Imperialism, Reform and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre

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Imperialism, Reform, and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre Sue Thomas

Imperialism, Reform, and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre

Also by Sue Thomas THE WORLDING OF JEAN RHYS ENGLAND THROUGH COLONIAL EYES IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION (with Ann Blake and Leela Gandhi) ELIZABETH ROBINS (1862–1952): A Bibliography

Imperialism, Reform, and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre Sue Thomas

© Sue Thomas 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9780230554252 hardback ISBN-10: 0230554253 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thomas, Sue, 1955 Imperialism, reform, and the making of Englishness in Jane Eyre/Sue Thomas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 9780230554252 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0230554253 (alk. paper) ISBN-13: 9780230554252 1. Brontë, Charlotte, 18161855. Jane Eyre. 2. Imperialism in literature. 3. National characteristics, English, in literature. I. Title. PR4167.J5T56 2008 823 .8“dc22 2008000204 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

for Brendan, Anne, and Nathaniel

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Contents

List of Abbreviations

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1 Christianity and the State of Slavery

8

2 The Tropical Extravagance of Bertha Mason

31

3 Monstrous Martyrdom and the ‘Overshadowing Tree’ of Philanthropy

54

4 The Ferment of Restlessness

71

5 Playing Jane Eyre at the Victoria Theatre in 1848

92

6 An 1859 Caribbean Perspective on Jane Eyre

104

Appendix 1: Timeline

127

Notes

130

Works Cited

147

Works Consulted

162

Index

165

vii

List of Abbreviations JE JES

CS OED

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ed. Sally Shuttleworth. 1847. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Courtney, John, adapt. Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor. Jane Eyre on Stage, 1848–1898: An Illustrated Edition of Eight Plays with Contextual Notes. Ed. Patsy Stoneman. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, 17–63. [ Jenkin, Henrietta Camilla.] Cousin Stella; or Conflict. London: Smith, Elder, 1859. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989.

viii

Acknowledgements The research for Imperialism, Reform, and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre has been funded by a number of grants: an Australian Research Council small grant in 2000; a Research Enhancement Fund grant from La Trobe University’s School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry in 2002; an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant in 2003; Outside Studies Programs and travel grants from La Trobe University in 2000, 2004, and 2007; a grant from the Dean of La Trobe University’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in 2006; and a Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences research grant in 2007. The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University and the School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry provided conference travel grants. The work towards an early version of Chapter 2, ‘The Tropical Extravagance of Bertha Mason’, part of a wide-ranging project on Jean Rhys, was funded by an Australian Research Council small grant in 1993–94. Jean Rhys’s close unpacking of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea has been inspirational. I have been blessed to work with such fine research assistants as Christy Collis, Karen Welberry, Julie Deblaquiere, Elizabeth Dimock, and Thomas Crosbie. Elizabeth’s background of scholarship on nineteenth-century missionaries and missionary endeavour informed fruitful discussions. At La Trobe I want to thank in particular interlibrary loan and reference staff at the Borchardt Library; Alec Hyslop and Ross Phillips, former Heads of the School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry; Roger Wales, former Dean, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; Gregory Kratzmann; Christopher Palmer; and Richard Freadman. I warmly appreciate the generosity and interest of Alec and Roger at crucial moments and the collegiality of the English Program (both staff members and the postgraduate community). I have taught the Brontës to many groups of students over my career; I thank them for exchange of ideas and for helping me measure and clarify my arguments. Special thanks are due to librarians at the Brontë Parsonage Museum; the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; the British Library; and the British Library Newspaper Library. Imperialism, Reform, and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre draws together my expertise on British and Caribbean materials, and has extended it through work on aspects of Indian history. It is very tough ix

x

Acknowledgements

working on Caribbean topics in Australia. The Australian Association for Caribbean Studies has been vital in developing a supportive and friendly research community. I am very grateful to the colleagues I have met through the association. Peter Hulme, too, has been a generous fellowtraveller. In different ways Christine Alexander and John Maynard have encouraged my research on Brontë. Russell McDougall’s invitation to contribute to a special journal issue To the Islands: Australia and the Caribbean prompted me to think through questions of class, gender, and racialized difference. Barry Higman alerted me to the differences between the editions of Lady Nugent’s journals. Giving the keynote address at Writing, Diaspora and the Legacies of Slavery in London in 2007 at the invitation of Joan Anim-Addo also enabled me to do some timely research on Henrietta Camilla Jenkin. Preliminary versions of chapters of this book were presented at conferences of the Australasian Victorian Studies Association at the University of Adelaide (1996), Griffith University (2003), and the University of Sydney (2004); The 1830s, European Studies Research Institute, University of Salford (2002); and Burden, Benefit, Trace: The Legacies of Benevolence, University of Queensland (2003). Versions of Chapter 1,‘Christianity and the State of Slavery’, were presented to audiences at the University of Wales, Swansea, and at La Trobe University. I thank my audiences, and the conference and seminar organizers. Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, then at Swansea, were generous hosts. Earlier versions of Chapters 1 and 2 have been published in Victorian Literature and Culture: ‘The Tropical Extravagance of Bertha Mason’, 27.1 (1999): 1–17; and ‘Christianity and the State of Slavery in Jane Eyre’, 35.1 (2007): 57–79. Some material in Chapters 1 and 5 has also been drawn from ‘White Gothic in Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and The Albatross Muff’, To the Islands: Australia and the Caribbean, ed. Russell McDougall, special issue of Australian Cultural History 21 (2002): 89–96, 122–4. It is used with the permission of Australian Cultural History and Network Books. Some material in Chapter 6 has been drawn from ‘Remembering Catherine Whitfield, Ann King and Betty Jackson: Jean Rhys and Kamau Brathwaite’s Slave Sublime’, Atlantic Literary Review 5.4 (October–December 2004): 146–63, and has been used with the permission of Atlantic Literary Review and Atlantic Publishers and Distributors (P) Ltd. Every effort has been made to trace rights holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

Acknowledgements xi

At Palgrave Macmillan special thanks are due to the Commissioning Editor for Literature and Performance Studies Paula Kennedy, Assistant Editor Christabel Scaife, and Vidya Vijayan. The anonymous reader for Palgrave Macmillan provided helpful close comment on an earlier version of the book. In Melbourne Richard McGregor indexed the book in a timely and efficient manner. Sadly, Christine Rawson (d. 2007), with whom I first studied a Brontë (Emily) at high school, will not see this book in print. She always enjoyed hearing about my travels working on it. Our long friendship and conversations in and across various parts of the world have been very special to me, and will be sorely missed. My family in Melbourne and Brisbane has been, as ever, richly, richly supportive, and during difficult years. Imperialism, Reform, and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre is dedicated, with deepest love and with gratitude for sustaining joys, to Brendan Thomas, Anne Hannington, and their son, my grandson, Nathaniel Liam Thomas.

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Introduction

Expressing trepidation about the possible reception of Jane Eyre shortly after its publication in 1847,1 Charlotte Brontë maps relations of genre, gender, and history across a stock contemporary dichotomy of the public and the private: ‘It has no learning, no research, it discusses no subject of public interest. A mere domestic novel will I fear seem trivial to men of large views and solid attainments’ (Letters 1:554). Readers and critics have often accentuated ‘the timeless quality of the myth and daydream’ (Leavis 489). For Kathleen Tillotson it is ‘a novel of the inner life, not of man in his social relations: it maps a private world. Private, but not eccentric’ (257). ‘Jane Eyre’s fairy-tale shapings, its archetypal themes of search for love and escape from danger, above all, perhaps, its representation of childhood suffering, do seem to point away from its specific historical moment, and towards areas of experience which all can readily understand’, Heather Glen argues in Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History (65). She restores Jane Eyre to part of its historical moment by reading it alongside evangelical advice literature, tracts, and annuals. In my study of Jane Eyre I am interested, like Glen, in the historical worlding of Charlotte Brontë and her worlding of her characters. I map relations of genre and gender across the novel’s articulation of questions of imperial history and relations, reform, racialization, and the making of Englishness. My approach restores, to cite Peter Hulme’s postcolonial reinflection of new historicist precepts, part of ‘the complex trafficking that exists between texts (and their authors) in the world’, reconnecting Jane Eyre with the ‘local and the particular materials which went into [its] making’ and from which it has been ‘sheered’ by the ‘vast critical enterprise which produced the novels of the Brontës as works of genius unconnected with the conditions of their production’ 1

2

Imperialism, Reform, and Englishness in Jane Eyre

(30–31). These materials are integral to the historical horizons of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 audience, but assumptions of close familiarity are unwarranted. The historical and cultural distance of later readers has also rendered aspects of the contemporary worldliness of Jane Eyre unintelligible. Worlding is a concept and approach that I developed in my 1999 book The Worlding of Jean Rhys. Worlding is a research, reading, and analytical strategy which connects texts to their ‘local’ and ‘particular’ historical contexts. It is a strategy that works to locate and situate the historical consciousness of authors and the historical consciousness given to their characters, and to disclose the ways in which that consciousness has been shaped. It enjoins extensive primary and secondary historical research, including research on the history of the meanings of specific words. Worlding understands texts to be ‘worldly’ in Edward Said’s sense in The World, the Text, and the Critic, ‘always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society’ (35); ‘worldliness, circumstantiality, the text’s status as an event having sensuous particularity as well as historical contingency, are considered as being incorporated in the text, an infrangible part of its capacity for conveying and producing meaning’ (39). Worlding draws out the worldliness of texts in their originary historical moments. At times worldly references in texts can be cryptic to modern readers or very compressed, and the work of critically unpacking and analysing them can, as in Imperialism, Reform, and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre, radically reframe understandings of primary texts and authors. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak conceptualizes ‘worlding’2 rather more narrowly than I do, describing it as the ‘necessarily heterogenous’ processes (‘Rani’ 133) by which colonized spaces and peoples are absorbed into ‘the consolidation of Europe as sovereign subject, indeed sovereign and subject’ (‘Rani’ 128). Her ground-breaking and influential reading of Jane Eyre in ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’ explains this process sweepingly through allegorization of ‘two registers: childbearing and soul making. The first is domesticsociety-through-sexual-reproduction cathected as “companionate love”; the second is the imperialist project cathected as civil-society-throughsocial-mission’ (244). Since the publication of this essay Jane Eyre has become, as Jenny Sharpe suggests, ‘a contested site for establishing the relationship between feminism and imperialism’ (29). Spivak had charged that it was ‘particularly unfortunate when the emergent perspective of feminist criticism reproduces the axioms of imperialism’ (‘Three Women’s Texts’ 114). I resist the critical will to allegory, paying

Introduction

3

close attention, though, to the heterogeneity and historical contingency of the processes to which she draws attention. Not acknowledging problems of textual dating, Benita Parry has recently observed, and yet still rightly, that contrapuntal postcolonial readings of slavery and empire in Jane Eyre have tended to focus on the novel’s tropological schemes in manners that can be ‘casual about historical specificities’ (70).3 My worlding of Jane Eyre restores a range of these specificities, complementing some rich, ground-breaking studies of Jane Eyre published over the last 15 years, informed by a feminist, new historicist emphasis on the relation between text and context, studies which are like mine, however, also attentive to genre and language. I think here especially of Mary Poovey’s analysis of Jane Eyre in relation to contemporary discourses around the figure of the governess (1989), Cora Kaplan’s situation of the novel in relation to shifting racial discourses (‘Heterogenous’ 1996), Sally Shuttleworth’s account of Brontë’s oeuvre in the context of nineteenth-century ideas of phrenology and psychology (Charlotte Brontë 1996), and Glen’s Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History (2002). Christopher Heywood’s close historical research on Charlotte Brontë’s and Emily Brontë’s familiarity with Yorkshire slavery connections has been enabling for me. Through my research on the West Indies of the 1830s and 1840s for the chapter on Wide Sargasso Sea in The Worlding of Jean Rhys, I recognized in Jane Eyre a very precise allusion to a particular moment in the history of slave rebellion in Jamaica and of the British campaign for the abolition of slavery, and began to examine more closely the novel’s internal chronology and its references to contemporary events. In the course of my reading I became very conscious of the history of language itself, and this consciousness is readily apparent in my analysis of the novel. Received critical opinion is that Charlotte Brontë is very sloppy about dates and historical markers in Jane Eyre. Leavis writes of a ‘general confusion of dates and eras and fashions and facts’, conceding that ‘probably no reader of Jane Eyre ever notices these anomalies until after repeated readings, such are the charm and the power of the novel and the imparted belief in her creation of the novelist’ (489). Leavis vents her irritation in a note on St John Rivers’ gift of a copy of Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion to Jane when she is teaching at Morton. Editors and critics have assumed that the present is given in 1808, the year in which the poem was first published.4 I show in Chapter 1 that Jane’s comment on the volume refers, again precisely, to an 1833 commemorative edition of Marmion, and one that supports my dating of the action of the novel.5 The most glaring anachronism of Brontë in my dating is Bessie Lee’s singing of

4


Edwin Ransford’s song ‘In the days when we went gipsying’, a song published in 1839, having been performed by him at the Theatre Royal in London. Jane describes it as a ‘ballad’, suggesting it was drawn from an oral tradition (JE 21; vol. 1, ch. 3). Recently Plasa has castigated other critics who have taken up questions of gender, racialization, and empire in Jane Eyre for ‘seem[ing to be] just as keen as their feminist predecessors, generally speaking, to fetishize Jane Eyre – as if it were the only, or even most significant juncture in Brontë’s writing at which an encounter with colonial history takes place’ (Charlotte Brontë xi). His book Charlotte Brontë covers her juvenilia, poems and novels. My research on Jane Eyre is premised, rather, on the view that signs of empire in the novel and their historical enmeshing with British reform politics and contestation of English identities have been massively under-read, and that the under-reading justifies a book-length study of the novel, and aspects of its reception. I situate Jane Eyre historically with great precision in relation to the ‘religious, philanthropic and reform complex’ elucidated by David Turley in The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860, and Catherine Hall in White, Male and Middle Class, revising their accounts with new historical research on British, West Indian, and Indian materials, which draws out the location of the Brontë family within this complex. I also demonstrate that readings of ‘race’ in Jane Eyre have been based on insufficiently historical understandings of the racial formation of the British empire. Throughout I am attentive to Gillian Beer’s advice on ‘Re-presenting the Past’: ‘the encounter with the otherness of earlier literature can allow us to recognise and challenge our own assumptions, and those of the society in which we live’ (80). My first four chapters are each organized to address concepts crucial to a reading of imperialism, reform, and Englishness in Jane Eyre. Chapter 1, ‘Christianity and the State of Slavery’, examines gendered and racialized meanings of slavery, temporal freedom, spiritual freedom, and Christianity in the novel. By resituating Jane Eyre in relation to those meanings, I read the political and developing ideas of ‘race’ and Englishness back into the psychological registers of Jane’s Gothic and heroic narratives. In Chapter 2, ‘The Tropical Extravagance of Bertha Mason’, I historicize meanings of Creole, the West Indies, primogeniture, whiteness, Englishness, ‘race’, and blood.6 In Chapter 3, ‘Monstrous Martyrdom and the Overshadowing Tree of Philanthropy’, I turn to examine the ideas central to the relationship between Jane Eyre and St John Rivers: the faculties, benevolence, missionary work in India, Englishness, and despotism. Chapter 4, ‘The Ferment of Restlessness’, works to situate

Introduction

5

Jane’s famous reverie on the roof of Thornfield Hall in its historical moment, October 1832. The core ideas unpacked in the chapter are restlessness, imagination, despotism, women’s rights, reform, rank, caste, mental assimilation, and the Anglo-Saxon code of breeding. I analyse Brontë’s engagement with the terms of the Long Transition in Britain, offering, too, a new reading of Elizabeth Rigby’s excoriation of the novel, and the ways in which Rigby engages with reviews of Jane Eyre, particularly reviews in the Church of England press. I use her attack to open out, in particular, further aspects of Brontë’s treatments of Englishness and class. As Patsy Stoneman has shown in Brontë Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (1996), Charlotte’s novel has been reworked in ‘repeated reproductions in a variety of media’ since 1848 (xi). In my later chapters I analyse two early reworkings of Jane Eyre: an 1848 stage adaptation of the novel for a workingclass audience by John Courtney in Chapter 5; and an 1859 Caribbean analogue, or parallel text, by Henrietta Camilla Jenkin in Chapter 6. Each critically engages with aspects of Brontë’s treatment of imperialism, reform, and the making of Englishness, drawing out some of the limits of the social imaginary of Jane Eyre. In his history of early nineteenth-century drama Allardyce Nicoll notes the popularity of theatrical adaptations of novels: Fiction was rapidly becoming a dominant form of literature, and the minor dramatists found here in plenty that for which they were seeking—plots, characters and dialogues already formed, the scenario (and more than the scenario) on which they could base their hastily written plays. The dramatisation of novels had begun in the latter part of the preceding century, but it was not until the time of Scott that the whole field of fiction was eagerly and systematically sacked. (91–92) Copyright law did not protect the novelist. As John Russell Stephens points out, [u]ntil the 1860s neither legislation nor case law did anything to alleviate an area of copyright obscurity which was the cause of much ill-feeling between novelists and playwrights, namely, dramatised versions of novels, which were in effect immune from the law on copyright. Novels had copyright neither from those hack dramatists who, recognising their complete defencelessness, plundered them for

6


all they were worth, nor from managers who were tempted by their cheapness in dramatic form. (97) The vesting of copyright in the adaptor of a dramatized novel upheld the general principle that ‘[t]he author is he who by the power of his mind and the labour of his brain gives form to the work’ (Shepherd and Another v. Conquest 752). Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor opened at the Victoria Theatre in Lambeth, London, a theatre that drew largely working-class audiences, in early 1848, within a few months of the publication of Jane Eyre. On hearing of this adaptation, Brontë expressed the fear that her book would be ‘wofully exaggerated and painfully vulgarized by the actors and actresses on such a stage’ (Letters 2:25). For her the melodramatic transposition is a travesty. Margaret Smith and Patsy Stoneman, recent readers of the play, invoking binaries of high and low, canonical and ephemeral text, concur with this view. Stoneman, who has recently edited Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor, places it as one of a number of ‘debased’ Victorian stage adaptations of Jane Eyre which ‘simplify and narrow the novel’s focus’ (Jane Eyre 15). Like Brontë herself, Stoneman is concerned about the treatment of Jane Eyre and Rochester. Julie Sanders in her primer Adaptation and Appropriation comments that ‘it is usually at the very point of infidelity that the most creative acts of adaptation and appropriation take place’ (20). Courtney interpolates new sub-plots involving servants and Richard Mason. For Stoneman the sub-plot involving servants lessens Jane’s ‘individuality, and distorts the realities of class stratification, but its exaggeration of Jane’s lowly status emphasizes her class effrontery in daring to claim equality with the gentry’ (15). In its infidelities the play, I argue in Chapter 5, offers a topical, at times ironic commentary on Jane Eyre, addressing questions of gendered class, and imperial politics, and the terms of the Long Transition valorized in the novel. In literary history, Jenkin, an expatriate Jamaican, figures in the margins of the lives of more famous intellectuals and writers: pioneering engineer Fleeming Jenkin (her son), Elizabeth Gaskell (an acquaintance who helped her place fiction for publication), Vernon Lee (her protégée), and Giovanni Ruffini (the character of Lucy in his novel Doctor Antonio being based on her).7 In Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin (1887) Robert Louis Stevenson is condescending towards Henrietta Jenkin’s writing career: ‘Her novels, though they attained and merited a certain popularity both in France and England, are a measure only of her courage. They were a task, not a beloved task; they were written for money in days of poverty,

Introduction

7

and they served her end.’8 The anonymously published Cousin Stella ran to two editions. In discussing analogue as a form of adaptation and appropriation, Sanders cites contemporary cinematic examples: Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995), a reworking of Jane Austen’s Emma; Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), a reworking of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; and Michael Winterbottom’s The Claim (2001), a reworking of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (22–3). Evelyn O’Callaghan comments briefly on Cousin Stella in her recent compendious study Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939, but has not recognized it as a colonial analogue of Jane Eyre. I draw out the relation between the two novels in Chapter 6, showing that it is not ‘merely enriching’ for a reading of the analogue (230). That so much of the action of Cousin Stella overlaps the time frame of Jane Eyre suggests that Jenkin understood well the historical specificities of the earlier novel. I argue that, implicitly, for Jenkin the liberalism of Jane Eyre and its popular reach and influence are part of the legacies of the contests between colony and metropole over slavery and the Englishness of colonial identities. In a project that prefigures aspects of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Jenkin engages with many of the discursive fields of Jane Eyre I have outlined in earlier chapters.

1 Christianity and the State of Slavery

Postcolonial readings of Jane Eyre have often highlighted the historical occlusion of West Indian slavery in the novel. Plasa, for instance, argues that despite the pivotal and determinant role of the West Indies in Jane Eyre in terms of the narrative and economic fortunes of its major characters, Brontë’s text nowhere explicitly refers to the institution of British slavery or the colonial project with which, for the early Victorian reader, the West Indies would still, in 1847, be strongly associated and against whose distant horizon Jane conducts her metropolitan life. (Textual Politics 62–3) Penny Boumelha points out that by her reckoning there are ‘ten explicit references to slavery in Jane Eyre. They allude to slavery in Ancient Rome and in the seraglio, to the slaveries of paid work as a governess and of dependence as a mistress. None of them refers to the slave trade upon which the fortunes of all in the novel are based’ (62). Jane Eyre’s allusion to slavery in the seraglio is the most precise historical allusion in the novel. Indeed, the precision of detail is such that critics working with general schemes of slave and imperial history have not been able to identify or unpack its topical reference to an anomalous moment in the history of British abolition of slavery. In this chapter, I elaborate the generic and more broadly historical intertextuality of Jane’s Gothic narratives of identification with the slave. By doing so, I disclose further meanings of slavery and empire in Jane Eyre and the ways in which Gothic and heroic modes become a means, for Brontë and her characters alike, of articulating fraught racialized identifications and disavowals. 8

Christianity and the State of Slavery 9

Jane’s growth of religious feeling, which Barbara Hardy has influentially suggested is taken ‘for granted’ rather than demonstrated (66), is, I argue, grounded in her consciousness of the tensions between slavery and Christianity as they are played out in domestic and imperial spheres at a particular historical moment. Disconcerted by Rochester’s showering of expensive gifts on her and his ‘smile such as a sultan might, in a blissful and fond moment, bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched’ (JE 269; vol. 2, ch. 9), the betrothed Jane orders Rochester ‘to the bazaars of Stamboul’ to purchase his slaves. In resisting Rochester’s eroticization of her dependency on him Jane identifies herself with a missionary working among slaves, rather than as a member of his seraglio. ‘I’ll be preparing myself to go out as a missionary to preach liberty to them that are enslaved – your Harem inmates amongst the rest’, she avers. ‘I’ll get admitted there, and I’ll stir up mutiny; and you, three-tailed bashaw as you are, sir, shall in a trice find yourself fettered amongst our hands; nor will I, for one, consent to cut your bonds till you have signed a charter, the most liberal that despot ever yet conferred’ (269; vol. 2, ch. 9).1 Jane, speaking in June 1833, draws inspiration from the work of William Knibb, an English Baptist missionary working in Jamaica, who had been for a brief time charged with inciting mutiny among slaves during the 1831 revolt now known as Sam Sharpe’s Rebellion.2 The charges against Knibb were dropped but the vigilante violence of planters, which included burning down his church, forced him to leave Jamaica for England. There he campaigned for the abolition of slavery and his ‘evidence to the Commons committee on the extinction of slavery convinced Lord Howick, parliamentary undersecretary at the Colonial Office, of the need for immediate abolition’ (Turner 173). In June 1833 British parliament formalized ‘just and liberal’ measures to abolish slavery in Britain’s crown and chartered colonies in the West Indies,3 yet in July 1833 in the context of renewal of the India Charter Act it refused to interfere with the practice of what was termed ‘domestic slavery’ in the ‘harems of the Mahommedans and the zenanahs of the natives’ in India.4 Sir Robert Inglis noted that Parliament was ‘by a solemn engagement bound to observe all the rights of masters of families, whether preserved by the Gentoo [nonMuslim] or Mahommedan laws’.5 Captain Henry Bevan had reminded the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company that Indians ‘were guaranteed that all former usages and customs, both civil and religious, should be respected and protected in the same manner as when they were under the sway of the native governments’.6 In

10


Clause LXXXVIII of the 1833 India Charter Act the Governor General in Council was ‘required to take into consideration the Means of mitigating the State of Slavery, and of ameliorating the Condition of Slaves, and of extinguishing Slavery throughout the said Territories so soon as such Extinction shall be practicable and safe’, with ‘due Regard’ to the ‘Laws of Marriage and the Rights and Authorities of Fathers and Heads of Families’.7 The Clause was debated in the House of Commons on 17 July 1833. Several members asserted strongly that harems and zenanas ought to be exempt from anti-slavery provisions. Were they not, the clause ‘would be likely to throw the whole country into a flame’; failure to exempt such domestic spaces ‘was a wanton meddling with the prejudices of the natives’ that would have ‘the most disastrous consequences’, declared Cutlar Fergusson. Mr Buckingham opined that if harems ‘were interfered with, it would unite all classes against our Government’. Charles Grant reassured members of parliament ‘that the clause had no reference to domestic slavery, but only to predial slavery’.8 As in early-nineteenth-century official debate over the practice of sati, this discussion was organized, as Lata Mani points out, around ‘the question of the political feasibility of abolition’ of a customary practice anchored in religion ‘rather than the ethics of its toleration’ (15). Brontë is aware that any reform of ‘domestic slavery’ in the seraglio would have to take place on a household-by-household basis. Jane’s reference to Walter Scott’s poem Marmion (1808), a gift from St John Rivers while she is teaching at Morton, is often used to date the action of the novel in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.9 As Q.D. Leavis shows, a web of anachronisms is produced by such a dating (487–9). She comments, ‘The general confusion of dates and eras and fashions and facts is even more irrational than anything Dickens allowed himself, suggesting the timeless quality of the myth and day-dream. It is also the opposite of her sister’s practice in Wuthering Heights, where every date and fact coheres perfectly’ (489). Leavis’s argument has been influential.10 Jane, however, describes the work as a ‘new publication’ not a new poem (JE 370; vol. 3, ch. 6) and St John gives it to Jane on 5 November, a Guy Fawkes Day holiday. Both of these details indicate that Brontë is referring to the publication of Marmion in Robert Cadell’s 12-volume Poetical Works of Walter Scott, issued in 1833– 1834; the volume containing Marmion was issued in late October/early November 1833. (Scott had died in 1832.) In commenting on the gift, Jane engages with Byron’s attack on Scott over Marmion in ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ (1809), which is reproduced in the editorial matter provided by John Gibson Lockhart. In particular, she praises Cadell’s


memorialization of Scott’s genius in ‘one of those genuine productions so often vouchsafed to the fortunate public of those days I know poetry is not dead, nor genius lost’ (370; vol. 3, ch. 6).11 That Jane alludes, in the same year in the novel’s internal chronology, to an 1833 anomaly in the history of the abolition of slavery and to the gift of this new edition of Marmion indicates that her engagement to Rochester and teaching at Morton also take place in 1833. She arrives at Thornfield Hall aged 18 in October 1832, and returns there to rejoin Rochester on 1 June 1834, Bertha Mason having died in the autumn of 1833. According to this dating, Bertha Mason and Rochester married in 1819; Bertha was born in 1792, Rochester in 1797, and Jane in 1814. This dating is supported by the internal chronology of other Gothic allusions to slave rebellion, the first set of which occurs in chapters 1 and 2 of the novel. According to my dating, Jane’s response to the experience of confinement in the red room, punishment for railing against the tyrannical John Reed, takes place in October 1824. By this time, news of the August 1823 slave rebellion in Demerara and of several harshly punished incidents of slave unrest in Jamaica had reached England. Brontë associates the ten-year-old Jane with these rebellious slaves in several ways. Jane denounces John, following his verbal and physical attack, as ‘[w]icked and cruel’, insisting that he is ‘like a murderer – like a slavedriver – like the Roman emperors Nero, Caligula, &c’ (11; vol. 1, ch. 1). Jane subsequently characterizes this outburst (in which she makes public an analogy drawn in private, and based on her reading of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Roman History from the foundation of the city of Rome, to the destruction of the Western Empire) as ‘a moment’s mutiny’, like that of a ‘rebel slave’ (12; vol. 1, ch. 2). Brontë also has Jane identify with a ‘revolted slave’ who can ‘reason’ the injustice of her situation and brace her with ‘bitter vigour’ (14; vol. 1, ch. 2). Jane’s other self-identification in this chapter, linked with a personified Superstition that will win ‘complete victory’ over her, is with her image in the mirror, a spectacle of abject whiteness, signalling sinking ‘courage’ and a ‘habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression’ (16; vol. 1, ch. 2), the price of having been ‘[h]abitually obedient’ to John (10; vol. 1, ch. 1). Jane’s reference to Roman master/slave relations is not a sign of Brontë’s historical amnesia over West Indian slavery. On the contrary, an analogy between Roman slavery and slavery in the West Indies circulated in early nineteenth-century missionary discourse and in vigorous public debates over the compatibility of Christianity and slavery from the mid-1820s until the early 1830s. In pro-abolitionist discourse, slavery

12


was held to be ‘contrary altogether to the genius, the tendency, the doctrine, the example, and the precepts of christianity’.12 In parliamentary agitation in favour of abolition in May 1823 the anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Fowell Buxton controversially put a motion in the House of Commons: That the State of Slavery is repugnant to the principles of the British Constitution, and of the Christian religion; and that it ought to be gradually abolished throughout the British colonies, with as much expedition as may be found consistent with a due regard to the wellbeing of the parties concerned. 13 George Canning, Foreign Office Secretary, countered that there was no ‘special denunciation against slavery’ in Christianity, which ‘took its root amidst the galling slavery of the Roman empire’. He favoured a longer-term preparation of slaves for freedom through a ‘widening diffusion of light and liberality’ through Christian conversion, supporting his case by referring to Dr Paley’s analysis of the slow decline of ancient slavery under the ‘alterative’ influence of Christianity.14 Vocal West India planters and the pro-slavery lobby in Britain blamed the slave rebellions and unrest of 1823 and 182415 in large part on the circulation among slave populations of news of the terms of this parliamentary debate and of the amelioration measures that were eventually recommended to local legislatures. As Mary Reckord explains, The amelioration programme was intended to mitigate the severities of the slave system and introduce the slaves to moral and civic responsibilities. The proposal included the abolition of flogging for women and the regulation of all punishments, the promotion of marriage among the slaves and admission of slave evidence in court. Particular importance was attached to providing the slaves with religious instruction. In general, imperial authority extended only to recommending legislation to the island Assemblies. In the Crown colonies, on the other hand, it was constitutionally possible for the Colonial Office to draw up an Order in Council incorporating the desired reforms. (724) In the stridently pro-slavery paper John Bull, lent to the Brontë family by Jonas Driver (and described by Brontë as ‘high Tory, very violent’ [qtd. in Gaskell 117]), the spectre of murderous rebellion and ‘unprecedented atrocities’ on the scale of those in St Domingue was raised in warning


letters from various colonies.16 The British government was said to have ‘placed’ colonists on a ‘volcano’,17 possibly an allusion to Mirabeau’s comment on the planters of St. Domingo: ‘They sleep on the verge of a volcano, and the first sparks that burst from it give them no alarm?’18 These allusions to St Domingue confirm, as Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert has asserted, that the ‘Haitian revolution, the foundational narrative of the Caribbean Gothic becomes the obsessively retold master tale of the Caribbean’s colonial terror’ (234). David Geggus summarizes the significance of this revolution: Racial equality, the abolition of slavery, decolonization, and nationhood first came to the Caribbean with the Haitian Revolution. Between 1791 and 1803 the opulent French colony of Saint Domingue was transformed by the largest and most successful of all slave revolts. After twelve years of desolating warfare, Haiti emerged in 1804 as the first modern independent state in the Americas after the United States. For slaves and slave owners throughout the New World, the Haitian Revolution was an inspiration and a warning. (21) The four alleged insurrections in Jamaica in 1823–24 were brought before the British public again in 1826 when controversy raged in parliament, pamphlets, pulpit and press about miscarriage of justice in the trials of the rebels, and indeed about whether the incidents constituted even conspiracy to rebel.19 Charges were based mostly on overheard talk of rights and freedom. And 54 slaves were charged and convicted and 23 acquitted; 23 of those convicted were executed and many more were flogged. In Blackwood’s Magazine, read avidly by the Brontë children, slave rebellion is figured as an ‘approach[ing]’ ‘storm’ (James McQueen, qtd. in Lockhart, ‘West India’ 450; pt. 1), ‘bloody insurrection’, a ‘sea’ or ‘torrents’ of ‘blood’ (Lockhart, ‘West India’ 458; pt. 1), and flames.20 Fire, storm, black clouds, and blood are the predominant Gothic tropes in Rochester’s account of the night of deepest suicidal despair that marks the culmination of his Jamaican sojourn. The tropology of the account, as in literary horror more generally, works to ‘transform political struggles’ – here the 1823–24 slave unrest in Jamaica – ‘into psychological conditions’ (Halberstam 18). Enslaved people are figured by Rochester as ‘black clouds’ (JE 307; vol. 3, ch. 1); narrating his decision to return to England after discovering Bertha’s supposed madness, he remarks that ‘the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed, and the air grew pure’ (308; vol. 3, ch. 1). As I show in Chapter 2, Bertha Mason is

14


a figure not of the rebel slave, as Susan L. Meyer and Plasa argue, but of the ineducable despot, who creates domestic terror, unrest, potentially suicidal despair, and, in the larger body politic, open revolt. Rochester describes Thornfield Hall inhabited by Bertha as ‘this accursed place – this tent of Achan’ (300; vol. 3, ch. 1). In the Bible, Achan had ‘coveted’ and stolen spoils (a garment, money, and gold) from Jericho. The Lord speaks of the spoils as ‘the accursed thing’, and decrees that ‘he that is taken with the accursed thing shall be burnt with fire, he and all that he hath: because he has transgressed the covenant of the LORD’ (Josh. 7.15).21 The fire is represented as a cleansing. The allusion to Thornfield Hall as a tent of Achan housing the spoils of the barter of ‘good race’ (JE 305; vol. 3, ch. 1), Bertha’s dowry, suggests that its destruction by fire, Bertha’s death, and Rochester’s injuries sustained during it are signs of divine providence.22 In the contexts of the Demerara slave rebellion of 1823 and the Jamaican slave rebellion of 1831 non-Conformist missionaries were accused of inciting mutiny. The rebellions exacerbated planter suspicion of missionaries. In 1817, Methodist missionary John Smith reported to the London Missionary Society from Demerara that ‘almost every planter looks upon a missionary as one who aims at nothing less than the entire subversion of the colony’ (qtd. in da Costa 140). As Catherine Hall points out, the rebellions were ‘widely reported in Britain, partly because of the central involvement of missionaries in the events and the way in which they were held responsible by planters and colonists for the eruptions which took place’ (Civilising Subjects 85). Indeed the coverage of the rebellions in the Leeds Intelligencer – a newspaper taken by the Brontë family – focussed overwhelmingly on the charges against missionaries.23 Because of the alleged prominent role of Baptist missionaries as agents provocateurs, Sam Sharpe’s Rebellion in Jamaica, named after its black leader, is also known as the Baptist War. Sharpe himself was a Baptist deacon. The 1831 rebellion, Hall observes, ‘was organised by Christian converts who used the mission networks, took inspiration from the Bible, and claimed the missionaries as their allies. Sharpe proclaimed the natural equality of men, and refuted the planters’ claim that they could hold black people in bondage’ (Civilising Subjects 105). The details of the Demerara rebellion were widely broadcast in Britain in 1824 in the efforts to exonerate posthumously the Methodist missionary John Smith. He had been convicted in Demerara of inciting mutiny, and had died of consumption in prison on 6 February 1824 while awaiting the King’s clemency recommended by the court martial that had sentenced him to death. Summarizing Smith’s legacy, Emilia


Viotti da Costa observes that he had maintained that ‘God’s law was the supreme law’ (263); embraced ‘liberal’ ‘aversion to slavery’ (264); challenged the ‘myth of the benevolent master and contented slaves’; and inculcated in slaves a sense of their capacity for ‘dignity’, ‘autonomy’, leadership, and community (291). The publicity given to the persecution of him ‘triggered’ a ‘new emancipationist wave’ in Britain (287). As Cecil Northcott points out, ‘the trauma of the Smith case’ converted William Wilberforce and the Clapham evangelicals ‘to complete abolition’ (117). In public debate around the newly invigorated abolition campaign the Roman analogy was used to refute abolitionist claims that Christianity and slavery were incompatible. John Gibson Lockhart summarized the tenor of such claims: ‘the existence of slavery is an absolute violation of the precepts of the Bible, and, its toleration in any shape by any Christian country, constitutes a national SIN’ (Review 501–2).24 This was Patrick Brontë’s position on slavery by the late 1820s. Abolition is, he writes in a letter to the Leeds Intelligencer, a ‘reasonable and scriptural’ demand, a ‘responsib[ility]’ to God, and a ‘duty’ to England of ‘a christian and enlightened people’. It is, for him, integral to the reformation of an English nation according to the principles of Christian Enlightenment rationality (3), and in April 1830 ‘in common with Evangelicals all over the country, he organized petitions for the abolition of slavery to both Houses of Parliament’ (Barker 168). In November 1824 John Bull quoted from the Bishop of Exeter’s prefix to the last report of the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, in which he declared that Christianity ‘permits and sanctions slavery’, and that it ‘equally impresses’ on master and slave ‘their relative obligations, and inculcates equally the duty of kindness and compassion in the master, of good-will and obedience in the slave’.25 Missionary societies would routinely counsel missionaries going to the West Indies that they were to address the spiritual and not the civil or temporal condition of the enslaved. Their precedent was to be the apostles of Jesus who proselytized among enslaved people in the Roman empire and did not advocate slave rebellion. In the wake of Smith’s arrest the Wesleyan Methodists released to the press their general instructions to missionaries: your only business is to promote the moral and religious improvement of the slaves to whom you have access, without in the least degree, in public or private, interfering with their civil condition. On all persons in the state of slaves, you are diligently and explicitly to enforce the same exhortations which the Apostles of our Lord

16


administered to the slaves of ancient nations, when by their ministry they embraced Christianity Eph.vi.5–8, ‘Servants, be obedient.’ &c – Col.iii.22–25, ‘Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh,’ &c.26 This was published widely, including in the Leeds Intelligencer. Paul’s injunction in Ephesians 6 epitomizes the style of instruction recommended: 5 Servants be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; 6 Not with eyeservice, as men-pleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart[.] The Baptist Missionary Society counselled Knibb in its instructions to be similarly circumspect, so that ‘none will justly be able to lay anything to your charge’: The gospel of Christ, as you well know, so far from producing or countenancing a spirit of rebellion or insubordination, has a directly opposite tendency. Most of the servants addressed by the apostle Paul, in his epistles, were slaves, and he exhorts them to be obedient to their own masters, in singleness of heart, fearing God; and this not only to the good and gentle, but to the froward. (qtd. in Wright 31–2). On public platforms in Britain in 1832–33, however, Knibb abandoned circumspection and declared himself to be an ‘unbending friend’ to ‘slaves’, and that ‘[t]he contest which is now going on is a contest between Christianity and slavery’ (qtd. in Hinton 156).27 He spoke in the name of a God ‘who has made of one blood all nations that dwell upon the face of the earth’ (qtd. in Hinton 149).28 In December 1824, in the last of a set of four unsigned Blackwood’s articles Lockhart expounds his sense of the implications of St Paul’s divinely inspired advice to slaves. He argues that St Paul placed his hopes of their eventual emancipation ‘on the effects of the reformation of life and manners which he knew must mark the progress of a christianized population. He relied on the gradual increase of knowledge, virtue, and religion; on the natural consequences of these upon the industry of individuals in the state of slavery’ (689; pt. 4). This was unsurprisingly the position Lockhart himself adopted throughout his


series of articles. He presents himself throughout as a rational, widely read moderate. While he believes that slavery is an ‘abomination’ (652; pt. 2), he feels it is a lesser evil than abolition, and variously pillories and refutes the leaders among and the arguments of the abolitionists. He defends West Indian Britons from blanket abolitionist charges that they are devils incarnate: ‘monsters’, ‘the most perfect brutes – cannibals – savages – wild-beasts – so many incarnations of every bad, gross, and cruel passion that ever sullied the bosoms of the children of Adam’ (449; pt. 1). He mordantly endorses Trinculo’s sentiment in The Tempest that ‘[i]n England, a monster makes a MAN’ (449; pt. 1), meaning that charging colonists with monstrosity provided abolitionists with a spiritual and moral capital to galvanize public opinion and pity for enslaved people.29 Brougham, for example, in defending Smith in the House of Commons described ‘West-Indian society’ as ‘that monstrous birth of the accursed slave-trade’.30 In White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition David Lambert demonstrates that ‘the representation of West Indian slave societies as “un-English”, aberrant spaces that required metropolitan humanitarian intervention’ was ‘central to the hegemonic role of antislavery and to the forging of British metropolitan identity in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (12). Lockhart also exhibits a virulent racism towards black Africans and enslaved people of African descent. In an unsigned review essay in the Quarterly Review, for instance, the Roman analogy spurs him to reflect on the differences between ancient and modern slavery. In modern West Indian slavery, he insists, there is ‘a total and visible line of demarcation drawn by the hand of nature herself, between the master-race and the vassal – a distinct, absolute, immeasurable inferiority in regard to civilization’ (Review 503). Although Lockhart was the cousin of James Potter Lockhart, Jean Rhys’s slave-owning and politically active greatgrandfather,31 and though he appeals to family and familiar connections with West Indian Britons as grounds for refuting ‘wanton attack upon the[ir] moral character and feelings’ (‘West India’ 449; pt. 1), there is no extant evidence to suggest that his cousin was a colonial informant. Contrary to scripturally based justifications of slavery, Sam Sharpe, like Patrick Brontë, interpreted civil freedom of the slave to be a scriptural demand. On his speaking tour of Britain, Knibb reported to his audiences Sharpe’s words on the gallows, in which he differentiated between temporal and spiritual laws: ‘I have sinned against the laws of my country, and by those laws I ought to die; but I cannot see that I have sinned against my God. All I wished was to be free; all I wished was to enjoy that liberty which I find in the Bible is the birthright

18


of every man’ (qtd. in Colonial Slavery 4). Kamau Brathwaite lists the Biblical justification of freedom among several of Sharpe’s groundings of freedom as a right: freedom was a natural right (as heir of the French Revolution, Sharpe was literate); it was a divine right, willed by God to all Christians (Sharpe was a Baptist deacon); it was a slave right which could be fought for (the Haitian model), and it was an economic right (as part of the Industrial Revolution) which could be made good not through violence (necessarily or only) but through strike action: with-holding of labour (passive resistance) until the planters acknowledged their freedom. (‘Rebellion’ 81) Brathwaite, too, has drawn attention to the ways in which the Baptist missionaries Knibb and, later, P.H. Cornford appropriated Sharpe as a ‘Christian hero’. ‘[A]lthough he was a deacon in the Baptist church he was also’, Brathwaite insists, ‘unknown and invisible to the missionaries who thought they patronized his soul, a “ruler” in his own right in his own people’s church’ (‘Caliban’ 54). David Brion Davis points out that ‘many abolitionists and Christianized slaves’ (67) drew inspiration from Isaiah 61.1: ‘The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound’.32 The speaker of these lines has been construed to be, John N. Oswalt shows, a ‘synthesis’ of the Servant referred to earlier in Isaiah, who is an ‘agent’ of ‘God’s redemption’, and the Messiah (563, 323). ‘Jesus’ appropriation of these words in Luke plainly indicates that he understood himself to be the realization of the synthesis that Isaiah was describing in the Servant/Messiah. Christians in all the ages since have agreed. This is the prophet representing the Servant/Messiah in a climactic way’, observes Oswalt (563). Jesus is reported to have read the passage from Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth near the beginning of his ministry: ‘The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised’ (Luke 4.18). The meanings of ‘liberty’ and ‘deliverance’ were open to civil and spiritual interpretation. Knibb was pointedly questioned by parliamentary committee about whether he was able to maintain in his preaching to


slaves the distinction between ‘temporal’ and ‘spiritual’ freedom. He replied, ‘Whenever I have had occasion to speak on that subject, I have explained, that when freedom is mentioned in the word of God, it referred to the soul and not to the body’ (qtd. in Hinton 176). Davis cites an 1834 sermon on slave emancipation by Ralph Wardlaw in which he ‘interpreted the Gospel’s “proclamation of freedom” to be primarily a “freedom from Sin, from Satan, from Death, from Hell” ’. ‘But by 1833’, Davis adds, ‘these terms had become closely identified, at least in the minds of British evangelicals, with West Indian slavery’ (67). The Leeds Intelligencer reported on 1 March 1832 (with some caution to readers) an editorial in a Jamaican paper which ‘describes the manner in which the Negroes have been incited by the sermons of the Baptists: the latter, it seems, were in the habit of preaching that the time was come when the Negroes were to be free “pronouncing these words with emphasis, and adding, in a soft tone – from sin” ’.33 While Jane explicitly refers to Roman slavery in the opening chapter of the novel, the Gothic tropes she and other characters use to describe her rebellious self – ‘fury’, ‘picture of passion’, ‘like a mad cat’ (JE 12; vol. 1, ch. 2), ‘bursting with volcanic vehemence’ (400; vol. 3, ch. 8) – are commonplace in representations of the spectre of rebel West Indian slaves in this period.34 Roman slavery in the early Christian period provided the abstract justification for modern racial slavery. The occlusion of an explicit identification with the black slave may be underpinned by the kind of distinction, the ‘total and visible line’, John Gibson Lockhart makes between the ‘master-race and the vassal’ in modern slavery. Jane understands her rightful class expectations to be acknowledgement as English gentry. Roman and West Indian slavery are stitched together, however, through the contemporary tropes of slave rebellion and by the common emphasis on the cruelty and ill-temper of John Reed and of Bertha Mason; Bertha in managing an unquiet and unsettled household run on slave labour. This comparison implicitly links Bertha as a representative of a slave-owning plantocracy with the degenerate excesses of Caligula and Nero. Oliver Goldsmith characterized these as ‘furious passions, unexampled avarice, capricious cruelty’ and ‘prodigality’ in the case of Caligula (163), and ‘innate depravity’ (216), ‘appetites not only sordid but inhuman’ (223), ‘cruelties’ that ‘out-did all his other extravagancies’ (229) in the case of Nero. Rochester, too, will link Bertha with fabled Roman debauchery in describing her as his ‘Indian Messalina’ (JE 311; vol. 3, ch. 1).35 Goldsmith writes that Messalina’s ‘name is almost become a common appellation to women of abandoned character. However, she was not less remarkable for her

20


cruelties than her lusts’ (197).36 Jane’s assumption of the ‘Resolve’ of the ‘revolted slave instigated some strange expedient to achieve escape from insupportable oppression – as running away, or, if, that could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die’ (JE 14–15; vol. 1, ch. 2). These expedients were two of those adopted by West Indian slaves:37 three of the 1824 Hanover conspirators in Jamaica committed suicide and another attempted to do so. Jane marks out the foreignness of such means with the word ‘strange’ and, implicitly, acknowledges the criminality of suicide in a Christian state. Jane’s defiance of John has been read as an assumption of critical agency and, in late-twentieth-century terms, feminist voice-agency (Politi 60, Sharpe 39, Kaplan, ‘Heterogenous’ 183–4). In the novel, that voice-agency is racialized by Helen Burns, who provides a voice for the kind of New Testament theology that St Paul espouses as advice to servants. When Jane in conversation with the consumptive Helen justifies disobedience towards and rebellion against ‘cruel and unjust people’, Helen tells her that ‘[h]eathens and savage tribes hold that doctrine, but Christians and civilized nations disown it’ (JE 58; vol 1, ch. 6). In this scheme, disobedience and rebellion are, to borrow Elizabeth Rigby’s words in her famous review of Jane Eyre, a ‘murmuring against God’s appointment’ (591). Helen’s position mirrors that of missionary societies: ‘The gospel of Christ, as you well know, so far from producing or countenancing a spirit of rebellion or insubordination, has a directly opposite tendency’.38 Helen herself offers the child Jane a model of such Christian endurance. Jane and Helen enact their roles of ‘slave’ and ‘Christian’ most memorably after Mr Brocklehurst, deceived by Mrs Reed’s show of being benevolent mistress of her household, has separated Jane out from familial Christian community at Lowood as ‘an interloper and an alien’, a sinning ‘liar’. He orders her to stand ‘exposed to general view on a pedestal of infamy’ (JE 66–67; vol. 1, ch. 7). Helen walks past her and Jane finds in the ‘strange light’ in Helen’s eyes and in a smile that Jane as mature narrator characterizes as ‘the effluence of fine intellect, of true courage’, temporary spiritual inspiration to endure the ordeal: ‘It was as if a martyr, a hero, had passed a slave or victim, and imparted strength in the transit’ (67; vol. 1, ch. 7).39 The ‘spell’ is short-lived, however. Jane is soon overwhelmed by ‘grief’ and a feeling of being ‘again crushed and trodden on’ (68; vol. 1, ch. 8). Here the identification with the slave is as victim of false witness; her accusers exhibit class and racial prejudice, with race understood as family.


