REFERENCE
THE CRITICS
Jane Eyre was an immediate success with the reading public and has remained
popular ever since. The first critics, too, were mostly favorable.
One exception was a reviewer named Elizabeth Rigby, who condemned the novel
as profoundly immoral and "anti-Christian"- not so much because of Mr.
Rochester's character as because of Jane's "unregenerate and
undisciplined" spirit.
Far more typical was the reaction of the great critic George Henry Lewes
(who, like Rochester, had left his first wife to live with another woman, the
novelist George Eliot):
Reality- deep, significant reality- is the great characteristic of the book.
It is an autobiography- not, perhaps, in the naked facts and circumstances, but
in the actual suffering and experience.... This faculty for objective
representation, is also united to a strange power of subjective representation.
We do not simply mean the power over passions- the psychological intuition of
the artist, but the power also of connecting external appearances with internal
effects- of representing the psychological interpretation of material phenomena.
Writing in 1925, the novelist Virginia Woolf praised the highly personal
quality of Charlotte Bronte's art:
The writer has us by the hand, forces us along her road, makes us see what
she sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to forget her. At the end we
are steeped through and through with the genius, the vehemence, the indignation
of Charlotte Bronte. Remarkable faces, figures of strong outline and gnarled
feature have flashed upon us in passing; but it is through her eyes that we have
seen them.
David Cecil, in his Early Victorian Novelists, makes perhaps the best case
against Charlotte Bronte's writing. His charges against Bronte include:
- lack of restraint
- lack of a sense of humor
- thin, two-dimensional characterizations
But, most of all, Cecil attacked Bronte's improbable plot:
....Not one of the main incidents on which its action turns is but
incredible. It is incredible that Rochester should hide a mad wife on the top
floor of Thornfield Hall, and hide her so imperfectly that she constantly gets
loose and roams yelling about the house, without any of his numerous servants
and guests suspecting anything: it is incredible that Mrs. Reed, a conventional
if disagreeable woman, should conspire to cheat Jane out of a fortune because
she had been rude to her as a child of ten: it is supremely incredible that when
Jane Eyre collapses on an unknown doorstep after her flight from Rochester it
should be on the doorstep of her only surviving amiable relations.
David Cecil was rather typical of his generation in feeling distaste at
Bronte's "naive" and overemotional approach to her art.
But during the last several decades, many critics have praised Bronte for the
very qualities Cecil disliked:
....If in Rochester we see only an Angrian-Byronic hero and a Charlotte
wish-fulfillment figure (the two identifications which to some readers seem
entirely to place him), we miss what is more significant, the exploration of
personality that opens up new areas of feeling in sexual relationships.
....Charlotte's remoulding of feeling reaches a height when she
sympathetically portrays Rochester's efforts to make Jane his mistress. Here the
stereotyped seducer becomes a kind of lost nobleman of passion and specifically
of physical passion.
"Charlotte Bronte's New Gothic" by Robert H. Heilman,
reprinted in O'Neill, Critics on Charlotte and Emily Bronte
"Jane Eyre is at bottom... largely a religious novel, concerned with the
meaning of religion to man and its relevance to his behavior. Jane discovers at
Lowood that she can comprehend religion only when it has some relation to man,
but at Thornfield she sees the opposite error, of man attempting to remake
religion to his own convenience."
Robert Bernard Martin, The Accents of Persuasion Madness is
explicitly associated with female sexual passion, with the body, with the fiery
emotions Jane admits to feeling for Rochester. In trying to persuade her to
become his mistress, Rochester argues that Jane is a special case: 'If you were
mad,' he asks, 'do you think I should hate you?' 'I do indeed, sir,' Jane
replies, and she is surely correct... When they finally marry, they have become
equals, not only because Rochester, in losing his hand and his sight, has
learned how it feels to be helpless and how to accept help, but also because
Jane, in destroying the dark passion of her own psyche, has become truly her
"own mistress."
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own
And finally, in defense of Bronte's "unrestrained" style:
On the first page of Jane Eyre the first issue raised is in fact the issue of
style. The wrong style, in girlhood and in language, is the reason why Jane is
kept by Mrs. Reed from joining the other children around the fire.
Ellen Moers, Literary Women
ADVISORY BOARD
We wish to thank the following educators who helped us focus our Book Notes
series to meet student needs and critiqued our manuscripts to provide quality
materials.
