I'm yours alone, you do not care

[lotesse]

Since Brontës seem to be going around (selenak on Wuthering Heights, katta on Jane Eyre), it seemed to me like it might be time to try expounding on my Grand Unified Theory of Rochester. Which I have never tried to do before, not really, so be gentle!

Like Katta, I love Rochester. I always have, ever since Jane Eyre whirled me away as a sixteen-year-old and made me decide to study Victorian literature for a living. But I've had a really hard time talking about him, to most fans of the book, and certainly I've found that academic analyses of him don't patch with my reading. The current tendency seems to be to read Rochester as similar to Heathcliff, but without the benefit of Emily's sarcastic commentary and relentless anti-Romanticism: a Byronic brooding Bad Boy Woobie who gets himself Redeemed By Lurve. Witness the take Fassbender gave on him in the recent film: his Rochester is all about the lure of the bad boy. Rochester's appeal gets read as symptomatic of women's simultaneous political desire for freedom and sexual desire for submission, as suppressed s&m. All very Twilight, when you come down to it.



My Rochester, first off, begins in a position more usually occupied by female characters, particularly in New Woman novels, and particularly in melodramas: he's sold by his father into a marriage-bond with an unsuitable partner. (I want to stop right here and now and recognize the validity and the importance of all the scholarship that's been done on Bertha Mason Rochester's status as mixed-race, and on the absolutely culpable way that Charlotte makes Blackness the vector for the transmission of brutishness, madness, and sexual immorality. The reading that I'm laying out here exists alongside the postcolonial one; neither by themselves is, I think, enough to account for the full text.) But - try reversing the genders of the persons in this passage, and see if it is not strikingly like Victorian literary accounts of the sufferings of badly-married women:

"...my father was an avaricious, grasping man ... it was his resolution to keep the property together; he could not bear the idea of dividing his estate and leaving me a fair portion: all, he resolved, should go to my brother, Rowland. Yet as little could he endure that a son of his should be a poor man. I must be provided for by a wealthy marriage ... They showed her to me in parties, splendidly dressed. I seldom saw her alone, and had very little private conversation with her. She flattered me, and lavishly displayed for my pleasure her charms and accomplishments ... Her relatives encouraged me; competitors piqued me; she allured me: a marriage was achieved almost before I knew where I was. Oh, I have no respect for myself when I think of that act!—an agony of inward contempt masters me. I never loved, I never esteemed, I did not even know her. I was not sure of the existence of one virtue in her nature: I had marked neither modesty, nor benevolence, nor candour, nor refinement in her mind or manners—and, I married her:—gross, grovelling, mole-eyed blockhead that I was! ... I lived with that woman upstairs four years, and before that time she had tried me indeed: her character ripened and developed with frightful rapidity; her vices sprang up fast and rank: they were so strong, only cruelty could check them, and I would not use cruelty. What a pigmy intellect she had, and what giant propensities! How fearful were the curses those propensities entailed on me! ... And I could not rid myself of it by any legal proceedings: for the doctors now discovered that my wife was mad—her excesses had prematurely developed the germs of insanity."

(There's also some really nasty stuff in this passage about the grotesqueness of Bertha's person, which, considering the racialized undertones of the whole encounter, is very problematic. Just. Ugh.)

So, sold into matrimony by an avaricious father, desperate and miserable and deprived of the ability to end his marriage - trapped just as a woman would be by British divorce law - Rochester turns to the acceptable vices of Victorian masculinity: he leaves his wife (in better care than he could have, which sounds dreadful but is, considering the period, a very real commendation of his character) and begins, in his own words, "the process of ruining myself in the received style, like any other spoony. I had not, it seems, the originality to chalk out a new road to shame and destruction, but trode the old track with stupid exactness not to deviate an inch from the beaten centre." He takes mistresses, spends money, fights in duels, and remains, unsurprisingly, miserable. He surrounds himself with hypocrites and finds no pleasure in their company. At last, feeling himself "hard and tough as an India-rubber ball; pervious, though, through a chink or two still, and with one sentient point in the middle of the lump," he goes home to his various unloved dependents. With any clear idea of reformation in mind? Who knows. Because as he rides home along Hay Lane, Jane Eyre pops up out of the gloaming, and then he's done for.

I know Rochester's actions in this part of the novel are often read as calculated, manipulative, or seductive. Certainly he's trying to manipulate - his motives are not entirely pure. But as far as what he does - guys, I think he's flailing. He's got no fucking idea. He's feeling things for this girl that his education and life have not prepared him for - he wants her, but not like that. He wants to be friends with her, and have her love him, but not with falseness or servility. And there is no script available to him for that sort of thing. PPL, HOW U LOVE THEM? Jane is not a conventional love object; he can't go about wooing her by the conventional means he's applied in every other romantic/sexual relationship he's ever been in. So instead he ... dresses up like a gypsy and gets engaged to another girl that he doesn't even really like. It's farcical, a cross-gendered Emma, but the stakes are frighteningly high and the players are just frightened.

