Victorian Women: 1. Jane Eyre
We study six great books by and about women in our Victorian Women course, live online, September to November 2023.
Lecturer Clare Walker-Gore reflects upon each of the books in a series of blog posts. She starts with Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte.
Jane Eyre
[Rochester:] ‘Is it better to drive a fellow-creature to despair than to transgress a mere human law, no man being injured by the breach? for you have neither relatives nor acquaintances whom you need fear to offend by living with me?’
This was true: and while he spoke my very conscience and reason turned traitors against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him. They spoke almost as loud as Feeling: and that clamoured wildly. “Oh, comply!” it said. “Think of his misery; think of his danger—look at his state when left alone; remember his headlong nature; consider the recklessness following on despair—soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his. Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?”
Still indomitable was the reply — ‘I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.’
The romantic passion with which Charlotte Brontë’s most famous heroine is forever associated is on full display in this passage from the third volume of Jane Eyre, in which Jane wrestles with her conscience, tempted by Rochester’s appeal that she defy the moral codes of their society and live with him out of wedlock. The struggle with Rochester is expressed in thrillingly melodramatic terms – and yet we are aware all the time that the truly momentous conflict is within Jane’s own self. Does she want to abandon her own principles and become Rochester’s lover? Are the obstacles in her way ‘mere human law’, as Rochester asserts, or profound religious scruples – or something else entirely?
As twenty-first century readers, we might be inclined to read Jane’s refusal as quintessentially ‘Victorian’, a prioritising of duty over desire, of self-suppression over self-realisation. Yet her refusal did not please some contemporary reviewers; most famously, Elizabeth Rigby, writing in the conservative Quarterly Review, suggested that ‘the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.’
Why should Jane Eyre, who acts so correctly, be accused of rebellion and Chartism? For Rigby, the answer was simple: Jane is ‘proud’, seeing herself as a person with rights, rather than being grateful for what falls her way. And it is indeed Jane’s pride that comes through most strongly when she resists her own desire to go with Rochester here: ‘I care for myself.’ Jane Eyre might be best remembered now as a love story, but at its heart is Jane’s regard not for Rochester, but for herself, and it is her insistent self-assertion that shapes the novel.
This challenges us to reconsider what we mean when we describe the novel as quintessentially ‘Victorian’. What is a ‘Victorian’ woman - what different forms does she take?
The Victorian Women course first ran in autumn 2022 and is repeated Sept.-Nov. 2023.
Dr Clare Walker Gore has taught at the Open University and the University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge.
