Thackeray, not knowing this eminent literary figure had had his wife confined to a lunatic asylum. Women who created scandal or behaved inappropriately (promiscuity, blasphemous language, fits of temper, drunkenness or opium addiction) could be confined to asylums even if they were not insane.
From what I have read, Thackeray's wife really was insane. There is no evidence that Thackeray felt her to be an inconvenience. She was the model for Amelia in Vanity Fair.
Thackeray, not knowing this eminent literary figure had had his wife confined to a lunatic asylum. Women who created scandal or behaved inappropriately (promiscuity, blasphemous language, fits of temper, drunkenness or opium addiction) could be confined to asylums even if they were not insane.
From what I have read, Thackeray's wife really was insane. There is no evidence that Thackeray felt her to be an inconvenience. She was the model for Amelia in Vanity Fair.
It's now thought that Isabelle Thackeray suffered from post-partum psychosis, not understood back then. You're missing the point though @Moo -- it is recorded that Charlotte's gesture of dedication was seen as a social gaffe by London society, this isn't speculation on my part. There were not many courses of treatment for women with severe mental health issues but the incarceration of wives in asylums was a scandal much as the placing of rebellious or troubled daughters in convents had been for earlier generations.
Thackeray, not knowing this eminent literary figure had had his wife confined to a lunatic asylum. Women who created scandal or behaved inappropriately (promiscuity, blasphemous language, fits of temper, drunkenness or opium addiction) could be confined to asylums even if they were not insane.
From what I have read, Thackeray's wife really was insane. There is no evidence that Thackeray felt her to be an inconvenience. She was the model for Amelia in Vanity Fair.
It's now thought that Isabelle Thackeray suffered from post-partum psychosis, not understood back then. You're missing the point though @Moo -- it is recorded that Charlotte's gesture of dedication was seen as a social gaffe by London society, this isn't speculation on my part. There were not many courses of treatment for women with severe mental health issues but the incarceration of wives in asylums was a scandal much as the placing of rebellious or troubled daughters in convents had been for earlier generations.
To me the point is that it is unfair to Thackeray's reputation to lump him together with the husbands who had their wives committed to mental asylums because they were inconvenient.
@Moo that isn't what I said though, you're not reading fairly or accurately. Because Victorian men with private means were unable to divorce wives who suffered with mental illness, they placed them in care -- in Thackeray's case he placed Isabelle in two asylums in France and then in private care in Britain. He may have done it with reluctance, but according to his first biographer Trollope in 1879, being able to send Isabelle away saved Thackeray's career. Thackeray had a number of mistresses but did not set up house with anyone to avoid scandal.
There's a sad postscript, which is why I went back to look more closely at Thackeray's life some years ago: when Thackeray's granddaughter Laura Stephen, born to Leslie Stephen and Thackeray's daughter Minnie behaves wildly and irrationally as a child and exasperates her unsympathetic step-mother Julia, it is thought that Laura has inherited congenital lunacy through Isabelle Thackeray and Laura is placed in an asylum where she will stay until her death in 1945. Laura is, of course, Virginia Woolf's half-sister and it is now believed that Laura was autistic.
Thanks for that; a biography of Vanessa Bell ( Stephen) mentions her “ feeble minded” stepsister who disappeared early in the narrative & appears never to have been mentioned again…
I've been havering over whether I should shove an oar in here, because I haven't read 'Jane Eyre' this month, having only re-engaged with the Ship about a week ago after a bit of a break, but seeing as the conversation has turned to mental health, I feel like I can...
I first read Jane Eyre in my early teens - the book was given to me as an end-of-year prize in, I think, year eight. I read it numerous times over the next 4-5 years while I was at home - we didn't have many books.
Then I left home and went to university and came back to Jane Eyre post-degree and post-feminist studies, and it was a different book. Undoubtedly Charlotte Bronte pushed boundaries and broke new ground with Jane, who is worth forty of any female character Emily Bronte wrote...but the book palls for me now due to the treatment of Bertha Mason, who, to be honest, is more of an object than a character in the story.
There is a subtle implication that she might not be entirely white, there is an unsubtle implication that she comes of 'bad stock'. There is no empathy, no attempt to enter into her situation, no fellow-feeling. There is nothing groundbreaking here. Rochester, reflecting on his marriage, doesn't feel sorry for her - he feels sorry for himself. This is bog-standard mad-is-bad stuff. You get what you deserve, your sins catch up with you. Women are always on edge of insanity, and women who are mouthy and flashy and libidinous are already over the line.
"Bertha's madness is also linked to female sexuality and the periodicity of the menstrual cycle. Her worst attacks come when the moon is 'blood red' (ch25) or 'broad and red' (ch27); at these moment she is vicious and destructive, although at other times she is lucid and calm. A prisoner of her reproductive cycle...Bertha suffered from the 'moral insanity' associated with women's sexual desires." (Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady).
I too think Bertha gets a tough deal. I assume she was about as keen as Rochester was on the marriage in the first place.
I also find all the suggestions that somehow the British are superior to anyone else in the world somewhat irritating. There is the bit when Jane talks about how much better she thinks English farmer's daughters are to their continental counterparts for instance.
What do we make of Adele by the way? There has to be a child for Jane to be the governess of for her to be at the Hall in the first place, but why the child of a French mistress and not the daughter of the dead older brother for instance.
Adele serves several purposes. She gives Jane a reason to be there, as you've said; she forms a constant reminder to Jane of what could happen to her personally if she stops walking the straight and narrow, sexually speaking;* she gives us a chance to see Rochester in a more positive light; and she serves as a bit of foreshadowing, both of impropriety (if you see what I mean) and of eventual family (which includes Jane's own child). She also gives Jane the chance to shine by her "management" of the child's minor "distempered freaks," showing that she herself is not a harsh abuser but an effective caregiver/teacher.
The question of what would happen if it had been the dead child of the older brother is an interesting one. I assume that would complicate Rochester's inheritance, but it would also inject a note of unexpected (unwelcome?) sobriety into thewhole dream-like sequence where we're supposed to think everything is fine in Romance Land and the (first) wedding will go forward. Such a child would stand as a constant reminder of death in the family, and ties that did not work out, and so on and so forth. Adele is a recipient of grace; for her day she has absolutely no claims on Rochester, but he honors them anyway when plenty of men would not even consider it. A nephew or niece would have legitimate and recognized claims on him which would tend to dilute the softening power of child caretaking on his picture--after all, he owes a duty to an orphaned niece or nephew, and so on and so forth.
