All the Monsters in Jane Eyre

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Recently, I re-read Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is a dark, bewitching book, and this time, I hunted for monsters in it.

I found four—four specific usages of the word “monster”—amid a glut of spooky things (ghoulish motifs, metaphors and pathetic fallacy, and sinister pet-names, to name a few types). As a seminal Gothic text, which both plays up and subverts stylistic hallmarks of the genre, Charlotte Brontë‘s 1847 novel Jane Eyre is obviously associated with beasts and phantoms—and many such examples are highlighted in a chapter called “A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane’s Progress” from perhaps the most influential work of feminist Victorian scholarship written in the twentieth century, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.

In their book, Gilbert and Gubar argue that nineteenth century female writers shared a frustration with the parameters which they were given to work, not only by society but also the masculine literary world ruled by their predecessors. They write, “the literature produced by women confronted with such anxiety‐inducing choices has been strongly marked not only by an obsessive interest in these limited options but also by obsessive imagery of confinement that reveals the ways in which female artists feel sickened both by suffocating alternatives and by the culture that created them.”

As the journalist Le Anne Schreiber explained, in her New York Times review of the book when it came out in 1979, these nineteenth-century women writers lived inside “a trap.” It was “a trap that called for complex, subversive strategies of escape.” Gilbert and Gubar “contend that what characterizes the female imagination is a set of covert, sometimes subconsciously employed methods of attacking or evading male authority… Female writers became adept at doubletalk—and at the creation of deranged doubles who act out the author’s own camouflaged guilt and rage. The authors call this double ‘the madwoman in the attic.'” They have named this archetype after Bertha, Mr. Rochester’s “mad” wife, whom he keeps locked in a tower in Thornfield Hall, and who later burns down the whole edifice.

Jane Eyre, and its literary compatriots, reveal the ways in which the gothic novel was a fundamental disruption to traditional domestic and class representations

It is a common thought that the nineteenth-century gothic novel centrally features a young woman escaping from the dangers of the large manor house where she has been brought as a bride—a progenitor of the so-called domestic suspense genre we see everywhere today. But Jane Eyre, one of the prototypical novels in this genre’s pinnacle, illuminates the ways that many were quintessentially anti-patriarchal texts, written by women who demanded much more, for their characters, for their readers, and for themselves, than simply escaping from a ubiquitous, oppressive, masculine architecture. Jane Eyre, and its literary compatriots, reveal the ways in which the gothic novel was a fundamental disruption to traditional domestic and class representations—featuring characters who break away from confining norms, but wreck them altogether. Jane Eyre is one of many characters in this era who embodies fury, change, and demolition.

In the nineteenth century, Jane Eyre was itself received as a rather monsterous book. Elizabeth Rigby wrote in The Quarterly Review in 1848 that “Jane Eyre is throughout the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit…” She called it “pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition, full of “the tone of mind and thought which has fostered Chartism and rebellion.” And a Mrs. Oliphant wrote in a review in 1855, “Ten years ago we professed an orthodox system of novel-making…  when suddenly, without warning, Jane Eyre stole upon the scene, and the most alarming revolution of modern times has followed the invasion of Jane Eyre.”

Gilbert and Gubar wrote,

“We tend today to think of Jane Eyre as moral gothic, ‘myth domesticated,‘ Pamela‘s daughter and Rebecca‘s aunt, the archetypal scenario for all those mildly thrilling romantic encounters between a scowling Byronic hero (who owns a gloomy mansion) and a trembling heroine (who can’t quite figure out the mansion’s floor plan). Or, if we’re more sophisticated, we give Charlotte Bronte her due, concede her strategic as well as her mythic abilities, study the patterns of her imagery, and count the number of times she addresses the reader. But still we overlook the “alarming revolution”… which “followed the ‘invasion of Jane Eyre‘…

They were disturbed not so much by the proud Byronic sexual energy of Rochester as by the Byronic pride and passion of Jane herself, not so much by the asocial sexual vibrations between hero and heroine as by the heroine’s refusal to submit to her social destiny…

In other words, what horrified the Victorians was Jane’s anger. And perhaps they, rather than more recent critics, were correct in their response to the book. For while the mythologizing of repressed rage may parallel the mythologizing of repressed sexuality, it is far more dangerous to the order of society.

