SOURCE: Murphy, Sara. “The Trials of Vision: Experience and Autobiography in Charlotte Brontë and Charlotte Tonna.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 16, no. 2 (winter 2001): 199-218.

Autobiography and experience are inexorably linked. What after all is an autobiography but the story of how one has become who one is? One of the fundamental tenets of modernity has been that one's identity is created, shaped, informed by experience—of the environment, of others, of oneself. To put experience somehow into a narrative form is the autobiographer's task. Yet “experience” itself is not an unvexed category. Experience often seems a synonym for the authentic, for something made transparently available—or as Alexander Welsh has put it, “something prior to representation that still gets represented somehow” (199). In this essay my principle interest lies in the “somehow”; that is to say, how does experience get represented? What in fact does experience have to do with representation? Not only do I want to argue for the importance of examining the category of experience in autobiography studies, I also want to point out some ways in which experience and autobiography share a complex modern space and history. Understanding experience as a category of analysis, rather than a transparently available entity or as one existing prior to representation can help us read the formal and rhetorical stakes of the autobiographical text.

My focus here will be on texts by two Victorian Charlottes; the one, Charlotte Brontë, of course, never wrote an autobiography and in discussing her Jane Eyre (1846), I am not suggesting in the least that it should be read as her autobiography. The other text is the Personal Recollections (1840) of Charlotte Elisabeth Tonna, an early Victorian Evangelical writer and pamphleteer. Both of these Victorian texts raise questions about the forms that women's self-representation can take. Brontë's novel is subtitled “An Autobiography”; as she described the novel in an 1848 letter, “[Jane Eyre] is a woman's autobiography; by a woman it is professedly written.” The conceit of Jane's first person narration relies not only on the redeployment of the conventions of spiritual autobiography, familiar to Brontë's mid-nineteenth-century readership, but precisely on the fact that these conventions are redeployed in the context of a form that is quite clearly fictional. Read beside Tonna's narrative, which charts her upbringing, her conversion, and her evangelical work among the Irish in both Ireland and London, questions of the relation between experience and representation are thrown into bold relief. Read with the spiritual autobiography, the status of Brontë's novel as an extended reflection upon the genre of autobiography as it was available to women writers at mid-century comes clear.

I

Interest in women's self-representation is arguably rooted in a particular understanding of the relations of identity to experience; it is not accidental, for instance, that the “second wave” of feminism coincided with some of the earliest scholarly works on women's autobiographical writing.¹ The practice of consciousness-raising represented one sort of autobiographical work; through the sharing of experiences, women came to see that what could easily be perceived as individual and idiosyncratic was part of a general and politicizable condition of a class of persons in society. Or, perhaps more to the point, what was not perceived at all—so natural, so everyday did it seem—could come into view. Feminism long relied on the category of experience in order to constitute a political identity, yet recent feminist and gender theory has raised some serious questions about the extent to which the articulation of experience with identity may function to enforce precisely the structures of oppression that, for instance, consciousness-raising practices were designed to challenge.² As consciousness-raising itself suggests, the category of experience itself is by no means an unproblematic one, particularly insofar as it concerns the study of women's life-stories.

Joan Scott's important discussion of the experience as a category of analysis focuses on the evidentiary claims made for experience by historians. Criticizing the empiricism that underwrote the traditional historical method, historians of traditionally marginalized groups introduced the category of experience on the grounds that it was more supple and revealing than a narrow focus on a Rankian “things as they were.” But Scott points out that experience as a category of historical analysis can come to function in the same ways that were found to be so objectionable in empirical methods; experience, like “fact,” comes to be foundational. She argues that as long as experience is treated in scholarly work as self-evident, the ideological systems that produce subjects are occulted. “When experience is taken as the origin of knowledge, the vision of the individual subject becomes the bedrock of evidence upon which explanation is built” (25). This could be taken as an effective definition of the impetus underlying a good deal of nineteenth-century autobiographical practice—and certainly is at stake in more than one realist novel of the period. Late-twentieth-century efforts to make visible the experiences of those marginalized by dominant culture, Scott argues, tend to reiterate the conditions that situate individual subjectivity as the cornerstone of social and historical explanation, thus obscuring the status of experience as linguistic and situating subjects as somehow prior to experience. Scott offers the following way of reconceptualizing the category of experience: “Subjects are constituted discursively, experience is linguistic event (it doesn't happen outside established meanings), but neither is it confined to a strict order of meaning. Since discourse is by definition shared, experience is collective as well as individual. Experience is a subject's history. Language is the site of its enactment” (35).

