Reading JANE EYRE in 2018 America

Wealth and family connections. Chronic mistreatment of vulnerable children. The despising of the poor by those comfortably well off. Institutional life in place of home life for the poor. Lessons in “humility” and “gratitude” to those warned to keep their “place.” -- But even in that place, flickers of kindness and opportunities to better herself. Leading to — independence, and then, in her new position, an unexpected sense of home and feelings of respect and love. -- But the veil is torn away and reality revealed, followed by the direst poverty, hunger, situational homelessness. Dangers to the homeless are real, while those with homes perceive threats from the homeless. Of course, the story does not end there....

The character of Jane Eyre herself as well as her story were something quite new to English literature. What a difference from the world of Pride and Prejudice we find in Jane Eyre! And I say this as someone who loves the novels of Jane Austen.

But in Jane Austen’s England and the class to which the Bennett daughters were born, a young woman’s only respectable end was marriage. “Independence” was a disgrace, if not a scandal, depending on how it was achieved — or, rather, “independence” was defined only by wealth, and so brought about by the right kind of marriage. Class distinctions were paramount. Servants were invisible. “Sensibility,” the name given to overwrought passion given free rein by the wrong kinds of reading in Sense and Sensibility, could lead to nothing good. 

Then along came the mystery author “Curran Bell” (Charlotte Bronte’s nom de plume), with her passionate little orphan, Jane, with her innate sense of justice. Revolutionary! I ask my women friends, whose life rings truer to yours in its essentials, that of Eliza Bennett or that of Jane Eyre?

Does the child deserve ill treatment? She is dependent on an aunt by marriage who detests her, as do the three children who are her blood first cousins. You would think that tie would mean more, but Jane’s mother was sister to the cousins’ father, so they are cousins by a female relative — and one who, moreover, married beneath her station. The brother could forgive, but his wife could not, and their children have no love for their cousin. The 14-year-old boy is particularly cruel and despicable, telling little Jane that she “ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mamma’s expense.” Jane’s mother’s sin had been to marry a poor curate, against her family’s wishes. Her punishment was to be disinherited by her grandfather. Jane’s parents dying of typhus (her father contracted the illness while visiting those poorer than himself, in pursuit of his calling), her uncle adopted her — and loved her — but then he also died. Family wealth is not to be shared except under the most careful legal arrangements, and the daughter of a disinherited relative by marriage has no claim on the cousins’ mother beyond the promise made to her dying husband — conveniently set aside in time, the better to suit her own feelings and purposes.

Jane’s background is given quickly in the novel’s beginning. Mr. Rochester’s character and the lively relationship he comes to value in Jane is the focus of most readers and has been mine in previous readings of the novel, but this week I come to it with a different heart, with different heavy thoughts. I see the fictional aunt’s and boy cousin’s heartlessness in the first two chapters against current stories — in 2018 — of girl children accorded lesser value than their male contemporaries. Issues of poverty and wealth add another dimension. Envy, hatred, retribution -- it's all there.

The Bennett family and the mother and daughters in Sense and Sensibility are close to adulthood and their “poverty” relative only to the wealth of antecedent generations. Little Jane Eyre, on the other hand, despised by her own relatives, is daily schooled in “humility,” first in the home of those relatives and afterward in the charity school to which she is sent. She succeeds academically, however, conquers her temper, and after six years as a student is promoted to teaching in the same school. It is independence of a sort, but the scope of the school world does not satisfy her. She wants to see more, to experience more — and, still determinedly independent, she seeks and finds a position as governess. 

When one of Jane Austen’s characters prepares to go out as governess, she is an object of pity to friends and to the author. For Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the position of governess is an achievement — not failure but success. In Pride and Prejudice, only the housekeeper, “Hill,” is given a name. In Mrs. Reed’s house, we know Bessie and and Abbott and Robert; in Mr. Rochester’s Thornfield, even the footman, Sam, is named. Is it a difference in the times or in the eye of an author who sees beyond social conventions? Perhaps something of both. 

Jane Eyre was feared by many in its time. The novel exposed a young woman’s capacity for passion and urged moral equality, not only among various social classes but also between men and women. If Jane is elevated late in the novel by an unexpected inheritance, so is Mr. Rochester brought low by injuries sustained in the fire that destroys Thornfield. Their respective changes in fortune do not make the man the woman’s inferior, however; what is brought about is an equality of fortune to align with the moral equality Jane had claimed from the start — and which Edward Rochester could not help acknowledging and respecting, even at his most desperate.

