00:01:10.240Which, of course, was the nom de plume of author Charlotte Bronte, one of the Bronte sisters.
00:01:17.960So I've got Jane Eyre on the brain a lot lately.
00:01:20.600The Brontes have been on my mind really for a couple months since we did our episode on Wuthering Heights, and that one was pegged to the Emerald Fennell movie adaptation.
00:01:32.120Wuthering Heights was, of course, the only novel published by Charlotte Bronte's sister, Emily Bronte.
00:01:36.760They are very different books, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, although they do share some themes.
00:01:42.900an unnerving sexuality a sense of gothic ominousness interesting and like qualified
00:01:51.500critiques of imperialism all of those are in both of these books and I think they are similar books
00:01:56.700in that they kind of like resist movie adaptations Jane Eyre is a book that directors
00:02:04.440really want to make about a pretty woman and all these like wan but gorgeous models get cast as
00:02:12.000Jane, and that's really not the Jane of the novel who is like sort of pointedly plain, right?
00:03:48.140Right. Two of the initially five Bronte sisters died.0.99
00:03:54.180So Charlotte's two older sisters died at this boarding school.
00:03:58.060And the boarding school is sort of depicted and somewhat parodied in really miserable terms.
00:04:03.260I think if there's one thing people remember from those survey courses that they took in college or in high school where they were assigned to Jane Eyre, if you've forgotten everything, you'll remember the burnt porridge at Lowood, you know, Jane Eyre just having like no food.
00:04:19.420But this is also a book that departs from Charlotte Bronte's life in some interesting ways, not only the ending, where, you know, Jane Eyre, famously reader I married him, achieves what is to her a happy ending.
00:04:32.880I have notes. But, you know, Charlotte Bronte's own matrimonial fate was, you know, shall we say, more ambivalent.
00:04:43.280She got married towards the very end of her life to a guy who was not very nice to her and who she didn't seem to especially like.
00:04:49.420So I read Jane Eyre this summer for the second time, but I read it originally in my teens.
00:05:00.540And Adrienne, I don't know if I've ever told you this story, but when I was in high school,
00:05:06.500when I graduated high school, the two beloved English teachers, like every American public
00:05:12.380school child, I have a beloved English teacher. There were actually two of them. And they took
00:05:18.180some of their favorite students and gifted them copies of novels that were supposed to be
00:05:23.420significant to that student. It was a really nice gesture. Yeah, it's lovely. And I was given a copy
00:05:29.980of Jane Eyre. Wow. Upon my graduation by these people who were like, this is what you should
00:05:34.560read. This is the book that is most aligned to what we consider, you know, your emerging character
00:05:41.020and your likely fate. And that pissed me the fuck off, actually. I did not take this as a0.57
00:05:47.720compliment. Yeah, I'm sort of with high school Moira here. That feels like an odd one. This is
00:05:53.560a book about what happens to women who can't quite hack it in the sort of avenues for status
00:06:05.360and stability that are available to women in her world, right? So like, you know, Jane is ugly.1.00
00:06:10.980She doesn't have any money. She's actually at some points pointed out as like not especially smart.1.00
00:06:16.520She is described repeatedly by herself and by extension by Charlotte Bronte as poor, obscure, plain, and little, right?
00:06:26.380You know, it's interesting that you mentioned, Adrienne, the sort of parallels to Charlotte Bronte's own life.
00:06:31.480Charlotte Bronte sort of couldn't hack it in the avenues that were available to her, even though she was desperately trying to.
00:06:37.300She was not a pretty girl, not a charming girl, a girl with exceptional intellectual gifts, but not a lot of sort of avenues to make those work for her.
00:06:50.240She had some like really deeply felt professional disappointments as a writer in her lifetime.
00:06:55.340And she clearly understood herself as sort of like outside these metrics of female accomplishment and female desirability, right?
00:07:02.540Also, it's a very close first person in Jane Eyre, by which I mean it's like the first person narration in Jane Eyre is not the kind of first person where the reader maintains enough distance from the narrator character to see when they're being a little unreliable or deluding themselves or making a wrong choice.