That the category of experience should have come to function as a foundational category that situates the subject as a “bedrock of evidence” should not necessarily surprise us, however. When we look closely at the word itself, we find that it is as complex in its history as it is central to a modern epistemology focused on a subject that precedes language and representation. The word shares its etymology with “experiment,” coming from the Latin experior meaning “to try, to prove, to test.” Raymond Williams points out that in English before the eighteenth century the two terms were interchangeable; by the late eighteenth century, the word had acquired the meaning of “the consciousness of what has been tested or tried, and thence a consciousness of an effect or state” (126). From this point, “experience” comes to have its more modern meanings, which Williams distinguishes as “knowledge gathered from past events, whether by conscious observation or by consideration and reflection” and “a particular kind of consciousness which can in some contexts be distinguished from reason or knowledge” (126). Experience is, on the one hand, a mode of knowledge production: by developing a certain relation to past events, I will be able to discern general principles that can help me in the present or in the future. On the other hand, experience is associated with a present mental state, something that is by definition interior and carries with it an air of incontestable authenticity insofar as it is “the fullest, most open, most active mental state [including] feeling as well as thought” (127). Yet as Williams acknowledges, these two senses are frequently difficult to disentangle from one another.

What the senses of experience outlined by Williams do seem to share is a particular positioning toward the cultural commitment to the value of numerical representation and statistical knowledge that derives from it. Both senses are at stake in the kinds of scholarly work that Scott is interrogating in her essay. The two senses of the word experience carry with them the capacity to signify the excess, the remainder, of that knowledge which is understood as purely objective,³ attainable through scientific methods.

That remainder, the Romantics argued in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, may well be the only real knowledge worth acquiring. But as experience is juxtaposed—and opposed—to other forms of knowledge, such as that arrived at through the numerically representable, the types of claims that can be made for it, its evidentiary status, come under interrogation. One place where this is readily apparent is in the domain of religion, where the term “experience” has a special connotation; for Evangelical Protestants, particularly, it relates to the moment of conversion. “Telling experiences” is another way of describing the testimonial impulse. Although the conversion experience itself is transformative and necessarily private, it surely can, and in some cases must, be communicated. Insofar as this experience can be understood as effecting a particular subjectivity constituted through the authentic hearing of God's word, the experience itself can be understood as evidence of a providentiary agency: God speaking directly to the consciousness of an individual. Telling the story of how it came about is a second-level act of evidence provision, testifying to the efficacy of God. Experience, in this special use, shares with other instances of the term not only the connotation of a particular mental state but its transformative effects felt after the fact.

The example of Evangelical “experiencing” draws our attention both to experience's tight connections with testimonial and autobiographical discourses and, more particularly, to the extent to which it shares with the genres that lean on it an ambivalent and difficult relationship to claims of truth and evidence. Genre theory focusing on autobiography always finds itself, of necessity perhaps, concerned with the text's capacity to refer to what Philippe Lejeune once called “an unquestionable world-beyond-the-text, a real person,” and the truth of what that purported real person, the autobiographer, has to say (11; cited in Eakin 2). As Paul John Eakin has pointed out, definitions of autobiography have often been categorizable, however schematically, as either “anchoring it in a world of reference … or [picturing] such a task as hopeless.” Scott's interrogation of “experience” suggests a way to consider both reference and discourse without treating them as mutually exclusive. Insofar as experience is understood not only as discursively constructed, but also as a concept with a complicated history, it can help us break the apparent deadlock that Eakin describes.

In reading Brontë's novel alongside Tonna's spiritual autobiography, then, I am not suggesting that there is no generic difference between the two. Instead, what I want to do is to look at some possible ways that the distinction might be analyzed. If experience is discursively constructed, the most naive way of rendering the distinction is thrown into question. However, understanding experience as highly contingent upon discourse available at a given historical moment can help us think about the distinctions between autobiography and fiction in a richer and more effective way.

II

That a first-person narrative, especially one made by an appealing voice, could be both dynamically persuasive and dangerously false was a concern of the conservative essayist and critic Miss Rigby in her well-known review of Jane Eyre. Rigby criticizes Brontë's novel on moral grounds, but her deepest concern is to provide her readership with a lesson in reading narrative and evaluating testimony. “The tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre,” she proclaims (174). Of course, regardless of one's political sympathies, one might protest that readers certainly understood that Jane Eyre was a novel. Yet this is precisely the point, for in this essay, published in 1848, Rigby offers a theory of novelistic aesthetics that hinges on the evidence provided by fictional experience. She argues that the novel has a complex moral function, “especially the nearer it comes to real life”; it is “a common friend, about whom people can speak the truth without being compromised,” and thus functions as a mediator between people, rendering them relatively transparent to each other without compromising what Rigby terms “our national idiosyncracy,” British reserve and shyness (153-54).

