Jane Eyre Gender
Analysis of Jane Eyre
"Yes; Mrs. Rochester," said he; "Young Mrs. Rochester-Fair-fax Rochester's girl-bride." -Rochester to Jane, Jane Eyre
Since its publication in 1847, readers of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre have debated the subversive implications of this text. The plot conventions of Jane's rise to fortune and the marriage union that concludes the novel suggest conservative affirmations of class and gender identities that seemingly contradict the novel's more disruptive aspects. Despite the personal or professional motivations that led Bronte to conform the conclusion to sentimental norms, the novel continues to prove unsettling …show more content…
in its use of gender identities and its associations of gender with class and age.2 Notably, while challenging gender identities, the text does more than simply transfer power from the patriarchal grasp of Rochester to the powerless hand of Jane, and it does more than feed post-Butlerian critical perspectives; the text highlights the anxieties and complexities of the Victorian understanding of gender by paradoxically dismantling and reifying nineteenth-century notions of masculinity and femininity. Masculine and feminine constructions in Jane Eyre ultimately cannot be separated from the larger gender anxieties raised by Jane's class position or from the "twenty years of difference" (p. 333) between the partners of the novel's marriage plot. Jane's roles as governess and as girl bride associate her with complex and often contradictory notions of androgyny and femininity, sexuality and innocence. Because of their complex relationships to power, economics and age operate as essential pieces in the textual performances of gender identities, performances that suggest conscious parodies of these identities and lead to radical rejections of gender norms. Furthermore, the class differences between Jane and Rochester combine with the gap between their ages to exaggerate the already extreme binary logic of Victorian gender relations and create what Judith Butler calls "psychic excess," a feature of "psychic mimesis" that structures performance and potentially undermines gender identities.3 Reading Jane Eyre to uncover how class and age influence gender offers more insight into the text's subtle shifts in power and potentially reconciles disparate critical readings of the novel.
By the mid- 1840s, the increasing effects of industrialism and capitalism coincided with the processes that undermined and reinstated gender identities. In Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778-1860, Judith Lowder Newton examines the division of the nineteenth-century labor force, claiming that the rise of factory production led to the decline of home industry and therefore to the rise of "separate spheres" for masculine and feminine work.4 Yet, these gendered realms of labor were inextricably bound with class economics; rather than experiencing a dramatic division of a masculine workplace and feminine domesticity, working-class laborers witnessed an increased blurring of gender division by the mid- 1840s. Agrarian notions of men's and women's work dissolved as both men and women were utilized in the growing industrial economy.5 Moreover, the corresponding polarization of male and female realms within the middle class can be read as the result of a larger societal anxiety about gender identities that emerged from the instability of working-class gender roles in the new social framework.
For example, in 1843 Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna published a study on the British working class: The Perils of the Nation: An Appeal to the Legislature, the Clergy, and the Higher and Middle Classes. In the chapter regarding the mining poor, the unsteadiness of class-based gender identities becomes central to Tonna's study. She laments at length the sinful licentiousness that pervades the mine, this "scene of deepened gloom."6 Men, women, and children worked in mixed company in the mines, wearing little clothing because of the heat, and created an androgynous workplace where the notion of separate spheres and often gender differences themselves did not exist.
As she describes, "The dress 854 state" of Engels's factory family suggest an equally perilous and dangerous position for the middle class, who, seeking to help the working class with basic economic concerns, also tried to resolve their own basic gender concerns. In reaction to this unsettling ambiguity regarding gender identities, middle-class Victorians began to push masculine and feminine constructions to extremes, reinforcing the divisions between male and female spheres of power and influence.
