Dedicated to him, whom I regard “as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things.”
We have a great deal of critical writing on Victorian novels—the grand products of George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, et. al.—but not as many accounts of how readers come to read these novels. In 1979, an entire cohort, especially of women, would have pounced on Jane Eyre after reading Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s fetchingly titled feminist study The Madwoman in the Attic. At that time, I was otherwise absorbed (incidentally, like the heroine of Jane Eyre) in reading classical German literature. But now, nearly half a century later, I am with Jane, struck by its power and beauty.
It was another book that brought me to Jane Eyre: Forms, by Caroline Levine. Levine makes the point that we should not confine the concept of form (and its “affordances”) chiefly to artworks: the social-political environment is itself a constellation of forms. The “real” is formally constituted by “wholes, rhythm, hierarchies, networks” and by such concrete forms—which we address in concepts that are, as such, “wholes”—as person, family, school, web journal, prison, nation, and onward; and reality moves, consequently, as a collision of forms. What is to be pondered is the collision of forms inside books with the forms of the lifeworld, in which they subsist as material objects, with possibly emancipatory effect.
Now, Forms is well-written by every conventional standard of thoughtful prose … but in its beginnings, it is abstruse and cries out for example. And so, Caroline Levine promptly cites Jane Eyre and the abundance of forms that collide during Jane’s tenure at the brutal orphanage Lockwood. There are the geometrical forms of place that the girls must assume when they descend for their (meager, often inedible) breakfast. There is the form of the pact made between Jane, her friend Helen, and a benevolent teacher to defend Jane against the Head’s insults to her character.[i] There are countless forms in play—architecture, cant, consumption, Christianity—and they are intricately webbed, extending from inside the fictional school to the social and political forms of the day. Well and good. But might it not be time for every reader of Forms to have Jane Eyre under their belt before proceeding through the quartet of forms of the real? If you’ve got access to a computer, you can read a solidly annotated Jane Eyre for 99 cents. And then open it! and feel the happy shock—the elation—on seeing an unsuspected richness of language called by one critic, casually but correctly, “hypnotic.” After Levine’s quiet, honorable prose, you encounter something like this. Jane Eyre, who has been consigned to the sadistic care of a Mrs. Reed, retaliates, saying to her tormentor, “People think you are a good woman, but you are bad; hard-hearted. You are deceitful!” This is strong beer, and it knocks Mrs. Reed over, as it were. Jane celebrates her victory “with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph” that she has ever felt. But not for long. Alone, reflective, that feeling dissipates, and we have Brontë’s diction on behalf of Jane, age 10:
a ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring, would have been a meet emblem of my mind when I accused and menaced Mrs. Reed; the same ridge, black and blasted after the flames are dead, would have represented as meetly my subsequent condition, when half an hour’s silence and reflection had shown me the madness of my conduct, and the dreariness of the hated and hating position. Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavor, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.[ii]
Jane continually enacts and records her “natural unenslaved feelings! … there would be recesses in my mind, which would be only mine.”[iii] You have, all throughout, a perceptiveness about inner states that will make you think: Proust—his equal!
Here is Jane in a more affectionate mode: “I witnessed hourly in him [her hero, Rochester] a style of courtship which, if careless and choosing rather to be sought than to seek, was yet, in its very carelessness, captivating, and in its very pride, irresistible.”[iv] Note the inversion and the repetitions; the musical rhythm, inviting speech or song; the conjunction of the passive, luxurious “captivating” with the bristling “irresistible”—sound imitating sense (not a lazy topic, as witness the very last preoccupations of the philosopher J. L Austin.) Her prose is steeped in a history of superior writing in English—the King James Bible, Shakespeare (Lear, Othello), Milton (Paradise Lost), Walter Scott, Wordsworth’s poetry—and not shy about displaying the fruit of a sedulous assimilation. All the resources of English diction are mined.
In the richness but also the transparency of Charlotte’s diction, you see everything Jane sees, you feel everything she feels, yet as something wider than the work of a single sensibility: an entire literary canon. You can stop to scrutinize her language: you see it is complex, and the vocabulary vast, and the sentences, long …but as a rule you don’t stop and stare at them, because they are transparent to their sense and full of suspense.
I’ll stop one more time to prove the rule. Writing about the two [nasty] Reed sisters, who are bad actors, Jane describes their character: “…. here were two natures rendered, the one intolerably acrid, the other despicably savorless for the want of it. Feeling without judgment is a washy draught; indeed, but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human ….” What? We need an anapest to fulfill the rhythm, and what will it be … and lo! it is there …“deglutition.”[v] Human deglutition. Ay caramba! Human swallowing! Why not “consumption”? Because we are precisely in the region of the mouth [“washy draught”] and not the gut. Here is proof of an intellectual power marrying Latinity with precision.