Murray Bromberg, Principal
Wang High School of Queens, Holliswood, New York
Sandra Dunn, English Teacher
Hempstead High School, Hempstead, New York
Lawrence J. Epstein, Associate Professor of English
Suffolk County Community College, Selden, New York
Leonard Gardner, Lecturer, English Department
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Beverly A. Haley, Member, Advisory Committee
National Council of Teachers of English Student Guide Series
Fort Morgan, Colorado
Elaine C. Johnson, English Teacher
Tamalpais Union High School District
Mill Valley, California
Marvin J. LaHood, Professor of English
State University of New York College at Buffalo
Robert Lecker, Associate Professor of English
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
David E. Manly, Professor of Educational Studies
State University of New York College at Geneseo
Bruce Miller, Associate Professor of Education
State University of New York at Buffalo
Frank O'Hare, Professor of English
Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
Faith Z. Schullstrom, Member of Executive Committee
National Council of Teachers of English
Director of Curriculum and Instruction
Guilderland Central School District, New York
Mattie C. Williams, Director, Bureau of Language Arts
Chicago Public Schools, Chicago, Illinois
BIBLIOGRAPHY
FURTHER READING
CRITICAL WORKS
Basch, Francoise. Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the
Novel. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. Contains a useful chapter on "Revolt
and Duty in the Brontes."
Bentley, Phyllis. The Brontes and Their World. New York: Viking Press, 1969.
An illustrated look at the places and people associated with the Bronte sisters'
lives and works. Bentley is also the author of a good short biography of the
Bronte sisters.
Cecil, David. "Charlotte Bronte" in Early Victorian Novelists.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, pp. 100-135. Although he admires
some aspects of Jane Eyre, Cecil concentrates on the novel's weaknesses.
Craik, W. A. The Bronte Novels. London: Gethuren, 1968. Defends the
characterizations of Rochester and St. John.
Ewbank, Inga-Stina. Their Proper Sphere: A Study of the Bronte Sisters as
Early Victorian Female Novelists. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966.
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn. Life of Charlotte Bronte. New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1908. An early biography by a woman writer who was a close friend of
Charlotte Bronte. Well worth reading, even though not all of Mrs. Gaskell's
facts and opinions are accepted today.
Gerin, Winifred. Charlotte Bronte: The Evolution of a Genius. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1967. The most complete and thoroughly researched biography of
Charlotte.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. A Study of
Women and the Literary Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1979.
Gregor, Ian, ed. The Brontes: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970. A good source book.
Knies, Erik A. The Art of Charlotte Bronte. Athens: Ohio University Press,
1969.
McCullough, Bruce. "The Subjective Novel" in Representative English
Novelists. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946, pp. 169-183. Sees Jane Eyre as
an example of romanticism.
Martin, Robert Bernard. The Accents of Persuasion: Charlotte Bronte's Novels.
New York: W. W.. Norton, 1966. Very useful on imagery, the supernatural, and the
religious and moral themes of the story.
Moglen, Helene. Charlotte Bronte: The Self Conceived. New York: W. W. Norton,
1976. Good on the Byronic hero and the fairytale aspects of Bronte's novels.
O'Neill, Judith, ed. Criticism on Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Coral Gables,
Florida: University of Miami Press, 1979.
Ratchford, Fannie E. The Brontes' Web of Childhood. New York: Russell &
Russell, 1964. An interesting look at how Charlotte Bronte's childhood fantasies
and writings influenced her mature novels.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from
Bronte to Lessing. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977. A
perceptive feminist critique.
Thorslev, Peter L. The Byronic Hero. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of
Minnesota Press, 1962.
Tillotson, Kathleen. "Jane Eyre" in Novels of the Eighteen Forties.
London: Oxford University Press, 1965.
Winnifrith, Tom. The Brontes. New York: Macmillan, 1977.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1957. (Originally published in 1929.)
AUTHOR'S OTHER WORKS
_____. Shirley. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. A tale of love and
social unrest, set in England during the Napoleonic era.
_____. The Professor. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Bronte's first
novel, not published until after her death, tells the story of an English
schoolmaster in France who must choose between a well-to- do woman and the young
student teacher he loves.
_____. Villette. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Besides Jane Eyre, the only
Charlotte Bronte novel still much read today. The novel draws on Charlotte
Bronte's experiences in Belgium; its heroine Lucy Snowe, is in some ways a
darker more complex version of Jane Eyre.
Shorter, Clement. The Brontes: Life and Letters. 2 vol. New York: Haskell
House, 1969. Charlotte Bronte's letters are filled with illuminating insight
into the art of Jane Eyre as well as the author's own life. (Note: There are
several other editions of the letters, and you will also find selections from
them in a number of biographies and critical studies.)
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