Reading the middle part of Jane Eyre is, for me, an exercise in extended eyebrow-raising and facepalming: oh Edward Rochester no. What are you - why would you think that - oh honey. Did you mean to tell her so much about Celine? Couldn't you see that she liked you just fine, and that taking up with another girl to make her jealous was a bizarrely labyrinthine Rube Goldberg plot to get something you already had? How on earth does crossdressing as a gypsy fortune-teller further your ends, exactly, bb? I also think that the bigamy thing is much more present in his mind than Jane's narration might lead us to believe, partially due to the problem posed by Blanche Ingram. Have you noticed that in film adaptations Blanche is always played as the queenly blonde? It does seem like she should be - you've got Bertha the Mad Bad Creole, Plain Jane, the logical third in the sequence would be the typical Victorian Blonde a la George Eliot. But Blanche Ingram is, instead, typed after Bertha, set up as her mirror. I think that Rochester meant to marry her - because really, what little sense the jealousy plot makes dissipates pretty quickly after those first few evenings, and he drags the "engagement" on for months and months. I think he knew that loving Jane was, by their religion, damaging to both their souls. I think he was trying to leave her for her own good, and punishing himself by replicating his first miserable marriage. Which is, I suppose, little consolation to poor Blanche :(

I am convinced that Rochester's proposal to Jane was completely unintended, that it just sort of burst out when he had to really confront the reality of her loss. He's not in control of anything in that scene; she's far more self-assured, he's borderline babbling.

He then proceeds to fuck everything up in his usual style. Because - that problem of no script available again - he has no idea how to actually go about being with a woman like Jane. Instead he just replicates his relationships with his mistresses, to her considerable distress: "Glad was I to get him out of the silk warehouse, and then out of a jewellers shop: the more he bought me, the more my cheek burned with a sense of annoyance and degradation." Jane, being Jane, calls him on this - "Do you remember what you said of Céline Varens?—of the diamonds, the cashmeres you gave her? I will not be your English Céline Varens." But it doesn't really work; he continues to try to buy her love, riding roughshod over all her sensibilities in the process. He's not ready to love her, not fully, not yet. He's got to give and hazard all he hath, before that, and lose it too.

I guess - I don't know that my sympathy with Rochester is exactly woobification, it's more that I read him as a slightly comical and bumbling man who means well, aims high, and has no idea how you actually go about interacting with other human beings in a meaningful fashion. This does not mean that he does not fuck up. It doesn't mean that his actions don't hurt others. He serves Blanche terribly, and causes Jane an awful lot of pain and suffering, and the way he rejects poor little Adele at first always sort of breaks my heart. While it's true that Bertha was well-treated, relatively, for a madwoman in early Victorian Britain - well, even if you do take Rochester at his word and believe her actually mad, instead of taking her as a strong Black woman being slurred, slandered, and imprisoned by colonialist patriarchy (which would be a totally valid and legit thing to do), still it can't have been very much fun to be her. I bet he was insufferable to be married to, from her point of view. I take Edward Rochester as an object lesson in why it's a bad idea to give individual people too much power - because they might be flaily idiots about important things, and that can screw everyone over.

(This also ties in with Charlotte's critique of Austen as an unfeeling portraitist - Rochester's flail could easily read as comic/farcical if the consequences of the thing weren't made so apparent. Charlotte makes sure that every pang of pain is felt; she takes it all very seriously, and doesn't let comedy soften any of the blows. She lets Rochester be ludicrous often enough, but the tone of the book never gives the reader laughter as a way out.)

Comments

[sophia_sol]

Oh wow, this is a really interesting reading of Rochester, and one that I never would have thought of. I can see the sense you are making, though. I will have to think on this more!

[lotesse]

I'm glad to hear that someone else thinks it makes sense - it seems to be a very idiosyncratic reading, although it's always been my take. This is what happens when you allow children freerange interaction with literature :)

[sophia_sol]

Haha, yep! I first read Jane Eyre when I was about 12, I think, and I...did not have a particularly idiosyncratic reading. I think I was just all "OOOH HOW ROMANTIC", as silly teenage girls often do over romances they don't realize might be problematic. (upon reread, years later, I was kind of horrified that I'd found it romantic, because it seemed clear to me that Rochester was SUCH A CREEP.)