* I had mentioned upthread the existence of Sharon Shinn's sci-fi reimagining of this story in the form of Jenna Starborn. There Jenna is not a governess, but a nuclear technician; yet the Adele role is too important to be left out, so it is supplied by a similar child named Ameletta and by her tutor as well, who enacts the role of a lower-class woman who "goes too far" for love with an unreliable man and ends up paying for it. Thus Jenna/Jane gets her warning, but the child figure is now wholly sympathetic, with none of the unpleasant-to-our-ears little asides about her immoral mother or French nationality. Her role is restricted to humanizing Mr. Rochester/Ravenbeck.
Yes poor Adele suffers from the dreadful condition of being French, and therefore fundamentally worldly and frivolous. AIR she is rescued at the end by being given a sound English education, which somewhat mitigates her (congenital) faults.
Except the timescale is too long, I could see her turning into Adelaide Bartlett having been bundled off into a 'respectable' marriage.
@anoesis, I also found the descriptions of Bertha discomfiting to read as internalised misogyny. What did interest me, and it was something the writer Jean Rhys from Domenica explored in Wide Sargasso Sea, was the aspect of Bertha as not just foreign (the way the French characters Adele and Celine Varennes are treated as frivolous and amoral) but as an incarnation of corruption and disgust, the product of Caribbean slave plantation society, the liaisons between white planters and their slaves which produced Creole communities. Bertha doesn't belong in the Caribbean or in English society: she would have had no choice in marrying Rochester and her insanity is ascribed to the decadent, corrupt and interracial nature of her family background. As mentioned earlier, congenital insanity in Victorian times was often blamed on family lines of corrupt tendencies (gambling, promiscuity, addiction) or impure breeding. In Jane Eyre these racist and prejudiced ideas are simply reproduced.
And yet Jane Eyre herself is in some ways Bertha's twin, she too doesn't belong as a governess or servant despised by Blanche Ingram or Georgiana Reed, as someone physically unattractive, as someone poor and without family to protect her. I noted that for most of the novel, Jane is repelled and frightened by the gaoler Grace Poole and not by the hidden menace of Bertha, Grace's prisoner. Bertha, like the child Jane, is someone hated, even feared, and imprisoned in the equivalent of a Red Room for much of her life.
Another instance of doubling in the novel has to do with the bickering sisters Georgiana and Eliza Reed, in contrast to the loving thoughtful sister duo of Diana and Mary Rivers. Jane meets the Reed sisters again in adulthood and they are discontented, unhappy women. She tells us as an aside that that avaricious stupid Georgiana will make a successful marriage and live in wealth and comfort; her sister Eliza has turned to a punitive religious discipline and plans to enter a Roman Catholic convent in Europe (a living death) where she will endow the convent and become Mother Superior. They get what they deserve, in Jane's view: marriage without love, religion without humanity in a foreign country walled up in a nunnery.
Another instance of doubling in the novel has to do with the bickering sisters Georgiana and Eliza Reed, in contrast to the loving thoughtful sister duo of Diana and Mary Rivers. Jane meets the Reed sisters again in adulthood and they are discontented, unhappy women.
Although he features mostly off stage John Reed is a contrast to St John Rivers in that he is only interested in his own pleasure. However as Rivers doesn't actually consider anyone else in his plans to 'save' them, I guess they are more alike than it appears.
At least Bronte, unlike Mrs Henry Wood or some other Victorian novelists doesn't hit us over the head with moralising about the errors of various characters ways.
I hope you do! It is interesting watching the author (Sharon Shinn) seek a reasonable reason why her version of Jane (Jenna) should not simply take up a romantic sexual relationship with Mr. Rochester/Ravenbeck. Given that this is set in a time and place that is multiplanetary-but-culturally similar to the modern West I mean. So she doesn't assume or bring in religious reasons--rather, she ties it all to their hierarchical citizenship system, where she is already in the bottom caste (half-cits), and he at the top--and stepping out of her "place" through an impermanent relationship with a level 1 citizen would almost certainly end in disaster.
Re Bertha: The reader has to take Rochester's word, but he mentions that Bertha wanted to marry him as much (and for the same reasons) as Blanche did. He also claims that if Jane were to go mad, he would dedicate himself to caring for her personally (of course, Jane's size would make her much easier to restrain if necessary--"...if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat--your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me...").
It's been mentioned that many of the novel's names are deliberately evocative; they were probably ironic regarding Blanche ("white, pure") and at least two of Rochester's mistresses. Celine means "heavenly", while the dull Clara's name means "clear, bright". Giancita, however, means "hyacinth", which has a neutral connotation.
(Wikipedia mentions that the different species of hyacinth in Greece were sacred to Aphrodite, but I'm guessing this particular fact would be too obscure even for Victorian readers, who on average had a better knowledge of Classical History than those of today. I don't think the better-known Hyacinthus myth has any relevance either.)
Re Bertha: The reader has to take Rochester's word, but he mentions that Bertha wanted to marry him as much (and for the same reasons) as Blanche did. He also claims that if Jane were to go mad, he would dedicate himself to caring for her personally (of course, Jane's size would make her much easier to restrain if necessary--"...if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat--your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me...").
The trouble, of course, is that it is incredibly easy to say shit like this when it hasn't happened. Grrrr.
Another instance of doubling in the novel has to do with the bickering sisters Georgiana and Eliza Reed, in contrast to the loving thoughtful sister duo of Diana and Mary Rivers. Jane meets the Reed sisters again in adulthood and they are discontented, unhappy women. She tells us as an aside that that avaricious stupid Georgiana will make a successful marriage and live in wealth and comfort; her sister Eliza has turned to a punitive religious discipline and plans to enter a Roman Catholic convent in Europe (a living death) where she will endow the convent and become Mother Superior. They get what they deserve, in Jane's view: marriage without love, religion without humanity in a foreign country walled up in a nunnery.
Interesting, that. I read JE first at age 10 & later in my teens, at a time when sectarian bigotry was alive & well in Oz. I thought then and still do that Eliza got a bum rap from Charlotte ( a rabid anti-papist; after all her awful old dad was a C of I clergyman). Eliza was portrayed as the grasping Ugly Sister and her smackdown of her useless spoiled brat of a sister outdid anything that sanctimonious little Cinderella Jane could have come up with. She clearly had no time for her nasty departed brother either and what is more had a life plan. You only have to read a few other Charlotte novels to comprehend her horror of all things Romish.
@Sojourner yes, but 'anti-Romish' and 'anti-Papist' sentiments were common in Victorian Britain and Roman Catholicism was seen as peculiarly foreign ('Continental') and superstitious, with centuries of persecution and exclusion from England leaving a legacy of distrust and contempt. Only from 1850 did England have their own Roman Catholic bishops and most recusant families kept a low profile. The well known converts from the Church of England like Henry Manning and John Henry Newman were viewed as an anomaly by most. I got the feeling that being walled up in a convent was a fitting end for one of the Reeds, in the author's eyes.
