Jane Eyre: "Though she be but little, she is fierce"

Caitlin and Ashley discuss Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, a heroine who knows herself and her worth. Join us as we talk about personhood,  Jane's desire for belonging and love, and most of all, her fierce loyalty to herself and what she knows to be right. Plus there's a mad wife locked in the attic, and that always makes things interesting. 

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Transcript

 So Caitlin, if your husband Josh went crazy, would you lock him in the attic? What? I present to you Jane Eyre. When reprimanded for being naughty and asked how she will keep out of hell, she responds with, by keeping in good health and not dying. In the book Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte explores Jane's insistence on her personhood as she searches for love and belonging, without sacrificing who she   is and what she knows to be right.

 Hi, and welcome to the Literary Lamp Post podcast, where we analyse books and see what we can learn from them. I'm Caitlin, I'm a math grad student, but I love English and I love analysing literature. And I'm Ashley, an assistant editor and writer. Today, as mentioned, we are going to be talking about Jane Eyre, which was written in 1847 by Charlotte Bronte, who is the sister of last episode's book Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte.

Jane Eyre isn't quite as Creepy. Creepy. That's a good word. As Wuthering Heights, it's more of a coming of age novel with some supernatural elements kind of adding to the tension, but not fully explored. So this was actually my second time reading Jane Eyre, but it was Caitlin's first time. So Caitlin, what did you think about it?

I actually enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting. It's been on my reading list for a long time now, but I kept avoiding it because I thought it would be boring, or slow, or difficult to read. But it's actually turned out to be a really, really good book that I'm definitely going to read again. What about you?

Yeah, well, I read it a few years ago. I think what inspired me was actually watching Anne with an E, and Anne in the orphanage sneaks Jane Eyre out to read it in the middle of the night because she finds it so gripping. I don't think I found it that gripping the first time I read it. I wasn't really reading classics at that point.

And so it was kind of difficult to get through, but lately I've been reading a lot more classics and kind of getting into them. And honestly, Jane Eyre is so good, there are so many good points. So yes, read it. But first, listen to the rest of the episode. And let's just reiterate, you don't actually have to have read the book in order to enjoy and appreciate this episode.

We give lots of context and avoid spoilers as much as possible. Okay, so we mentioned at the beginning the word personhood. Caitlin, can you define this for us? So, by personhood we mean that Jane is a full human being with thoughts, emotions, and dreams of her own, and she refuses to compromise these qualities for the sake of others.

And the themes that we're going to discuss in this episode through this lens of personhood are personal agency, gender and societal roles, and faith manipulation. But before we dive into that, let's take a quick look at who Charlotte Bronte was. So, as mentioned, she's the sister of Emily Bronte, who wrote Wuthering Heights, and there was actually a sister, Anne Bronte, and a couple more of them, but these sisters grew up creating a fantasy world in which they made up lots of stories and then these stories became the basis of their classic works of literature.

And you can kind of see references to this fantasy world in Jane Eyre because there's lots of mention of fairies and elves and these mystical fairyland kind of creatures. And I think that's probably directly pulled from this world that was created by the sisters growing up. Yeah, I reckon. And also it's interesting because you can see aspects, um, in their books of their own lives and the things that they experienced in real life.

So it's just a really interesting mix of all of that. So let's. Go into a little bit of a summary of Jane Eyre, just so you know what's going on. The story starts off when Jane is 10 years old and she's living with her aunt and her cousins because her parents died when she was a baby and she's been raised in this household Unloved, mistreated, continually punished, basically for nothing, just because none of them like her.

So the first part of the book kind of goes through her experiences with this family, feeling like an outsider. She has this strong sense of injustice because they dislike her for made up reasons. They accuse her of being a liar when she's really not, and she really strongly feels the injustice of this, and she feels like it's not right.

At age 11, I believe, she's sent away to a boarding school, which is quite problematic. The people that work there, for the most part, genuinely want the best for these orphans, but it's run by Mr Brocklehurst, who's a reverend. Who definitely doesn't do the best by these children. No, definitely not. We will go into more detail about this later on, but basically, in this school, poverty, hunger, and cold were viewed as spiritual lessons.

Anyway, Jane spends eight years there and she eventually gains a very good education and lands a position as a governess at a large estate looking after a little girl named Adele. But there, she starts noticing strange things. All of these sounds at night that are unfamiliar and weird. Creeping sounds, these strange laughs.