I shared this post of yours with my sister, who also loves Jane Eyre, and she says that she wonders to what extent, maybe not intentionally, a person might form opinions/feelings about a character when you're young, and as you grow up and understand the deeper things at play, you come up with justifications for your feelings. Which is an interesting thought! I know I've definitely done it for other works I loved as a kid, and I think it possible that the only reason Jane Eyre escaped this treatment from me is because when I read it as a preteen I was far more interested in Jane than Rochester and so he left no lasting impression on me.

[lotesse]

I think your sister definitely has a point, but similarly, my adolescent romance was more with Jane than with Rochester - I found her so utterly compelling, so absolutely important, I don't know if I can even use words to express what she meant for me. It was the bit where she longs for freedom, and the wind carries it away, and finally she yells then at least grant me a new servitude! I was a teenager in a midwestern backbeyond longing for work and freedom and activity and passion, and the sheer force of hunger and longing that was Jane absolutely bowled me over.

Rather, it seems to me that there's an ongoing conversation about whether to read the Brontës as discourse or counterdiscourse - and, by her own words, Charlotte is easy to designate as discourse. All that stuff about apologizing for Emily and suppressing Anne, put together with the fact that if Wuthering Heights is a delirium and Wildfell Hall is the waking nightmare then Jane Eyre is the wishful fairytale of being a straight girl in a patriarchy. But I still read Charlotte as firmly belonging to counterdiscourse, just an example of the way that patriarchy will try to pull the fangs of even the baddest bitch. See the fluffification of Austen for more on that last!

[sophia_sol]

I wish I could remember at all what I was thinking when I first read Jane Eyre! Your description of why Jane was so appealing makes sense, but I have no idea if the book spoke to me in that way at all. I just remember lying on my stomach on my bedroom floor late at night, coming to the end of the book, and just feeling utterly thrilled and satisfied -- and that's really my only clear memory of the experience of reading it.

The other stuff you're saying -- you're clearly coming at this with a LOT more familiarity with other novels of the time than I am, and more familiarity with the academic discourse on the subject! And it definitely sounds really interesting. Would you mind expanding a bit on the fluffification of Austen? I'd love to know more!

[lotesse]

Sure! So, Austen is pretty much a vicious socioeconomic satirist; these are not romances, they're exposes. Sometimes superficially romantic, but often not. Nevertheless, because anything related to love & marriage is coded feminine and therefore superficial, and also because we've lost connection with her sociopolitical context, and so cannot perceive the full sharpness of her irony, she's often stereotyped by contemporary culture as a sort of prissy proto-romance-novelist.

I once tore a copy of How to Read Literature Like A Professor physically in half, because it made some snide throwaway joke about how even though Jane Austen doesn't really deal with it violence is a major thing in literature. (it was from my ex-in-laws, so no loss there.) What happens to Georgiana Darcy, to Colonel Brandon's lost love, that's not violence? Or, heck, what happens to Jane Bennett, or to Charlotte Lucas? Austen obsessively comes back to the economic gendered violence of entailment, which essentially left women homeless if their fathers died before they were married, which is pretty much sexual coercion when you get right down to it.

You see it in the development and marketing of Austen culture - frex, the idea that Bridget Jones is somehow a modern version of Austen narratives is borderline insulting. Austen = fanservice for ladies, not hard-hitting sociopolitical satire, in the public consciousness. And that's really quite a shame, because she's such a magnificent bitch.

[stlkrchck]

Got here via sophia_sol's pinboard. Hope you don't mind me chiming in!

Oooh, fascinating. I absolutely agree with you on this. Rochester has no idea how to react to Jane, and it's nice to meet another person who thinks that he honestly didn't mean to propose to her then and afterwards has no idea how to handle it. Particularly since so many of their conflicts during their engagement come from Jane's expectations of what it means to be a poor governess engaged to a rich man.

(As an aside, have you ever read Mary Stewart's Nine Coaches Waiting? There are a lot of fun, tongue-in-cheek references to Jane Eyre, particularly about the main character—a governess, of course—building her employers up to be much more class-conscious than they are.)

There's all this talk about the relationship being so very dubcon: Rochester has all the power, Rochester is trying to trick her into marrying him when he's already married, etc. And there is a lot of truth in that, but I've never seen it as quite that simple. Jane managed to escape him—not without terrifying personal sacrifice, it's true, and much dramatic Wandering on the Moors—, but there's no escape from Bertha for Rochester.

I am considerably less coherent than I'd like to be, but I wanted to let you know that I thought your post was thought-provoking and really, really interesting.

[lotesse]

Hi! I think you're absolutely right that the novel's pov can be tricksy; Jane tends to, ah, underestimate herself and her powers rather dramatically! But the thing I love best about JE is that it's pretty much the story of how the Gothic tried to eat plain little Jane Eyre, and how she found out that she was actually its queen and sovereign. (there's a reason for the Labyrinth icon, in other words!)

