal mother:

Many of the great mothers have not been biological. The novel Jane Eyre … can be read as a woman-pilgrim's progress along a path of classic female temptation, in which the motherless Jane time after time finds women who protect, solace, teach, challenge, and nourish her in self-respect. For centuries, daughters have been strengthened and energized by nonbiological mothers, who have combined a care for the practical values of survival with an incitement toward further horizons, a compassion for vulnerability with an insistence on our buried strengths. It is precisely this that has allowed us to survive….³⁰

The fact that Brontë, like Jane, was motherless lends a poignancy to this search for an actual, literal mother figure. However, unlike Rich, I feel that, within the scope of the novel, such a search is doomed to disappointment. There is hardly a female character in Jane's acquaintance who has not conformed in some way to social expectations for the female. Mrs. Reed, whose energies are consumed in pampering her son, rejects Jane and chooses to assume the role of evil stepmother rather than provide Jane with the nurturing love she longs for. On the occasion of Mrs. Reed's death, later in the novel, Jane reveals: "Many a time, as a little child, I should have been glad to love you if you would have let me" (300). Jane finds some grudging affection, motivated undoubtedly by pity, in the person of Bessie, the maid, whose song of "The Poor Orphan Child," however, serves only to confirm Jane's sense of loss. At Lowood Institution, Jane seeks love and tenderness with Helen Burns, but Helen is solipsistically caught up in her own vision of Christian stoicism and dies a martyr of self-denial, an act which Jane's strong survival instincts would never permit her to emulate. Miss Temple, the beloved teacher, also in effect abandons Jane when she leaves Lowood to marry a respectable clergyman. Diana and Mary Rivers, the sisters of St. John, arrive on the scene only after they are no longer needed as mother figures, and they too marry and are lost to Jane.

The only mother available to Jane is thus a metaphoric mother, virtually a cosmic force, who lives both in the universe and in the self. Jane sees her clearly for the first time on the night of her abortive wedding to Rochester. She lies alone in her room at Thornfield, as desperately unhappy as she had been in the red room at Gateshead, where there also occurred revelations of a quasi-supernatural nature. Now Jane communicates with the moon itself:

She broke forth as never moon yet burst from cloud: a hand first penetrated the sable folds and waved them away; then, not a moon, but a white human form shone in the azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward. It gazed and gazed on me. It spoke to my spirit: immeasurably distant was the tone, yet so near, it whispered in my heart—

"My daughter, flee temptation!"

"Mother, I will" (407).

The moon here undoubtedly represents, in accordance with long literary tradition, primarily chastity. Yet Brontë's images are never quite so simple. For example, a similar moon often precedes the apparition of the nun in Villette whose mysterious life had included some sin, presumably sexual, against her vows. Perhaps Brontë would be more in accord with the Jungian psychologist M. Esther Harding, who devotes her study Woman's Mysteries to an analysis of the moon-mother in ancient and modern cultures. Various moon goddesses, says Harding, have represented fertility as well as chastity; they are universally autoerotic, "one-in-themselves," belonging only to themselves.³¹ If we can assume such a complexity for Bronte's image, it is possible to conclude that the moon-mother is the voice of the feminist consciousness, a kind of inner voice of sanity which, unlike the traditional patriarchal God to whom Jane frequently pays lip service, affirms self-respect and not self-denial, sexual or otherwise.

Again, as Jane wanders the moors in flight from Rochester, she finds affinity with the cosmic mother rather than with the male God. This time the mother-goddess is represented by the earth rather than by the moon:

I have no relative but the universal mother, Nature: I will seek her breast and ask repose…. Nature seemed to me benign and good; I thought she loved me, outcast as I was; and I, who from man could anticipate only mistrust, rejection, insult, clung to her with filial fondness. Tonight, at least, I would be her guest—as I was her child: my mother would lodge me without money and without price (412-13).

Jane is thus so absorbed in her own search for the mother that she at least subconsciously rejects the role of motherhood for herself as being yet another threat to autonomy. Though the novel abounds in images of pregnancy and conception, as Peters has pointed out in Style in the Novel,³² Brontë spares but a few lines for the birth of Jane's own child. We know only that it is a male child who has inherited Rochester's black eyes. Jane's attitude toward Adele has been one of professional indulgence rather than sincere affection, and shortly after Jane's marriage to Rochester Adele is unceremoniously shipped off to school. Also reflective of Jane's reluctance to assume the role of mother herself is her recurring dream of the wailing infant which clings to her neck, strangles her at times, poses a terrifying responsibility in the form of a burden which she is not permitted to lay down, and always forbodes disaster. That which at least partly contributes to Lucy Snowe's mental crisis in Villette is her onerous duty as sole caretaker of an idiot child. Moglen attributes such feelings of obvious antipathy to the fact that Brontë's own mother died very probably as the result of excessive child bearing.³³ Ironically, Brontë herself was to die of complications of pregnancy.

Thus, Jane wishes only to be a mother to her self, and the authority she has sought in the moon and in the earth is after all but the mother within. Jane, at a moment of severe temptation, asks herself, "Who in the world cares for you?" Her immediate recognition is, "I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself (404). The female self, for Brontë, is an idea of psychological order; its preservation lies in the sanity of the feminist consciousness.

Notes

¹ Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Jane Jack and Margaret Smith (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 370. All subsequent references are to pages in this edition.

² W. A. Craig, The Brontë Novels (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 81.

³ David Smith, "Incest Patterns in Two Victorian Novels," pt. 1, "Her Master's Voice: Jane Eyre and the Incest Taboo," Literature and Psychology 15 (Summer 1965), 136-44.

⁴ Richard Chase, "The Brontës: A Centennial Observance," in The Brontës: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Gregor (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970), p. 25.

⁵ R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 12.

⁶ Helene Moglen, Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived (New York: Norton, 1976), p. 30.

⁷ Ibid., p. 110.

⁸ Ibid., p. 111.

⁹ Winifred Gerin, Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 278.

¹⁰ Margot Peters, Charlotte Brontë: Style in the Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), p. 108.

¹¹ R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (New York: Random House, 1969), p. 47.

¹² Ibid., p. 49.

¹³ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1957), p. 76.

¹⁴ Margot Peters, Unquiet Soul: A Biography of Charlotte Brontë (New York: Doubleday, 1975), p. 95.

¹⁵ Adrienne Rich, "Jane Eyre: Temptations of a Motherless Woman," MS. 2, no. 4 (October 1973), p. 98.

¹⁶ Moglen, Self Conceived, p. 128.

¹⁷ Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 32.

¹⁸ Moglen, Self Conceived, pp. 126-27.

¹⁹ Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (New York: Norton, 1966).

²⁰ Woolf, Room, p. 72.

²¹ Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1969), p. 140.

²² Charlotte Brontë, Villette (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 154.

²³ Ibid., p. 200.

²⁴ Millett, Sexual Politics, p. 192.

²⁵ Laing, Divided Self, p. 47.

²⁶ Peters, Unquiet Soul, p. 19.

²⁷ Moglen, Self Conceived, p. 143.

²⁸ Carolyn Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), p. 59.

²⁹ Peters, Style in the Novel, p.107.

³⁰ Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976), pp. 252-53.

³¹ M. Esther Harding, Woman's Mysteries, Ancient and Modern (New York: Bantam, 1973), p. 70.

³² Peters, Style in the Novel, p. 153.

³³ Moglen, Self Conceived, p. 21.