ML, I’m a bad Catholic of Irish antecedents who is hitting 70 so none of this is news to me; anti-Catholic sectarianism was on its last legs in Oz as I was growing up. As for a “ fitting end” that would be an expected attitude (as I see it) of the highly-sexed Charlotte who had a bad track record for falling for unsuitable ( unavailable) men before settling for her father’s ( also) Anglo-Irish curate. It struck me that Eliza had a poor opinion of men and probably of most of the human race. Hardly a surprise given her horrid family. But of course Charlotte had to demonise the whole bloody lot of them.
Charlotte emphasises in Villette Paul Emmanuel's 'simple faith' as indicating that it is not tainted by what seems to be the principal evils of Catholicism, ie doctrine, ritual and Art (all those pictures and statues).
I recall the bare Presbyterian churches of my childhood (Northern Ireland in the 1950s) and how, starved for visual arts, I would look out as we drove through Carlisle Circus, past the statute of Roaring Hanna (a virulently anti-Catholic cleric of the 19thC) for a crucifixion sculpture in a dank corner beside an RC church.
There's a sad postscript, which is why I went back to look more closely at Thackeray's life some years ago: when Thackeray's granddaughter Laura Stephen, born to Leslie Stephen and Thackeray's daughter Minnie behaves wildly and irrationally as a child and exasperates her unsympathetic step-mother Julia, it is thought that Laura has inherited congenital lunacy through Isabelle Thackeray and Laura is placed in an asylum where she will stay until her death in 1945. Laura is, of course, Virginia Woolf's half-sister and it is now believed that Laura was autistic.
Thanks for that, perhaps a sideline but very interesting.
I would like to read Wild Saragasso Sea now, though including postage second hand costs almost as much as new and my library system doesn't have a copy. On the plus side they did have next month's book which has a much more sensitive take on mental illness and addiction.
There's a sad postscript, which is why I went back to look more closely at Thackeray's life some years ago: when Thackeray's granddaughter Laura Stephen, born to Leslie Stephen and Thackeray's daughter Minnie behaves wildly and irrationally as a child and exasperates her unsympathetic step-mother Julia, it is thought that Laura has inherited congenital lunacy through Isabelle Thackeray and Laura is placed in an asylum where she will stay until her death in 1945. Laura is, of course, Virginia Woolf's half-sister and it is now believed that Laura was autistic.
Thanks for that, perhaps a sideline but very interesting.
This book has certainly elicited a lot of comment, some of it perhaps rather tangential. But I thank various shipmates, notably @MaryLouise for their insights, particularly into the important role played by almost all the minor characters in moving the story along, and to the significance of their names (which had completely escaped me). And we've had some discussion on the role of Christianity, and the extent to which various clergymen epitomise it (not very well, is the consensus), which is certainly a major theme in the book.
But to my eye, an allied and major theme is: can (should?) a woman of clear intellect and Christian principles, but without riches and a long way from conventional contemporary ideas of beauty, gain respect and love on that basis? And is it wrong for her to have or to show sexual yearnings? Does Jane's unexpected inheritance make a difference? But then I'm only a man and can't claim familiarity with much 19th century literature, and what would be scandalous at the time. So how do all you learned female shipmates feel about this and its importance in the book?
There's a sad postscript, which is why I went back to look more closely at Thackeray's life some years ago: when Thackeray's granddaughter Laura Stephen, born to Leslie Stephen and Thackeray's daughter Minnie behaves wildly and irrationally as a child and exasperates her unsympathetic step-mother Julia, it is thought that Laura has inherited congenital lunacy through Isabelle Thackeray and Laura is placed in an asylum where she will stay until her death in 1945. Laura is, of course, Virginia Woolf's half-sister and it is now believed that Laura was autistic.
Thanks for that, perhaps a sideline but very interesting.
Yes; I didn't know that, so thank you.
Somewhere or other, we have a good biography ofVirginia Woolf. The impression it gave was not that Laura was autistic, but rather that she had some mental illness. The biography was written 40 or so years ago - perhaps not as much was then known about autism as there is today. Very much a sideline, I know, but shows the real value of these threads in broadening general knowledge as well as discussion of particular books.
This book has certainly elicited a lot of comment, some of it perhaps rather tangential. But I thank various shipmates, notably @MaryLouise for their insights, particularly into the important role played by almost all the minor characters in moving the story along, and to the significance of their names (which had completely escaped me). And we've had some discussion on the role of Christianity, and the extent to which various clergymen epitomise it (not very well, is the consensus), which is certainly a major theme in the book.
But to my eye, an allied and major theme is: can (should?) a woman of clear intellect and Christian principles, but without riches and a long way from conventional contemporary ideas of beauty, gain respect and love on that basis? And is it wrong for her to have or to show sexual yearnings? Does Jane's unexpected inheritance make a difference? But then I'm only a man and can't claim familiarity with much 19th century literature, and what would be scandalous at the time. So how do all you learned female shipmates feel about this and its importance in the book?
All right: here is my unlearned take on the story:
(1) Yes Christian virtue and intellect should be rewarded but in Charlotte’s day if a genteel girl had no money she could either earn her keep as a governess, be a slavey to more fortunate relatives or marry a poor curate. Charlotte ramps up the drama by Jane almost making it to the altar ( Round 1) with Mr Rochester.
(2) Sexual yearnings? Nice girls didn’t and Charlotte kept hers under wraps; interesting how she transferred that to Rochester’s wife the dark sultry exotic from the West Indies, whom she fears.
(3) The inheritance allows the neat wrapping up of Jane’s life: virtue rewarded, financial
independence and the chance to make decisions on her terms. She can magnanimously help the nice Rivers girls ( who just might marry and get away from their git of a brother) and she can enjoy some Schafenfreude at the reduced circumstances of the nasty Reeds.
I will add that she is able to get her man in the end after his wife is killed ( in suitably melodramatic fashion) and he is reduced to a “ sightless block” which allows her an upper hand.
Toss in an apparent miracle a few years later ( partial restoration of Rochester’s sight) plus a baby so happy endings all around.
Lots of “ virtue rewarded” and ya boo sucks to the baddies.
...we've had some discussion on the role of Christianity, and the extent to which various clergymen epitomise it (not very well, is the consensus), which is certainly a major theme in the book.
Bronte really goes after the clergy in her following novel Shirley; the first chapter in particular, featuring a conversation between three curates, raised some controversy.
