Chapter 26 ended with the revelation, blunted for me as it was by my sister's lack of "spoiler sense", that Rochester was already married and married to a crazy lady. The wedding was called off, the madwoman revealed to all parties involved and bizarrely, or so I thought at the time, Jane cutting herself off and away from Rochester.
in Jane Eyre there is not single antagonist, no enemy, no arch villain trying to thwart Jane from every joy and happiness. There are multiple antagonists each with a different mask, each with a different "mental problem". I am putting that phrase in quotes because I'm not exactly certain that they have a "mental problem" and I don't want to diminish the very definition of "mental problem". It may seem a trifle like splitting hairs to you, dear reader, but it is a fairly important clarification in my mind regardless.
First we see John Reed who is all rage and abuse towards Jane for no purpose other than that he can. Mrs. Reed is another "villain" who despises Jane because of ridiculous standards of society. Jane's mother, Mr. Reed's favorite sister, married "low" and now she's forced to deal with her. Her secondary "villainous" trait is that she refuses to see that her children could ever do anything wrong. Denial is such a strong force and causes infinitely more damage than it brings comfort to the denier.
Following Mr. Reed is another self righteous individual in Mr. Brocklehurst. Of all of them I tend to despise him the most. He is a vain man who uses religious piety to shove down, humiliate, and abuse others. I cannot stand his narcissistic inconsistencies. Perhaps it is because I am closer than I'd like to be to a very similar individual. The world around him is well served by his pontificating on how it should run and act, yet he is guilty of sins and improprieties ten times worse. And if you expose his "short comings", as he would call his egregious sins, he will lambaste you for judging and acting like you are so much holier than he. He once laughed and bragged about verbally abusing a store cashier to the point that she was crying. Her sin? Not knowing how to count back change correctly. He actually said how lucky she was to have him criticize her, so lucky that he came along and set her straight.
Sorry, I digress. I just see his face every time Brocklehurst is mentioned.
Miss Ingram, haughty and proud, is another villain...but hardly a villain at all as it turns out. Gone in an instant.
So up until the madwoman in the cage once wed to Rochester, these were all villains that Jane could endure, that Jane could "out live" in a sense. Her situation would one day change and they all could be left behind. Mrs. Rochester, however is an immovable object. Mrs. Rochester cannot be reasoned with, or endured.
Chapter 27 opens with the fallout. Rochester pleads and begs, goes so far as to threaten violence if she will not see reason. (Speaking of which...the footnote in my Penguin Classics edition mentions that the quote regarding "violence" means that he is threatening to rape her. Where do they GET these people? Rochester is many things, including an analogous Beast to Jane's Belle, but a rapist? Did they even read the book they were footnoting?)
I spent pretty much the entirety of chapter 27 feeling nothing but sympathy for Rochester. I'm tempted to think that this is due to my gender. I can't fully say how women would react to his entreaties and all out begging. (Given that my wife has had to stop reading so heavy a book during tax season my usual touchstone for feminine behavior questions is unavailable to me. Le sigh.) Perhaps some ladies see him as a scoundrel or less than honorable. Perhaps some of the female persuasion see him as pathetic for being this emotional and distraught. As for myself...it's all too familiar. I have been there.
I have been on record as having never broken up with anyone I've ever dated. I've always been on the receiving end. The first time I felt like the breath had been stomped out of me and a gaping void where my heart was supposed to have just been. She gave me a note in passing after school as she was going off to her job at the mall. I didn't need to have read the note. It was written all over her face. The only reason that I needed to read it was to find out the why of it. It was the stupidest reason imaginable, in retrospect. It was totally her, not me (she was 17 but had fallen in "love" with a guy who was 34 and who had taken advantage of her) but at the time it couldn't fit in my matrix. What had I done? What could I have done differently? Was she worth winning back? None of that was on my mind. Nothing reached me logically. There was just this psychological gaping, sucking chest wound. She had someone drive her to work...and I ran. I was in such a panic. I begged, I pleaded, I cried, I got down on my knees in the hardware aisle and wailed. That's pretty much how I'm sure Rochester felt, though he probably had more self respect and held a bit more decorum. He had all the more reason to wail since he actually had a woman worth it. This girl I begged to come back came back to me weeks later when she'd had a pregnancy scare and asked me to claim it as my own so her lover wouldn't go to jail for statutory rape. That was a bridge too far given the weeks of pain and depression...and I burned that bridge with a laugh. I literally laughed. Self respect came a bit too late, but I arrived at it all the same.
All this to say, from the male perspective I understand perhaps a fraction of what Rochester is going through. Mine was with a girl unworthy of my affections. I can't imagine what it would be like to lose one so truly worthy as Jane.
He is in such a horrible position: stuck between a drooling, murdering, basket case and one of the most noble and praiseworthy of all women. He loses Jane and is stuck with the former.
When Jane says that she believes he would hate her as well were she mad, Rochester replies,
"Then you are mistaken, and know nothing about me, and nothing about the sort of love of which I am capable. Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still..."
