Jane Eyre

(Yes, I’m doing a lit post again. I promise not to make this blog into a book club, but I have no one to talk these things over with, and I hate reading a good book without mulling it over sufficiently. So feel free to ignore this post if it’s too stuffy for your interests. I won’t be sad. I promise. But if you’re into this stuff like I am, yay!)

I have to say I’m sad to be finished with Jane Eyre. My house has now run dry of unexplored 19th century chick lit, and I’ve been forced to start Conrad’s Lord Jim instead, which is hardly a fitting sequel to the Brontes’ novels, or Austen’s. As soon as I’m able I plan to raid Margie’s Book Nook for more of Charlotte’s work, and maybe The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne, if they have it. I’ve also got a hankering to read Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen’s satire of the gothic romance novels of her time– like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

Charlotte impresses me slightly more than Emily now that I’ve become more familiar with her work. Emily’s passion and genius are more unrestrained and abrupt, and had she lived longer she might have easily surpassed Charlotte’s accomplishments, but Charlotte (given more time to work and develop her craft) has the steadier hand and a more complete rendering of her characters and their inward growth.

Some of her plot resolutions are too coincidental and happy to be believed, such as Jane suddenly finding that the ladies and gentleman who saved her from exposure and starvation just happen to be her long lost cousins, and that their uncle conveniently dies and leaves her a fortune she could not otherwise have claimed, without their acquaintance. And then there is the instance of telepathy (in which Charlotte ardently believed), and the bothersome lunatic in the attic, kept secret most of the novel, but where would a gothic be without a few wild abstractions?

The leading man, Mr. Rochester, is nearly as unforgettable as any Heathcliff or Darcy, although in this case our affection for him is mostly the result of our sympathy for Jane and her love of him. We spend a good part of the read wishing for her to jump into his arms and run away with him, no matter what the consequences may be. But Jane Eyre is, above all other themes, about integrity. Jane’s journey from childhood to womanhood is centered on her ability to make peace within herself, and on her decision (however painful) to do only what would allow for her own self-respect and ease of conscience. Even when long-sought love and happiness are presented to her on a silver platter, and we want to urge her to take them despite the loss of innocence she would have to incur, we know she will tear herself away (to the point of death, as it happens), because to do otherwise would not be Jane.

I was a little peeved that the one ‘Calvinist’ character in the novel happens to be of the persuasion that happiness and pleasure were created by God to tempt us into hell, and that no life could lead to heaven that was lived without constant deprivation and a suicidal bent on sacrifice. I wonder if it wasn’t an Anglican prejudice on the author’s part, since Calvin himself was known by his letters to have a wife he loved to distraction, and also to earn a compensation package which included hundreds of gallons of wine per year. And while he had a healthy theology of suffering, it certainly never led to a works-based concept of redemption. In fact, the theology of the novel as a whole distracted me. Fiction isn’t meant to be a vehicle for theological expression (at least not expressly, and there are certainly those who use it as such, and well), but Charlotte seems to take such pains to draw it out, especially in Jane’s own musings, and to soliloquize over it so often, that it seems like an important force to grapple with in the themes, and even in the plot. I might like to read it over and study her theology and its effects on the work in more detail, now that I think of it.