Simply, Jane Eyre is the story of a young woman who is angry at her oppression in a cruel, draconian world. I am interested, though, in the four distinctive ways in which the word “monster” is used in the book, extending this main theme. Mapping that word, specifically, tracks the process of animalization and identification that Jane undergoes through the novel.

The first “monster” appears in Jane’s description of her beloved Gulliver’s Travels. She explains,

“I doubted not that I might one day, by taking a long voyage, see with my own eyes the little fields, houses, and trees, the diminutive people, the tiny cows, sheep, and birds of the one realm; and the corn-fields forest-high, the mighty mastiffs, the monster cats, the tower-like men and women, of the other. Yet, when this cherished volume was now placed in my hand—when I turned over its leaves, and sought in its marvelous pictures the charm I had, till now, never failed to find—all was eerie and dreary; the giants were gaunt goblins, the pigmies malevolent and fearful imps, Gulliver a most desolate wanderer in most dread and dangerous regions.”

Jane, who will be swept away from the abusive Reed house to the sinister Lowood School, and then the haunted Thornfield Hall, and then the somber Rivers home, is a traveler not unlike Gulliver, a wanderer through dark and twisted places, presided over by figures whose disquieting natures have been stretched to Brobdingnagian proportions.

But first, as in Jane’s conception of Gulliver’s journey, the world appears full of interesting, gentle, little creatures. Typically, young Jane delights in learning about animals—specifically birds, which thematically dovetails rather neatly with Jane’s entrapment in different “cages” and longing for freedom. She is reading Berwick’s History of English Birds when the novel begins, and we learn shortly after that few things lift her spirits like the “bird of paradise” design on her porcelain plate.

However, in the Reed house, her beloved animals are turned against her—or perhaps animals are a source of comfort to her because she has been made to think of herself as one. The maids refer to her as a “mad-cat” and threaten to tie her down, while she is raging. As Gilbert and Gubar note, her beastly cousin John Reed employs an abusive, animal-centric vernacular when referring to her. He calls her a “bad animal,”  a “rat,” tells her she ought to “beg.” John’s linking his young cousin with animals implies danger, since he has a habit of “twist[ing] the necks of the pigeons, kill[ing] the little pea-chicks, set[ing] the dogs at the sheep.”

The monster-creatures Jane longs to encounter if she embarks on an adventure, as Gulliver does, are changed for her after she confined to the Reed’s eerie red room with its spectral past (similar to the attic-confinement of the mad Bertha Mason, another one of the four “monsters”). (“A fearful voyage I had with such a monster in the vessel,” Rochester tells Jane, later on, attempting to explain Bertha’s imprisonment.)

This literal act of confining or caging Jane is the cold Mrs. Reed’s final attempt to curb Jane’s behavior before sending her away to school, and, this caging (in a room that had been the site of the ultimate transformation) sets her future path from enclosure to enclosure, and sets in motion her (then-unknown) parallel with Bertha, who, when Jane encounters her ten years later, will have already been transformed from a woman into a monster by Rochester.

Bertha, who had journeyed from Jamaica to England to marry Rochester, finds herself a stranger in a new land—and, like the transformed Gulliver, is a lonely, unwanted (even “exotic”) intruder in a drying, gloomy environment. So is Jane when she begins her journey and arrives at Lowood School, where the sinister headmaster, Mr. Brocklehurst, informs the congregation, “this girl, who might be one of God’s own lambs, is a little castaway: not a member of the true flock, but evidently an interloper and an alien.” Here, she is both a wayward animal in a cage, and an unworldly creature. Bertha, whom Mr. Rochester refers to as a “monster,” is both, as well. She is referred to by Rochester as a “wolf,” a “goblin,” and a “wild beast” and by Jane as both a “hyena” and a “vampire.”

Perhaps because of her history, being referred to with the names of animals, Jane is quick to work out how she is and is not monstrous. She refers to herself not as an animal, but as a supernatural creature—like one of the changed, sad animals in the gloomier version of Gulliver’s Travels. In the mirror, she sees herself as a creature—“like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp”—and she observes that she has been walking “like a troubled spirit.” She scolds herself for wicked thoughts, and yet, the only time she calls herself a literal monster is when she is discussing her most “human” quality—her social station. “Why?—Am I a monster?…is it impossible that Mr. Rochester should have a sincere affection for me?” she asks Mrs. Fairfax, who expresses incredulity at the prospect of Jane, the governess, marrying her master.