What if, what if??? we may ask, imagining other paths the story might have taken, but Bronte shaped her novel to the characters she conceived, and so their end is not contrived but, according to the individuals they were and the circumstances of their lives, inevitable. Society is left as it was, except that readers of Jane Eyre have been given a glimpse of different values and possibilities. 

Paul Krugman had an interesting opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times. Here’s part of what he wrote in refutation of the notion that only blue collar workers feel “economic anxiety” and are responsible for the current political climate:

…It’s perfectly possible for a man to lead a comfortable, indeed enviable life by any objective standard, yet be consumed with bitterness driven by status anxiety. 

You might think this is impossible, that having a good job and a comfortable life would inoculate someone against envy and hatred. That is, you might think that if you knew nothing of human nature and the world. 

I’ve spent my whole adult life in rarefied academic circles, where everyone has a good income and excellent working conditions. Yet I know many people in that world who are seething with resentment because they aren’t at Harvard or Yale, or who actually are at Harvard or Yale but are seething all the same because they haven’t received a Nobel Prize. 

What is happening in our country today, he says (and I agree) is “not about populism." The power behind it, the money and influence behind it, come from the privileged who don’t want others to share their good fortune.

What has become of Bronte’s vision? Of respect for honest work, of truth spoken across classes, of moral equality between men and women, of the “American dream” for all Americans? What has become of the American dream vision it used to seem most of us shared for our country?

“Whenever I went out, I heard on all sides cordial salutations, and was welcomed with friendly smiles. … At this period of my life, my heart far oftener swelled with thankfulness than sank with dejection: and yet, reader, to tell you all, in the midst of this calm, this useful existence … I used to rush into strange dreams at night….  By nine o’clock the next morning I was punctually opening the school; tranquil, settled, prepared for the steady duties of the day.” - Charlotte Bronte, JANE EYRE

I'm not even separated from my true love, and still it takes that second cup of coffee every morning for me to shake the nightmares of these times.

JANE EYRE Was Inspiration For MR. ROCHESTER

Charlotte

In the classic English novel Jane Eyre, written in 1847 by Charlotte Brontë, we meet the protagonist narrator as a child on the book’s first page. Both her parents having died, she was taken in by an uncle, but when he also passed away, responsibility for the orphan girl had fallen to his widow, Jane’s aunt by marriage, who finds the child a terrible burden. Her three cousins bear her no love, either. The boy particularly delights in tormenting her, knowing his mother will always take his side.

The resentful aunt unburdens herself by sending ten-year-old Jane away to a residential charity school. Lowood School is a harsh environment at first, and the girl has no vacations away from it, but she does make one close friend and finds a kind and sympathetic teacher. In time, life at the school improves. Eventually, at age 16, Jane becomes a teacher there herself.

Having achieved through education the means to be independent—and longing for a world beyond Lowood, which is all the world she has known other than the home of her unloving aunt—at age 18 Jane advertises for a governess position with a private family. Her ad brings in a single response, and so Jane travels to Thornfield Hall for an interview and gets the job. After her first quiet, introductory weeks, the master returns to his residence. Life at Thornfield grows much more interesting! The master is, of course, the enigmatic Mr. Rochester, one of English literature’s most mysterious and compelling male characters.

This is the story we all know. Jane and Rochester meet in the twelfth chapter of Jane Eyre, when he is 35 years old to her 18. So much for background.

But what was Rochester’s life before Jane Eyre came along? How different was his childhood and youth from hers? Why did Jane appeal to him so strongly? What were his motives and inward thoughts and feelings as he fell in love with and courted the plain, solemn governess while concealing from her a prior, still-binding marriage? And what allowed him in the first place to think himself justified in locking his wife away, keeping her very existence hidden from the world?

One reader, Sarah Shoemaker, kept asking herself, “What kind of man does such things?” Of all these matters, Charlotte Brontë has told us next to nothing, because her story all comes to us through the eyes and ears and from the heart of Jane, leaving Rochester a tantalizing mystery.

Edward

Shoemaker, however, probably because she is a writer as well as a reader, could not silence the questions in her mind. The mystery of Rochester’s earlier life would not let her go. And because she felt compelled to imagine a past for the man who, by the end of Charlotte Brontë’s book, finally marries the literary world’s beloved Jane Eyre, we now have a companion novel to the nineteenth-century classic. That is, we will have it very soon, for Sarah Shoemaker’s Mr. Rochester, from Grand Central Press in New York, is due for release this coming May 9.