Helen’s consumptive pallor does mark her out as an example of extreme whiteness. Richard Dyer has observed that the ‘function of extreme whiteness’ is to make available ‘a space of ordinariness’, a ‘position’ that can claim ‘to speak for and embody the commonality of humanity’ (222–3). In assuming such a position in relation to Helen’s world-view, Jane speaks against the Biblical justification of slavery sedimented in the Roman analogy, which frames all subsequent references to slavery in the novel: If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should – so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again. Helen immediately characterizes Jane’s view as ‘untaught’ (JE 57; vol. 1, ch. 6). Like Mr Brocklehurst and Mrs Reed, Helen has faith in the alterative effects of a Christian education. Jane’s rival identifications in the red room, between the ‘revolted slave’ and an abject whiteness named Superstition, are also marked as a split between the modern and the archaic.40 To the young Jane, though, the spectacle of whiteness in the mirror seems ‘like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessie’s evening stories represented as coming up out of lone, ferny dells in moors’ (14; vol. 1, ch. 2). Jane’s Gothic imagination has been shaped by Bessie’s ‘remarkable knack of narrative’ (29; vol. 1, ch. 4), stories drawn largely from oral traditions that Brontë represents as archaic. By contrast, Brontë associates the reason of the ‘revolted slave’, albeit producing only a ‘transitory’ sense of empowerment (15; vol. 1, ch. 2), with modern Enlightenment ideals, which Robert J.C. Young summarizes as ‘a common liberty, equality and fraternity for humankind’ (30). The contrast between the modern and the archaic is underlined by Jane’s characterization of Bessie as having ‘indifferent ideas of principle or justice’ (JE 29; vol. 1, ch. 4) in her role of nurse (in which she holds what Anne McClintock has called ‘the power of social prohibition’ [92]), as well as in Bessie’s role as bearer of a working-class culture. That cultural influence, which is implicated through Bessie’s stories in the victory of Superstition in the red room, ultimately debilitates Jane’s health: the experience gives her ‘nerves a shock’ from which she continues to ‘feel the reverberation’ (JE 20; vol. 1, ch. 3).41

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The ‘precocious’ inspiration of the modern in childhood had its limits: it allowed Jane to name her situation ‘Unjust! – unjust!’ (15; vol. 1, ch. 2). As adult, Jane brings a more modern racialized understanding to bear on her childhood experience in the Reed family: They were not bound to regard with affection a thing that could not sympathize with one amongst them; a heterogeneous thing, opposed to them in temperament, in capacity, in propensities; a useless thing, incapable of serving their interest, or adding to their pleasure; a noxious thing, cherishing the germs of indignation at their treatment, of contempt of their judgment. (15–16; vol. 1, ch. 2) She acknowledges herself to have been for Mrs Reed ‘an interloper not of her race an uncongenial alien permanently intruded on her own family group’ (16; vol. 1, ch. 2). The adult Jane has absorbed the language of Mr Brocklehurst’s denunciation of her as a heathen, and of Rochester’s repudiation of Bertha Mason as having a ‘nature wholly alien’ to his, he being of ‘good race’, meaning family (305–6; vol. 3, ch. 1). Bertha has, he insists, ‘giant propensities’, which are realized in the ‘intemperate and unchaste’ (306; vol. 3, ch. 1). Jane articulates a grim vision of social relations in such language, relations that Cora Kaplan characterizes as ‘an unanswerable set of fixed antipathies’ bearing signs of an emerging paradigm of racial difference popularized by Robert Knox. This paradigm emphasizes ‘instinctual aggressivity and revulsion’ (‘Heterogenous’ 182, 175). Jane discloses the abjectness of her response to her heightened sense of the ambiguities of her class position through her shifting response to Gulliver’s Travels. After Jane’s release from the red room Mrs Reed relegates her to the company of servants, principally Bessie, and has her treated by apothecary Mr Lloyd, whom she customarily employs to treat ‘ailing’ servants, the Reed family being treated by a ‘physician’ (JE 19; vol. 1, ch. 3). This further blurring of Jane’s class position transforms the marvel and sense of scale she has imbibed as ‘facts’ from Gulliver’s Travels: ‘all was eerie and dreary; the giants were gaunt goblins, the pigmies malevolent and fearful imps, Gulliver a most desolate wanderer in most dread and dangerous regions’ (21; vol. 1, ch. 3). Jane’s imaginative mapping of the globe produced through middle-class access to books and literacy becomes permeated by the archaic and Gothic residues of a working-class culture racialized here as savage, and the modern place of which is properly abroad.


Colonialism, in Jenny Sharpe’s argument, is ‘the discursive field in which Jane’s struggle for self-determination is played out’ (29). In accounts such as hers, the exchange between the betrothed Jane and Rochester when she is disconcerted by his showering of expensive gifts on her and his ‘smile such as a sultan might, in a blissful and fond moment, bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched’ (JE 269; vol. 2, ch. 9) has assumed particular significance. Jane’s invocation of the harem, which, according to Joanna de Groot, ‘raises questions of male despotism and sexual licence which are in fact central problems in Jane’s relationship to Mr Rochester’ (52), is usually read as exclusively personal rather than also topical in its reference. The passage has been read as central to the grounding of Jane’s voice-agency in assertions of ‘moral’ and ‘racial superiority’ (Sharpe 49), the ‘Eastern allusion’ as ‘supplying the vocabulary for the sexual risks faced by the unattached Englishwoman’ (Perera 81). For Plasa it is a denial of the literality of slavery (Textual Politics 73), which he essentializes as West Indian and as based on racial hierarchy. Joyce Zonana has elaborated early-nineteenthcentury images of ‘Eastern treatment of women’ condensed in the harem and available to ‘feminist writers’ to criticize domestic male despotism in Britain (602). She assumes that like other women’s emancipists Brontë ‘unquestioningly perceives polygamy as sexual slavery’ (595). However, a perceived ‘trade in women’ for harem attendants was understood in Britain as integral to practices of ‘domestic slavery’ by the early 1830s, and was condoned by the imperial state. In evidence on slavery presented to hearings of the Select Committee on the affairs of the East India Company in 1831 and 1832, domestic slaves are understood to be those ‘employed only in the house itself’.42 Thomas Harvey Baber, Late First Judge, Western Division, Madras Territories, listed a number of ways in which people might become domestic slaves: persons who are the offspring or descendents of freeborn persons captured during wars; out-caste Hindoos, who had been sold into slavery under or by former Governments; kidnapped persons, brought by bingarries and other travelling merchants from distant inland states, and sold into slavery; persons imported from the ports in the Persian Gulf, in the Red Sea, or from the African coast; persons sold, when children, by their own parents in times of famine or great dearth; the offspring of illegitimate connexions, that is, of cohabitation between low-caste Hindoo men and Brahmin women, and generally between Hindoos of different castes, or within prohibited degrees of kindred; persons who, in consideration of a sum of money,

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or in discharge of a security for the payment of a debt, have bound themselves, by a voluntary contract, to servitude, either for life or a limited period[.] (551) In the evidence there is some acknowledgement of difficulties in applying the nomenclature ‘slavery’ to the voluntary contract, as well as to the arrangements parents entered into in times of desperate need, the features of which might also be construed as a temporary contract of employment. Such children earned their keep and their wages were ‘advanced to maintain’ the parents.43 A.D. Campbell, who had held ‘official situations’ in India for 22 years, testified that female domestic slaves ‘employed as attendants on the seraglios of Mussulmans of rank’ were more poorly treated than male domestic slaves: ‘they are too often treated with caprice, and frequently punished with much cruelty. Once admitted into the haram, they are considered part of that establishment, which it is a point of honour to a Mussulman to seclude from all communication with others.’ Such seclusion ‘too often precludes complaint, prevents redress, and cloaks crimes at which Europeans would shudder’.44 Baber commented that the domestic lives of East Indian peoples were generally shrouded in secrecy grounded in ‘watchful jealousy in all that regards their domestic economy’, yet stated that it ‘is almost universal with respect to female domestic slaves’ that they are kept ‘for sensual gratifications’. Domestic slavery, he insists, ‘must, at best, be but a life of pain and sorrow, and as such, as repugnant to humanity and morality, as it is to the principles of British rule’.45 (After the passing of the 1833 India Charter Act, the question of slavery in India was taken up in the 1830s and 1840s by Joseph Pease, George Thompson, the British India Society [1839–43], and the committee of the Aborigines’ Protection Society [Turley 127–8].) The emphasis on the vulnerability of the female slave attendant in the harem accords with Jane’s sense of the threat in Rochester’s erotic gaze. Charlotte Brontë, too, was familiar with what Nancy L. Paxton characterizes as Byron’s ‘treatment of the harem as a voyeuristic site of male pleasure’, ‘a [primarily] private domain where moral codes disciplining sexuality can be overthrown and sexual pleasures can be more fully enjoyed’ (52).46 Brontë would also have been familiar with James McQueen’s references to Indian slavery in articles in Blackwood’s Magazine in May 1829 and February 1830, both structured as letters to the Duke of Wellington, a particular hero of hers. He urges in the first of these articles that female Hindu slaves in Moslem households are commonly expected to provide two kinds of service: ‘laborious servitude’


and ‘sensual gratifications even such as his [their master’s] perverted and unnatural passions may impel his brutality to indulge’ (‘British Colonies. A second letter’ 650–1). While Rochester’s gaze seems to place Jane in a position analogous to that of a harem attendant, when she imagines the signing of a liberal charter – a reference, as I have argued, to the abolition of West Indian slavery – she identifies with the triumph rather than the suffering of the missionary martyr. This identification is consistent with what Davis calls the ‘idealization of the emancipation moment’ (69). To apply Barnor Hesse’s paradigms of the remembering of Atlantic racial slavery in the West, Jane draws on ‘abolitionist memory’, which characteristically ‘focuses on the heroic consecration of white liberators as defining the cognitive limit on the political memory of slavery’ (155).47 Such an emphasis is evident, too, in Knibb’s rousing abjurations, on public platforms in England, of retailing his ‘own sufferings’ in the interest of his ‘duty’ (qtd. in Hinton 156),48 obeying God’s command to ‘break the fetters of the slave’ exposed to ‘every cruelty which uncontrolled power and unbridled licentiousness were sure to call forth’ (qtd. in Hinton 154–5).49 As Hall notes, Knibb, in ‘speak[ing] for the African in England empowered himself by representing others’ (Civilising Subjects 113). Abolitionist memory also obscures the role of Christianity in the consolidation and justification of empire and slavery. George Lamming has memorably written of colonial migrants, sojourners, and slaves in the Caribbean: ‘they all move and meet on an unfamiliar soil, in a violent rhythm of race and religion’ (17). Jane’s identification with Knibb’s perceived example confirms English evangelical Christian agency, grounding her resistance to sexual seduction by Rochester, a danger acknowledged in her allusions to Danae and Céline Varens. These allusions implicitly position Rochester as a Zeus-figure, wanting to seduce Jane with a ‘golden shower’ of material wealth (JE 268; vol. 2, ch. 9), and as a recidivist ‘spoonie’ determined on ‘ruining’ himself in the ‘received style’ (140; vol. 1, ch. 15).50 Danae and Céline, too, are foreign women.51 Jane’s missionary identification heightens the drama of her will to resist sexual danger, and, as Diana Fuss observes more generally of identification, ‘names the entry of history and culture into the subject’ (3). While Jane refers to Eastern slavery, her topical historical reference is to West Indian slave rebellion.52 The identification rescripts the scene from a Gothic to a heroic emplotment. For Jane, as for Charlotte Brontë, there is no question of making a distinction between temporal and

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spiritual freedom in preaching liberty; these freedoms are inextricably bound together. Sharpe argues that Jane does not identify herself as a slave in order to express her desire for liberation, as she did when she was a child. Rather, she assumes the position of a missionary who will free others that are enslaved. Slavery cannot figure female rebellion because the slave in this instance is an Oriental woman who is passive and agentless. By positioning herself as a missionary, Jane empowers herself with the moral superiority of British civilizers at the precise moment that her own morality is undermined. In other words, an assertion of racial superiority discursively resolves Jane’s class and gender inferiority in relationship to Rochester. (49) Certainly missionary endeavours are founded on assumptions of cultural and racial superiority, yet Jane’s allusion to slavery is more complexly entwined in its historical moment. It reflects the centrality in the English national and racial imagination of the triumphal missionary campaigner for abolition. The allusion implicitly draws attention to the hypocrisy of the British state in protecting ‘domestic slavery’ in India while abolishing slavery elsewhere in its imperial spheres of influence, and links that hypocrisy with the indulgence of forms of gendered despotism in the private sphere in England. Seeing herself eroticized by her master as she imagines a dependent enslaved woman of the seraglio might be, Jane abjures this positioning by redeeming herself as Christian subject empowered to speak in the name of temporal and spiritual freedom. Even Jane’s reference to Rochester’s prospective recalcitrance in enacting the terms of a charter agreed to ‘under coercion’ (JE 269; vol. 2, ch. 9) echoes British experience of the West Indian plantocracy instructed to ameliorate the conditions of slaves. Jane’s allusion to missionary incitement marks an identification with masculine evangelical agency, but she resites her imagined missionary endeavour in the harem, a space not available to English men, and to which her gender would be a passport, making possible the sustaining fantasy of transgressive Christian empowerment. Jane’s allusion to missionary triumph, furthermore, draws together the two main generic strands of the novel that condition ‘reader expectation’. Peter Allan Dale characterizes these strands as romance and ‘spiritual pilgrimage’ (209), and Spivak as ‘childbearing’ (‘domesticsociety-through-sexual reproduction cathected as “companionate love”’) and ‘soul making’ (‘the imperialist project cathected as


civil-society-through-social-mission’) (‘Three Women’s Texts’ 244). Carolyn Williams points out that ‘Jane names God as the principle of separation from Rochester’ (235); during Rochester’s courtship of her, Jane, as maturer narrator, comments that ‘[h]e stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for his creature: of whom I had made an idol’ (JE 274, vol. 2, ch. 9). Dale labels this idolatry ‘apostasy’ (213). Jane’s period of engagement to Rochester is represented by Brontë as an ordeal in which she resists the sexual temptation implied in her acknowledgement of idolatry. Jane’s religious agency here enables a precarious resistance to Rochester’s sexualization of her that she characterizes as pagan, both by referring to his harem and in her rescripting of his lyric anticipation of erotic bliss as ‘suttee’ (sati).53 In a serenade he has sung of his bliss being assured by his ‘Love’ having contracted ‘to live’ and ‘to die’ with him (JE 272; vol. 2, ch. 9). Jane counters Rochester, reasserting an English evangelical Christian identity based on the ‘judgment’, ‘common-sense’, and ‘taste’ integral to a Christian household (JE 274; vol. 2, ch. 9), civility articulated, to borrow Hall’s phrase, ‘through a language of difference that drew on images of racial purity and sexual virtue’ (Civilising Subjects 17). The racial purity here is a reforming purification. These assertions of Christian civility instantiate Jane’s need for temporal and spiritual freedom, both of which have been jeopardized by romantic idolatry. In separating from Rochester, Jane acknowledges at the moment of crisis in her ordeal that her spiritual freedom (her possession of her soul) is grounded in honouring Christian law. To do otherwise is irrational, would be to obey the dictates of somatized excess of feeling in ‘veins running fire’ and a ‘heart throbbing faster than’ she ‘can count its throbs’ (JE 317; vol. 3, ch. 1). Jane here, as in her subsequent relationship with St John Rivers, insists implicitly that she owns property in what Brontë, in her phrenological discourse, terms Jane’s ‘faculties’ – in Carol Pateman’s terms, her ‘capacities and attributes’ (13) – and that, moreover, she controls their disposition. Jane’s and Brontë’s affirmation of this property relation illustrates what Ronald Thomas explains as ‘a deployment of the rhetoric of capitalism to represent the inner self’, a rhetoric which ‘clearly attests to the increasing power of the nineteenth-century bourgeois conception of the psyche as a commodity in a marketplace’ (74). On the night that Rochester tells Jane about his past in Jamaica and with Bertha, and begs her to be his mistress, Jane has a dream that reworks elements of the ‘fiery West Indian night’ Rochester has

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described, a Gothic rendition of slave rebellion. Jane’s dream opens in the ‘red-room at Gateshead’ (a site of childhood identification with the rebellious slave), and features ‘sable’ clouds (Rochester’s trope for rebel West Indian slaves). Here, however, a radiant white (rather than bloodred) moon takes the form of a maternal protective figure. This figure parts the clouds and waves ‘them away’, and, ‘inclining a glorious brow earthward’, speaks to Jane’s ‘spirit’, saying, ‘My daughter, flee temptation!’ Jane responds to this whisper in her ‘heart’, ‘Mother, I will’ (JE 319; vol. 3, ch. 1). Again the emplotment shifts from a Gothic to a more heroic mode, as Jane is fortified in her resolve to resist the idolatry that might lead her into sin. The voice confirms her earlier resolution: ‘him who thus loved me [Rochester] I absolutely worshipped: and I must renounce love and idol. One drear word comprised my intolerable duty – “Depart!” ’ (315; vol. 3, ch. 1). She has invoked ‘law given by God, sanctioned by man’, ‘principles’, against the ‘temptation’ of the moment when ‘body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour’ (317; vol. 3, ch. 1). In context, the advice of the motherly figure catches up Pauline injunctions to the Corinthians: ‘Flee fornication’ (1 Cor. 6.18); ‘my dearly beloved, flee from idolatry’ (1 Cor. 10.14). Christian civility is again articulated through images of racialized purity. Rigby’s denunciation of Brontë as an advocate of the ‘violat[ion] of every code human and divine’, a charge of an antinomian ‘tone of mind and thought’ (174), refuses to accommodate the force of such inner struggle in Jane, and her adherence to moral law. A tenet of antinomianism is that ‘humans were freed from the obligation to justify themselves by submitting to Moral Law; Faith was sufficient for salvation’ (Rix 109). Rigby quotes at length not from scenes of renunciation in the name of Christian moral law, but from the earlier scene of Jane’s desolation after Bertha has been displayed to the clergyman and wedding guests and she has ‘withdrawn’ to her room (295; vol. 2, ch. 11). Jane reports that she found ‘no energy’ to seek divine consolation by offering a ‘prayer’, ‘something that should be whispered’, words from Psalm 22, in which David, acknowledging his dependence on divine providence (‘I was cast upon thee from the womb’, 22.10), pleads of God, ‘Be not far from me; for trouble is near: there is none to help’ (296; vol. 2, ch. 11). Rigby reads this as ‘the picture of a natural heart’ that abjures divine providence and exhibits ‘an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit’ (172–3). At Moor House, as Jane helps St John prepare for his missionary work by learning Hindustani, she feels that his ‘influence’ takes away her ‘liberty of mind’ (JE 397; vol. 3, ch. 8). She describes her ‘mind’


as having been after his proposal of marriage ‘at this moment like a rayless dungeon’ (403; vol. 3, ch. 8); his plans are an ‘iron shroud’ which ‘contracted’ around her (404; vol. 3, ch. 8). The proposal does offer ‘revelations’ about St John: ‘The veil fell from his hardness and despotism’, and she ‘saw his fallibilities’ (406; vol. 3, ch. 8). The narrating Jane records that when she was most tempted to acquiesce in St John’s desire she ‘sincerely, deeply, fervently longed to do what was right; and only that. “Shew me – shew me the path!” I entreated of Heaven’ (419; vol. 3, ch. 10). Rochester’s call seems to show her a true path: ‘The wondrous shock of feeling had come like the earthquake which shook the foundations of Paul and Silas’s prison: it had opened the doors of the soul’s cell’ (421; vol. 3, ch. 10). As Carolyn Williams points out, Jane’s entreaty is ‘answered in such a way that her deepest wishes, not St John’s, are expressed as correspondent with God’s voice’ (240). Charlotte Brontë’s resolution of the novel seems, too, to place confidence in the kind of merciful providential design intimated in Luke 4.18: ‘The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised’. The passage condenses patterns in the metaphorical and metonymic language of the third volume of Jane Eyre. Before his realization that missionary work is his fit vocation, St John Rivers feels that his ‘nature’ and ‘faculties’, which ‘God’ and ‘heaven’ bestowed on him, are being ‘pent in with mountain’ (JE 356; vol. 3, ch. 4). His resolution to discharge the ‘errand’ that God ordained for him lifts him from a ‘wretched state of mind’: ‘the fetters dissolved and dropped from every faculty, leaving nothing of bondage but its galling soreness – which time only can heal’ (362; vol. 3, ch. 5). When his wedding to Jane is interrupted, Rochester acknowledges that ‘Providence has checked’ him (291; vol. 2, ch. 11). ‘Divine justice pursued its course; disasters came thick on me: I was forced to pass through the valley of the shadow of death’, the newly penitent Rochester tells Jane when they are reunited (446; vol. 3, ch. 11). ‘Of late, Jane – only of late – I began to see and acknowledge the hand of God in my doom. I began to experience remorse, repentance; the wish for reconcilement to my Maker. I began sometimes to pray: very brief prayers they were, but very sincere’ (446; vol. 3, ch. 11). Jane describes the maimed Rochester as ‘remind[ing]’ her ‘of some wild and fettered wild-beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eye cruelty has extinguished, might look as that sightless Samson’ (431; vol. 3, ch. 11). His call to Jane is

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part of a supplication to God: ‘I asked of God, at once in anguish and humility, if I had not been long enough desolate, afflicted, tormented; and might not soon taste bliss and peace once more’, Rochester tells her (447; vol. 3, ch. 11). The prospect of ‘Jane’s soft ministry’, as he names their marriage (445; vol. 3, ch. 11), causes him to offer thanks to a merciful Redeemer. As Paula Sullivan argues, ‘The partial restoration of Rochester’s eyesight seems to correspond to his partial restoration to a state of grace’ (194). With Rochester, as with Jane, ‘the chiasmic exchange of voices’ blends ‘conscience God’s will wish-fulfilment, and lover’s need all in one’ (241). Rochester’s term ‘ministry’ invites readers to compare the paths followed by Jane and St John. Jane ministers to Rochester and their child; St John’s missionary work in India is his ministry. Jane’s class-inflected consciousness of the tensions between Christianity and the state of slavery indicates a sympathy with the civil politics of reform in the realization of an enlightened Christian nation, as well as an affirmation of a twin demand for temporal and spiritual freedom. This sympathy enables a gendered assumption of English evangelical agency within a middle-class Christian household. The desire for civil and spiritual freedom acts as the voice of her liberatory conscience.

2 The Tropical Extravagance of Bertha Mason

Susan L. Meyer suggests that ‘[a]n interpretation of the significance of the British empire in Jane Eyre must begin by making sense of Bertha Mason Rochester, the mad, drunken West Indian wife whom Rochester keeps locked up on the third floor of his ancestral mansion’ (‘Colonialism’ 252). In Richard Mason’s deposition concerning the marriage of Edward Fairfax Rochester and Bertha Antoinetta Mason in Spanish Town, Jamaica, Bertha is described as the child of Jonas Mason, West India planter and merchant, and Antoinetta Mason, identified only as a Creole. In Rochester’s account of Bertha’s family the ‘germs of insanity’ are passed on by the Creole mother (JE 306; vol. 3, ch. 1). In this chapter, I retraverse late-eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century ethnographic discourses about white Creole degeneracy and situate Brontë’s representations of the Creoleness of Bertha and Richard Mason in relation to them, arguing that in Jane Eyre Brontë demarcates both femininity and masculinity in imperial and racial terms, while also blurring these categories. Brontë, I demonstrate, links the degenerate moral and intellectual character of the white Creole with the cruelties of the slave-labour system in Jamaica, and with historical Jamaican slave rebellions figured through metaphor and allusion. This figuring suggests that Brontë has carefully historicized the relationships among Bertha Mason Rochester, Edward Fairfax Rochester, and Jane Eyre. Recent finely nuanced and impressive readings of empire and the metaphorics of slavery in Jane Eyre have highlighted Bertha Mason’s racial ambiguity (Azim 175–83, Meyer, Plasa), or have been based on the assumption that she is white (Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts’ 249) or the ‘offspring of interracial union’ (Perera 99), ‘the racial Other incarnate’ (82). In an extensive discussion of Brontë’s representation of Bertha, Meyer develops two lines of argument: that Bertha is ‘imagined as 31

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white – or as passing as white – in the novel’s retrospective narrative’, and that she ‘become[s] black’ in ‘the form in which she becomes visible in the narrative’ (‘Colonialism’ 252). That form, she argues, is marked by racial stereotypes of the ‘non-white’ (‘Colonialism’ 254). Jenny Sharpe has researched part of the historical imparting of ‘moral, cultural and territorial content to Whiteness’ through a ‘triple conflation’ of ‘ “White,” “Europe,” and “Christian” ’ dating from the late seventeenth century (Bonnett 175). Drawing on Wylie Sypher’s research on an eighteenth-century British stereotype of the Creole, normatively white, she argues that in the early nineteenth century ‘the term creole was a derogatory name for the West Indian sugar plantocracy’ (45), and reads Bertha in relation to that stereotype of depraved self-indulgence, and Jane as an emblem of Christian feminine restraint. Before 1850, four meanings of Creole were in circulation in Britain: white people of Spanish descent naturalized by birth in Spanish America; people of non-aboriginal descent naturalized by birth in the West Indies; non-aboriginal people ‘of different colours’ (white or ‘negro’) born in Spanish America (Johnson and Walker); and white people of European descent naturalized by birth in the West Indies. The entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica; or a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Miscellaneous Literature (1815–24) records the first two meanings: CREOLES, a name originally given to the families descended from the Spaniards who first settled at Mexico in America. These are much more numerous than the Spaniards so called, and the Mullattoes, which two other species of inhabitants they distinguish; and are excluded from all considerable employments. It is now used in a more extensive sense, and applied to all natives of the West Indies. (Millar) Anthony Trollope draws out the implications of the second usage in his The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1859): ‘There may be white Creoles, coloured Creoles, or black Creoles’ (159). Only the first Britannica meaning is given in Encyclopaedia Londinensis; or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature (1810–29) and The Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1837); both Britannica meanings are recorded in The London Encyclopaedia; or Universal Dictionary of Science, Art, Literature, and Practical Mechanics (1829).1 In The Cyclopaedia; or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature (1819) compiled by Abraham Rees, Bryan Edwards’s The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793) is selectively cited to produce an account of Creoles as white people of European descent native to the

The Tropical Extravagance of Bertha Mason

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West Indies.2 Edwards refers explicitly also to Creoles of mixed blood (2:4). Rees’s Cyclopaedia and The Penny Cyclopaedia offer readers basic ethnographic accounts. The entry in Rees’s Cyclopaedia is quite detailed. Of white Creoles of Spanish descent it is said that by the enervating influence of the sultry climate, by the rigour of a jealous government, and by their despair of attaining that distinction to which mankind naturally aspire, the vigour of their minds is so entirely broken, that a great part of them waste their life in luxurious indulgences, mingled with an illiberal superstition still more debasing. Languid and unenterprising, the operations of an active extended commerce would be to them so cumbersome and oppressive that almost in every part of America they decline engaging in it. According to the cyclopaedia, Creoles are ‘sunk in sloth, satisfied with the revenues of their paternal estates’. A key source here is Don George Juan and Don Antonio de Ulloa’s mid-eighteenth-century A Voyage to South America. The entry then draws on Edwards’s account of the influence of climate on white Creole people, whose characters are not formed by the legal restrictions imposed by the Spanish government. Edwards, like Thomas Atwood in his 1791 history of Dominica, engages with and qualifies a range of then current ideas about the effects of climate on human character. Birth in the Caribbean supposedly naturalized character attributes brought about by ‘acclimation’ to the tropics. Nancy Stepan, who has researched the polygenist development of discourses of white tropical degeneracy after 1850, points out that in the late eighteenth century, scientists assumed that all human races belonged to the same species, and that environmental influences caused a ‘degeneration’ away from a primordial form to create the different racial varieties in the world. Racial biology by mid-nineteenth century was a science of boundaries between groups and the degenerations that threatened when those boundaries were transgressed. (‘Biological Degeneration’ 97–8) Those boundaries included geographical regions as well as social and moral stratifications. Popular and scientific stereotypes of the tropical degeneracy of white Creoles begin to map the emergence of a new racial variety. Both Edwards and Atwood write to counter what Edwards

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terms ‘gross’ ‘[c]alumnies’ against the morality of white people in the West Indies (8), calumnies to which they allude directly and indirectly. Atwood notes the ‘sobriety and chastity’ of the ‘English Creole women’, ‘a clear refutation of that too generally received notion, that women in particular, in warm climates, are given to inordinate desires; and proves to a demonstration, that such passions are not owing to the climate, but rather to a too warm constitution, which, aided by luxury, too often gives itself up to satisfying its own depraved appetites, against every sense of decency, and consideration of duty’. ‘The generality of the white women’ among ‘the loose wantons of the sex in the West Indies’ are ‘actually composed of adventurers from Europe, or of such as have followed the army and navy to the islands’ (212–13). Edwards suggests that the climate ‘displays itself more strongly on the persons of the Natives, than on their manners, or on the faculties of their minds’. (2:11) The men are ‘a taller race, on the whole, than the Europeans; but I think in general not proportionably robust. [T]hey wanted bulk, to meet our ideas of masculine beauty’ (2:11). Of Creoles he also notes ‘the freedom and suppleness of their joints’ which allows them to excel in dancing, ‘penmanship, and the use of the small sword’ (2:11). Their bodies acclimatized to the tropical sun, they have a ‘considerably deeper eye socket’ (to cope with glare) and ‘considerably colder’ skin (2:11). The ‘leading feature’ of white Creole character, he states, is ‘an independent spirit, and a display of conscious equality, throughout all ranks and conditions. Perhaps too, the climate itself, by increasing sensibility, contributes to create an impatience of subordination’ (2:8–9). Jane Eyre’s independence of spirit, consciousness of equality, and impatience of subordination are racialized by her doubling with Bertha. In this racialized doubling the possible effects of Jane’s ‘hot’ temper are, on a metaphorical level, linked with the effects of a tropical climate. Carolyn Vallenga Berman argues that Brontë’s ‘diagnosis of moral madness confirms that Bertha’s illness involves the failure of selfgovernment’ (131). Jane’s capacity for self-government is inculcated by her education. The climate, in Edwards’s view, encourages early intellectual precociousness, but ‘the want of proper objects for exercising the faculties’3 and ‘the contagion and enervating effects of youthful excess’ (a ‘propensity’ for ‘licentiousness’ ‘undoubtedly’ encouraged by the climate and masculine in Edwards’s context) mitigate against ‘mental improvement’ (2:14). Edwards explicitly attributes the ‘indolence’ of which white Creoles ‘are accused’ not to a sloth and timidity brought about by a hot climate, the argument of an unidentified writer on the relation of climate and character, but to ‘aversion to serious thought and


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deep reflection’ (2:15).4 Atwood provides a social rather than climatic explanation for such aversion, observing, for instance, that the practice of parents ‘sending their children to Europe for education’ means that there are ‘so few good school-masters, or other proper persons, to form the minds of youth in the English islands’ (215–16). The discourse of white Creole moral degeneracy could offer Brontë a type, which might be construed as perverse, in accord with James Cowles Prichard’s theory of moral madness (Grudin 147). ‘There is a phase of insanity’, Charlotte Brontë explains to W.S. Williams on 4 January 1848, ‘which may be called moral madness, in which all that is good or even human seems to disappear from the mind, and a fiend-nature replaces it. The sole aim and desire of the being thus possessed is to exasperate, to molest, to destroy, and preternatural ingenuity and energy are often exercised to that dreadful end. Mrs Rochester, indeed, lived a sinful life before she was insane, but sin itself is a species of insanity’ (Letters 2:3). Rochester’s description of Bertha’s household management echoes in many details Maria Nugent’s account of a visit to the home of General and Mrs Rose, in which she describes the ladies as ‘perfect viragos’, especially in their treatment of slaves assigned servant duties (107).5 Nugent was the wife of George Nugent, the Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica from 1801 to 1806. Brontë may well have read or heard read her A Journal of a Voyage to, and residence in, the Island of Jamaica, from 1801 to 1805, and of subsequent events in England from 1805 to 1811, issued for private circulation in 1839. Christopher Heywood has shown that Charlotte and Emily Brontë worked into Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights respectively a hidden local history of West Indian slavery connections, which included the Mason and the Sill families (‘Yorkshire Slavery’). Lady Nugent mentions visiting a Mrs Mason and meeting a Mr Sill. After a tour of the island Nugent writes, It is indeed melancholy, to see the general disregard of both religion and morality, throughout the whole island. Every one seems solicitous to make money, and no one appears to regard the mode of acquiring it. It is extraordinary to witness the immediate effect that the climate and habit of living in this country have upon the minds and manners of Europeans, particularly of the lower orders. In the upper ranks they become indolent and inactive, regardless of everything but eating, drinking, and indulging themselves, and are almost entirely under the dominion of their mulatto favourites. In the lower orders they are the same, with the addition of conceit and tyranny; considering the negroes as creatures formed

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merely to administer to their ease, and to be subject to their caprice. (131) For Maria Nugent the spectacle of excessive food and alcohol consumption by both men and women, including Mrs Mason, was ‘as astonishing as it was disgusting’ (78). She was especially offended by the behaviour at second Creole breakfasts. The sexual impropriety of young men – involving, she writes, ‘horrid connections’ and ‘ruin’ – causes her to reflect that Jamaica ‘is, indeed, a sad immoral country’ (223–4). Turley observes that within abolitionist circles it was thought that there were so few exceptions to the ‘state of debauchery and debasement’ of the colonists that reformers were fully justified in their condemnation of ‘the present state of corrupted morality and religion in the West Indies’. [A] great deal of antislavery argument grew out of a fundamental concern for proper order in the world. [Abolitionists] spoke out of convictions about a moral order sanctioned by Providence and a ‘natural’ order in which Providence was understood through the laws and qualities of God’s creation, human, animate and inanimate. (41, 44) Only in the descriptions of white Creole women does the face receive detailed attention. ‘The Creole women are characterized by the symmetry of their persons, the brilliancy of their eyes, and the sallowness of their complexions’, readers of the Penny Cyclopaedia are informed. Edwards attributes a ‘lax fibre, and a complexion in which the lily predominates rather than the rose’ (a complexion also noted by Atwood in ‘English white women in the West Indies’ [211]) to the effects of abstemious diet and the ‘calm and even tenour of their lives’ which does not ‘impel them to much exertion of either body or mind’: ‘To a stranger newly arrived, the ladies appear as just risen from the bed of sickness. – Their voice is soft and spiritless, and every step betrays languor and lassitude.’ They have the ‘finest eyes in the world; large, languishing and expressive’, read as an index of ‘native goodness of heart and gentleness of disposition’ (12–13).6 A planter, Edwards is wanting to convince his readers ‘that no women on earth make better wives, or better mothers’ (13); he focusses on physiological and intellectual acclimation to the tropics. In Brontë’s representation of Richard Mason many of these lateeighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century ethnographic details of white Creole physiology and character are mapped on his face. He visits


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England in April 1833, during parliamentary debate on the abolition of slavery. In mapping Creole character through physiognomy, Brontë necessarily has to draw on accounts of Creole women. Jane Eyre reads Richard’s character in minute detail from his comportment and physiognomy: His manner was polite; his accent, in speaking, struck me as somewhat unusual—not precisely foreign, but still not altogether English: his age might be about Mr Rochester’s—between thirty and forty; his complexion was singularly sallow: otherwise he was a fine-looking man at first sight especially. On closer examination, you detected something in his face that displeased; or rather, that failed to please. His features were regular, but too relaxed: his eye was large and well cut, but the life looking out of it was a tame, vacant life—at least so I thought. Jane remembers examining him further at dinner: But I liked his physiognomy even less than before: it struck me as being at the same time unsettled and inanimate. His eye wandered, and had no meaning in its wandering: this gave him an odd look, such as I never remembered to have seen. For a handsome and not an unamiable-looking man, he repelled me exceedingly: there was no power in that smooth-skinned face of a full oval shape; no firmness in that aquiline nose and small cherry mouth; there was no thought on the low, even forehead, no command in that blank, brown eye. (JE 190; vol. 2, ch. 3) Contrasting him with Rochester, Jane finds him to be ‘a sleek gander’ to Rochester’s ‘fierce falcon’, a ‘meek sheep’ to Rochester’s ‘rough-coated, keen-eyed dog, its guardian’ (190; vol. 2, ch. 3). His ‘shrinking’ ever closer to the fire ‘as if he were cold’ (190; vol. 2, ch. 3) implies that his tropically acclimatized Creoleness is carried in his body or on his skin. Meyer glosses ‘singularly sallow’ as ‘yellow-skinned yet socially white’ (‘Colonialism’ 252), and this reading opens her argument that Bertha Mason may have been passing for white. Sallow complexion, regular (symmetrical), yet too relaxed features, and large eyes are, however, purported physical attributes of white Creole women, and Richard’s character conforms to a stock white Creole type: the life expressed in the eye is ‘tame, vacant’, unsettled in focus; the want of power, firmness, thought, and command implies indolence, unexercised faculties,

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and ‘aversion to serious thought and deep reflection’. The absence of thought on Richard’s forehead, or, as Rochester calls it, his ‘feeble mind’ (JE 305; vol. 3, ch. 1), is mirrored in more detail in Rochester’s narrativization of the sane Bertha: ‘her cast of mind’ is ‘common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher, expanded to anything larger’; she gives topics of conversation ‘coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile’ turns (306; vol. 3, ch. 1).7 This seemingly paradoxical internal discord of scale – ‘pigmy intellect’ and ‘giant propensities’ – brings on madness in Bertha (306; vol. 3, ch. 1). After Bertha has attacked Richard, and Richard is left in Jane’s care, Jane notes his ‘unresisting’ and ‘passive disposition’ (211; vol. 2, ch. 5). The approving language of Louisa Eshton’s and Mary Ingram’s less discriminating assessment of Richard is normally applied to women in this period. He is ‘beautiful’, ‘charming’, with a ‘sweet-tempered forehead’ and ‘placid eye and smile’ (190–1; vol. 2, ch. 3). Louisa admires the smoothness of the features Jane finds ‘too relaxed’; the ‘frowning irregularities’ Louisa proclaims she dislikes (191; vol. 2, ch. 3), however, Jane finds sexually compelling and masculine in Rochester. A naturalizing stereotype of the colonial relation that entails an imperial and racial demarcation of masculinity8 is mapped across the character differences between English gentleman Rochester and plantocracy-class Creole Richard. Rochester is positioned as manly, active, and adult in relation to the feminized and passive Richard. In Jane’s eyes ‘the impetuous will’ of Rochester holds ‘complete sway over the inertness’ of Richard; the ‘passive disposition’ of Richard ‘had been habitually influenced by the active energy’ of Rochester; Rochester’s ‘word’ suffices ‘to control’ Richard ‘like a child’ (211; vol. 2, ch. 5). Rochester describes Richard’s former ‘attachment’ to him as ‘doglike’ (305; vol. 3, ch. 1), suggesting Richard’s recognition of mastery. Jane endorses Rochester’s colonial guardianship function in her farmyard analogy, in which Rochester is the ‘guardian’ dog to the ‘meek sheep’ Richard (190; vol. 2, ch. 3). When Richard defies Rochester’s will by hiring a solicitor to disclose the legal impediment to his marriage, Rochester mocks Richard’s ‘quivering limbs and white cheeks’, commenting that he would ‘almost as soon strike a woman’ as strike him (291–2; vol. 2, ch. 11). The colonial relation is naturalized by the binaries, and Brontë implies the perversity of Richard’s effeminate masculinity, which Rochester disavows. Rochester’s shows of bullying masculine force have a silencing effect on Richard (209; vol. 2, ch. 5, and 291; vol. 2, ch. 11). After Bertha attacks Richard, Rochester takes command of the situation, with Jane’s assistance, ordering Richard not


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to speak to Jane on ‘peril’ of his life (209; vol. 2, ch. 5). In the scenes of first aid and medical attention Richard’s voice murmurs (209, 212; vol. 2, ch. 5), is ‘faint’, and ‘shuddering’ (212; vol. 2, ch. 5), or is a groan (209; vol. 2, ch. 5). He utters a blasphemy in the church, crying ‘faintly’, and, in response to Rochester’s demands that he speak (‘what have you to say’), has to be prompted to greater articulateness by his solicitor, Mr Briggs, who urges him: ‘ “Courage speak out” ’ (290–1; vol. 2, ch. 11). He whispers in the scene in which Rochester displays Bertha, ‘We had better leave her’ (293; vol. 2, ch. 11). Jane is sexually attracted to the imperial masculinity that Rochester embodies for her, yet repelled by his despotic tendencies, which Brontë figures as the contaminating effect of Bertha. The boundaries of genteel femininity are blurred in Bertha. Rochester acknowledges that ‘no servant would bear the continued outbreaks’ of Bertha’s ‘violent and unreasonable temper, or the vexations of her absurd, contradictory, exacting orders’ during their time in Jamaica. The house she manages is not ‘quiet or settled’ (306; vol. 3, ch. 1). Intemperance, cursing, and unchastity mark insubordination to Rochester’s model of genteel femininity and prematurely ripen the ‘germs of insanity’ in Bertha. These ‘vices’ are normally, but not exclusively, attributed to men, the lower classes, ‘coloured’ women,9 or black people in early-nineteenth-century discourses about Creoleness. In her ‘moral madness’ Bertha acquires ‘virile force’ (293; vol. 2, ch. 11). The gender instability of Bertha, linked with her degeneracy, is also underlined by Jane’s description of her as a ‘clothed hyena’ (293; vol. 2, ch. 11), an image that resonates with the iconography of the hyena. In religious iconography the ‘hyena, which eats decaying corpses, has been used as a symbol of those who thrive on the filthy corpse of false doctrine. The ancients said that the hyena is able to change its sex, and used it as a symbol of the unstable man’ (Webber 371; Webber uses ‘man’ in a generic sense). In the relationship between Bertha and Rochester, Brontë maps other dimensions of the colonial relation, inflected across British marriage law. Bertha is figured both as despotic mistress to her household slaves and as enslaved and bestialized by her passions. In her madness Bertha laughs and largely makes animal noises. When she is displayed in her cell, she is first seen grovelling ‘seemingly, on all fours’ (JE 293; vol. 2, ch. 11); Rochester describes his life with a series of mistresses as a ‘grovelling fashion of existence’: ‘Hiring a mistress is the next worst thing to buying a slave: both are often by nature, and always by position inferior: and to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading’ (311–12; vol. 3, ch. 1).