But to my eye, an allied and major theme is: can (should?) a woman of clear intellect and Christian principles, but without riches and a long way from conventional contemporary ideas of beauty, gain respect and love on that basis? And is it wrong for her to have or to show sexual yearnings?...I'm only a man and can't claim familiarity with much 19th century literature, and what would be scandalous at the time.
Also a man, but can definitely say that the Bronte sisters generated scandal. While their authorship was still not generally known, many thought that no decent woman would write in a manner so "coarse" (Somewhat tangential but funny comic). The attitude wasn't limited to men--the then-famous intellectual Harriet Martineau wrote that she "did not like the love, either the kind or the degree of it" in Jane Eyre and (CB's final novel) Villette. The repercussions probably affected George Eliot--Michel Faber theorized that after the villification of the Brontes despite their celibate private lives, Eliot had to be extra careful given her relationship with George Lewes, contributing at least in part to her (even by Victorian standards) understated approach to romance.
Tangent: I and the rest of my High School English class hated Wuthering Heights (Nelly Dean was the only remotely sympathetic character); I believe Charlotte's assertion that Emily meant it to be an anti-romantic novel and definitely understand the reaction of many Victorians.
Edit: Wow, I spent a long time on this post--I started it before Sojourner's was up.
[Jane] can magnanimously help the nice Rivers girls (who just might marry and get away from their git of a brother)...
In fairness, St. John was going to be out of the picture soon anyway, and at least Diana--Jane mentions that her will, in its own way, was as strong as his--had been able to stand up to him; no doubt he had tried to convince her or Mary to go with him to India.
This weekend I read a comment by Olivia Laing in the Guardian on how she disliked Jane Eyre as a "horrendous little hysteric." For me, Rochester the tormented peculiar Byronic lover, is far more of a classic hysteric than Jane.
Gothic fiction as a genre relies on Victorian ideas of the body as symptom, illness and hysteria. The grand hysteric of 19th-century English literature is Dickens' Miss Haversham, the crazy jilted bride in her wedding dress. When Bertha Mason the imprisoned wife tears the veil of Jane's wedding dress, it is an act of homicidal vengeful madness but also symbolic of the tearing of the hymen and loss of virginity that accompanies marriage, an irruption of pure Gothic into the Romantic idea of a blissful wedding.
Looking at what @Tukai asked, I come back to something that intrigued me all the way through the novel. Does Jane Eyre have a body? The respectable governess of that time, a poor but educated anomaly, was like other women encased from head to toe in bonnets, high collars, scarves, shawls, long-sleeved tops, gloves or mittens, ground-length heavy skirts over whalebone corsets, petticoats and worsted stockings, lace-up boots. If a woman in this social position (neither servant nor family), was to attend a ball or banquet, she would dress demurely, no cleavage showing although she might wear lighter colours (ivory, pearl-grey) with a discreet brooch or locket. Social invisibility is Jane's norm. If she had been beautiful in the conventional manner admired by Victorian society, she would have incurred more disapproval and suspicion and expected to dress even more plainly. For Jane too, there is a puritanical virtue in her simple grey clothes and lack of vanity, she has no desire to attract Rochester's attention to her body. The female body is hidden away and what Jane feels are emotions and ideas rather than physical sensations: she doesn't talk very much about breathlessness or palpitations or stomach-churning nervousness. She doesn't have nose-bleeds, her palms don't sweat, she doesn't menstruate or need to use the bathroom, she doesn't experience sexual arousal as a Sally Rooney character might do. The idea of sexual pleasure may be vaguely associated with love and marriage but the smell of Rochester's cigar is all that Jane knows of sensuous enjoyment.
If shocked or distressed, the Victorian heroine lets her body speak as symptom for her: she faints, usually in a sitting position or where she will be caught and propped up, revived with sal volatile. This psychic collapse accompanied by tears, amnesia or black-outs, is permissible. Her pallor indicates she is in extreme distress, because her facial complexion is visible where her neck and shoulders are not: her trembling hands are gloved and can be hidden in thick skirts, her encased torso is rigid from years of postural training and corsets. If you've ever worn a full Victorian outfit, you'll know how claustrophobic it feels, the movement of the legs hampered, the constricting petticoats and stays. In paintings of PreRaphaelite women, we see them depicted in erotic immobility, that they are frozen on the point of flight with robes in disarray; that they are unmoving at a moonlit window in hopeless yearning (The Lady of Shalott's crack'd mirror); that they are like dead Ophelia in a coffin-boat strewn with flowers.
In contrast, what shows the reader that Bertha Mason is hideous and crazy is that she is dishevelled, unkempt and slovenly, a madwoman who refuses to stay in place. The most famous image associated with the beginning of modern psychiatry is of Dr Charcot's female hysterics at the Salpêtrière in Paris, women's bodies contorted and frozen in hysterical paralysis, unable to move and showing no reaction when their arms or breasts were pierced by needles. Hysteria was associated with women and mental illness until after WWI, when trench warfare psychosis turned the focus on 'shell-shocked' men.
For me, Rochester the tormented peculiar Byronic lover, is far more of a classic hysteric than Jane.
Yes--the Introduction of my paperback JE mentions that "Mr. Rochester has been the subject of good deal of derision...the Brontes' daydreams had clearly been formed on Byronic lines."
Very good post, MaryLouise, I think the idea of the male hysteric is particularly interesting. It's always assumed that women are hysteric, but Charcot described it in men. I think later it was linked with shellshock. But it's fascinating to re-anayze literary figures, thus Hamlet endlessly twittering on about his conscience, even Macbeth.
One of the favourite books I read last year was Hester by Mrs Oliphant. Mrs Oliphant managed to keep her family going after her husband's death with her writing. I wonder if Bronte and her sisters had lived longer they would have been able to have moved away from the parsonage and had more independent lives. Elizabeth Gaskell made enough money to be able to buy a house and not tell her husband about it until after she'd done so.
One of the things I liked about Hester was the range of different female characters, most handled fairly sympathetically. One of the characters, rather like Georgiana is desperate for her 'chance' to nab a husband. She is a much more rounded character than either of the Reed sisters.
The more I think of it, the more I'm sure I wouldn't actually like Jane if I met her in real life.
I'm not so sure, really. It seems to me completely human to respond to serious long-term ongoing abuse by seeing (and painting) one's former abusers as unsympathetic characters; and the same is true of over-partisanship towards one's intended, even if wrongly intended! The one I think I might have real trouble with would be Rochester. He's too fond of stage managing at the expense of others' pain, even if temporary; and perhaps he could have done better by his first wife. The other thing I'm seeing is a tendency to mix up the author's choices with the characters'--I don't care for some of the author's choices (such as the blindness making him dependent on Jane, and then the eventual triumph-of-the-good-woman thing with the lifting of the blindness), but these are Bronte's choices and not Jane's.