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As Brontë did in giving us Jane Eyre’s childhood and girlhood, Shoemaker gives us Edward Rochester as a boy and young man. In the end we are brought to Brontë’s familiar conclusion but from a very different starting point and along a very different, much more exotic path of adventure and misadventure.

We meet Jane first as a poor orphan, while Edward is to the manor born. But his mother is dead and his father so cold and so seldom at home that Edward’s boyhood is mostly solitary until he is sent away to school at the age of eight. Informed that he is to be sent away, rather than tutored at home as was his older brother, the boy is shocked. Schooling, however, turns out to be one of the happiest periods of Edward’s young life. The friends he makes in the course of his studies, the freedom the boys enjoy, and the eccentric teaching of their master, Mr. Lincoln, who loves maps and battle strategy, combine to make this part of Shoemaker’s story a sheer delight. Edward’s only sorrow while at Mr. Lincoln’s establishment is that, unlike the other boys, he never goes home over vacations. In that, his experience mirrors Jane’s at Lowood, although it is different in almost every other respect.

Edward’s father has business interests in Jamaica and spends much of his time there, so it is not entirely surprising that the boy becomes obsessed with the island, anticipating the day he will join his father and brother there. “Jam,” the other boys and Mr. Lincoln take to calling him. (All the boys go by nicknames.) But when Edward leaves school, he is neither summoned home to Thornfield nor abroad to Jamaica: instead his father has arranged an apprenticeship for him in a mill where broadcloth is made. He is not to work on the floor himself but to learn the ways of the “counting house,” in preparation for his future. From there he goes off to university and earns a degree.

(In both novels, social class plays an important role. Jane’s parents had “nothing,” she attends a charity school, and as a governess, she lives on the uncertain middle ground between servants and gentility. Edward’s father, though titled, chose the active life of business, but because Edward’s older brother will inherit Thornfield and all his father’s properties in England, Edward must follow in his father’s footsteps in Jamaica and make his own way in the world. The head start his father gives him is education, experience in running a business, and a going concern, his sugar cane plantation in Jamaica. In both books, unlike those of the preceding century, the servants are given names and have visible presence in the stories.)

Part Two of Mr. Rochester, then, is set in Jamaica, where Edward finds he has inherited slaves as well as land. His marriage to the beautiful Bertha is all but arranged for him, and he knows little of her beforehand other than her beauty. The only other Brontë spinoff I know is The Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys. Also made into a movie, the Rhys novel tells the story from Bertha’s perspective but was not, for me, anywhere as satisfying or convincing as I found Mr. Rochester. (Maybe I should read it again, too?)

--But don’t look for a spoiler here! I have no intention of detailing the Jamaica section, which sets the stage for so much of what follows. No, you must wait for the book to come out and read every word for yourself, but you wouldn’t have it any other way, would you?

Then there are the years that Rochester leaves the running of his plantation to an estate manager and allows himself a licentious, rootless life in Europe. Again, details await your reading. The child Adèle, I’ll mention, Jane Eyre’s charge, is one consequence of the European sojourn. Another, planted in Jamaica and afterward expanded in Europe, is Rochester’s suspicious attitude toward women, his belief that they are not to be trusted.

In Part Three we are on familiar ground, back at Thornfield Hall, where Jane is ensconced as governess to Adèle, and there unfold the events familiar to us from Jane Eyre--but different now, because we are seeing them through new eyes. In the older novel, we had access to Jane’s heart and saw the world through her eyes; in Sarah Shoemaker’s new novel, we see the world through the eyes of Rochester, and are privy to the secrets of his heart.

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I first read Mr. Rochester in manuscript almost three years ago, and before opening my advance reading copy this winter, I re-read Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Still, despite knowing that all would come right in the end, I found myself spellbound. I was gripped with anxiety through all Rochester’s turmoil! His many trials and setbacks, one after another, and the series of wrenching discoveries that are not over until almost the last page of the book all made any happy ending seem wildly improbable, even though I already knew the ending! This, of course, was the author’s challenge from the beginning: since all who have read Brontë’s novel remember Jane’s closing, “Reader, I married him,” how can the story be retold in such a way as to create suspense? Simple. All the writer has to do is to create a story that will fully engage the reader from start to finish, as if what is happening on the page is happening in the very moment of (or the moment just before) the reading. That’s all. Simple! Simple???

Sarah Shoemaker does much more than imagine Rochester from the inside. She imagines and lays before us entire worlds, notably Mr. Lincoln’s school, the broadcloth mill, and life on the island of Jamaica. To be believable and keep us immersed in the story, these worlds must be historically accurate and, at the same time, come across as immediate experiences to readers, not as history lessons. Shoemaker succeeds on both counts.