00:07:25.240the reader is very loyal to Jane's perspective
00:07:29.440and there's not a lot of breathing room
00:07:31.580to see outside of Jane's perspective in Jane Eyre.
00:07:34.300This was a critique that Virginia Woolf had of the novel.
00:07:36.540She found the closeness of the first person
00:08:09.500There were some crises to be had, and then I, you know, like, nothing really happened to redeem this except that I got old enough to, like, accept my own limitations as a person
00:08:19.620and have a broad enough perspective that, like, the judgments of my high school English teachers didn't mean as much to me.
00:08:24.700But, yeah, I was like, what the hell, guys?
00:08:38.780But, like, I read this book that summer, and I think maybe because I was so defensive as, like, an 18-year-old,0.99
00:08:47.700And maybe because I just didn't quite have the intellectual capacity yet to, like, handle a complicated novel that has a lot of doubling and, like, sort of subterranean messages in it.
00:09:01.640I just wasn't a good enough reader yet.
00:09:04.840I didn't really like Jane Eyre when I read it.0.95
00:09:07.040I was sort of more interested to read it this summer, but I wasn't expecting what happened, which is that I fucking love this book.
00:09:13.380So, like, I really hope that if you've ever had this kind of experience where you read a classic book when you were young or in school or something and you didn't love it, I really hope that you go back and look at that book again.0.98
00:09:26.180Because I'm, like, so, so glad that I reread Jay Nair as a mature adult because this shit is amazing.0.94
00:09:31.720I was, like, blown away by this book.0.99
00:10:34.360was the son of like a really poor Irish farmer
00:10:37.060who had worked his way up into a modest
00:10:41.200but somewhat dignified role in the clergy through, like, an intense investment in education.
00:10:47.460I didn't know this, but her father actually opened a school at the age of 16.
00:10:52.500Wow. Speaking of undeveloped frontal courtesies, yes.
00:10:56.500And, like, crucially, her father did not forbid any books to his children.
00:11:01.880He was not evidently or reportedly an especially warm guy.
00:11:05.380There is a sort of like coldness and sort of morbidity to accounts of like this deprived, emotionally austere Yorkshire childhood that is a marked quality of a lot of accounts of the Howard Parsonage in their early lives.
00:11:21.780But the children were allowed to read basically whatever they wanted, and they did.
00:11:27.240They read adult books from a very young age.
00:11:30.540So Charlotte, as we mentioned, was one of six children, five daughters and one son.
00:11:39.280And those two older sisters died before reaching adulthood.
00:11:46.100Her mother died when she was quite small.
00:11:48.300So her mother dies when she's very small.
00:11:50.720Then her two older sisters die as children when they are all sent to this like ill-resourced charity boarding school for the daughters of clergy.
00:11:59.740And then she has one older brother, Branwell, who was an opium addict and a drunk and who wasted his own artistic potential and like, frankly, like a lot of the family's money.
00:12:12.100Yeah. Washed out of art school and didn't have the guts to tell his family.
00:12:15.520And so they kind of kept paying the bills.
00:12:18.720Apparently he never even went to art school.
00:12:20.480He told them he was going to art school and then just sort of like drank himself into a stupor in London until he couldn't pay his debts anymore.
00:12:27.920So a guy who had these, like, desires to be creative had a sense of, like, the importance of artistic exertion to the intellect and to the soul, but could not bring himself to, like, confront the challenge that his own, you know, sense of a calling posed.
00:12:43.880So one thing that happened is that, you know, Charlotte and her sisters are writing. They are writing from a very young age. They are in particular writing about a fantasy world or a fantasy country they called Angria.
00:13:00.500And they are concealing their productions and eventually their publication from their brother Branwell, who never knows.
00:14:15.720The toy soldiers have descendants who populate Angria.0.99
00:14:19.240And Angria is a place of, like, great epic struggle of particularly, like, Byronic heroes who have this edge of darkness and passion to them that defies social mores.
00:14:31.980Those are, like, typical figures of the Angrian stories.