One of the favourite books I read last year was Hester by Mrs Oliphant. Mrs Oliphant managed to keep her family going after her husband's death with her writing. I wonder if Bronte and her sisters had lived longer they would have been able to have moved away from the parsonage and had more independent lives. Elizabeth Gaskell made enough money to be able to buy a house and not tell her husband about it until after she'd done so.
One of the things I liked about Hester was the range of different female characters, most handled fairly sympathetically. One of the characters, rather like Georgiana is desperate for her 'chance' to nab a husband. She is a much more rounded character than either of the Reed sisters.
The more I think of it, the more I'm sure I wouldn't actually like Jane if I met her in real life.
I'm not so sure, really. It seems to me completely human to respond to serious long-term ongoing abuse by seeing (and painting) one's former abusers as unsympathetic characters; and the same is true of over-partisanship towards one's intended, even if wrongly intended! The one I think I might have real trouble with would be Rochester. He's too fond of stage managing at the expense of others' pain, even if temporary; and perhaps he could have done better by his first wife. The other thing I'm seeing is a tendency to mix up the author's choices with the characters'--I don't care for some of the author's choices (such as the blindness making him dependent on Jane, and then the eventual triumph-of-the-good-woman thing with the lifting of the blindness), but these are Bronte's choices and not Jane's.
@Lamb Chopped I share your uneasiness about Rochester and 'stage managing' is a good way to describe what he does. That histrionic character is part of the 'wounded male hero' and Byronic, the intense domineering lover gnashing his teeth, despairing and acting out his devastation (it's always all about him) and there's a typology of Victorian masculinity veering from the dissolute obtuse bully John Reed and tyrant Brocklehurst to the repressed cold St John Rivers to the frenetic scenes staged by Rochester that foregrounds something in flux and unresolved in Victorian society and literature.
Despite the sudden forceful (and not altogether credible) affirmation of Christianity at the end, I don't know I would call Jane Eyre a novel informed and shaped by conventional Christian beliefs. I was thinking of what @Cathscats wrote earlier about Helen Burns offering an example of someone who took her faith seriously in a harsh and loveless context. The story of Helen's brief and tragic life, however, cannot co-exist with the dramas created around Rochester.
This is for me a problem of genre because the Gothic and its supernatural don't offer the same plausibility for Christian schemas as fictional realism (I was thinking of the church-going hypocrisies and Anglican power plays in Trollope or the breadth of Christian humanism in George Eliot). Gothic by its nature looks back to medievalism and the inexplicable, mixing the miraculous with an element of horror. The allegories that inform Christian narrative (Helen Burns as martyr) work best as fiction in a realistic context, with didactic elements restrained. We wouldn't read The Pilgrim's Progress as a novel, for example, but as poetic allegory. Much Victorian fiction had to do with clerical novels and dilemmas of faith and doubt, often pivoting on the conversion of the unbelieving suitor, conversion itself as life-changing revelation ("I was blind but now I see"), the ethical dangers underlying the perils of courtship and marriage between innocent virginal girls and roués (Thomas Hardy's Tess). How to resolve these dilemmas in a way that satisfied the Christian reader without falling back on tired old stereotypes and predictable 'happy ever after' endings was the challenge for a serious writer. My own feeling is that the novels produced by Margaret Oliphant and Elizabeth Gaskell were more successful than those produced by Hardy (that staggering misogyny) or Dickens (female caricatures).
My main problem with Jane wasn't her attitude to the Reeds, Brocklehurst or even Bertha but her throwaway comments about Adele's intelligence and by extension that of all women not fortunate enough to have been born English. The latter is supported by her comments about the women she met abroad who didn't compare to the farmer's daughters she taught for a brief while.
I wonder whether the difference in Bronte's male characters and that of Gaskell and Oliphant was that the latter two were both married women, and had first hand experience of sex, childbirth etc. Writers such as Charlotte M Yonge, much though I love her work, really didn't have a clue about such things and it shows in their writing.
How would the novel have panned out, if in returning to Thornfield Eyre had discovered, that apart from Bertha dying of natural causes, everything was much as it was. I can imagine in such a case it would be a pretty stormy marriage.
I'm bugged by the racism (ethnocentrism?) as well, but as it's pretty standard equipment in the novels etc. of the time, I heave a sigh and move along.
Yes--I find Jane's xenophobia a "things were different then" thing. Jane does strongly defend Adele as well:
"...but now you know that it is the illegitimate offspring of a French opera-girl, you will be coming to me some day with notice that you have found another place--that you beg me to look out for a new governess, etc.--Eh?"
"No: Adele is not answerable for either her mother's faults or yours: I have a regard for her; and now that she is, in a sense, parentless--forsaken by her mother, and disowned by you, sir--I shall cling closer to her than before. How could I possibly prefer the spoilt pet of a wealthy family, who would hate her governess as a nuisance, to a lonely little orphan, who leans towards her as a friend?"
I also think Jane would keep her rhapsodizing to herself and be a decent acquaintance; her equals at Thornfield liked her well enough, the Rivers sisters more so.
Just occurred to me that, given any decent opportunity, Jane gets along with people in general. With the obvious exception of Mr. Brocklehurst, she had no obvious enemies at Lowood (she did wind being bullied at times, but no more than the other girls her age); her experience at Gateshead gave her an "it is so easy to be careful" mindset (though even that wasn't enough to escape John's and Mrs. Reed's abuse).
On @Lamb Chopped 's suggestion I've just started reading Jenna Starborn, and I'm really enjoying it so far. I like the way it is like and yet so unlike Jane Eyre
Just occurred to me that, given any decent opportunity, Jane gets along with people in general. With the obvious exception of Mr. Brocklehurst, she had no obvious enemies at Lowood (she did wind being bullied at times, but no more than the other girls her age); her experience at Gateshead gave her an "it is so easy to be careful" mindset (though even that wasn't enough to escape John's and Mrs. Reed's abuse).
I agree. Indeed, had she gone to India with St John Rivers (which she was very wise not to do) , I strongly suspect she'd have been much more engaged with the actual people around the mission (especially the women) than he was ever likely to do, as many mission wives did. But , unlike with more successful missionaries, that would be an inclination of which he would be very critical and unappreciative.
I think you do draw a long bow, however. I suspect she would have seen the locals as being just above those loathesome Papist French, as being at best conversion fodder, as the loathesome French Papists were not.