Yeah, so that's, that's kind of the gothic element. And there's this ongoing mystery while she's there. Then the master of the house, whose name is Mr. Rochester, comes home. He's the guardian of Adele. Over the course of many chapters, he and Jane fall in love and get engaged. At their wedding, it is revealed that Mr.

Rochester already has a wife who is mad and is locked in the attic. So he tells his story and it turns out that there's actually this crazy story behind how this has happened. And. He acknowledges that he can't actually marry Jane because he's technically already married and he asks Jane to move to Europe with him and be his mistress but she really strongly feels that this is not right and that she cannot.

And so she runs away and she nearly dies of starvation but she finds her way to a family at a place called Moor House in a tiny little village and they take her She spends a year there, discovers That they're actually her family, they're her cousins. And she also discovers that she inherited a fortune.

And at Morehouse, one of her cousins is named Sinjin. Which is spelled Saint John, and so that's quite confusing. But apparently because it came from French, we pronounce it Sinjin. Sinjin! Yes. He tries to convince Jane to marry him and go with him as a missionary to India! She realizes she cannot, for reasons that we will be discussing later, and she returns to Mr.

Rochester. But who will she end up with in the end? Listen and find out. Alright, let's continue. I present to you, Jane Eyre. When reprimanded for being naughty and asked how she will keep out of hell, she responds with, By keeping in good health and not dying. Classic. I love it. What a legend. Honestly, Jane Eyre is such a cool person.

She is stubborn. She's not willing to accept less. She really knows her worth. Even from a young age, we see her standing up for herself. You know, she's really blunt. She's frank. She's willing to speak her mind, which At this point in history, it was not really a strong point when it came to the proper woman.

It's not really accepted behavior for the fairer sex, as women were referred to back then. And Jane remarks, Women are supposed to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men feel. They need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do. They suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer, and it is narrow minded in their more privileged fellow creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings, and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.

What a stimulating lifestyle. So when Jane is at Thornfield she's able to feel like she's doing something and having an effect on the world and this really interesting struggle comes to light where Jane desires to find love and belonging but she also craves freedom and generally At this point in history, women could not have both.

Several times throughout the book, the word cage or caged is used, and she's referred to, um, as a bird, or refers to herself as a bird. And Mr. Rochester recognizes this in her fairly early on. He actually says something I really like. I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close set bars of a cage.

A vivid, restless, resolute captive is there. Were it but set free, it would soar cloud high. So, you know, fairly early on in the book, we are shown that this is who Jane is. She's caged. If she were able to be set free, she would soar. So women in the Victorian era did not have a lot of options. Marriage back then was more of a duty, or something that they did in order to have stability.

And Jane Eyre recognizes this, but for her It's more important that she be married to somebody who sees her as an equal than for her to have that financial stability. And that's quite revolutionary for this time period when it was expected that women would marry for stability. Jane also has a really strong sense of right and wrong.

She categorically refuses to do what she perceives as wrong, even if it's asked of her by someone above her in social standing. And this is quite frustrating to those people who are used to being able to have power over her. See, Jane's in a really interesting position, because she's a governess.

Governesses were not servants, because they had a higher education, so they were generally on the same intellectual level of the gentry, but they were low in status. They were paid like servants. and so not part of the higher class. Jane has no status and no power but she's educated and that kind of creates an interesting paradox.

Throughout the book we see how Jane tries to find belonging In this strange position that she's in from very early on, she is rejected. She's treated as an outsider, as a child at Thornfield. She finds belonging to a degree and she finds satisfaction in her work. But because she's not completely treated as an equal, she's not completely satisfied.

She hasn't found. that sense of belonging yet. And then when she runs away to Morehouse, she finds family. You know, for the first time in her life, she has cousins, and she's thrilled. But she ends up being stifled by Sinjin, who wants her to be someone who she's not. And Jane realizes that she can't find belonging in a place which is trying to change her.

You know what's interesting is that there are two characters in this book who are both clergymen, pastors, reverends, workers for the church. And they both actually bring similar challenges into Jane's life. And the first one is Mr. Brocklehurst, who's the superintendent of Lowood School, which is where Jane gains her education.