Rigby imagines a world of isolated subjectivities informed by reading; in a society constituted by such subjectivities, it is difficult to know who one's neighbor really is. If indeed reading shapes subjectivities, if it mediates social contact and permits the detection of similarities and differences, it is vital to have uniform and stable protocols of reading. Rigby pursues a comparison between the “irregular Autobiography” of Jane Eyre with the sweeping third-person narrative of Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Thackeray's text offers an example of worthy novelistic aesthetics insofar as it is a “literal photograph of the manners and habits of the nineteenth century.” Because the reader sees through the eyes of Thackeray's narrator not only Becky Sharp's actions and their consequences, but her motivations as well, we can truly know who Becky Sharp is. Rigby believes that there is no chance Becky will gain the reader's pity. While she, like Jane Eyre, came into the world “tryingly placed,” the reader will perceive that Becky's difficulties stem from her lack of “letters of credit upon those two great bankers of Humanity, Heart and Conscience,” and not because she lacked more material authorization (157). Precisely because her crimes have to do with subterfuge and hypocrisy, she is the perfect example of life's major danger, which is not “the evil that we see” but the kind that hides beneath the surface and might even be inmixed with good. Rigby explains: “For it is only in fictitious characters which are highly colored for one definite object, or in notorious personages viewed from a distance, that the course of the true moral can be seen to run straight—once bring the individual with his life and circumstances closely before you, and it is lost to the mental eye in the thousand pleas and witnesses, unseen and unheard before, which rise up to overshadow it” (156). The problem is not only that Rigby feels that Jane herself expresses “a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself,” it is that the novel with its intimate first-person narrative—“Reader, I married him”—offers none of this distance. It is a narrative “of genuine power and horrid taste. Both together have assisted to gain the great popularity it has enjoyed” (167). And one might add that the two are inextricably connected; Rigby spends a fair amount of time impugning Jane's veracity as a witness to her own life, pointing out that a skeptical reader should see that Jane's assessment of her situation and her qualities as a person is skewed; where she thinks she has “perfect tact and wondrous penetration” Rigby sees only their “positive contrasts” (168). It is all too easy, Rigby worries, for a reader to be deluded by Jane Eyre's narration of her own life, precisely because of “the wonderful reality of [Jane's] thoughts and descriptions” (168).

Rigby's attack on Brontë's text is fundamentally about the social and moral role that the novel should play in mid-nineteenth-century British life. But it also tells us a great deal about the evidentiary status of the first-person testimony of experience: Jane Eyre is problematic to Rigby precisely because it mimes the discourse of autobiography. Her championing of Vanity Fair's third-person discourse is analogous to championing circumstantial evidence over first-person testimony—or what Alexander Welsh calls “strong representations.” “By strong representations,” he writes, “I mean those … that openly distrust direct testimony, insist on submitting witnesses to the test of corroborating circumstances and claim to know many things without anyone's having seen them at all” (9). Rigby's reading of Jane Eyre rewrites the novel in the terms of “strong representation,” yet this is a paradoxical rewriting, since it is clear by the vehemence with which the critic condemns the novel that not every reader is as distrusting of direct testimony as she is.

III

Jane Eyre concerns itself with what might be called weak representation. That is to say, it is an exploration into the ways in which first-person narration can achieve credibility, the ways in which experience can stand as evidence; insofar as this is true, the rivaling claims of “strong representations” are never far away, as in the scenes at Lowood School and at Rochester's house, for instance. And in fact, they cannot truly be separated from Jane's development of her own skill at framing her experience, at representing herself in the absence of any corroborating evidence. This theme is developed through a sequence of scenes, culminating in the Lowood section of the novel. As a young child, Jane is interrogated on her life at Gateshead by the apothecary who visits after her experience in the red room. Distress and immaturity are credited here with her incapacity to “frame an answer” to the medic's questions (23). Feeling, thought, and words are hopelessly disjunct; “Children can feel,” intervenes the narrator, “but they cannot analyze their feelings; and if the analysis is partly effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in words” (23—24). Later, fully in command of her words, she is still having difficulty with the analytic distance that would permit her experience to be represented coherently. “Bitter or truculent when excited, I spoke as a I felt without reserve or softening,” when telling the story of her earlier life and mistreatment at the hands of Mrs. Reid to Helen (71). At last, Jane seems to approach a narrative mode that will permit her difficulties to be communicated in a way both coherent and, critically, more credible. During her interview with Miss Temple, the schoolmistress, she acquires “a language … more subdued than it generally was when it developed that sad theme” of her childhood. “Told with less of gall and wormwood than ordinary,” her story, in this case quite specifically testimony on her own behalf against the imputation of being a liar, becomes believable (71). Although she concedes that she will need corroborating evidence to present to Brocklehurst, Miss Temple immediately clears Jane of all blame.

Acknowledgment of the need for corroboration here is subordinated to the more vital message conveyed. Institutions, for this is what Brocklehurst represents in the novel, may demand “strong representations” in order to assert belief. But Jane learns another lesson here, which is that the testimony of experience can indeed be sufficient for belief, but that the representation of experience influences the truth value that listeners will attribute to it. Experience is connected to a kind of narrative performance; removing the “gall and wormwood” for Jane has the effect of creating a clear, connected, coherent story and this is the criterion, for Miss Temple and presumably now for the reader as well, of believability.

This exchange at Lowood is only one instance of a scene repeated throughout the novel in which Jane fights off social and sexual threats by endlessly reproducing coherent self-representations. Only her self-representation, the novel constantly reminds us, distinguishes Jane from the array of other women—liars, outcasts, beggarwomen, French opera-mistresses, and most significantly, Rochester's insane Creole wife, Bertha Mason, in whose structural positions she is perpetually being placed.⁴ Jane Eyre retains her identity as a middle-class subject by constantly creating it. Her capacity to control her own story will thenceforward be contingent on her recruitment of a mode of rhetoric and self-presentation marked by calmness, coherence, and a lack of overtly expressed emotion. The credibility of Jane Eyre as the narrator of her own life is dependent, not on any externally-verifiable referent or witness, but on Jane's ability to produce a narrative encoded as coherent by the text..

