Rage: Blog #2

Bertha Chuckles

Being of Irish extraction, I have always found intriguing the moment in Jane Eyre when Rochester, by way of eliciting from Jane some more or less violent confession of her feeling for him, informs her that he has seen fit to secure for her a position as a governess in far-away Connaught. If the prospect of professional exile to Ireland wouldn’t induce a young English woman to declare her affections, the novel’s logic suggests, nothing would. So it is not surprising that Rochester’s ploy works, inducing Jane to pledge devotion to him—not unquestioning devotion, but potentially unlimited (if mutual) in the spirit of a love that transcends class and position. What reader among the English wouldn’t find it inherently probable that, faced with the horror of having to live out the rest of her life among people whom a good English girl of any breeding would have considered quasi-savages, Jane would be unable to maintain her characteristic self-restraint?

The Irish, after all, were nothing if not a rebellious lot. They’d never had the good sense to live peaceably under their Saxon overlords, and they didn’t suffer injustice with grace as Jane does throughout the novel. When on the battlefield the Irish marched to their doom they did so with murderous looks sustained by the cacophonous accompaniment of Irish pipes, which to the Saxons was an unsettling and demonic expression of self—its lower regions, that is, to where the English were particularly inclined to consign the passions and raw emotions that a proper English woman, even a governess, wouldn’t have been caught dead putting on display. To harbor any passions, as Jane secretly does in Brontë’s novel, is quite logically to warrant banishment to the farthest ends of the earth where people live in clans and gnaw at turnips all day, or else gum the spuds of a well-deserved futility.

The thing I’ve always loved about Jane Eyre, though—the character and the book—is that she refuses to accept a fate as cruel as banishment to Ireland, which as I’ve noted is where before coming to America my own turnip-gnawing forebears forebore. Instead, Jane rises in defiance against a man of extraordinary will and self-possession, a man, no less, who has every right and every privilege by virtue of gender, wealth, and class, to send her anywhere he wants. A man who, after all, has felt but a philosophical compunction about locking his wife in the attic of his ancestral home to gnaw her metaphorical turnips precisely because there is no place wheresoever in his life for her rage. Jane’s defiance is an act of self-preservation. It's quite different from Bertha Mason’s caged ferocity and existential disintegration, which latter, the novel implies, would be the inevitable result if Jane went to live among the feral Irish. In the face of male privilege—of male arrogance—Jane discovers a selfhood that transcends power. The distinction is between on the one hand Jane’s assertion of an independent if devoted self and, on the other, Bertha’s inability to maintain, let alone assert, anything even close to selfhood—or, for that matter, devotion.

The racism involved in this portrayal of the West Indian Bertha aside, for Brontë to have harbored such a vision of feminine self-realization as Jane's was tantamount to throwing herself off a tower as far as might be concerned the securing of any firm knowledge of who she herself might be or become as a middle-class woman. There was little frame of reference in her time for such a vision on the part of such a woman, even a woman writer, just as there was no frame of reference for a woman's undertaking the composition of a novel in the tradition of Thackeray, say, or the redoubtable Trollope. The material circumstances of Brontë’s life, both as an unmarried woman and as a married one, themselves mitigated against writing with such boldness and integrity of vision. Not only was there nowhere that she could have vocalized such a notion of female will, but, both literally and metaphorically, she had nowhere even to write that wasn’t haunted by the suppressive trappings of patriarchy. Her dwelling was a parsonage, the architectural embodiment of her father’s mind and, presumably, his staunch and sanctified soul. Every room, one might imagine, was her father’s room, and no room, not even her own, was, well, her own. Marriage when it finally materialized offered her, in the nine months before she died, the same parsonage to live in, subject to the husbandly attentions of a man not unlike, broadly and conjecturally speaking, Charlotte Lucas’s Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice—although Arthur Nicholls was in fact Irish. So, by the way, was Charlotte’s father Patrick, whose name in Drumballyroney, Co. Down, was Brunty.

So, therefore, was Charlotte herself. 

At any rate, such material considerations are important, it seems, when weighing Virginia Woolf’s criticism of Brontë as a writer and of Jane Eyre as a novel, since even though it is a criticism it’s not unimbued with a measure of sympathy. In fact, it’s an extension of Woolf’s larger complaint to the effect that, since no woman writer before the eighteenth century, unless fortuitously endowed, possessed an independent income, or stood to make one from her writing, throughout most of history no woman has ever had a room of her own in which to develop a vision of her artistic universe independently of the disapproving pressures of patriarchy. Woolf means this both literally and metaphorically. The mind is not unlike a dwelling place, so the literal room Woolf means is resonant of a kind of mental apartment, too, to which a woman might withdraw for the purpose of thinking her own thoughts. Without either the material or the mental space to concentrate on crafting an independent vision, it’s not surprising, Woolf asserts, that even a woman possessed of the verbal and intellectual resources of a Charlotte Brontë might lapse in artistry from time to time, especially in the composition of a novel as psychological and, well, as willful as Jane Eyre.