And I found it quite frustrating to read Mr. Brocklehurst's character because he uses religion as a way to oppress and cause suffering to the girls at the school while his family enjoys luxury. And he does this by suggesting they are not good enough. Because they are orphans, and they need to be punished and learn proper Christian ways.

And what I found really frustrating is he admonishes the teachers for giving the girls bread and cheese to eat when their breakfast porridge is burnt beyond being edible by saying, Man shall not live by bread alone! And when you put bread and cheese instead of burnt porridge into these children's mouths You may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls.

So pretty much he's justifying starving literal children because of these spiritual reasons, and I think that that's a massive abuse of These spiritual qualities, which are in many ways a good thing, but they are drastically being abused, and that is a problem that frequently happens with spirituality, even today.

I know, for me, at a previous place of work, I found that my own faith was being taken advantage of to justify and gloss over some of the negative things happen. Oh, it doesn't matter because who are you really working for? You're working for God. So this horrible encounter you had doesn't matter. And I think that that's really easy to do when you're not constantly thinking about, you know, the true meaning of your faith and what it's supposed to be.

And Mr. Brocklehurst is such a huge hypocrite in this regard. So he Is in the middle of ordering that the girls chop off their hair. He says, I desire that hair must be cut off entirely. I have a master to serve whose kingdom is not off this world. And then he goes on to pontificate on that Bible verse about how women should not have braided hair or costly apparel.

And then he's interrupted by his own family walking through the door and they are all dressed in velvet and silk and furs and ostrich feathers. And they have this elaborately curled hair. The hypocrisy just. drives home at that moment and I think that Bronte did a brilliant job with that scene because just the juxtaposition of this whole moralizing pontification about, you know, the virtues of poverty and how the girls need to learn all this, and then he's not applying it in his own family.

It just It really got to me. And later on in the book, we kind of see this taken on when Jane arrives at Morehouse. She's initially not allowed in by the housekeeper, despite being near death from starvation. And Jane later reprimands the housekeeper for not giving her shelter because the housekeeper considered her a homeless beggar.

And she says, some of the best people that ever lived have been as destitute as I am. And if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider poverty a crime. And while the housekeeper apologizes and acknowledges that she did wrong, Mr. Brocklehurst never does. The irony of treating these poor orphans in this way as a pastor, while his family lives in luxury, never dawns on him.

Anyway, Jane spends eight years at Lowood. She says that over time, the school improved and she gains an excellent education there. But she wants more for her life, so she applies to be a governess, which leads her to Thornfield and Mr. Rochester. But let's take a second away from our lovely protagonist and discuss the elephant in the room.

Or should I say, the wife in the attic. So, major criticism exists of Mr. Rochester, who locked up his quote unquote crazy Wife, named Bertha, in the attic. We would first like to say that we realize Mr. Rochester was not perfect. He made a lot of mistakes throughout the course of the book, but he was navigating a very difficult situation.

So let's outline it. It genuinely seems like Mr. Rochester wanted to do his best by his wife, Bertha. Mr. Rochester was tricked into this marriage. Bertha's family actually lied to him about her age, her mental capacity, the family she had come from, and their family history of mental illness. And she actually treated him terribly.

So when she fully went, for lack of a better word, mad, he hired a nurse from a retreat, which would have been a much kinder version of an asylum, so it really was the best care he could have given her. And he commented in his explanation of the past that there came a point where only cruelty would restrain her, and he didn't want to do that.

He didn't want to use cruelty. He didn't want to send her to his other estate in the forest for fear it would be too dark and damp. And he was actually so lonely and unhappy, he considered suicide. So, a lot of people don't like Mr. Rochester, especially when a book came out in 1966 called The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rees.

It kind of cast a different light onto the story, leading to a lot of people seeing Quote unquote Bertha's side and we might even say twisting the story in order to portray a certain perspective and Caitlin and I are kind of unsure if Rochester actually deserved that. We thought that taking the novel at face value This take was kind of unfair to Mr.

Rochester but if any of you listeners have any comments on that. We'd actually love to hear what you think. Neither of us have actually read the Wide Saga SoC and we'd love to hear your thoughts. But yeah, so Mr. Rochester really felt no love in this marriage and it's implied that she was unfaithful to him before.