Jane's performance of femininity initially flops. While Mrs. Fairfax encourages the gender parade of her charge, announcing to Rochester when he fails to notice Jane, "'Here is Miss Eyre, sir,"' his answer appears to renounce any desire to provide the appropriate masculine gaze to the feminized object: "'What the deuce is it to me whether Miss Eyre be there or not? At this moment I am not disposed to accost her"' (pp. 146-7).14 Jane is pleased that her theatrically contrived portrayal of gender and class is temporarily interrupted. She reflects on Rochester's …show more content…
dis- 858 missive comments, "I sat down quite disembarrassed. A reception of finished politeness would probably have confused me: I could not have returned or repaid it by answering grace and elegance on my part; but harsh caprice laid me under no obligation" (p. 147). Seated, she momentarily allows herself to return to her familiar identity as a working-class, ambiguously gendered figure, and, as she rests outside of Rochester's scrutiny, she realizes the strangely empowered implications of her gender neutrality: "on the contrary, a decent quiescence, under the freak of manner, gave me the advantage" (p. 147; emphasis added). This scene is one of many in which Jane revels in her lower-class position and finds it useful for its complex relation to gender. Although Jane appears feminized by her disempowered position while she remains in a subservient, even servile, relationship to Rochester, the androgyny of her working-class status clears the way for the text's dalliances with gender deviancy. For Victorians, the threat to gender stability presented by governesses stemmed not only from the middle-class fear that they would teach ambiguous notions of gender and class to their children but also from the more explicit sexual threat governesses wielded to the middle-class men they encountered. Because they contrasted and complicated middle-class notions of femininity, governesses commanded desire through their polymorphous characteristics. They were feminine and yet they were not feminine; they were sexual objects and gender subjects; they occupied a place simultaneously within and outside middle-class society.
These working-class reproductions of middle-class female sexuality conveniently were and were not conventional of existing gender identities, and the uncertainty of the governess's class and gender positions piqued middle-class interests. Richard Redgrave's 1844 painting The Poor Teacher plays upon the governess's marginalized position within the middle-class home, and Rebecca Solomon's 1854 The Governess extends the sexual connotations of the theme by depicting the governess as stealing a look that is both longing and covetous toward her male employer while he, at least for the moment, manages to focus his gaze on his wife.15 Poovey maintains, 'That representations of the governess in the 1840s brought to her contemporaries' minds not just the middle-class ideal she was meant to reproduce, but the sexualized and often working-class women against whom she was expected to defend, reveals the mid-Victorian fear that the governess could not protect middle-class values because she could not be trusted to regulate her own sexuality."'6 The tension
Poovey describes is a crucial one; 859 the governess simultaneously presents a middle-class feminine ideal, which, if not devoid of sexuality, is sexually restricted, and she embodies a working-class androgynous reality that suggests unrestrained sexuality. Governesses could, therefore, provide a site for middle-class male desire while working against existing gender norms and outside of the sexual restrictions imposed upon middle-class wives and daughters. In Jane Eyre, the gender subversions permitted by Jane's working-class status become even more powerful and more complex, as the romantic tension between Jane and Rochester focuses increased attention on her ambiguous sexual position. Jane's working-class androgyny and the sexual liberties associated with feminine unsexing penetrate the middle class just as Tonna predicts the mineworkers will "spread contamination" from the mines. 7 But if class opens the door for Jane Eyre to convey the pliability of gendered constructions, it does so to make way for other devices that challenge gender identities. In its romance plot, the text participates in the Victorian obsession with male-female relationships in which an older, fatherly male exceeds a younger, childlike female in age by twenty years or more, and age, like class, creates power inequities between Jane and Rochester. Bronte's brilliant pairing of the subversive qualities of class and age is central to the text's dismantling of gender identities and offers new insight into Victorian gender anxieties. The effects of Jane's doubly feminized position through age and class superficially reaffirm her subservient position to Rochester. Jane must bear Rochester's orders of when to stay and when to go and when to speak and when to be silent. He is clearly her "master," and she responds to him with the deference expected by one in his position. "'Yes, sir"' and "'no, sir"' become abundant refrains throughout the text, persistently, and perhaps subversively, reminding the reader of the gross inequalities in their economic situations as their attraction grows. Jane's use of the terms "sir" and "master" to refer to Rochester becomes so natural through frequent repetition that she, as well as the reader, must be reminded of their inappropriateness when Jane and Rochester's romance attempts to transcend their difference in class. When Rochester proposes, he asks Jane to use his given name Edward, yet after she responds with "'Then, sir, I will marry you,"' he must remind her that she is now entitled to use