As I wrap up my fifth semester of college, I'm excited to share with you all the final paper I wrote for one of my literature classes this fall. Concerning the classic Victorian novel "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte, this paper employs a feminist lens to study and critique the novel's feminist triumphs and failures. Enjoy!
"The Fault in the Feminine Starring: Jane Eyre as the Perfectly Chaste Female and Bertha Mason as the Othered Sexual Degenerate"
For its time, "Jane Eyre" was an incredibly progressive, feminist novel. The author, Charlotte Bronte herself, was certainly among the more privileged of women during the Victorian Era. Daughter of a prominent Anglican Clergyman, Charlotte and her sisters were sent to the Clergy Daughter’s School in Lancashire. Conditions were harsh and unforgiving, but the Bronte sisters still had access to quality education, which is far more than can be said for many other women of the time period. In some aspects, "Jane Eyre" can still be considered “feminist” and the character of Jane Eyre herself is certainly a prototypical feminist heroine. However, from a contemporary standpoint, "Jane Eyre" lacks the intersectionality necessary to a true feminist novel. Though Jane is cast as independent, self-reliant, chaste, and virtuous, the other women in the novel never reach the same paradigm of greatness that she does. Particularly in the case of Bertha Mason, Jane’s character foil, the disparity between race, class, status, and madness becomes incredibly clear. The juxtaposition of Jane - a white, Christian, well-educated woman, totally sane - with Bertha - Creole, not Christian, not educated, mad - others Bertha by casting her as the degenerate sinner and Jane as the enlightened savior.
Jane, our lovely heroine, is the idealized representation of everything a proper Victorian lady should be. She is chaste, self-denying, and acutely able to repress her emotions. Yet for those reasons, Jane could also be considered a feminist hero. In her essay “A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane’s Progress,” scholar and professor Sandra Gilbert argues that “["Jane Eyre’s”] “Anti-Christian” refusal to accept the forms, customs, and standards of society - in short, its rebellious feminism” was rather horrifying to Victorian audiences. However, Jane is perhaps the only main character who actually follows any of the social mores and fits into the conventional role. Granted, Jane is “not naturally austere, any more than [Rochester] is naturally vicious." It is certainly through her upbringing -her abuse at Gateshead, her Christian education at Lowood - that has taught her these virtues of austerity. It would seem that Jane is naturally passionate, but she has been taught to deny those emotions and act in a rational way. Jane forgets how to be passionate and emotional until she arrives at Thornfield, and her repression of emotion is exactly what allows her to be both proper and ladylike, yet also a rebellious feminist, at least in Gilbert’s eyes.
Yet Jane is only a “feminist” character because she has something to rebel against. Gilbert states that “women in Jane’s world, acting as agents for men, may be the keepers of other women. But both keepers and prisoners are bound by the same chains." It is not society on a whole that Jane is actively rebelling against (if she was doing that she would’ve shoved her Christian morals aside and consummated her relationship with Rochester as soon as she was given a chance), rather, it is Rochester’s other love interest that Jane is rebelling against. Jane’s “rebellious feminism” cannot exist without Bertha’s submission. We can also consider this from the Romantic context: Jane is perhaps the only character in the novel who consistently resists “madness,” which we can define as acting on emotion rather than reason. But the only reason Jane has to resist madness, i.e. her passionate emotions where Rochester is involved, is because Bertha exists and is undeniably mad, because she once gave in fully and completely to her passionate emotions (i.e. sexual desires).
Within the novel there are two overarching tensions portrayed, which can best be expressed through the character foils of Jane and Bertha. On one side we have nature and madness, represented by Bertha, and on the other we have nurture and reason, represented by Jane. At its structural core, Jane Eyre is a built around Romantic archetypes and concepts, and Romanticism relies heavily on binaries. Jane is chaste, self-denying; she represses her emotions and denies her sexual desires. In this way, Jane is the representation of reason. Yet, it is only because she has been forced into this mold through her abuse at Gateshead - which occurred as punishment for her passionate outbreaks - and her education at Lowood that she is able to embody the Victorian ideal of a “proper” woman. In this way, Jane is the representation of nurture. She is white, European, and possesses the inherent ability to be taught and civilized. Bertha, on the other hand, acts on her passions (e.x., burning Rochester’s bed, slashing her brother’s face) and on her degenerative sexual desires. In this way, Bertha is the representation of madness. She is never forced to reckon with her passionate nature through a Christian education; at this point, it is important to note that Bertha Mason is a Creole woman from the West Indies. Not only does she posses the capacity for madness, as arguably everyone does, but she is inherently mad because she is dark-skinned and therefore it is in her nature to descend into madness and theoretically, no amount of nurture could ever change that: “Bertha Mason is mad; she came of a mad family … her mother, a Creole, was both a madwoman and a drunkard!" In this way, Bertha is the representation of nature.