00:14:35.540They are a world that is in sort of obtuse reference to the political realities of the Brontes' time, but are sort of filtered through the distorting and difference-making texture of a child's imagination, right?
00:14:53.660And of the Brontes, the person who is most invested in the Angrian fantasy is Charlotte.
00:16:09.020She was the most interested in publication.
00:16:12.040She seems to have esteemed herself as sort of the moral and like literary judge of value among the sisters, right?
00:16:19.340So like she has, I think we talked about in our Wuthering Heights episode, Charlotte's introduction to the 1851 edition of Wuthering Heights.
00:16:35.680She's like, I'm not sure it's wise to create characters such as Heathcliff, right?
00:16:39.360On the other hand, she seems to have been really kind of blown away by the quality of Emily's poetry.
00:16:45.740And so it is Charlotte who, through these, like, Herculean acts of will, convinces the sisters to pursue publication.
00:16:56.320So the three of them together, basically through Charlotte's like furious intervention, wind up publishing a book of poetry, a sort of poetry collection by Kerr Ellis and Acton Bell.
00:17:10.700This sells, this poetry collection that they publish, this sells two copies.
00:19:43.120I mean, I don't know what's to it, but like I remember reading this in the critical edition of Tenant where there's some sense that after their deaths, she became a literary executor and it was not just, she was not a promoter only.0.85
00:19:57.880And that meant there were things she withheld or under-accentuated or only let out the door with, you know, her emendations, basically.0.92
00:20:08.180Yeah, you know, I think we can see her sense of leadership in the family as both the way Charlotte seems to have seen it, which is as this like long-suffering pragmatist trying to stop these people from, you know, doing things that are not appropriate or not in their interests.
00:20:24.480And also as sort of somebody who's intervening in the preferred courses of action, we might say, of other people, right?
00:20:33.420It's the double-edged sword of leadership.
00:20:35.020There's both the burden and the imposition.
00:20:38.180So if you are in the first half of the 19th century in England, a kind of like cerebral, charmless girl without any money, there is basically exactly one profession available to you.
00:20:55.020The governess was a class of employee that we don't really have anymore, right?
00:21:00.780And I say employee, but that's kind of an ambivalent qualification for the governess.
00:21:05.740The governess was paid. She was a live-in part of a wealthy household who acted as a private tutor and educator, sort of both academically but also like morally, for the children of wealthy families.
00:21:22.880So she was like a little bit childcare, a little bit education, a little bit sort of like finishing school, especially for girls.
00:21:29.780She was usually a young, unmarried woman, and she was of really ambivalent status, where she was given sort of more status, more authority, more respect than other servants, but not as much as members of the household.
00:21:46.520Yeah. I'm sorry, I have to laugh a little bit because Moira is saying all that living like only blocks away from Dolores Park. I would encourage you to find out why there are so many surly, very young Italian women pushing those children on the swing sets. That's called an au pair, Moira, and they're all around you.
00:22:02.440Yeah, it's the same thing. It's the same thing, right? These young women of ambivalent status brought in as like childcare and they're proximate to the family, but they are not members of the family, right?
00:22:14.340Yeah. Nor are they straightforwardly like service providers. They're often underpaid because it's supposed to sort of like also give them a boost in status, again, like an au pair, right, who's ostensibly there for language study, right? There is an element there of like, well, you're not, you know, the coachman or you're not, you know, the butler. Your status forbids you from like bargaining up, for instance.0.99
00:22:35.500So it is also like, it's both outside of the family, but also outside of capitalism, so therefore more like a family member that you can exploit and set upon and treat terribly.
00:26:11.960So this was a novel she based on Monsieur Hege,
00:26:15.240who had been her supervisor and kind of her teacher
00:26:18.880when she and Emily were student teachers
00:26:22.680at an academy in Brussels in the early 1840s.
00:26:26.600So Charlotte and Emily, they go to Brussels.
00:26:29.760They are kind of learning how to be teachers, how to be better governesses, because they have this like vague ambition to one day open their own school.
00:26:38.460And Constantin Ije is a English teacher there.