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In Rochester’s narrative the bestialization of Bertha makes literal her degradation by passion, living familiarly with slaves and lovers,10 and her ineducability, which figures the uselessness in her case of the civilizing or, to use Spivak’s term, ‘soul making’ mission of colonialism (Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts’ 244) which Rochester tries to assume in the privatized domain of marriage. Rochester is more confident about the educability of the child Adèle, daughter of his French mistress Céline Varens; in his account he ‘transplanted’ Adèle to England, ‘to grow up clean in the wholesome soil of an English country garden’, and to be trained through an English education (JE 144; vol. 1, ch. 15). Bertha, however, is placed by Rochester in a windowless room, denied the prospect (the view) which Karen Chase argues ‘becomes a figure of the balanced self’ or personality in Brontë’s articulation of space (89). The degenerate Bertha takes on stereotypical attributes of a blackness outside the fold of the colonial civilizing mission, epitomized in lines from Edwards’s verse ‘Ode on Seeing a Negro-Funeral’: Transform’d to tigers, fierce and fell, Thy race shall prowl with savage yell, And glut their rage for blood! (2:82) Following a cue from Richard’s account of Bertha’s attack on him – ‘She sucked the blood: she said she’d drain my heart’ (JE 213; vol. 2, ch. 5) – Jane comes to see Bertha as vampire-like (284; vol. 2, ch. 10). This representation would accord with the suggestion in Rees’ Cyclopaedia that white Creoles subscribe to debasing ‘illiberal superstition’. In the context of the references to slavery in Jane Eyre, it is worth noting that on marriage Bertha’s body became the legal property of Rochester (Bodichon 119), and that confirmation of insanity entailed in law ‘loss of liberty and civil rights’ without the consent of the person certified to be mad (McCandless 85). Rochester’s confinement of Bertha sets a boundary of repudiation, marks a repression of his own racialized ‘contamination’ (JE 307; vol. 3, ch. 1), and attempts to bury ‘in oblivion’ the tropical degeneracy of white women (309; vol. 3, ch. 1) – degeneracy that suggests the ‘scandal’, as Sharpe calls it, that ‘ “whiteness” alone is not the sign of racial purity’ (46). Rochester represents his contact with Bertha’s depravity as a contamination of his being, the more begriming because Bertha is ‘called by the law and by society a part’ of him (JE 306; vol. 3, ch. 1), and carries her contagion inside him as a corporeal memory and as a monitory presence. Her ‘breath (faugh!) mixed with the air’ he breathed,


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the recollection of husbandly (sexual) contact ‘was then, and is now, inexpressibly odious’ to him, his ‘ears were filled with the curses the maniac still shrieked out’ (307–8; vol. 3, ch. 1). Her Creole unsettlement (shared with Richard) is infectious, transforming Rochester into a wandering ‘Will-o’-the-wisp’ (310; vol. 3, ch. 1), a largely absentee proprietor of his English estate; her unchastity is shadowed in his, although he says he ‘eschewed’ ‘[a]ny enjoyment that bordered on riot’ which seemed ‘to approach’ him to ‘her and her vices’ (311; vol. 3, ch. 1). He refuses cruelty towards Bertha (309; vol. 3, ch. 1), cruelty being a trait for which slave-owners were generally notorious. This humanitarian representation of self marks his adherence to a ‘culture of sensibility’ that developed through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Karen Halttunen explains that this culture was ‘part of a broader “reformation of manners” reshaping English social (and especially male) behavior in this period In the context of the bourgeois “civilizing process,” compassion and a reluctance to inflict pain became identified as distinctively civilized emotions, while cruelty was labeled as savage or barbarous’ (303). As in the ‘humanitarian reform literature’ discussed by Halttunen, Rochester’s truncation of details of the cruelty is a ‘self-conscious omission’ that ‘served primarily to highlight its prurient nature, by calling attention to the inescapable conviction that dreadful pain was obscene pain’ (329). Several instances of appalling cruelty perpetrated by or on the orders of slave-owning women received wide publicity in Britain in the late 1820s and early 1830s, and commentary on their actions placed the women well outside evangelical gender norms of femininity. The Anti-Slavery Reporter covered, for example, the cases of cruelty towards the slaves Kate (1829), Eleanor Mead (1830), Kitty Hilton (1830), and Catherine Whitfield and Ann King (1832).11 Under the sub-heading ‘Illustration of Jamaica Society and Manners’, for instance, The Anti-Slavery Reporter outlines Mrs Earnshaw’s treatment of her elderly slave Eleanor Mead: Mrs. Earnshaw, who is described by some as a lady of humanity and delicacy, having taken offence at something which this slave had said or done, in the course of a quarrel with another slave, ordered her to be stripped naked, prostrated on the ground, and in her presence caused the male driver to inflict upon her bared body fifty-eight lashes of the cart whip. One of the persons ordered to hold her prostrate during this punishment, was her own daughter Catherine. When one hip had been sufficiently lacerated in the opinion of Mrs. Earnshaw, she told the driver to go round and flog the other

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side. On rising up after the infliction, the woman proceeded to pull down her clothes which had been raised up towards her shoulders. Mrs. Earnshaw would not permit her to do so, but ordered her to be conveyed in her naked and exposed state, by two men, to the bilboes, she herself walking behind till she reached the bilboes, and had her feet fastened in them. (345) Eleanor Mead and her daughter Catherine were punished severely again after escaping and complaining to the Custos over this treatment, and Mead was ‘arraigned for an assault on her overseer, and for refusing to do the duty of the estate’ (‘Case of Eleanor Mead’ 482). As Diana Paton points out, anti-slavery reportage of the ‘exposure of the female body entailed in flogging’ risks a ‘voyeuristic’ tone (171). The AntiSlavery Reporter cited the stinging criticism of Mrs Earnshaw’s standards of ‘delicacy’, ‘humanity’, and ‘modesty’ in the Jamaica Watchman (345), and itself refers to ‘the grossness of manners, and the perfect hebetude of feeling, even in ladies, which result from the every day practices of slavery’ (‘Case of Eleanor Mead’ 481). The ‘disgusting effects’ of plantation slavery are said to have turned the West Indies ‘into a loathsome Lazar-or [sic] rather Charnel-house’ (‘Illustration’ 345). The Anti-Slavery Reporter noted that Mrs Earnshaw was driven by ‘extremes’ of ‘the passion of jealousy’, as Eleanor Mead had ‘cohabited’ with Mr Earnshaw during his lifetime, as a slave woman ‘scarcely’ being in a position to dare to ‘resist the desires of her master’ (‘Case of Eleanor Mead’ 486). Mead’s demeanour in court was described in the proceedings as ‘a personification of the passion of Hate, and, from what she publicly evinced in the court, she seems not to be imbued with the most distant feeling of generosity’ (485). The material was also publicized through the issue of a pamphlet West Indian Humanity: II. Case of Eleanor Mead (1830).12 According to the pro-slavery lobby, as I indicated in Chapter 1, the publicity surrounding such cases of cruelty unfairly produced a stereotype of the colonial monster, and placed colonists outside the community of Englishness or Britishness. I cite this case in part because of Emily Brontë’s use of the name Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, a narrative organized around themes of the extremes of jealousy and hate, and, as Heywood has shown, animated by an interest in Yorkshire connections with West Indian plantation slavery (Appendix C). Meyer maintains that Brontë ‘represses the history of British colonial oppression and, in particular, British enslavement of Africans, by marking all aspects of oppression “other” – non-British, non-white, the result of a besmirching contact with “dark races” ’ (‘Colonialism’ 262).


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James Buzard reads Brontë’s work as a forerunner of late-nineteenthcentury Imperial Gothic in which Britain is ‘alarmingly open to penetration by alien, even demonic forces that insinuate themselves into the fiber of British being’ (449). In Brontë’s representation of Rochester the contaminating native ‘other’ is the degenerate white Creole. Bertha’s despotism as slave-owner is mirrored in the character of the haremowning ‘oriental despot’ which Brontë suggests Rochester assumes in playing out his sexual desire for Jane. An alternative Caribbean model of masculine sexual depravity – the planter sexually involved with ‘mulatto favourites’ or slaves – is unspoken in the text. Bertha’s Jamaican lovers are seemingly unspeakable in Rochester’s narrative. In Rochester’s retrospective account of his experience of Jamaica, blood is a common motif in the intertwined Gothic narratives of ‘good race’ and of colonial horror. And here, as Julia Kristeva more generally observes, ‘blood, as a vital element, also refers to women, fertility, and the assurance of fecundation. It thus becomes a fascinating semantic crossroads, the propitious place for abjection where death and femininity, murder and procreation, cessation of life and vitality all come together’ (96). In Rochester’s Gothic narrative of his marriage, his father, upholding the principle of primogeniture favouring the oldest son Roland, barters his second son’s ‘good race’ in exchange for a sizeable dowry (JE 305; vol. 3, ch. 1). That ‘good race’, glossed also as ‘an old name’ (311; vol. 3, ch. 1), is in peril of defilement through familiar contact with Bertha Mason. The word ‘race’ here encompasses the social standing and reputation of family (birth) and bloodline. Robert Knox’s view of the West Indies was that ‘[w]ithout the constant inflow of “fresh European blood”, infertility, sickly offspring, and moral degeneration were the inevitable issue’ (Livingstone 418).13 Judith Halberstam has suggested that the Gothic text ‘plays out an elaborate skin show’. ‘Skin’, she argues, becomes a kind of metonym for the human; and its color, its pallor, its shape mean everything within a semiotic of monstrosity. Skin houses the body and it is figured in Gothic as the ultimate boundary, the material that divides the inside from the outside. Slowly but surely the outside becomes the inside and the hide no longer conceals or contains, it offers itself up as text, as body, as monster. (6–7) What becomes epidermalized in the swollen and discoloured features of Bertha as she, in Brontë’s representation, crosses from the human to the animal is the moral depravity associated with the dissolute white Creole. As in other Gothic texts, ‘visual recognition’, here through morally

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legible physiognomy, is ‘the most important code in the narrative of monstrosity’ (Halberstam 39). Bertha, too, functions as a metonym for the desperate capitalization of the second son under the system of primogeniture, of which Mary Wollstonecraft asks in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, ‘Who can recount all the unnatural crimes [against “natural parental affection”] which the laudable, interesting desire of perpetuating a name has produced?’ (22). Brontë uses primogeniture as the source of the ‘[f]amily troubles’, which Mrs Fairfax urges as the cause of Rochester’s alienation from his father and brother (JE 127; vol. 1, ch. 13). Primogeniture was central to conservative understandings of English social stability, by comparison with revolutionary France that abolished the system. Thomas Paine cites Edmund Burke’s praise for primogeniture: ‘It is the standing law of our landed inheritance; and which, without question, has a tendency, and I think a happy tendency to preserve a character of weight and consequence’ (qtd. in Paine 206). Paine urges that primogeniture ‘is the law against every other law of nature Aristocracy has never more than one child. The rest are begotten to be devoured. They are thrown to the cannibal for prey, and the natural parent prepares the unnatural repast’ (48). He sets aristocratic inheritance through primogeniture against a meritocratic individualism, in his own case based on education, which his parents faced difficulties in providing for their son (206). In Revue des deux Mondes, the reviewer Eugène Forçade writes of Jane Eyre: ‘In England the old order still exists The political, colonial and mercantile activities of the English people, that spirit of enterprise that takes AngloSaxons to every corner of the world, do it is true, redress, for men, the effects of the law of primogeniture. It is not quite the same for women; they have not the same means of winning a place in the sun’ (Allott 102). While Brontë shows the way in which primogeniture corrupts and damages members of the upper class, she does not urge reform or abolition of the practice of primogeniture, and Jane and Rochester have only one child, a son, so questions of how the couple might deal with issues of division of inheritance do not arise. Rochester’s father’s prejudice in favour of primogeniture, and the ‘painful position’ he places his second son in ‘for the sake of making his fortune’ (JE 127; vol. 1, ch. 13), as Mrs Fairfax calls it, do not tend ‘to preserve a character of weight and consequence’ pace Burke. Rochester explains to Jane his arranged marriage with Bertha Mason: ‘my father was an avaricious, grasping man being so, 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


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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’ (304; vol. 3, ch. 1). The implication is that primogeniture has fed and legitimized Rochester’s father’s corruption. Rochester’s unsettled life, the restlessness fermented by the implications of his arranged marriage to Bertha Mason, makes him, in his own eyes, a ‘Will-o’-the-wisp’, pursuing ‘wanderings as wild as those of the Marsh-spirit’ (310; vol. 3, ch. 1). He characterizes himself to Jane as ‘a trite commonplace sinner’ ‘owing rather to circumstances than’ a ‘natural bent’ (135; vol. 1, ch. 14). Reviewers who picked up on this distinction interpreted a ‘natural bent’ to sin as a ‘corrupt heart’.14 Writing specifically about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but making points with a wider nineteenth-century resonance, Franco Moretti suggests that the ‘monster is a historical product, an artificial being: but once transformed into a “race” he re-enters the immutable realm of Nature. He can become the object of an instinctive, elemental hatred; and “men” need this hatred to counterbalance the force unleashed by the monster’ (86). Rochester’s repudiation of Bertha’s monstrosity and its contaminations – signs of morally extreme whiteness – enables him to occupy a place of ordinary humanity, of upper-class English manliness, by eschewing the cruelty, ‘debauchery’, ‘enjoyment that bordered on riot’ (JE 311; vol. 3, ch. 1), and infamy he associates with her. Rochester represents his prolific abomination of Bertha as a fastidious and human desire to be cleansed. He will sparingly use the name Bertha Mason (denying her his patronym) as a sign of legal impediment to a marriage or sexual relationship with Jane. Marked implicitly by Rochester as bad ‘race’, Bertha becomes ‘the ghastliness of living death’, ‘fiend’, ‘mad-woman’, ‘demon’ (300; vol. 3, ch. 1), ‘the maniac’ (300, 308; vol. 3, ch. 1), ‘[t]hat woman’ (308; vol. 3, ch. 1), ‘wild beast’, ‘goblin’ (309; vol. 3, ch. 1), ‘thing’, ‘black and scarlet visage’, ‘[t]he lunatic’ (309–10; vol. 3, ch. 1), ‘Indian Messalina’ (311; vol. 3, ch. 1). In hindsight Brontë concedes to W.S. Williams on 4 January 1848: ‘It is true that profound pity ought to be the only sentiment elicited by the view of such degradation, and equally true is it that I have not sufficiently dwelt on that feeling; I have erred in making horror too predominant’ (Letters 2:3). Brontë’s concession illustrates an aspect of the ‘gendered transformation of manners’ effected by the rise of sentimentality and sensibility in the late eighteenth century: ‘Sensibility was endemic amongst women of the middle station of life: yet such women also had to exercise constant vigilance in order to maintain this sensibility’ (Ellis 27). ‘The culture of sensibility’, Halttunen explains, ‘steadily

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broadened the arena within which humanitarian feeling was encouraged to operate, extending compassion to animals and to previously despised types of persons including slaves, criminals and the insane’ (303). Brontë allows that as author she has lapsed from the sentimental propriety of discoursing publicly on a character type suited to placement as pitiful object. Halberstam observes that the ‘power of literary horror lies in its ability to transform political struggles into psychological conditions and then to blur the distinction between the two’ (18). In Rochester’s narrative, West Indian slave rebellion, anti-slavery agitation in Britain, and British government recommending of amelioration measures to local West Indian legislatures coalesce in his figuration of the psychological extremity of suicidal impulse to which he is driven by his hellish marriage and the passing of this crisis. The blurring of the distinction between political and psychological conditions is effected by the inscription of two Gothic staples – the storm and the mysterious voice – as a moralized landscape in a ‘Gothic psychodrama’ (Milbank 153). Rochester’s narrative of his tropical sojourn begins in the realm of realism, moving into a highly subjective Gothic register to articulate its ‘abominable details’ (JE 306; vol. 3, ch. 1). Those details culminate in his account of a ‘fiery West-Indian night’ in a world ‘quivering with the ferment of tempest’. As I noted in Chapter 1, representation of slave unrest in terms of cataclysmic natural images was a commonplace during the 1820s and 1830s. Prospective destruction of life and property is projected in Rochester’s narrative as fiery and bloody weather conditions. In the tropological scheme the storm figures the crisis of open rebellion, and the ensuing calm the ‘refresh[ing]’ and growing ‘pure’ (JE 308; vol. 3, ch. 1) of the colonial body politic by release of anger and brutal suppression of revolt. Enslaved people, themselves, seem to be figured in Rochester’s narrative as ‘black clouds’ (307; vol. 3, ch. 1). The representation of the night compresses the terror Bertha wreaks (and Rochester’s superficial release from it) and the history of the 1823 slave rebellions and unrest, articulating the second tropologically, projecting them through the mind of the demoralized and suicidal Rochester. In this projection it is as if the island itself is convulsed to selfdestruction by the terror of Bertha. ‘[I]t was a fiery West-Indian night’, Rochester relates, one of the description that frequently precede the hurricanes of those climates the sea rumbled dull like an earthquake—black clouds were casting up over it; the moon was setting in the waves, broad


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and red, like a hot cannonball—she threw her last bloody glance over a world quivering with the ferment of tempest. A wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through the open casement: the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed, and the air grew pure. The sweet wind from Europe was still whispering in the refreshed leaves, and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious liberty: my heart, dried up and scorched for a long time, swelled to the tone, and filled with living blood. (307–8; vol. 3, ch. 1) The voice of Hope, a consolation of ‘true Wisdom’ (308; vol. 3, ch. 1), advises him to return to Europe, to liberate himself by secreting his wife Bertha and denying his connection with her. The moralized and psychologized landscape does act to displace to a large extent the horror of slave unrest, psychic energy being transferred to abomination of Bertha as hell. The terror of slave unrest is symbolized in the period of the novel by the firing of houses and property, rape, and murder. At the level of the psychodrama Rochester’s description of his heart as ‘swell[ing]’ to the tone of thunderous liberty and ‘fill[ing]’ with ‘living blood’ (JE 308; vol. 3, ch. 1) resonates with his characterization of his marriage to Bertha as the ghastliness of living death. At the level of encrypted political struggle the description more critically implies a vampiric relation to the ‘bloody’ colonial body politic that recuperates a sense of manliness. The 1823–24 revolts in Jamaica were said in legal terms to have taken the form of ‘rebellious conspiracy’ and ‘other crimes’. They were localized in the parishes of St Mary, St George, and St James, although a ‘general spirit of rebellion’ was noted in the House of Commons.15 In the 1826 debate over miscarriage of justice in the trials of the rebels, slavery is represented as an ‘accursed system’ by the Solicitor-General.16 Rochester’s Gothic references to slave rebellion in Jamaica in 1823 link Bertha’s despotism and degeneracy causally with insurrection. In 1823, despite rumours of the abolition of slavery, the British amelioration measures actually recommended against cruelty – a prohibition on the flogging of women and the use of the whip in the field – and promoted Christian living among slaves. News of amelioration measures relayed largely through word of mouth and gossip brought slaves, Clinton V. Black argues, ‘to the conclusion that certain benefits conferred on them by Britain were being withheld, and this led to unrest and open revolt, especially in Guiana [the Demerara uprising] and Jamaica’ (104). A personified Hope shows Rochester the way to ameliorate his condition, and more fancifully that of slaves, by incarceration of the

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contagious Bertha, the depraved representative of the plantocracy, who sullies the name of an English family (a stock trope of the relation between England and its colonies). He tries to contain her in England amidst the relics of bygone fashions on the third storey of Thornfield Hall, and to extricate himself from the taint of her contagious despotism he carries within him. Bertha figures not just the degenerative effects of self-indulgence, as Sharpe suggests she does (47). Rochester is also haunted by the horror Bertha represents. ‘To live, for me, Jane, is to stand on a crater-crust which may crack and spue fire any day’, he says after Richard Mason’s visit (JE 216; vol. 2, ch. 5). The mere announcement of Richard Mason’s name on his first visit is enough to turn his complexion ‘whiter than ashes’ and to make his ‘tone’ in enunciating ‘Mason! – the West Indies!’ sound to Jane like that of ‘a speaking automaton’ (203; vol. 2, ch. 4). Meyer associates Bertha with the Maroons, runaway slaves who waged guerilla warfare against Caribbean plantocracies (‘Colonialism’ 252), an interpretive move encouraged by Brontë’s ‘deployment of a metaphorics of slavery as a way of representing forms of domestic oppression’ ‘created by gender and class’ in Britain (Plasa, Textual Politics 63), but colonial discontent and ‘rebellion’ during the early nineteenth century before full emancipation of slaves occurred across all British Caribbean colonies (mostly in 1838) did not only take the form of slave revolts. The letter of the law, for example, was used to assert the rights of planters (as they saw them). Local legislatures (empowered to make local laws) often failed to enact amelioration measures directed by the British government. Viscount Goderich, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, wrote to Sir E.J. Murray MacGregor, the Governor of Dominica, on 10 December 1831, referring tersely to ‘the many earnist [sic] appeals upon this subject [the amelioration of slavery] which have been addressed to the reason, and discretion, of the colonial Legislatures’, and observing that ‘His Majesty’s present advisers feel that the language of admonition has been exhausted’, that admonitions were ‘more than once rejected without even the forms of respect’, that efforts to educate the legislatures through comment on the laws that they passed had met with scant success, and that West India colonists evinced an ‘insensibility to the influence of Public Opinion in the mother Country’ in ‘favour of the Slaves’ (Goderich). Thomas Mason – owner of Content Hall in Jamaica and identified by Captain Oldrey, a former Special Magistrate in the colony, as the leader of the pro-slavery party opposed to the apprenticeship system – used the letter of colonial law in 1835 to launch three vexatious legal actions against Oldrey for trespass (Great Britain,


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Reports from Select Committees 275–84). The Special Magistrates could hear complaints apprentices made against their masters. From July to August 1837 the Legislative Council of Dominica, the upper house, of which James Potter Lockhart, Jean Rhys’s great-grandfather, had been President for most of the 1830s, took umbrage at Lieutenant-Governor Light’s poorly framed, technically illegal instruction to Special Magistrates ‘forbidding them to use the lash [on men] as a Stimulus to labor or as a punishment’ (Colebrooke). The Council responded by staying (temporarily) all legislative proceedings in Dominica, and this at a time when reforms of various kinds were being pressed on the colony. Vigilante behaviour on the part of planters in the wake of the Christmas 1831 slave rebellion in Jamaica included chapels being burnt, missionaries being set upon and persecuted, and a ‘Klu Klux Klan-like Colonial Church Union’ being established (Brathwaite, ‘Rebellion’ 96). Hall suggests that this was ‘in effect a white planter rebellion’ (‘Rule of Difference’ 119). If Bertha is a ‘figure for the very literality’ of colonialism (Plasa, Textual Politics 74), she stands for the domestic excesses of a recalcitrant despotism, rather than the ‘ “rebel” or “revolted slave” ’, as Plasa suggests she does (74). In the scene of Rochester and Jane’s interrupted wedding, Richard has recourse to the letter of the law to assert Bertha’s right in marriage. A solicitor reads Richard’s announcement of an impediment to the marriage. Brontë emphasizes in the scene that Richard is inclined to hide behind the letter of the law and the body of his solicitor, fearing a personal confrontation with the stronger Rochester. Bertha acts occasionally as Rochester’s double, a sign of the uncontainable violence of his desires, and its implications. Bertha breaks out of her cell at the moments when her taint shows itself in Rochester’s relations with the governess in his employ, Jane, in the over-familiarity of telling her about his affair with Céline Varens, in bigamous wedding preparations, and in his ‘quite savage’ disappointment at losing Jane to the claims of her conscience (427; vol. 3, ch. 10). To use Plasa’s useful distinction between the literal and the metaphorical, Bertha has a ‘literal presence as a character’ and occasionally acts, too, as a ‘metaphorical expression’ of Rochester’s violence (Textual Politics 61).17 Bertha’s rending of and trampling on Jane’s bridal veil symbolically prefigures rape, also hinted at in Jane’s sense of Bertha’s vampire-like features (JE 284; vol. 2, ch. 10). (She identifies the vampire as a ‘foul German spectre’ [284; vol. 2, ch. 10].) Had Rochester’s first marriage been disclosed after the consummation of his bigamous marriage to Jane, the consummation might have been refigured as a rape procured by false inducement

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to sex. In Meyer’s reading of Jane Eyre the scene in which the veil is torn and trampled is the one in which the ‘topoi of racial “otherness” ’ (‘Colonialism’ 253) operate to produce a ‘Bertha-become-black’ (‘Colonialism’ 254). The ‘discoloured purple’ face, ‘bloodshot eyes’, and ‘swelled’ lips Jane remembers (JE 283–84; vol. 2, ch. 10) are, however, stock markers of intemperance, a key attribute of the stereotypical white Creole moral degenerate. Plasa uses Jane’s failure in this scene of meeting ‘to see the likeness between Bertha and the “rebel slave” for which she is the hyperbolic or literally inflated figure’ as a textual reflexivity, a ‘scepticism’ about the ‘rhetorical operations’ which conflate slavery and oppressions based on gender and class hierarchies (Textual Politics 75). In my reading of the novel Bertha is not a figure of the rebel slave. In the novel’s tropological schemes Bertha’s fires (the motives for which are said to be murderous) figure the wages of sin and disorderly despotism among a landed ruling class. Maddened and witless, Bertha seemingly does not lay plans for her own escape from the second fire; her death is figured as purification, as a chastening of the blinded and maimed Rochester, and as a liberation of him for the now independently wealthy Jane’s humanizing project of reclamation. Jane, Sharpe avers, secures a ‘personal victory when she reinvents domestic labor in terms of the humanmaking enterprise of colonialism. Women’s work may lack the grand vision of St. John’s noble enterprise, but women do not forget, as he does, “the feelings and claims of little people” ’ (38).18 Quakerish Jane’s are the eyes which interpret the blind Rochester’s prospect, providing him, in Chase’s terms, a reformed balance of self. Bertha dies in 1833, the year in which the abolition of slavery and the introduction of apprenticeship were passed in the British parliament, an event associated in England with the success and influence of Quaker (or Quakerish) antislavery campaigning. Jane’s account of her marriage to Rochester begins with a ‘quiet wedding’ (JE 448; vol. 3, ch. 12), and emphasizes, in stark contrast to Rochester’s representation of his Jamaican marital home, the ‘perfect concord’ (451; vol. 3, ch. 12) of companionable talk and ‘companionate love’ (Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts’ 244). Their merger is not, like Rochester’s marriage with Bertha, modelled on contamination: Jane declares, alluding to Genesis I:23, that she is ‘ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh’ (JE 450; vol. 3, ch. 12). Recent critical analyses of ‘colonialism as the discursive field in which Jane’s struggle for self-determination takes place’ and of ‘the relationship between feminism and imperialism’ in Jane Eyre (Sharpe 29) have been based on insufficiently historical understandings of the racial formation


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of the British empire. Michael Omi and Howard Winant define racial formation as ‘the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed’ (55). In the racial formation of the British empire whiteness was not a homogenous category. There were hierarchies within whiteness, as well as hierarchies that placed various non-white peoples in relation to white peoples and to each other on civilizational scales, and indeed, as Alistair Bonnett shows, the category whiteness was mutable. He cites, for example, a textbook used in English schools, Lionel Lyde’s A Geography of Africa (1899), in its fifth edition by 1914, in which the white peoples of Africa include ‘Arabs and Abyssinians Berbers and Tuaregs, Masi and Somalis’ (176). Meyer’s and Plasa’s subtle and carefully detailed readings of the literal and metaphoric registers of ‘race’ in Jane Eyre are informed ultimately by a conceptual opposition of whiteness and blackness: Bertha Mason’s difference in the English world of Thornfield Hall must entail her becoming black. Bonnett suggests that the scarcely questioned status of this kind of contemporary opposition ‘may be understood’ as a product of the neocolonial diffusion of an American ‘ “race relations” paradigm’, ‘a highly dualistic vision of “racial conflict” between “Blacks” and “Whites” ’ (176–7). Brontë engages with emerging ethnographic discourses about white Creole people, which chart a racial variation of whiteness based on susceptibility to moral degeneration and physical and intellectual adaptation to a tropical climate. European racial ‘science’ from the late eighteenth century through to the twentieth ‘naturalized’ and racialized the perceived difference of white Creoles from European physical and cultural norms of whiteness. In Brontë’s invocation of these ethnographic discourses white Creole people are represented as morally inferior, degenerate in varying degree, rather than simply a ‘not-yet-human Other’ (Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts’ 247), and in need of reclamation by the soul-making and English character-building project of British imperialism. As Kaplan argues, however, Brontë’s endorsement of that project is qualified by her critical stance towards St John Rivers’s austerity and despotism: ‘The constant evocation of Rivers’s whiteness becomes increasingly ambivalent, then fully critical. Whiteness as frigid adult phallicism represents an aberrant extremity of the human; Rivers calls his own ‘cold, hard’ ambition a ‘human deformity’ (‘Heterogenous’ 186). Brontë measures his ‘deformity’, as she does Bertha Mason’s and Richard Mason’s shortcomings, in the domestic sphere. Kaplan notes St John Rivers’s ‘ability to terrorize, his incapacity for warm familial affection or deep love, and his repudiation of heterosexual desire’ (‘Heterogenous’ 186).

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Sharpe insists that the ‘sexed subject of Victorian England is also a racial identity’ constituted through ‘a splitting in the domestic individual, a nonentity that constitutes itself as a totalizing image through colonial tropes of bondage and emancipation’ (11). For her the ‘sexed’ ‘racial’ subject and ‘domestic individual’ of Brontë’s novel, however, is female. Richard Mason is scarcely mentioned in any of the readings of empire and colonialism in Jane Eyre, and consequently his functions in the novel are ignored. This oversight produces readings of Jane’s representations of Rochester as a gendered, racialized subject focussed principally on Jane’s metaphorics of slavery and oriental despotism (Meyer, Plasa, Perera). In the contrasts between Richard Mason and Edward Rochester, and Bertha Mason and Jane Eyre, Brontë invokes an imperial and racial demarcation of masculinity and femininity respectively, with the degeneracy of the Creole Masons being indicated by an effeminizing of Richard and a masculinizing of Bertha. Their characters are read for readers of the novel largely through physical traits that encode them. The splitting of masculinity naturalizes imperial leadership of and guardianship over colonial and colonized peoples. Jane’s sexual attraction to Rochester is amplified as she naturalizes the stereotypical colonial relation between him and Richard Mason, producing Rochester as superiorly masculine. Richard Mason and his story are largely silenced by Rochester, and to assert his sister’s right in marriage and his family’s stake in it he has recourse to the letter of the law, a stock mode of conservative colonial resistance to English authority. Brontë certainly does not suggest that Richard acts improperly. In relation to Quakerish, educated, and lowermiddle-class individualist Jane, Bertha is a figure not of the rebel slave, as Meyer and Plasa argue, but of the ineducable despot, who creates domestic terror, unrest, potentially suicidal despair, and, in the larger body politic, open revolt. Sharpe argues against Spivak’s suggestion that the ‘native female’ (understood here, I note, as generically non-white) is excluded from a discourse of nineteenth-century feminist individualism (Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts’ 245). Spivak’s use of the term ‘native’ is, as Hulme observes, problematic in a Caribbean colonial context. Does she mean aboriginal or native-born? Creoles (white, coloured, or black) were by definition native-born (22). Sharpe contends that ‘Jane’s appeal to the moral mission of colonialism for asserting her own autonomy [by inhabiting in imagination the part of the missionary] indicates a triangular relationship whereby English women’s bid for domestic power passes through the racial hierarchy of colonialism. In short, the silent passivity of the Hindu woman [evoked in Jane’s narrative as


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object of missionary effort] is the grounds for the speaking subject of feminist individualism’ (55). The imperial voice-agency of both Jane and Rochester, who express their desires for freedom in gendered liberal terms, is also grounded in Bertha’s loss of capacity for human speech and the silencing of Richard; they become objects of Jane’s and Rochester’s narration. Bertha, occasionally acting as Rochester’s monitory double, is figured as a contaminant, rather than reformer, of Rochester’s being and of upper-class social morality. Brontë’s careful dating of Rochester and Bertha’s marriage through historical allusion to slave rebellions and the abolition of slavery suggests that she works to develop a historical allegory of British ruling-class masculine despotism and agency in the period, and the influence of degraded and degrading colonial femininity superseded by a purer English womanhood.

3 Monstrous Martyrdom and the ‘Overshadowing Tree’ of Philanthropy

Charlotte Brontë’s understanding of character draws, as Sally Shuttleworth has most fully shown, on ‘the language and assumptions of phrenology’ (Charlotte Brontë 57). Popularized phrenological mapping of human faculties or propensities become part of Jane’s and Rochester’s efforts to read each other and others. What is at stake for Jane in her recoil from committing herself to missionary work as St John Rivers’s wife on the eve of his departure for India in 1834 – ‘such a martyrdom would be monstrous’, she thinks (JE 405; vol. 3, ch. 8) – is her sense of responsibility for her own faculties and their development. ‘From the minute germ, natural affection’, religion ‘has developed the overshadowing tree, philanthropy. From the wild, stringy root of human uprightness, she has reared a due sense of the Divine justice’, St John tells Jane, offering an account of his own growth (375; vol. 3, ch. 6). Jane’s faculties are identified as imagination, ‘a good deal’ of adhesiveness (249; vol. 2, ch. 8), judgement that characteristically tempers passion, and conscience (201; vol. 2, ch. 4). Brontë develops the contrast between Jane’s and St John’s senses of self and its prospective realization in vocation through tropologies of horticulture, martyrdom, and sacrifice. Addressing the detail of the relationship between Jane and St John, Alison Milbank points to Brontë’s interest in an internalized Gothic: ‘the threat’ represented by St John’s proposal, imaged as a contracting ‘iron shroud’, ‘is not just physical but one that threatens identity itself’ (151). Halberstam argues that in Gothic ‘crime is embodied within a specifically deviant form – the monster – that announces itself (demonstrates) as the place of corruption’ (2). Bertha Mason is revealed as the ‘crime that lived incarnate’ at Thornfield Hall (JE 210; vol. 2, ch. 5); for Jane, psychological martyrdom as St John’s wife in India would be a criminal betrayal, a blighting or martyring of her self. 54

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St John’s despotic ambition is also identified as a corruption. Following Spivak, Perera, and Sharpe, Plasa insists that Brontë represents such martyrdom as sati, another sign of her text engaging ‘in a process of ideological critique at home whose liberative aims are compromised by the discursive re-enactment of the very oppressions which form the ground of their enablement’ (Textual Politics 79). Such arguments empty Jane’s and St John’s language of sacrifice and martyrdom of meanings within Christian traditions. I attend to such signifiers in reading the politics of Jane’s and St John’s phantasmatic engagements with the India of the early 1830s back into the psychological registers of Jane’s Gothic and heroic narratives, and St John’s heroic Christian melodrama. The settings of Rochester’s and St John’s proposals to Jane are marked as English; her investments in the Englishness inscribed in them frame her romantic sexual responses to the men and her sense of the scope they will each allow her faculties. Jane and St John understand themselves to have faculties bestowed by God, and hence naturalized in their characters. They own property in their ‘capacities and attributes’ (Pateman 13) and are responsible for its control and disposition. In this, their views echo those of Brontë herself expressed in her letters. Commenting to W.S. Williams about her own ‘faculty of imagination’, she writes, for instance, ‘I am thankful to God who gave me the faculty; and it is for me a part of my religion to defend this gift and to profit by its possession’ (qtd. in Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë 57). As Shuttleworth points out, the phrenological discourse of Jane Eyre supports a social philosophy of bourgeois individualism by stressing ‘innate endowment’ and ‘individual improvement’ or self-cultivation above ‘social divisions based on rank and privilege’ (Charlotte Brontë 64). Jane herself terms these divisions ‘the wider ocean – wealth, caste, custom’ (JE 251; vol. 2, ch. 8) – which threatens to intervene between her and Rochester. ‘The input of gender’, however, Shuttleworth argues, ‘radically destabilizes the symbiotic relationship between phrenological doctrine and bourgeois ideology’. Brontë’s fiction ‘exploit[s], with reference to gender, the subversive potential of notions of equality and free faculty development’ (Charlotte Brontë 65). As narrator, Jane comments on the ‘silent revolt’ of women: ‘they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do’ (JE 109; vol. 1, ch. 12).1 Jane’s resistance to the domineering masculine hold of St John’s personality over her is articulated both as a responsibility to the cultivation of her faculties and as a refusal of imagined, dutiful, loveless sexual relations with him, of which she has had a foretaste in his fraternal ‘marble kisses, or ice kisses’ good-

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night (398; vol. 3, ch. 8). The former grounds her assertion to St John after her inheritance enables her to give up teaching at Morton: ‘I want to enjoy my own faculties as well as to cultivate those of other people. I must enjoy them now’ (389; vol. 3, ch. 8). St John in this scene has urged self-sacrifice in the service of what he considers a higher good: ‘the task of regenerating your race’ (389; vol. 3, ch. 8), meaning, in the context of his conceptualization of her work at Morton, humankind. Jane acknowledges that St John’s faculties and goals are suited to his projected missionary labours. To win his approval Jane realizes, ‘I must disown half my nature, stifle half my faculties, wrest my tastes from their original bent, force myself to the adoption of pursuits for which I had no natural vocation’ (398; vol. 3, ch. 8). Jane’s sense of the boundaries between self and other at stake in a prospective marriage to St John – which would mean becoming ‘part’ of him (408; vol. 3, ch. 8), his vocation, and his ‘will’ (418; vol. 3, ch. 9) – grounds her sexual repugnance expressed in terms of a ‘monstrous’ martyrdom. G.W.H. Lampe points out that in Christian theology ‘it is the witness [of faith] before hostile authorities that is the essence of “martyrdom” ’ (122–3). Jane contemplates a witness of faith in Christianity before St John’s ‘stern Calvinistic doctrines’ (JE 352; vol. 3, ch. 4) and in her God-given faculties before the hostility of St John’s despotism and an unkind Providence. As St John’s unmarried ‘curate’ or ‘comrade’ in India Jane’s temporal freedom ‘would be under rather a stringent yoke’, but she would enjoy a spiritual freedom of ‘heart and mind’: I should still have my unblighted self to turn to: my natural unenslaved feelings with which to communicate in moments of loneliness. There would be recesses in my mind which would be only mine, to which he never came; and sentiments growing there fresh and sheltered, which his austerity could never blight, nor his measured warrior-march trample down: but as his wife—at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked—forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital—this would be unendurable. (407–8; vol. 3, ch. 8)2 The pattern of figurative language is also consistent with Brontë’s schematization of the contrasts between the stakes of Jane’s relationships with Rochester and St John, and, as I discuss later in this chapter, with Biblical distinctions between types of sacrifice. As Shuttleworth highlights, Rochester, in welcoming Jane ‘as an agent of purification’