his given name: "'Edward-my little wife!"' (p. 321). Despite his suggestion, she continues to refer to him as her master not only up to the point of her fleeing Thornfield but also after she has gained an independent fortune. When she seeks Rochester at Ferndean, she continues to employ the terminology of her former servile position: "Dusk as it was, I had recognized him;-it was my master, Edward Fairfax Rochester, and no other" (p. 551). The dynamic quality of the age difference allows for more overt shifts in power that coincide with the novel's dramatic reversals of fortune. The sexual threat of Jane's youth influences the transference of physical and economic strength from Rochester to Jane. Consequently, while many feminist critics have focused on the Rochester-centered romantic triangles of Jane and Rochester and Bertha or of Jane and Rochester and Blanche Ingram, the most 865 important triangle in terms of the subversion of gendered power comes through the romantic triangle of Rochester and Jane and St. John Rivers that concludes the novel. Rochester's relation-ships with Bertha and Blanche contribute to his control of sexual and economic power, but Jane's marriage proposal from St. John Rivers completes the power reversal brought about by Rochester's loss of his estate, his social position, and his eyesight. Rochester's anxiety from the threat of young Jane's sexual interest in another forms the foundation of chapter thirty-seven of the final volume, the next-to-last chapter, and colors the seemingly conventional romantic ending that is so challenging for feminist critics. After Jane has returned to the blinded Rochester, but before her romantic interests in him are clear, Rochester must address his own fears of her power. Clearly, Rochester is aware of the various ways the scales of power have tipped in Jane's favor, but the text repeatedly returns to his concern with her age. He interrogates Jane: "'I suppose I should now entertain none but fatherly feelings for you: do you think so? ... But you cannot always be my nurse, Janet: you are young-you must marry one day"' (pp. 557-8). Rochester's concerns about his powerlessness directly correspond to his sexual fears regarding their age difference. He compares himself to the "'old lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield orchard"' and questions, "'what right would that ruin have to bid a budding woodbine cover its decay with freshness?"' (p. 568). Now assured that the two scenarios he envisioned regarding Jane's departure from Thornfield did not occur (that she was dead in a ditch or a "pining outcast among strangers" [p. 5561), Rochester speculates that Jane has likely met a man her own age. The sexual threat of the younger woman builds with additional fervor. Rochester forcefully demands, "'Who the deuce have you been with?"' to which Jane replies, "'If you twist in that way, you will make me pull the hair out of your head; and then I think you will cease to entertain doubts of my substantiality"' (p. 561). Jane's new power here is clear to Rochester and the reader, and Rochester is forced to temper his queries, though he incessantly pushes, repeating "'Who have you been with, Jane?"' and, a few lines down, "'Just one word, Jane: were there only ladies in the house where you have been?"' (p. 561). Jane revels in her sexual power and makes Rochester wait until the next day for the "one word" that will answer his question.
"Yes; Mrs. Rochester," said he; "Young Mrs. Rochester-Fair-fax Rochester's girl-bride." -Rochester to Jane, Jane Eyre
Since its publication in 1847, readers of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre have debated the subversive implications of this text. The plot conventions of Jane's rise to fortune and the marriage union that concludes the novel suggest conservative affirmations of class and gender identities that seemingly contradict the novel's more disruptive aspects. Despite the personal or professional motivations that led Bronte to conform the conclusion to sentimental norms, the novel continues to prove unsettling …show more content…
in its use of gender identities and its associations of gender with class and age.2 Notably, while challenging gender identities, the text does more than simply transfer power from the patriarchal grasp of Rochester to the powerless hand of Jane, and it does more than feed post-Butlerian critical perspectives; the text highlights the anxieties and complexities of the Victorian understanding of gender by paradoxically dismantling and reifying nineteenth-century notions of masculinity and femininity. Masculine and feminine constructions in Jane Eyre ultimately cannot be separated from the larger gender anxieties raised by Jane's class position or from the "twenty years of difference" (p. 333) between the partners of the novel's marriage plot. Jane's roles as governess and as girl bride associate her with complex and often contradictory notions of androgyny and femininity, sexuality and innocence. Because of their complex relationships to power, economics and age operate as essential pieces in the textual performances of gender identities, performances that suggest conscious parodies of these identities and lead to radical rejections of gender norms. Furthermore, the class differences between Jane and Rochester combine with the gap between their ages to exaggerate the already extreme binary logic of Victorian gender relations and create what Judith Butler calls "psychic excess," a feature of "psychic mimesis" that structures performance and potentially undermines gender identities.3 Reading Jane Eyre to uncover how class and age influence gender offers more insight into the text's subtle shifts in power and potentially reconciles disparate critical readings of the novel.
