Charlotte’s web of intrigue
Thought Jane Eyre was fiction? Wait till you hear about...
The Secret History Of Jane Eyre John Pfordresher Norton €28.35
First published to acclaim in 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is the ideal gothic romance: a saturnine hero; a virginal and demure heroine; an old dark house; a mad woman in the attic.
But whence came such febrile passion? Brontë was a mousy woman raised in a Yorkshire parsonage. Surely she never did much more than go for long walks on chilly afternoons?
It is the contention of John Pfordresher that her melodramatic novel is an expression of her ‘almost unbearable inner struggle’ with her feelings of frustration, humiliation and self-doubt. Though cast in fictional form, Jane Eyre is a kind of lurid subconscious autobiography. Even the insane Mrs Rochester concealed in the loft represents something that ‘lurks within [Brontë] herself, something fearful and shameful’, which she, and her autobiographical cipher, Jane Eyre, have ‘tried to repress’.
The novel, we are told, is a web of truth, imagination, realism and fantasy. The church school, Lowood, which Jane attends, is based on Cowan Bridge, the monstrous establishment where Brontë had been sent. Here, ‘child abuse was justified by religious hypocrisy’.
The teachers deliberately ‘impoverished the girls physically and psychologically’, suppressing and punishing any ‘independence of mind’. Like Jane, Brontë went on to become a governess. It was a gruesome occupation. A governess was ‘tyrannised over, finding her efforts to please and teach utterly vain’.
Between 1842 and 1845, Brontë was a teaching assistant in Brussels – and here Mr Rochester appears. She fell in love with her married employer, Constantin Hager, who we are told was ‘strong-willed and courageous, a man with a considerable sex drive who knew how to handle a gun’. Jane was to voice her author’s feelings about ‘an adulterous passion that was never to be hers’ when in the novel she says to Rochester: ‘All my heart is yours… and with you it would remain were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.’
Charlotte was to write about her predicament with Hager: ‘He made me love him without looking at me.’ How passive, how masochistic, can a relationship possibly be?
Yet in her novel she could toy with the idea of marriage, then call it off. ‘Instinctively, Jane knows the wedding should not take place. It’s wrong. And it doesn’t.’
Also contributing to the character of Rochester is Charlotte’s temperamental father, who’d ‘acquired the habit of carrying a loaded pistol’ and who was a sexually frustrated widower. Milton’s Satan is in the mix, as is Lord Byron. Plus Charlotte’s ‘dissolute brother’ Branwell. The key difference is that Rochester is prevented from plunging ‘headlong into wild licence’ by Jane’s sensible influence.
The Secret History Of Jane Eyre cleverly intertwines art and life. It made me go and watch the film adaptation with Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine – and 12-yearold Elizabeth Taylor.
Jane was to voice her author’s feelings about ‘an adulterous passion that was never to be hers’