Miss Rigby's critique of the novel sought to undermine the power of this mode of self-representation by assaulting the aesthetics of the novel, attempting to demonstrate a distance between Jane as perceiving and narrating subject, and the world of the fiction. We might term this an ironic attempt by a sharp, if not sympathetic reader, since Brontë's fiction makes trenchantly clear that its heroine's subjectivity arises out of her mastery of a fundamentally aesthetic procedure. For Jane, the capacity to render a coherent account of her life quickly transcends the mere question of defending herself against charges of dissimilation; it becomes the condition of possibility for a work of world-making.

This is emphasized by Jane's own drawing, particularly the exercise in self-portraiture which she executes in anticipation of the arrival of Ingram family at Thornfield. Jane turns to drawing ostensibly in order to discipline her unruly desire for her employer, a desire she articulates as having “rejected the real and rabidly devoured the ideal.” She makes two portraits, her own made in chalk “faithfully without softening one defect,” and an ivory miniature of Blanche Ingram as she imagines her to be, a beautiful woman with “august and harmonious lineaments, Grecian head and bust” (163). But the project, designed to restrain the production of fantasy, simply reverses its terms; Blanche, whom Jane has never seen, is now firmly inscribed in the ideal and Jane, who has coded her desire for Rochester as ideal and thus to be rejected is, in all of her defective detail, real. When the lovelorn governess sees the real Blanche Ingram, she notes that the model corresponds “point for point” to her drawing. Jane has the power to constitute reality; the actual Blanche appears as an effect of her artwork.

Jane Eyre: An Autobiography—but “not a regular one,” as Jane points out (24)—argues for the primacy of first-person narrative of experience, but as it does so, it advances an understanding of experience as rhetorical and aesthetic. If the novel works to undermine a concept of experience as transparently available, it also challenges forms of induction based on circumstance which underwrite narratives which we can call, following Welsh, “strong representation.” These sorts of representations are repeatedly challenged, revealing not so much that, as Victorian legal experts were fond of saying, “circumstances do not lie” but that interpreters—including on occasion Jane herself—can be led off track by prejudice, stereotype or presumption (Welsh 15-17). The novel is structured around a play between visibility and invisibility—“the claims to know many things without anyone's having seen them at all”—most centrally figured through the figure of Bertha Mason, hidden in the attic rooms of Thornfield. As many critics of the novel have noted, Bertha is metonymically connected with other things unseen, not least among them Jane's mental states.⁵

One central moment in this is, of course, the revelation of Rochester's circumstances; that he is married to Bertha at the time he is preparing his wedding to Jane seems to be evidence not only for his criminality but his moral turpitude as well. And the sight alone of Bertha in the attic, Thornfield's devastating secret at last revealed, would seem to reinforce his loose purchase on the moral, but Jane's narrative of this draws attention not only to the ways in which circumstances do not speak for themselves but to the fact that even eye witnessing requires language for interpretation. After the abortive wedding, Rochester brings Jane, the clergyman, Richard Mason, and his lawyers into the attic where Bertha is incarcerated. After she lunges at Rochester and he wrestles her to a chair where he ties her up, he glosses the scene for his guests: “‘That is my wife,’ said he … 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. Wood and Briggs, look at the difference! compare these clear eyes with those red balls yonder—this face with that mask, this form with that bulk …” (297). This is the companion scene to the earlier one in which Jane draws portraits of herself and Blanche; here she is transformed into the idealized image of womanhood that her portraiture first hinted at through the contrast with the upper-class woman. Now, as Rochester brings forth the evidence that will subvert circumstance, Jane is contrasted with Bertha in terms that are not only specifically visual but also rhetorical. Wood and Briggs are not just told what they are seeing, but commanded directly to perform a particular intellectual operation: comparison.

Jane Eyre not only argues for the validity of first-person testimony but articulates it with the necessity of understanding experience as aesthetic and rhetorical and, as the novel does so, it puts forward a theory of self-representation. But Brontë's theory of self-representation must be understood in the context of her novel's intertextual relationship with one of the dominant models of self-representation contemporary with it. As a clergyman's daughter, Charlotte Brontë would have been especially familiar with the formal qualities and rhetorical objectives of spiritual autobiography and much of her novel, implicitly and explicitly, both rewrites and satirizes the Evangelical tradition particularly. Certainly we see this in the figure of Brocklehurst, the director of Lowood School, with his dream of making the girls “hardy, patient, and self-denying” (63). More importantly for us, the framework of spiritual autobiography is seen in the particular usage of Biblical quotation throughout the text and in the way in which Jane Eyre's notions of experience is articulated over against the model of experience defined in the Evangelical tradition. In order to clarify this, I want to turn now to an autobiography published just shortly before Jane Eyre, Charlotte Tonna's Personal Recollections.

