October 19, 1847—The eponymous heroine of the book
published by the British firm Smith, Elder and Co., Jane Eyre, made her way
through a world riven by class and gender distinctions through open,
full-throated defiance of her brutal aunt-guardian and brooding employer. But the author,
31-year-old Charlotte Bronte, sought
to do so through subtler means.
Like her protagonist, Bronte saw books as a source
of stimulation, even as a means of refashioning her identity. She had convinced
sisters Emily and Anne to send their novels together to publishers, using pseudonyms. While their
non de plumes held the keys to their
respective identities through the first initials, their gender-neutral names
(Currier Bell, Ellis Bell and Acton Bell) would allow them, they hoped, to get
more open-minded receptions from prospective publishers, critics and readers.
The ruse worked. At first, only the manuscripts by
Emily and Anne (Wuthering Heights and
Agnes Grey, respectively) were
accepted for publication. But Charlotte received such an encouraging rejection
letter concerning hers, The Professor,
that, she later recalled, “it cheered the author better than a
vulgarly-expressed acceptance letter.” Within weeks, she had submitted another
manuscript, Jane Eyre, which was read
with mounting excitement by one editor after another at the firm.
For months, Charlotte maintained her alternate
identity in dealing with Smith, Elder. (Even messages from “Currer Bell” that
all mail to “him” should be addressed instead to “Charlotte Bronte” does not appear to
have aroused suspicions.) In fact, it would not be until July 1848 that
Charlotte and Anne traveled by train to the firm’s London offices and revealed
their identities, in order to demonstrate that, contrary to rumor, Currer,
Ellis and Acton Bell were not one (male) person, but three females.
Smith, Elder released the book with the subtitle “An
Autobiography,” harking back to an early marketing ploy used for Daniel Dafoe’s
Robinson Crusoe, in which readers’ identification with fiction was increased by
the suggestion that the book came from a real person. In more ways than Smith,
Elder ever suspected when it accepted the novel, however, it was heavily autobiographical. Though she and her sisters were still at home with their
father, Charlotte had, like her heroine, grown up motherless before becoming
a governess. Like her character, she had few real advantages: no money
and, because of her stunted growth and poor skin, little in the way of looks. And the author even gave her middle name to her creation.
What she did have, from early on, was a powerful love
for literature. Books enabled poor, plain Charlotte Bronte, like poor, plain
Jane Eyre, to discover herself, to realize her true identity.
Readers encountering Bronte’s horrific descriptions
of being locked in the “red room” at Gateshead, the home of her aunt, and of
surviving a starvation diet at the charity school Lowood are likely to
associate Bronte with Charles Dickens and his similar fiction about the
travails of orphans. But perhaps a more intriguing comparison might be drawn
with Henry James’ short novel, Washington Square (1880).
Both novels are, at heart, about the struggle for
female autonomy. The death of a parent leaves James’ heroine, Catherine Sloper,
like Jane Eyre, at the mercy of a well-educated professional whose most notable
personal characteristic is cruelty. (Jane contends at Lowood against the Rev.
Brocklehurst, while Catherine deals with her father, who ends up directing his
own self-disgust for botching his wife’s pregnancy at his innocent daughter.) In
adulthood, Jane and Catherine deal with predatory men who want to exploit them
sexually. (Edward Rochester simply wants his way with Jane, while Morris
Townsend is a fortune hunter who dupes Catherine into falling in love with
him.)
The difference between the two female protagonists arises
from the life of the mind. Catherine’s identity is shaped by her fortune
(hence, the title of the play and film derived from the novel, The Heiress); Jane’s, on the other hand,
derives from books. Not only Jane's intellect, but her sense of fairness and justice derives from her reading. When her aunt's son, 14-year-old schoolboy John Reid, tries to bully her from reading any of the family's books, it represents an attack on the only sustenance the penniless, loveless little girl has. Her accusation--that he is as cruel as the Roman emperors--might derive from her reading of an Oliver Goldsmith history, but it gives her a sense of the confidence she'll need as a young woman in standing up to Edward Rochester.
Someone could write a fascinating, though admittedly
quite idiosyncratic, book simply by reading all the books to which Jane alludes
in her narrative: not just the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, but also Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Bunyan, Swift, Milton, Byron,
Shelley, Keats, Thomas Moore, Coleridge, Pope, Cowper, and Robert Burns (whose
surname perhaps inspired the one given to Jane’s consumptive schoolmate, Helen
Burns).
Catherine Sloper survives the soul-searing sarcasm
of her father and the callousness of her suitor, but her achievement of
selfhood comes from acts of negation—i.e., saying no to the two men who deeply
hurt her—rather than from happiness. In contrast, Jane, through her love of
books, gains a friend (Helen) and a mentor (Lowood’s headmistress, Miss Temple)
whose example light her way even after they pass from her life. In fighting for
the right to self-improvement represented by books, Jane becomes “heir” as well
as “Eyre” to the best of civilization and the best of herself.
(Portrait of Charlotte Bronte ca. 1839 by J. H. Thompson)
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