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(Introduction xxx), sees her as beyond his ‘blight’ (JE 143; vol. 1, ch. 15). In the scene in which he reads Jane’s future through phrenology, he has reassured her: ‘I wish to foster, not to blight – to earn gratitude, not to wring tears of blood – no, nor of brine: my harvest must be in smiles, in endearments, in sweet – that will do’ (201; vol. 2, ch. 4). As Jane struggles with her emotions in the early stage of the proposal scene at which Rochester taunts her with the prospect of his marriage to Blanche Ingram, she declares her love for Thornfield Hall: it has provided ‘a full and delightful life, – momentarily at least. I have not been trampled on. I have not been petrified. I have not been buried with inferior minds, and excluded from every glimpse of communion with what is bright, and energetic, and high.’ She goes on to praise in Rochester ‘an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind’ (252; vol. 2, ch. 8). Unlike St John’s, his mind, in Brontë’s scheme, has been expanded by worldliness rather than religious ideals of benevolence. Jane notes in Rochester’s physiognomy ‘an abrupt deficiency where the suave sign of benevolence should have risen’. ‘I am not a general philanthropist; but I bear a conscience’, he tells her (131; vol. 1, ch. 14). A bridge between the two recounted proposal scenes is Jane’s account of the ‘bright visions’ and inner tale of her imagination which sustain her during her ‘restlessness’ over her stagnant provincial life at Thornfield Hall before Rochester’s arrival. Imagination, Brontë writes to G.H. Lewes in 1847, ‘is a strong, restless faculty which claims to be heard and exercised When she shews us bright pictures are we never to look at them and try to reproduce them? – And when she is eloquent and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear are we not to write to her dictation[?]’ (Letters 1:559) On the leads – it is October 1832 – Jane ‘looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim skyline’. She remembers, then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen: then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach. [T]he restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it—and certainly they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement which, while it swelled

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it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended—a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence. (JE 109; vol. 1, ch. 12) I connect this discontent and desire with reform politics in England and imperial questions in Chapter 4. Here I would note that the development of Jane’s relationship with Rochester provides her by the time of his proposal an imaginatively habitable expansion of intellectual and worldly horizons. To St John’s proposal she says, ‘Nothing speaks or stirs in me while you talk. I am sensible of no light kindling – no life quickening – no voice counselling or cheering. Oh, I wish I could make you see how much my mind is at this moment like a rayless dungeon’ (403; vol. 3, ch. 8). The missionary life in India of the mid-1830s on his terms can only be accommodated in her inward tale abjectly. For Jane the ‘antique garden’ at Thornfield Hall in which Rochester proposes has the picturesque appearance of an insular English Eden (248; vol. 2; ch. 8).3 Harmony and fecundity are highlighted in her description of it. Assuming an English audience, she describes England mythopoetically as ‘our wave-girt land’ and refers to the ‘cliffs of Albion’ (247; vol. 2, ch. 8).4 The sea between England and Ireland, the colonized country to which Rochester teasingly threatens to send his ‘dependant’ to work for the O’Gall family (251; vol. 2, ch. 8), becomes in Jane’s mind a metaphor for the distance of ‘wealth, caste, custom’ (251; vol. 2, ch. 8) between Rochester and herself.5 The contrast between this figured conventional insularity and the ‘original’, ‘vigorous’, and ‘expanded’ mind of Rochester which has provided her liberal access to a ‘full and delightful life’ (252; vol. 2, ch. 8) provokes Jane to declare a spiritual equality with Rochester and the freedom of an ‘independent will’ (253; vol. 2, ch. 8). The landscape of Marsh-Glen, the Peak District setting of St John’s proposal, is less marked by historical change than Rochester’s estate – enclosure has boosted the Rochester family’s wealth. Jane and St John are ‘shut quite in’ by hills (401; vol. 3, ch. 8). St John’s restless ambition to play the ‘practical philanthropist’ abroad (351; vol. 3, ch. 4) more generally gives him the subjective sense that at home in his ‘fatherland’ (401; vol. 3, ch. 8) he and his faculties are ‘buried in morass, pent in with mountain’ (356; vol. 3, ch. 4). The prospect of exchanging this newfound home for the shores St John anticipates – the Ganges and, less imminently, death – dizzyingly disconcerts Jane’s English identity

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earlier asserted through her picturesque aestheticization of Marsh-Glen and her identification of the area as the ‘healthy heart of England’ (359; vol. 3, ch. 5). There she has desired and found a ‘sheltered’ and ‘safe asylum’ (355; vol. 3, ch. 4). Now ‘[t]he glen and sky spun round: the hills heaved!’ (402; vol. 3, ch. 8) India offers Jane the prospect of self-division (‘I abandon half myself’) and ‘premature death’ (404; vol. 3, ch. 8). The contrast between Marsh-Glen and India illustrates Alan Bewell’s general argument that for Brontë as for other nineteenth-century English writers, imagining disease is very much a part of imagining place, as ideas drawn from the area of medical geography (or ‘medical topography,’ as it was frequently called) played a fundamental role in how they constructed what George Levine has called ‘the geography of ordinary England.’ (774–75)6 Bewell argues that Brontë’s connection of India and death is an aspect of her use of ‘medical geography for anti-imperialistic purposes: to question colonialist optimism by demonstrating its immense cost in human lives and suffering’ (789–90), and that Jane’s ‘quest for health and home had its beginning in a specific urban, working-class context’ (801). The domestic mission work of her ‘rash’ parents among the poor in ‘an overgrown manufacturing town’ has resulted in their early deaths. As with St John’s work in India the field of missionary endeavour is represented as ‘overgrown’, in need of the ‘Christian labourer’s task of [reclaiming] tillage’ (JE 354; vol. 3, ch. 4). St John’s field, ‘clear[ing]’ a ‘painful way to improvement’ ‘for his race’, is, in Jane’s words, ‘encumbered’ by the ‘prejudices of caste and creed’ (452; vol. 3, ch. 12). That her father’s work was the offsetting of the besmirching and unhealthy effects of industrial modernity is suggested by the ‘grim, sootblack old cathedral’ in the churchyard of which the couple are buried (379; vol. 3, ch. 7). Both fields of missionary labour lie outside the moralized and medicalized domain of Jane’s sense of the picturesque. Brontë does work to locate the ‘rayless dungeon’ of St John’s India in its historical moment. This image performs what Lawrence J. Starzyk suggests is ‘a principal function of the pictorial in Jane’s world: the comparison of impressions wrought in historical moments with the “ideal stores” of personality from which they derive’ (296–7), her faculties. As Mani points out, the commercial and religious histories of the British presence in India were not synchronous. Jerome Beaty, drawing on the work of E.J. Hobsbawm, uses a broader historical argument than

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mine to posit that ‘neither Brontë nor St John think[s] of his mission as enabling the commercial exploitation of India’ (195). ‘[M]issionary activity was illegal in East India Company territory until 1813’, and the few Baptist missionaries working there from 1793 to 1799 and 1801 to 1813 ‘were accordingly dependent on the tolerance of East India Company officials’, Mani reminds her readers (87). The 1813 India Charter Act legalized missionary work in this territory and authorized the establishment of an Anglican diocese based at Calcutta. This took place in 1814, although initially no new missionaries willing to travel to India were found (Embree 273). William Wilberforce, who with his cousin Henry Thornton had sponsored most of Patrick Brontë’s university education at Cambridge,7 was a leading parliamentary advocate of the legalization of missionary endeavours. Ainslee Thomas Embree summarizes his argument: Wilberforce had accused the whole nation of abusing its trust in India. Next to the slave trade, he said, ‘the foulest blot on the moral character of the country was the willingness of the Parliament and the people to permit our fellow-subjects in the East Indies to remain under the grossest, the darkest and most degrading system of idolatrous superstition that almost ever existed upon earth.’ (273) The push for authorization of missionary work was spearheaded by a campaign based around public petition that popularized ‘the picture of India as a land of darkness, waiting for light’; it ‘caught the imaginations of ordinary people who before had no concern with the problems of British control of India’ (273–4). Patrick Brontë, an evangelical Anglican minister, may have been inspired by it. Juliet Barker records that in 1813 he attended ‘the inaugural meeting of a new Church Missionary Association at Bradford’, and became a subscriber.8 The circular of the new non-denominational association, ‘whose object was to fund the sending of bibles and missionaries to Africa and the East’ (60), described these territories as a ‘most ample’ ‘field of labour’, in which ‘the prospects of usefulness are great’ (qtd. in Barker 60). Beilby Porteus, the Bishop of London, had declared in 1808, conflating ‘the British name’ with ‘the English Nation’, These [the global dissemination of the Gospel and Christianity] are truly Imperial works, and worthy of the British name. These will immortalize it to the latest posterity, and distinguish it most honourably from every other nation in the world.

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Let these, then, be the characteristic features of the English Nation. Let the great Enemy of the repose and comfort of mankind, place his glory in universal dominion; let Britain place it in universal benevolence; and while he is subjugating the world by his arms, let Britain be employed in repelling him from her own coasts, in assisting and protecting the distressed, and in meliorating the condition of distant countries, by communicating to them in various ways, the blessings of the Christian Revelation. (33–4) In parliamentary debate on the renewal of the India Charter Act in 1833, Thomas Babington Macaulay – then one of the members for Leeds, a Whig9 – reworked the Manichean divide in the discourse of the earlier campaign. He drew a distinction between Indians as ‘a race debased by three thousand years of despotism and priestcraft’ and ‘the English nation as a people blessed with far more than an ordinary measure of political liberty and of intellectual light’ (Hansard, 3rd series, 19:535). St John’s articulation of his realization of missionary vocation resonates in this discursive field with its binaries of India/English, race/nation, darkness/light, despotism/liberty, priestcraft/intellectual light, debasement/usefulness. The ‘great work’, he anticipates, will be ‘bettering’ the human ‘race – carrying knowledge into the realms of ignorance – substituting peace for war – freedom for bondage – religion for superstition – the hope of heaven for the fear of hell’ (JE 374; vol. 3, ch. 6). The historical moment of St John’s departure for India is also suggested by small detail of a conversation between him and Jane. The British parliament established a committee charged with making recommendations on the renewal of the East India Charter Act scheduled for 1833. The evidence tendered to and the report of the committee gave publicity to the view that ‘the number of Chaplains at present in actual service’ in India ‘is not sufficient for the wants of the people’ (Great Britain, Minutes xv). Of finding missionaries fit for work in India Jane comments, ‘Those are few in number, and difficult to discover’, to which St John responds, ‘You say truly’ (JE 401; vol. 3, ch. 8). Hinduism and Islam are understood in the British discourses surrounding passage of the 1833 Charter Act to be ‘religious prejudices’ rather than true religion (see, for instance, Great Britain, Minutes 110). As I pointed out in Chapter 1, in deference to such ‘prejudices’ the Act pointedly debarred amelioration of domestic slavery said to be authorized under Hindu and Islamic law, a move very precisely alluded to by Jane. Drawing on British understandings of the role of William Knibb in bringing about the abolition of West Indian slavery, she refers to liberal missionary endeavours

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in India effecting a similar change in India, imagining herself in this role as a means of resisting, criticizing, and marking as foreign Rochester’s sexual despotism. The Reverend James Hough in evidence to the Select Committee gave as one of the key benefits of Christian education by 1832 the diminishing of caste prejudice (244–5). Jane commends St John as a Christian warrior ‘hew[ing] down like a giant the prejudices of creed and caste’ that hinder the ‘way to improvement’ of ‘his race’ (JE 452; vol. 3, ch. 12). Here ‘his race’ might refer to humankind or the English. With the latter resonance the suggestion is that he facilitates the way of the English in spiritually ameliorating the condition of Indian peoples. St John proposes that Jane accompany him as his wife to be ‘a conductress of Indian schools, and a helper amongst Indian women’ (404; vol. 3, ch. 8), a ‘fellow-labourer’ (402; vol. 3, ch. 8). Diana Rivers knows that her brother plans to work in Calcutta (415; vol. 3, ch. 9). Conducting Indian schools in Calcutta (implicitly for girls) is not understood by St John to be a ‘visionary project’ (Great Britain, Minutes of Evidence 245).10 Gauri Viswanathan points out that ‘British involvement in Indian education and the entry of missionaries were far from being complementary or mutually supportive’ (37). Accounts of British education practices and policy in India in the early nineteenth century are dominated by the rise of Anglicism, which achieved its first significant victories during the mid-1830s, and occlude its gendered reach. Anglicism, Viswanathan explains, ‘grew as an expression of discontent with the policy of promoting the Oriental languages and literatures in native education’ (30), and was conceptualized as an engrafting of European knowledge and innovations upon Indian cultural traditions. Imparting European knowledges and familiarity with English literature (pointedly, rather than Christian scripture and tenets) through instruction in English or the Indian vernaculars was seen to be a means of Anglicizing Indian people through diffusion. Hindustani (spelt ‘Hindoostanee’ in the novel), the language St John Rivers asks Jane to help him learn, was one of these vernaculars. ‘The imagery of engrafting that permeated the discourse around this time’, Viswanathan suggests, ‘pointed to an emerging theory of organicism that conceived of political formation as part of a process of cultural synthesis’ (33). It is also consistent with a wider conventional use of horticultural tropes to represent human development, a practice exemplified in the pedagogical discourses of Jane Eyre. The wider political resonances of engrafting are apparent in Macaulay’s speech to the House of Commons on 10 July 1833 in support of the India Charter Act:

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We have to frame a good government for a country into which, by universal acknowledgment, we cannot introduce those [representative] institutions which our habits—which all the reasonings of European philosophers—which all the history of our own part of the world would lead us to consider as the one great security for good government. We have to engraft on despotism those blessings which are the natural fruits of liberty. (Hansard, 3rd series, 19:513) Grafting, a method of ‘asexual plant propagation’, is ‘used to propagate cultivars that will not root well as cuttings or whose own root systems are inadequate’ (‘Grafting’). That Macaulay was speaking in the first parliament after the passing of the 1832 Reform Act frames his optimism about English democracy. Macaulay’s subsequent career in developing Indian colonial policy is strongly associated with the installation of Anglicism at the core of higher, post-elementary education for boys funded or subsidized by the East India Company. The ‘class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’ whom he says in his 1835 Minute on Indian Education the British should ‘use as interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern’ are implicitly male (430). His formulation of the grafting process keeps a biological miscegenation taboo in place. Under the terms of the 1813 India Charter Act the East India Company was to offer some financial support to education, but ‘refused to take any direct action for the education of girls and women’ (Mathur 21). Such education was seen to be too culturally sensitive an issue, one that could well threaten political stability. The Governor-General intervened in 1825 to prevent a grant of 10,000 rupees being made to the Calcutta School Society to promote female education. Y.B. Mathur reports that he had ‘ascertained that it had been publicly known that the object of this ladies’ society was to propagate the Christian religion’ (22). The formulation ‘benevolent designs’ was used in the 1813 India Charter Act to describe ‘the introduction of useful knowledge, and of religious and moral improvement’ albeit that ‘the Principles of the British Government, on which the Natives of India have hitherto relied for the free Exercise of their Religion, be inviolably maintained’ (Great Britain, Statutes 1814:366). The grant would have contravened the religious neutrality promulgated in the Act. Yet the British education available for Indian girls was overwhelmingly religious, its direct object soul-making.11 Priscilla Chapman, author of Hindoo Female Education (1839), writes of conducting day schools, ‘where the scriptures are the

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prominent subject of instruction’, and ‘visiting females of the higher castes in their dwellings, with the same Christian object’ (75), education in the scriptures,12 as being recognized measures to ‘effect the elevation of Hindoo females from their present degradation to their proper level’, measures ‘promising an ample harvest’ (74). This is precisely the kind of work St John expects of his ‘fellow-labourer’, his ‘useful tool’ (JE 415–16; vol. 3, ch. 9) in the mission field. Chapman reports that needlework and habits of industry were also taught at the schools and orphanage. The Reverend W.H. Bowley’s Hindoostanee Testament and Bengali translations of the Bible and the Catechism were favourite texts. The scope of and discourses surrounding British-funded education for Indian girls in Calcutta in the 1830s are exemplified particularly in accounts of the work of Miss M.A. Cooke, later Mrs Wilson.13 Cooke travelled to Calcutta in May 1821 with, it was reported in the early 1830s, the ‘visionary’ purpose of establishing ‘female schools’ there (Great Britain, Minutes of Evidence 245).14 While she was not the first to attempt the establishment of girls’ schools, she ‘gave the greatest force to the[ir] proliferation’ (Potts 123). She had been inspired by William Ward’s Farewell Letters to a Few Friends in Britain and America on Returning to Bengal in 1821, which contains an ‘appeal to the ladies of Liverpool’ to address ‘the degraded and neglected state of the females of India’ (Chapman v). Ward, in Mani’s account, insisted that ‘lack of education made Indian women unsuitable companions to their husbands, even less suitable mothers, and, above all, “slave[s] to superstition” ’, a key instance of which was sati (149). The condition of Indian women is, she argues, produced on shaky evidence as ‘horror and pity’ to bolster ‘evangelical fundraising efforts’, to consolidate evangelicism, and to justify missionary work (150–1). Despite scepticism on the part of local European residents in Calcutta, Cooke, the Reverend James Hough triumphally noted in evidence to the Select Committee in 1832, ‘persevered’ and by 1823 ‘nearly 1,200 female children’ attended such schools and by 1831 ‘upwards of 3,000’ did (Great Britain, Minutes 245).15 Cooke married the Reverend Isaac Wilson. Widowed in 1828, she continued her work in India. Chapman, writing, like Ward, to raise funds, highlights Mrs Wilson’s ‘unceasing labor’ and ‘the Lord’s blessing resting upon, and extending her benevolent designs’, particularly the Central School in and the Native Female Orphan Refuge near Calcutta, the latter founded in 1836 (vi–vii).16 The designs that originally inspired Cooke are represented as ‘improvement’ of the lives of Indian people (77). This goal resonates both with the clause relating to education in the 1813 India Charter Act and with St John’s vocation, as enunciated by

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Jane: ‘he labours for his race: he clears their painful way to improvement’ (JE 452; vol. 3, ch. 12). St John wants in Jane a wife ‘formed for labour, not for love’ (402; vol. 3, ch. 8). At an initial meeting with Calcutta mothers about schooling for their daughters they were reportedly told that Miss Cooke ‘has given up every earthly expectation, to come here, and seeks not the riches of this world, but desires only to promote your best interests’ (Chapman 77–8).17 This formulation, too, resonates with St John’s understanding of the stakes of his vocation. Cooke’s enterprises were dependent on charity, as indeed was St John’s school for girls at Morton. The Church Missionary Society helped found the Central School in Calcutta with a grant of £500. Cooke herself ‘suggested that Girls’ Schools throughout England should be invited to contribute specially to this work’ (Stock 200). The Female Education Society in the East, formed in Britain in 1834 to promote religious education, would support Wilson’s work by, for instance, providing fares to India for an assistant, Miss Wakefield, in 1835, and donations to the orphan asylum from 1837.18 Among the reasons St John gives Jane for thinking her a suitable missionary are that ‘lucre’ has no ‘undue’ sway over her, and that her ‘readiness’ to divide her inheritance honours ‘the claim of abstract justice’ (JE 403; vol. 3, ch. 8). In her thoughts about St John’s possible marriage to Rosamund Oliver and the domestic and foreign missionary uses to which St John might put her wealth, Jane shows an awareness of married British women’s lack of property rights over their fortunes. Ironically, given the reference to ‘abstract justice’, her uncle Eyre’s wealth derives from trade based in Madeira, a Portuguese colony, and with the slave labour economy of Jamaica. Portugal abolished slavery in 1878, although the move was announced in 1858. Uncle John Eyre writes to Mrs Reed that ‘Providence has blessed my [his] endeavours to secure a competency’ (239; vol. 2, ch. 6). St John arguably misreads Jane. The division of wealth he reads as a sign of ‘a soul that revelled in the flame and excitement of sacrifice’ (403; vol. 3, ch. 8) is, for Jane, a means of securing a family to herself. The spiritual freedom expounded as central to Jane’s being in her thoughts about the implications of St John’s proposal is grounded in the temporal freedom afforded by financial independence. While acknowledging her fault in the early judgement, she has had to learn to put aside her feelings about ‘the ignorance, the poverty, the coarseness’ of the ‘little’ peasant girls at Morton, whom it is her domestic mission to educate (359; vol. 3, ch. 5). These feelings resonate with her childhood imaginings of poverty as ‘synonymous with degradation’, and determination that she is ‘not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste’ (24; vol. 1, ch. 3).

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It is significant in relation to these contemporary governmental, pedagogical, and missionary discourses about India that in Jane’s recoil from St John she identifies him with a threatening Gothic darkness and despotism. Rochester and Bertha’s marital relation in Jamaica is metonymic of the West Indian colonial body politic in the 1820s; Jane’s sense of her potential marital relation to St John as wife of a missionary acts, too, as a metonym of Christianizing India under colonial rule in the 1830s. Rochester speaks of marriage to Bertha as having ‘blighted’ his ‘youth’ (309; vol. 3, ch. 1), and his despotism is represented as a sign of this blight. Jane fears the despotic blight of St John as husband. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that ‘despot’ came into general usage in the wake of the 1789 French Revolution, citing Todd quoting Mason: ‘the French revolutionists have been very liberal in conferring this title’. Despotism is a concept central to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791). Brontë applies the term and concept to masculine or, in Bertha’s case, masculinized conduct in the private sphere that has a wider social reach. In Chapter 4, I discuss the historical provenance of this application more fully. St John’s influence, too, is associated with a deathly whiteness and repression of vitality. As Kaplan observes, ‘the constant evocation of Rivers’s whiteness becomes increasingly ambivalent, then fully critical, as his “austere and despotic” character is revealed in his interactions with Jane’. His ‘frigid adult phallicism’, she argues, ‘represents an aberrant extremity of the human’, ‘a grown-up deformation’ (‘Heterogenous’ 186–7). Maria Lamonaca suggests that ‘[h]is countenance – so perfect and regular it suggests the hard lineaments of Greek statuary – accurately reflects a soul made rigid by its own moral strengths’ (4). In this sense St John is for Jane an abject figure, hypocritical, driven by a passion for eternal life that, in Julia Kristeva’s terms, ‘uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it’ (Kristeva 4). John Reed’s and Rochester’s despotism is figured as foreign, St John’s as English. The Indian people who are to be the objects of his despotism are characteristically totalized as ‘the prejudices of creed and caste’. Some are represented as ‘savage tribes’ (JE 408; vol. 3, ch. 8). The prospective quality of his engagement with Indian people is hinted at in Jane’s self-deprecating remark: ‘he forgets, pitilessly, the feelings and claims of little people, in pursuing his own large views. It is better, therefore, for the insignificant to keep out of his way; lest, in his progress, he should trample them down’ (416; vol. 3, ch 9). He describes condescendingly the schoolgirls at Morton who are the object of his domestic missionary endeavours as ‘only poor girls – cottagers’ children – at the best, farmers’ daughters’. Their condition and

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expectations would degrade Jane’s refinements and education: her ‘accomplishments’, the ‘largest portion’ of her ‘mind – sentiments – tastes’ (355; vol. 3, ch. 4). ‘[T]he Christian labourer’s task of tillage’ he offers Jane as teacher is the children’s ‘hope of progress’ (354; vol. 3, ch. 4). She and their faculties her pedagogy is able to cultivate are agents of change. The closure of Jane Eyre cites what one might term St John’s ‘will-tosublimity’ (Wilson 4), based on Biblical authority and exercised through philanthropy. In the last three paragraphs Jane, as narrator, opens her ear to St John’s inward tale, making five Biblical allusions consistent with his theological vision. As Carolyn Williams notes, the novel ends in St John’s voice, a move significant in an ostensible autobiography about Jane’s coming to voice. ‘[I]n terms of dramatic and thematic content, it [the closure] focuses on the “other man”, the rejected suitor, and through him it focuses on another way of life, the very way most pointedly not taken by Jane’ (228–9). Jane’s schooled rhetoric of the religious sublime echoes her earlier weighing up of the work in India that St John proposes – it would be ‘truly the most glorious man can adopt or God assign’, with its ‘noble cares and sublime results’ (JE 404; vol. 3, ch. 8) – and accords with her subsequent sense that as St John’s curate or comrade she could ‘profoundly esteem’ the Christian in him (407; vol. 3, ch. 8). Diana Rivers, too, acknowledges St John’s ‘severe decision’ to be ‘right, noble, Christian’, though the prospect of family separation pains her (357; vol. 3, ch. 4). In hailing St John in India as a ‘pioneer’ (452; vol. 3, ch. 12), Jane alludes to St John’s articulation of the glory of ‘the Christian labourer’s task of tillage’ (354; vol. 3, ch. 4) in offering her the position at Morton. In narrative terms, Jane’s citation of St John’s voice does not, however, contain or close off the compelling Gothic registers of her refusal of him. Brontë’s criticism of St John acts within the novel to qualify Jane’s eulogistic evocation of his missionary endeavours in India at the novel’s close. Closure is in realist critical paradigms, as Catherine Belsey points out, ‘disclosure, the dissolution of enigma through the reestablishment of order, recognizable as a reinstatement or a development of the order which is understood to have preceded the events of the story itself’ (70). The enigma which unfolds in the St John Rivers subplot is the implication of his ‘hardness and despotism’ from which the ‘veil fell’ for Jane in the proposal scene (JE 406; vol. 3, ch. 8). Parama Roy does not weigh the vehemence and force of Jane’s refusal of St John against the closing paragraphs in declaring them a ‘sanitization and glorification of the missionary’ (726), an aspect of Brontë’s ‘enthusiastic’ support

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of ‘camouflaged and insidious forms of patriarchalism’, including ‘the exploitation of colonized peoples’ (715). The Gothic scope of this exposure is registered in the language of Christian sacrifice and martyrdom through which Jane imaginatively processes the prospect of missionary work in India. In thinking about the proposal, for instance, Jane, echoing words from the Christian marriage ceremony, determines, ‘if I do make the sacrifice he urges, I will make it absolutely: I will throw all on the altar – heart, vitals, the entire victim’ (JE 404; vol. 3, ch. 8). She alludes to the Old Testament distinction between the burnt offering (offered whole) and the offering from which portions ‘deemed the seats of vitality’ were reserved for offerer or priest (Buttrick 4:155). Bewell argues that ‘Jane Eyre can be read as a fictional treatise on “tropical invalidism” ’ in its invocation of ideas drawn from medical geography about the debilitating physical effects on Europeans of life in tropical climates (794). Jane’s metaphorical distinction, drawn from a Biblical discourse of sacrifice, works to suggest that the debilitation of the vitality of Europeans abroad may also have a spiritual or psychological provenance. In pressuring Jane to marry him after her first refusal, St John describes her counter-proposal that she accompany him as his sister as ‘a mutilated sacrifice’, one not ‘entire’. Her ‘divided allegiance’ to God would constitute a blemish in his offering of himself (JE 406; vol. 3, ch. 8), a breach of Levitical injunctions against making impure sacrifices. Jane responds to St John, rescripting his notion of purity, ‘Oh! I will give my heart to God You do not want it’ (406; vol. 3, ch. 8). Marianne Thormählen draws attention in general terms to the way in which Jane’s wider language of the heart reflects ‘the centrality of the heart in early nineteenth-century theology. It is not merely the seat of feeling; it is the core of the entire personality, including its religious dimensions’ (80). Jane’s rescripting is integral to a larger process, her realization that ‘she must contradict or circumvent the category “God” when it is being wielded by St John Rivers as an indicator of his will’ (Carolyn Williams 235). St John acknowledges his ‘cold, hard’ ambition to be, in metaphorical terms, a ‘human deformity’ (JE 375; vol. 3, ch. 6). Jane finds the revelation of the enormity of this ‘imperfection’ in the terms of his marriage proposal, which she represents as masculine despotism, to be liberating; his fallibility makes them spiritual equals in her eyes (406; vol. 3, ch. 8). Ironically St John’s language recalls Levitical injunctions against the presence of the blemished at sacrificial altars (Lev. 21.18–23). Diana Rivers’s comment about Jane being ‘grilled alive in Calcutta’ if she accompanied St John (JE 415; vol. 3, ch. 9) has been, like this

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discourse of Christian sacrifice and martyrdom, identified as a reference to sati. It operates, however, within the Biblical paradigm of burnt offerings and the discourse of medical geography outlined by Bewell. At about the time of the publication of Jane Eyre the word ‘grille’ came into usage as a verb meaning ‘to fit with a grille or grating; to fence off with a grille’. The first recorded historical instance cited in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1848: ‘The choir is grilled, and rigidly kept private by parcloses.’ Diana’s remark might also be a reference to the seclusion of women in India, a reading consistent with Jane’s metaphors of imprisonment in her process of resolve to resist St John’s proposal. The seclusion of Indian women was a stock topos in the period. Perera, following Spivak’s lead, characterizes Bertha Mason as the ‘ultimate sati’ (93), yet Bertha is not a widow, her act of arson is not represented as an intended immolation, she dies by jumping from the leads, and her death is not authorized by interpretation of religious law or surrounded with religious ritual. Brontë did write an essay on sati while at the Pensionnat Heger in the early 1840s, her language, Sue Lonoff notes, ‘[c]onstrained by limited facility in French’ (9). In Lonoff’s translation, Brontë writes that Hindustan is ‘enslaved while she remains subject to the despotism of an arrogant and cruel Hierarchy’, despotism identified with ‘the orgies of the Demon’ that the ‘turbulent troupe of pagan savages take to be God’ (Belgian Essays 3–5). This language of the orgiastic and the demonic is not part of Brontë’s discourse of sacrifice in Jane Eyre. Jane’s juxtaposition of her life in England and St John’s in India at the close is grounded in the understanding that their human fallibilities make them spiritual equals, and that each is pursuing a path that will develop their inherent faculties. Carolyn Williams, too, suggests that Jane’s ‘achieved safety in distance from his [St John’s] psychological and textual threat’ makes her final honouring of his vision possible (244). Jane and Rochester’s life together is, as Thormählen points out, ‘not the lesser fulfilment; it is the fulfilment of God’s will through the sacrament of marriage’ (218). Jane exercises her English evangelical agency within her marriage. In the last letter Jane receives from St John he anticipates his death, which would confirm her and Brontë’s sense of the susceptibility of the European abroad to debilitation, and allows St John to contemplate his heavenly ‘reward, his incorruptible crown’ (452; vol. 3, ch. 12). As Glen points out, ‘[t]o the evangelicals, life on earth was a mere preparation for the hereafter: death, therefore, was its climactic point – the moment of entry into bliss or perdition’ (75). Jane acknowledges St John’s ruthless ambition to take his place at the marriage supper of the

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lamb after death, one of ‘the last mighty victories of the lamb’ or Jesus (452; vol. 3, ch. 12) anticipated in Revelation. Jane’s and St John’s identifications with and as missionaries mark out the differences between them. As I argued in Chapter 1, Jane’s identification with the missionary triumph of abolition indicates sympathy with the civil politics of reform in the realization of an enlightened Christian state and an affirmation of the twin demand for temporal and spiritual freedom. For St John the civil effects of his work and the spiritual freedom of the objects of his missionary labour are secondary to his spiritual ambition for personal salvation. Jane’s and Brontë’s disavowals of St John’s masculine despotism offer an implied criticism of the process of the contemporary Christianization of India, not the legitimacy of the endeavour. The legitimacy of the endeavour is founded in ‘improvement’, the way to which is acknowledged to be ‘painful’ (452; vol. 3, ch. 12). The discourse of improvement in the novel has a pedagogical provenance, as for instance in Jane’s accounts of her education at Lowood (68; vol. 1, ch. 8) and her work as Adèle’s governess and teacher at Morton (108; vol. 1, ch. 12 and 366; vol. 3, ch. 6), Rochester’s commendation of Jane’s work with Adèle (121; vol. 1, ch. 8), and St John’s conceptualization of the object of his parish work at Morton (354; vol. 3, ch. 4). The vindication of improvement as an object supports a Eurocentric teleology of development.

4 The Ferment of Restlessness

There are several famous scenes of Jane looking out from the windows or the roof of houses: the ten-year-old in the window seat at Gateshead intermittently studying the ‘aspect’ of a stormy ‘winter afternoon’ while looking through Bewick’s History of British Birds (8; vol. 1, ch. 1); the 18-year-old at Lowood gasping for ‘liberty’ and desperately petitioning for ‘at least a new servitude’ (85; vol. 1, ch. 10) and on the leads at Thornfield Hall longing ‘for a power of vision which might overpass’ the ‘limit’ of her horizon (109; vol. 1, ch. 12). The motif is a common one in the literary heritage of British women: a woman’s look from her abode as a spatialized figure of desire for transcendence of the materiality of her domestic circumstances, the materiality of, in Nancy Armstrong’s formulation, the ‘knowledge housed, as it were, in the body of the woman’ (245).1 Jane claims that ‘the restlessness was in’ her ‘nature’ (109; vol. 1, ch. 12), and for her the prospect of transcendence is imbricated with her faculty of imagination. The material limits that constrain her are produced through her gendered class position and its ambiguities. When Jane Rochester, remembering her restless younger self at Thornfield, moves from past- into present-tense narration to lament what ‘custom has pronounced necessary’ for women, she identifies with ‘millions’ in ‘ferment’, ‘in silent revolt against their lot’, rather than engaging directly in ‘political rebellions’ (109; vol. 1, ch. 12). She looks from the leads in October 1832. The political rebellions of the early 1830s include unrest surrounding the passage of the bills comprising the 1832 Reform Act, revolutions in France, Brazil, Belgium, and Italy, and, as elaborated in Chapters 1 and 2, slave and planter rebellions in the West Indies. In this chapter, I work to locate Jane’s ‘silent revolt’ in relation to practices that form the custom of a classed and racialized woman’s sphere, and to the ferment of contemporaneous political unrest and women’s rights 71

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discourses. I analyse Brontë’s engagement with the terms of the Long Transition in Britain, offering, too, a new reading of Elizabeth Rigby’s excoriation of the novel, and the ways in which Rigby engages with reviews of Jane Eyre, especially those in the Church of England press. The terms of Rigby’s review help bring into focus aspects of Brontë’s treatments of Englishness and of class relations. Jane’s retrospective narration of her reverie on the leads moves into a more generalizing comment about women’s social position, which reflects, too, on Jane’s role as a married woman. The comment is made in the present tense, suggesting some continuity between Jane’s place as an 18-year-old and her place as Mrs Rochester. ‘It is vain to say that human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it’, Jane insists. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to feel very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. (109; vol. 1, ch. 12) Jane draws attention to the power of public opinion in shaping custom that confines women to the private sphere and to domestic roles. The ‘more privileged fellow-creatures’ who exercise the power of public opinion are male. In Nancy K. Miller’s general terms, ‘authorial commentary’, here Jane’s as ostensible autobiographer, ‘justifies its story to society by providing the missing maxims’ (30) or social values in relation to which her conduct should be measured by readers: ‘women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer’. Shuttleworth points out that ‘the passage articulates support for the reformist position adopted by Combe, that women, as well as men, should be allowed to exercise their faculties to the full’ (Charlotte Brontë 162).

The Ferment of Restlessness

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Jane’s propositions about the masculine bias of public opinion and the circumscription of women’s faculties in the domestic sphere are neither unfamiliar nor, in comparative terms, particularly radical to an 1847 audience. They are arguments put forward, for instance, in Owenite William Thompson’s Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery (1825). Thompson pays fulsome tribute to Anna Wheeler as a shaper of his thinking. The tract argues against James Mill’s dismissal of women’s rights in his ‘Article on Government’ (1824). Thompson writes of ‘the public opinion which men club together to form, and which they call morality’ (35), the ‘public opinion of man formed in his own favor’, which keeps women in civil and domestic subjection (78). Drawing, like Brontë, on phrenological ideas, he promotes for women ‘the free and equal developement [sic] and exercise of their faculties’ (159). He notes the ways in which that exercise is limited by the ‘dull routine of domestic incidents’ (39) dictated as women’s sphere by public opinion, and the ‘domestic caprice and despotism’ of men (70). Thompson insists that marriage is inherently despotic under existing custom and law founded on men’s interests. In English Feminism, 1780– 1980 Barbara Caine describes his tract as ‘a diatribe against the enslavement of women in marriage’ (72). Thompson’s discussion of marriage is organized around the concept of male despotism. This despotism is characterized as ‘pernicious’ (Thompson 62) and ‘withering’ (91). Men under current social arrangements in marriage indulge an ‘unhallowed love of’ (80) and take ‘vulgar pleasure’ (101) in ‘despotic command’ (80), he writes. His persistent use of the words ‘despotism’ and ‘despotic’, language associated in Britain with Jacobinist social critique, underlines the revolutionary fervour and scope of his arguments against contemporary British marriage codes. Like Brontë he associates only serial male promiscuity and a sexual double standard with Eastern despotism (84), a piece of what Zonana terms ‘feminist orientalism’, a practice of ‘figuring objectionable aspects of life in the West as “Eastern” ’, here ‘rhetorically’ integral to his push for ‘the removal of Eastern elements from Western life’ (594). Men’s despotic power of command and restraint over women, operating domestically and through social morality, is, in his view, universal. Thompson takes issue with James Mill’s curt assertion that women’s interests as a foundation for civic representation ‘are indisputably included in those of other individuals’, their fathers or husbands, and might therefore ‘be struck off without inconvenience’ (79). By contrast,

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Thompson appealed, Caine points out, for ‘complete equality in matters of civil and criminal law, the opening to women of all public offices, and a transformation of society on the lines of co-operation’ in communitarian ‘working and living arrangements’ (60). Brontë takes up the question of women’s individual rights in relationships rather than, as Thompson does, specific civic rights as a group. Jane’s interests, bound up with development and exercise of her faculties, are not included in those of St John as prospective husband. His despotism, like Mr Brocklehurst’s in loco parentis at Lowood, is represented as English. Jane’s assertion in relation to her marriage to Rochester that ‘[n]o woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh we are ever together’ (450; vol. 3, ch. 12) suggests an extraordinary commonality of interests across lines of gender in their relationship. She implies the realization in their marriage of the earthly and sublime promise of Rochester’s view that he and Jane share ‘natural sympathies’ (151; vol. 1, ch. 15) and the validity of her assertion in relation to him, ‘I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him’ (175; vol. 2, ch. 2). For Lara Freeberg Kees the concept of sympathy in the novel is Brontë’s ‘new trope of union, one that can justify a governess marrying her master’ (885) in the face of an increasing racialization of class difference in scientific discourse. Jane’s comment on Morton, ‘it was sheltered, and I wanted a safe asylum’ (355; vol. 3, ch. 4), sums up her sense of the dangers facing the unprotected woman after her experiences in the interim between leaving Thornfield and being taken in by the Rivers family. As Chase points out, ‘confinement and exposure’ become ‘dreaded alternatives for Jane’ (88). The purported ‘natural sympathies’ between Rochester and Jane become Jane’s shelter and ‘safe asylum’ in marriage. With respect to Jane’s ideas concerning women’s sphere, however, the narration of her autobiography ten years after her marriage is an exercise – outside her daily round – of her faculty of imagination in animating her life story. Her autobiography amply demonstrates her qualities of adhesiveness, judgement, and conscience. Jane resists in her views on women’s social and cultural place the domestic ideology of the separation of masculine and feminine spheres that, Caine argues, gained considerable popularity during the 1830s and 1840s through the work of such writers as Sarah Lewis, Mrs John Sandford, and Sarah Ellis. Caine links the appeal of these writers to ‘essentially conservative’ evangelical


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reformulation of the status, the nature, and the duty of women while carrying within itself [evangelicism] the basis for a new assertion of women’s rights. As [Leonore] Davidoff and [Catherine] Hall have shown [in Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850], the need for women to provide the distinctive religious and moral base for middle-class families and the moral and spiritual guidance for their menfolk meant that women were seen at one and the same time as naturally subordinate to men—and as the most appropriate leaders and guides of those men in religious and moral matters. They were both to confine themselves to the home and to transform that home—and through it the whole world—by virtue of their religion and piety. (84) The advancement of the task of moral regeneration of the maimed Rochester is, it is implied in Jane Eyre, integral to principled Jane’s role as his wife, although her reservations about playing such a role are memorable, and the novel suggests that the couple, in Sandra M. Gilbert’s terms, share ‘pleasure in physical as well as spiritual intimacy, erotic as well as intellectual communion’ (368). As the review in the Church of England Quarterly Review indicates, not all readers found the prospect of Rochester’s moral regeneration particularly convincing. Its critic writes in relation to the blend of ‘physical’ and ‘spiritual intimacy’: ‘There are, to be sure, towards the close of the last volume, some ejaculatory acknowledgments of a Redeemer on the part of the hero; but they are vague, rambling, and visionary – strangely blended with the breathings of earthly passion and the levities of an unregenerate heart’ (492). During the courtship Rochester speaks of his desire to be ‘healed and cleansed, with a very angel as [his] comforter’. Jane finds this amusing: ‘ “I am not an angel,” I asserted; “and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me, – for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you; which I do not at all anticipate” ‘ (260; vol. 2, ch. 9). In narrative terms the closing juxtaposition of Jane’s domestic mission in marriage and St John’s overseas mission does not close off the charge of the erotic and earthly registers of the representation of Jane and Rochester’s relationship. The ideology of separate spheres was publicly contested by writers like Harriet Martineau and Ann Richelieu Lamb, the latter the author of Can Woman Regenerate Society? (1844), and Brontë indeed alludes to key portions of Lamb’s argument in the language of the passage in which Jane describes her ‘relief’ of her ‘restlessness’ (109; vol. 1, ch. 11). Lamb writes,

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We are told that without freedom the mind never can attain its highest elevation; how then can the mind of woman expand, fettered and chained as it is? How can she progress, when laughed at if she moralizes, ridiculed if she dares to tamper with philosophy, and told from time to time keep within her sphere? – a sphere circumscribed by the narrowest limits of conventional usages, a prison within which she is doomed to dwell, and wherein, like the generality of prisoners, she must become a heartless, listless, apathetic being, hoping for nothing; or, if the contrary, enduring much, and fearing more. Those who have known this petrifaction of the mind, this all but annihilation of the soul, where no object was allowed upon which the powers of that soul might have been healthily and actively employed, will perfectly understand what I mean. There are invisible fetters more galling than iron ones possibly can be, and which bow down the spirit, even more cruelly and certainly than the others can oppress the body. Such as have been gifted with a brilliant imagination, should consider themselves happy; if used aright it may brighten many a dark and dreary hour; when wearied with warring with the elements which environ our existence, they may find in it refreshment and solace; for in an instant, it can place before them such glowing pictures of what is one day to be realized, that they may thereby gain fresh courage to renew their exertions, and fresh hope to pursue the object of their wishes. (8–9, 147, my italics) Jane narrates, the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it—and certainly they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended—a tale of imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence. (109; vol. 1, ch. 11, my italics) The narrating Jane, too, comments generally of women: ‘It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex’ (109; vol. 1,


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ch. 11). During her reveries on the leads, she recalls, she ‘not unfrequently heard Grace Poole’s laugh’ (110; vol. 1, ch. 11). Jane’s sense that women are in ‘silent revolt against their lot’ and her insistence on the reality of their feeling of ‘restraint’ and ‘stagnation’ (109; vol. 1, ch. 11) recalls Lamb’s comment that ‘many women are forced to wear’ an ‘appearance of assumed cheerfulness’ ‘as a mask lest others should perceive the real state of their feelings’ (35). Echoing Lamb’s language of women’s place as a prison, Brontë has Jane describe the prospect at Lowood after Miss Temple’s departure as ‘blue peaks their boundary of rock and heath seemed prison-ground, exile limits’ (JE 85; vol. 1, ch. 10).2 In Can Woman Regenerate Society? Lamb addresses Sarah Lewis’ arguments in Woman’s Mission (1839) that the ‘office’ of women is ‘that of instruments (under God) for the regeneration of the world, – restorers of God’s image in the human soul she will best accomplish this mission by moving in the sphere which God and nature have appointed, and not by quitting that sphere for another’ (12). Lewis urges that this regeneration is effected by ‘influence’ (119) within the ‘home the favourite field for the exercise of virtues a fine field for the energies and talents’ increasingly exercised through philanthropy outside the domestic sphere (121). For her the ‘ideality’ of the ‘missionary spirit’ in women (128) is best expressed in maternal love; childless women may redirect this love towards ‘[t]he poor, the ignorant, the domestic servant’ (130). The woman’s mission about which she generalizes is the middleclass Christian Englishwoman’s. The inspirational spirit of regeneration in her scheme has ‘but one source complete surrender of the heart to the cause of God, and the promotion of his glory, which is the essence of Christianity’ (131). Christianity, she asserts, ‘is the only scheme which has annexed happiness to self-renunciation’ (133). The separation of spheres is, for Lewis, by providential design. Brontë was consistent in her criticism of the ideology of the gendered separation of spheres. In an 1851 letter to Elizabeth Gaskell in which she expressed reservations about aspects of Harriet Taylor Mill’s ‘The Emancipation of Women’, published anonymously in Fraser’s Magazine, she questions again its operation: ‘if there be a natural unfitness in women for men’s employment, there is no need to make laws on the subject; leave all careers open; let them try; those who ought to succeed will succeed, or, at least, will have a fair chance; the incapable will fall back into their right place’ (qtd. in Murray 36). Brontë implies that the author is wanting the ‘finer chord[s] of the soul’ she herself exhibits in acknowledging ‘self-sacrificing love and disinterested devotion’ (qtd. in

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Murray 36). She reports that when she initially believed the author to be female, she thought the author must have ‘nerves of bend leather’ (qtd. in Murray 36). The narrating Jane’s representation of her ‘restlessness’ exhibits a feature of Brontë’s elaboration of Jane’s character through concepts drawn from what Chase terms ‘the Enlightenment tradition of philosophical psychology’ (52): ‘extravagant figural’ language (54). Chase characterizes this tradition as explaining the human mind in terms of a few leading faculties: reason, judgment, conscience, memory, feeling, imagination. These terms appear frequently in Jane Eyre, often with upper-case authority, and Jane depends on them whenever she attempts to give a thorough exposition of her state of mind. They provide the discursive scaffolding of the novel; when explanation is in order, these terms come forth to explain. (53) Concentrating on Brontë’s interpretation of Jane through the concepts of ‘reason, judgment, passion’, Chase argues that the ‘extravagant figural’ language of Brontë’s explanation shows a habitual and marked tendency to transform concepts into conceits—as a tacit recognition of the limits of her technical vocabulary. Traditional faculty psychology has, after all, relatively few terms with which to describe the infinite gradations of human feelings, and Brontë’s imaginative reworking of these terms reflects a straining after finer discriminations. (54) Jane’s account of her ‘restlessness’ abounds in pregnancy metaphors: ‘swelled in trouble’, ‘expanded with life’, ‘quickened’. Her ‘heart’ is impregnated with the ‘bright visions’ of her imagination, ‘the exultant movement’ of her desire for ‘a power of vision which might overpass’ the ‘limit’ of her geographical and social horizons as governess. In sleep Jane’s imagination will subsequently produce ‘baby-phantom[s]’ (221; vol. 2, ch. 6) in dreams that are ‘presentiments’ (220; vol. 2, ch. 6). It is perhaps the figural language that leads Kaplan to describe the account as having ‘its own slightly manic register’ (‘Pandora’s Box’ 173). In Jane’s dreams of children she is responsible for the baby-phantom, which her account of her reverie on the leads suggests is a dream symbol of her fecund and ‘exultant imagination’ (109; vol. 1, ch. 11), a faculty of sensibility.3 As Ronald Thomas points out, ‘Jane Eyre’s dreams embody


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a desire for a language to express them’ (54). He links them to ‘Jane’s desire to retain possession of her own voice, superseding even her desire to be with Rochester’ (65). The year 1832, the year of Jane’s restless private longings on the leads of Thornfield Hall by my dating, is, Hall argues, ‘a key moment in the process of British nation formation the national settlement represented by the English Parliamentary Reform Act of 1832’. She elaborates, For two years the country was in turmoil, revolution was widely feared by the propertied classes and major changes took place in the organization of the franchise as a result. In 1832 217,000 voters were added to an electorate of 435,000, £10 householders in boroughs received the vote, pocket and rotten boroughs were significantly reduced in number, and the representation of the new industrial towns were increased. Approximately 1 in 5 adult men now had the vote in England and Wales in a population of 16 million. At the same time it was specified for the first time that the franchise was granted to ‘every Male Person of full Age, and not subject to any legal Incapacity’; the political citizen was formally named as masculine. (‘Rule of Difference’ 107) Charles Greville wrote in his journal on 21 November 1831: The state of the country is dreadful; every post brings fresh accounts of conflagrations, destruction of machinery, association of labourers, and compulsory rise of wages. Cobbett and Carlile write and harangue to inflame the minds of the people, who are already set in motion and excited by all the events which have happened abroad. (qtd. in Smith 41) A major spate of riots had followed ‘[t]he rejection of Grey’s second [Reform] Bill by the House of Lords on 8 October 1831’ (Stevenson 290). The largest-scale riots took place in Bristol in late October. John Stevenson notes, ‘The official casualties were later put at 12 killed and 94 wounded; of 102 prisoners taken, 31 were capitally convicted, of whom 4 were eventually executed. [E]stimates of the damage done rang[ed] up to £300,000’ (292). Much of the damage was caused by arson. Conflagrations were a routine weapon of riot in the United Kingdom, yet in some postcolonial readings of Jane Eyre incendiarism is essentialized as an act of slave rebellion (Plasa, Textual Politics 73–74, Meyer 69).

