I'm yours alone, you do not care
Jun. 27th, 2012 03:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseSince 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.)
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.)
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Date: 2012-06-28 03:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-28 11:47 pm (UTC)