IV

Charlotte Elisabeth Tonna (1790-1846) wrote her Personal Recollections near the close of a remarkable career as an Evangelical pamphleteer, novelist, and social reformer. At the dawn of the Victorian age, she was avidly engaged in factory and slum reform, with special concern for the plight of women and children workers. The shaping event of her life, which provides her epistolary autobiography with a sort of phantom center, however, is Catholic Emancipation in 1829. For, while she was born into an Establishment family in Norwich, she became an fervent Evangelical as an adult. Prior to Catholic Emancipation, she worked tirelessly if vainly to oppose it; afterwards, she spent her ink and her energy encouraging conversions. After her first marriage took her to live for a time in Ireland where she experienced conversion, her attention remained on the Irish.

While Jane Eyre stands as her own witness, Tonna's life story is itself intended as testimony to Providence. She offers her autobiography as evidence for the workings of a God by whose will everything is done, and whose aims can be dimly perceived by the faithful over a long period of time, if at all. But far from lightening the author's burden of proof, the structure of the providential narrative effects a displacement of it; to convince her mid-century reader of the workings of Providence, Tonna has only her own subjectivity and discourse. The clarity and confidence of the individual believer are fundamental standards of proof of salvation.⁶ Thus, producing interpretations of life events that persuade her audience that God, and not chance or individual will, caused them, requires that she present herself as a stable and clear-sighted.

The spiritual autobiography which has as its goal the defense of providential explanation finds itself in a similar evidentiary bind. By the 1840s, however, the vision of causality represented by providential explanation had become extremely difficult to reconcile with a world increasingly governed by market forces, especially for those writers, like Tonna, whose focus had fallen on industrial fiction.⁷ Within her autobiography, however, Tonna negotiates the problem arising from the collision between this mode of causality and the material conditions of her world by focusing on that which is most important to the Evangelical believer: her “mental and spiritual discipline.” As the story of one woman's beliefs and commitments, the autobiography avoids the incoherencies potentially immanent in applying providential explanation to narratives concerned with factory life. Furthermore, Tonna's recollections break off at precisely the moment when she is entering the parish of St. Giles, where she worked among the Irish in the mid-thirties. Avoiding discussion of contemporary London life, she can focus her narrative around a long-gone past. Her interventions with the Irish are displaced onto her personal relations to her foster son, a mute Dublin boy named Jack whom she converted from Catholicism, thus evading any direct discussion of the political opposition to the passage of Catholic Emancipation.

Tonna's autobiographical discourse is nonetheless shaped by the tensions arising from her need to remain consonant with the requirements of Evangelical testimony, a discourse that demands that life events be interpreted to demonstrate the unyielding faith of the autobiographer and at the same time, her recognition of the challenge her contemporary world presented to the notion of faith alone as a standard of proof. Providence is not only what justifies her presenting an autobiography to the public, but also that which justified her public career in the first place. Thus, if at one level, providential explanation appears to demand a standard of proof difficult to attain, at another the attainment of such a standard does much to obviate concern about female first-person testimony by elevating her to the position of an example. The effect of the exemplar is to invite the reader to a meditation on her own conduct and choices, such that, as Bunyan had put it, “others may be put in remembrance of what He hath done for their souls” (2). The possibility of identifying directly with Charlotte is neatly ruled out by the structure of the discourse itself.

Her text is composed as a series of letters to an unnamed correspondent, who has apparently “demanded” that she write her life story, and her self-representation is informed by strategies designed to emphasize her qualifications as a well-governed religious subject. Reluctant though she expresses herself to be, she is ostensibly convinced to write by the post-mortem threat cited by more than one literary celebrity in nineteenth-century culture: the desire to put forward an authoritative version of her life and opinions as a buttress against biographers and journalists. But the burden of literary celebrity is quickly counterbalanced by the “record of that mental and spiritual discipline by which it has pleased the Lord to prepare me for the very humble, but not very narrow, sphere of literary usefulness in which it was his good purpose to bid me move” (8). Literary fame may provide one rationale for autobiography or biography—but Charlotte Elisabeth would not have this were it not for the Lord's will. And the rest of her letters are devoted, not to demonstrations or references to her literary celebrity, but to the pilgrim's internal progress, “with whatever of outward things, passing events, and individual personal adventure … may be needful to illustrate the progress” (8).

As God justifies the entrance into a literary career, God justifies the writing of public autobiography. And while this is a story of interior progress, of the slow illumination of a pilgrim who miraculously avoids danger and destruction while trodding to the point where she freely accepts God as her savior, details of personal will, desire, dream and passion are excluded entirely. Her meeting, courtship and marriage to her first husband, for example, are dispatched in half a paragraph. Her husband is himself dispatched fairly early in the narrative; after their move to Ireland, he is re-stationed to England and she simply notes that she did not choose to accompany him, thus terminating discussion of the end of what was apparently an unhappy marriage.

Because Tonna's representation of her interiority inscribes individual depth as either a sinful nature blinded to the Providence of God or as a sinful nature choosing to recognize the workings of Providence, her capacity as a moral agent is delimited. But to the extent that it is limited, divided between the two poles of choosing God and failing to do so, her credibility as a first-person narrator is insured. At no point is she ever assuming any more authority for her life than that represented by her capacity to choose to see God's hand in her life's progress.