A big mistake that Mr. Rochester makes is lying to Jane about this whole situation with Bertha. So there are some kind of creepy situations where Bertha comes into Jane's room at night or or he is creepy laughter and Mr Rochester kind of gaslights her and says that it was just mental terrors and not real and blames it on someone else and he admits that he does this because he's afraid that if she knew the truth that she would leave him which is kind of a bad excuse to be honest.

Well, it's kind of valid, but it's a bad excuse. It's valid that she would want to leave him. Um, but he does try to make things right overall. And so, on one hand, the way that Bertha's treated And the fact that Rochester tried to marry again, while being still married, is not great. But on the other hand, he was tricked, and he never experienced love.

He didn't experience love from Bertha, and he actually tells Jane that he searched afterwards for years and years for love, and never actually found it, until Jane came along. And it genuinely does suck. And so I guess what we're wondering is, where's the line? Where's the line between morality and doing what's right and fulfilling The basic human desire for love.

And in that moment, Jane forgives him, but she still feels like at that moment, she can't stay with him. Alright, so now we're going to backtrack a little bit and talk about Jane's relationship with Mr. Rochester. Because we've talked about Bertha, gotta go back to Jane. Let's talk about Jane. Jane's a virgin.

So, Jane and Mr. Rochester had a lot of interesting conversations, and honestly, I loved reading so many of their conversations. Just So well written and so hilarious and it really highlights how they are intellectual equals but not equals in power. That being said, Jane strongly asserts that she is independent and Even though she doesn't have societal power, she has power as a person.

She says to Mr. Rochester, Do you think because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong. I have as much soul as you, and full as much heart. And she also says, I don't think you have a right to command me merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I.

Your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience. Oh, see, look at her standing up for herself. Mr. Rochester is quite emotionally overbearing and over the top. He kind of makes all these advances towards Jane she doesn't really want, even though she loves him. Like, he calls her all these names and he's constantly wanting affection and she's like, bro, back off.

She's almost trea She's almost treated like a pet. You know, someone who needs to be brought up. to his level and it's a level she can't really reach because it's not who she is. So he takes her out to the shops and he tries to get her to buy a bright purple dress and a pink one and she's like, please no, I don't need all these things.

You know, I don't want all these things. It's not who I am. And she kind of refuses to be bought by his gifts, which symbolize his control, and she refuses to accept that control by refusing his gifts. It's also interesting because this kind of highlights that his love comes with conditions, that she has to be a certain way.

in order to be his wife. So once Jane finds out about Bertha, she determines that she actually can't stay, even though Mr. Rochester begs her to stay and be his mistress. She She finds that that would actually leave her with no autonomy and she realizes that she can't do it and it wouldn't be true to herself or would be what she truly wants.

And so she makes this decision to leave, which is really, really hard for her, but it shows her self respect and her independence and that she's not bound by emotion and she's not letting her desire for love override her desire for agency. And she says. I am no bird, and no net ensnares me. I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.

So, she refuses to be trapped in this relationship that is not built on equal footing and trust. So in contrast to Mr. Rochester, who's very loving and warm and expressive, we have Sinjin, who's cold and rigid and really suppresses his emotion. He really does his best to not allow himself to feel. After about a year of knowing Jane, he kind of expects her to marry him out of obligation, not really caring about her feelings.

Really, all logic, no emotion. And he says that she's built for service and not for love. Wow, what a compliment. That's just what a girl wants to hear. Sinjin also tries to bring Jane up to his level, something she can never quite reach. She says, I daily wished more to please him, but to do so I felt daily more and more that I must disown half my nature, stifle half my faculties, rest my tastes from their original bent, force myself to the adoption of pursuits for which I had no natural vocation.

He wanted to train me to an elevation I could never And as mentioned before, Sinjin has this extreme devotion to his religious duty, and he prioritizes this over love, and he manipulates Jane by suggesting that her refusal to marry him and go be a missionary to India is a rejection of God's will. He says, It is not me you deny, but God.

Through my means, he opens to you a noble career. As my wife, refuse to be my wife and you limit yourself forever to a track of selfish ease and barren obscurity. He tries to tell her that what he wants, her to go with him and marry him, is God's will, insinuating that she'll go to hell if she disobeys.

Red flag! Major red flag. Handy hint, anyone who tells you that if you don't do something, then you're going to go to hell, is It's not only completely defying the teachings of Jesus, but that's not a good person to be around. No, definitely not. And Jane realises that going with St. John and marrying him would require her to completely sacrifice herself.