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The events mentioned by Greville included slavery conditions abroad and anti-slavery agitation within Britain, as is indicated by a despatch from Secretary of State Viscount Goderich to colonial Governor Sir Evan McGregor, only weeks before the 1831 slave rebellion in Jamaica. He urged that colonial recalcitrance on the implementation of amelioration measures is tending more and more every day to precipitate a powerful party in this country [the anti-slavery lobby] in the opposite extreme [immediate abolition], and to produce dangers, which, however ill they may be understood in a distant quarter of the World, no one who is conversant with the influence of Public opinion in this Country and the direction of it upon the subject of Slavery could fail to foresee. (10 December 1831) Shuttleworth identifies S – , the town Rosamond Oliver visits 20 miles from Morton, as Sheffield. She does so on the basis that Rosamond refers to ‘all our young knife-grinders and scissar merchants’ there4 and ‘Sheffield was famed for its knife and scissor production’ (Explanatory Notes 482). In 1833, by my dating, Rosamond mentions a ‘regiment stationed there, since the riots’ (364; vol. 3, ch. 6). Shuttleworth notes, among other possibilities, that the reference might be to ‘riots at the time of Sheffield’s first parliamentary elections in 1832 which led to the deaths of several rioters in what came to be known as the “Sheffield massacre” ’ (Explanatory Notes 482). Brontë’s allusion cuts across Politi’s argument that ‘the opposition French/English’ in the novel establishes a ‘nationalistic’ discourse that xenophobically marks civic rebellion as un-English (61). The riot took place on 14 December 1832. The inquests into the deaths determined that they were ‘Justifiable homicide[s]’ on the part of soldiers called in to restore order (Times 21 December 1832; ‘Disturbances’). The Sheffield Mercury described the riots as ‘insubordination’, the work of an ‘infatuated mob’ (‘Dreadful Riot’). The rioters seemed to have taken exception to the likely election of a local Whig barrister, Mr Parker, who was backed by monied interests (‘Sheffield, December 13’). The riot followed ‘[c]onsiderable efforts made by many non-electors to obstruct the polling-booths of individuals’ (‘Sheffield, December 12’). Elizabeth Rigby famously declares in her commentary on Jane Eyre in the Quarterly Review of December 1848 that it is ‘pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition’ characterized by ‘a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority either in


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God’s word or in God’s providence’ (173–4). Here she alludes to both an earlier review of Jane Eyre published in the Christian Remembrancer in April 1848, and terms of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens by the National Assembly of France in 1791. Both reviews were published in the wake of the February 1848 rebellion in France, and continuing political turmoil in mainland Europe. The Christian Remembrancer was a High Church Anglican quarterly. Its reviewer had urged that, while not being ‘positively immoral or antichristian’, Jane Eyre had ‘a questionable aspect’ (Allott 91), ‘moral Jacobinism’: ‘ “Unjust, unjust,” is the burden of every reflection upon the things and powers that be’ (Allott 90). By March 1848, John Saville notes, there were in Britain ‘fears of a militant and expansionist Jacobinism’ (80). The rights of man and of citizens enunciated in the 1791 French declaration were ‘liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression’ (qtd. in Paine 79). The Declaration pronounced these to be ‘sacred rights’, and did so in anticipation of God’s ‘blessing and favour’ being conferred upon them (qtd. in Paine 79). Rigby directly states that the revolutionary ideals hinted at in the phrase ‘rights of man’ ‘find no authority either in God’s word or in God’s providence’. H. Gustav Klaus notes, Jane evokes the terms ‘liberty’ and ‘equal’/‘equality’ rather too often, and on one occasion even speaks of ‘fraternization’ for historically alert readers not to register their deep resonance. ‘Fraternization’ passes Jane’s lips when she learns that she is related to the Rivers family and thus has in the first place a kinship meaning. But by pairing it with ‘Famous equality’ and pronouncing it as she is about to redistribute her newly inherited wealth it acquires a dangerously radical ring, even if the potential threat to property is domesticated by limiting the sharing out of the fortune to her cousins. (2) In her reading of Jane Eyre Rigby finds anti-Christian Jane’s claim as a woman to the ‘rights of man’, her apparent endorsement of revolutionary rights, which Rigby finds un-English, and the revolutionary claim that such rights should have divine sanction. Brontë’s Preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre seems also to have incited both the critic for the Christian Remembrancer and Rigby. Brontë had railed against the timorous or carping few who doubt the tendency of such books as ‘Jane Eyre’ whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry— that parent of crime—an insult to piety, that regent of God on

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earth. Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns. (3) The Christian Remembrancer had remarked of the novel and Preface: All virtue is but well masked vice, all religious profession and conduct is but the whitening of the sepulchre, all self-denial is but deeper selfishness. In the preface to the second edition, this temper rises to the transcendental pitch. There our authoress is Micaiah, and her generation Ahab; and the Ramoth Gilead, which is to be the reward of disregarding her denunciations, is looked forward to with at least as much unction as of sorrow (Allott 90) As narrator, Jane anticipates that she ‘shall be called discontented’ over confessing her reverie on the leads (JE 109; vol. 1, ch. 12). Rigby faults in Jane Eyre that pervading tone of ungodly discontent which is at once the most prominent and most subtle evil which the law and the pulpit, which all civilized society in fact has at the present day to contend with. We do not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre. (174) Rigby’s picking up of the term ‘discontent’ from the narrating Jane’s reminiscence of her reverie suggests that Rigby’s sense of the novel’s antinomian spirit is grounded in large part in a reading of Jane’s quickening of imagination as a celebration of a ‘quickening of the spirit over the letter of the law’, a quickening prized by antinomians (Mee 58). Rigby would endorse the view of Helen Burns that disobedience and rebellion are foreign to ‘Christians and civilized nations’ (JE 58; vol. 1, ch. 6). For Rigby ‘Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength, but it is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself. No Christian grace is perceptible upon her’ (Rigby 173). Here she echoes the reviewer in the Church of England Quarterly Review who had urged in April 1848 that ‘the education of Jane Eyre was little calculated to promote the growth of religion in her heart she is a merely moral person, and, for the rest, she might have been a Mahomedan or a Hindoo for any bias of


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Christianity we discover in her actions or sentiments’ (492).5 Rigby and this critic are very much out of step with earlier reviewers who describe Jane Eyre, for instance, as ‘eminently religious’ (Nottingham Mercury), a ‘healthful exercise’ (Tablet), having a ‘morality throughout of an unexceptionable and instructive nature’ (Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 348), and having a ‘tone quite healthy and moral’ (Newcastle Guardian). Rigby also seems to be responding to what Raymond Williams terms ‘the intensity of feeling’ in Jane’s voice, new in English fiction (English Novel 60). He says of Brontë’s handling of Jane’s first-person narrative voice that she has a ‘capacity to compose an intimate relationship with the reader’, a ‘secret sharing’ with an ‘intimate reader’ (Long Revolution 69–70). Rigby’s response to this confidential intensity is a scathing repudiation of the values she attributes to Jane and to Brontë. Her disidentification with Jane’s and Currer Bell’s voices produces them as what Judith Butler would term ‘an abjected outside’ (3) to her own subject position. Rigby eulogizes the ‘sound English character’ of Lowood under the influence of the ‘enlightened committee’ that replaces the Puritanical Brocklehurst. Marking as foreign his Puritan principles for ‘young orphan girls’, Rigby describes them as ‘those of La Trappe’ (163), presumably referring to the Trappist Order’s emphases on ‘enclosure’, ‘manual labour’, ‘a spirit of apartness from all worldliness and a dedication to prayer and penance’ (Pennington). Rigby collapses Miss Temple’s example into the work of the ‘enlightened committee’. Under ‘sound English’ principles, according to Rigby, Jane ‘progresses duly from scholar to teacher, and passes ten profitable and not unhappy years at Lowood’, even if, having ‘been brought up dry upon school learning’, she is ‘somewhat stunted accordingly in body and mind’ (163). Ian Hunter, extrapolating from an argument of Thomas Laqueur, points out that ‘[i]t was not through religious or moral ideology that norms took hold of individuals but rather through a variety of religious and social practices, given new scope and effect by the disciplinary organisation of the school’ (45). Laqueur had highlighted ‘[t]he structure of authority, the discipline of time and space, to a lesser extent the organization of teaching, the rules governing appearance, and the system of rewards and punishments’ integral to schooling (qtd. in Hunter 45). Jane speaks of Lowood’s ‘rules and systems’, ‘school-duties, schoolhabits and notions’ (84–5; vol. 1, ch. 10). What constitutes ‘sound English character’ for Rigby is suggested by Jane’s characterization of her growth during these years: ‘more harmonious thoughts, what seemed better regulated feelings’, ‘allegiance to duty and order’, ‘quiet’, apparent

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‘content’, ‘disciplined and subdued character’, ‘tranquillity’ (84; vol. 1, ch. 10). In the last chapter Jane herself comments ethnocentrically on Adèle that ‘a sound English education corrected in a great measure her French defects; and when she left school, I found in her a pleasing and obliging companion: docile, good-tempered, and well-principled’ (450; vol. 3, ch. 12). For Rigby, Jane, despite an education of a ‘sound English character’, articulates dangerously French values. Rigby’s denunciation of Jane Eyre echoes one of the themes ‘implanted deeply within British political consciousness’ highlighted by John Saville as a feature of reaction in 1848: ‘the identification of members of the extreme radical movement in Britain with foreign ideas and movements, with Chartism as a synonym for rioter, leveller, Jacobin’ (163). Rigby’s review exhibits the ‘stiffening of the resolve of the middle ranks of society against the constant disturbances and turbulence from below’ that Saville observes in his study of the year (125). The tenth of April was the day on which a Chartist march through London was to have presented its Charter to British parliament; it was finally delivered in cabs. The Charter petitioned principally for the introduction of adult male suffrage without property qualification.6 In 1848 the provisional revolutionary government in France extended the national franchise in this manner. It is Jane’s linking of a woman’s discontent with both, in her reading, the ‘rights of man’ and the ‘ferment’ of rebellion in the ‘masses of life’ which disconcerts Rigby. In ‘The Language of “Mass” and “Masses” in Nineteenth-Century England’ Asa Briggs notes that in the early part of the period ‘the idea of “the mass” was obviously related both to number and to scale and to “massing”, the bringing together of people in towns or in factories’ (66). Briggs observes that for influential intellectuals like Benjamin Disraeli and Thomas Carlyle the language of the ‘masses’ in politics was integral to demagoguery (67). The concept of the ‘masses’ underpins St John’s description of Jane’s father’s domestic mission field as ‘an overgrown manufacturing town’ with a ‘grim, sootblack old cathedral’ (379; vol. 3, ch. 7). In his formulation the economic modernization that produces such massing is a source of disease and pollution. Rigby singles out ‘a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God’s appointment’ (18) as a key sign of the anti-Christianity of Jane Eyre. ‘God’s appointment’ in Rigby’s conservative, anti-revolutionary discourse refers to stable class relations and primogeniture. Like the more conservative characters in the novel,


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Mrs Reed and Mr Brocklehurst, for instance, Rigby assumes that ‘position and prospects’ in life are given by divine providence. The words ‘position’ and ‘prospects’ are Mrs Reed’s: she sends Jane to Lowood to be ‘trained in conformity to her position and prospects’ (JE 34; vol. 1, ch. 4). I have discussed Brontë’s criticisms of the system of primogeniture in Chapter 2 and the ways in which primogeniture was central to conservative understandings of English social stability by comparison with revolutionary France that abolished the system. Significantly the lady’s maid at Gateshead Hall who vehemently admonishes Jane that her ‘place’ is ‘less than a servant’ in the Reed household and that she should not presume to be ‘on an equality with the Misses Reed and Master Reed’ is named Martha Abbot (12–13; vol. 1, ch. 2). In the Christian tradition Martha ‘was cumbered about much serving’ (Luke 10.40); she is the ‘patron saint of good housewives, represented in art in homely costume, bearing at her girdle a bunch of keys and holding a ladle or pot of water in her hand’ (Brewer 814). The implication is that Martha Abbot’s social attitudes around rank will fix her in her current place. John’s attack on Jane is accompanied by reference to his own future independence as a ‘gentleman’s’ son (11; vol. 1, ch. 1) and a condescending excoriation of Jane’s dependence on the Reeds as a kind of parasitism. Hall, in commenting on the period, writes, In a social world in which identity was always defined in relation to ‘others’, the ‘others’ of the manly independent individual were the dependent and the subjected – the woman, the child, the servant, the employee, the slave – all of whom were characterized by their dependence. Here, indeed, were the roots of the connections between the bondage of womanhood and the bondage of slavery which was [sic] richly explored both in politics and in literary and visual representations in the nineteenth century. One need only think of Jane Eyre, in which the heroine’s search for individual freedom and independence from her subjection to men is represented as her escape from slavery, or John Stuart Mill’s classic Liberal text entitled The Subjection of Women, with its analogy between marriage and slavery. (White, Male and Middle Class 258) More generally Hall highlights the manner in which the ‘particular form of individuality, associated with masculinity, that was the common sense of mid-nineteenth-century middle-class men’ became a social standard (280). For Brontë this standard set a benchmark of individual

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temporal freedom. Lauren Goodlad has noted that ‘throughout her fiction, Brontë made independence – the socio-economic condition that the 1834 New Poor Law had inscribed as the foremost requisite of Victorian personhood – the characteristic marker of English character at its most ideal’ (209). The more despotic tendencies encouraged in John Reed and Rochester by their wealth are stigmatized by Jane as foreign: John is like a Roman emperor; Rochester like a sultan. In exerting her claims of conscience against Rochester’s bounty in the silk warehouse, Jane refuses his positioning of her as desirably dependent, submissive, and passive, to be outfitted according to his taste and as a doll-like object reflecting his social status and wealth (partly derived, of course, from Bertha Mason’s dowry). Realizing that an inheritance would guarantee her ‘ever so small an independency’, she resolves to write to her Uncle John in Madeira, whom she now knows wants ‘to adopt’ her and name her ‘his legatee’ (JE 268; vol. 2, ch. 9). It is this letter about her marriage and her uncle’s connection to Richard Mason that will alert Richard to Rochester’s bigamous intent and lead to the disruption of Rochester and Jane’s wedding ceremony. Dianne F. Sadoff argues that with the letter Jane ‘hedges her dependency on Rochester’ (144). Brontë’s characters in the novel, including Jane, tend to use the word ‘class’ as a term for a group: Jane’s discourse of class is ‘rank’ based on divisions of ‘wealth’ and ‘custom’ and on ‘connexions’;7 Raymond Williams points out that ‘rank’ was still a common signifier of class in the nineteenth century, and a relatively conservative term which, with connotations of ‘standing, stepping and arranging in rows, belong[s] to a society in which position was determined by birth’ (Keywords 61–2). Social rank for Jane is a worldly rather than divine ordination; Brontë’s narrative endorses Jane’s and reportedly Rochester’s view that they share ‘natural sympathies’ (JE 151; vol. 1. ch. 15). Jane’s access to books is central to the refinement of her faculties and sensibility, and the nurturing of the imagination she realizes in her art. She compares ‘the scanty pickings’ at Lowood with the ‘abundant harvest of entertainment and information’ in the books available to her in the library at Thornfield Hall (103; vol. 1, ch. 11). It is surely significant that John Reed throws a book at Jane: for him, the book is a material object, exclusive ownership of which befits his gendered sense of rank expressed as a species difference between himself and Jane, a ‘bad animal’ (9; vol. 1, ch. 1). The book becomes the symbol of the cultural and class capital, the ‘delicacy and cultivation’ expected of the governess (332; vol. 3, ch. 2), that Jane acquires through the pedagogic growth of her faculties.


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Jane uses the term ‘caste’ when she reflects on her childhood preconceptions of poverty (‘I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste’ 24; vol. 1, ch. 3), when she is most conscious and critical of the exclusivity of the English gentry, and to declare piously that St John ‘hews down the prejudices of caste that encumber’ ‘improvement’ of ‘his race’ in India (452; vol. 3, ch. 12).8 The word ‘caste’ originates from the Spanish and Portuguese word ‘casta’, which was applied to social hierarchies in India from around the mid-sixteenth century, carrying connotations of purity of stock within social divisions (OED). The earliest instance of the term being transferred to apply to social relations in Britain dates from 1807. Through transference from applications in India, caste came to mean ‘[a] hereditary class resembling those of India’; ‘[a] class who keep themselves socially distinct, or inherit exclusive privileges’ (OED). Brontë’s use of the term evokes, too, one of the meanings of the noun ‘cast’: ‘lot, fate’ (OED). Overlooking Jane’s references to caste, Klaus notes that Jane’s language of rank with its embedded vision of hierarchy ‘emphasizes distance rather than opposition’ (8). Jane’s opposition to rank, I argue, is expressible in the language of caste. An objectionable aspect of English life is criticized through analogy with Indian social structures, which are understood to have a prejudicial, indeed unchristian foundation. Brontë illustrates scathingly in the chapters devoted to Rochester’s house party customary practices organized through prejudices of caste in England. During the house party Ladies Lynn and Ingram ‘gossip’ apart together. ‘Mild Mrs. Dent talked with good-natured Mrs. Eshton; and the two sometimes bestowed a courteous word or smile on’ Jane. ‘Sir George Lynn, Colonel Dent, and Mr. Eshton, discussed politics, or county affairs, or justice business’ (JE 188; vol. 2, ch. 3). The attitude of this set to Jane is, at best, condescending (Mrs Dent and Mrs Eshton); at worst, insulting (the Ingrams). Jane is, by virtue of her gender and class position, placed socially outside the masculine sphere of ‘politics, or county affairs, or justice business’, marked here as the domain of the landed gentry. Sir George Lynn is in early 1833 the newly elected member for Millcote. Drawing a contrast between shallowness and depth, Jane describes the Lynns as having ‘gallant grace’ which can scarcely compare with Rochester’s ‘look of native pith and genuine power’ (175; vol. 2, ch. 2). Sir George is ‘a very big and very fresh-looking country gentleman’ (176; vol. 2, ch. 2); his wife Lady Lynn is ‘very erect, very haughty-looking’ (171; vol. 2, ch. 2). Jane’s most vehement assertions of equality with members of the gentry – to Mrs Reed and to Rochester – are in response to what she reads

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as their caste assumptions that as an orphan or as a governess she has no feelings. The vicious conversation about governesses conducted within her hearing during Rochester’s house party illustrates the scope of caste prejudice; Jane recognizes herself as one of an ‘anathematized race’ (177; vol. 2, ch. 2). The implication is that the prejudices of caste in England act to ground execration of people outside a favoured breed. Charles Dickens exposes these prejudices tellingly, too, in The Personal History of David Copperfield (1850). James Steerforth observes snobbishly that the poor ‘are not to be expected to be as sensitive as we are. Their delicacy is not to be shocked, or hurt easily.’ Rosa Dartle responds cuttingly: ‘It’s so consoling! It’s such a delight to know that, when they suffer, they don’t feel!’ (352). The conversation about governesses and charges making sport of governesses in Jane Eyre and Jane’s observation of the behaviour of the set bring her close to tears. Rochester is shown to be more sensitive to her feelings: he questions her about her paleness and depressed spirits after she slips quietly out of the room. Brontë’s exposure of caste prejudice led the reviewer in the Christian Remembrancer and Rigby to place Currer Bell, the pseudonymous author of Jane Eyre, socially. The Christian Remembrancer urged that the ‘satire is “high life below stairs” with a vengeance; the fashionable world seen through the area railings, and drawn with the black end of the kitchen poker’ (Allott 91). Noting Jane’s place as narrator, Rigby comments, ‘The moment Jane Eyre sets these graceful creatures conversing, she falls into mistakes which display not so much a total ignorance of the habits of society, as a vulgarity of mind inherent in itself’ (168). Brontë subjects Jane’s view of herself as being of an ‘anathematized race’ to some deflationary irony through juxtaposing the treatment of Jane with treatment of a purported gypsy woman desiring to ply her trade of fortune-telling. The footman carries news of her arrival and persistence to magistrate Mr Eshton, who quickly replies, ‘Tell her she shall be put in the stocks if she does not take herself off’ (JE 191; vol. 2, ch. 3). Most of the other guests welcome the ‘excellent sport’ she can provide (192; vol. 2, ch. 3). When Blanche does not like what Rochester in gypsy disguise tells her about her mistaken sense of his fortune, her pique is apparent in her recommendation of punishment: ‘My whim is gratified; and now I think Mr. Eshton will do well to put the hag in the stocks to-morrow morning, as he threatened’ (194; vol. 2, ch. 3). For Rochester the Romany fortune-teller is a mimicable stereotype, a part playable with the aid of ‘a red cloak’, ‘a broad-brimmed gipsy hat’, skin made up as ‘brown and black’, a wig of ‘elf-locks’, and a pipe (195–6; vol. 2, chap. 4). Mr Eshton’s response to the arrival of a seeming gypsy


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cuts across the romanticizing of Romany life apparent in the lyrics of a song that Jane remembers Bessie Lee singing as she makes a bonnet for Georgiana’s doll: ‘In the days when we went gipsying,/A long time ago’ (JE 21; vol. 1, ch. 3). Mayall links this kind of romanticization with the symbolic elevation of the Gypsy to the status of chief protagonist with the forces of progress and advance, resisting the crushing organisation of society and the routine and restraints of civil life. They stood for freedom against the tyranny of law, for nature before civilisation and for simplicity before complexity. This instinct for liberty was held as the symbol for the aspirations of all who challenged the repressive forces of modernisation. (72) Jane’s comment on Rochester’s performance of the part of gypsy, ‘I knew gipsies and fortune-tellers did not express themselves as this seeming old woman had expressed itself’ (JE 202; vol. 2, ch. 4), names what she understands to be class distinctions on ethnic and epistemological lines: white English sensibility/Angloromany sensibility and astute phrenology/quack palmistry and fortune-telling. The Eshtons and Ingrams sometimes use phrenological language, but they are shown to lack the perspicacity of Rochester and Jane. Deborah Epstein Nord argues that ‘[u]nlike colonial subjects Gypsies were a domestic or an internal other, and their proximity and visibility were crucial features in their deployment as literary or symbolic figures’ (Gyspies 3). From the sixteenth century, Romanies were subjected to ‘persecution and harassment’ in Britain (Mayall 154). Ian Hancock cites transportation of Romanies to the West Indies as slaves after a Privy Council decision in 1714 (Pariah Syndrome 66). Robert Dawson discusses the transportation of Romany convicts to the Americas to work as indentured servants, their offence often being one of cultural difference, criminalized as vagrancy. Romany convicts were also transported to Australia (Brandner 122–89). In the Angloromani language, magistrates, Hancock notes, are still known colloquially as transporters (Pariah Syndrome 68). While the fact of linguistic links between Romani and an older Sanskrit language was made public by Heinrich Grellman in 1787 (in an account translated into English in 1807), the argument for the Indian origins of Romany peoples in Europe, ‘relying heavily on the[se] philological links’, only became ‘especially popular’, David Mayall notes, ‘by the late nineteenth century’ (75). Grellman argued that Romanies ‘came from “Hindostan” and were likely identifiable as

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the lowest caste of Indians: “Parias; or, as they are called [there] Suders” ’ (Nord, Gypsies 7). There is still controversy over the origins of Romany peoples.9 Nord argues that ‘it is the gypsy’s kinship to herself that impresses Jane and leads her to recognize Rochester beneath the disguise’ (‘Marks’ 195), offering her ‘access to unconventionality, to a gypsy self’ (‘Marks’ 195). For Nord the gypsy becomes through a metonymic chain linking Rochester, Grace Poole, and Bertha ‘a flamboyant but potent marker of what is alien in the text and, ultimately, in Jane’ (‘Marks’ 196). Her interpretation of Jane’s identification with the gypsy relies heavily on a reading of Jane’s comment: ‘The old woman’s voice changed: her accent, her gesture, and all were familiar to me as my own face in a glass – as the speech of my own tongue’ (202; vol. 2, ch. 4). Nord comments, Jane might be saying that Rochester’s face and speech are as familiar to her as her own (which, in itself, makes no real sense), or she might be suggesting that looking at the gypsy is like looking in the mirror (which, on a literal level, makes even less). The ambiguous and strange words seem to suggest that Jane recognizes Rochester because he resembles her, and not simply because he is familiar. (‘Marks’ 196) In my reading Jane recognizes class and ethnic ‘kinship’ with Rochester as his disguise of manner, sensibility, and voice falters. ‘Familiar’ in Jane’s account of recognition is used in its meaning ‘pertaining to one’s family or household’ (OED). What is illustrated in the contrast between the gentry’s and Jane’s values is what Philip Cohen identifies as an Anglo-Saxon ‘code of breeding’. ‘There is’, he writes, the aristocratic code, which first emerged in the late seventeenth century, linking notions of social pedigree and ancestral blood to a hierarchy of human sensibilities; and there is a bourgeois version which linked the practice of refinement to that of reason in a new way, by emphasising hierarchies of individual achievement based on inherited differences of ‘intelligence’ or ‘natural aptitude’. (64) Rochester’s set, Mrs Reed, and Mr Brocklehurst subscribe to the first code; Brontë in large measure to the second. Rochester’s recognition of Jane’s special properties as an individual, ordained by divine providence, and their seductive heterosexual appeal across a barrier of rank endorses the bourgeois version of the code of


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breeding and a particular ‘historical compromise’. Jane’s restlessness is placated by this recognition and her inheritance of property. Cohen notes that the Long Transition in Britain was characterized by selective absorption of the middle class into the upper class. He suggests that this historical compromise meant that bourgeois ideals had to be incorporated within the aristocratic code. Possessive individualism had to find a home within its logic of race and class ascription. As a result, breeding had to be associated with certain private properties of personality which in turn resumed the public bourgeois virtues of industriousness and thrift. Reason, or at least a certain calculating rationality, was thus promoted as the distinguishing feature of human individuality, a condition of full admittance to civil, and hence civilised, society. In the process, its meaning underwent a subtle transformation; it took on an expressive, even an aesthetic, dimension. Reason became the practice of refined sensibility, the mark of superior intellect. (66) Rigby resists what she reads as the narrating Jane’s valorization of female individualism grounded in ‘talents, virtues, and courage’ (173), in honouring the growth of God-given faculties. She also stresses the underlying coarseness, rather than refinement of Jane’s sensibility. Jane’s formulation, ‘I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him’ (175; vol. 2, ch. 2, my italics), suggests that her refined sensibility merits her being ‘put into the same class’ (OED) as Rochester.

5 Playing Jane Eyre at the Victoria Theatre in 1848

When W.S. Williams informed Charlotte Brontë that an adaptation of Jane Eyre was being staged at the Victoria Theatre in London – the run commenced on 31 January 1848 – the preparation of the second edition of Jane Eyre was well under way and she was anxiously contemplating the ‘new works’ (Letters 2:9) which might consolidate her reputation. In a letter to G.H. Lewes on 12 January 1848, she confided, somewhat selfdeprecatingly: ‘my stock of materials is not abundant but very slender, and besides neither my experience, my acquirements, nor my powers are sufficiently varied to justify my ever becoming a frequent writer’ (Letters 2:9–10). His admonition of the melodramatic elements in Jane Eyre had drawn a defensive response in November 1847: ‘startling incident’ and ‘thrilling excitement’ had been demanded by publishers catering to the circulating libraries when she tried to market her first book (Letters 1:559). Now she explains to him why an intention to abjure melodrama in her next book might not be realizable: When authors write best, or at least, when they write most fluently, an influence seems to waken in them which becomes their master, which will have its own way, putting out of view all behests but its own, dictating certain words, and insisting on their being used, whether vehement or measured in their nature; new moulding characters, giving unthought-of turns to incidents, rejecting carefully elaborated old ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new ones. (Letters 2:10) To Williams, in the letter in which she responds to his account of John Courtney’s melodramatic adaptation Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor, she calls this capricious master a ‘humour’ which 92

Playing Jane Eyre at the Victoria Theatre in 1848

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exacts ‘industrious’ labour from the ‘Author’, a class of writers she distinguishes from ‘mere’ and ‘more prolific’ ‘bookmakers’, dependent on market forces, who ‘find the great stimulus of their pen in the necessity for earning money’ (Letters 2:27). Her writing process is represented as more organic: her ‘next book’, she ‘suppose[s] will grow to maturity in time, as grass grows or corn ripens’ (Letters 2:27). Her reservations about her powers as a writer become an anxious theme in letters to Williams in January and February 1848. Her experience, she suggests, grounds her writing and her ‘sympathies’ on ‘public and private’ issues. Her scope is, she worries, ‘contracted’ by it, disadvantaged because many doors of knowledge which are open for you, are for ever shut for me—though I must guess, and calculate, and grope my way in the dark and come to uncertain conclusions unaided and alone—where such writers as Dickens and Thackeray having access to the shrine and image of truth, have only to go into the temple, lift the veil a moment and come out and say what they have seen (Letters 2:23) Williams’s report on Courtney’s play would open one such door of knowledge for her, but she promptly desired it closed, telling him, ‘you have shewn me a glimpse of what I might call loathsome, but which I prefer calling strange’, recanting her earlier desire to have ‘witnessed this exhibition’, and advising him, ‘You must now try to forget entirely what you saw’ (Letters 2:27). Recognizing the public immediacy of theatre, she had expressed a curiosity to collect ‘useful observations’ of ‘the effect of the various parts on the spectators’ (Letters 2:25). The ‘various parts’ might be the storyline, or Courtney’s and the players’ interpretations of her leading characters. ‘A representation of “Jane Eyre” at a Minor Theatre would no doubt be a rather afflicting spectacle to the author of that work’, she had written. I suppose all would be wofully exaggerated and painfully vulgarized by the actors and actresses on such a stage. What—I cannot help asking myself—would they make of Mr. Rochester? And the picture my fancy conjures up by way of reply is a somewhat humiliating one. What would they make of Jane Eyre? I see something very pert and very affected as an answer to that query. The translation of the novel from page to stage, from ostensible autobiography to melodrama, she fears, will produce a mortifying spectacle, ‘both rant and whine, strut and grimace’ (Letters 2:25).

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This reception of Courtney’s adaptation and its largely local workingclass audience supports Philip Cox’s general argument that the stage adaptation of literary texts in the early nineteenth century is a ‘monstrous doppelganger [sic] which offers a disturbing and uncontrollable “other” to the original novel which effectively brought it into being’ (166–7). As with Charles Dickens’s relationship to W.T. Moncrieff analysed by Cox, Brontë’s binaries of high and low, author and hack, place Courtney as ‘a touchstone’ for her ‘fears concerning [her] early career as a professional novelist’ (126). ‘The literary high ground,’ he insists, ‘has to be regained (or rather, distinguished from) that inhabited by the hack writers of the minor theatres’ (136). In turning from the truths from which Williams ‘raised the veil’ Brontë others the ‘Metropolitan populace’, one of whose ‘haunts’ is the Victoria Theatre (Letters 2:27). This reinforces her sense of herself as a provincial writer. Courtney’s addressing of the affective obligations of leadership and following in Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor provides an offsetting reflection on the relations between author and adaptor. The play offers a topical, at times ironic commentary on Jane Eyre, addressing questions of gendered class, and imperial politics, especially through a thematization of leadership, followers and following, and the development of a sub-plot involving working-class characters. The imperial reach of the melodrama includes both the West Indies and Australia. John Courtney was, as Margaret Smith notes, ‘the stage name of John Fuller (1804–65), an actor who had first appeared on stage in 1829’ (C. Brontë, Letters 2:25, n. 1). He was the author of some dozen plays published under his name, many of them adaptations.1 Stoneman notes that in addition to Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor the Lord Chamberlain’s Collection holds ‘more than sixty other plays’ by Courtney (Jane Eyre 20). By the early 1850s Courtney was working as the stock author for the Surrey Theatre on a ‘small weekly stipend’ (Shepherd and Another v. Conquest 748); in 1852 he was sent to Paris by its management at its expense and on ‘a weekly salary of 2l.’ (746) ‘for the sole purpose of spotting suitable plays for adaptation’ (Stephens 96). He had, then, an extensive working knowledge of theatre, theatrical audiences, adaptation, and melodrama as a genre. That Courtney’s adaptation Jane Eyre or the Secrets of Thornfield Manor was written to appeal to the audience at the Victoria Theatre and its management, David Webster Osbaldiston and Eliza Vincent, is evident in his development of a sub-plot involving working-class characters. Theatre historians point to three mid-nineteenth-century representations of the audience at the Victoria Theatre: in Charles


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Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1849), Charles Dickens’s articles on ‘The Amusements of the People’ in Household Words (1850), and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851). Kingsley’s and Mayhew’s offer lurid depictions of the audience as an uncivilized ‘herd’ (Kingsley 95) or ‘mob’ (Mayhew) in need of improvement. Dickens invents the figure of patron Joe Whelks, whose theatrical tastes may be unsophisticated, but who relishes ‘dramatic entertainment’. He does not excoriate the managers of minor theatres, for ‘[t]hose who would live to please Mr Whelks, must please Mr Whelks to live. It is not the Manager’s province to hold the Mirror up to Nature, but to Mr Whelks – the only person who acknowledges him’ (181). Common themes in the three accounts are physicality, unruly loudness, packed spaces, gross manners, and raucous consumption. As in other nineteenth-century middle-class accounts of the working class, analysed so cogently by Gill Davies, ‘the conjunction of mouth–body–appetite’ in the elaboration of these themes ‘reveals a horror’ of it (72). A rough sociological sketch, however, may be drawn from the three accounts: the audience is predominantly from the local working-class area, where there are high rates of illiteracy and semi-literacy; the theatre attracts a relatively young audience of men and women; there is ‘raucous’ (Schlicke 196), at times choric, audience engagement with the action on stage; and audience members in the pit and gallery tend to know each other, forming a theatre-going community. Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow show that under Osbaldiston and Vincent’s management the theatre continued its tradition of identification with a ‘local audience’ (8), staging plays ‘which referred to local trades and preoccupations’ (38), and responding in its pricing of tickets to Lambeth’s fluctuating economic fortunes. In the recession of the mid-1840s ‘prices were further dropped to boxes 1s, half-price 6d, pit 6d, and gallery 3d’, Osbaldiston proclaiming that ‘the theatre’s prices were “within the means of all classes of society” ’(38). The playbill for Courtney’s adaptation, performed on a bill with a popular pantomime World of Wonders or Harlequin Caxton and the Origin of Printing,2 gives ticket prices as ‘Boxes 1s – Pit 6d – Gallery 4d ’ (Stoneman, Jane Eyre 22). George Rowell notes that the Victoria Theatre’s repertoire came increasingly to rely on the audience’s identification with the struggle and survival of one of their own kind to compensate for the spectacle it could no longer afford. Osbaldiston was clearly making a virtue of necessity when his playbills boasted of ‘Those Beautiful Domestic Dramas for which

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this Theatre has already under the present Management become so universally and extensively celebrated’. (38) Courtney’s Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor fits the style of the typical Victoria Theatre play of the 1840s. Repeated scenes of violence in which the word ‘murder’ is uttered loudly and the fire that destroys Thornfield Manor provide theatrical sensation. Stoneman, drawing on Mayhew’s account of the Victoria Theatre audience of Chartists, observes that they were content to accept landowners so long as they were benevolent, and were much more eager for the come-uppance of hypocritical parsons, cheating shop-keepers and sadistic policemen—the ‘rich’ classes they had most to do with. The social order in melodrama is not overthrown but purged of its wickedness; melodrama is most vividly democratic in showing the oppressed poor as the arbiters of good and evil. (Jane Eyre 7) George Rowell recounts that Vincent’s local knowledge was drawn from experience. She was ‘the daughter of a Lambeth newsvendor’, had made ‘several child appearances at the Coburg’, the earlier incarnation of the Victoria Theatre, and gone on to a stage career at Drury Lane (32). He observes that Vincent was the theatre’s mainstay it was she rather than Osbaldiston who shaped the repertoire, and her appeal that made the heroine the centre of so many plays presented during these years. The list of pieces presented tells its own story: Susan Hopley, the Servant Girl (1841); Grace Huntley (1843); Alice Aukland (1843); Isabel Bertrand (1846); Katy O’Sheil (1846); Alice Duane (1849); Marion Hazelton (1849) are some of the title-roles she played. It is noticeable not only that the heroine gives her name to the play, but that she is of native and often humble stock. The review of Courtney’s Jane Eyre in the Era praised Vincent’s performance of the part of Jane: ‘she displayed much feeling and good taste, and was loudly applauded’ (qtd. in Stoneman, Jane Eyre 30). The comic sub-plot involving servants in Courtney’s play has been summarily dismissed by Margaret Smith and by Patsy Stoneman in her early commentary on the play, yet it provides the Victoria Theatre’s audience points of class identification and reflects on the class politics of Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Smith judges the extant playscript


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to be ‘a crude mixture of melodrama and slapstick comedy’ (C. Brontë, Letters 2:25, n. 1), ‘a gross travesty’ of Jane Eyre, with ‘stock low comedy servants, involved in knockabout scenes totally unrelated to the novel’ (C. Brontë, Letters 2:28, n. 1). In Brontë Transformations Patsy Stoneman complains of ‘extended extraneous material providing comic business between characters called Betty Bunce, Joe Joker, Sally Suds, etc.’ (15). In her recent edition of nineteenth-century stage adaptations of Jane Eyre she is more sanguine about the interpolation of a sub-plot involving servants: the rebellious servants from Lowood sink happily into the less oppressive servitude of Thornfield Hall. Nevertheless the play as a whole supports Peter Brooks’s argument that the assertive rhetoric of melodrama is ‘in all cases radically democratic’. If, as Brooks argues, the essence of melodrama is ‘the dramaturgy of virtue misprized and eventually recognized’, then in this play it is the virtue and resourcefulness of servants and victims – the class from which the audience is drawn – which is recognized by a benevolent superior (Rochester), while the devious and parasitic middle classes are exposed as the real class enemy. (Jane Eyre 8)3 My reading draws on Jacky Bratton’s useful general analysis of the comic elements in nineteenth-century British melodrama: The figures who carry the serious weight of the Manichean polarities of melodrama’s moral world, especially the villain and the heroine, have no psychological complexities or ambiguities; but alongside them, the countryman who is the villain’s unwilling assistant and the maid who shares the heroine’s distresses may voice a quite different, more ‘natural’ and certainly more mixed response to the drama. In assessing these plays as discursive projects, it is their articulation of comic and serious voices which needs to be understood. (38–9) The comic dimension is usually provided by servant figures who ‘conventionally present a broader, coarser version of a love plot, or scenes in which a comic man scrambles for self-preservation and incidentally or even accidentally achieves heroic feats the inclusion of their sceptical and pragmatic voices is nevertheless a significant modification of the romance’ (39). Courtney’s melodrama, which has a contemporary 1840s setting, is grounded in the idea of an ‘unfeeling world’ (JES 35)4 imbued with

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‘cold’ (JES 33, 35), ‘uncharitable’ (JES 35), ‘avaricious’, ‘grasping’, and ‘imperious’ values (JES 56). Transcendent humanity comprises kindly and giving spirit, judicious pity for suffering, and protection grounded in friendship, all of which may cut across worldly barriers of class and gender. Jane Eyre becomes the play’s symbolic embodiment of these values. The word ‘poor’ is central to Courtney’s moral universe (for example, JES 32, 33, 37). Remembering his arranged marriage, Rochester, for example, speaks of his father’s mercenary and ‘imperious spirit’ that could not countenance seeing a son of his ‘poor’ in a pecuniary sense (JES 56). In Jane’s dialogue ‘poor’ is a synonym or metonym for the ‘unprotected’ (JES 35, 42, 53), ‘lone’ (JES 42, 52), or ‘friendless’ (JES 58) state of the ‘orphan girl’ (JES 53), a sign of her identification with a larger social category. ‘Poor’ is also a marker of the sympathy of working-class characters for Jane’s condition as orphan and sister sufferer at Lowood. Brontë’s Jane remarks of St John Rivers that ‘he forgets, pitilessly, the feelings and claims of little people, in pursuing his own large views’ (416; vol. 3, ch. 9). Courtney’s interpolation of a working-class subplot and new plot developments involving Richard Mason implicitly point to some of the limits of the social imaginary of Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The social imaginary of Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor encompasses, by contrast, the miserable working and living conditions of servants at Lowood under Brocklehurst’s governance; serial sexual exploitation of maids by their male masters; the fate of a male servant who like Jane has ‘no more independence than an independent spirit’ (JES 46) in a period of economic recession; the destitution of servants after the fire at Thornfield; and a familial love in Richard Mason, who grieves terribly over Bertha’s death. Smith reads this grief simply as an opportunity to enhance the melodrama through ‘an additional mad character’ (C. Brontë, Letters 2:28, n. 1). Richard Mason’s love for his sister is double-edged. In Rochester’s first brief soliloquy he recalls ‘staying by the old beech trunk’ – a symbol of Englishness – and feeling that a ‘hag’, ‘a wild form’, challenged his ‘love’ of Thornfield by exclaiming with a ‘loud laugh’, ‘Like it if you can, like it if you dare’ (JES 38). As a metonym for white Creole degeneracy, Bertha stands as a curse on the West Indian alliances of the English great house and class-bound affiliation to Englishness, and a drain on the heart of a post-slavery West Indian plantocracy in decline, emblematized by Richard, here ‘rough weather-worn looking’ (JES 40). Bertha and Richard are here the children of a planter rather than a merchant. Courtney’s Rochester criticizes Richard’s want of ‘energy’ (JES 44), energy having become by mid-nineteenth-century, as Dyer points out, a key


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marker of white male imperial enterprise (31). One of the cruel ironies in Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor is that Rochester, given a far stronger sense of his own suffering than in the novel, callously tells Richard Mason that when he has returned to Spanish Town he may consider Bertha ‘dead, or rather you need not think of her at all’ (JES 44). That Richard’s love for her ties him to the past, rather than frees him to a healthier future, ripens the seeds of what is represented as hereditary madness, to adapt Rochester’s formulation of Bertha’s decline into insanity in Jane Eyre. The time scheme of the novel is sharply compressed in the play. The fire at Thornfield is set the day Jane departs unobserved, and Courtney’s Rochester is injured searching for her, rather than trying to rescue Bertha. ‘The house is turned upside down’, Miss Scatchard comments in Act 1, Scene 2 (JES 37) on the mayhem produced at Lowood by various characters – Jane, and servants Betty Bunce, Joe Joker, and Sally Suds – giving ‘vent’ to usually repressed feelings about conditions there (JES 35). Joe,5 whose last name suggests he is the wild card in the pack of characters, describes those conditions as ‘Domestic Transportation – visiting Botany Bay or Norfolk Island without crossing the herring pond’ (JES 32). Norfolk Island was established as a punishment station for those convicted of crimes in New South Wales; according to Governor Ralph Darling it was designed as ‘a place of the extremest punishment, short of Death’ (105). It became known the world over as a hell on earth on which mutinies were frequent. The allusion to convictism is timely. Miles Taylor notes that transportation ‘had been scaled down by the mid-1840s, with only Bermuda, Gibraltar and Norfolk Island retained as offshore prisons’ and that in 1848 convict traffic was resumed in response to domestic tensions in Britain and colonial unrest in Ireland (156). Courtney’s antipodean analogy is also supported by Betty’s assertions that the girls at Lowood have been ‘sent out of the way’ by relatives, British colonies having a reputation for being places to which family secrets, inconveniences, and disgraces could be effectively banished. Further, the inmates of Lowood are abandoned to their fortune there: in this case, to be ‘thumped, bumped and consumptionized’, starved, out of sight (JES 32). Courtney works to establish empathy across class lines in his characters and in his audience by drawing out akinship (JES 50), likeness among the life experiences of Joe, Jane, and Rochester, in that they have all been sent out of the way by relatives, and have suffered as a result of this abandonment. Joe was abandoned by mother, father, and relatives, and has survived on his wits; Jane was sent to Lowood; Rochester was shunted off to Jamaica.

