Off ye lendings! King Lear and Mr Fairfax Rochester
In my last thread I demonstrated how Mr Rochester is supposed to be interpreted far from noble. In this paper I will take under scrutiny the one obvious to Shakespeare’s play King Lear in Jane Eyre , namely ‘Off ye lendings’ that is said by Mr Rochester in chapter XIX of Jane Eyre and by King Lear in act III of King Lear.
King Lear is one of the greatest tragedies of Shakespeare about a king who feels wronged by his daughters and suffers for his mistakes. With his play, Shakespeare showed the evil that the new-found individualism of the Renaissance could do. The play expresses Shakespeare’s views on loyalty in feudalistic medieval society and individualism that occurred in the Renaissance. Lear expects his daughters to be loyal to him because he will give them something. He wants to be the centre of their existence and reciprocally Cordelia is his centre of existence. The beginning of the play is especially constructed by Lear to justify his bigger love for Cordelia than for Goneril and Regan. Great is his amazement, however, when Cordelia states that she ‘love[s] [his] Majesty, According to [her] bond; no more nor less.’ In his narcissism, Lear wants to claim Cordelia exclusively for him, but Cordelia refuses. The future Lear planned entirely depended on Cordelia’s loyalty and when she declines his future crumbles and he denies her what she is entitled to as a daughter, according to their bond, namely a dowry. When his two first daughters undergo the capricious needs of Lear and confront him with it, he feels wronged but fails to see that his own inflated ego is to blame for it. From then on he will become old and broken-hearted. He will continually woe his own fate while he fails to see that he has sought it himself, but will also realise his own susceptibility.
The second storyline in the play is about Edmund, second and illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester who tricks his father into banning his brother from his castle.
All the individualism in the play will have bad consequences (1). Similarly in Jane Eyre, the individualism of Rochester has bad consequences, both for himself and the people around him. Rochester accuses his father of not giving him anything for an inheritance, which I established as quite normal in my last paper, as Edward Rochester was the second son. Similarly to Edmund in King Lear he finds that unfair, but fate awards him with the inheritance anyway as his older brother Rowland dies without wife or children. However, it is not there that the whole similarity between the two works ends. Charlotte put the words of Lear in Rochester’s mouth and there is indeed some likeness between the two characters. In the play Lear continually woes his fate, as does Rochester in the book, but Jane doesn’t buy it. She implies that she will be treated the same as Bertha by Rochester, but he adamantly denies tha . Lear tells his daughter Regan: ‘No, Regan, thou shalt never have my curse.’
Like Lear in the play says:
Thy tender-hefted nature shall not give
Thee o'er to harshness. Her eyes are fierce; but thine
Do comfort, and not burn. 'Tis not in thee
To grudge my pleasures,……
Rochester says: ‘But Jane will give me her love: yes—nobly, generously.’ And holds out his arms as he is convinced that she will stay with him after his tale of woe. After, when Lear curses Regan too, he says: ‘this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws’, before the former, Rochester said: ‘without [Little Jane’s love], my heart is broken.’ In other words, both men are distraught to see that the people they love are ‘disloyal’ to them and, by telling them a tale of woe, they hope to change the minds of those who are critical towards them. In the minds of Lear and Rochester disloyalty equals not loving, whereas it is clear that those two are not the same, not to Shakespeare and not to Charlotte Brontë. Both men don’t understand that the love they expect from others consists solely out of blind loyalty towards them. Lear doesn’t understand how it is possible that his daughters would dare to criticise him because after all ‘[he] gave [them] all’. The same goes for Rochester when he accuses Jane of only valuing ‘[his] station and the rank of [his]wife’. With this he implies that she only wanted his money and didn’t actually love him for his person, like Lear implies that his daughters should be loyal to him because he gave them each half of his kingdom. So Rochester offers everything to Jane again by proposing to her to go to France together where she ‘shall be Mrs Rochester’. By doing this, in his logic, he is sure she will surrender, because loyalty (which he is seeking from her) depends on offering something. Of course for Jane loyalty and love are not about the possessions you gain, but the mere loyalty and love themselves, like it is for Kent and Cordelia: they are ‘disloyal’ to Lear, because they respectively feel that he is not right or that he is unreasonable. Lear doesn’t see it this way and strips Cordelia of her dowry and essentially banishes her, and banishes Kent as well. Rochester, also, sees Jane’s refusal (that he knows is coming) as a scheme against him: ‘you are thinking how to act—talking you consider is of no use. I know you—I am on my guard.’ Although she tells him that ‘[she] does not wish to act against [him]’ he refuses to understand: ‘Not in your sense of the word, but in mine you are scheming to destroy me.’ He admits in this however that it is only his logic that says so, and not hers. In that, Charlotte put irony in Rochester’s character. That that sentence occurs just before he tells his past is very significant. Lear and Rochester make out to be innocent whereas the public can see that they are both wrong in what they do, have done and are doing.