Then there are her original characters, individuals who people these other worlds of Rochester’s. You did not meet them in Jane Eyre, but you will not soon forget the boys Touch and Carrot at the school, Mr. Wilson at the mill and his motherly wife, the worker called Shap, and others.

Sarah

When Dog Ears Books hosts the party to launch Mr. Rochester and to celebrate author Sarah Shoemaker, it will be almost three years since I first gained entrance to this mesmerizing story. It was on the morning of June 1, 2014, that I read the last manuscript page, and since then I never doubted for a minute that this book would eventually be made available to a world audience. Now, the time is almost here!

So mark your calendar! It’s Tuesday, May 9, and the time is 7 to 9 p.m. I’m giddy just thinking about it!

A Scent of the Past

By the side of the road ...

... have you ever noticed this?

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one gray morning of war-time. 

-      Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

A summer visitor who usually comes up from Texas later in the season was enchanted by the woodland wildflowers in May and asked me what would be blooming there in June. Not much, I told her. The spring ephemerals are pretty much finished by June, and the canopy filling in with leaves, shading the ground. But field and roadside and garden flowers come on strong and are so many and so varied that it’s hard to keep track of them.

Viburnum

Campion

Some are, however, easy to overlook. The plant in the three images at the top of this post is an instance of the easily overlooked June wildflowers – or weeds, if you prefer. A scruffy little fellow that sprouts in the dust of driveways and dirt roads, pineapple weed, Matricaria discoidea, is identified by Stan Tekeila in Wildflowers of Michigan: Field Guide as “inconspicuous.” But when I pull over to the side of the road and my tires crush its greenish-yellow tops, releasing their scent, I am once again, if only for a moment, seven years old.

There were pineapple weeds in my grandmother’s dusty driveway in central Ohio. Must they not still be there? And shouldn’t my grandmother still be there, too, feeding her chickens and shelling peas, with little me beside her, eager to help? Will my grandfather be working out in his garden or his large raspberry patch? If a storm is coming, will my grandparents call me down from the swaying fruit trees in the backyard to join them in the safety of the house?

Other easily overlooked June blooms bring other memories.

Clover in the grass takes me back to Barry County.

Daisies by the drive elicit "Thank you, Claudia" every day they bloom.

In Brideshead Revisited, the narrator recounts, from the perspective of World War II, scenes of his adolescence at the end of the Great War, the one not called “First” until the Second arrived. The book opens with his coming unexpectedly upon scenes from his youth:

“I have been here before,” I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.

How strange it is to come upon – often out of context -- an old familiar aroma strongly associated in memory with a particular place and time and people. Here it is again, the same as always, that old sense perception, but now absent its old surroundings. Or one comes upon it in the old surroundings, as did Charles, but the familiar place has been transformed and is empty now of all those one remembers in it. 

Hidden creek blooms: Where is the old water ram?

Bridalwreath

How can it be? we ask ourselves. How can those vivid scenes have vanished? They feel so very near at hand that one more than remembers: memory repeoples, reanimates, and reincarnates the past.

The river in Waugh's novel was the Bride, and June is the traditional month of brides. The many white flowers of garden and field seem to honor wedding couples, don't you think?

Always, For Me, Jane Austen

Our “intrepid Ulysses group,” having tackled James Joyce, Dante, Beckett, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Faulkner and so on, decided most recently to read Pride and Prejudice together, the first time for about half the group. As for me, I’ve read this delightful novel countless times – really, cannot begin to count my readings, since Austen was my tired-brain-bedtime reading through my first two years of graduate school. Lined up at the head of my futon on the floor were Pride and Prejudice; Sense and Sensibility; Emma; Northanger Abbey; and Persuasion, and every evening when my brain could not absorb one more word of philosophy, I would crawl under the blankets and pull out whichever Austen novel I had closed the night before, opening where my bookmark had been left. Night after night. Finishing one, I would move on to the next, and at the end of the row I would begin again at the beginning. So yes, I know these novels pretty well.

But being asked to lead a group discussion made my reading different this time around. For the first time, I noticed Austen’s incredible economy of language. How much information is packed into the first sentence! We know that we have begun reading a comedy, that the cast of characters comes from a certain class of society, that the story will end in marriage, and that the author looks at her world with eyebrows raised and an amused smile on her lips.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

There it is. This “truth universally acknowledged” is of course not “universal” at all but part of the fabric of a certain class of English society at the time of the novel. The “good fortune” tells us more about which class of English men and women we will meet in the novel’s pages. “Single man” and “wife” aims us toward the marriage market, and the author’s sly wording tells us that she finds much humor in this business of families looking to marry daughters into money. All this in twenty-three words!

