The
brilliant and off-the-beaten track novelist, who musing on the female heart,
challenged 19th century conceptions of appropriate female behaviour
through her novel Jane Eyre,
celebrated her 200th birth anniversary this
year.
Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and that lady with literary
blood in her veins, Virginia Woolf, are the three women writers that we have
often heard about during our early college days, though frugally. Amongst the
three, it is of course, Bronte sisters who have often been talked about,
perhaps more out of their eccentricities and temperament that is quite unusual
of women—particularly women of Victorian era—to display. Over it, their
literary output which is of piercing originality, made them stand out
distinctly from the rest.
Of
the Bronte sisters, readers often tend to place Emily Bronte—perhaps because of
her much popular novel, Wuthering Heights—at the top, Charlotte in the
middle followed by Anne at the last. But with her debut novel, Jane Eyre: An
Autobiography, which according to Queen Victoria was an “intensely
interesting novel” that traces the depths of the mind of a woman and its
emotions while narrating the journey of a thinking and feeling woman’s struggle
to uphold her passionate and honest nature within the confinements of her
womanly destiny, Charlotte had become the most popular writer of her time with
the reading public of the day.
April
21, 2016 marked the bicentenary of the birth of Charlotte Bronte which,
unfortunately could not command the literary world’s attention to the extent it
is desired, perhaps, being overshadowed by the 450th death anniversary of Shakespeare that fell on
April 23, but she remains in the minds of readers as a novelist with a searing
eye who portrayed the emotional realism associated with women and their moral
searching in her novel, Jane Eyre, which she published in 1847 under an
adopted male name, Currer Bell.
Unlike
her illustrious predecessor, Jane Austen, who focused more on social criticism,
Charlotte Bronte focusing on delineating the passions of the women’s heart—that
could, of course, be at odds with the social norms of the day because of which
women are often found suppressing them within—for the first time presented the
soundings of ‘female heart and mind’ to the readers with a fiery conviction and
poetic intensity. This independent streak of her mind is visible all through
her novel. For instance, in the very preface to the 2nd edition of Jane Eyre, reacting to the
“carping few who doubt the tendency of such books as Jane Eyre in whose
eyes whatever is unusual is wrong;...” she reminds them of certain simple
truths: “Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion.
To attack the first is not to assail the last.” In the same vein, reacting to a
reviewer who commented that if Currer Bell was a woman, “she must be a woman
pretty nearly unsexed”, Charlotte replied: “to such critics I would say—‘to you
I am neither Man nor Woman—I come before you as an Author only—it is the sole
standard by which you have a right to judge me—the sole ground on which I
accept your judgment.’”
Choosing
to narrate the story from the perspective of a child—for the first time,
perhaps—that too, in first person, Charlotte presents her female protagonist,
Jane Eyre as an orphaned ten-year-old child living with her unloving and indeed
bullying aunt and her children. Much against the argument of her sisters that
readers would not accept an unattractive heroine, she portrays her Jane as an
ordinary looking girl but endowed with unusual courage and intelligence that
makes her stand up against the antipathy of John, son of her aunt and cry like
a rebel slave: “Unjust! Unjust!” Resolving, “Speak I must” Jane had the courage
to say on the face of her aunt, the only support she had in this world thus: “I
am not deceitful: If I were, I should say I loved you; but I declare I do not
love you…I will never call you aunt again as long as I live. …if anyone asks me
…how you treated me I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that
you treated me with miserable cruelty.” As her aunt wonders, “How dare you
affirm that, Jane?” she asserts: “How dare I, Mrs Reed? …Because it is the
truth?” It is by ascribing such traits as zeal for moral righteousness, intense
desire to speak her mind, stand by truth with a rebellious spirit that
Charlotte could make her novel relevant even to present day readers.
Later
joining Lowood School, she, fired by “a desire to excel in all”, standing up to
the odds and manoeuvring through humiliations under the tutelage of her friend
Helen, who proclaims, “Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing
animosity or registering wrongs”, and, of course, duly aided by hard work and
intellectual abilities, distinguishes herself by rising to be the first girl of
the first class and finally becoming a teacher in the same school. But with the
going away of Ms Temple, to the instruction of whom she owed all that she had
accomplished at the school, she seeking a change, making a humbler
supplication: “grant me at least a new servitude”, arrives at Thornfield as an
18-year-old governess.
