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“Again Charlotte avoids the subject of sexuality. This is quite in line with the repressive sexual values of a small but morally influential Victorian class”
I am not sure it is due to convention only that she “avoids” the subject of sexuality. I am not sure she avoids it at all. She pretty much deals with it through all of the book. She didn’t need to go further. Sexuality is there for three reasons in my opinion:
1) It was an essential part to Jane’s development. Since she was studying the spiritual, physical, moral, sentimental growth of a girl turning into a woman, how could her sexual awakening be missing, especially when she gets involved in a such complicated love story.
2) She meant to create a heroine that would be able to feel intense passion and be able to separate love from friendship, affection from lust etc. This would also make her moral dilemma more difficult. It is passion vs reason, passion vs morality, passion vs independence.
3) It was a very sensible choice given the age difference between the two heroes. It wouldn’t be nice to see Jane and Rochester as a father-daughter relationship. She makes it so clear there is physical attraction that when Rochester says he should have for her now only fatherly feelings we automatically reply “No, way!”. Someone has mentioned in another forum that he thought a little abnormal the way Emma and Mr Knightley become a couple when we know he was playing her on his knees when she was little girl and he wondered when his feelings towards her changed. There is not such awkwardness here.
So (although it would be pleasant ;)) we don’t really need her to tell as anything more than her being “bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh”. Let alone that Charlotte had no such experience. It is amazing enough that she wrote as much out of fantasies.
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The astonishing fact is that Jane, the fictional woman, transcends the author. Charlotte was and died bound by Victorian morality. She married without love, was tormented by doubt as to her talent, lack of beauty, and very probably in a God that had taken her sisters and brother before their time. What was the burning ember in Charlotte's imagination that allowed this transcendental leap?
It is not so very astonishing. Charlotte had to live in the real world with its limitations but even so, she was less conventional than you think. She was no orphan (as all her heroines are) and many times had to consider her family’s fame beyond her personal one. Jane Eyre is an envision of a new kind of woman who defies and rejects the femininity standards of Victorian era. Charlotte herself was in search of new ones. She had rejected for a long time of her life marriage (which was very different than the usual feminine attitude then), she preferred to earn her living instead and she was appalled by a fellow-teacher in Brussels who send letters through her father and brother to various gentlemen because she didn’t want to end up “a sister of mercy”. Charlotte admitted she didn’t want to become a sister of mercy either, but wouldn’t degrade herself as much as seeking any husband. She had rejected also religious life, she wrote to Ellen Nussey that she longs for a holiness she will never, never attain. She continued to believe in her talent although everybody tried to dissuade her from it (Southey, Heger, the societal attitudes in general) and that says much. She shocked Victorian readers with the presentation that there is such a thing as female desire and that it doesn’t make a woman immoral and in Villette she showed that a woman can have feelings for more than one man, writing to her objecting editor that she knows that the romance writing would suggest than a heroine should fall and stay in love till the end with a superb hero, but this is not so in real life. It is against realism and probability.
Her life was tightly attached to her art or differently she also lived through her art.
So in her books we have that search for in-betweens, in which she puts her heroines. In Jane Eyre we have Eliza the nun and Georgiana the husband-seeking, both of which Jane rejects (notice how she clings more to Rochester after seeing those two alternatives). In Shirley the heroine comments that men (even the smartest) don’t see women correctly: their idea of a woman is an angel or a demon. In Villette, Lucy Snowe rejects both the luxurious mistress (that the Cleopatra picture implies) and the life of women in 4 pictures which she thinks hypocritical and flat. All this says that there are not only the opposites that exist. People’s character can be more complex and exist in a continuum.
About her marriage, when a female friend told her that she was glad that finally she found someone “to care for and make happy”, she answered that also “to be the first object with any one” is really great thing (a totally un-Victorian attitude-she was married because she was for the first time really loved by that someone, not because it was her female duty to care for others) and she then confessed that she was worried about her husband not being intellectual, because he could not follow her intellectually and also that although she really estimated his constancy and devotion she thought that such a character “would be far be less amusing and interesting, than a more impulsive and fickle one: It might be dull!” (this surprising observation confirms that wild side her heroines have, that she shared with, and it is also tragic in the fact that she was planning to live a whole life with him instead of the brief, but happy, as it proved, 9 months). I believe she couldn’t be the creator of those heroines had she not be so very original herself, no matter if she could not freely express that or did not find soon enough a Rochester to love and accept her for what she was . He too is the envisage of a more liberal and original man than her contemporaries. Not everyone would tolerate Jane’s rebelliousness and tart language. St John criticizes for being “violent, unfeminine, and untrue”. Rochester is never shocked for any supposing lack of respect.
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When Charlotte attempted to follow up with Villette and the rewriting of the Professor, she did not succeed in captivating the imagination as with Jane Eyre. Here the intellect was more dominant and her attempts to broaden her vision produced a commentary, not a unique work of art.