I'm not familiar with the Stewart book - is that the same Mary Stewart who wrote all the King Arthur stuff? Because I remember really enjoying that as a kid.

[innie_darling]

I have unabashedly loved Rochester since the second time I read the book (the first time I was far too young and could only see the melodrama of the story instead of the characters). What always delights me about him is how intelligent he is - it shows in his unsparing contempt for his own past actions - and how funny he is - the line about "Arithmetic is useful, you see," remains my favorite because he's such an unrepentant weirdo at that moment.

It's lovely to see more Rochester love!

[lotesse]

He's both remarkably smart and remarkably dim; somehow, I find the combination impossible to resist :P

[bowdlerized]

LOTESSE. What a great post. I love your take on Rochester...and not just because it's similar to mine. :D I have always loved how Charlotte's male characters have these elements of stereotypical femaleness (if that's the right way to put it)--even when they are not literally dressing up as nuns and gypsies, they have these other trappings, they're vain and hysterical, etc. The thing about Rochester being like a badly-married woman is so true and an awesome observation.

And yes, he is a complete flailer--that is a lot of what makes him lovable to me even though he is such a jerk. What an idea that he didn't really intend to propose to Jane!!! Wow. I will have to think about that. I can see it, though.

(How much do I love that I have to seriously examine my beliefs about Jane Eyre now?)

And yes again to how Rochester/the book would be so comic if the stakes weren't so high. I have gotten a lot of funny looks when I tell people how funny I think JE is--but I genuinely do think it's one of the funniest books I've ever read. It's just that it's so painful, too. Yet another reason why Charlotte is the absolute best of the best (and I am definitely not biased or anything here).

Argh, dammit...there is a ton more interesting stuff I want to say in response, but I am in the middle of a lot of tumult at work and home and as a result I barely have the time/energy to think critically, much less write coherently. Also I have to go to bed. I am just going to memory this post and (probably forget to) come back to it later. But know that it made me genuinely happy to read it!

What specifically are you studying (unless that is a secret from the internet)? Also, I am wondering if you've read Martineau's Deerbrook. I read it a couple years ago and was dying to discuss it at the time, but I couldn't convince anyone around me to read it.

PS I imagined your post title was some Brontë poem quote or similar and I was distressed that I couldn't place it...so I was relieved to find, on googling it, that it was lyrics from the song you were listening to. :D

[lotesse]

Yay Jane Eyre squee! I'm reading for my qualifying exams in Victorian Literature, finishing off the non-dissertation part of my PhD, so this sort of thing is pretty much my bailiwick right now. I've not read the Martineau, but she's definitely on my radar as someone I need to dig into in the near future - if/when I do, I'm definitely going to bug you about it :)

[likeadeuce]

Oh, wow. I came over here from Katta's -- this is a great essay. It's so awesome to see so many people with passionate things to say about these novels.

[lotesse]

I will never run out of passion for Brontës; they are the bestest.

[oursin]

That makes a lot of sense, more than assuming he's complete evil manipulator (vague recollections of Saw It Somewhere Studies on the symbolic significance of his being struck blind would fit here?).

it's a bad idea to give individual people too much power - because they might be flaily idiots about important things, and that can screw everyone over.

As John Stuart Mill pointed out, not all husbands of his day were actually cruel tyrants, but the state of the law meant that if they were, they had free reign pretty much.

[lotesse]

My undergrad senior essay was on the blindness thing; in retrospect, the critical methodology is appallingly psychoanalytic, but I'm still square with the thesis it advances: that before Jane can marry him, Rochester has to be forcibly removed from the position of absolute privilege he occupies. The essay got sort of over-literal on the "was blind but now I see" trope, but. Undergrad writing.

[starlady]

This is a really interesting interpretation. It's been so long since I've read the book that I want to reread it now. I definitely think you are right about Rochester being like a badly married woman.

I think the thing about Berrtha is that there isn't that much of a difference between her being actually mad and her being a strong black woman imprisoned by the patriarchy, yanno? At least not from the perspective of Rochester and the narrative. I'd have to think about JE as counter discourse - my instinct is to say yes, and Bad Boy Rochester is a way to tame the book back into discourse - but that part of it is pretty darn discourse.

[lotesse]

I'd have to think about JE as counter discourse - my instinct is to say yes, and Bad Boy Rochester is a way to tame the book back into discourse - but that part of it is pretty darn discourse.

Yes, very much this - I keep insisting to myself that I'm square with that critique, that I can isolate the racism from the rest of my passionate enjoyment of the book, but I'm still not entirely sure that I've dealt with and internalized it. Because it's just so terrible, and I genuinely do think it's just about the only thing Charlotte does wrong but she does it so very wrong that just. Argh.