But she seems to have forgotten Adele completely when she is reunited with Rochester.
I may be wrong, as it is a good few years since I last read the book, but that has bothered me for a long time.
You're not wrong and I found the dismissal of Adele at the end very unsatisfying and even cruel.
You have not quite forgotten little Adèle, have you, reader? I had not; I soon asked and obtained leave of Mr. Rochester, to go and see her at the school where he had placed her. Her frantic joy at beholding me again moved me much. She looked pale and thin: she said she was not happy. I found the rules of the establishment were too strict, its course of study too severe for a child of her age: I took her home with me.
So Jane with memories of Lowood, rescues this underfed pale child (another Helen Burns?). But rather like someone who adopts a stray pet and then finds it inconvenient, the new family togetherness and homeschooling doesn't work. Perhaps Rochester is jealous?
I meant to become her governess once more, but I soon found this impracticable; my time and cares were now required by another—my husband needed them all. So I sought out a school conducted on a more indulgent system, and near enough to permit of my visiting her often, and bringing her home sometimes.
That 'sometimes' is chilling because I couldn't help feeling it might depend on Rochester's mood and how complaint Adele might be. Not the lively chatty nuisance we met earlier in the novel. And Jane and Rochester have a baby son, Adele is superfluous.
I took care she should never want for anything that could contribute to her comfort: she soon settled in her new abode, became very happy there, and made fair progress in her studies. As she grew up, a sound English education corrected in a great measure her French defects; and when she left school, I found in her a pleasing and obliging companion: docile, good-tempered, and well-principled. By her grateful attention to me and mine, she has long since well repaid any little kindness I ever had it in my power to offer her.
This then is the transformation of the French child with those foreign defects into the meek equivalent of a subservient paid companion and possibly housekeeper, grateful and no trouble to Jane or Rochester. What chance has Adele of finding a husband or even her own Rochester?
In the Conclusion Jane states that soon after her marriage she goes to see Adele at the school where Rochester had sent her. She was very unhappy so Jane took her home, intending to be her governess again - "but I soon found this impracticable" as Rochester needed all her care and attention. So she found a school nearby for Adele, where she made "fair progress in her studies" and brought her back to them sometimes as well. When she finished school Jane "found in her a pleasing and obliging companion" which I'm assuming means she then lived with them.
Comments
From what I have read, Thackeray's wife really was insane. There is no evidence that Thackeray felt her to be an inconvenience. She was the model for Amelia in Vanity Fair.
It's now thought that Isabelle Thackeray suffered from post-partum psychosis, not understood back then. You're missing the point though @Moo -- it is recorded that Charlotte's gesture of dedication was seen as a social gaffe by London society, this isn't speculation on my part. There were not many courses of treatment for women with severe mental health issues but the incarceration of wives in asylums was a scandal much as the placing of rebellious or troubled daughters in convents had been for earlier generations.
To me the point is that it is unfair to Thackeray's reputation to lump him together with the husbands who had their wives committed to mental asylums because they were inconvenient.
There's a sad postscript, which is why I went back to look more closely at Thackeray's life some years ago: when Thackeray's granddaughter Laura Stephen, born to Leslie Stephen and Thackeray's daughter Minnie behaves wildly and irrationally as a child and exasperates her unsympathetic step-mother Julia, it is thought that Laura has inherited congenital lunacy through Isabelle Thackeray and Laura is placed in an asylum where she will stay until her death in 1945. Laura is, of course, Virginia Woolf's half-sister and it is now believed that Laura was autistic.
I first read Jane Eyre in my early teens - the book was given to me as an end-of-year prize in, I think, year eight. I read it numerous times over the next 4-5 years while I was at home - we didn't have many books.
Then I left home and went to university and came back to Jane Eyre post-degree and post-feminist studies, and it was a different book. Undoubtedly Charlotte Bronte pushed boundaries and broke new ground with Jane, who is worth forty of any female character Emily Bronte wrote...but the book palls for me now due to the treatment of Bertha Mason, who, to be honest, is more of an object than a character in the story.
There is a subtle implication that she might not be entirely white, there is an unsubtle implication that she comes of 'bad stock'. There is no empathy, no attempt to enter into her situation, no fellow-feeling. There is nothing groundbreaking here. Rochester, reflecting on his marriage, doesn't feel sorry for her - he feels sorry for himself. This is bog-standard mad-is-bad stuff. You get what you deserve, your sins catch up with you. Women are always on edge of insanity, and women who are mouthy and flashy and libidinous are already over the line.
"Bertha's madness is also linked to female sexuality and the periodicity of the menstrual cycle. Her worst attacks come when the moon is 'blood red' (ch25) or 'broad and red' (ch27); at these moment she is vicious and destructive, although at other times she is lucid and calm. A prisoner of her reproductive cycle...Bertha suffered from the 'moral insanity' associated with women's sexual desires." (Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady).
I also find all the suggestions that somehow the British are superior to anyone else in the world somewhat irritating. There is the bit when Jane talks about how much better she thinks English farmer's daughters are to their continental counterparts for instance.
What do we make of Adele by the way? There has to be a child for Jane to be the governess of for her to be at the Hall in the first place, but why the child of a French mistress and not the daughter of the dead older brother for instance.
The question of what would happen if it had been the dead child of the older brother is an interesting one. I assume that would complicate Rochester's inheritance, but it would also inject a note of unexpected (unwelcome?) sobriety into thewhole dream-like sequence where we're supposed to think everything is fine in Romance Land and the (first) wedding will go forward. Such a child would stand as a constant reminder of death in the family, and ties that did not work out, and so on and so forth. Adele is a recipient of grace; for her day she has absolutely no claims on Rochester, but he honors them anyway when plenty of men would not even consider it. A nephew or niece would have legitimate and recognized claims on him which would tend to dilute the softening power of child caretaking on his picture--after all, he owes a duty to an orphaned niece or nephew, and so on and so forth.
* I had mentioned upthread the existence of Sharon Shinn's sci-fi reimagining of this story in the form of Jenna Starborn. There Jenna is not a governess, but a nuclear technician; yet the Adele role is too important to be left out, so it is supplied by a similar child named Ameletta and by her tutor as well, who enacts the role of a lower-class woman who "goes too far" for love with an unreliable man and ends up paying for it. Thus Jenna/Jane gets her warning, but the child figure is now wholly sympathetic, with none of the unpleasant-to-our-ears little asides about her immoral mother or French nationality. Her role is restricted to humanizing Mr. Rochester/Ravenbeck.
Except the timescale is too long, I could see her turning into Adelaide Bartlett having been bundled off into a 'respectable' marriage.