By the mid- 1840s, the increasing effects of industrialism and capitalism coincided with the processes that undermined and reinstated gender identities. In Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778-1860, Judith Lowder Newton examines the division of the nineteenth-century labor force, claiming that the rise of factory production led to the decline of home industry and therefore to the rise of "separate spheres" for masculine and feminine work.4 Yet, these gendered realms of labor were inextricably bound with class economics; rather than experiencing a dramatic division of a masculine workplace and feminine domesticity, working-class laborers witnessed an increased blurring of gender division by the mid- 1840s. Agrarian notions of men's and women's work dissolved as both men and women were utilized in the growing industrial economy.5 Moreover, the corresponding polarization of male and female realms within the middle class can be read as the result of a larger societal anxiety about gender identities that emerged from the instability of working-class gender roles in the new social framework.
For example, in 1843 Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna published a study on the British working class: The Perils of the Nation: An Appeal to the Legislature, the Clergy, and the Higher and Middle Classes. In the chapter regarding the mining poor, the unsteadiness of class-based gender identities becomes central to Tonna's study. She laments at length the sinful licentiousness that pervades the mine, this "scene of deepened gloom."6 Men, women, and children worked in mixed company in the mines, wearing little clothing because of the heat, and created an androgynous workplace where the notion of separate spheres and often gender differences themselves did not exist.
As she describes, "The dress 854 state" of Engels's factory family suggest an equally perilous and dangerous position for the middle class, who, seeking to help the working class with basic economic concerns, also tried to resolve their own basic gender concerns. In reaction to this unsettling ambiguity regarding gender identities, middle-class Victorians began to push masculine and feminine constructions to extremes, reinforcing the divisions between male and female spheres of power and influence.
Jane's performance of femininity initially flops. While Mrs. Fairfax encourages the gender parade of her charge, announcing to Rochester when he fails to notice Jane, "'Here is Miss Eyre, sir,"' his answer appears to renounce any desire to provide the appropriate masculine gaze to the feminized object: "'What the deuce is it to me whether Miss Eyre be there or not? At this moment I am not disposed to accost her"' (pp. 146-7).14 Jane is pleased that her theatrically contrived portrayal of gender and class is temporarily interrupted. She reflects on Rochester's …show more content…
dis- 858 missive comments, "I sat down quite disembarrassed. A reception of finished politeness would probably have confused me: I could not have returned or repaid it by answering grace and elegance on my part; but harsh caprice laid me under no obligation" (p. 147). Seated, she momentarily allows herself to return to her familiar identity as a working-class, ambiguously gendered figure, and, as she rests outside of Rochester's scrutiny, she realizes the strangely empowered implications of her gender neutrality: "on the contrary, a decent quiescence, under the freak of manner, gave me the advantage" (p. 147; emphasis added). This scene is one of many in which Jane revels in her lower-class position and finds it useful for its complex relation to gender. Although Jane appears feminized by her disempowered position while she remains in a subservient, even servile, relationship to Rochester, the androgyny of her working-class status clears the way for the text's dalliances with gender deviancy. For Victorians, the threat to gender stability presented by governesses stemmed not only from the middle-class fear that they would teach ambiguous notions of gender and class to their children but also from the more explicit sexual threat governesses wielded to the middle-class men they encountered. Because they contrasted and complicated middle-class notions of femininity, governesses commanded desire through their polymorphous characteristics. They were feminine and yet they were not feminine; they were sexual objects and gender subjects; they occupied a place simultaneously within and outside middle-class society.
