I first read Jane Eyre in junior high or early high school. My mother had a vintage hardback copy of the book. I think the dusky smell of its pages is what lead me to pick it up for the first time. And it is within Charlotte Bronte’s dreary reminiscences of the moors of England that I first found my love of classic literature. I was enthralled by Bronte’s writing style and I related very closely to Jane Eyre herself. Not that I’m an orphan sent to a neglectful school and then sent to work at a mysterious bachelor’s crumbling estate but like Jane I have often felt different from everyone else and not listened to as I would often wish someone would.
I had a particular sensitivity as a child that Jane’s frightful stay in the red room encapsulated perfectly. Jane is in one scene after fending off her abusive older step-brother is restrained and locked in a unused room where someone previously died. Young Jane then feels the unnerving sense that the ghost of the deceased relative is creeping up behind her and then she screams and cries for someone to let her out. Her pleas are ignored and she faints. This captured for me the foreboding anxiety I felt throughout my childhood and the constant feeling that no one around me, especially adults, understood the seriousness or the enormity of what I was feeling. Combine this with Jane’s desire to escape the world in books, her strong sense of justice, her desire to find beauty in even ugly things and I could see this little version of myself tromping through the English highlands.
I am now reading the book again with my class of high school Seniors. I thought a return to this work would be fitting to the end of my five year stint as a high school English teacher in Malaysia. One of the great benefits of being a teacher, which I imagine is similar to the feeling of being a parent, is to experience again favorite works of fiction or poetry through the eyes, expressions, and reactions of your students. My seniors have loved reading this work together. We have especially enjoyed Jane’s sharp tongue in her bouts of coquettish banter with Mr. Rochester. Beyond that here are two moments that stood out to me sharply in my reread of the formative classic.
The first is a moment burned into my brain from my first read, the death of Helen Burns, but here is a quote that hit me differently this time.
“We are, and must be, one and all, burdened with faults in this world: but the time will soon come when, I trust, we shall put them off in putting off our corruptible bodies; when debasement and sin will fall from us with this cumbrous frame of flesh, and only the spark of the spirit will remain,—the impalpable principle of light and thought, pure as when it left the Creator to inspire the creature: whence it came it will return; perhaps again to be communicated to some being higher than man—perhaps to pass through gradations of glory, from the pale human soul to brighten to the seraph! Surely it will never, on the contrary, be suffered to degenerate from man to fiend? No; I cannot believe that: I hold another creed: which no one ever taught me, and which I seldom mention; but in which I delight, and to which I cling: for it extends hope to all: it makes Eternity a rest—a mighty home, not a terror and an abyss. Besides, with this creed, I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last: with this creed revenge never worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice never crushes me too low: I live in calm, looking to the end.”
Jane Eyre, Chapter 6
Here Helen Burns speaks of a belief that I wish I had known as a child. She shares with Jane a fuller Christian hope than what is routinely taught; God gives grace and eternal comfort to all creatures, all his creation. That God does not degrade, categorize, rank, or make those lesser than him win his approval, although these are things the priests and teachers of men regularly emulate in the god made in their own likeness. Jane experiences this first hand with her condemnation without fault or trail by her caretakers, Mrs. Reed and Mr. Brocklehurst. Helen Burns not only stands out as a true priestly figure in contrast to Mr. Brocklehurst but puts to shame so much of the present Christianity and other religious institutions that browbeat children into submission with visions of hellfire and judgement. These visions represent nothing in reality except the vindictive response that these religious leaders, institutions, or communities will perpetrate if the child falls out of line. An abusive God is really just the supreme self-assertion of abusers into the minds of those they seek to control. If God is to be believed and if he is to be believed to be good, he must be wholly good without faltering something that religious witness has explicitly denied for centuries. And this belief in a good God is what sustains Helen Burns even through her internalized shame and submission to abusive institutions.
I believe that it is the witness of Helen Burns that fortifies Jane and gives her a backbone of eschatological hope that allows her to see through the decaying world of her circumstance to the beauty, truth, and goodness that is behind it all. When Jane sneaks into the sick ward to be with Helen on her deathbed, Helen again reiterates her apocalyptic hope: “My Maker and yours, who will never destroy what He created. I rely implicitly on His power, and confide wholly in His goodness…I am sure there is a future state; I believe God is good; I can resign my immortal part to Him without any misgiving. God is my father; God is my friend: I love Him; I believe He loves me.” Although Helen had no parents, and no loving father on earth, she saw the reality of a Reality beyond her supposed sins and the choir of constant prosecutors. Indeed, the negative words drilled into her all her life still defined much of her self-conception and in this last conversation she admits that she is glad to die for if she lived, “I should have been continually at fault.”
The second scene that struck me was on Jane’s return to her aunt’s estate at the news of her coming death. The way that Mrs. Reed is still fixed in her contempt of Jane even on her deathbed, after all these years available for possible reflection and repentance. To me she represents the parent who cannot recognize that their child is a separate or individual person with a will and personality of their own. Mrs. Reed is the archetype of those many parents who cannot come to terms with something they cannot control, and who resent their children for being themselves.
“‘You have a very bad disposition,’ said she, ‘and one to this day I feel it impossible to understand: how for nine years you could be patient and quiescent under any treatment, and in the tenth break out all fire and violence, I can never comprehend.’”
Jane Eyre, Chapter 21
Mrs. Reed cannot forgive Jane for standing up for herself, for asserting that she too had need and required fair treatment. She calls the voice Jane found to rebuke her “unchildlike.” And in the next line Mrs. Reed powerfully exposes how she really sees children. “I felt fear as if an animal that I had struck or pushed had looked up at me with human eyes and cursed me in a man’s voice.”
Mrs. Reed and Mr. Brocklehurst display the false “seriousness” this first a self-deception. They believe what they are doing is what is best for those in their care and that what they do is for the preservation or attainment of a higher good. But it is a “seriousness” that leads adults to neglect and abuse children and which repudiates the principles they sought to uphold. Mrs. Reed hates Jane as an affront to wealth, class, and breeding. But in the end her hate leaves her poor, disgraced, with children who do not care for her. Mr. Brocklehurst murders through neglect the wards he was entrusted and is removed from his post and demonstrated in an unspoken British way as offensive to the values which he held as so lofty that he used them as a cudgel. Bronte through the character of Jane Eyre shines an shrewd eye on hypocrisy in all those people who are supposed to be her “superiors” in age, rank, class, or piety.
It is not a sin to assert your needs, to display your own personality, or to doubt and escape the intellectual or institutional confines of “serious” society. For the parents and priests this is of course rebellion, disrespect, heresy, apostacy. But to a young girl on the British moors it is to be a bird sprung from its cage. With hope, set free.