He goes on to relate the unfortunate circumstances regarding his former, or rather current in point of fact, marriage. They are an understandable mistake at every point. Rochester then relates how his love grew for Jane over the weeks and months. "I did not then know that it was no transitory blossom, but rather the radiant resemblance of one, cut in an indestructible gem". Dang. Yes, he made a mistake in keeping this from her, he doesn't deny any of this. To him the madwoman in the attic is dead and their marriage annulled by her violent, maddened mind. Jane's emotions and resolve appear to be all over the map. There is a war in her soul. This battle is not over whether she forgives him or not, she declares very early in his discourse that she had already forgiven him. To the modern mind this may seem strange. I even have it written in my copy "Jane...stop being DUMB!" and "Sigh...Jane...Oh, Jane...COME ON!". Again, perhaps it's my gender that sides with Rochester on this.
Rochester launches a logical gambit at her, bringing in to question her value placement, "It is better to drive a fellow-creature to despair than to transgress a mere human law, no man being injured by the breach?" Just as when Jane launched her assault on Mrs. Reed I was cheering him on at this point. Honestly, who is hurt by this? What's her point? Does she really see him as married to this...thing upstairs? How does that count? Who is she trying not to injure? Is it just the principal of the thing?
Jane replies with the very quote on the back of the book, which I presume to be the most famous quote. (though it is truncated and her heroism in this moment neutered by the absence of the direct why of it, namely God).
"I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God: sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad - as I am now."
"given by God; sanctioned by man."
Again, as with those precious cranial neuron shifting moments with Helen, I am left with only one response.
"Well...crap."
No single page in this whole book, thus far, is as marked in black ink with all my notes and underlining of quotes as this one. And why? Because Jane give words to what we, the reader, so needs to hear. You cannot help but be challenged, at the very least, or changed, at the very best, by the words she continues with.
"Laws and principles are not for the times when there is not temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth - so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe in it now, it is because I am insane - quite insane, with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by; there I plant my foot."
My only response that I can muster when I read that is like a black lady in church who replies to the preacher with a deep, soulful "Mmmm hmmm" as support.
This is how you can tell a good writer, a masterful writer, apart from the rest, and I may have mentioned this in Pride and Prejudice, but it bears repeating. There is no villain here. She's not hitting this moment and all the ladies shout, "You go girl! You don't need that man! You fine by yourself! You do you, girlfriend." These are two people, as she declares many times, in such a deep and consuming love who cannot be together. Is it so terrible that he wants her? He wants her for all the right reasons. Rochester loves her for the very essence of her being. She is not a strutting peacock for him to show off and then put away when he's bored. He wants her for everything and in everything good and bad. In the presence of so expansive and anchored a love, when compared to a woman who is violent and literally out of her mind...yeah...I'd try everything to keep Jane as well. Is he wrong? No. Is he going about it in a wrong manner? Hell yes.
It is the principal of the thing. For Jane it is a foundational principal of life and godliness. If she were to marry him while he was still married it is a soul level violation for her. He says it's a convention of man and no one is hurt, so who cares? We hear this a lot in our society. She replies, and rightly, that it is a law given by God, sanctioned by man. Sure, man sanctioned it, but it is God who made it a law. Not a "convention" a law.
As she bears down and maintains the sanctity of her soul and digs her foot in, the most remarkable thing happens. I should expect it of Rochester by now, but it surprised me still. Her defiance, her sticking to her principals...only makes him love and admire her more.
"Never," said he, as he ground his teeth, "never was anything at once so frail and frail and so indomitable."
He's pissed, he's in pain, he wants what he wants, and here she is being more beautiful in spirit, more admirable, than ever before. In the presence of pressure she turns into a diamond.
There is a simple moment two paragraphs away from there that shook me.
"What unutterable pathos was in his voice! How hard it was to reiterate firmly, 'I am going.'
'Jane!'
'Mr. Rochester!'"
This is the moment I want to see done well in the film. So much hangs on this simple exchange of names. There is a tension so thick you'd need a ship to break through. It is the axis upon which the entire book rotates. This is "the moment" if ever there was one yet.
"'Withdraw, then - I consent...'"
In all of fiction I'm not sure I've ever read a more tortured and absolute "I love you" than that fraction of a quote right there. By heaven, I'm tearing up right now...silly sod that I am.
"I had already gained the door; but, reader, I walked back - walked back as determinedly as I had retreated. I knelt down by him; I turned his face from the cushion to me; I kissed his cheek; I smoothed his hair with my hand.
'God bless you, my dear master!' I said."
And that is the most tortured and absolute "I love you too" in return.
I was going to write about how enchanted I was with chapter 28. Bronte has this whole very cool moment where she has Jane alone out on the moors, disconnected from every living thing. There's a character in the novel I'm working on ("The Dawn Chorus") who asks the main character who he actually is when naked, alone, in a cave. That's when we truly know who we are. When we don't have anyone around us to provide context, who are we really? Jane gets to her genuine self there and I love the internal matching the external.
So, there I did it. I feel like it detracts from the discussion of chapter 27, though. Man, that chapter. It's the kind of chapter that makes a writer think he has no business being in the same...well, business as Charlotte Bronte. Lord, these women could write.
Pax,
Will
No comments:
Post a Comment