00:26:42.140He's teaching the French-speaking Belgian children how to read and write in English.
00:28:20.260And he's irritable and he kind of like negs her a little. He is immediately flirtatious, but in a way that is a little presumptuously familiar, you know? Like, I think you should not flirt this way with anybody you don't know very well.
00:28:38.560Does this happen in your marriage where, like, you tease each other by being like, you suck so much shit?1.00
00:28:43.760Like, you're like, this is a big part of my marriage where we're like, of course you did that.1.00
00:28:48.360You're always doing that silly thing or that stupid thing or that self-defeating thing.0.99
00:29:07.660So he's kind of, like, deficient in this way, but he's got this kind of animalistic quality that is very, very appealing to young Jane.
00:29:16.780So Charlotte writes this first novel, The Professor, basically about Monsieur Egger, this kind of Byronic, ugly, but very sexually appealing character.
00:29:28.360There's a word in Dutch that, of course, I don't remember, but it translates to dog sexy.0.88
00:30:03.940It's immediately rejected by publishers. It's never printed in her lifetime. They're like, this is not as accessible as some of her later work will be. It's not quite as accomplished. But it kind of forms this transitional work between the angry and juvenilia and the mature novels, right?
00:30:22.840And Charlotte will, as we said, draw again and again from her experiences as a governess in England and as a student teacher in Belgium in her future works.
00:30:33.340Not just a professor, but in Jane Eyre and in Vallette and all of her novels, really.
00:30:37.900But something that's really interesting to me about The Professor is that it's told from the old man's point of view.
00:30:43.320It's told from the professor's point of view.
00:30:45.980And when she moves on after that novel gets rejected and she starts writing Jane Eyre, she chooses the different first person, that of the young governess whose experiences are a lot more like hers.
00:30:59.220So let's get into the plot of Jane Eyre.
00:31:02.980And like spoiler alert for a novel published in 1847, she marries him, right?
00:31:09.040So Jane Eyre basically has five distinct parts.
00:31:14.560It was published in three volumes. I really do understand it as a book in three major acts, but it has five settings, and the five settings are her childhood at a manor called Gateshead, her school days at a really kind of miserable, boring school named Lowood, her youth as a governess at Mr. Rochester's estate of Thornfeld, her self-exile from Thornfeld when she winds up at a place called Moore Hall,
00:31:42.120And then her reconciliation back with Rochester towards the end of the book, again at Thornwood, but this time in a cottage on the grounds of the destroyed manor house.
00:31:52.860So it's this kind of journey, maturation, lesson learned, and then a return, right?
00:31:58.760It's kind of like a typical hero's journey.
00:32:01.180Can you hear the barking dog outside my window?
00:32:11.440Okay. So it's a story about a poor governess who falls in love with her employer, discovers that he is married to a woman who is profoundly mentally disturbed, who he keeps imprisoned, locked up in the attic of his manor house.
00:32:31.120So if you ever heard the phrase, the mad woman in the attic, or perhaps picked up the book, which we will be discussing, that is a reference to Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester's first wife.
00:32:41.880She flees to a life of poverty, Jane does, rather than become Mr. Rochester's mistress.
00:32:51.300First, she receives a proposal of marriage from another man.
00:32:55.360And second, she receives notice that she has inherited a fortune from a previously unknown relative.
00:33:02.340So this woman who does a principled thing and rejects a sort of like sinful or just unsatisfying and dishonest partnership with a married man is rewarded by, you know, coming into means of her own.
00:33:19.060But she rejects this alternate marriage proposal
00:33:22.120and receives a kind of like dubiously supernatural telepathic communication
00:33:28.280from Mr. Rochester telling her to return to him.
00:34:06.920She jumps from a great height in a, like, dubiously cognizant suicide, right?
00:34:13.260Like, does she actually know what she's doing?
00:34:14.800I think Bertha is one of the most interesting characters in Victorian literature, but she's really made interesting by subsequent interventions, right?
00:34:25.840Like the richness of Bertha, this mad woman in the attic, and all that she is able to do is really the product of interventions by 20th century writers.
