Why my students like Jane Eyre

Sorry about skipping around in the syllabus here – but we just got through Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea the other day and thought I would share some thoughts with you.

Wide Sargasso Sea narrates the story primarily from the perspective of the “madwoman in the attic” from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is the story of Jane Eyre, an impoverished, sincere, virginal, rosy-cheeked governess who shows up at Mr. Rochester’s Thornfield Hall in order to take care of his ward. Mr. Rochester is dark, brooding, enormously wealthy, and naturally they fall in love. Their wedding is interrupted with the revelation that Mr. Rochester is already married to a woman named Bertha Mason, a woman he’d met in the West Indies who had consequently gone insane, so he locked her up in the attic of his creepy mansion. But not to fear – although Jane is horrified and abandons Rochester, she returns to Thornfield Hall to discover it in ruins. She learns that Bertha Mason had gotten free one night and had burned the place down, committing suicide in the process, and Mr. Rochester emerged from the fire horribly disfigured and blind. Nevertheless, she ends up with Rochester anyway, because they really, really, really love each other.

The Norton edition of WSS that we use for the class is quite handy in that it includes relevant excerpts from Jane Eyre. What’s remarkable to me is how much my students loved what they read of the Bronte novel. The majority of them are women, and I think the novel strikes a romantic chord. (Masterpiece Theater recently produced a wonderful adaptation of the novel, by the way.) In a telling moment, I asked them what they would do if they found out at the altar that their fiancé were already married, and, what’s more, he’d been keeping his crazy wife in the attic of the house they’d been sharing all this time. Dead silence. I think they were really thinking about what they would do. I had to remind them that it was a terrible idea to stay with someone after going through something like that – call me a cynic. In fact, I think Bronte deliberately gives us the most absurd, unimaginable scenario in order to amplify the power of Rochester’s confession to Eyre. Truth can conquer all; Rochester’s confession dispels both the exotic savage in the attic and the shadowy, morally murky terrain of Gothic fiction. And that idea – truth can conquer all, truth is love and love is truth – is very romantically appealing. Moreover, the disfigurement of Rochester ensures that the relationship between him and Eyre is a relationship of pure or spiritual love, expurgated of all sensuousness, as opposed to the lusty relationship he shared with the madwoman.

All of this is turned on its head in Wide Sargasso Sea. Instead of the revelation (and Revelation) of Truth, we have the confusing clash of narratives from Antoinette's and the male narrator's point of view. The male narrator (never identified as Rochester) draws a distinction between "his way" of dying and hers. "His way" of dying is the conventional sense of dying as sex, as orgasm. But then he makes the mysterious reference to "her way" on the next page. What her way of dying is is omething that the novel never tells us explicitly, but is something we have to uncover, and we can only uncover this way if we get beyond our own prejudicial reading, firmly rooted in years of Jane Eyre worship, of Antoinette as the half-savage madwoman in the attic.