And yet Jane Eyre herself is in some ways Bertha's twin, she too doesn't belong as a governess or servant despised by Blanche Ingram or Georgiana Reed, as someone physically unattractive, as someone poor and without family to protect her. I noted that for most of the novel, Jane is repelled and frightened by the gaoler Grace Poole and not by the hidden menace of Bertha, Grace's prisoner. Bertha, like the child Jane, is someone hated, even feared, and imprisoned in the equivalent of a Red Room for much of her life.
At least Bronte, unlike Mrs Henry Wood or some other Victorian novelists doesn't hit us over the head with moralising about the errors of various characters ways.
(Wikipedia mentions that the different species of hyacinth in Greece were sacred to Aphrodite, but I'm guessing this particular fact would be too obscure even for Victorian readers, who on average had a better knowledge of Classical History than those of today. I don't think the better-known Hyacinthus myth has any relevance either.)
The trouble, of course, is that it is incredibly easy to say shit like this when it hasn't happened. Grrrr.
Interesting, that. I read JE first at age 10 & later in my teens, at a time when sectarian bigotry was alive & well in Oz. I thought then and still do that Eliza got a bum rap from Charlotte ( a rabid anti-papist; after all her awful old dad was a C of I clergyman). Eliza was portrayed as the grasping Ugly Sister and her smackdown of her useless spoiled brat of a sister outdid anything that sanctimonious little Cinderella Jane could have come up with. She clearly had no time for her nasty departed brother either and what is more had a life plan. You only have to read a few other Charlotte novels to comprehend her horror of all things Romish.
I recall the bare Presbyterian churches of my childhood (Northern Ireland in the 1950s) and how, starved for visual arts, I would look out as we drove through Carlisle Circus, past the statute of Roaring Hanna (a virulently anti-Catholic cleric of the 19thC) for a crucifixion sculpture in a dank corner beside an RC church.
Thanks for that, perhaps a sideline but very interesting.
But to my eye, an allied and major theme is: can (should?) a woman of clear intellect and Christian principles, but without riches and a long way from conventional contemporary ideas of beauty, gain respect and love on that basis? And is it wrong for her to have or to show sexual yearnings? Does Jane's unexpected inheritance make a difference? But then I'm only a man and can't claim familiarity with much 19th century literature, and what would be scandalous at the time. So how do all you learned female shipmates feel about this and its importance in the book?
Somewhere or other, we have a good biography ofVirginia Woolf. The impression it gave was not that Laura was autistic, but rather that she had some mental illness. The biography was written 40 or so years ago - perhaps not as much was then known about autism as there is today. Very much a sideline, I know, but shows the real value of these threads in broadening general knowledge as well as discussion of particular books.
All right: here is my unlearned take on the story:
(1) Yes Christian virtue and intellect should be rewarded but in Charlotte’s day if a genteel girl had no money she could either earn her keep as a governess, be a slavey to more fortunate relatives or marry a poor curate. Charlotte ramps up the drama by Jane almost making it to the altar ( Round 1) with Mr Rochester.
(2) Sexual yearnings? Nice girls didn’t and Charlotte kept hers under wraps; interesting how she transferred that to Rochester’s wife the dark sultry exotic from the West Indies, whom she fears.
(3) The inheritance allows the neat wrapping up of Jane’s life: virtue rewarded, financial
independence and the chance to make decisions on her terms. She can magnanimously help the nice Rivers girls ( who just might marry and get away from their git of a brother) and she can enjoy some Schafenfreude at the reduced circumstances of the nasty Reeds.
I will add that she is able to get her man in the end after his wife is killed ( in suitably melodramatic fashion) and he is reduced to a “ sightless block” which allows her an upper hand.
Toss in an apparent miracle a few years later ( partial restoration of Rochester’s sight) plus a baby so happy endings all around.
Lots of “ virtue rewarded” and ya boo sucks to the baddies.
Also a man, but can definitely say that the Bronte sisters generated scandal. While their authorship was still not generally known, many thought that no decent woman would write in a manner so "coarse" (Somewhat tangential but funny comic). The attitude wasn't limited to men--the then-famous intellectual Harriet Martineau wrote that she "did not like the love, either the kind or the degree of it" in Jane Eyre and (CB's final novel) Villette. The repercussions probably affected George Eliot--Michel Faber theorized that after the villification of the Brontes despite their celibate private lives, Eliot had to be extra careful given her relationship with George Lewes, contributing at least in part to her (even by Victorian standards) understated approach to romance.
Tangent: I and the rest of my High School English class hated Wuthering Heights (Nelly Dean was the only remotely sympathetic character); I believe Charlotte's assertion that Emily meant it to be an anti-romantic novel and definitely understand the reaction of many Victorians.
Edit: Wow, I spent a long time on this post--I started it before Sojourner's was up.
In fairness, St. John was going to be out of the picture soon anyway, and at least Diana--Jane mentions that her will, in its own way, was as strong as his--had been able to stand up to him; no doubt he had tried to convince her or Mary to go with him to India.
Gothic fiction as a genre relies on Victorian ideas of the body as symptom, illness and hysteria. The grand hysteric of 19th-century English literature is Dickens' Miss Haversham, the crazy jilted bride in her wedding dress. When Bertha Mason the imprisoned wife tears the veil of Jane's wedding dress, it is an act of homicidal vengeful madness but also symbolic of the tearing of the hymen and loss of virginity that accompanies marriage, an irruption of pure Gothic into the Romantic idea of a blissful wedding.
Looking at what @Tukai asked, I come back to something that intrigued me all the way through the novel. Does Jane Eyre have a body? The respectable governess of that time, a poor but educated anomaly, was like other women encased from head to toe in bonnets, high collars, scarves, shawls, long-sleeved tops, gloves or mittens, ground-length heavy skirts over whalebone corsets, petticoats and worsted stockings, lace-up boots. If a woman in this social position (neither servant nor family), was to attend a ball or banquet, she would dress demurely, no cleavage showing although she might wear lighter colours (ivory, pearl-grey) with a discreet brooch or locket. Social invisibility is Jane's norm. If she had been beautiful in the conventional manner admired by Victorian society, she would have incurred more disapproval and suspicion and expected to dress even more plainly. For Jane too, there is a puritanical virtue in her simple grey clothes and lack of vanity, she has no desire to attract Rochester's attention to her body. The female body is hidden away and what Jane feels are emotions and ideas rather than physical sensations: she doesn't talk very much about breathlessness or palpitations or stomach-churning nervousness. She doesn't have nose-bleeds, her palms don't sweat, she doesn't menstruate or need to use the bathroom, she doesn't experience sexual arousal as a Sally Rooney character might do. The idea of sexual pleasure may be vaguely associated with love and marriage but the smell of Rochester's cigar is all that Jane knows of sensuous enjoyment.
