The Penguin Classics intro to Jane Eyre was written by Dr Stevie Davies.
Much of the following text is simply copying, or slightly paraphrasing Davies.
The politics of Jane Eyre
The novel is narrative of power and conflict. It was written in 1847 while the universal suffrage and equal rights movements in in full swing. The conservative ruling classes saw this as a threat to civilization itself. The Quarterly Review denounced the novel’s “murmuring against the comforts of the rich and the privations of the poor involves a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority either in God’s word or in God’s providence”.
The reaction was due to Jane Eyre’s passionate self-assertion: ‘I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.’ She demands to know, ‘Do you think I am an automaton? A machine without feelings? And can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips…?’ She claims to be her employer’s equal and he cannot deny it. Jane Eyre’s vow to ‘keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man’ is founded on and secondary to her sense of sovereign self-worth. Individual human rights therefore lie at the center of the ethic of Jane Eyre.
Charlotte Bronte was no revolutionary. She was a Tory and an Anglican, but she was a working woman and spoke to the injustices of her world. The Saturday Review had written that “marriage was a woman’s profession and therefore an unmarried woman ‘failed in business’. Governesses were paid poorly because the wares they sell are worthless.”
But the novel refuses deference to money and insists on the value and dignity of honest labor. Servants and dependents, quiet as they may be on the outside, watch, judge, and curse their ‘betters’.
Jane’s economic progress is a parable of self-help. She isn’t a servant, but neither is she an employer.
Conditions of her employment are a subject of discussion between her and her employer. There is discussion of the current dehumanizing employer-employee roles. She, as a 19 year-old, informs her ‘master’ that no freeborn would submit to insolent treatment from an employer. The reply is ‘Humbug! Most things freeborn will submit to anything for a salary.’ Economic relations are radically questioned.
There is a dialogue about submission and rebellion, the struggle for justice and the duty to endure. Chapter 2 begins with, ‘I resisted all the way… like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved in my desperation to go all lengths.’ ‘How dare I, Mrs Reed? How dare I? Because it is the truth’, the outraged child bellows.
Jane and the Self
The name Eyre suggests ‘heir’, ‘air’, ‘e’er’, ‘err’, ‘Eire’, and rhymes with ‘where?’. In a novel of many wanderings, it is possible for Jane to ‘err’ from her way. As an ‘heir’, what is her inheritance? Whose ‘heir’ is she?
‘My master’: Power, sexuality, and marriage
The most complex and contradictory aspect (at least in modern eyes) of Jane Eyre is its treatment of gender relations and marriage. Jane calls Rochester her master with relish. But she repudiated Brocklehurst, John Reed, and St John Rivers as masters. Davies writes that the feminist assertion of female autonomy alternates with a craving to melt into and become one with the beloved ‘master’.
In the bible, Davies notes, Christ is the master, both loved and revered. Rochester is Jane’s literal master, as her employer and a member of the landed gentry. But Jane’s use of the word is sexually charged. It is used as a term of endearment and a sign of her attraction. Bronte wrote of her schoolmaster, Constantin Heger, ‘the only master I have ever had.’ Rochester is no less her ‘master’ when she returns as his independent equal.
But the novel confronts the idea of mastery. Rochester’s despotic behavior towards her is not to her taste. She asserts not only equality, but superiority, ‘I am better than you- let me go!’ Rochester acknowledges this when he says ‘I was your equal at 18.’ But then he says later on ‘you please me and master me’. When she returns to Ferndean, he is contrite.
The dynamic gives Jane her energy, and she tells St John, ‘I have never known any medium in my dealings with positive, hard characters…. between absolute submission and determined revolt.’
Davies writes: Egalitarian marriage, in which the woman’s very smallness becomes a prop to the otherwise too dominant male, is Jane Eyre’s ideal. Even now, this sentence seems odd to me, in that I read prop naturally as a mere thing in a scene. But I believe it meant to be understood as a the thing that supports. So that the woman’s smallness is the thing that holds up- in the sense of counterbalances- an otherwise dominant male. I’d probably want some examples of this in order for it to make more sense to me, but the writer is clearly saying that this is the novel’s idea of an ideal marriage.