I also noticed for the first time how short many of the chapters are and how most of them consist of a single scene. Onstage in the first chapter are Mr. and Mrs. Bennett. Basically, we are given two sentences of introduction, then a spirited dialogue between husband and wife, ending with a paragraph summing up their marriage in general. Austen’s ability to convey character through dialogue is well known, and it’s no wonder her novels have been so often adapted for dramatic presentation, but has anyone considered how the English theatre might have been changed had she been introduced into a literary/theatrical milieu in London? What a playwright she might have been!

Of the 61 chapters of Pride and Prejudice (the final chapter being a summary exposition of the future of its characters, without dialogue), three stand out from the rest -- for me, at least -- in their startling dramatic impact: Chapter 19, the extraordinarily ridiculous proposal of marriage from Mr. Collins and Elizabeth’s spirited refusal of same; Chapter 34, another proposal of marriage, this time issuing reluctantly and haughtily from Mr. Darcy, and Elizabeth’s even stronger refusal; and finally the marvelous, irresistible scene between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Chapter 56. Surely Lady Catherine could hold her own onstage beside Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell! Which one do you think would come out on top?

And oh, that Eliza Bennett! Who can help loving her? She is well read but no showoff bluestocking, musical without the heaviness of genius, not a ravishing beauty but slim and attractive, with bright, lively eyes, dark and beautifully expressive. Her sense of humor is irrepressible. She loves long country walks. She will not marry without love, even if it means remaining an old maid, and she is determined to be recognized as a “rational creature.” 

Not for Elizabeth the wit of the staircase, l’esprit de l’escalier, thinking too late of the retort she should have made. No, Eliza is never at a loss for words (except when spoken to by her sister, Mary, who has none of Elizabeth’s quickness or sense of the ridiculous). Our heroine’s regrets are of a very different order, regret for what she said rather than what she did not say, regret that she let herself be prejudiced against Mr. Darcy and in favor of Mr. Wickham for no other reason than the former’s initial coldness and the latter’s easy charm, the one offending and the other fueling her own pride. The conclusions of all reasoning rest on the soundness of first premises, and this charming "rational creature" had some hard lessons to learn before reaching her happy ending.

I put forward to the group the following hypothesis: Mrs. Hurst, Bingley’s married sister, is crucial to the story by giving Miss Bingley an audience for her cruelest observations on the Bennett family. Without Mrs. Hurst, Miss Bingley’s character would not be so readily revealed. Mr. Hurst, who does nothing but eat and sleep, is useful in taking his wife out of the marriage market so that Bingley does not have two sisters competing for Mr. Darcy.

One question our group has not yet resolved is Mary, the pedantic Bennett sister. What is her function in the story (or drama, as I now think of it)? Does she have one? Any thoughts?

Not generally a great reader of secondary sources, I did venture into a couple other writers’ researches and views of Austen. I picked up some interesting facts but also found a couple of opinions that had me spluttering. How in the world can Francine Prose, in Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them, say that Mr. and Mrs. Bennett had a happy marriage?! Did she read the last paragraph of the first chapter or the first paragraph of the forty-second chapter? “Close reading,” the method Prose recommends to writers, certainly fell down on the job here! And Nigel Nicolson, in his book, The World of Jane Austen – how can he say that Austen looked at houses only as evidence of characters’ wealth, not of their taste? Here is a description of Pemberley and Elizabeth’s response to it:

It was a large, handsome, stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills – and in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal, nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste.

Does that sound as if only wealth had been on display or noted by the heroine or author? Nicolson advances “evidence” for his claim that Austen did not care for a certain contemporary architect by quoting lines of dialogue from another of her novels – but the character who advises throwing out the architect’s plans is a shallow fop! Who on earth would take Robert Ferrars as a mouthpiece for the author?

But there were nuggets of information in the little secondary reading I did. For example, I learned that the four novels published during the author’s lifetime were published anonymously ... that her brother acted as her agent ... that her posthumous reputation was very great when her brother revealed her identity ... and, most heart-piercing nugget of all to my mind, that Jane Austen never in her life met another writer. It is one thing to live in a small village or in the countryside and to have a limited circle of acquaintance but never in her life to have met another writer? How I wish I could invite her to my bookstore to meet my writer friends! Imagine the exchange of views, the “spirited critique” of society and literary fashion!