Unlike Jane Eyre, Charlotte Tonna does not—to quote Miss Rigby—“murmur against God's appointments” (173). In fact, her text exists in order to demonstrate the perfect organization and consistency of those appointments; more specifically, Tonna's aim is to manifest the degree to which she recognizes that perfection. Facts that might seem contingent are laden with meaning. The future anti-Catholic crusador notes the proximity of her place of birth to what was locally termed the “Lollard's Pit,” where the Queen Mary, Tonna explains, “burnt good people alive for refusing to worship wooden images” (18). Tonna emphasizes the inscription of her own life into a larger Providential text independent of her own agency. If Providence seems alarmingly consonant with Tonna's individual will, this consonance is represented as its complete supersession. “These things result either from God's free will, or from chance, or from something in us,” sermonized the well-known Evangelical Charles Simeon in the late 1820s. “The last two it cannot be” (Jay 23). The agency of Providence closes all differences internal to individual subjects.

Precisely in order to demonstrate this, she is under pressure to expel from her interpretations any sense of fancy or enthusiasm. Such flights of imagination were potential impediments to the proof of salvation, thus undermining the testimonial value of the autobiographical text. Peterson reminds us that a more literary Evangelical testimony, full of bookish reference, could be viewed as intended to stave off accusations of “enthusiasm”; at the same time, the Evangelical commitment to individual authority came bound up with caveats against an overly intellectual bent (25). In a sermon on “Divine and Human Knowledge,” published in 1841, Francis Close points out that “the most literate were most opposed” to Jesus Christ (50). While certainly an assault upon the Oxford movement, the anti-intellectualism suggested by Close's remark was also a complex centerpiece of a tradition that, in emphasizing each individual's capacity to hear for themselves the word of God, had to concern itself that those individual minds were properly disciplined to listen.

Thus, in charting out her early education, Tonna informs her reader that “you will learn how mercifully I have been preserved from doctrinal error in its various forms, through that full acquaintance with God's word, you will trace his marvelous workings in furnishing my mind …” (22). Long years before her conversion, she was readied for it through Bible study, through her family religion—although, crucially, there was nothing of Evangelical belief in either her mother's or father's beliefs. Describing herself as a precocious child, with an early interest in literature and writing, Tonna both sanctions her later career as arising out of God-given gifts and emphasizes the dangers of such gifts: “Satan, to whom these gifts are exceedingly valuable, marked me as one who would, if properly trained to it, do his work effectually within his own sphere” (29). The provision of providential proof is articulated with social justification of female ambition. God gave her abilities, and although such intellectual abilities come with their own hazards, kept her from those hazards by repeatedly placing her nascent intellect out of harm's way.

Very early, she discovers other books in addition to the Bible and becomes “entangled in a net of dangerous fascination” (28). Shakespeare, Milton, Richardson all engage her interest in turn, with the result that “reality became insipid, almost hateful to me … my mind became unnerved, my judgment perverted, my estimate of people and things wholly falsified, and my soul wrapped in the vain solace of unsubstantial enjoyments … when but for this I might have early sought the consolations of the gospel” (30). This phase, the autobiographer suggests, was not widely detectable in the family circle, at least as it commenced. On the surface, she remained the ideally well-behaved girl she had always been, but now, her complacency and obedience had an ulterior goal, for she knew that good comportment would be rewarded with a chance to take a book off to her room.

In terms of Tonna's position as witness, as well as the justification of her calling to a career in the public arena, the representation of this developmental stage of what we might call “dangerous reading” is critical. Such phases are conventional in representations of female development, from Lennox to Austen to Brontë; unlike these scenes of sentimental reading, however, Tonna is not interested in charting the social regulation of female desire into middle-class marriage. Rather than finish this period of girlhood reading with an entry into the “real world” of companionate marriage, Tonna concludes it with a bout of blindness, ostensibly brought on by medication she was given for another ailment, but attributed to God's desire to get her away from corrupting literature. In marking out her distance from this childhood consumption of secular reading material, she implicitly refutes any charges of imagination or enthusiasm which might compromise the coherence of her providential narrative.

The evidence of God's presence, for the Evangelical believer, comes not through pastoral authority or intellectual apprehension, but rather through individual experience. Yet it is critical to the Evangelical commitment to providential explanation that human senses be admittedly partial, incapable of any sort of global apprehension. Reading is central to the moment of conversion, but precisely because it is a question of a moment, and not a long space of interiorized reflection, that reading must be of a certain sort. Tonna's conversion is represented as underwritten by textual knowledge; her childhood schooling in scripture comes to her aid at the instant that “the veil is removed from [her] heart” (106). But it is her memory of the Bible, and not any physical apprehension of the text, that is key to her depiction of this central scene. Conversion is instant, direct, emotional: “Jesus Christ, as the Alpha and the Omega, the sum and substance of everything, shone out upon me just as he is set forth in the everlasting gospel” (106). The absence of the physical text promotes the utter immediacy with which “the opening of the understanding” takes place; what is implied is that the printed words themselves might almost serve as a blockade against such an opening (106).