00:34:36.800And we're going to get to sort of Jane Eyre's afterlives.
00:34:40.220But because Bertha is dead, that means Mr. Rochester is now single.
00:34:44.320However, in the blaze, he has been maimed and blinded. He loses use of one of his hands and he can't see. And so that means that Jane Eyre, the heiress, who has been raised up in status and Rochester, who has been lowered in status dramatically, they are now equals, right?
00:35:06.400They're able to embark on a honest partnership of equals, which is something I guess that happens when a woman is a billionaire and a man is blind.
00:35:18.800But this is like sort of the happy ending, right?
00:35:23.760They live in a cottage on his old property.
00:35:28.200He regains his eyesight and is able to look upon their children and they sort of live happily ever after.
00:35:34.580Yeah, and I mean, as more as description should make clear, it's both kind of a social novel, a Bildungsroman, sort of a story of development, but it's also, it has trappings of the Gothic the same way that Wuthering Heights does.
00:35:48.540You know, you can't have someone jumping out of the burning building.
00:35:51.460Like, that wouldn't have happened to Jane Austen, having someone just like fling themselves from a burning manor house while the Lord loses his eyesight down below.
00:36:00.080So in The Madwoman in the Attic, this is always something I flash back to.
00:36:05.380The authors call Jane Eyre Pamela's daughter and Rebecca's aunt, which I really like.
00:36:11.040Because it's a lot of creepy, large mansions that have a tendency to catch fire.
00:36:30.080The like merger of sort of virtuous woman and sort of like a darkly evil man is kind of there.
00:36:39.700And there's this kind of like framework of like low status woman and high status man as a marriage sort of prospect that I think is given to us in a lot of like marriage plots and like other kinds of Victorian novels that gets really subverted by what Jane does, which is sort of continually refuse and rebel against positions of lower status and the indignity that comes with them.
00:37:06.020right? And so this is going to really inform feminist readings of the novel. But first,
00:37:11.340I want to dwell a little bit on this madwoman in the attic, Bertha Mason. Adrian, could you
00:37:17.240like gloss Bertha for our listeners who maybe haven't read Jane Eyre?
00:37:20.740I'm trying to remember now a book I read 25 years ago, but my recollection is that as soon as Jane
00:37:28.160arrives in Thornfield House, things are starting to be a little strange. The first time readers
00:37:36.000you kind of entertain the possibility that there's something supernatural going on,
00:38:18.520And then they go and they are going to get married.
00:38:20.840Rochester and Jane are going to be married.
00:38:24.240He takes her to the church in the little village.
00:38:27.300And they are literally at the altar when a man comes in and says, this guy can't get married because he's already married.
00:38:32.940And she discovers that he has been concealing the secret wife the whole time.
00:38:37.100And that is when Jane is finally taken to the attic and sees this creature who is referred to, using a lot of like animal metaphors, like as a hyena, as a bird of prey, sometimes referred to as it, who is sort of base, animal-like, without redeeming qualities in her suffering and is violent, right?
00:39:00.020So at one point she bites the man who is her brother, who has come to stop Mr. Rochester from marrying someone else.
00:39:07.460And if I remember correctly, the madness is not accidental.
00:47:26.100But her mother remarries a wealthy man. But this does not stop the local people from burning down their house. So like the emancipated black people burn down the sort of like manor house, former plantation house that Antoinette and her family are living in.
00:47:43.860And the fire kills her younger brother, who is disabled and can't flee.
00:47:49.460And there's also like a really like vivid, disturbing description of the family's pet parrot dying with like its wings outstretched and on fire.
00:47:58.800So the loss of the child is what drives Antoinette's mother insane.
00:48:04.800And Antoinette, at a certain point, goes and visits her mother where this woman who is, you know, now incapable of reason is being sort of tended to by paid servants that her stepfather is paying.
00:48:18.040And she realizes that her insane mother is being raped by her caretakers in this sort of like insane asylum cottage that she's been exiled to.