According to the story, Jane has been only marginally educated; she has read nothing of any importance. Yet she speaks … books. Her diction, even as a girl, is as rich and cultivated and informed by as high a culture of books as is imaginable. Jane appears to have read everything except … this book! But if she had read nothing but this book, she would be able, subsequently, to speak like Jane in this book. There is scarcely a sentence of hers not worth reading and knowing and reflecting on for its form or its sense. And Jane, within this book, declares herself conscious of the contribution of her book—this fictive memoir, this fictive autobiography—to a dark time when genius has otherwise absconded.
How we are bound to Jane in the narrative! At one point, it is revealed to her that an uncle intends to bequeath his fortune to her, but she must contact him. We learn that she has this news, but she never reacts to it … for a time. We wonder, Is this a narrative loose end? No! It is part of this ultra-cerebrally designed plot. Suddenly Jane, too—like the reader—remembers the news and responds to it. Moments later, there is vivid proof of the strong and intimate bond the narrator establishes with her reader, of which she appears to be aware: we read the words, prior to her revealing a great secret, “Stay till he [Rochester] comes, reader; and, when I disclose my secret to him, you shall share the confidence.” She seems to know the reader’s time of reading—exactly!
I’ve just made my way through a very honorable, nearly interminable, essay on the bewildering assortment of the values asserted in Jane, happy only to find this forlorn phrase at the very end: “It is a work of great linguistic virtuosity.” Yes, beyond all expectation: this is what interests me. But I can’t leave unmentioned the swirl of critics’ views on what moral values this adventure in rhetoric, syntax, and style recommends.
It’s fitting to close with an admirable discussion from Caroline Levine’s Forms at the close of her book. She takes up Jane Eyre again, dealing an elegant put paid to the roaring struggle among critics of the novel in the years after The Madwoman in the Attic. Heads collide: those that saw in the novel a paean to domestic sensuousness and those who saw an undercurrent text, too timid to speak its name—Jane’s missed opportunity to rise, through independent intellect and work, to a high post in the colonial bureaucracy. A fanatical, ascetic Christianity half in love with death opposes a simpler gratitude for life as divinely given. Loyalty to conventional principles of social conduct vies with an irrepressible desire for personal authenticity. Merely to list all its dichotomies would burst the bounds of a single essay. But this is where Levine’s originality comes into play. The text’s several distinctions of privilege and priority contend and collide:
To assume that a European woman’s meaningful career necessarily comes at the expense of an indigenous other [the madwoman in the attic is Caribbean]; or that a man’s choice of the domestic sphere will always come at the expense of his power [Rochester, a family man at the end, is by now literally mutilated, blind and lame]; is to assume a master hierarchy of values that works like a zero-sum game: a gain in one place always entails losses elsewhere. And this is simply not how hierarchies—or indeed forms in general—work. They are just as likely to unsettle one another, their collisions as liable to produce gains in odd places … . No single hierarchy [nor, indeed, form] governs all others, nor do they all work together ….[vi]
You will not be able to establish a firm hierarchy of values in this text in which value-systems spring up abundantly and are replaced. W. H. Auden wrote, “In poetry, all facts and all beliefs cease to be true or false and become interesting possibilities.” For Levine, in Jane Eyre, “all facts and all beliefs cease to be either true or false and become the interesting possibilities of forms in collision.”
In a comment that combines matters of style and language and matters of morality, we have, finally, Henry Staten’s sumptuous formulation: Jane is flexible in her way of “instrumentalizing language”:
she can deploy the language of morality … or, alternatively, she can listen to the voice of passion, as needed, for the purpose of resisting the men’s will to dominate her. The central conflict is not, as moral ideology would have it … between duty and inclination, reason and passion, nature and the word of God, but between the wills to power that opportunistically grasp either pole of these ideological structures as instruments to dominate or to resist domination. The ideological structures and the institutions they support are to some degree neutral in valence; their meaning depends on how they are instrumentalized by the wills involved.[vii]
Here is Auden once more: “In poetry, all facts and all beliefs cease to be true or false and become interesting possibilities.”
And so: Jane Eyre, with no end in sight, is what the product of high culture should be like. It ought to be the case that no one today should risk publishing writing that has not gone through Jane Eyre and is in principle able to conduct an argument or a description at the level of her rhetorical and intellectual prowess. You won’t be the equal of Charlotte Brontë, but it might be rewarding to be conscious of the disparity.
Notes
[i] Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Kindle edition, 1, 20.
[ii] Kindle edition: Jane Eyre—Full Version (Annotated) (Literary Classics Collection Book 4), 78.
[iii] Ibid., 561.
[iv] Ibid., 270.
[v] Ibid., 339.
[vi] Levine, Kindle edition, 108.
[vii] Henry Staten, Spirit Becomes Matter: The Brontës, George Eliot, Nietzsche (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 46.