100 Imperialism, Reform, and Englishness in Jane Eyre

The melodramatic scheme of the play is established in this opening scene. The playbill summarizes, ‘Tyranny of Mr. Brocklehurst. The Cant of Hypocrisy Jane, goaded by her sufferings, becomes the CHAMPION of the SCHOOL’ (Stoneman, Jane Eyre 24). In her first soliloquy Jane muses, Cold and chill, will my spirit bear on this bleak and cheerless fate. Infancy past in a dull lethargy—girlhood encountering every day the frowns and scoffs of those who should have cherished and caressed me, and now womanhood dawns with a still darker prospect. Eight years have passed away since as a care-stricken child I quitted my aunt Reed for this place & from that hour, no friendly letter or inquiry has reached me—no mother’s caress or father’s kindly regard lives in my memory. I am as one dead to the world save that I live and move, for even my aunt sent with me evil reports, painted me in the blackest dye to Mr Brocklehurst. (JES 33) Helen Burns and Miss Temple are not special friends or prospective models for Jane, and art offers her no refuge; later Courtney’s Jane tells Rochester that at Thornfield she has ‘received the only kindness in my [her] unhappy life’ (JES 50). Attacked by Mr Brocklehurst with stories remembered of her aunt’s banishment of her, she bursts out: I will be heard for my pent-up feelings must have vent. For eight years I have endured all that falls to the lot of the poor orphan girl, discarded by those that should protect her and cast upon the cold care of an unfeeling world – all that I could do in patience, suffering, industry, and obedience to those above I have done. You sir by the munificence of others are placed here as our protector. Instead of kindness from you, I and those around me meet but scorn. In place of the bland smile and mild reproval for our errors we meet but your continuous frown, your determined opposition. Charity! Oh ’tis a monstrous mockery of it, ’tis persecution upon the helpless and unprotected – and I tell you sir, that you should blush to own such feelings as inhabit your cold and uncharitable heart. (JES 35) This scene takes the place of Jane’s childhood verbal defences of herself to John and aunt Reed. Mutiny breaks out among the servants at Lowood when the starved Joe, who has just given Brocklehurst one-month notice, is summarily dismissed after he tries to comfort the stricken Jane. Having confirmed their love for each other in a pragmatic way, Joe and


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Betty depart Lowood to seek their fortunes together; Jane fortunately has the governess position to take up. While Courtney’s Jane at one point decides to ‘offer up’ her ‘orphan prayer to him who ever shields the lone and unprotected’ (JES 42) and at another to trust to angels for protection, the play is distinctly more secular in moral orientation than Brontë’s novel. The moral principle that Courtney’s Jane cites when Rochester appeals to her to become his mistress, for instance, is self-respect, rather than self-respect and ‘the law given by God; sanctioned by man’ (317; vol. 3, ch. 1). Jane, who in the play has drawn marked ‘confidence’ from Rochester treating her as an equal (JES 49), names this principle when Rochester addresses her in this scene as an inferior by scoffing, ‘’tis false pride, fear of others – who in the world cares for you or will be injured by what you do’ (JES 57). Jane responds, ‘I care for myself – that moral principle that sustained me when a poor friendless child is all I have at this hour’ (JES 57). This growth in confidence, which Courtney charts dramatically, is the only character development in Jane. In Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor Jane Eyre functions as a symbolic figure of transcendent and potentially redemptive purity. The purity is achieved through the maintenance of self-respect through suffering, being ‘conscious in integrity’ (JES 58). Courtney’s Jane is far more comfortable with her symbolic meaning for Rochester than Brontë’s is. His Jane anticipates with pleasure becoming ‘the ministering agent of his future happiness’ (JES 52). The word ‘ministering’ suggests service. His Rochester thinks Jane ‘stainless’ (JES 40), his ‘better angel’ (JES 57); his role is to ‘shepherd’ this ‘lamb’, protecting her from the predatory ‘wolf’ (JES 44). The contrast, of course, is with Bertha, whose laugh is blatantly cued to illustrate mystery and provide sensation. She acts here as neither Jane’s nor Rochester’s double; she does not rend Jane’s bridal veil. The playbill suggests the tenor of the representation of Bertha: ‘The Wild Unearthly Yell and Scream The Attempt at Murder! Mysterious Appearance of the Maniac. Perilous Situation of Jane. A Night of Terror!!! The Maniac Fires the Mansion!!!’ (Stoneman, Jane Eyre 24). Courtney’s emphasis on his Jane’s purity downplays the struggle for temporal and spiritual freedom in Brontë’s character. What is repressed in his Jane, too, is her restlessness over the scope of women’s sphere. Jane, Joe, and Betty move in the course of the play from rebellion against a class hierarchy at Lowood, marked as cruel and callous, to security at Thornfield Manor, a politically charged trajectory in early 1848, a year of large-scale Chartist agitation and defeat. The great house


is in ruins, but there is a farm house, loyal farm servants, and Jane’s £20,000 fortune to help rebuilding. (Her sojourn at the Rivers home is very brief indeed, they are not cousins, and St John makes no demands of Jane.) Joe has become Rochester’s ‘preserver’ (JES 63), saving him from the fire, and Rochester and Jane from the now mad Richard’s fury. The wealthy Jane promises to ‘make’ him and, by extension, Betty ‘happy’ (JES 63), implying financial reward for their personal and class loyalty which will enable them to marry. Jane had early persuaded Rochester to employ first Joe and then Betty, Joe as a coachman, and Betty as a maid; for Jane his acceptance of her recommendations, contrary to house policy against staff having ‘followers’ (JES 45), is a sign of an inspiring personal trust in her that cuts across class lines. For them, as for Rochester, Jane becomes the ‘ministering agent’ (JES 52) of better fortune. Betty had initially found work as a maid for Jehediah Piper, grocer, mealman, and corn chandler, who ‘never had a new maid but in a very short time he had a new young piper’ (JES 48). Vulgar sexual predation of female employees by their masters frames and provides a foil to the developing more highbrow romance between Jane and Rochester. This theme is a staple of melodrama of the period. The language of love and sexual desire in the play is very class-bound. When Joe arrives at Thornfield Manor hoping that Jane will put in a good word for him to get any available work, he is derelict. Jane looks past his personal appearance, inviting him to breakfast with Mrs Fairfax and her. Joe asks, ‘Do you mean, Miss, to introduce me as an old acquaintance with such clothes as these – look at my jacket!’ Jane responds, ‘I introduce you not your attire – ’tis your heart I estimate, your clothes I heed not – come.’ ‘Well I never!’ says Joe in astonishment, also performing his (and Betty’s) dramatic function of providing working-class choric commentary on the action of higher-class characters ( JES 46). Bessie Lee, later Leaven, Martha Abbott, and Mrs Fairfax (an upper servant) occasionally perform this choric function in Brontë’s novel. A good instance is Bessie’s visit to Jane at Lowood just before Jane is about to embark on her career as governess (a role characterized by ambiguities of class position). The visit functions to remind Jane and the reader of the economic relations on which middle-class family life is founded and the quasi-maternal affect that may become implicated in them. The exchange between Bessie and Jane marks the distance Jane has travelled from the blurring of class boundaries that had so disconcerted her in the Reed household. Bessie affirms to Jane that her accomplishments make her ‘quite a lady’, locating Jane’s rightful class expectations (gentry) in both her family (bloodline) and the cultural capital acquired


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through education (JE 91; vol. 1, ch. 10). As Anne McClintock observes in a different context, it is ‘necessary that the women look at each other, for their glances recognize and confirm each other as representatives of their class’ (104). Bessie’s life narrative after the break-up of the Reed household occasioned by Mrs Reed’s death and John Reed’s profligacy is tangential to Jane’s and Brontë’s stories. Her fundamentally economic tie to the family has been severed. Jane’s exchanges with servants emphasize not akinship and mutuality of affect, but in Brontë’s terms the rightful class gap between them. As I argued in Chapter 4, Brontë’s novel illuminates what Cohen identifies as an Anglo-Saxon ‘code of breeding’ which tied ideas of pedigree and ancestry to ‘a hierarchy of human sensibilities’ (64). Rochester’s recognition of Jane’s individual properties of sensibility and their appeal across class lines endorses a middle-class version of the code of breeding and a particular ‘historical compromise’ (66) at a tense moment of reform in Britain. They marry in 1834. The contemporary mid-1840s ‘historical compromise’ represented at the close of Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor, by contrast, also includes servants who have earned Jane’s recognition and confidence on the basis of tried and true character, sometimes expressed through fists and wits, rather than worldly appearances or refined sensibility. Their subscription to this compromise is grounded in their economic positions and the loyalty Jane has earned from them. Jane is the crucial redemptive figure in Courtney’s vision of English renewal in 1848 for the audience at the Victoria Theatre. Jane’s welcome to Joe when he arrives at Thornfield Manor (valuing his heart over his external appearance) would seem to offer a self-reflexive wish on Courtney’s part concerning the relation between the novelist and the theatrical adaptor: that the heart of the play rather than its rougher sensibility or its more melodramatic garb be the measure of its value. Brontë’s horrified response to Williams’s account of the play – her sense that it is ‘loathsome’, ‘strange’ (Letters 2:27) – suggests a distancing of herself from both Courtney’s historical allegory and his melodramatic dressing of her novel. At stake is her valuing of the class and aesthetic reach of refined sensibility.

6 An 1859 Caribbean Perspective on Jane Eyre

The year 1859 marked the 25th anniversary of the coming into force of the Emancipation Act and the centenary of the birth of William Wilberforce. In 1859, too, Cousin Stella; or Conflict, the first Caribbean reworking of Jane Eyre, was published by Smith, Elder, the original publisher of Jane Eyre, on the strength of a recommendation by Elizabeth Gaskell, Brontë’s biographer.1 Its anonymous author was expatriate Jamaican writer Henrietta Camilla Jenkin (1808–85), a white Creole. The three-volume novel is a Bildungsroman, told in the third person, which traces the development of white Creole Stella Pepita Joddrell, whose history refigures aspects of Brontë’s characters Jane Eyre and Adèle Varens, and is set largely between 1828 and 1832. In Cousin Stella; or Conflict Jenkin strikingly reworks a considerable number of narrative topoi from Jane Eyre to create an analogue or parallel text, rather than shifts the balance of the story to the point of view of one of the minor characters.2 Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which meshes together first-person voices of Antoinette (Bertha) Cosway Mason, the unnamed Edward Rochester, and Grace Poole to reconstruct a ‘plausible’ life of Bertha Mason (Letters 156), has been the most influential retelling of the latter kind.3 Rhys writes that she ‘was vexed’ by Brontë’s ‘portrait of the “paper tiger” lunatic, the all wrong Creole scenes’ (Letters 262). In a project that prefigures aspects of Wide Sargasso Sea, Jenkin engages with many of the discursive fields of Jane Eyre I have outlined in earlier chapters. Jenkin critically engages with discourses of the tropical degeneracy of white Creole people. She also offers stringent comment on the evangelical ideals that animated the abolitionist movement in Britain, on the clash between these ideals and dominant plantocratic values in late plantation slavery culture, on despotism, and on analogies between 104

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women’s position and slavery. Stella Joddrell’s identification with the rebel slave is far more limited than Jane Eyre’s. Jenkin extends her engagement with discourses of degeneracy to criticize assumptions about the degenerative influence of ‘foreign’ blood and the degeneracy of female public performers. Jenkin represents and commemorates the institution of plantation slavery as a despotism that corrupts slaveholders (CS 3:42) and is anti-slavery, though offering a sympathetic portrait of ‘liberal’ plantocratic arguments which upheld, according to her, ‘the rights of humanity and justice’ for both enslaved people and planters (1:216–17). As a white Creole family romance Cousin Stella emphasizes divine and temporal retribution against slave-owners – their damnation, ruin, and dispossession. The novel, with its blinkered and stereotypical representation of African Jamaican characters, supports the character Louis Gautier’s view that while Sam Sharpe’s 1831 rebellion is a mark of political maturation among enslaved people, leaving open only ‘severest restrictions’ or immediate emancipation (3:218) as prudent courses of action, ‘the blacks of these islands are too degraded a set of beings to benefit by freedom’, a degradation ‘only partly’ attributable to enslavement and its legacies (2:97). Jenkin’s narrative voice sums up the period in which Cousin Stella is set: ‘The old nations of Europe were vibrating under the struggle for liberty. The reverberations of the emotions of Europe ran the round of the globe. Gold and blood were plentifully spent, a fierce cloud gathered, and hung heavy and threateningly over the West Indies; when it burst, would it purify, or utterly destroy?’ (3:42–3) These ‘emotions of Europe’ are agitation over abolition of slavery, the Reform Bill and Corn Laws in England, and revolutions in France and Italy. The political climax of the novel is the 1831 slave rebellion in Jamaica, Sam Sharpe’s rebellion,4 and its immediate aftermath, to which Brontë alludes, as I showed in Chapter 1. Parts of the novel’s plot turn on aspects of what became known as the Disallowed Slave Act. Jamaica was a chartered colony with a local parliament. In 1823 the British government recommended various amelioration measures to the Jamaican House of Assembly, part of its shift in policy towards amelioration, which, as I outlined in Chapter 1, was held responsible by planters and the pro-slavery lobby for the Demerara rebellion and more widespread unrest among slaves. Lambert observes, ‘Although based on the proposals of the West India Committee [the pro-slavery lobby group in Britain] and part of its strategy to undercut calls for immediate emancipation, this accommodationist approach was unpopular among resident whites, and reformism was met with local


defence’ (147). Black justly describes the response of the Jamaican House of Assembly to the proposed measures as ‘terrible’ (104). Under pressure, some limited measures, ‘An Act to alter and amend the Slave Law’, were passed in 1826. On the advice of the Committee of Privy Council for Trade and Foreign Plantations, King George IV disallowed the Act, a decision communicated by the Principal Secretary of State for the Colonial Department William Huskisson on 22 September 1827, and conveyed to the House through the office of the Lieutenant Governor Sir John Keane. Keane asked that members of the House ‘proceed to a temperate reconsideration’ of the issues (Barclay 445), but they were further enraged, responding at length, arguing that compromise was not possible ‘without sacrificing their independence, and endangering the safety of the island’ (Barclay 470).5 In Cousin Stella the House is described as being in a ‘state of rebellion’ (CS 1:185), ‘set into a blaze’ (1:215). Jenkin’s Rochester figure Gautier, who travels to England in early 1828 in a mediatory capacity, sums up the tensions between metropole and the resident plantocracy of the colony: ‘party spirit runs too high on both sides It is a sad spectacle to see passions paramount where principle ought to prevail, and poor coterie interest substituted for the eternal rights of justice and humanity. [P]arties are exclusive and intolerant’ (1:247). Louis’s suggestion that in England the evangelical ideals of the abolitionists have degenerated into ‘party spirit’ is not undercut by Jenkin. As Lambert points out, ‘the controversy over slavery was fundamentally bound up with the contested articulation of white colonial identities between colony and metropole’ (5). I have addressed this ‘contested articulation’ in Chapters 1 and 2. The furore around the Disallowed Slave Act among the plantocracy was bound up with questions of selfgovernment and the authority of local knowledge. As in other British Caribbean literary texts analysed by Deborah Wyrick, Cousin Stella ‘encode[s] “emancipation anxiety” as courtship and marriage melodrama, domesticating massive political and ideological change under the aegis of the family’ (45). Jenkin stages the tensions among entrenched white Creole prejudice (represented by the older Joddrells), a miniscule more liberal white Creole faction (represented by Louis Gautier), and ‘a newer bourgeois model’ of governance (Gibson, ‘Henry Martyn’ 421), legitimated by evangelical gender norms and concepts of liberty (represented by Stella Joddrell). The newer missionary model does not prevail as it cannot be accommodated politically or socially in Jamaica. Jenkin challenges the idea of the innate degeneracy of white Creoles and highlights the contingency of English identification. In moral terms the first


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group are shown to have been irretrievably corrupted by the exercise of despotic power over enslaved people, Louis is a pragmatic man of substantial principle flawed by prejudices of racial caste, and while the idealized Stella has progressive anti-slavery ideas, she learns to temper them against the recalcitrant prejudices and practicalities of everyday life in Jamaica. One of Louis’s functions in the novel is to acquaint Stella with local conditions in Jamaica. A rebellious figure at the opening of the novel, she learns the value of individual self-governance and is rewarded for it by prudent management of her inheritance and at the close with marriage to the now invalid Louis, ‘a helpless cripple’ (CS 3:297), casting himself as ‘the wearied spectator of the fulfilment of our general ruin’ (3:219). The crippling of the hero serves a political allegory.6 Stella and Louis become absentee owners in search of a cure for Louis at health resorts in mainland Europe, Stella comporting herself ‘full of goodness, loyal and frank – softening with a golden smile of love when her look met that of her husband’ (3:297). Unlike the marriage of Jane Eyre and Rochester, the union of Louis and Stella is childless, which would signal in Jenkin’s scheme that it is not a foundation of future nation-building.7 Dr McNeil, a voice of reason in the novel, reminds Stella in relation to the 1831 rebellion: ‘we cannot escape from the pitiless logic of cause and effect. Those who sow the whirlwind will reap the tempest – they and their children’s children’ (3:202). This accords with Stella’s ideas of a retributive curse on slave-owning families, yet also implicates the anti-slavery lobby in Britain. The fragility of the plantocracy is represented through tropes of soil. To Celia Dashwood, Stella’s paternal aunt, Louis Gautier’s comparative lack of wealth compared to the Joddrells – he cannot afford to delegate the ‘dirty work’ of running a slave plantation to ‘many overseers and book-keepers’ – makes him ‘nearly as black as one of his own Negroes – a perfect rum-and-water savage’, a ‘slave-driver’ (1:95). Her formulation illustrates Ann Laura Stoler’s general point that in various parts of empire ‘whiteness was seen not as fixed by birth, but altered by environment and secured by class’ (105). (Celia’s distinctive usage of the term ‘slavedriver’ offers a contrast to Jane Eyre’s in declaring John Reed a slavedriver.) In Europe Louis is identified as English (CS 3:297); he speaks English and has been educated in Britain. Louis Gautier explains to Stella that the planters’ ‘social position in Jamaica is as uncertain as our soil’, with its rock falls and land slips (2:94). Louis lectures Stella that ‘for the sake of the general weal’ she needs to exercise caution in expressing her ideals of liberty (2:94–5), lest she ‘fall into a stormy sea of troubles’ (2:96). In a tirade against incendiarism and the threat of ‘insurrection’


shortly before the 1831 rebellion, Colonel Bagshot comments, ‘Jamaica is a morass, gentlemen, and we are floundering in it, and very soon the quicksands below will be above our heads’ (3:124). Jenkin’s epigraph from William Wordsworth’s ‘She was a phantom of delight’ positions Stella as a figure ‘of virgin liberty’: I saw her upon nearer view, A spirit, yet a woman, too! Her household motions light and free, And steps of virgin liberty The reason firm, the temperate will, Endurance, foresight, strength and skill; A perfect woman, nobly planned To warm, to comfort, and command; And yet a spirit still and bright, With something of an angel light. ([i], my ellipsis) Rigby places Jane Eyre as a dangerously anti-Christian and French figure of liberty; through use of Wordsworth’s poem as an epigraph, Jenkin positions the mature Stella as an embodiment of an English middleclass domestic ideal of liberty, associated with neither rebellion nor riot. For Rochester, of course, Jane has ‘something of an angel light’. Both Jane and Stella are in the opening scenes of the respective novels passionate rebels against domestic despotism, and through the course of their education, formal in Jane’s case and informal in Stella’s, they learn to regulate their feelings. Shortly after Louis meets Stella in England he advises her to have the strength to combat her own ‘rebellious feelings’: ‘If you only aim at governing that which is in your own power, you will never strive in vain, and no one can hinder or hurt you’ (1:228). Stella’s articulation of the values by which she comes to live are worthy of Jane Eyre: ‘I feel I am no puppet at the mercy of every blast that blows through my soul – I can choose between right and wrong. I believe, that with the sense of having done or tried to do right for God’s sake, we can bear our trials’ (3:142). Louis’s mother Maman Gautier, a highly idealized white Creole character, teaches Stella by example the ‘perpetual consolation’ of ‘passions conquered’ (2:272). That Stella does not have a formal religious education as Jane does, her grandmother’s anti-Catholicism having prohibited church attendance in Evian, implies a more innate goodness. Stella’s ‘steps of virgin liberty’ are first demonstrated in the opening chapter. Her maternal grandmother was Loaysa Perez, ‘a famous


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rope-dancer’, a Spanish woman from Cuba, rescued by Mr Gautier, a Jamaican man of French ancestry, from ‘the massacre of St Domingo’ with her two daughters Pepita and Nena (1:117). The Gautiers adopted Pepita; Nena and her mother travelled on to Spain, and Nena, too, took up a career as a rope-dancer. Mrs Gautier was the sister of Stella’s paternal grandmother, Mrs Joddrell. Unbeknown to Mrs Joddrell, her son George married Pepita, who died in childbirth. When Stella was six years old George placed her in the care of his widowed mother who was living in Europe, conscious of her own ‘decay and desertion’ (1:3). The arrangement is, on George Joddrell’s part, an effort to ‘decently’ smother (3:151) signs of a Spanish marital and family connection he has come to despise. The novel opens with 15-year-old Stella looking out of the window of the house in Evian where she lives reclusively with her grandmother. The reviewer for the Literary Gazette described Mrs Joddrell as an ‘oppressive and repressive incubus’, Stella as ‘ignorant, unformed, sensitive, but withal honest and brave, and of course yearning for affection’. Like motherless Jane Eyre at the opening of Brontë’s novel, Stella is driven to mutiny, ‘put in a passion’ (CS 1:22) by her guardian’s repressive authority, which Jenkin characterizes as despotic. Stella remonstrates with her grandmother over failed promises of an education; more privately she is ‘revengeful’ over being ‘reproached’ for ‘Spanish blood’, a ‘speaking ill’ of her ‘mother’ (1:115). Mrs Joddrell despises what she considers Stella’s ‘hot Spanish blood’ (1:10), and favours her own ‘dazzlingly fair’ children over the ‘brunette’ Stella, whose ‘complexion was a species of disgrace in the eyes of a lady who had spent most of her life among blacks’ (1:44). Her complexion excites open racist and xenophobic comment in Volume 1. Mrs Hubbard declares to her family before she takes charge of Stella that she has ‘doubts about her parentage’ and that she refuses to ‘have the care of any half-castes’ (1:329). Reassured by her husband General Hubbard that Stella’s mother was Spanish, Mrs Joddrell opines, ‘A foreigner is nearly as bad as a Negro: I hate them with all their nasty, vicious, attractive ways’ (1:330). By the novel’s close, Stella’s passions regulated, she is recognized by ‘English travellers’ in Europe as a ‘pale young woman’ with ‘regular features’ (3:297). In each of the houses to which she is transplanted after Mrs Joddrell’s death Stella is a figure of wonder, as she is, too, for the narrative voice. Implicitly Jenkin models the narrative voice’s attachment to Stella as one of romantic friendship. In the novel Harriette Hood and Stella’s aunt Celia Dashwood have a ‘romantic friendship’, Harriette having been dazzled by Celia’s ‘beauty’ and her accomplishments (1:91). Stella’s


moral beauty is what attracts the narrative voice in the novel. Her beauty is, Jenkin writes, ‘the incarnation of a pure heart the real virginal nature, unscathed by evil passions, that excites a feeling of almost reverence. Words are involuntarily chastened before her, wit repressed, allusions avoided: in her form the ideal of purity is worshipped, and this without the witchcraft of classical outlines’ (3:117). At one point Richard Smith (also known as Stapylton Smythe), Nena Perez’s estranged husband, who is smitten with Stella, stages a reading of Act 3, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. She is positioned as the Miranda figure to his Ferdinand. John Gillies argues that ‘Miranda is “sublime” (a “goddess” to Ferdinand, a “nonpareil” to Caliban), beautiful, associated with a thematic of temperance, nurture, education’ (193), ‘an embodiment of wonder and exemplar of renewal’ (194). These are qualities Jenkin gives Stella.8 Jenkin’s emphasis on wonder may be read as a pointed challenge to abolitionist generalizations about the moral depravity of the plantocracy, and suggests a possibility of cultural renewal from within the class. Broader cultural renewal is closed off by Stella’s youth, her gender, and her need to accommodate to Jamaican conditions. In the novel Stella’s movement outside the great houses of plantations is shown to entail the risk of undesirable attention from lower-class white and enslaved men. Like Brontë, Jenkin develops a thematic around transplantation. In Rochester’s account he ‘transplanted’ Adèle to England, ‘to grow up clean in the wholesome soil of an English country garden’, and to be trained through an English education (JE 144; vol. 1, ch. 15). After Mrs Joddrell’s death Stella is transplanted to a number of houses: Waterloo Cottage in England, where her paternal aunt Celia Dashwood lives with her husband Major Dashwood and his aunt Philly Dashwood; the Hubbards, parents of her stepmother; Cedar Valley, her father’s Jamaican estate; and Silver Hill, the Gautier estate in Jamaica. Jenkin exposes the fiction of the idealized English country home, ‘those English interiors considered peculiarly the result of English laws, the growth of English soil’ (CS 1:74) and gardens a ‘seeming sort of Arcadia’ (1:83). The name Waterloo Cottage commemorates an English victory over the French. The Dashwoods and their social circle are xenophobic and acutely class conscious. Aunt Philly is another domestic despot, hypocritically denouncing slavery abroad while being curt towards and despising the black servant Pompey. Major Dashwood’s major occupation is absorbing each day’s copy of the Times. Celia is judged by her niece to be ‘very degenerate and commonplace’, given over to the ‘nattiness’, ‘luxury’, and ‘self-worship’ that animate the home (1:86). She is


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too lazy and self-absorbed to make much effort in ‘playing governess’ (1:125) by teaching Stella. Stella’s thinking about her future life at Cedar Valley is shaped by more ambitious models of evangelical Christian heroism, service, and governance than those recommended by Louis. The passage is worth citing at some length: Stella had lately been full of projects of keeping papa’s house and remodelling the government of his slaves. She had been busy erecting a visionary Church on Cedar Valley. She was to make such an Eden of her father’s estates, that every planter in the Island was to be led to emulate the good example. Stella had excellent Henry Martyn’s life by heart, and entirely believed in the facility of making slaves, the offspring of slaves, into enlightened self-denying Christians. She was to establish infant schools, and evening schools for the adults. Papa was to distribute prizes. Many a gay and pleasant scene she conjured up; herself a presiding Lady Paramount in a romantic palm-thatched arbour under the shade of her paternal cedars, mocking-birds thrilling forth their loud, emphatic, thrush-like notes; humming-birds, with ‘gemmed frontlets, and necks of verdant green,’ ‘glancing like living jewels through the melodious air,’ kept cool by the waving of the broad plantain leaves. Around her, eager, upturned, black faces, listening with delight to the words of peace and good-will to men. Stella, having read of such scenes, longed to realize the idea of a sort of angelic life. Papa was to be happy, the slaves happy, she the happy servant of all. (1:204–5) Stella’s projection of a gendered modernizing role for herself on the plantation shows how well she has absorbed the nineteenth-century iconography of Henry Martyn, an Englishman, an Anglican chaplain for the East India Company, who became, as Mary Ellis Gibson has shown, a type of the Christian hero, his life story ‘link[ing] the domestic and the heroic, duty and romance, self-renunciation and imperial authority’ (‘Henry Martyn’ 420).9 Martyn has, indeed, been identified as a prototype of Brontë’s St John Rivers, although there is no direct evidence of this (Gibson, ‘Henry Martyn’ 433–4). Unlike Jane, Stella never imagines herself preaching liberty to enslaved people, even despite her sympathy to their aspirations for freedom. Jenkin’s allusion to Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1845) subjects Stella’s vision of her plantation role to telling


irony. Like Mrs Sparsit in relation to the Coketown Bank, Stella has ‘a self-laudatory sense of correcting, by her ladylike deportment, the rude business aspect of the place’ (87). Dickens describes Mrs Sparsit as ‘lady paramount’ imagining ‘herself, in some sort, the Bank Fairy. The townspeople who, in their passing and repassing, saw her there, regarded her as the Bank Dragon keeping watch over the treasures of the mine’ (87). The chapter describing Stella’s journey to Jamaica is titled ‘Bound for Fairy Land’.10 Jenkin explodes a principal ‘self-sustaining myth’ of ‘planter ideology’, which Gordon Lewis sums up as ‘the myth of Negro happiness’ (119). She suggests through Eden tropology that in Jamaica Stella has to learn knowledge of good and evil. The scope of Stella’s roles at Cedar Valley and Silver Hill never accommodates teaching African Jamaican people. After the deaths of Stella’s father and two younger half-brothers, Stella inherits the Joddrell wealth, but because ‘the properties and negroes are entailed’ she is not able to free the enslaved people, nor as a minor can she pay them ‘for their work the same as if they were free’ (CS 2:216–17). Stella has Louis, her guardian, direct the overseer ‘that he must not punish with the whip, nor let the drivers of the field gangs have any whips, and that the Negroes are to have every Sunday’ free of labour (2:287). These were amelioration measures recommended in 1823. The reformed model of plantation management is still ‘paternalistic’, predicated on the idea that with due care the owner could earn the ‘respect and loyalty’ of enslaved workers (Lambert 65). As Lambert argues of this ‘planter ideal’, ‘it was a racial discourse, predicated on ideas of familialism, dependency, and duty, which could be just as subjugating as more explicitly supremacist conceptions of enslavement’ (65). Jenkin attributes the despotisms integral to slavery, industrial relations, patriarchy within the family, and ‘parent’/child relations to a corruptible human nature. Like Brontë, Jenkin links the practice of cruelty with despotic authority and racialized class relations. In the authorial voice Jenkin explains her view of the origins of cruelty: It was the infernal system of slavery, it was the absolute control over fellow creatures, which originated cruelty at Cedar Valley. Go wherever despotism is, and you will find, whether on a great scale, as in slave states, or in factories, or even in families, on a small one, there, with the power to do it, comes the wrong. And cruelty, gentle reader, is nourished by cruelty; once the animal in man is roused and gets the upper hand, it will not be appeased without a victim. No one can gauge the amount of ferocity latent in himself, so we had


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better all of us be on our guard; for, unfortunately, we all have it in our power to be cruel to one another. (2:57–58) In this scheme Mrs Joddrell is a domestic despot, one of several such despots in the novel. The explanation also alludes to the common comparison made in anti-abolitionist argument between the lots of the West Indian slave and English factory employees, the latter being objects of political agitation in Britain around industrial reform and protection. Lewis argues that ‘both West Indian slave and English factory operative were the exploited labor force of the modern industrial capitalism, the one in its earlier Atlantic phase, the other in its later world phase’ (122). While Mr Joddrell regards Stella as one of his ‘belongings’ (CS 2:64), her position in the family is pointedly differentiated from slavery by Jenkin. She has been assigned an enslaved woman Rebecca as a servant. Rebecca sleeps on the floor of Stella’s bedroom, and it is she who is subjected to arbitrary physical punishment by Georgina Joddrell. The characters who link white women’s position with slavery are complacently conservative, and their views are undercut. This link is one Brontë makes, uncritically echoing contemporary discourse. In Jenkin’s novel, Stella offers the most pointed rebuff of the idea. Her aunt Nena (also known as Olympia) compares Stella’s position at Silver Hill with that of Laurence Sterne’s caged starling in A Sentimental Journey, of which Yorick comments, ‘Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still slavery!’ (72) Ellis notes that ‘[t]he starling is a bird with mainly iridescent black plumage, spotted with brown. The incarceration of the bird in the cage and its knowledge of the four words “I can’t get out” make it a witty, though again perilously risky pun on African slavery in the colonies’ (74). Stella retorts to Nena’s allusion: ‘I have only to ask, and the door of the cage will be opened, and very willingly too’ (CS 2:243). In Jane Eyre and Cousin Stella, questions of foreign breeding are addressed in a language of horticultural propagation. Rochester expresses his feelings towards Adèle, ‘that French floweret’, in horticultural tropes: ‘Not valuing now the root whence it sprang; having found that it was a sort which nothing but gold dust could manure, I have but half a liking to the blossom: especially when it looks so artificial as just now’ (139; vol. 1, ch. 14). In Jenkin’s Jamaica white residents are identified as English, Spanish, French, and Jewish. The rose, a national symbol of England in spite of its history of varietal travelling and hybridization, is an exotic species in the Caribbean. Native and exotic species of plants have figured metaphorically in Caribbean writing to take up questions around cultural affiliation and cultural syncretism.11 Cedar Valley, the


Joddrell plantation, has a path bordered by ‘tall cedar trees’ and a ‘hedge of china roses’ (2:46) that delight Stella. The family cemetery there is shaded by ‘[t]all palm trees’, yet rose bushes for Stella to carefully nurture are planted around Pepita Joddrell’s grave (2:138–9). Louis expresses his admiration for Stella in a gift of a ‘white rose’ from the Botanical Gardens (3:99), the white rose being a stock emblem of innocence, and thinks of her as a ‘rosebud’ (3:240). During the slave rebellion, Silver Hill ablaze, Stella loses her footing outdoors, tumbling down precipitous rocks until her fall is broken by ‘a large ginesta or Spanish broom, “that lover of solitary, deserted places,” rooted in the cleft of a rock’ (3:184). The hardy Spanish broom, indigenous to the Mediterranean region, may naturalize in sandy soils. The activity of a hummingbird, an indigenous species, guides her to a ‘wild coffee sapling’ and ‘bind-weed’ that she is able to use to pull herself up (3:186). As with Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea, Jenkin mediates aspects of her family’s history as slave-owners that were referred to and censured by the Colonial Secretary. Rhys belonged to the Lockhart family of Dominica. Hulme has argued that Wide Sargasso Sea as a ‘creole family romance, is offered as in some sense a “compensation” for the ruin of that family at the time of Emancipation, a compensation, though, which serves to occlude the actual relationship between that family history and the larger history of the English colony of Dominica’ (23). He shows the way in which the burning of the Coulibri estate house and Tia’s throwing of a stone at Antoinette mediate the involvement of Rhys’s grandfather Edward Lockhart in census riots of June 1844, the ‘guerre nègre’. Edward Lockhart was censured by Lord Stanley. I have elaborated in ‘James Potter Lockhart and the “Letter of the Law” ’ and The Worlding of Jean Rhys the manner in which Christophine Dubois’s railing against the application of the ‘Letter of the Law’ in the wake of slave emancipation (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea 22) compresses aspects of Rhys’s great-grandfather’s history as planter, attorney, and parliamentarian, censured by Lord Glenelg. In the early 1830s two of Jenkin’s brothers12 and a sister-in-law were at the centre of a case of cruelty towards enslaved women that was investigated by the Colonial Secretary Viscount Goderich and taken up by the Anti-Slavery Society. Mary Reckord, while not analysing this specific case, shows that, ‘between 1828 and 1831’, the investigations of cases of cruelty and ‘the conduct of a slave court’ ‘clearly exposed the existence in the West Indies of a social system in which brutalities were endemic, not casual, and inhumanity the characteristic of the planter class, not the aberration of individuals’ (725).13 Jenkin, too, understands the brutalities of slavery to be endemic, yet, as the Saturday Review pointed out,


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in Cousin Stella by the standards of the day ‘[t]here are no details of sickening and outrageous cruelty’, ‘the more dramatic class of atrocities’ associated with slavery (108). Its reviewer smugly declares, ‘These may have been omitted to humour the delicacy of modern palates, but more probably [by comparison with the United States] such horrors were scared away by the constant presence [in the West Indies] of a healthy English public opinion, whose uprightness was maintained by constant infusions of fresh blood from home’ (108).14 Speaking in French, Stella’s aunt Celia Dashwood cautions her in the interest of respectability not to wash the family’s dirty linen in public. In 1831, charges were brought by magistrate Archibald Leighton Palmer against Jenkin’s half-brother John Rawleigh Jackson, the Custos (chief magistrate) of the parish of Port Royal, Jamaica, and his wife Elizabeth Walker Jackson over their conduct towards their slaves Catherine Whitfield, aged about 40, and her daughter Ann Amelia King, aged 18 or 19.15 The details of their vicious treatment at the hands of the Jacksons over a period of eight months and the miscarriages of justice in handling their complaints16 were so horrific that the Colonial Secretary Viscount Goderich, in writing to the Earl of Belmore, the Governor of Jamaica, abandoned what he termed the ‘desirable’ ‘measured tone’ of ‘official communication’ to declare the treatment ‘[a] series of the most revolting outrages on humanity’ that had been ‘admitted without reserve, or tacitly acknowledged’ by the Jacksons, ‘offences against two helpless female slaves of the most revolting and unmanly character’. They showed Mrs Jackson, he said, in a ‘shameful’ and ‘degrading light’. In an effort to outmanoeuvre Palmer, Jenkin’s brother Campbell Jackson, a fellow magistrate, had initially taken ‘a statement’ of Whitfield and King’s ‘grievances’, a conflict of interest to which King vehemently objected (‘Jamaica: CORRESPONDENCE’ 9). Goderich directed that John Rawleigh Jackson and Campbell Jackson were to be removed from public office, and that the Council of Protection and Grand Jury, which heard the charges, were to be admonished to behave ‘on any future occasion in a manner more consonant with the sacred trust imposed upon them, of doing equal justice between all ranks and classes of the King’s subjects’ (‘Jamaica: CORRESPONDENCE’ 27–30). For Goderich civil justice and exemplary evangelical gender norms constituted sublime ideals, disgustingly violated by the Jacksons; in antislavery circles in Britain the treatment of the women was measured against sublime Christian ideals of ‘everlasting justice’ and ‘that feeling which above all was the tenderest and strongest – maternal attachment’