Traveling from one station to another is the monstrousness Jane questions—is it so wrong to enter a new sphere through marriage? Mrs. Fairfax says that is not, because Rochester loves Jane. The same cannot be said for Bertha, though her situation is similar (only with geographic, instead of class, mobility).

Gilbert and Gubar write,

“Nevertheless, it is disturbingly clear from recurrent images in the novel that Bertha not only acts for Jane, she also acts like Jane. The imprisoned Bertha, running ‘backwards and forwards’ on all fours in the attic, for instance, recalls not only Jane the governess, whose only relief from mental pain was to pace “backwards and forwards” in the third story, but also that “bad animal“ who was ten-year-old Jane, imprisoned in the red-room, howling and mad.”

Rochester tries to turn Jane into a creature, too, though. He asks if she is “waiting for her people… the men in green.” He curses her “elvish” thoughts, and frequently calls her names that evoke enchanting, such as “witch”  or “sorceress.” According to Gilbert and Gubar, “…Bertha’s ‘goblin appearance’—’half dream, half reality,’ says Rochester—recalls the lover’s epithets for Jane: ‘malicious elf,’ ‘sprite,’ ‘changeling,’ as well as his playful accusation that she had magically downed his horse at their first meeting.” However, when he has the opportunity to contrast Jane to Bertha, he calls her a “lamb” to Bertha’s “wolf.” 

Jane and Bertha are indeed positioned as alternate selves. As Gilbert and Gubar explain,

“Bertha’s fiendish madness recalls Mrs. Reed’s remark about Jane (‘she talked to me once like something mad or like a fiend’) as well as Jane’s own estimate of her mental state (‘I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad-as I am now.’ And most dramatic of all, Bertha’s incendiary tendencies recall Jane’s early flaming rages, at Lowood and at Gateshead, as well as that ‘ridge of lighted heath’ which she herself saw as emblematic of her mind in its rebellion against society. It is only fitting, therefore, that, as if to balance the child Jane’s terrifying vision of herself as an alien figure in the ‘visionary hollow’ of the red-room looking glass, the adult Jane first clearly perceives her terrible double when Bertha puts on the wedding veil intended for the second Mrs. Rochester, and turns to the mirror. At that moment, Jane sees ‘the reflection of the visage and features quite distinctly in the dark oblong glass,’ sees them as if they were her own.”

Gilbert and Gubar highlight one of the most important elements of the 19th century Gothic genre, which is that the most furious, dangerous creature might live within the heroine. Jane Eyre becomes not a story about a woman threatened by her dark and spooky surroundings, as much as a story about a woman who destroys the unsatisfactory world she is cursed to live in, and builds a new one for herself where she has control and power. Jane and Bertha, together, destroy Thornfield and take control over Rochester.

Rochester, himself, is a brute, and Gilbert and Gubar link him to the equally massive, threatening John Reed (who, again, abuses birds and sheep, specifically). Jane, who is “used to the sight of the demon,” does not flinch at Rochester’s name-calling and is determined not to be his subordinate, might also possess some kind of the power she has been accused of having throughout, as evidenced by the manner in which uses the word “monster” this fourth time it appears. She is walking through the woods, and says, to the creepy-looking trees: “’You did right to hold fast to each other, speaking “as if the monster-splinters were living things, and could hear me.”  She continues,

“I think, scathed as you look, and charred and scorched, there must be a little sense of life in you yet, rising out of that adhesion at the faithful, honest roots: you will never have green leaves more—never more see birds making nests and singing idyls in your boughs; the time of pleasure and love is over with you: but you are not desolate: each of you has a comrade to sympathize with him in his decay.”

Here, it is almost as if she is predicting what will happen to Rochester—that he will burn, and go blind, and metaphorically become castrated and unseated as a patriarchal oppressor—and in doing this, she demonstrates an almost magical ability: turning him from an animal, into a plant—from a brute into a tree.

And by the end of it all, Jane, possibly, is the bird he cannot see, making a home among his ruins.

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