And if, as Close insists and Tonna implies, the printed word does serve at certain moments within the Evangelical tradition as such a blockade, this is because print can give the impression of complete or global apprehension, thereby privileging the intellect and allowing it to drag the senses along with it. This is what happens to the young Charlotte enamored of Shakespeare and Milton. It does not happen to the boy Tonna raises as her foster son, Jack, and it is through Jack that this woman writer manages to figure the partial nature of the knowledge humans derive through their senses. Jack is mute, from a poor Irish family whom she meets after her conversion. That even a child who has no power of speech and a limited intellectual capacity should make the momentous choice of the “chaste spouse of Christ” over the “arrogant assumptions of the Great Harlot,” Catholicism,⁸ is for Tonna central evidence for the ways in which providential causality functions (143). The poor, disadvantaged Jack, according to her interpretation, is all the more able to hear the word of God over the din of the “Harlot” because the restricted nature of his senses keep him from the prideful assumption that he has a central view on the workings of the here-below. Faith demands the acknowledgment that one “sees through a glass but darkly” (I Corinthians 12).

It is Jack who provides what might serve as an epigraph to Tonna's Recollections, had she chosen to use one. At several junctures in the narrative, often where it is a question of denigrating Catholic clergy or practices, he is represented as quoting from the Bible in abbreviated form “God sees.”⁹ The full pledge to the completeness of divine vision implies the recognition of the limited and partial nature of human vision. And though it is difficult not to recognize, reading Tonna's account of her life, that the text implicitly claims a special purchase on precisely what God does see, the Evangelical writer insists that it is only through a constant affirmation of the sinfulness of human nature and the incompleteness of its apprehensions that she can constitute herself as an autobiographical subject. For the subject of the Personal Recollections is constituted in her subjection to the authority of God, an authority which can be perceived by but ultimately remains exterior to the autobiographer.

V

Experience, in the language of Tonna's self-representation, is not only the mental state associated with the moment of conversion, but the consciousness in the aftermath of conversion of one's life as shaped by Providence. Where little Jane Eyre must learn to shape her self-representations so that they are clear and connected narratives, Tonna's work demonstrates how the providential renders coherence even where it appears to be absent. Conversely, it is the absence of the providential that shapes Jane Eyre's experience—Miss Rigby was indeed correct—and precisely because of that absence, Jane is, as we have seen, under a good deal of pressure to learn how to frame her story. In sharp contrast to the spiritual autobiography, the presence of God in Brontë's novelistic universe is of the most distanced and mediated sort. Characters representing religious authority are consumed by anything but noble intentions; young Jane finds French verbs and German syntax easier than understanding simple Scriptural quotations; alone and penniless in the countryside, she appeals to the moon, and when she appeals to God at the end of the novel, Rochester's voice answers. Laced with Scriptural quotation and figure, Jane Eyre's discourse locates no immanent authority in the Bible. In fact, her discourse functions to displace such authority, rendering Scriptural quotation more an aesthetic strategy than a grounding of Truth.¹⁰

The dialogue that Jane Eyre engages with the tradition of spiritual autobiography is particularly resonant in the late sections of the novel, where Jane must make a decision about going to India with her newlyfound cousin and would-be husband, St. John Eyre Rivers. As the novel heads to its resolution, Jane Eyre is in a terrible quandary over St. John's proposal of marriage. St. John has, in fact, understood Jane's expression of ambivalence as a commitment to Providence: when she says “were I but convinced that it is God's will I should marry you, I could vow to marry you here and now …” (424), he dashes off happy to bed, convinced his prayers have been answered. And Jane remains awake, in a state of internal suffering not dissimilar from that described by Tonna just prior to conversion. Recalling the moment, Jane reports, “I contend with my inner dimness of vision. … I sincerely, deeply, fervently longed to do what was right—and only that. ‘Shew me—shew me the path!’ I entreated heaven” (424). It is, of course, not God that answers, but the disembodied voice of Rochester that Jane hears calling her in the night.

The conflict, of course, comes from her perception that St. John does not love her, expressed in Jane's narrative as his desire to instrumentalize her abstract interiority; refusing marriage, she volunteers to go to India with him as a “sister”; “my body would be under a rather stringent yoke, but my heart and mind would be free” (412). St. John's dissatisfaction with this is not expressed in terms of desire, but in terms of providential explanation: “God and nature intended you for a missionary's wife” (407), he tells her, reminding her that “God sees not as man sees” (419). But if Jane is prepared to cede to an incomprehensible universe, it is not one whose incomprehensibility can be explained through the evocation of a God whose sight is thorough and whose reasons clear if invisible to human consciousness. When St. John reads passages from Revelation and implicitly threatens her with eternal damnation if she refuses him, Jane wavers under the possibility of becoming a castaway. But her gaze returns, not to a mystified contemplation of God's eye, but of man's—“I felt his eye … had turned on me” (422)—and it is clearly the persuasive power of St. John's discourse and appearance that causes her nearly to consent to his demands.