(Anti-Slavery Reporter 158). Miscarriages of ‘everlasting justice’ in relation to Catherine Whitfield and Ann King were taken up by the Anti-Slavery Society in Britain in 1832. At a general meeting of the Society and its friends on 12 May Dr Stephen Lushington addressed a sympathetic audience on these matters. The proceedings published in the AntiSlavery Reporter note that ‘Dr Lushington’s statement of this case was given in language so forcible and affecting that many of the audience shed tears, and the ladies wept, many of them audibly’ (156–7). He quoted approvingly Goderich’s stringent criticisms of the Jacksons, and presented Whitfield’s violated rights as a mother compellingly. His relation of the fact that in Jamaica ‘there were not sufficient grounds for a prosecution’ of the Jacksons was greeted with ‘Cries of shame!’ (158). For him the case was an example of the ‘monstrous evils’ of slavery. The Jacksons ‘scarcely deserved the name’ ‘man and woman’. Jamaican law was demonstrably, in his view, a means to perpetrate all the horrible excesses of arbitrary will – to give full scope to the power and authority of the master, uncontrolled by responsibility – without the fear of incurring the possibility of punishment for the outrages offered by his distempered passions to the unfortunate beings whom Providence had, for a season, committed to his charge. (158) Goderich, Lushington, and Lushington’s audience sympathized with the suffering of the enslaved women; the women’s agency on their own behalf was downplayed. The immediate cause of Elizabeth Jackson’s initial punishment of Ann King in January 1831 was a dispute over whether a dog King was feeding had a full stomach or not; the dispute was instigated by the Jacksons’ nine-year-old daughter Betty. For perceived impudence, Elizabeth Jackson beat King ‘with a supple-jack till it broke in two’, ‘boxed and thumped’ her, and ‘flogged’ her ‘with a horsewhip’. King made an unsuccessful effort to run away, intending to make a ‘complaint to the magistrate’ about Elizabeth Jackson’s cruel treatment of her mother and her since the previous year (‘Jamaica: CORRESPONDENCE’ 17–18). She was identified as a runaway by Jenkin’s sister-in-law Mrs Campbell Jackson and returned to her owner. After King’s return, she and her mother Catherine Whitfield were kept apart, placed in the stocks by night and then compelled to perform field labour or coffee barbecuing by day from mid-January to early June 1831. King had ever only worked as a domestic slave. She was compelled to work shoeless in the stubbly


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fields, and her palish skin became severely blistered. At one point in the official correspondence over the case she is categorized as a ‘Mestee’ (another term for octaroon) (3), at another as a ‘quadroon’ (17). Given a shade hierarchy in Jamaica, in which lighter-coloured slaves were more generally assigned domestic duties, her refusal to wear a ‘negro hat’ in the fields suggests that she felt keenly a loss of slave caste, which fuelled a determination not to apologize to the Jacksons. In his 1831 slave narrative Ashton Warner comments that ‘it is always counted by negroes who have been above it, the worst of all punishments – the lowest step of disgrace – to be placed in the field gang’ (31). King also expressed disgust at having been laid down for a whipping the previous year by four female ‘negroes’, and having been whipped ‘on the rump by a girl’ whom she says was ‘like’ herself. She had called into question the truth of complaints made about her conduct. For her alleged ‘impudence’ John Jackson ‘strapped her’, had her flogged ‘with a new cat’, placed in bilboes (feet shackles), and kept in the stocks at night ‘for more than six weeks, or two months, above three months’ (‘Jamaica: CORRESPONDENCE’ 17). Opaque, possibly sexual matters are alluded to in King’s evidence. She recalls, ‘I and my mother always slept in mistress’s room. I was accused by master of having allowed an improper character through the window into my mistress’s bed-room in his absence, which I denied, and asked master to prove it, or bring the person who said so before me’ (‘Jamaica: CORRESPONDENCE’ 19). If the accusation relates to sex rather than, for instance, abetting a theft, whose lover the ‘improper character’ was is unclear. The accusation could have been that King abetted an affair his wife was having. The evidence of Whitfield and King as preserved in the historical record reveals a pattern of agency around defence of and for rights, including a right to human dignity. I mention but a few instances. Whitfield’s ‘speaking’ of her ‘daughter, who was ill-treated’, in ‘a rage’ led Elizabeth Jackson to call her, Whitfield remembers, ‘an infamous wretch’ and to threaten to ‘flog’ her ‘mulatto bottom’ (15). Several years earlier King and Whitfield had run away to Spanish Town to complain to the Governor about their treatment at the hands of the Jacksons. (In 1827, in an effort to promote amelioration, the Colonial Office had made ‘colonial Governors responsible for investigating all complaints of cruelty and injustice towards the slaves’ [Reckord 724].) Whitfield had taken on paid work in addition to her slave labour in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to buy her freedom. Whitfield recalls that her mistress ‘had flogged me before Christmas, had laid me down and flogged me by the driver. I said to mistress there is no occasion for you to take and


flog me, you wanted to suck the little blood out of me, as my flogging was not yet well’. Questioned by Palmer and other magistrates, she gave further details of the earlier incident. Ann, who must have been present, told her she received ‘12 licks. I was punished because I gave my mistress impudence; I said to mistress, when she said she would turn up my clothes to flog me, if you want to see anything I can show it to you, it is as good as your own’ (‘Jamaica: CORRESPONDENCE’ 16). After Whitfield intervened again in relation to subsequent punishment of her daughter, she was placed in the stocks. During this routine Whitfield felt humiliated by the laughter of white women as she was paraded before the house in a debilitated condition with the physical support of other people. She then refused this exercise: ‘I said, I was not a puppetshow’ (16). King defended her mother’s right to stand up for her, ran away in the hope of making a complaint, and threatened when caught to commit suicide rather than return to the Jacksons. She refused to do the needlework she was ordered to while in the stocks. Whitfield’s and King’s articulations of rights and equality seem to have provoked Elizabeth Jackson to further outrages. King, for instance, remembers that after Whitfield tried to intervene to stop Elizabeth Jackson beating her: ‘I said to mistress that my mother had as much right to speak for me as she, mistress, had to speak for Miss Elizabeth [i.e., Betty]. Mistress then flogged me with a horsewhip’ (‘Jamaica: CORRESPONDENCE’ 17). The voices of Whitfield and King giving evidence can be heard in the imperial archive for several reasons: Dr Palmer’s intervention to bring charges against the Jacksons; the women forthrightly understand themselves to be rights-bearing individuals and a rights-bearing family; Councils of Protection were empowered to hear slave evidence; and the flogging of slave women had become ‘an overarching symbol for slavery’s barbarity’ (Paton 174) at a time when public opinion in Britain was being successfully mobilized in favour of abolition. One of the recommended amelioration measures that the Jamaican House of Assembly refused to introduce was a ban on the whipping of women. On 22 November 1831, in the wake of court proceedings involving the Jacksons, the Jamaican House of Assembly resoundingly defeated by a vote of 25 to 3 a motion proposing the establishment of a committee to examine ‘the expediency of abolishing the flogging of female slaves’ (‘Jamaica: Slave Trials’ 17).17 Palmer and Goderich recognized many of the rights the women claimed in their conduct of themselves: both men recognized their right to make a legal complaint about ill-treatment; and in Goderich’s case, the right of a mother to defend her daughter, and a gendered right to be


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treated with decorum. Goderich exhibits the newly emerging humanitarian concern about the moral effects of ‘the “spectacle of suffering” on those who watched and administered punishment Observing the flogging or torturing of others was thought ultimately to lead to depravity’ (Paton 172).18 ‘Here was a mother’, Goderich comments of Whitfield, compelled to witness the scourging of her daughter with instruments of punishment at once painful and degrading. With such a provocation, what self-government could reasonably be anticipated from a mother? No condition of life ought to have repressed those emotions with which a parent must witness the infliction on her offspring of such great and unmerited suffering. (‘Jamaica: CORRESPONDENCE’ 28–9) Mrs Jackson’s violence, ordering and watching of violent punishments, and humiliation, especially of Whitfield, are what made Goderich describe her conduct as ‘shameful’, ‘degrading’, and ‘gross’ (‘Jamaica: CORRESPONDENCE’ 27–28). Like Lord Stanley, his successor as Colonial Secretary, he associated civilization with the inculcation of ‘a sense of delicacy’ (qtd. in Paton 174). As Paton argues more generally, ‘[f]or Goderich, the most serious effect of flogging women was its distortion of gender norms for men as well as women, free people as well as slaves, and whites as well as blacks’ (173).19 Kamau Brathwaite’s paired poems ‘Days’ and ‘Nights’ are an imaginative reconstruction of incidents that took place on the Jackson estate Belle Vue in early 1831.20 The incidents are, he says, ‘part of our [Bajan and Caribbean] collective unconscious’ (Mother Poem 121). Brathwaite has also performed the poems as a closure to an essay ‘A Post-cautionary Tale of the Helen of Our Wars’ (1995), which has become legendary in postcolonial criticism. The ‘Helen of Our Wars’ is Jean Rhys, and the essay is a response to Hulme’s article ‘The Place of Wide Sargasso Sea’ (1994), a broad-ranging review of criticism of Rhys’s 1966 novel in which Hulme discusses Brathwaite’s placement of Rhys in Contradictory Omens (1979). To apply a distinction made by Barnor Hesse in a fine analysis of the stakes involved in the remembering of slavery, Brathwaite in broad terms ascribes ‘self-ownership of a debilitating psychological legacy racially. Through a historically positioned racialized embodiment, the black subject remembers slavery through trauma and the white subject remembers it through guilt’ (164). Brathwaite’s closure of a ‘A Post-Cautionary Tale of the Helen of Our Wars’ with a revised performance of ‘Days & Nights’, in which Rhys is linked with Jenkin’s niece, the child Betty Jackson, infantilizes Rhys in the fields of racial


and decolonizing politics, and her contradictory and ambiguous feelings about constructions of race and her planter family history. The reperformance essentializes her as the daughter of slave-owners, a bearer of personal and communal guilt over the treatment of black people. In analysing Jenkin’s treatment of the cruelties of plantation slavery I aim to draw out further her contradictory and ambiguous feelings about constructions of race and planter family history. The phrases in Cousin Stella which resonate with Goderich’s and the anti-slavery lobby’s handling of the Whitfield and King case are ‘upholding the rights of humanity and justice’ and ‘eternal rights of justice and humanity’. Jenkin’s contexts are significant: ‘upholding the rights of humanity and justice as regards the blacks, also requir[ing] that neither humanity nor justice should be forgotten towards the whites’ (CS 1:217); ‘party spirit runs too high on both sides [pro-slavery and pro-abolition] poor coterie interest [is] substituted for the eternal rights of justice and humanity’ (1:246). The critic for the Saturday Review was scathing about abolitionists, noting, too, that the author of Cousin Stella, ‘though deeply in earnest against slavery’, seemingly ‘had personal cause of quarrel with these most embarrassing Quixotes’ (108). In addressing questions relating to rights of justice and humanity for enslaved people, Jenkin uses aspects of the Whitfield and King case: placing of an enslaved woman in the stocks; the cruelty of a white woman; abolitionist interest in cases of cruelty towards enslaved people; and a jury of white men deliberating on want of humanity towards a black person. No women are whipped in Cousin Stella, nor is there reference to such a practice. Jenkin’s account of the inquest into the death of the enslaved Maurice exposes the racism and bigotry that structured the Jamaican justice system. Her representations of pro-slavery sentiment and pillorying of abolitionists have a historical accuracy that suggests deep familiarity with their articulation. Jenkin’s African Jamaican characters, usually known only by first name, are a gamut of stereotypes. Examples include Mammy Venus, a crone, whose obeah activities are suspected; Manie, the loyal housekeeper who accompanies the Gautiers to Europe at the novel’s close; and the ‘free coloured’ Miss Hawke, a lodging-house keeper, who boasts of her ‘jist fust-rate English blood’ (2:39) and damns ‘dem ’bominable lazy blacks’ (2:38). Again stereotypically, the more noble African Jamaican characters, Rebecca and French Charles, have less negroid features. Their features, both physical and moral, approach more closely ‘European notions of beauty and value’ (Wyrick 45).21 The name French Charles


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suggests a Haitian lineage. French slave-owners fleeing the revolutionary war in Haiti in the 1790s brought slaves with them to Jamaica. In 1799 a conspiracy to rebel was uncovered. The rebel slaves in 1831 are represented by Jenkin as an ape-like mob, full of ‘furious cries of licence and thirst of vengeance’ (3:177). The novel links the political rebellion of enslaved people with the ideals of the French Revolution and the failures of planter self-governance. They arrive at Silver Hill singing ‘their Marseillaise – the song their fathers had sung through Kingston streets in 1799: One, two, tree, All de same. Black, white, brown, All de same, All de same. One, two, tree. (3:175) A British military force restores order. Jenkin renders the terror induced in white women by the ransacking of plantation property in large part with the immediacy of present-tense narration. The us/them dichotomy in ‘their Marseillaise’ is a telling sign of where Jenkin’s sympathies lie. Stella’s father the Honourable George Joddrell ‘is the custos rotulorum of his parish he is in the House of Assembly’ (1:96), ‘a regular bluff, round-featured, square-made John Bull’ (1:99), a description which emphasizes his English type. Her English stepmother Georgina Joddrell is, Jenkin suggests, corrupted by slave-ownership. The authorial voice says that for the white inhabitants the daily routine of the Cedar Valley Great House ‘could not fail to produce a stupifying [sic] of heart and intellect’ (2:69). The word Creole is used only once in Cousin Stella and by a Jamaican passenger on the boat in which the grown Stella returns to Jamaica. The vulgar Mrs Popplewell wants to draw a distinction between the treatment of ‘black and brown’ people by locals and newly arrived ‘ladies’. ‘[W]e Creoles’, she insists, ain’t the ones that have the heaviest hand. The ladies who come from English boarding-schools and are full of text and what not, see them four of five years after they come to the country; it’s for everlasting flog, flog, stocks, stocks; they won’t let ’em be blacks, want to make ’em into fellow creatures, and end by hating ’em worse than pison. (2:19).


It is implied that women with an English boarding-school education may speak more proper English, but that their moral education may be seriously defective.22 Angered by the perceived insolence of the slave Rebecca in refusing to explain an absence at night, Georgina Joddrell has her placed in the stocks. (In Jane Eyre English magistrate Mr Eshton has a footman convey to an apparent Romany woman a threat of being placed in the stocks.) Rebecca had attended a religious meeting; such meetings were proscribed under Jamaican law. (The Jamaican House of Assembly’s refusal to extend greater freedom of religious assembly to enslaved people – a ‘prohibition of meetings for religious worship between sunset and sunrise’ [Barclay 434] – was one of the reasons for the Crown’s disallowance of the 1826 slave act.) When Stella remonstrates with her stepmother over the punishment, begging that Rebecca be released in exchange for an apology, Mrs Joddrell exclaims, ‘We are come to a pretty pass indeed, if one’s own slave can be impertinent to one with impunity’ (2:126). Rebecca is in the stocks for three days before the bookkeeper Mr Boggis tells Mr Joddrell of the punishment. ‘[A]lmost inarticulate with passion’, George Joddrell berates his wife: ‘I hope, ma’am, you’ll like it when you are brought up before a court to answer for cruelty. It was just like a woman never to think of anything but her own spite. The girl’s off, ma’am – taken her foot in her hand’ (2:133).23 He is adamant, however, that the person who released Rebecca be found and harshly punished in a public spectacle. Rebecca’s ‘beau’ (2:140), the cook French Charles, a type of the noble savage, receives 33 lashes. Boggis, very agitated by the severity of the proposed punishment, tells Stella, ‘these ain’t the times to trifle with, there is such a seeking to find planters in fault’ (2:139), ‘a fine kettle of fish them missionaries will cook out of such a story’ (2:141). During the whipping of Charles, Stella, whose efforts to intervene against the punishment only harden her father’s resolve, stays indoors. She ‘ran backwards and forwards in the hall like one possessed. Every lash tearing a scream from her’ (2:161). Charles poisons George Joddrell’s egg flip. A drunkard, George Joddrell offers his young sons Johnnie and George Jr sips of the egg flip, and all three die. There is some doubt over whether George Sr died from the poisoning. The narrative voice speculates that he might have ‘seen his dead infants, and been driven mad’ (2:220). Mrs Joddrell becomes ‘bewildered and incoherent’, develops a hysterical ‘aversion’ to Stella, and is ‘sent to England, to the care of her own family’ (2:212). This sequence of events fulfils Aunt Portia Lowe’s prophecy of divine retribution. (Like Jane she has premonitionary dreams.)24 Stella mourns


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briefly only the deaths of her siblings, the authorial voice explaining that the Joddrells were ‘almost strangers to her’ (2:220). Stella’s moral estrangement from them echoes Rochester’s repudiation of Bertha and her cruelty. Seemingly divine retribution is exacted on Rebecca, who had urged Charles to his action. She becomes deranged by guilt and repentance for her failure of self-governance (‘fire’ in her ‘’art’ [2:283]). More mercifully in Rebecca’s view, Charles had ‘gone dead for sorrow’ (2:283). Stella has Louis direct the overseer that Rebecca ‘not be molested’ (2:287). She is allowed ‘a “free pass,” to prevent any zealous upholder of the slave laws from sending her to the workhouse as a runaway. In short, every precaution compassion could dictate had been taken to secure to the afflicted girl her liberty, the only good left to her’ (3:277–8). This treatment of the insane is a marked contrast to the incarceration of Bertha Mason Rochester. The planter rebellion in the wake of Sam Sharpe’s rebellion is represented as a form of madness by Dr McNeil: ‘Treason, Rebellion, America, St Domingo, anything rather than Emancipation’ (3:219).25 The claim to full humanity and humane treatment of Whitfield and King was measured in relation to maternal attachment; in Cousin Stella the claim to full humanity and humane treatment of Rebecca and French Charles is made in relation to romantic attachment, a sign of sensibility and restraint. Indeed the depths of their guilt and penitence are, in the novel’s terms, further evidence of sensibility. This argument exhibits ‘a Christian Universalism which stressed a humanity grounded on feeling rather than on reason’ which Peter Kitson suggests is common in ‘much abolitionist writing’ (21). For Louis, who describes his class as ‘lording it over a race degraded to the same level as mules, their fellow-labourers’ (2:256), recognition of Charles’s humanity, his ‘willingly bearing suffering’ for his loved one, becomes a key argument for amelioration, ‘independently of the pressure of public opinion in England’ (2:176). The black characters who exhibit full humanity in the novel’s terms, though, need to go mad or die to sustain Jenkin’s grim vision of the doom of the West Indies after emancipation. They do not articulate their status as rights-bearing individuals in the forthright way that Catherine Whitfield, Ann King, and Sam Sharpe do. The plotline involving Maurice is complicated; it also takes up questions around stock social assumptions about the sexual immorality of female theatrical performers, assumptions recycled in Brontë’s representation of Céline Varens and of her mothering of Adèle.26 Nena Perez complains to Stella that ‘women before the footlights imagine that the women behind them are born to a different morality’ (3:137). She


points out that, a dancer by profession, she was a loving and dutiful daughter, an industrious and honest worker, generous to the needy, and prudent. For all this, outside her circle of family and friends she was not considered ‘a respectable member of society’ (3:138). Flattered by the attentions of Richard Smith and dazzled by his looks and manners, she married him to further her ‘ambition to be acknowledged respectable by the privileged class’ (3:138). Her prudence did not extend to the ‘sensible arrangement of a marriage settlement’ (3:145). He ‘became as a god’ to her (3:139), a comment which recalls Jane’s reflection on her love for Rochester during his courtship of her: ‘I could not, in those days, see God for his creature: of whom I had made an idol’ (JE 274; vol. 2, ch. 9). While living at Morton Jane affirms her decision to abide by ‘principle and law’ in having refused the ‘temptation’ to live with Rochester ‘in a fool’s paradise at Marseilles’ (359; vol. 3, ch. 5). Succumbing to the temptation of respectability as Mrs Richard Smith, Nena lived ‘in a fool’s paradise’, ‘play[ing] at being a bourgeoise’ (141). Richard Smith ran through Nena’s considerable savings, forced her to return to her dancing career to support them, demanded domestic frugality from her to support his socializing with upper classes, and engaged in public flirtations. She separated from him, changing her name to Madame Olympia to avoid his discovery of her, moved to Jamaica, and lived under the protection of Louis Gautier, who had been brought up with her sister Pepita. She earned her keep as Louis’s bookkeeper: ‘He was the manager of the out-of-doors work, she of the office, they worked together as if they had both been men’ (2:224–5). While they are sexually attracted to each other, neither acts sexually on the strength of desire, her married status being a barrier. The friendship between Louis and Nena is, though, the prior attachment that affects the course of the relationship between Louis and Stella. Jenkin suggests that Nena’s unrequited passion corrupts her, causing her to be very spiteful towards her niece Stella when she realizes that Louis is attracted to her. Olympia lives secretively at Silver Hill. As with the secreted Bertha Mason, she is the subject of local rumour: ‘who or what she was it was difficult to conjecture’ (JE 426; vol. 3, ch. 10). She is forced to reveal herself at an inquest into the death of one of the slaves at Silver Hill, Maurice, characterized as an insubordinate ‘mulatto’ (2:279). In a drunken state Maurice accosts Olympia and declares his love for her, and a physical struggle between them ensues. Louis comes to her rescue, knocks Maurice to the ground, and fails to render assistance to the injured man, who dies. Louis’s failure to assist is attributed by the narrative voice to ‘prejudices of caste’ which


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position the black man as an ‘ignoble slave’ (3:92). As Hall comments, ‘Given the long history of concubinage and illegitimacy, both before and after emancipation, and the connections between white male power and sexual authority, it was not surprising that white fantasies of black revenge included the rape’ of white women (Civilising Subjects 257–8). Louis comments on Maurice’s death and his part in it: ‘I am afraid an ugly business will be made of it: it will too well serve the purpose of those tampering with the negroes’ (3:102). Old Sally lays a complaint against him with Richard Smith, now living under the name Stapleton Smythe and working as a protector of slaves. A strong motive for his coming to Jamaica is a desire to marry the Jamaican heiress Stella. In preparation for his travel he had investigated whether Nena was alive, and believed her to be dead. He discovers his wife and his bigamous interest in Stella at the inquest. The jury members at the inquest are types of tropical degeneracy – ‘loud, cruel, uneducated, sensual men’ with the ‘sodden features’ of chronic alcoholics (3:117–18) – and the proceedings are punctuated by the crassly racist outbursts of the Coroner Colonel Bagshot. The inquest unsurprisingly reaches the finding that Maurice died by ‘misadventure’ (3:135). As protector of slaves Smythe is unhappy with this decision, but Sam Sharpe’s rebellion takes place before he can initiate further proceedings against Louis Gautier. In the turmoil of the slave rebellion Smythe shoots Louis, leaving him an invalid, but dies himself, his ‘worn life’ having ‘been snapped suddenly by the emotions of that fearful night’ (3:211). The weakened Louis has a fall in his home that brings on progressive paralysis of the nerves. Jenkin ties the outbreak of rebellion at Silver Hill directly to the revenge of an enslaved community against a management that has killed two of its members, Maurice and Denniston, who died after a whipping ordered by Olympia. The rebellion gives Smythe the cover to exact personal revenge against Louis. As an analogue of Jane Eyre, Cousin Stella addresses questions of selfgovernance or self-regulation and its value at many levels: the domestic, the moral, the cultural, the social, and the political. Jenkin points to some of the limits of the imaginary of Brontë’s novel, highlighting overgeneralization about Creole people, xenophobia, class snobberies, and complacent Englishness. Stella Joddrell, in spite of her white Creole and Spanish lineage and her descent from a family in which women earn livings as dancers, embodies an English middle-class Christian domestic ideal. Pointedly, given Brontë’s representation of innate white Creole degeneracy, Stella finishes her informal education in self-regulation of passion in Jamaica. In Jenkin’s terms, as Stella tests her ‘steps of virgin


liberty’ in worldly cultural, social, and political settings, she has to temper her ideals against harsh and uncomfortable realities. As a figure of liberty she stands for spiritual enlightenment, rather than rebellion. The temporal freedoms with which she sympathizes focus on amelioration of the condition and orderly emancipation of enslaved people. Cousin Stella, by comparison with Jane Eyre, offers a vapid manifesto for the rights of women and is more reservedly anti-slavery. While mediating and toning down aspects of her family’s history in Jamaica, Jenkin offers a stark depiction of the failures of self-government and of despotism among the plantocracy. For her the intransigence of the plantocracy and of the anti-slavery lobby sows a ‘whirlwind’ and both the Caribbean and Britain ‘reap’ the legacies of rebellion and slave emancipation. Implicitly, for Jenkin the liberalism of Jane Eyre and its popular reach and influence are part of those legacies, and she engages with this ambivalently at a particular commemorative moment, 1859. Her own liberalism is compromised by her recycling of ‘race-founded & racefoundered’ stereotypes of African Jamaican people.27

Appendix 1 Timeline

I cite here key dates in Jane Eyre (in bold type) and of events and texts referred to in my reading.

1790

1791 1792 1797 1804

1807 1808 1810 1813 1814 1816 1819 1821/2 May 1823

July 1823 August 1823 December 1823 1824 October 1824 19 January 1825 1824/25 1825

1826

publication of Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France; Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men; and Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens by the National Assembly of France birth of Bertha Mason birth of Edward Fairfax Rochester birth of St John Rivers Republic of Haiti established after protracted revolutionary struggle (1791–1804) abolition of the British slave trade birth of Blanche Ingram birth of John Reed missionary work in India authorised by British parliament birth of Jane Eyre birth of Charlotte Brontë Rochester and Bertha Mason marry Miss Cooke establishes female schools in Calcutta British parliamentary debate on the abolition of slavery, a debate blamed by planters and the West India lobby for West Indian slave rebellions in 1823–24 amelioration measures recommended to colonies using slave labour rebellious conspiracy Jamaica Demerara rebellion rebellious conspiracy Jamaica Rochester imprisons Bertha Jane locked in red room Jane arrives at Lowood birth of Adèle Varens publication of William Thompson, Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery an Act to alter and amend the Slave Law passed in Jamaica 127

128 Appendix 1 1827 1830 1831 October 1831 c. 27 December 1831–5 January 1832 3 January 1832 7 February 1832 1832

October 1832 December 1832 14 December 1832 January 1833 April 1833 1 May 1833 12 June 1833

July 1833

Autumn 1833 late October/early November 1833

5 November 1833 1 June 1834 1834

1 August 1838 1839 1844 1847 February 1848

the Act is disallowed by George IV revolution in Paris proclamation of Belgian independence revolution in Brazil Bristol riots Sam Sharpe’s Rebellion, Jamaica (also known as the Baptist War) Baptist missionary William Knibb arrested William Knibb’s chapel at Falmouth burned chapels burned this day and the next planter rebellion, Jamaica insurrection in Italy successful passage of the Reform Act in Britain Jane arrives at Thornfield Hall Sir George Lynn elected member for Millcote in first reform parliament Sheffield Massacre Jane meets Rochester in the lane assembly of first reform parliament in Britain Richard Mason visits Thornfield Hall Jane returns to Gateshead British House of Commons passes a bill for the abolition of slavery in the West Indies and Mauritius Jane leaves Thornfield Hall after Rochester’s bigamous plan is exposed India Charter Act renewed by British parliament Bertha Mason dies posthumous publication of Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion in The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, edited by J.G. Lockhart. St John gives Jane a copy of Marmion Jane returns to Thornfield Hall slavery abolished in Antigua and Bermuda slavery replaced by an apprenticeship system in other West Indian colonies and Mauritius emancipation of apprentices in the West Indies and Mauritius publication of Sarah Lewis, Woman’s Mission publication of Ann Richelieu Lamb, Can Woman Regenerate Society? publication of Jane Eyre Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor, by John Courtney, performed at the Victoria Theatre, London revolution in France

Appendix 1 10 April 1848 December 1848 1859

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Chartist march in London Elizabeth Rigby reviews Jane Eyre in the Quarterly Review publication of Cousin Stella; or Conflict, by Henrietta Camilla Jenkin centenary of the birth of William Wilberforce twenty-fifth anniversary of the coming into effect of the Emancipation Act

Notes Introduction 1. Williams worked for the novel’s publisher, Smith, Elder, and Company. 2. The blurb for a new book, in press at the time of my writing, The Worlding Project promises to entrench a different concept of worlding again. Rob Wilson and Christopher Lee Connery announce the edited collection as a ‘manifesto that aims to redefine the aesthetics and politics of postcolonial globalization with alternative forms and frames of global becoming’. ‘The book posits that world literature, cultural studies, and disciplinary practices must be “worlded” into expressions from disparate critical angles of vision, multiple frameworks, and field practices as yet emerging or unidentified.’ 3. Parry cites scholarship by Jenny Sharpe, Suvendrini Perera, Susan Meyer, Carl Plasa, and Marcus Wood, all of whom have worked in the wake of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’. In Culture and Imperialism, Said urges a contrapuntal reading practice which involves ‘a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts’ (59). 4. In a very recent edition of Jane Eyre Shuttleworth comments that an 1808 date ‘would seem to be out of keeping with other evidence for textual dating which would place the novel more in the 1820s and 1830s’ (Explanatory Notes 483). 5. One contemporary reviewer, the critic for the church magazine the Guardian, comments on the likely date of the gift: We learn in vol. iii, p. 143, that ‘Marmion’ has just been published—this fixes the date of our story at the year 1808—and in vol. i, p. 30, (ten years before that date) we have a recollection of a nursemaid singing, ‘In the days when we went gipsying, a long time ago,’ which makes a considerable impression on little Jane. We had no idea that this song was a child of the last century. And in vol. ii, p. 170, (about 1808 again) we hear of an emptyheaded, cold-hearted, uncharitable young lady, who regards the rubric as the ‘great attraction’ of the Prayer book, and is a ‘rigid formalist in matters of religion,’ and afterwards turns Romanist. We should have thought that, in those days, such minds as hers would have taken an opposite course. We fear, too, that a ‘Saints-day service at the New Church’ (p. 175) was not then to be met with. (717)

6. A 2003 stoush in the premier journal Victorian Studies attests to what is at stake for some in readings of racialization in Jane Eyre. Erin O’Connor pathologizes, indeed pillories, the emergence and scope of postcolonial literary history, what she terms an ‘ethnohistory’ (243, n. 4) ‘predicated on the fantastic reach of marginal details’ (227). This ethnohistory characteristically inflates ‘a 130

Notes

131

minor, undeveloped plot line’ (225), ‘marginal ethnic characters or passing mentions of imported things’ (226) which in the interest of scholarly rigour and proper professional training need to be put back in their place, shrunk to their true scale within the text. O’Connor’s polemical mapping of the reach of postcolonial literary history is roundly and cogently criticized by Patrick Brantlinger and Deirdre David in a later issue of Victorian Studies. 7. Fleeming Jenkin (1833–1885) was the inventor of telpherage and advances in underwater telegraph technology. At his death he was Professor of Engineering at Edinburgh University. Fleeming Jenkin’s recent biographers Gillian Cookson and Colin A. Hempstead note that Stevenson, in an uncharacteristically critical passage where he tried to account for the tendency towards liberalism [in Fleeming Jenkin] which he, Stevenson, considered illogical, placed the blame for this and other shortcomings on Jenkin’s mother, ‘an imperious drawing-room queen’. Thus Jenkin inherited her faults: ‘generous, excessive, enthusiastic, external; catching ideas, brandishing them when caught ready at fifteen to correct a consul, ready at fifty to explain to any artist his own art’. And while Jenkin was meticulous in his work, ‘his thoroughness was not that of the patient scholar, but of an untrained woman with fits of passionate study’. (144) Shirley Foster argues that Gaskell ‘was always anxious to help other women writers’ (3). With Gaskell’s help Jenkin placed two stories (‘Coralie’ and ‘The Child-Seer’) with Household Words in 1855 and Cousin Stella with Smith, Elder, in 1859. Vineta Colby describes Jenkin as one of Lee’s ‘surrogate mother figures’ (14). She gives some detail of Jenkin’s relationships with Giovanni Ruffini and his brother Agostino Ruffini (15). Shafquat Towheed provides the fullest account of Jenkin’s relationship with Lee (203–12). In the entry on Jenkin in The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction John Sutherland conflates her output with that of Cecilia G. Jenkin. The error was revealed by my consulting The Archives of Richard Bentley and Son, 1829–1898. 8. Henrietta Camilla Jackson married Charles Jenkin, a midshipman in the British navy, in 1832. In the mid-1840s he rose to the rank of Commander, but was ‘superseded, and could never again obtain employment’ (Stevenson).

1

Christianity and the state of slavery

1. Editors of Jane Eyre typically suggest that Jane is referring to the reformist Chartist Movement, whose People’s Charter was published in 1838 and presented as a petition to the House of Commons in 1839. That the charter is spelled with a capital C in the manuscript is taken as confirmation of this interpretation (see, for instance, Ian Jack 328 and Shuttleworth 475). Charters are also, however, legal instruments of imperial governance. In debates over West Indian slavery in the early 1830s, Peter Borthwick, a proslavery speaker, urged that ‘the planters are bound by the charter of King George II of 1754 to cultivate their land with slaves’ (‘First Meeting’). Here

132 Notes

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

I pursue the implications of a dating I first outlined in 1999 in ‘Tropical Extravagance’ 8–9. Catherine Hall has recently highlighted his missionary work in White, Male and Middle Class and in Civilising Subjects. Secretary Stanley, Circular despatch to the Governors of his Majesty’s Colonial Possessions, 13 June1833, Great Britain, Papers Relating to the Abolition of Slavery 15. Great Britain, Hansard (17 July 1833): 799. The term ‘domestic slavery’ was used by Charles Grant. Hansard (17 July 1833): 798. Great Britain, Minutes of Evidence ,Appendix K: 579. Great Britain, An Act for effecting an Arrangement with the East India Company [28 Aug. 1833], Statutes 444. Hansard (17 July 1833): 799. See, for instance, Sutherland 427–37. Jane Jack and Margaret Smith, for instance, concur with this view, attributing Brontë’s apparent inconsistencies to historical ‘allusions to whose chronological significance she is unlikely to have given thought’ (610), and commenting that ‘it is clear that the action is set thirty or forty years before the time of publication, and that further precision is no part of Charlotte Brontë’s purpose’ (611). Shuttleworth, who has recently revised Smith’s notes to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Jane Eyre, notes that the 1808 publication date of Marmion ‘would seem to be out of keeping with other evidence for textual dating which would place the novel more in the 1820s and 1830s. There was, however, a new edition, with an introduction by Scott in 1830’ (Explanatory Notes 483). The evidence for an 1820s and 1830s setting which she cites is not drawn from imperial or colonial history. Jane’s intervention in the debate over Scott is more fully evident in the passage as a whole: she describes the ‘new publication’ as one of those genuine productions so often vouchsafed to the fortunate public of those days—the golden age of modern literature. Alas! the readers of our era are less favoured. But, courage! I will not pause either to accrue or repine. I know poetry is not dead, nor genius lost; nor has Mammon gained power over either, to bind or slay; they will both assert their existence, their presence, their liberty, and strength again one day. Powerful angels, safe in heaven! they smile when sordid souls triumph, and feeble ones weep over their destruction. Poetry destroyed. Genius banished? No! Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought. No; they not only live, but reign, and redeem: and without their divine influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell—the hell of your own meanness. (370; vol. 3, ch. 6) Jane alludes here to Lord Byron’s attack on Scott in ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ (1809), in which he complains that contemporary taste favours ‘Pseudo-bards’ idolized by ‘[e]ach country Book-club’ after ‘lawful Genius’ had been hurled ‘from the throne’. He represents Scott’s receipt of 1000

Notes

133

pounds for Marmion from his publishers as symptomatic ‘[of] prostituted Muse and hireling bard’: When the sons of song descend to trade, Their bays are sear, their former laurels fade. Let such forego the poet’s sacred name, Who rack their brains for lucre, not for fame, Still for stern Mammon may they toil in vain! And sadly gaze on Gold they cannot gain! Such be their meed, such still the just reward Of prostituted Muse and hireling bard! For this we spurn Apollo’s venal son, And bid a long, ‘Good-night to Marmion.’ (Complete Poetical Works, Vol. 1: 233–34)

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

Jane counters Byron’s negativity about Scott, Marmion, and the general decline of poetic genius since the days of Milton, Dryden, and Pope. Lockhart’s edition of the poem for Cadell includes Scott’s 1830 Introduction to Marmion in which he defends himself against Byron’s charges. Lockhart includes a footnote in which Byron’s characterization of Scott in ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ is cited at length. On 10 November 1833 the recent publication of Marmion in the Poetical Works series was announced in the ‘Literary Notices and Varieties’ column of the Leeds Intelligencer and Yorkshire General Advertiser. ‘[S]o cheap an edition’, the column noted, ‘places the work within the reach of very moderate means’ (‘Literary Notices’ 4). Jane’s praise of this edition as a ‘genuine’ production extends to the quality of Cadell’s publishing enterprise and its commemoration of Scott’s genius. ‘Mr Thompson’s Anti-Slavery Lectures’, Leeds Intelligencer (24 January 1833): 3. Great Britain, Parliamentary Debates, n.s., 9, 274–5. Great Britain, Parliamentary Debates, n.s., 9, 279. In addition to the Demerara rebellion in 1823, there were three small rebellions in Jamaica in 1823–24; slave unrest in Trinidad and Dominica was reported in the British press (‘Foreign Intelligence’, Leeds Intelligencer 1 January 1824: 2–3, 12 February 1824: 2). The declaration of martial law in Dominica was mentioned. The quotation is from a letter to the editor, John Bull (13 April 1823): 118. See the letters to the editor of John Bull on 24 August 1823: 269 and 5 October 1823: 317. Mirabeau’s question was cited by George Canning in the House of Commons. Parliamentary Debates n.s., 11, 1286. (British writers of the period usually termed St Domingo the island divided as St Domingue – Haiti – and the Spanish colony of St Domingo.) Lockhart comments on the controversy in Review 515–17. The ‘conspiracies’ were discovered in the parishes of St Mary, St James, St George, and Hanover. No white people were physically harmed; some of the charges made reference to slaves ‘imagining the death’ of white Jamaicans. See, for instance, Great Britain, Papers Relating to Slaves in the West Indies 1822–24, 128.

134 Notes 20. Susan L. Meyer notes that tropical storms are used by writers like Monk Lewis, Harriet Martineau, and Charlotte Brontë (in ‘Well, here I am at Roe Head’ and Villette, rather than Jane Eyre) to figure rebellion by or among black people (Imperialism at Home 60–1). 21. Knibb was reported in the Leeds Intelligencer on 7 February 1833 as having posed the ‘question, whether the banner of Christianity should be struck to the Moloch of slavery, or that accursed system should be overwhelmed’ (‘Baptist Missions’). Christopher Heywood has shown how Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights worked, like many abolitionist writers, to identify ‘the names and localities of the English families with plantation links’ (‘Yorkshire Slavery’ 187), whose wealth was based on the use of slave labour in the colonies. In a later article he points out that they ‘were constrained partly by the confidentiality expected of the clergy and their families, partly by their contrasted temperaments, and partly by the difficulty that by the time they wrote their novels, the problems they explored had been resolved at Parliamentary level. In their hands, slavery became a metaphor for disorders of mind and society’ (‘Yorkshire Landscapes’ 24–5). 22. Marcus Wood asserts that ‘Rochester must finally assume the role of the widow as voluntarily sacrificial victim at the novel’s close, in order to pass into the form of suffering slave surrogate.’ To sustain this line of argument, however, he represents Rochester’s attempt to save Bertha as a choice ‘to dive into the conflagration’, an attempted ‘self-immolation’, a reading not supported by the text (342). The innkeeper who tells Jane about the fire mentions that Rochester personally ‘helped’ the servants sleeping in the ‘attics’ escape the fire, and then ‘went back to get his mad wife out of her cell’ (JE 428; vol. 3, ch. 10). Wood also reads Rochester’s ‘cicatrized visage’ (436; vol. 3, ch. 11) as a sign that he is now ‘a generalized African slave victim’ with features comparable to ‘any other African or Caribbean slave with tribal markings’ (344). The OED reference for ‘cicatrice’ that Wood gives in support of this view is not contemporaneous with the novel, however; it is from Livingstone’s 1865 Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and its Tributaries. 23. See, for instance, editorials on 23 October 1823, 22 April 1824, 10 June 1824, 1 March 1832, and 8 March 1832. 24. Lockhart was one of Charlotte Brontë’s favourite authors, but his political commentary which I discuss in this chapter was published anonymously. The attributions of authorship of anonymously published articles in Blackwood’s Magazine and Quarterly Review to Lockhart are made in the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, Vol. 1, ed. Walter Houghton. 25. John Bull, November 1824, 364. George Stephen remembers of the antislavery campaign: ‘The pulpits, too, were closed, the clergy, excepting those of the evangelical class, taking their cue from the episcopal bench’ (117). 26. Editorial, Leeds Intelligencer and Yorkshire General Advertiser, 23 October 1823: 3. 27. The quotation is from a speech Knibb gave at Exeter Hall in London on 15 August 1832. 28. The quotation is from a speech Knibb gave on 21 June 1832, as reported in the Patriot.

Notes

135

29. In a breezy summary of Jane Eyre in an 1847 letter he does not fulminate against Brontë’s representation of Bertha as a colonial monster. He writes of her as ‘a concealed mad wife’, and of Jane taking ‘that awful lady’s place’ in marrying Rochester (qtd. in Allott 82). 30. Parliamentary Debates, n.s., 11, 998. 31. On his political career see Sue Thomas, ‘James Potter Lockhart and the “Letter of the Law”’. 32. Ellen Nussey reminisces about Charlotte Brontë at Roe Head School: ‘I must not forget to state that no girl in the school was equal to Charlotte in Sunday lessons. Her acquaintance with Holy Writ surpassed all others in this as in everything else. She was very familiar with all the sublimest passages, especially those in Isaiah, in which she took great delight’ (qtd. in Wise and Symington 99; vol. 1). These reminiscences were first published in Scribner’s Monthly in 1871. 33. ‘Foreign and Domestic. The Slave Insurrection in Jamaica’, Leeds Intelligencer (1 March 1832): 2. 34. See, for instance, Lockhart 71, pt. 3; 653, pt. 2; Bryant vi; John Bull 27 Oct. 1823: 340; Edwards 2: 82. 35. ‘Indian’ in this context is a general term, applicable to either the West or the East Indies, not a reference to the colony of India (OED). In Villette Brontë has Lucy Snowe refer to Guadelope as ‘an Indian isle’ (594). Not recognizing this usage, Marcus Wood urges that Bertha ‘is not simply like Messalina but, in a strange conflation of classical Roman debauchery and fantastic Asian sexual appetite, an “Indian Messalina” ’ (326). 36. On his speaking tour of Britain in 1833 Knibb represented himself as having told Jamaican planters that he ‘was coming home to expose their cruelty as far as his voice would reach’ (‘Baptist Missions’ 3). 37. This point is also made by Wood 336. ‘It was a commonplace of the literature of slavery’, notes H.L. Malchow, ‘that the recently enslaved experienced deep depression and were prone to either rebellion or suicide’ (30). 38. Wood suggests that ‘Jane’s destructive fury, and just indignation, are examined in the context of Helen Burns’s explicitly Christian “Doctrine of endurance”. While neither view is morally satisfactory, Brontë does endorse the inevitability of Jane’s outrage’ (339). 39. Dying of consumption in jail, John Smith, ‘dubbed the “Demerara Martyr” ’ (Walvin 276), drew inspiration from 2 Corinthians 4: 8 We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed, we are perplexed, but not in despair; 9 Persecuted but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed The Biblical reference was cited on an authorization of payment of a bill for his trial. 40. Kaplan, by contrast, formulates Jane’s competing self-identifications as a site of ‘anxiety about national, colonial and imperial imaginaries’, which forces on her a choice between ‘equally frightening “fictive ethnicities” ’ that makes her ill and brings about a ‘melodramatic reversal of affect in Jane’s reader-response’ to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. This ‘condense[s] and

136 Notes

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

reprise[s] a narrative version of the history of colonial slavery and its overthrow’ (‘Heterogenous’ 184–5). The white identity is not classed in Kaplan’s reading. For her, that Jane identifies with a black slave is indicated when her ‘angry thoughts are described in terms of a psychically saturated and sedimented blackness: “a dark deposit in a turgid [sic] well” ’ (183). Kaplan mistranscribes the word ‘turbid’; the error works implicitly to reinforce her reading of the swollen-featured Bertha as a dark, racialized vessel of anger. In Jane’s account, however, the opacity is ‘dense ignorance’ of ‘why I thus suffered’ in the Reed household (JE 16; vol. 1, ch. 2) that as adult narrator she is able to explain. Politi points out that a ‘moment, when the subject splits into its double’, as when Jane confronts the spectacle of abject whiteness in the mirror, ‘is a precondition for autobiographical narratives’. She reads Jane’s gaze here as a sign of ‘the novel’s structural rift into two distinct narrative modes – the realist, where rebellion materializes, and the fantasy, where the erotic fable and its sexual-ideological discourse are organised’. The fantasy mode, she argues, renders the mirror image ‘an it de-sexualized and fully de-socialised [sic]’ (62), and, sustained by Rochester in the language of fairy through which he speaks of his attraction to Jane, produces Jane as a regressive romantic object. In this she displays the kind of materialist critical hesitancy about fantasy and the psychic dimension of female experience that Cora Kaplan discusses in ‘Pandora’s Box’ (153). To make her argument, Politi valorizes rebelliousness as being realist, rather than as also being produced through what might be theorized as phantasmatic identification. See Kaplan, ‘Heterogenous’ 171–2. Evidence of A.D. Campbell, Great Britain, Minutes of Evidence , Appendix K 572. Evidence of A.D. Campbell, Great Britain, Minutes of Evidence , Appendix K 572. Great Britain, Minutes of Evidence , Appendix K 573–4. Great Britain, Minutes of Evidence , Appendix K 553. Paxton analyses Byron’s Oriental tales and ‘Sardanapalus’. Brontë draws on abolitionist memory, too, in praising the new French republican government’s abolition of slavery in 1848 as ‘acting very nobly’, a ‘glorious’ deed (Letters 2:41). The quotation is from a speech Knibb gave at Exeter Hall in London on 15 August 1832. The quotation is from a speech Knibb gave at the Byrom Street Chapel in Liverpool on 24 July 1832. Rochester had thought himself to be Céline’s ‘idol’ (JE 140; vol. 1, ch. 15). Politi offers a spirited reading of the French/English dichotomy in the novel (61–2). Meyer, by contrast, argues of this passage that Brontë ‘veers away from making a direct parallel with the British enslavement of Africans by associating Rochester’s dominating masculine power over Jane with that not of a British but of an Eastern slave master’ (82). In an essay written at the Pensionnat Heger, ‘Sacrifice of an Indian Widow’, Brontë links the practice of sati to the ‘despotism of an arrogant and cruel Hierarchy’ (Belgian Essays 2).