Woolf herself knew the oppressive influence patriarchal culture exerted against a woman’s self-regard. Her material and her psychological life had not been unaffected by it. There’s good reason to believe her eventually fatal bouts with manic-depression were fed by a very real anxiety about a world imploding around her in the trenches of northern France and Belgium.  This was a world she had meticulously rebuilt in her imagination, and for the better, after surviving a childhood regularly marked and marred by her father’s tyrannical outbursts, as well as by the repeated sexual molestations of a half-brother who apparently felt too keenly his inheritance and his privilege. The winds of war and the winds of sexual violence, the all-destroying winds, that is, of male rage, had hurly-burlied through Woolf’s life as much as through any woman’s.

In her diary Woolf writes about the difficulty of composing upon commission A Room of One’s Own, in which she overtly criticizes patriarchal values vis-à-vis women especially as they apply to education and the pursuit of the literary arts. At each step of the way while writing this book she felt sure that she would be attacked in the press upon its publication for the “radical” nature of her ideas. In light of such difficulties the essay itself may almost be a case of art embodying the circumstances of its own coming into being, the way a baby’s cry might be taken not simply as an expression of the pain and trauma of birth but as a bodily realization of it. The essay’s deceptively simple thesis is that for women to be successful writers they must have an annual income—the amount doesn’t matter, but she is careful to name one, as if entering into negotiation with her predominantly male audience. That’s not all, though. A woman needs a room of her own, Woolf says, where she can ponder and compose without interruption. This is because in the eyes of the world a woman who aspires to write remains nevertheless a daughter, a wife, a mother, a domestic—in fact always that last: the one who puts out the parlor fires, the one who soothes the ego of whatever requisite male, the one who dutifully smooths the counterpane when it gets ruffled. In the eyes of the world something so solitary and detached as a writer is the last thing she can, or in fact should, aspire to be. A writer needs a door that can lock and four walls, a window for light, time and space to enter into a vision that is her own and only her own.

Woolf tests out her hypothesis by considering a number of women writers from the seventeenth century up through Austen and Brontë. Some were women of means—their husbands’ or fathers’ means—and some were mystics. Most of them, Woolf found, no matter how heroic or how eccentric, were failed writers in the grand sense. They had not produced great art, and this was because of the material and metaphorical rooms they didn’t have.

Austen and the Brontës, though, had come closest. That was because by the time they were writing it was possible for an author to make an income publishing her works. That is, the great middle class had arisen on the crest of the Enlightenment, and with standardized education had come a vast new readership for novels and other frivolities. If they played their cards right, women writers could earn money, and with money came the possibility of a room—although in Austen’s and Brontë’s cases that may have been a bit of a dream, more possibility than reality. Austen wrote in her family sitting room and had to endure from her family a dun of criticism concerning what became her most famous work. Brontë’s prospects were similarly limited, as I’ve outlined above. She even worked as a governess for some years—a bleak profession that nevertheless provided rich material for her imagination. Of the two, Woolf found that Austen’s art was the surer, the more balanced and sufficient unto its own internal principles, isolated as such from the disturbances that might disfigure it, all which stemmed from the suppressed psychological needs of the author. In short, what every woman author must guard against is that her rage in the face of patriarchy might too directly and too willfully shape—or, perhaps more accurately, mis-shape—her material.

In comparison to Austen, Woolf asserts, Brontë was given to somewhat egregious lapses in this regard. Woolf even implies that Charlotte lacked the art of her sister, Emily, whose Wuthering Heights has never seemed to me as great a book as Jane Eyre—more metaphysical, perhaps, but less necessarily so. Emily, Woolf argues, wrote “as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, [she] entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue—write this, think that.” Furthermore, Jane Austen and Emily Bronte, Woolf said, maintained artistic “integrity,” which she compellingly defined as the ability “to hold fast to the thing as they saw it.” Unlike Austen in Pride and Prejudice, and unlike her sister in Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte had failed frequently enough to maintain this integrity.

Consider, Woolf writes, the moment Jane mounts to the roof of Thornfield and says to herself:

. . . women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.

Woolf’s objection here is not so much that Jane is becoming in this scene a mouthpiece for her solitary, confined, and frustrated author, but that at the moment Jane is swelling with such convictions while looking out over a landscape of inaccessible possibilities, Bertha Mason is heard to chuckle in the attic just below her, creepily, of course, demonically. Jane thinks it’s the enigmatic Grace Poole who’s chuckling, but it is in fact, as we learn later, Rochester’s mad wife Bertha. This, Woolf suggests, is an indiscretion: the anger, the frustration—Woolf goes so far as to say “the rage”—of the author should never determine the timing of even a doppelganger’s chuckle. The work is the work, Woolf insists, it’s the thing as the author sees it. Doppelgangers do not chuckle by way of punctuating characters’ inner thoughts. Because she’s writing too directly out of her own rage, a woman like Charlotte Brontë, Woolf asserts, whose genius is perhaps greater than Austen’s, will never “get her genius expressed whole and entire.” Rage will always corrupt her art, distorting its integrity. Great writing is produced in a state of aesthetic calm. Rage may be its theme, but in the act of composition it mustn’t be its source.