These working-class reproductions of middle-class female sexuality conveniently were and were not conventional of existing gender identities, and the uncertainty of the governess's class and gender positions piqued middle-class interests. Richard Redgrave's 1844 painting The Poor Teacher plays upon the governess's marginalized position within the middle-class home, and Rebecca Solomon's 1854 The Governess extends the sexual connotations of the theme by depicting the governess as stealing a look that is both longing and covetous toward her male employer while he, at least for the moment, manages to focus his gaze on his wife.15 Poovey maintains, 'That representations of the governess in the 1840s brought to her contemporaries' minds not just the middle-class ideal she was meant to reproduce, but the sexualized and often working-class women against whom she was expected to defend, reveals the mid-Victorian fear that the governess could not protect middle-class values because she could not be trusted to regulate her own sexuality."'6 The tension
Poovey describes is a crucial one; 859 the governess simultaneously presents a middle-class feminine ideal, which, if not devoid of sexuality, is sexually restricted, and she embodies a working-class androgynous reality that suggests unrestrained sexuality. Governesses could, therefore, provide a site for middle-class male desire while working against existing gender norms and outside of the sexual restrictions imposed upon middle-class wives and daughters. In Jane Eyre, the gender subversions permitted by Jane's working-class status become even more powerful and more complex, as the romantic tension between Jane and Rochester focuses increased attention on her ambiguous sexual position. Jane's working-class androgyny and the sexual liberties associated with feminine unsexing penetrate the middle class just as Tonna predicts the mineworkers will "spread contamination" from the mines. 7 But if class opens the door for Jane Eyre to convey the pliability of gendered constructions, it does so to make way for other devices that challenge gender identities. In its romance plot, the text participates in the Victorian obsession with male-female relationships in which an older, fatherly male exceeds a younger, childlike female in age by twenty years or more, and age, like class, creates power inequities between Jane and Rochester. Bronte's brilliant pairing of the subversive qualities of class and age is central to the text's dismantling of gender identities and offers new insight into Victorian gender anxieties. The effects of Jane's doubly feminized position through age and class superficially reaffirm her subservient position to Rochester. Jane must bear Rochester's orders of when to stay and when to go and when to speak and when to be silent. He is clearly her "master," and she responds to him with the deference expected by one in his position. "'Yes, sir"' and "'no, sir"' become abundant refrains throughout the text, persistently, and perhaps subversively, reminding the reader of the gross inequalities in their economic situations as their attraction grows. Jane's use of the terms "sir" and "master" to refer to Rochester becomes so natural through frequent repetition that she, as well as the reader, must be reminded of their inappropriateness when Jane and Rochester's romance attempts to transcend their difference in class. When Rochester proposes, he asks Jane to use his given name Edward, yet after she responds with "'Then, sir, I will marry you,"' he must remind her that she is now entitled to use his given name: "'Edward-my little wife!"' (p. 321). Despite his suggestion, she continues to refer to him as her master not only up to the point of her fleeing Thornfield but also after she has gained an independent fortune. When she seeks Rochester at Ferndean, she continues to employ the terminology of her former servile position: "Dusk as it was, I had recognized him;-it was my master, Edward Fairfax Rochester, and no other" (p. 551). The dynamic quality of the age difference allows for more overt shifts in power that coincide with the novel's dramatic reversals of fortune. The sexual threat of Jane's youth influences the transference of physical and economic strength from Rochester to Jane. Consequently, while many feminist critics have focused on the Rochester-centered romantic triangles of Jane and Rochester and Bertha or of Jane and Rochester and Blanche Ingram, the most 865 important triangle in terms of the subversion of gendered power comes through the romantic triangle of Rochester and Jane and St. John Rivers that concludes the novel. Rochester's relation-ships with Bertha and Blanche contribute to his control of sexual and economic power, but Jane's marriage proposal from St. John Rivers completes the power reversal brought about by Rochester's loss of his estate, his social position, and his eyesight. Rochester's anxiety from the threat of young Jane's sexual interest in another forms the foundation of chapter thirty-seven of the final volume, the next-to-last chapter, and colors the seemingly conventional romantic ending that is so challenging for feminist critics. After Jane has returned to the blinded Rochester, but before her romantic interests in him are clear, Rochester must address his own fears of her power. Clearly, Rochester is aware of the various ways the scales of power have tipped in Jane's favor, but the text repeatedly returns to his concern with her age. He interrogates Jane: "'I suppose I should now entertain none but fatherly feelings for you: do you think so? ... But you cannot always be my nurse, Janet: you are young-you must marry one day"' (pp. 557-8). Rochester's concerns about his powerlessness directly correspond to his sexual fears regarding their age difference. He compares himself to the "'old lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield orchard"' and questions, "'what right would that ruin have to bid a budding woodbine cover its decay with freshness?"' (p. 568). Now assured that the two scenarios he envisioned regarding Jane's departure from Thornfield did not occur (that she was dead in a ditch or a "pining outcast among strangers" [p. 5561), Rochester speculates that Jane has likely met a man her own age. The sexual threat of the younger woman builds with additional fervor. Rochester forcefully demands, "'Who the deuce have you been with?"' to which Jane replies, "'If you twist in that way, you will make me pull the hair out of your head; and then I think you will cease to entertain doubts of my substantiality"' (p. 561). Jane's new power here is clear to Rochester and the reader, and Rochester is forced to temper his queries, though he incessantly pushes, repeating "'Who have you been with, Jane?"' and, a few lines down, "'Just one word, Jane: were there only ladies in the house where you have been?"' (p. 561). Jane revels in her sexual power and makes Rochester wait until the next day for the "one word" that will answer his question.