The Jane Eyre Trilogy – Part Three
Dear Reader, I Got Married Too, Then Returned To Jane and Bertha!
Jane Eyre and I go back a long way. I first met Jane at school, when she was simply part of a story: an orphan, a gloomy house, a mysterious man and, of course, a secret containing the shadows of another woman. The storytelling technique was exciting and thrilling, keeping me hooked!
At college, I met Jane again. This time there was more to notice. Victorian society, religion, class and all the things that come with studying a nineteenth-century novel entered the reading. The gothic aspect was enticing and compelling as I was looking to stabilise my own identity. The concept of feminism existing that far back in History was fascinating!
Then came university, where Jane had to withstand literary analysis. Voice, gender, autonomy and power all came under examination. Nothing escaped scrutiny, including Jane herself. The depth was perfectly suited to my intellectually curious mind. I could literally discuss any theme or topic that arose about it. But I must add it was all learned debating, lacking much needed life experience and wisdom.
All these three readings had something in common which was that someone else had asked me to read about Jane Eyre and write in a distinctive style. Although I enjoyed this analysis as I got older I realised it was all about the numbers game. I wanted a good grade and the institution wanted good statistical data that their students were a success.
This Time I Set the Question
Now, decades later, I have opened the pages of Jane Eyre for a fourth time and hopefully not for the last time. This reading was rather personal as I also wanted to observe how I have changed over the decades and if I recognise the Jane Eyre we were taught or if I recognised the writer behind the famous character she created.
In the absence of a teacher, proper essay questions and no pressure of an upcoming exam, my initial feeling was of relief. The realisation that I did not have to assess the novel in that rather harsh critical tone I once employed for examinations. In fact now that I did not have to prove anything about Jane. I could simply read her much like being in companionship with a much loved character.
As I began reading through the novel again, reacquainting myself with a story I once knew very well, some things returned immediately. Others have almost disappeared from memory. And occasionally I find myself wondering whether I remembered something because it mattered to me, or because at some point a teacher or lecturer told me that it mattered.
I note that although this beloved novel has not changed, the reader in me after several decades of life experience most certainly has!
Jane Eyre is one of the best works of literary fiction, partly because it offers many themes: feminism, class, religion, marriage, power, colonialism, Bertha Mason, Rochester and, of course, Jane’s fierce insistence upon her own independence. As my overview of my personal independence has evolved over the years, I decided to assess Jane Eyre’s independence. Because the novel is nicely subdivided into different locations, the structure of my essay became almost apparent without any force from me.
All the subjects mentioned above deserve room of their own, and some may eventually become literary essays. This was not just a book review and, it was more an opportunity to reconnect with a younger practised version of myself without deciding beforehand what I am supposed to find there.
The First Reading – The Emotional Reader
What I remember most from that first reading is how emotionally I responded to Jane. I recognised something of my own childhood indignation in those moments when she felt misunderstood or unfairly treated.
The Red Room particularly stayed with me. There was something so raw and human in Jane’s response to injustice that it went straight to the heart. I didn’t need to understand Victorian society, gender or class to recognise the feeling of being a child who believed she had been wronged.
Even then, I remember thinking that Charlotte Brontë herself must have understood something of those feelings to have written them with such passion. I wasn’t studying Jane yet. I was simply feeling alongside her.
The Second Reading – The Contextual Reader
By the time I met Jane again at college, I was approaching adulthood myself. This time I was learning to look beyond the story and place Jane within the Victorian society she inhabited.
Class, religion, the position of women and the expectations placed upon them all became part of my reading. I was beginning to understand that Jane’s choices could not be separated from the world in which Charlotte Brontë had placed her.
Yet underneath all this new knowledge, I don’t think the original reader had changed very much. I was learning to understand why Jane’s world mattered, but I was still emotionally on her side.
The Third Reading – The Intellectual Reader
By university, my reading of Jane had deepened considerably. This was the stage I found intellectually stimulating. Voice, gender, autonomy and power could all be examined, questioned and argued over, and I thoroughly enjoyed doing it.
There was also something I didn’t think much about at the time: I was now roughly the same age as Jane herself, a young woman setting out into adulthood and beginning to establish her own independence.
Perhaps that was why Jane’s determination made such sense to me then. I was analysing her independence academically while beginning to experience my own.
And then Jane and I parted ways for a very long time.
The Fourth Reading – The Experienced Reader
When Jane and I met again decades later, the novel had not changed, but I certainly had. This time I came to her with something none of my previous readings could have given me: lived experience.
My understanding of independence had changed because I had experienced my own. My understanding of love was no longer theoretical either, and even my ideas about marriage had altered. I certainly don’t see marriage as a bad thing; many people find great happiness within it. But for the first time, I found myself wondering whether Jane’s marriage to Rochester needed to represent the natural conclusion of her journey.
Then my literary mind intervened. Perhaps I was asking a Victorian novel to provide a twenty-first-century perspective. In Charlotte Brontë’s world, marriage was the accepted way of bringing Jane and Rochester’s story to its conclusion, particularly for a heroine whose moral integrity matters so much throughout the novel.
When I was younger, marriage seemed the natural conclusion to Jane’s story. On this fourth reading, I simply found myself questioning something I had once accepted without question.
The Critic in the Basement
So, for this fourth encounter, I may have left the examination room behind, but I soon realised that my inner critic was still very much alive. She had simply been hidden in the basement rather than the attic. Once I began writing again, she was perfectly happy to be unlocked and allowed to run rampant through my relatively stable writing life, rather like Bertha escaping from the attic and tearing Jane’s wedding veil.
But this time, something was different. My Bertha was not another woman. She was part of me. And that made me look at Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha rather differently too.
As a younger reader, I had been annoyed with Bertha for standing between Jane and the man she loved. Now I found myself wondering about the woman herself. Perhaps Bertha was, in some way, also a part of Charlotte, a darker, angrier or less containable part of herself given a place within the novel.
Modern Day Conclusion
Perhaps wisdom and maturity come from recognising our own personal Bertha, living within us: the anger, frustration and less comfortable parts of ourselves we might prefer to keep hidden. Not because Bertha herself represents something shameful or undignified, but because she reminds me that we can contain many different selves. Maturity, perhaps, is recognising them while still choosing how we respond to the world, something I increasingly admire in Jane.
And perhaps this explains something about the writer I have become. I would rather write with compassion than criticism. I still want to question, analyse and sometimes disagree, but I no longer feel the same need to judge. We certainly need our critics; they have an important role in society but I have simply discovered that I don’t particularly want that job!
I went looking for the woman I used to be and, like Bertha, discovered she had never really disappeared. She was still part of me. What emerged from writing this essay was not her return, but an integration of the woman I was with the woman I am now. I can still question, analyse and argue, I just choose to do it with a little more compassion.
Finally, I address the younger version of myself who wore those boots through intense lectures and seminars, while learning to analyse and make critical judgements about novels such as Jane Eyre. Thank you, boots, but I no longer need you. They don’t need to fit now. As I look down at my feet, I rather like wearing my slippers as I write this.
This is the final post of a three-part series.
Read the Complete Jane Eyre Trilogy Below:
Part One | Part Two | Part Three
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