Not only the general tone of woe is similar in Lear and Rochester, but even their way of showing their love is the same. As I mentioned before, love and loyalty are the same for Lear and Rochester. Lear, in his role of king, claims, as a true medieval king, the loyalty of his lords by giving them land. However, it doesn’t end here: he acts in the same way with his daughters, buying their love, as it were. Rochester similarly ‘buys’ Jane’s love with presents, ‘a share of all [his] possessions’, etc. We have already established the fact that Lear denies his daughter Cordelia what she is entitled to, a dowry, because she is disloyal, read: she refuses to pledge full love to him. When they married, Rochester promised Bertha to have and to hold her, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health to love and to cherish her. In that, he vowed to respect her and to treat her with tenderness and affection (2). In calling her Messalina, Rochester implies that she was unfaithful to him (3). Like Lear, he feels that Bertha is disloyal and so, similarly to Lear, strips her of what she is entitled to as his wife: respect, tenderness and affection. In that, the fact that he locks her up is clearly linked with the refusal of a dowry to Cordelia: Bertha is disloyal so doesn’t get what she should get: care. In stead, he buys her a drunk companion. We cannot say that that is proper care, but his mind is eased because he gave her something, but in this case something inferior. As I have stated before, care for the mad was available, but was not sought for by Rochester. Céline Varens went the same way as Bertha, but didn’t go mad. In the beginning Rochester loved her and gave her a hotel room, dresses, etc. In short, everything a woman would want. But, she cheated on him with another man, and he stripped her of everything he gave her. He also grew tired of Clara and Giacintha and also left them without anything. Admittedly he bought them of, but he also admitted that having a mistress was ‘the next-best thing to buying a slave’, in other words to buy someone’s loyalty with money.
In Rochester, however, the love-possession connection goes even further to the point that Bertha is on the one end of the spectrum, getting nothing whatsoever and that Jane is on the other end, getting a load of presents she doesn’t want nor requires. Adčle on the other hand is somewhere in the middle: Rochester gets her presents and is somewhat in the dark about how it is possible that she wants presents every time she sees him. In other words, he spoils the child. This is quite remarkable, as Rochester publicly denies she is his daughter. As said in my last paper, he did love her dearly and it shows in his behaviour towards her. If we take the one end of the spectrum he hates, Bertha; she clearly cannot count on anything apart from a drunk attendant. Then Adčle is better off: not locked up in a room, with a governess and maid and a nice room, nice clothes etc. But she doesn’t go to school. ‘Too dear, [he] couldn’t afford it’. So Adčle can expect a lot less than Jane. For Jane anything goes, even bigamy and, consequently, prison. Nevertheless, maybe the diminished love Rochester shows Adčle has maybe to do with Victorian culture.
During their first meeting Rochester asks Jane whether ‘[she is] fond of presents.’ She then famously replies: ‘I hardly know, sir; I have little experience of them: they are generally thought pleasant things.’ The conversation goes on about the same thing as Rochester tries to find out what Jane actually thinks of presents. In the end he tells her that Jane ‘has taken great pains with [Adčle]…’ and Jane replies: ‘Sir, you have now given me my ‘cadeau;’ I am obliged to you: it is the meed teachers most covet—praise of their pupils’ progress.’ The only thing Rochester can answer to this, is an ‘ahum’ and be silent. Even here the difference in perception between Rochester and Jane is great. Rochester gives Adčle ‘playthings’, material matter/possessions as a ‘cadeau’, and Jane is already pleased with the ‘praise of [her] pupil’s progress’. Whatever the ‘ahum’ may mean, it is clear that Rochester doesn’t know how he should see this person who is easily pleased with the praise of her pupil rather than a material thing, as he then shuts up and starts on another subject after a long silence. Rochester is also puzzled that Jane doesn’t know what she thinks of presents. From the point of view taken from Lear, he must think that she has never been loved as she never got presents. Indeed, in the next chapter he will call her a ‘nonnette’ (a little nun). Surely he thinks she is above earthly or physical longing and love, which is also established in the fact that he associates her with supernatural creatures. She is devoted to a higher purpose than man, which is unattainable for him and not understandable to people who have not had the same experience. Not only that, but also the fact that she, were she a non, would have sworn an oath of poverty, which is unthinkable and not at all understandable for Rochester. What one would do without possessions is totally alien to him. The fact that Charlotte exactly chose the French of the word and not the English one, is also understandable, as the French form incorporates the words ‘non’, ‘none’ and ‘no’, which all feature the fact that Rochester sees Jane as a creature that has nothing and is nothing (without his possessions, as marrying him is the only way to gain a serious fortune, or at least enjoy it).
