This may be my favorite novel of all. I don't think of it as gothic or overly melodramatic, as it is usually characterized these days. It's symbolic of real life to me. I have read it many times and love it more each time. I just love Jane, who I think is really the author, Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), or who Charlotte knew was the right person to be. I love the words, I love the tone, I love the sentiment, I love the humility, I love the humanness, I love the faith, I love the strength, I love the good in this book. Characters, story, time period, writing, I love it all. I love it from the first nuanced line, “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”. . . to the very last three words in the book: “Come Lord Jesus.”
To begin with, we have Jane, the plainest name, symbolic of everyman (or everywoman). We have Eyre, similar to the word error. Charlotte read Dickens and Trollope and perhaps noted their meaningful name choices for their characters. I think she also chose her character names for good reason. Jane Eyre is about our frail, erring, but striving human nature, being meek and lowly and true and grateful and real and submissive to God, come what may. She tries to be longsuffering, sacrificing, forgiving, loving, in fact
charitable in all the most important, Christ-like ways. And yet she is still led into error just as we all are. Edward Fairfax Rochester? Fair facts? As in truth, good and evil, right and wrong, God.
I always have a point in the book when I doubt Rochester, which I suppose Charlotte means us to do. He comes across as such a heartless flirt. But then as the story goes on we become more charitable, as in more patient and understanding of this abused, wildly passionate, deep, brooding, suffering man, and we, like Jane, begin to pity him to our heart’s core. His nobility wins out in the intense heat of great trial, and we see he is all that Jane percieved he was underneath his rough, casual exterior.
The crux of this story is that this meek young intelligent person who was slighted and treated cruelly and unjustly for several years of her young life, who finally found a home and love and purpose and interest and joy, gave it all up –everything– in her own intense heat of great trial; and she gave it all up for truth, righteousness, God. It's a fiction, yes, and overdramatic, people say. But such temptations and dilemmas and the principles and choices behind them are very real and applicable to anyone's life, always have been, always will be.
Very few people in this world today would even imagine this kind of sacrifice. To give up everything for God? To walk—no, run—away from every earthly connection, comfort, convenience, sustenance, position, institution, livelihood, human affection, human belonging, human desire— because of the undeniable existence of rightness? And yet she did that. Come what may. Even though she was innocent when it came to wanting to marry Rochester, she admits she erred in idolizing him. Would she stay with a man she loved, even wrongly idolized, who she suddenly learned was technically married, legally and morally tethered to another woman? No, she would not, not for any other reason than it was wrong in the sight of God and man. There I plant my foot, she said, and besides walking away from the outward evil she also learned to relinquish the false idol in her heart. Isn't this what God requires of us?
Today most people do the exact opposite: compromise, rationalize, essentially abandon God and truth and righteousness to keep hold of every earthly connection, comfort, convenience, sustenance, position, institution, livelihood, human tie, human belonging, human desire. We see this in the concessions people make, in the lies people invent, in the games people play, in the “rights” people demand, in the money and positions people go after, in the evils people propagate, in short, in the defining lusts of our times.
I never tire of reading and learning about the remarkable Bronte family. I’m so grateful to my husband Stephen for driving me on that wild goose chase through the winding hills and vales of the English countryside to find Charlotte Bronte’s home on a business trip to England. Several times I suggested we give up the search. But he wouldn’t have it. We arrived just minutes before the museum was to close, and the nice lady let us in. It was like stepping back in time. Haworth probably hasn't changed much since Charlotte's time. I remember the calm, sad, enduring feel of the parsonage house, the Bronte children’s tiny handmade, handwritten books, Charlotte’s tiny-waisted dress and ancient, slim, thin-fingered gloves, like a fairy’s, like a spirit's.
Some quotes:
Helen Burns: “Hush, Jane! You think too much of the love of human beings; you are too impulsive, too vehement; the sovereign hand that created your frame, and put life into it, has provided you with other resources than your feeble self, or than creatures feeble as you. Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world , and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere; and those spirits watch us, for they are commissioned to guard us; and if we were dying in pain and shame, if scorn smote us on all sides, and hatred crushed us, angels see our tortures, and recognise our innocence (if innocent we be . . . ), and God waits only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward. Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death so certain an entrance to happiness . . . ?”
Jane: “Distrust it, sir; it is not a true angel.”
Janie: “That sounds a dangerous maxim, sir; because one can see at once that it is liable to abuse.’
“Sir,” I answered., “a wanderer’s repose or a sinner’s reformation should never depend on a fellow- creature. Men and women die; philosophers falter in wisdom, and Christians in goodness: if any one you know has suffered and erred, let him look higher than his equals for strength to amend and solace to heal.”
Jane:“Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their [the laws and principles] rigour; stringent are they, inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth–so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, ti is because I am insane–quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.
I did.”
Me: The above passage is hardly understood today, either that or it is twisted to support the popular sophistries. Now those inviolate certainties, laws, principles, opinions, determinations, she is referring to here are gone from us. Our moral foundation is ground to dust. How do people choose the right when there is no right held up to be seen, when they haven’t been taught it, when evil principles, laws, opinions, determinations have replaced righteous ones? This development probably never even crossed her mind.
Jane: “It is hard work to control the workings of inclination and turn the bent of nature; but that it may be done, I know from experience. God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate; and when our energies seem to demand a sustenance they cannot get–when our will strains after a path we may not follow–we need neither starve from inanition, nor stand still in despair: we have but to seek another nourishment for the mind, as strong as the forbidden food it longed to taste–and perhaps purer; and to hew out for the adventurous foot a road as direct and broad as the one Fortune has blocked up against us, if rougher than it.”
St. John: “Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus.”
Janice Graham
P.S. And I love her other three novels too.