Thus, begins a new chapter in her life and it is at Thornfield
that Jane learning about the pleasure and pains of love from her rich,
all-powerful and surly master, indeed a Byronic hero, Rochester, with whom she
falls in love. One splendid midsummer night as Rochester, revealing his plans
to marry Ms. Ingram, insists Jane to stay back in Thornfield, Jane, rejecting
his offer, asserts thus: “Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do
you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings? and can bear to have
my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed
from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am
soulless and heartless? You think wrong!—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. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom,
conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;—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!”
In response to her assertion, Rochester, gathering her to his
breast, says, “so Jane!” and she, responding in the same vein, “Yes, so, sir”
struggles to get out of his arms. But Rochester, holding her intact, entreats
her: “Jane, be still, don’t struggle so, like a wild frantic bird that is
rendering its own plumage in its desperation”. It is here that the real
strength of her character radiates as she declares: “I am no bird; and no net
ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now
exert to leave you.” Following a lengthy pleading by Rochester, she, of course,
finally gives consent to his proposal, which merits to be noticed by even
today’s readers, thus: “Then, Sir, I will marry you.” Before the marriage, once
Rochester takes Jane on a shopping trip. The whole expedition at Silk and
Jewellery shops become a kind of harassment for Jane, the bride-to-be, as she
felt “the more he bought me, the more my cheek burned with a sense of annoyance
and degradation.” And, mark, what a word Bronte used: “degradation!” That is
Charlotte’s Jane!
Subsequently, as she learns that Rochester is a married man
who keeps his insane wife locked up in the attic, Jane—an expectant bride
suddenly turning solitary girl again—wondering, “to rise I had no will, to flee
I had no strength, … longing to be dead”, and with a prayer on lips, “Be not
far from me, for trouble is near: there is none to help”, mustering her moral
courage, decides to leave him and his Thornfield, for marrying an already
married man is wrong, no matter how much she loves him. Here again, before
leaving, she leaves a sane advice to Rochester: “Do as I do: trust in God and
yourself… I advise you to live sinless, and I wish you to die in tranquil …we
were born to strive and endure—you as well as I: do so...God bless you, my dear
master! …God …direct you, solace you…” Thus, she not only upholds her
self-respect but also her moral rectitude.
Finally leaving Thornfield, as she heads towards Marsh End, a
naggy inner voice confronts her with a question: “Who will care for her now?”
But immediately her conscience responds thus: “I care for myself. The more
solitary, the more friendless, the more un-sustained I am, the more I will
respect myself.” And thus she faces the ordeal of staying alive for three days
in snow with no food till St John and his sisters gave hospitality. Here, when
St John Rivers proposes to marry her, she, an 18-year-old girl, fearing that
she may not be able to “endure all the forms of love (which …he would
scrupulously observe) and know that the spirit was quite absent… No: such a
martyrdom would be monstrous”, turns it down.
As the novel nears the end, Jane, sensing that a human
voice—voice of Rochester—calling, “Jane! Jane! Jane!” heads to Thornfield, and
there coming to know of the fire accident at Thornfield, in it the death of
Rochester’s insane wife and his losing his hand and sight while attempting to
save his wife, Jane, perhaps not to give the go-by to her individuality,
blissfully announces: “Reader, I married him” [Rochester].
That is Jane, the heroine of Charlotte Bronte’s innovative
and enduring romantic novel, with her narrative voice expressing so openly her
desire for identity, definition, meaning and agency continues to engage and
provoke even modern day readers. Bronte’s Jane is the epitome of a strong
woman, who believed “that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of
hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had the
courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its
perils.” She, supporting herself at a time when it was extremely difficult for
a woman to do such things on her own, teaches the importance of self-reliance.
Yet, one cannot but wonder how such a strong-willed lady continued to call her
love interest ‘master’—it sounds pretty bizarre, for it exhibits her as a
semi-subservient to him.
Bronte,
true to what she stated in one of her letters to her friend: “Unless I have the
courage to use the language of Truth in preference to the jargon of
Conventionality, I ought to be silent ...”, makes Jane air a passionate plea on
behalf of womankind: “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 puddings 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.” It is this style of her forthright writing that
earned her recognition as: “the first historian of the private consciousness”,
besides securing her fame as a literary genius for ages to come.
Image : Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, London
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