Interestingly enough, the binary between the natural world and civilized world within the Romantic context are bastardized in "Jane Eyre". Generally in Romanticism, nature is “good” - pure, regenerative, clean - and civilization is “bad” - dirty, corrupted. Yet in "Jane Eyre", a novel that takes all other Romantic tropes in stride and utilizes them to their full potential, that the tension between the nature and civilization - the perhaps the most stereotypical Romantic trope - is turned on its head. Jane, of course, represents civilization and all that it stands for; Bertha then represents nature and the natural world. In the Victorian era, nature was vaguely horrifying, especially on the heels of Romantic exultations of the natural world. We can see this juxtaposition between the untamed and wild natural world and the docility of civilization during the scene where Jane and Bertha are “formally” introduced for the first time: “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..” Jane however “stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon." Bertha is animalistic; Jane is civilized and refined. Bertha is a demon, a manifestation of hell; Jane is pure and angelic.
These binary oppositions are what complicates a feminist reading of "Jane Eyre". The problem then with reading "Jane Eyre" as totally and completely “feminist” during our contemporary time is that it lacks an intersectional feminism: again, I point to the fact that Bertha’s sole role in the novel is to make a savior out of Jane. The way that binaries operate is that they must constantly be in opposition with each other. Reasonable and mad, nature and nurture, black and white: one draws meaning from the other. Jane draws her purpose, her power, her agency through Bertha’s powerlessness. Within the context of the novel, Bertha only exists can be defined in relation to the more powerful actors in her life: her arranged marriage to Rochester, her imprisonment in the closet, her pyromaniac tendencies. The only act in which Bertha has full agency and is acting totally autonomously is when she flings herself off the barrister of Thornfield, ultimately killing herself. For Bertha, the price of freedom is her life, because she cannot exist when she isn’t being diametrically opposed. This is where Bronte fails: Bertha could be a dynamic character all on her own, but the development of Jane’s savior complex is far more important than Bertha’s redemption arch. Jane exists and acts independently; Bertha does not, and more importantly, she cannot. The issue of Bertha’s representation and her lack of autonomy is also present in Gilbert’s reading, but not consciously by Gilbert. As Laura Donaldson, Professor of English at Cornell University, points out in “The Miranda Complex: Colonialism and the Question of Feminist Reading,” though Gilbert’s reading is strongly in favor of a feminist Jane, in Gilbert’s reading, Bertha is still only a manifestation of Jane, and possesses no agency of her own. Says Donaldson: “This criticism seems particularly telling in view of Gilbert and Gubar's interpretation of Bertha in Madwoman, which not only imprisons her within the privatistic cell of Jane's psyche, but also deprives her of any independent textual significance."
From a contemporary standpoint, both Bronte and Gilbert’s treatment of Bertha is highly problematic. Within the context of racial identity and the connotation that Creole was inherently lesser, along with all the other, unmarked terms that are attached to Bertha’s identity, she certainly occupies “this position of the self-consolidating Other." Bertha is the obvious anti-hero, and she will never get the same kind of happy ending that Jane does. Yet, what of Jane? As discussed earlier, Bertha only exists within the novel as a foil to Jane. Jane can only be the rebellious, feminist heroine if she has a passive foe to oppose. When Bertha ultimately dies and is removed from the narrative, Jane loses the Other through which she understands her own identity. Before Jane returns to Thornfield, she is happy and successful teaching in Marsh End. Jane was able to have agency, independence, and autonomy earlier on in the novel simply because Bertha had none. When Bertha performs the ultimate autonomous act, taking her own life, Jane is then forced back into the role of submission. Jane gives up all of her freedom: her own house, her income, her new-found family, to submit to Rochester, because she is taking over the role of submissive wife left by Bertha. Now that Jane no longer has opposition, the binary collapses and she must define her relationship in terms of a different Other, which happens to be Rochester. Therefore, Jane abandons her “rebellious feminism,” and submits, just like any other passive, Victorian era woman would have.
Though Jane can be read as a feminist hero, and it was certainly a valiant effort on the part of Bronte in 1847 to attempt to construct a prototypical feminist hero, feminist readings of “Jane Eyre” ultimately fall flat. Due in large part to the highly problematic representation of the Creole woman Bertha, the novel’s lack of intersectionality, and the prominent critical pieces written about the novel that fail to acknowledge this, makes it impossible to be considered wholly feminist in contemporary times. The strict binaries that separate Jane and Bertha, and the consequences borne out of those oppositions, should force the reader to rethink the binary: what it mean in the Victorian era and what it means now. As the novel plays out, we see the rebelliousness in Jane die, and she herself submits to a life of domestic servitude. When identities are constructed through binaries, the individual will always need an opposition in order to orient and define himself through the Othering of the opposing force. Jane and Bertha act as mutual forces for a time, until Bertha performs the singular most autonomous act of taking her own life. Then, Jane opposes herself against Rochester, so she can comfortably define her identity again. Ultimately, madness consumes both Bertha and Jane in the end, try as Jane had for so long to resist it.