If shocked or distressed, the Victorian heroine lets her body speak as symptom for her: she faints, usually in a sitting position or where she will be caught and propped up, revived with sal volatile. This psychic collapse accompanied by tears, amnesia or black-outs, is permissible. Her pallor indicates she is in extreme distress, because her facial complexion is visible where her neck and shoulders are not: her trembling hands are gloved and can be hidden in thick skirts, her encased torso is rigid from years of postural training and corsets. If you've ever worn a full Victorian outfit, you'll know how claustrophobic it feels, the movement of the legs hampered, the constricting petticoats and stays. In paintings of PreRaphaelite women, we see them depicted in erotic immobility, that they are frozen on the point of flight with robes in disarray; that they are unmoving at a moonlit window in hopeless yearning (The Lady of Shalott's crack'd mirror); that they are like dead Ophelia in a coffin-boat strewn with flowers.
In contrast, what shows the reader that Bertha Mason is hideous and crazy is that she is dishevelled, unkempt and slovenly, a madwoman who refuses to stay in place. The most famous image associated with the beginning of modern psychiatry is of Dr Charcot's female hysterics at the Salpêtrière in Paris, women's bodies contorted and frozen in hysterical paralysis, unable to move and showing no reaction when their arms or breasts were pierced by needles. Hysteria was associated with women and mental illness until after WWI, when trench warfare psychosis turned the focus on 'shell-shocked' men.
One of the things I liked about Hester was the range of different female characters, most handled fairly sympathetically. One of the characters, rather like Georgiana is desperate for her 'chance' to nab a husband. She is a much more rounded character than either of the Reed sisters.
The more I think of it, the more I'm sure I wouldn't actually like Jane if I met her in real life.
Likewise
@Lamb Chopped I share your uneasiness about Rochester and 'stage managing' is a good way to describe what he does. That histrionic character is part of the 'wounded male hero' and Byronic, the intense domineering lover gnashing his teeth, despairing and acting out his devastation (it's always all about him) and there's a typology of Victorian masculinity veering from the dissolute obtuse bully John Reed and tyrant Brocklehurst to the repressed cold St John Rivers to the frenetic scenes staged by Rochester that foregrounds something in flux and unresolved in Victorian society and literature.
Despite the sudden forceful (and not altogether credible) affirmation of Christianity at the end, I don't know I would call Jane Eyre a novel informed and shaped by conventional Christian beliefs. I was thinking of what @Cathscats wrote earlier about Helen Burns offering an example of someone who took her faith seriously in a harsh and loveless context. The story of Helen's brief and tragic life, however, cannot co-exist with the dramas created around Rochester.
This is for me a problem of genre because the Gothic and its supernatural don't offer the same plausibility for Christian schemas as fictional realism (I was thinking of the church-going hypocrisies and Anglican power plays in Trollope or the breadth of Christian humanism in George Eliot). Gothic by its nature looks back to medievalism and the inexplicable, mixing the miraculous with an element of horror. The allegories that inform Christian narrative (Helen Burns as martyr) work best as fiction in a realistic context, with didactic elements restrained. We wouldn't read The Pilgrim's Progress as a novel, for example, but as poetic allegory. Much Victorian fiction had to do with clerical novels and dilemmas of faith and doubt, often pivoting on the conversion of the unbelieving suitor, conversion itself as life-changing revelation ("I was blind but now I see"), the ethical dangers underlying the perils of courtship and marriage between innocent virginal girls and roués (Thomas Hardy's Tess). How to resolve these dilemmas in a way that satisfied the Christian reader without falling back on tired old stereotypes and predictable 'happy ever after' endings was the challenge for a serious writer. My own feeling is that the novels produced by Margaret Oliphant and Elizabeth Gaskell were more successful than those produced by Hardy (that staggering misogyny) or Dickens (female caricatures).
I wonder whether the difference in Bronte's male characters and that of Gaskell and Oliphant was that the latter two were both married women, and had first hand experience of sex, childbirth etc. Writers such as Charlotte M Yonge, much though I love her work, really didn't have a clue about such things and it shows in their writing.
How would the novel have panned out, if in returning to Thornfield Eyre had discovered, that apart from Bertha dying of natural causes, everything was much as it was. I can imagine in such a case it would be a pretty stormy marriage.
I agree. Indeed, had she gone to India with St John Rivers (which she was very wise not to do) , I strongly suspect she'd have been much more engaged with the actual people around the mission (especially the women) than he was ever likely to do, as many mission wives did. But , unlike with more successful missionaries, that would be an inclination of which he would be very critical and unappreciative.
I think you do draw a long bow, however. I suspect she would have seen the locals as being just above those loathesome Papist French, as being at best conversion fodder, as the loathesome French Papists were not.
I may be wrong, as it is a good few years since I last read the book, but that has bothered me for a long time.
You're not wrong and I found the dismissal of Adele at the end very unsatisfying and even cruel.
You have not quite forgotten little Adèle, have you, reader? I had not; I soon asked and obtained leave of Mr. Rochester, to go and see her at the school where he had placed her. Her frantic joy at beholding me again moved me much. She looked pale and thin: she said she was not happy. I found the rules of the establishment were too strict, its course of study too severe for a child of her age: I took her home with me.
So Jane with memories of Lowood, rescues this underfed pale child (another Helen Burns?). But rather like someone who adopts a stray pet and then finds it inconvenient, the new family togetherness and homeschooling doesn't work. Perhaps Rochester is jealous?
I meant to become her governess once more, but I soon found this impracticable; my time and cares were now required by another—my husband needed them all. So I sought out a school conducted on a more indulgent system, and near enough to permit of my visiting her often, and bringing her home sometimes.
That 'sometimes' is chilling because I couldn't help feeling it might depend on Rochester's mood and how complaint Adele might be. Not the lively chatty nuisance we met earlier in the novel. And Jane and Rochester have a baby son, Adele is superfluous.
I took care she should never want for anything that could contribute to her comfort: she soon settled in her new abode, became very happy there, and made fair progress in her studies. As she grew up, a sound English education corrected in a great measure her French defects; and when she left school, I found in her a pleasing and obliging companion: docile, good-tempered, and well-principled. By her grateful attention to me and mine, she has long since well repaid any little kindness I ever had it in my power to offer her.
This then is the transformation of the French child with those foreign defects into the meek equivalent of a subservient paid companion and possibly housekeeper, grateful and no trouble to Jane or Rochester. What chance has Adele of finding a husband or even her own Rochester?