I already mentioned the fact that Lear’s future depended on Cordelia being there for him. When Cordelia refuses to pledge her love, Lear has to banish her and with that he becomes more and more old and senile. When his other two daughters cast him out, he is totally lost and will loose even his court. Like Lear, Rochester makes his future depend on Jane. He tells her: ‘Then you condemn me to live wretched and to die accursed?’ Of course, like Lear, he will have to pay for this individualism. Lear looses his court of 100 knights and will become mad and destitute; Rochester will loose his senses too, will dismiss all of his personnel but two (Mary and John), and will also loose Thornfield Hall in a fire and will become blind. This blindness is something that doesn’t occur in Lear, but does occur in the same play. Edmund’s father, the Earl of Gloucester, who stays loyal to King Lear, but fails to stay loyal to his own son Edgar becomes blind through the Duke of Cornwall, husband of Regan, who plucks out his eyes as a punishment for his disloyalty towards Regan and him. It is clear that this blindness is not only to be considered as a punishment for his disloyalty, but also stands as a metaphor for the ‘blindly’ believing of his son Edmund, who made him disown his son Edgar.
In chapter XIX, when Rochester dresses up as the gypsy, he doesn’t do it as merely an act of fun. He does it with a specific reason, which he tells Jane later: it is then that he tells Blanche Ingram that, in fact, his fortune ‘is not a third of what was supposed’. He later admits to Jane that he did it because her ‘pride need[ed] humbling’. At the time he dressed up as the gypsy he judged her, and that’s just what Lear did with Goneril and Regan in that farmhouse. Not only that is significant, Rochester dresses up in a character that is nomadic, a shrill contrast against ideals of an orderly society in cities. Thus the country was seen as a wilderness without civilisation. In other words, gypsies moved around in the wilderness (4). If we compare that to Rochester’s past before he came back to Thornfield, we can see how much the gypsy life is alike to his nomadic life around Europe. Therefore, like Lear, as the gypsy, Rochester finds himself on the heath in a storm. After the masquerade, he breaks the string, throws off his cloak and says: ‘Off, ye lendings!’ So, as Lear, he is in a storm, on the heath and throws off his clothes, only there is this little difference here between Lear and Rochester: Lear, after tearing at his clothes is naked/bare-chested, whereas Rochester only takes off a disguise. That is very significant, as Lear, at that moment in the play, realises his own humbleness, and results himself back to what he really is: a man. He is human and must now suffer. Being a king doesn’t rule out suffering (5). For Rochester, on the other hand, everything is a joke still: Thornfield hasn’t been taken off him yet, he was able to conquer the disloyalty of his wife (which will backfire in the end), he hasn’t lost his friends, nor his senses and neither his pride, which Lear does loose all. The fact that the gypsy is only a disguise is very sad for Rochester, because it shows that the tragedy is not at all over yet! On the one hand Jane didn’t buy the masquerade, only got enchanted for a while, then she realises her mistake and the suffering is only at the beginning. On the other hand, Rochester believes his prank was ‘well carried out’ and wants to hear from Jane what they said about the gypsy, to satisfy his own pride, no doubt. Here as well he insists, like he will insist in the end, but Jane does not give in, like she will not give in in the end either.
It is clear in the play how Lear is unreasonable and rants on about his fate of woe, whereas he caused it himself. However, in Jane Eyre it is not at all easy to pull down the mask of Rochester, although readers who lived at the time the book was published might have had a better view on the man than we have. That said, Charlotte left us with some very special clues about her leading man, one of which a sentence that comes straight out of Lear’s part of Shakespeare’s tragedy. If we take notice of that in chapter XIX, we can hardly believe Rochester’s tale of woe in chapter XXVII without any reservations, then we can rather understand it like we should understand Lear: unreasonable, selfish and narcissistic. The fact that the asterisks appear at the end of Rochester's big monologue, is a clear sign that there, there is an end to something. Indeed, there the old narcissistic Rochester dies, like Lear - after having said goodbye to Jane (Cordelia), now realising his mistake - to become new when Jane comes back to him in chapter XXXVII.
(1) http://www.scribd.com/doc/2870542/Eg...m-in-King-Lear
(2) http://www.allwords.com/query.php?Se...h&Language=ENG
(3) http://www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/en...web/Fawaz1.htm
(4) http://www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/en...b/GYPSIESI.htm
(5) http://descargas.cervantesvirtual.co...5/014544_7.pdf