She actually decides that she's willing to go as a missionary, but as his sister, as his companion, not as his wife. She even says something really insightful. She says if she were forced to marry him, she would be forced to keep the fire of her nature continually low to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry.

She's so sure that it would consume her from within if she marries him. And it's another cage. And she refuses to be trapped in this kind of marriage, a marriage of obligation. Again, we see that she knows her own worth, she knows what she wants, and she's not willing to put up with anything less. So during this time, when Jane is working through all this stuff with Sinjin, she's actually been gaining independence.

She has been teaching at a small village school, and she's actually learned that a distant relative has died and left her a pretty sizable inheritance. So she's genuinely independent for the first time in her life. And we can see over the course of the book, That she gets bolder in her conversations, not holding back, not being unkind, but saying what's on her mind, and standing up for herself, and not being afraid to call people out on their behavior.

So it's at this point that she decides that she is not going to go with Sinjin, and she returns her thoughts to Mr. Rochester. She hasn't heard from Mr. Rochester for some time now, and she feels this real sense of heartbreak over what's happened with him and she has this kind of supernatural moment where in her mind She hears him calling to her and she decides to return to him But this time when she returns to him, she returns to him as an equal She has money and she's returning to him on her own terms.

He can't actually dominate her anymore And then we find out what's happened to mr. Rochester while Jane has been away Bertha actually set the house alight and jumped off the roof and unfortunately died. Mr. Rochester ran to save her, but it was too late and he sustained terrible injuries. He lost one of his hands as well as his sight.

Now, Rochester's injuries cause him to meet Jane at the same level. He doesn't have the same power or control. He can no longer be the overbearing person he was. He thinks he's not good enough anymore, but he ends up being the perfect person for Jane. He has no choice but to accept her terms of equality because he needs her as much as she needs him.

He asks Jane if she really loves him and accepts him just as he is in his words. crippled and she says to him, I love you better now when I can really be useful to you than I did in your state of proud independence when you disdained every part but that of giver and protector. I think there's a certain category of person on the internet who could take a hint.

Giver and protector. I think that there's some things that could be said. But we will leave that to you, our lovely audience. Comment what you think about this on our Instagram page. Back to Jane. She's really happy that they've achieved this equality. And fairly quickly, they get married. And we see that Jane's final home is simple and secluded.

It's at another of Mr. Rochester's houses, that's a lot smaller, it's a lot more secluded. And we see that Jane's want for belonging was never about wealth or status, but mutual love. Equality in an intellectual sense. And in a power sense, we also see throughout the course of this book that love is not always enough, and security and duty is also not enough.

Love that cages a person is not real love, and it's shown through this book that a relationship on equal footing is the only way to attain true satisfaction within a relationship. And throughout this whole book, Jane really fights for recognition as an autonomous person, finding her individuality and her independence and her self worth in a world that's determined to bring her down and define her through specific lenses of the time.

She breaks through these expectations and she comes to this balance between being loved and being herself, and that's when her Personhood really was able to come through and shine and feel like it was complete. So now over to you, our listeners, what does personhood mean to you? And do you feel like your personhood is being stifled in any way?

Are there situations in your life that make you feel like you're sacrificing parts of who you are? We encourage you to take Jane's example in this regard and prioritize the amazing person that you are meant to be. As Jane says, I am not an angel, and I will not be one till I  📍 die. I will be myself. And on that note, thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the Literary Lamp Post Podcast.

Join us on Instagram and share your thoughts with us. Was Jane right in forgiving Mr. Rochester? How do you feel about Bertha in the attic? We'd love to hear what you think. We would also love it if you shared this podcast with somebody who you think would enjoy it and stay tuned for our next episode which will be on Pride and Prejudice.

Make sure to follow us on Instagram at the Literary Lamp Post as well as subscribing on Spotify, YouTube or Apple Podcasts or your preferred podcast platform to make sure that you don't miss any of our new episodes. Thanks for listening and see you next time!    This podcast includes brief excerpts from literary works for the purpose of commentary, criticism and analysis, which we believe constitutes fair use under copyright law.

Our theme music was created by Joshua Ibbott for exclusive use by the Literary Lamp Post podcast. Who we would never lock in the attic. Definitely not. Love you, Josh.