It is my belief that Charlotte Bronte did not want to capture again that kind of imagination. Even in Jane Eyre part of that imagination was forced. She writes in the preface of the Professor that she wanted to turn into realism but “I find that publishers in general scarcely approved of this system, but would have liked something more imaginative and poetical--something more consonant with a highly wrought fancy, with a taste for pathos, with sentiments more tender, elevated, unworldly”. She was advised to write a novel that could be published in three volumes and present more interest. Charlotte at that time of her life, disillusioned by Heger’s rejection of her love, her brother’s failure and lapse into drugs and alcoholism, her father’s blindness, her failure of her plans of opening a school, needed perhaps to write something more realistic. However, she followed their suggestions. Perhaps they came after the Lowood section and that is why the plot becomes wild? Anyway she resisted changing the first part of her book because “Truth has a charm of its own”. After having written her best seller, she again tries to publish “The Professor” and argues with her editor that it contains much more depth and realism than many parts of Jane Eyre. She also, on the occasion of Villette, writes to Mr Williams that she didn’t mean her to mount on the same pedestal some injudicious readers have put Jane Eyre. So, without saying that she did not like Jane Eyre or that it was not a book that she got involved into sentimentally, I believe she never would consider it as representative of her work or opinions. A lot of things did happen to make Charlotte a different, far unhappier person after Jane Eyre. And it is always difficult to write happy a ending when yourself is so unhappy. Someone says that even Jane Eyre gets “a mutilated happiness”, while the ending in Shirley is even more false. In Villette (where her father insisted on a happy ending) she couldn’t lie, so she left ambiguous. Villette in my opinion is a novel everyone should read in order to say that he understands Charlotte Bronte. And it is really considered her masterpiece by academics. But it is also true that had that last book of hers had a more vivid story it could win more easily the hearts of the public. Her “Emma” was highly promising (to the point that a friend of mine after reading it cried out “Oh, why did she have to die?”, which was close to my reaction too), but…she did die.
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Charlotte ends Eyre with a whimper. Jane is reconciled with Victorian values, makes an abasement of a genuflection to orthodoxy in religion, marries-off Diana and Mary, grant St. John a happy death… It is inconsistent with the intellectual and emotional freedom that Jane has (r)evolved into.(nice point)
This is harshly expressed! Lol! I partly agree. Jane is very strong in the end and could continue her life with or without Rochester. But as a friend of mine has put it Rochester and children is the icing of her cake. Some say why make such an independent woman only to marry her at the end. I believe loneliness is a high price for independence to pay and Jane knows that. I confess I would be really sad if those two didn’t reunite after all this love and suffering. And it is a great truth that after loving Jane as a character so much, neither Charlotte, nor we could accept an unhappy ending as Jeff66 correctly states.
Of course we could be sparred the spiritual calling (which really bothers me and would have preferred her to turn back simply because, as she had already stated to St John, she was worried about him), I could do without Rochester’s punishment too, but Charlotte Bronte could not make her beloved heroine appear immoral. So she resolved to divine intervention and tragedy.
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“The punishment she used was a biblical one – she didn’t invent it. Jane says: “you shall yourself pluck out your right eye; yourself cut off your right hand:”. In this context, what can - “Jane is not to be judged morally after all.“ mean?”
I don’t know. Lol! I never connected those two together. It is quite the opposite. I was referring to the laws of tragedy that Charlotte chose to follow in the end (see the last 2 lines of my above comment). In a tragedy it is true that the heroes get to be judged ethically. And it was exactly because of the quite conventional ending, where the good ones are rewarded and the sinful rightfully punished, that Jane Eyre gave the impression of a moral example - which is however at odds with my perception of her as returning to stay with Rochester with or without Bertha and made me believed that I was reading too much into it, me being a product of a different century and ethics. I can not believe either that she created that entire St John episode for nothing. It is her final lesson and her biggest foe. She just doesn’t make clear Jane’s gain out of it. But surely she is an entirely different woman when she returns. It is so annoying to see comments like “Does Jane triumph due to divine intervention after all?”. Certainly not, she is “an independent woman” now that owes no justifications of her acts (like in the scene where she sits on his knees just because they both felt better this way, if that is a sufficient excuse for Victorians) but she gets to be saved from condemnation anyway.
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BTW. “ I find that today there are not many men who would admit they would read, let alone like Jane Eyre (correct me if I am mistaken on that).” Well perhaps not mistaken but jeff66, Newcomer, ennison and myself should count for someone! You are corrected.
Of course you count for someone and I am glad to be found mistaken! But I was referring to the general reading population. I fear you are worthy and brave exceptions:). It would be interesting to hear the reason for which you like this novel nevertheless.
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The Forum discussions are like that, the tread breaks when you become captivated.
The good thing is the conversation stays and anyone can add at a different time.
