A Masterpiece Theatre version of “Jane Eyre” that ran some years ago was full of candelabras and castles, dark shadows, and mean faced mysterious people carrying out plans understood, if at all, only by themselves and their subconsciouses. That is fully in keeping with understanding Charlotte Bronte’s book, which was published in 1848, as of the same genre, gothic romance, as her sister Emily’s “Wuthering Heights”, which was published in 1847. Those girls sure had raging hormones.
There is another way to look at “Jane Eyre”. It is largely a realistic novel that shares the sentimentality of “Oliver Twist”, which had been published some ten years before. That is hard to believe only because the Gothic romance,in general, precedes the novel that spells out the conditions of the poor, but authors don’t just exemplify the periods of which they are a part. Literature is a vast overlap of everything that can impinge upon an author: public history, personal history, the history of genres, some impulse of genius. You have to look at the text to see what was produced by the mind of the author.
Jane Eyre is an orphan. That designation is not just a throwaway to indicate the situation in society from which Jane came. To the contrary, the condition of the orphanage is detailed enough to see how it forms Jane’s character into being someone who will wait with patience to serve her own interests, the sort of person Jane Austen had immortalized as Fanny Price. Both characters both seem and are crude, and are overlooked as threatening for that reason. That crudeness of feeling also explains why Fanny can feel comfortable only with her lackluster cousin and why Jane can fall for the flaky Lord Rochester.
We are not, however, engaged in “Jane Eyre” with a novel where the theme is upward mobility as that is to be found in a particularly grotesque setting. There is more at stake than that. Nor is the subject matter class or romance; those are just devices that help move along the plot. The distinctive subject matter of the novel, rather, is what we would now call the disabled—the Tiny Tims of the world—and the theme is how we adapt ourselves to their imperatives as they adapt themselves to our own. We are in an early version of Tod Browning’s “Freaks”. Rochester has to manage the crazy lady in the attic; Jane has to manage the neurotic Rochester; and he has to manage the pent-up Jane. It is a relief when he goes blind in the fire because then his dependence is out in the open, an overt disability, and so Jane can switch from governess to nurse, never mind what goes on in the dark.
So, as Victorian novelists are apt to do, Bronte has discovered a new category of difference, just as Dickens invents not only the poor and the criminal and the bankrupt as people to gain our attention, but also the frightened intellectual who will be sacrificed in “A Tale of Two Cities”, become overbearing in “Hard Times” and, finally, will come to no good in “Our Mutual Friend”. And, of course, Wilkie Collins invents the Feminist, complete with her uncertain sexuality, in “The Woman in White”. Charlotte Bronte’s discovery is the disabled.
That discovery is best appreciated by considering the life of Anne Sullivan, the woman who taught Helen Keller how to think (and maybe did a lot of her thinking for her, once she had established this profoundly disabled person in the national spotlight). Sullivan, born less than twenty years after the publication of “Jane Eyre”, is also the product of an orphanage who is given the job of tutor to Helen Keller only because Alexander Graham Bell, the great benefactor and researcher for the deaf, has to find a place for her so that this woman with damaged sight can make some kind of independent life for herself, it being the purpose of those who deal with the first discovery of a new category of person, whether the poor or the native or the disabled or the ex-slave, to rescue some few of them to the ordinary world so as to show that it can be done, that these people are therefore part of humanity however much separated by circumstances from their fellows. Paul Lawrence Dunbar was treated as a great credit to his race, a singular phenomenon, before he became part of the Harlem Renaissance.
Anne Sullivan creates a position for herself which earns her fame and a marriage, however difficult both were to manage, as well as a lifelong intimacy with Helen, who must have been a truly remarkable soul, one annealed through hard usage, whatever her educational attainments or the loftiness of the rhetoric she (and Anne) fashioned. There is much to be said for Bluestocking women who knew their lives were forged by themselves out of the remnants of the maiden aunt and the new education, their lineage stretching back to Elizabeth I and Jane Austen herself, who probably never married because she was so off putting as someone superior in every way except beauty to her suitors, and knowing it (That being also the curse of her major heroines—except that they got their men through some contrivance that goes against the odds.)
So if you put aside some of the blather and focus, rather, on the circumstances and the objective qualities of the characters, “Jane Eyre” takes on the feel as well as the substance of realism, what with its long discussions of how orphans and the elderly and the crippled and the blind are managed. More than that, it makes one contemplate why the ending is satisfying, Jane settling down with a blind man. Is this symbolic, in that he had always been spiritually blind, or is it that his blindness is a symbol of impotence? I think not. The preceding story had made the outcome plausible. First, she had loved him before the accident, though across a social distance now abridged by his disability. Second, the strands of the novel are resolved, twisted together into a satisfying completion, just as a set of marriages make satisfying the end of a Shakespearean comedy, by Jane having embarked on the life of a caretaker. Jane can work among the disabled, even if in this case it is only the one, and keep her own self-respect. That resolution points forward to the philanthropic work performed on a much grander scale by Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton and, eventually, Jane Addams. It is quite an achievement for a novel that it helps to invent a major new social role.
Why is this fact not more widely appreciated? I would suggest that is because Nurse Eyre has a caseload of one, and so what she is dealing with does not seem to be a social problem but rather a very strange situation, just as was the case with Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller. It takes a while to work up the number so that Jane Addams is not just intruding in some one person’s remarkably deprived life, becoming sort of a Mr. Henry Higgins who might have a school full of Eliza’s trying to become ladies rather than a single pupil. Now, that would have been an accomplishment worthy of Undershaft, the arms manufacturer in “Major Barbara”, who had indeed created model worker’s villages, but the comedy of “Pygmalion” partly relies on the fact that the education of Eliza is such a peculiar undertaking, rather than a way to rise up the poor in general.
Another example of this phenomenon that what is dramatic when applied to one case and a social problem when addressed to a group is the case of Ishi, the Indian who had managed to survive the loss of all his tribe and wandered in 1907 into a California already run by the white man, as if he had been reconstituted from the dead. He was placed in a museum and lived out his life there, becoming kind of a friend to the anthropology professor, Alfred Kroeber, who kept an eye out for him. How is this museum status much different from the sequestration of decimated Indian tribes in reservations which provided little employment or social services? That was also an attempt to make them live in museums for the preservation of Indian life even if it was also a way to deal with the social problem of what to do with a superannuated people who, apparently, could not make it as “immigrants” to the modern world. Not much different from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which also used Indians for their value as nostalgia for an era of American life that was fast disappearing. Jane Eyre is different in that her duties are not about holding on to the past, which is the way her novel is framed, a call to medievalism updated in its imagery, but instead an appeal to the future when society can recognize the disabled as human beings.