The only way that Jane can rationalize her refusal of St. John, however, is to claim to hear another “voice in the wilderness,” the mysterious cry of Rochester, now blind and in seclusion at the “desolate spot” of Ferndean.¹¹ Faith in a distant and unseen God is usurped by Jane's feeling of a “mighty spirit” and her flight “home” is motivated not by an abrupt acquiescence to God's will but by something that the text represents as the mysterious and disembodied power of the bond between two subjectivities. Jane is expert by now at tracing disembodied voices back to their sources; in this case, however, the source is not the spectacular Bertha, but the blind and crippled Rochester. Given the ways in which the novel has insistently transformed Gothic mystery into eminently explicable matters of the heart and mind, this particular experience of Jane's may well jar. But in fact, the entire narrative with its insistence on the primacy of a version of experience that is private, sentimental, and individualized has been heading in this direction all along. Freed of the necessity to convince with circumstantial evidence, having confirmed her reliability as a witness of her own life, Brontë's heroine rewrites the conventions of representation pertaining to spiritual conversion as the intimate—and the novel implies, ultimately inexplicable—contact between two human minds.

As she closes her story, Jane could avow, were she to borrow an Evangelical locution, that she has been “telling experiences.” Her version of this practice, however, is not designed to testify to the presence of God but to her own authority over her life, her own capacity to follow her heart and mind. The ending of her story, with its uncanny call, suggests how greatly Brontë's conception of experience differs from Tonna's. It also can be understood as an index of sorts to the relations between experience and representation, experience and form: without the spiritual framework that interprets all experience, no matter how irrational, as Providential intervention, events of uncertain or unseen causation can only be represented in the discourse of fiction.

Notes

1. See for instance Spacks. Other works that can be seen as delimiting women's autobiography as a specific field of inquiry include Mason and Jelinek.

2. Riley puts it thus: “‘women’ is historically, discursively constructed, and always relatively to other categories which themselves change; ‘women’ is a volatile collectivity in which female persons can be very differently positioned, so that the apparent continuity of the subject of ‘women’ isn't to be relied on; ‘women’ is both synchronically and diachronically erratic as a collectivity, while for the individual ‘being a woman’ is also inconstant and can't provide an ontological foundation” (1-2).

3. At the extreme poles of experience we could posit what Mark Seltzer in a discussion of nineteenth-century realism called “the deindividualizing tendencies of statistics [that] provide models of individualization: models for the generic, typical, or average man—what we might describe as the production of individuals as statistical persons” (90) and Benjamin's “Erlebnis” that he sees as central to the poetic project of Baudelaire: the moment of “shock” which, he writes, “may be seen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents” (163).

4. See Mary Poovey's discussion of the novel (Chap. 5).

5. The figure of Bertha, and what precisely she figures, has been subjected to extensive critical investigation; Gilbert and Gubar titled their book after her (The Madwoman in the Attic), taking Bertha as a figure for the repressed desires of the archetypal well-mannered Victorian woman, the wild woman matrix of nineteenth-century women's writing; Poovey's examination of the novel points out that Bertha has a formal function of articulating Jane's agency in the text; and crucially, Spivak's analysis pointed to the centrality of Bertha as evidence for the suppressed but enabling subtext of Jane Eyre's narrative, British imperialism. Spivak made clear how the woman hidden in the manor house attic operates synechdochically for that which underwrites—often quite literally—but is hidden in the domestic scenarios painted by nineteenth-century novelists.

6. See Weber, esp. part 2. Weber's analysis draws attention to the location of standards of proof and belief in the conduct and demeanor of the individual; as Lady Eastlake's critique of Jane Eyre suggests, this standard becomes difficult to maintain in nineteenth-century culture. Realism, as Welsh's analysis of the relations between the increased prominence of circumstantial evidence in jurisprudence and literary forms suggests, can be linked to a crisis in these standards of proof.

7. For an analysis of the fates of the providential narrative in mid-century England, see Gallagher.

8. We cannot miss that the story of Jack, which Tonna inscribes as an instance of free will on the part of the boy and evidence for the presence of God, might well be read much less sympathetically, given the history of Evangelicals in Ireland. Tonna neatly rewrites poverty and oppression as problems of belief; thus, the willingness of Jack's family to give him up to her is represented as their recognition of his conversion as an authentic experience as well as their understanding, however vague, of the inadequacy of their own belief system.

9. The full quotation: “God sees not as man sees.” I Samuel 16:7.

10. In this sense, then, Jane Eyre conforms to the form of autobiography that William Spengemann termed “poetic autobiography;” a nineteenth-century form that emerges specifically when earlier forms of spiritual autobiography seem no longer viable. At the same time, this novel suggests strongly the ways in which the form of autobiography comes to be borrowed and elaborated upon in the realm of domestic fiction. See Spengemann, (Chap. Four).

11. The reversal here is amusing: in Scripture, “the voice in the wilderness,” of course, is that of St. John the Baptist. “In those days came John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness of Judaea. And say, Repent ye for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” (Matthew 3:1-3).

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