Jane Eyre

The three Bronte sisters - Charlotte, Emily Jane, and Anne - are unique literary artists whose works resemble one another's far more than they do the works of writers before or since. Charlotte's compelling novel Jane Eyre and her three lesser yet strong narratives - The Professor, Shirley, Villette - form the most extensive achievement of the sisters, but critics and common readers alike set even higher the one novel of Emily Jane's, Wuthering Heights, and a handful of her lyrical poems. Anne's two novels - Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - remain highly readable, although dwarfed by Jane Eyre and the authentically sublime Wuthering Heights .

The Byronism of Rochester in Jane Eyre is enhanced because the narrative is related in the first person by Jane Eyre herself, who is very much an overt surrogate for Charlotte Bronte. As Rochester remarks, Jane is indomitable; as Jane says, she is altogether "a free human being with an independent will." That will is fiercest in its passion for Rochester , undoubtedly because the passion for her crucial precursor is doubly ambivalent; Byron is both the literary father to a strong daughter, and the idealized object of her erotic drive. To Jane, Rochester 's first appearance is associated not only with the animal intensities of his horse and dog, but with the first of his maimings. When Jane reclaims him at the novel's conclusion, he is left partly blinded and partly crippled.

Byronic passion, being an ambiguous entity, is legitimately present in Jane herself as a psychosexual aggressiveness turned both against the self and against others. Charlotte Bronte, in a mode between those of Schopenhauer and Freud, knows implicitly that Jane Eyre's drive to acknowledge no superior to herself is precisely on the frontier between the psychical and the physical. Rochester is the outward realm that must be internalized, and Jane's introjection of him does not leave him wholly intact. Gilbert and Gubar shrewdly observe that Rochester 's extensive sexual experience is almost the final respect in which Jane is not his equal, but they doubtless would agree that Jane's sexual imagination overmatches his, at least implicitly.

Jane Eyre, like Wuthering Heights , is after all a romance, however northern, and not a novel, properly speaking. Its standards of representation have more to do with Jacobean melodrama and Gothic fiction than with George Eliot and Thackeray, and more even with Byron's Lara and Manfred than with any other works. Rochester is no Heathcliff; he lives in a social reality in which Heathcliff would be an intruder even if Heathcliff cared for social realities except as fields in which to take revenge. Yet there is a daemon in Rochester . Heathcliff is almost nothing but daemonic, and Rochester has enough of the daemonic to call into question any current feminist reading of Jane Eyre.

The shape of Jane Eyre is very much represented by the places where the action occurs, which Charlotte Bronte makes an essential part of the structure, as well as the atmosphere, of her stories.