00:48:26.820So Bertha is then sort of like transactionally married off to this strange Englishman without her input or consent and is then rejected by him in increasingly cruel terms.0.88
00:48:40.900So Rochester is sleeping with Antoinette's black servants.
00:48:45.080He refuses to call her by her name and starts giving her this other name.0.72
00:48:50.560He's keeping her very drunk, like they're all very drunk in White Sargasso Sea, like all the time.
00:48:55.240And he is sort of like slowly pushing the people she knows away from her. And so like she tries to sort of get away and isn't able to. And eventually denied love, addressed as foundationally and congenitally broken, carrying all these experiences of like displacement and violence is sort of carried across the ocean and locked up in this attic where she doesn't know where she is.
00:49:23.740and she is treated very cruelly, right?
00:49:26.720So, like, why Sargossa Sea is Gene Rice being like,
00:49:29.620if this happened to you, you would go crazy as well.
00:51:56.500The Mad One in the Attic is a really fascinating, like critical intervention, trying to recast the Victorian era as one in which the novels have really potent gender politics that can be formative for the gender politics of the modern era, right?
00:52:15.020This is a very critically influential book. For our purposes, I'm really going to be focusing on their chapter on Jane Eyre, which is called Dialogue of Self and Soul or Plain Jane's Progress, right?
00:52:27.140And Gilbert and Gubar, I think this chapter was written by Gilbert, but I don't want to cheat Gubar, but Gilbert and Gubar say that, you know, one of the clear influences on Jane Eyre was A Pilgrim's Progress, which is one of the books that we know that the Brontes had in their home at Howarth Parsage when they were growing up.
00:52:48.000And which has, like Jane Eyre does, a sort of narrative of an individual coming into sort of like spiritual fullness and self-respect, right?
00:53:00.080One of the big critical questions about Jane Eyre is whether or not this is a Christian book.0.56
00:53:06.740On the one hand, this is a book which has tremendous hostility towards the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of religious authorities, right?
00:53:16.640So one character who comes in for a ton of mockery and ire is the founder and head of lower school, Mr. Brocklehurst, right?
00:53:25.360In the last third of the book, Jane receives a marriage proposal from a severe, cold, emotionally repressed cousin of hers named Sinjin, St. John, but it's pronounced Sinjin.
00:53:38.620who's like, be my wife because you are really good at self-discipline and self-sacrifice
00:53:44.060and we will go be missionaries in India.0.99
00:53:47.260And Jane's like, I don't want to fucking do that.0.97
00:53:49.300Actually, that does not sound fun at all.0.97
00:53:51.360That does not sound like it will be fulfilling, right?
00:54:01.620And it also rejects a vision of religion as being about sort of muting the passions, repressing pleasure, and living a life of self-sacrifice, right?0.99
00:54:14.260On the other hand, you know, Jane refuses adultery, and this is very much a mark of her self-respect, right?
00:54:22.720And the last word of the novel is Jesus.
00:54:24.420You know, it's a book that has, let's say, an ambivalent relationship to religion, but it does not have an ambivalent relationship to Jane.
00:54:33.580Gilbert and Gubar depict Jane as sort of rejecting her social destiny.
00:54:40.420So she is given this sort of way of being as a woman in the world, and she completely and repeatedly rejects self-sacrifice, self-abnegation, and sort of the strictures of a social role that she does not feel is, you know, appropriate to her dignity.0.90
00:54:59.600And that is where they find a really, like, profound feminism.
00:55:03.980Other critics working around the same time have different interpretations, right?
00:55:09.460So there's a famous critique by Gayatri Spivak, which comes out a few years after Mad Woman in the Attic in 1985, in which, you know, the second wave has just ended and Spivak is really looking at Charlotte Bronte's approach to imperialism.
00:55:25.320And she's like, look, and she also critiques White Sargasso Sea in the same essay, which is called Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.
00:55:31.620We should link to all of these in the show notes.
00:55:33.760But she's like, look, these texts, in order to, you know, redeem Jane Eyre as like a feminist, you sort of have to forgive or ignore the fact that she achieves her equality and status on the back of this racist caricature of Bertha.0.92