Notes

2

137

The tropical extravagance of Bertha Mason

1. The Encyclopaedia Londinensis was compiled by John Wilkes and the London Encyclopaedia by T. Curtis. 2. Sypher rightly observes that Edwards adds ‘but little’ to the ‘character’ of the white creole person (507) drawn by Edward Long in his History of Jamaica (1774), but by 1819 Edwards’s account is far more frequently cited. 3. Don George Juan and Don Antonio de Ulloa also note the intellectual precociousness of white people in Spanish America: The principal cause of the short duration of such promising beginnings, and of the indolent turn so often seen in these bright geniuses, is doubtless the want of proper objects for exercising their faculties, and the small hopes of being preferred to any post answerable to the pains they have taken. For as there is in this country neither army nor navy, and the civil employments very few, it is not at all surprising that the despair of making their fortunes, by this method, should damp their ardour for excelling in the sciences, and plunge them into idleness, the sure forerunner of vice; where they lose the use of their reason, and stifle those good principles which fired them when young and under proper subjection. (34) 4. A telling indicator of the way nineteenth-century encyclopaedia-makers cobbled together and indiscriminately blended sources is a sentence in the entry on CREOLE in the ninth edition of Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1875– 1889): ‘The creole whites, owing to the enervating influence of the climate, are not a robust race, but exhibit an elegance of gait and a suppleness of joint that are rare among Europeans.’ 5. ‘This is really a most uncomfortable house; the servants awkward and dirty, the children spoiled, and screaming the whole day. As for the ladies, they appear to me to be perfect viragos; they never speak but in the most imperious manner with their servants, and are constantly finding fault. West India houses are so thin, that one hears every word’ (Nugent 107). She spent a day there ‘crying and reading’ in her room. The ‘incessant noise of the children, not to mention the continual scolding of the servants’ is, she writes, ‘the most distressing thing in the world’ (110). Rochester complains of not having been able ‘to pass a single evening, nor even a single hour of the day’ with Bertha in ‘comfort’, of perceiving he ‘should never have a quiet or settled household, because no servant would bear the continued outbreaks of her violent and unreasonable temper, or the vexations of her absurd, contradictory, exacting orders’ (JE 306; vol. 3, ch. 1). Later he mentions the ‘thin partitions of the West Indian house’ through which he can hear the incarcerated Bertha’s ‘wolfish cries’ (308; vol. 3, ch. 1). The Nugents stayed with the Roses a day after Maria visited Mason’s Hall, the home of a Mrs Mason. I give references to the most widely available edition of Nugent’s journal, though I have checked the quoted passages against the original 1839 edition. 6. Atwood notes that ‘the generality of English white women in the West Indies are not so remarkable for that pleasing florid complexion, which is peculiar to the sex in England’ (211). Juan and Ulloa attribute the ‘wan and

138 Notes

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

livid complexions’ of white people in Spanish America which would ‘make a stranger suspect they were just recovered from some terrible distemper’ to ‘profuse perspiration’ (42). By distemper they mean illness. Rochester’s frustration at Bertha’s conversation accords with Maria Nugent’s comment soon after her arrival in Jamaica: ‘Find a sad want of local matter, or, indeed, any subject of conversation’ with the local ladies and gentlemen (Nugent 21). My thinking about this issue has been informed by Sharpe’s examination of the ways in which Jane Eyre’s ‘voice-agency is predicated on a national and racial splitting of femininity’ (38). She contends that ‘the paradox of being an individual in the domestic sphere is resolved by defining the English woman in relation to other women instead of to men. In Jane Eyre, a domestic form of social agency is established through a national and racial splitting of femininity, with the creole woman serving as a figure of self-indulgence and the Oriental woman, of self-immolation’ (47). Her use of the term ‘national’, however, to describe the contrast between Jane and Bertha is to my mind anachronistic. Edwards comments on the ‘incontinency’ of free women of ‘Colour’. ‘The fact’ of young and attractive women of this class being ‘kept mistresses’ of ‘White men of all ranks and conditions’ is, he writes, ‘too notorious to be concealed or controverted; and I trust I have too great an esteem for my fair readers, and too high a respect for myself, to stand forth the advocate of licentiousness and debauchery. [N]o white man of decent appearance, unless urged by the temptation of a considerable fortune, will condescend to give his hand in marriage to a Mulatto! The very idea is shocking’ (22). Sally Shuttleworth pointed out that masturbation could also have constituted unchastity when I presented a shorter version of this chapter as a paper at ‘The Victorians and Science’, Australasian Victorian Studies Association Conference, University of Adelaide, 7–11 February 1996. See ‘Cruelties Perpetrated by Henry and Helen Moss, on a Female Negro Slave in the Bahamas’ (1829), ‘Illustration of Jamaica Society and Manners’ (1830), and ‘The Review of G.W. Bridges, and His Slave Kitty Hilton’ (1830). I discuss the case of Catherine Whitfield and Ann King more fully in Chapter 6. Thomas Pringle, Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, edited and published The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831). Mary Prince recounts many instances of ill-treatment at the hands or on the orders of her mistresses. Diana Paton 183, n. 48. Livingstone is citing Knox’s The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations (London, 2nd ed., 1862) 107. The formulation was taken up in the Atlas on 23 October 1847, the reviewer describing Rochester as a ‘libertine of circumstances, not of a corrupt heart’ (Allott 69). On 20 November 1847 Rochester was characterized in Howitt’s Journal as ‘a man of the world, and a libertine, rather from circumstances than from nature’. In the same month he was depicted in New Monthly Magazine as a ‘libertine of circumstance rather than of a corrupt heart, if such a distinction may be allowed’. Parliamentary Debates, n.s., 14, 1040, 1018. Parliamentary Debates, n.s., 14, 1057.

Notes

139

17. Gilbert and Gubar, by contrast, read Bertha as ‘Jane’s truest and darkest double’ (360). 18. Sharpe’s quotation is from p. 366 of the Norton edition of Jane Eyre.

3 Monstrous martyrdom and the ‘overshadowing tree’ of philanthropy 1. A character in Patrick Brontë’s The Maid of Killarney, or Albion and Flora; a modern tale in which are interwoven some cursory remarks on religion and politics (1818) comments on a woman’s education that Providence has not ‘assigned for her the sphere of action, either the cabinet or the field’ (qtd. in Barker 117). 2. Hermione Lee reads the passage as a fine example of Brontë’s use of a ‘deliberate acting-out’ of an ‘elaborate succession of dramatised tropes’ to develop a ‘double allegory’, here ‘of the enslaving warrior’ and ‘the blighted (or trampled) flower, which has already been factually enacted in St John’s trampling of the harmless daisies’ (244). 3. Bewell argues that Brontë undercuts the prelapsarian quality of the garden scene by tropicalizing it with the ‘scents of a tropical New World, the smell of ‘honey-dew’ and tobacco’ (800). ‘Honey-dew’ is not necessarily tropical. It is a name given to ‘[a] sweet sticky substance found on the leaves and stems of trees and plants, held to be excreted by aphides’ (OED). 4. The formulation, of course, accords England primacy over Scotland and Wales. 5. I take up the implications of Jane’s use of the word ‘caste’ to describe rigid class divisions in Chapter 4. 6. He is quoting George Levine, ‘The Landscape of Reality’, The Realistic Imagination (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1981) 204. 7. Patrick Brontë’s financial distress had been brought to the attention of John Sargent by Henry Martyn. Martyn hoped that ‘assistance could be procured for him from any of those societies, whose object is to maintain pious young men designed for the ministry’ (qtd. in Barker 11). Sargent referred the request to Thornton. 8. Barker notes that in The Maid of Killarney, or Albion and Flora Patrick Brontë compares the British and Foreign Bible Society with the Nile River, having ‘countless tributaries, winding its irresistible course through different climates and nations until, “disdaining its prescribed limits”, it floods over the delta and brings riches to all’ (77). In Haworth he was a leading member of the non-denominational Haworth Auxiliary Bible Society. 9. In ‘The Politics of Verdopolis’ (1833), centred around an election campaign modelled on cynical observations of 1832 elections, Branwell Brontë introduces the character Thomas Babbicome Morley, who stands for the Constitutional Party and is elected for the city of Wellingtons Glasstown. In Branwell’s ‘An Historical Narrative of the “War of Encroachment” ’ (1833) Morley has the post of Colonial Secretary (365). Macaulay’s literary career, too, was of interest to the Brontës. In 1845 Branwell, perhaps, Barker suggests, through Mrs Robinson’s family connections, received a letter from Macaulay ‘complimentary’ of his poetry. He mentions the letter in correspondence with J.B.

140 Notes

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

4

Leyland (Wise and Symington 72; vol. 2). Barker notes that Mrs Robinson was a distant relative of Macaulay (464). Evidence of James Hough. My allusion is to Spivak’s ‘Three Women’s Texts’ 244. Chapman suggests that the necessary ‘qualification’ for visiting is ‘tried experience with a demeanour commanding respect’ (116). Linda H. Peterson makes passing reference to Cooke (93). Evidence of James Hough. Mathur mentions a Baptist Mission having opened a school for girls in Calcutta in 1819, and David Hare having opened another soon after (21–2). Elizabeth Dimock points out that the Society, which soon changed its name to the Society for the Promotion of Female Education in India, China, and the adjacent countries, was non-denominational, despite its evangelical Anglican origins. The schoolmistresses the Society sent to various parts of Asia and South Africa were termed ‘agents’. Many were single. Sharpe’s assertion, then, that ‘single women are not allowed to join the Christian missions’ (53) is too sweeping. Cooke had been sent to India ‘by the British and Foreign School Society, at the request of a local educational body at Calcutta, with a view to her starting a school for Hindu girls’. Because of the financial exigency of the Society she was ‘transferred’ to the Church Missionary Society and began study of Bengali (Stock 199). The account of her opening of schools given by Stock is, like Hough’s and Chapman’s, triumphal in tone. On 25 January 1822 she visited a local Boys’ School ‘to observe the pronunciation of the language’. Hearing of a girl in the crowd generated by her visit who had been repeatedly and vainly ‘begging to be allowed to learn to read with the boys’, she promised to return the next day to commence teaching her. The following day she and a local English woman more fluent in Bengali ‘found fifteen girls assembled, and their mothers standing outside, eagerly peering through the lattice’. Cooke was soon petitioned by locals to open more schools (Stock 199–200). She later became a Plymouth Brother. Minutes of meeting of the Female Education Society, 4 May 1835, minute 102. For examples of donations see minutes of meetings of the Female Education Society, 30 June 1837, minute 464; 24 November 1837, minute 537; 29 June 1838, minute 601; Nov. 1838, minute 633 (Church Missionary Society).

The ferment of restlessness

1. Chase argues that while ‘confinement and exposure’ become ‘dreaded alternatives for Jane, the spatial figures which dramatize her crises’, there is ‘a third figure: namely, the prospect. And within the set of spatial configurations that inform the novel, that give larger structure to its emotional nuances, the prospect represents a saving alternative. Against the threat of a confined space, it offers the liberation of an open view’ (88). 2. Glen quotes from Can Woman Regenerate Society? but does not pick up the tropological similarities between Lamb’s and Brontë’s prose. Brontë responds to the sublimest passages in Lamb’s text. My reference is to the sublime as a generic register.

Notes

141

3. Jane’s dreams of children have been central to influential interpretations of the novel by Margaret Homans, Mary Poovey, Marianne Hirsch, and Ronald Thomas; their readings, though, do not take cognizance of Brontë’s use of this figural language of pregnancy to characterize Jane’s fecund and ‘exultant imagination’ (109; vol. 1, ch. 11). Homans traces the origin of Brontë’s ‘complex series of connectives between danger or trouble and figures of childbirth’ to ‘Jane’s recollection of Bessie’s folk belief that “to dream of children was a sure sign of trouble, either to one’s self or to one’s kin” (ch. 21 [vol. 2, ch. 6]), and both Bessie’s experience and Jane’s verify the belief’ (89–90). Poovey and Hirsch, too, trace the dreams of children to Jane’s memory of Bessie’s belief. For Homans the ‘dreams of children represent Jane’s unconscious investigation of the state of becoming other than herself or of deferring altogether to projections’ (93); the novel ‘presents the fear of the objectification of self in a variety of ways that make particularly explicit the connection between femininity and objectification’ (85). Poovey argues, When Jane dreams of children, some disaster follows that is a displaced expression of the anger against kin that the character denies. In the sense that narrative effect is split off from psychological cause, Jane Eyre becomes at these moments what we might call a hysterical text, in which the body of the text symptomatically acts out what cannot make its way into the psychologically realistic narrative. Because there was no permissible plot in the nineteenth century for a woman’s anger, whenever Brontë explores this form of self-assertion the text splinters hysterically, provoked by and provoking images of dependency and frustration. Dreaming of children, then, is metonymically linked to a rage that remains implicit at the level of character but materializes at the level of plot. What Jane’s dreams of children reveal, then, in their content, their placement, and their form, is that the helplessness enforced by the governess’s dependent position—along with the frustration, self-denial, and maddened, thwarted rage that accompanies it—marks every middleclass woman’s life because she is not allowed to express (or possess) the emotions that her dependence provokes. (141) Hirsch suggests that the dreams ‘clarify the violence that resides within familial structures, exposing the mother, in particular, to danger’ (177). 4. JE 364; vol. 3, ch. 6. 5. Reviewers of Jane Eyre who addressed Helen’s style of Christian values exhibit a wider range of opinions. The Christian Remembrancer’s critic thought Helen ‘[t]he feeblest character in the book who is meant to be a perfect Christian, and is a simple seraph, conscious moreover of her own perfection. In her the Christianity of Jane Eyre is concentrated, and with her it expires, leaving the moral world in a kind of Scandinavian gloom’ (Allott 91). The reviewer for Atlas also suggested that Helen was a type rather than a realistic character, ‘the very incarnation of Christian charity and forbearance’, one of the ‘dream-children, with the unspotted hearts of babyhood and the wisdom of adolescence. Creations such as these are very beautiful, but very untrue’

142 Notes

6. 7.

8.

9.

5

(Allott 68). The reviewer in the Guardian , an organ of ‘moderate and liberalminded High Anglicanism’ (qtd. in Smith 573, n. 10) ‘altogether protest[ed]’ (717) against what Jane calls Helen’s ‘doctrine of the equality of disembodied souls’ in death (237; vol. 2, ch. 6), which Helen enunciates as a counterview to Jane’s response to secular injustice. Thormählen glosses the doctrine as the view ‘that a merciful God will not place any creature of his beyond eternal bliss. It is a bold doctrine, very much a minority view in its time; but it was far from being an unprecedented one’ (89). See the 1839 Chartist Circular. As narrator Jane acknowledges in relation to Rochester that ‘wealth, caste, custom’ (JE 251; vol. 2, ch. 8) and ‘rank and wealth sever us widely’ (175; vol. 2, ch. 2) and that ‘rank and connexions’ (186; vol. 2, ch. 3) might motivate a marriage between him and Blanche Ingram. She talks of St John’s work in India as a ‘hew[ing] down’ of the ‘prejudices of caste and creed’ (452; vol. 3, ch. 12). Ironically, of course, St John does little directly to combat the prejudices of caste in England. He uses his influence to have Jane appointed teacher at Morton. While Jane as narrator is still condescending in speaking about her pupils there, she claims that she came to recognize genuine worth in some of them and in their families. On these debates see especially Hancock, ‘Romani Origins and Romani Identity’.


1. The British Library holds Time Tries All. An Original Drama, in Two Acts, etc. (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy [1850?]); The Soldier’s Progress; or, the Horrors of War. A Pictorial Drama, in Four Parts, etc. (London: T.H. Lacy [1851]); Eustace Baudin. An Original Drama, in Three Acts (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy [1854]); A Wicked Wife. A Drama in One Act (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy [1857]); Double Faced People. A Comedy, in Three Acts (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy [1857]); The Two Polts. An Original Farce, in One Act (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy [1860]); Old Joe and Young Joe. A Comic Drama in Two Acts (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy [1861]); Aged Forty. An Original Petite Comedy in One Act (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy [1864]); and Deeds, not Words. A Drama in Two Acts (London: Samuel French [1875]). Cambridge University Library holds a microfilm of Belphagor, or, The Mountebank and His Wife: A Drama in Four Acts. Adapted from the French (London: T.H. Lacy [1851?]). 2. Stoneman gives the title of the pantomime as ‘The Great Pantomime of the Season [–] World of Wonders or Harlequin Caxton and the Origin of Printing’ (Jane Eyre 29). 3. Stoneman is citing Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New York and London: Yale UP, 1976) 15, 27. 4. I cite the recently published edited text of the play. The original from which I have worked is held in the British Library. 5. In the manuscript, Joe is called Jem for part of the opening scene. The play on gem suggests his status as a rough diamond.

Notes

6

143

An 1859 Caribbean perspective on Jane Eyre

1. Elizabeth Gaskell, letter to George Smith, 10 February 1859, The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, 527–8. She had not read Cousin Stella herself, but notes that ‘Signor Ruffini (“Doctor Antonio,”) thinks very highly’ of it (527). Unfortunately none of Jenkin’s correspondence with Smith, Elder, has been preserved in The Correspondence and Records of Smith, Elder & Co from the National Library of Scotland. 2. Jenkin also explicitly alludes to Jane Eyre in her 1861 two-volume novel ‘Who Breaks – Pays’ (Italian Proverb), and reworks plot elements from Jane Eyre. The ingénue Lill Tufton, the unsympathetic protagonist, anxious about her impending marriage to Sir Frederick Ponsonby, declares, ‘I shouldn’t be a bit surprised, if something dreadful were to happen, to put an end to it all. A murder, or a fire, or Sir Frederick turn out to be married, like Mr Rochester. If I had been Jane Eyre, I would have killed him. I would forgive anything but being deceived’ (2:191). Sir Frederick’s past does not include marriage, but rather an affair, about which Lill learns after her marriage. Lill insists on a separation. She is killed in the siege of Genoa in 1849 just before a planned reconciliation with her husband was to take place. Her response to the affair is hypocritical as she had broken an engagement with her Italian teacher. Lill had been very offended by her impoverished fiance’s assumption of equality with her. Governess Jane Eyre had declared her equality to Rochester. Stoneman lists ‘Who Breaks – Pays’ among her ‘Jane Eyre derivates listed chronologically’ in Brontë Transformations (258), but is not familiar with Cousin Stella. Jenkin is also the author of Violet Bank and Its Inmates (1858), Skirmishing (1863), Once and Again: A Novel (1865), Two French Marriages (1868), A Psyche of To-day (1868), Within an Ace (1869), Madame de Beauprés (1869), Jupiter’s Daughters; a Novel (1874), and Qui casse paie Roman Anglais traduit par Mme. Léon Georges (1876). 3. John McKelvey in his 1953 adaptation and Brian Tyler in his 1964 adaptation of Jane Eyre try to integrate a Caribbean perspective through expanding the part of Richard Mason. Robbie Kydd has retold Jane Eyre from the point of view of Richard Mason in The Quiet Stranger: A Novel (1991); Emma Tennant privileges Adèle Varens’ perspective in Adèle: Jane Eyre’s Hidden Story (2002); and Shady Cosgrove has published instalments of a novel, variously titled The Varens Obsession or The Golden Courtesan, a fictional life of Céline Varens ‘in a Rhysian tradition’ (‘From The Varens Obsession’ 10). In adaptations of Jane Eyre from the 1980s onwards, the influence of Rhys’s novel is readily apparent. Bertha Mason is presented less sensationally, as for instance in Franco Zeffirelli’s film of the novel. In Wide Sargasso Sea Antoinette Cosway Mason’s red dress is emblematic of her gendered and racialized difference from Rochester and of her alleged intemperance by Rochester’s upper-middle-class English standards. Red features prominently as a sign of passion in Debbie Shewell’s More Than One Antoinette (performed 1990), in performances of Polly Teale’s Jane Eyre, and in Susanna White’s recent serialized version of Jane Eyre (screenplay by Sandy Welch). I saw Teale’s play performed at the Melbourne Festival on 14 October 1999. 4. Jenkin represents the rebellion commencing on 22 December 1831, the date on which a proclamation of William IV was released in Jamaica. The proclam-

144 Notes ation referred to the circulation of erroneous rumours that enslaved people were to be emancipated, rumours which had produced acts of insubordination which have excited Our highest displeasure: We have thought fit, by and with the advice of Our Privy Council, to issue this Our Royal Proclamation; and we do hereby declare and make known, that the slave population in Our said colonies and possessions will forfeit all claim to Our protection if they shall fail to render entire submission to the laws, as well as dutiful obedience to their masters (qtd. in Brathwaite, ‘Rebellion’ 83–84). The historical rebellion commenced in earnest c. 27 December 1831. 5. Papers relating to the Disallowed Slave Act are collected by pro-slavery advocate Alexander Barclay 433–72. 6. This is a contrast to the function of the ‘crippled or feminized hero’ in women’s fiction of the 1860s, a figure, Sally Mitchell argues, who ‘is both a manageable object for the heroine’s affections and an alternate persona, who provides the daydreamer with a gender role in which more interesting adventures are possible’ (38). 7. Doris Sommer makes the point that the ‘productive sexuality’ of marriage in allegorical foundational fictions of the Americas often projects ideals of ‘national consolidation during periods of internecine conflict’ (76). 8. For the Saturday Review the ‘characters [of Cousin Stella] are displeasing, either from the extreme of exaggeration or the extreme of commonplace. They are either impossibly ideal or too repulsively real’. The author ‘has not attained that delicate touch which can idealize without impairing either probability or nature’ (180). Reviewing Cousin Stella anonymously in the Athenaeum, Geraldine Jewsbury writes, though, that ‘the characters are all life-like, and all act according to their own nature, and not by the arbitrary rule of the author’s will’ (113). 9. O’Callaghan comments, ‘If the ideal woman was white, domestic, submissive, virtuous and pious, her embodiment in the Caribbean was the “good” mistress of the West Indian plantation For the mistress in her role as “Angel in the House,” a large part of her duties included ministering to the unfortunate blacks’ (28). She identifies Stella as one of this type. 10. Not recognizing the allusion to Hard Times, O’Callaghan comments that Jamaica is ‘a site invested – at least initially – with magic and potential adventure. In Jenkin’s novel (1859), the chapter detailing Stella’s departure for Jamaica is entitled “Bound for Fairy Land” ’ (93). 11. See, for instance, my discussion of horticultural tropology in Dominican autoethnography in The Worlding of Jean Rhys, 19–22. 12. Robert Louis Stevenson notes the temper of Jenkin’s mother Susan Jackson: ‘a woman of fierce passions; she would tie her house slaves to the bed and lash them with her own hand; and her conduct to her wild and down-going sons, [sic] was a mixture of almost insane self-sacrifice and wholly insane violence of temper’. Of her place in Fleeming Jenkin’s childhood he writes, ‘The tragic woman was besides from time to time a member of the family she [sic] was in distress of mind and reduced in fortune by the misconduct of her sons; her destitution and solitude made it a recurring duty to receive

Notes

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

145

her, her violence continually enforced fresh separations. In her passion of a disappointed mother, she was a fit object of pity; but her grandson, who heard her load his own mother with cruel insults and reproaches, conceived for her an indignant and impatient hatred, for which he blamed himself in later life.’ The Catherine Whitfield and Ann King case is discussed briefly by Altink (115–16). In the explanation given for the view that West Indian slave-owners were not as degenerate as US slave-owners, the critic interprets West Indian history through the racial ideas of Robert Knox. As I pointed out in Chapter 2, Robert Knox’s view of the West Indies was that ‘[w]ithout the constant inflow of “fresh European blood”, infertility, sickly offspring, and moral degeneration were the inevitable issue’ (Livingstone 418). See David Alan Paterson’s family tree in The Halls of Jamaica – Allegonda’s Legacy. In the archive the stories of Catherine Whitfield and Ann King are told in three mediated forms: in summaries by magistrate Dr Palmer and Colonial Secretary Goderich, and in the abridged report of the evidence the two gave before the Council of Protection, which was empowered to hear the charges against the Jacksons and to admit slave evidence. The Jacksons were acquitted. When a bill of indictment against the Jacksons was referred by the Attorney-General Hugo James to the Grand Jury, Whitfield and King, James reports, ‘although sent into the grand-jury room in order that their complexion and condition might be inspected, were of course not permitted to make any statement’. James suggests that this legal silencing of the women caused the grand jury to ‘ignore the bill’. This court could not admit slave evidence against owners and hence not even the evidence summarized in the recorded proceedings of the Council of Protection could be tendered (‘Jamaica: Correspondence’ 26). Whitfield and King tendered complaints to the Council of Protection. Whitfield was questioned by Council members. Her responses, but not their questions, were recorded. The last section of King’s testimony, beginning with ‘I never go to prayers of a Sunday; I cannot read; I do not know prayers’, is disjointed enough to suggest that it comprises answers to unrecorded questions (Jamaica: Correspondence 18). Her comments about prayers would seem not to be part of a complaint, but rather a response to a question about Christian religious instruction. Papers 17. The phrase ‘spectacle of suffering’ is drawn from the work of Karen Halttunen. Elsewhere he urged that corporal punishments of women ‘must tend to the moral degradation of those who suffer, and of those who inflict them. I know not what more effectual method could be devised for repressing the growth of appropriate virtues of the female character, or for fostering base and unmanly dispositions in the other sex’ (qtd. in Paton 173). The poems have been published in a separate limited edition in 1975, as ‘Dais’ and ‘Nights’ in a book-length poetic sequence Mother Poem (1977), and as ‘Days and Nights’ in Ancestors (2001), a reworking of the trilogy Mother Poem, Sun Poem (1982), and X/Self (1987) in his Sycorax video style facilitated by computer software technology. In ‘Remembering Catherine Whitfield, Ann

146 Notes

21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

King and Betty Jackson’ I discuss much more fully Brathwaite’s performance of the poem in ‘A Post-cautionary Tale of the Helen of Our Wars’. In referring to the documents relating to the punishment of Whitfield and King in his 1984 Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture ‘Caribbean Women during the Period of Slavery’, Brathwaite notes that the slave woman’s ‘general invisibility’ as a person in the imperial archive makes her a ‘submerged mother’ (2; pt. 1), but that in the papers laid before the Colonial Secretary Whitfield and King ‘are very real, they come to life, their visibility is at last restored’ (14; pt. 2). The stereotype is perhaps more notable given that Louis’s habit of phrenological reading is pilloried by the narrative voice, which declares that ‘pride in our penetrating powers is one of the Evil One’s temptations’ (1:299). This judgement offers a pointed contrast to Brontë’s view of phrenology. The Creole language is also a reminder that ‘[w]hereas planters usually sent their sons to be educated in the “home country,” daughters rarely received the benefits of “proper” education’ (Wyrick 44). Curiously the entry on Jenkin in The Feminist Companion to Literature in English notes only ‘graphic scenes of white male brutality’ (Blain et al. 573). Stevenson notes the view that ‘[s]econd sight was hereditary in the house’ of the Campbells of Auchenbreck. Jenkin’s mother was Susan Jackson, née Campbell. In the context of the struggle over amelioration, pro-slavery West Indians threatened to transfer allegiance from Britain to the United States. Jenkin also refers to this at 2: 20. In another plotline concerning assumptions of the innate degeneracy of female performers that, in Nena’s words, they are ‘born to a different morality’ (3:137), signs of Stella’s interest in dancing are viciously repressed. Having seen a girl around her own age rope-dancing, a very young Stella had playfully ‘tried to balance herself on the back of a chair’ (1:52). Mrs Joddrell’s rebuke was severe and racist, and Stella was never allowed to visit the theatre or circus for fear that her inherited propensity to such display might be encouraged. The 16-year-old Stella tells Stapleton Smythe that she would like to learn to dance and that ‘when music is playing, I feel as if I could act out a story to it’ (1:139), a confession which mortifies her because of her grandmother’s admonitions. On his next visit to the Dashwoods he brings an illustrated book of ‘a story told by dancing’, Flore et Zéphyr; the physicality of the performance illustrated disgusts her (165). His intent is monitory, a fact which reflects badly on his mercenary marriage to Nena. Adèle’s performances in Jane Eyre are represented as sexually precocious, a sign of poor maternal upbringing. Brathwaite describes plantation slavery culture as ‘race-founded & racefoundered’ (‘Post-Cautionary Tale’ 74).

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Index

Adaptation and Appropriation (Sanders), 6 agency, 20, 26, 53, 116, 117, 118 Appeal of One Half the Human Race (Thompson), 73–4 Armstrong, Nancy, 71 Atwood, Thomas, 33, 34, 35, 36 Baber, Thomas Harvey, 23–4 Barker, Juliet, 60, 139 n. 9 Beaty, Jerome, 59–60 Beer, Gillian, 4 Belsey, Catherine, 67 Berman, Carolyn Vallenga, 34 Bewell, Alan, 59, 68, 139 n. 3 Black, Clinton V., 47, 106 Bonnett, Alistair, 51 Borthwick, Peter, 131 n. 1 Boumelha, Penny, 8 Brathwaite, Kamau, 18, 119, 146 n. 20, 146 n. 27 Bratton, Jacky, 97 Briggs, Asa, 84 Britain ‘culture of sensibility’ in, 41, 45–6 industrialization in, 59, 84, 113 Long Transition, 5, 72, 91 and primogeniture, 44–5, 85 social unrest in, 79–80, 84, 101 British empire, 135 n. 35 and Christianity, 25 and colonial policies, 9–10, 26, 48–9, 51, 60, 61, 62–3, 80, 105, 117, 144 n. 4 racial formation of, 4, 50–1, 52 see also colonialism; slavery; West Indies Brontë, Branwell, 139 n. 9 Brontë, Charlotte, 135 n. 32 and adaptations of Jane Eyre, 6, 93, 103 on her writing, 92–3

on moral madness, 35 and phrenology, 37, 54, 55, 57, 89, 146 n. 21 and slavery, 3, 10, 11, 21, 24, 134 n. 21, 136 n. 47 Villette, 135 n. 35 worlding of, 1 see also Jane Eyre (Brontë) Brontë, Emily and slavery, 3, 134 n. 21 Wuthering Heights, 10, 35, 42 Brontë, Patrick, 15, 60, 139 n. 7 The Maid of Killarney, 139 n. 1, 139 n. 8 Brontë family, 12, 13, 14 Brougham, Henry Peter (Lord Brougham), 17 Butler, Judith, 83 Buxton, Thomas Fowell, 12 Buzard, James, 43 Byron (George Gordon), Lord, 24, 132 n. 11

Campbell, A.D., 24 Canning, George, 12 Can Woman Regenerate Society? (Lamb), 75–6, 77, 140 n. 2 Chapman, Priscilla, 63–4 characters in Jane Eyre Adèle Varens, 40, 113, 146 n. 26; ‘transplanted’, 84, 110 Bertha Mason, 19, 47, 53 degeneracy and insanity of, 13, 31, 34, 35, 39, 45, 48, 50, 69, 99, 123; as despot, 14, 49, 52; metaphorical role of, 49; racial ambiguity of, 31–2, 135 n. 35 Bessie: as nurse, 21 Helen Burns: as ‘Christian’, 20, 21, 82, 141 n. 5 165

166 Index characters in Jane Eyre – continued Jane, 141 n. 3; discontent of, 87–8; Gothic imagination of, 21; identification with the slave, 8–9, 11, 19, 20, 25, 26, 28, 105, 135 n. 40; missionary identification of, 25; religious feeling of, 9, 27; resistance to Rivers, 55–6, 69 John Reed: cruelty and despotism of, 19, 66, 85, 86 Martha Abbot, 85 Richard Mason: Creole character of, 37 Rivers: austerity and despotism of, 51, 55, 66, 67, 70, 74; vocation as missionary, 30, 65 Rochester: despotic tendencies of, 9, 39, 43, 62, 66, 86; and mistresses, 39, 40, 49, 123, 138 n. 14; as manly and active, 38; relationship with Bertha, 13, 39, 40–1, 43, 44–5, 45, 46–7, 50, 66, 123, 138 n. 7 Rosamond Oliver, 80 see also Jane Eyre (Brontë) Chase, Karen, 40, 50, 74, 78, 140 n. 1 class, 6, 84 and an Anglo-Saxon ‘code of breeding’, 90, 91, 103 and gender, 71 racialization of, 74, 112 Cohen, Philip, 90, 91, 103 Colby, Vineta, 131 n. 7 colonialism, 42, 47, 48–9 civilizing mission of, 40 colonial relations, 39, 52, 106 and transportation, 99 Cooke (Wilson), M.A., 64, 65, 140 n. 17 Cookson, Gillian, 131 n. 7 Courtney, John (John Fuller), 5, 6, 94, 103 see also Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor (Courtney) Cousin Stella (Jenkin), 7, 104–6, 111, 124–6, 144 n. 8, 146 n. 26 ‘emancipation anxiety’ in, 106

plantation slavery in, 105, 106, 111–15, 120–6, 143 n. 4 plantocracy in, 104, 105–8, 110, 112, 146 n. 25 race in, 105, 108–9 transplantation in, 109–10 Cox, Philip, 94 Creole, the, 31, 34–5, 37–8, 40, 51, 137 n. 3 meanings of, 32–3 and ‘moral degeneracy’, 35–6, 43, 45, 50, 52, 98, 104, 106, 125, 137 n. 4 da Costa, Emilia Viotti, 15 Dale, Peter Allan, 26, 27 Davies, Gill, 95 Davis, David Brion, 18, 19, 25 Davis, Jim, 95 Dawson, Robert, 89 de Groot, Joanna, 23 despotism, 66, 73, 108, 110, 112 see also characters in Jane Eyre Dickens, Charles, 94, 95 David Copperfield, 88 Hard Times, 111–12 Dimock, Elizabeth, 140 n. 16 Doctor Antonio (Ruffini), 6 Driver, Jonas, 12 Dyer, Richard, 98 East India Company, 63 Edwards, Bryan, 32–3, 34–5, 36, 138 n. 9 Ellis, Markman, 113 Embree, Ainslie Thomas, 60 Emeljanow, Victor, 95 English Feminism (Caine), 73, 74–5 Englishness, 17, 61, 111, 125 and colonial identities, 7, 53 and the foreign, 110, 113 Enlightenment, 21 Forçade, Eugène, 44 Foster, Shirley, 131 n. 7 freedom, see rights; women Fuss, Diana, 25

Index Gaskell, Elizabeth, 6, 104, 131 n. 7 Geggus, David, 13 gender, 1, 52, 55, 119 and class, 48 and control, 9–10, 26, 28 and social roles, 74, 77, 144 n. 6 Gilbert, Sandra M., 75 Gillies, John, 110 Glen, Heather, 69 Charlotte Brontë, 1, 3 Goderich, Viscount, 48, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120 Goldsmith, Oliver, 19–20 The Roman History, 11 Goodlad, Lauren, 86 Grellman, Heinrich, 89–90 Greville, Charles, 79 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 22 Haiti revolution in, 13, 121 Halberstam, Judith, 43, 46, 54 Hall, Catherine, 14, 25, 49, 79, 85, 125 White, Male, and Middle Class, 4 Halttunen, Karen, 41, 45–6 Hancock, Ian, 89 Hardy, Barbara, 9 Hempstead, Colin A., 131 n. 7 Hesse, Barnor, 25, 119 Heywood, Christopher, 3, 35, 42, 134 n. 21 Hirsch, Marianne, 141 n. 3 Homans, Margaret, 141 n. 3 Hulme, Peter, 1, 114, 119 Hunter, Ian, 83 India, 66 British presence in, 59, 62 education in, 62–4, 140 n. 16 imperial policies in, 9–10, 62–3 missionary work in, 60–1, 63–4, 70 slavery in, 24, 61 social structures in, 87 women in, 63–4, 69 Jackson, Campbell, 115 Jackson, Elizabeth Walker, 115, 116–18, 119 Jackson, John Rawleigh, 115, 117

167

Jackson, Susan, 144 n. 12 Jamaica, see West Indies Jane Eyre (Brontë) analogues of, 7, 104–10, 113–14, 120–6, 143 n. 2, 143 n. 3 the archaic and the modern in, 21–2 chronology and dating, 3–4, 10–11, 53, 61, 79, 103, 127–8, 130 n. 4, 130 n. 5, 132 n. 10 class in, 22, 86–91, 96, 98, 102–3, 125, 142 n. 7, 142 n. 8 Englishness in, 4, 5, 52, 55, 72, 84, 86, 110, 125 fire at Thornfield Hall, 14, 50 gender issues in, 23, 39 imperialism and colonialism in, 4, 5, 6, 8, 23, 31, 38, 42–3, 50, 52, 59, 66, 67–8 Lowood school, 83 medical geography in, 59, 68, 69 narrative modes in, 8, 13, 28, 43, 45–6, 55, 67, 76, 83, 136 n. 41 publication, 1 ‘race’ in, 4, 8, 20, 22, 26, 27, 32, 34, 43, 45, 50, 51, 125, 138 n. 8 reader expectation in, 26 reception and criticism, 1–4, 5, 28, 75, 79, 80–1, 82–3, 88, 92, 108, 141 n. 5 reform in, 4, 5, 30, 70, 72–3, 79, 131 n. 1 religion and belief in, 28–30, 59, 69–70, 141 n. 5 slavery in, 8, 11, 13, 21, 24–5, 28, 35, 41, 46, 47, 48, 65, 70, 105, 134 n. 21, 134 n. 22, 136 n. 52 stage adaptations of, 5, 6, 92, 95–103 worlding of, 3 see also characters in Jane Eyre; Creole, the; West Indies; women Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor (Courtney), 93, 94 as melodrama, 96, 98, 100, 101, 102 opening, 6, 92 reception and assessments of, 94, 96–7 servants in, 96–8, 99, 100, 102, 103

168 Index Jenkin, Fleeming, 6, 131 n. 7 Jenkin, Henrietta Camilla, 5, 6, 104, 105, 126, 131 n. 7 ‘Who Breaks – Pays’, 143 n. 2 see also Cousin Stella (Jenkin) Jewsbury, Geraldine, 4n. 8 Journal of a Voyage, A (Nugent), 35–6, 137 n. 5, 138 n. 7 Kaplan, Cora, 3, 22, 66, 78, 135 n. 40 Kees, Lara Freeberg, 74 King, Ann Amelia, 115, 116–17, 118, 123, 145 n. 14, 146 n. 20 Kingsley, Charles, 95 Kitson, Peter, 123 Klaus, H. Gustav, 81, 87 Knibb, William, 9, 16, 17, 18–19, 25, 61, 134 n. 21, 135 n. 36 Knox, Robert, 43, 145 n. 14 Kristeva, Julia, 43, 66 Lambert, David, 105, 106, 112 White Creole Culture, 17 Lamming, George, 25 Lamonica, Maria, 66 Lampe, G.W.H., 56 Laqueur, Thomas, 83 Leavis, Q.D., 1, 3, 10 Lee, Hermione, 139 n. 2 Lee, Vernon, 6 Lewis, G.H., 92 Lewis, Gordon, 112, 113 Lewis, Sarah, 74 Woman’s Mission, 77 Lockhart, James Potter, 49 Lockhart, John Gibson, 15, 16–17, 134 n. 24, 135 n. 29 Lonoff, Sue, 69 Lushington, Stephen, 116 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 61, 62–3, 139 n. 9 McClintock, Anne, 21, 103 McQueen, James, 24 Malchow, H.L., 135 n. 37 Mani, Lata, 10, 59, 60, 64 marriage, 73, 75 and law, 40, 49–50, 52 and property rights of women, 65

Martyn, Henry, 111, 139 n. 7 martyrdom and sacrifice, 54, 55, 56, 65, 68–9 Mathur, Y.B., 63 Mayall, David, 89 Mayhew, Henry, 95 Meyer, Susan L., 14, 31–2, 42, 48, 51, 136 n. 52 Milbank, Alison, 54 Mill, James, 73 Miller, Nancy K., 72 missionary societies, 14, 15–16, 60, 65 Mitchell, Sally, 146 n. 6 Moretti, Franco, 45 newspapers and journals The Anti-Slavery Reporter, 41–2, 116 Blackwood’s Magazine, 13, 24 Christian Remembrancer, 81, 82, 88 Era, 96 John Bull, 12–13, 15 Leeds Intelligencer, 14, 19 Saturday Review, 114–15, 144 n. 8 Sheffield Mercury, 80 Victorian Studies, 130 n. 6 Nicoll, Allardyce, 5 Nord, Deborah Epstein, 89, 90 Northcott, Cecil, 15 novels (cinematic) analogues of, 7, 143 n. 3 and copyright, 5–6 theatrical adaptations, 5, 92–4 see also Jane Eyre (Brontë) Nussey, Ellen, 135 n. 32 O’Callaghan, Evelyn Women Writing the West Indies, 7, 144 n. 9 O’Connor, Erin, 130 n. 6 Omi, Michael, 51 orientalism feminist, 73 Osbaldiston, David Webster, 94, 95 Oswalt, John N., 18 Paine, Thomas, 44 Rights of Man, 66 Palmer, Archibald Leighton, 115, 118 Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, 13

Index Parry, Benita, 3 Pateman, Carol, 27 Paton, Diana, 42, 119 Paxton, Nancy L., 24 Perera, Suvendrini, 69 philanthropy, 54, 57, 58, 67 Plasa, Carl, 8, 14, 23, 49, 50, 51, 55 Charlotte Brontë, 4 Politi, Jina, 136 n. 41 political unrest, 71, 80–1, 84, 105 see also West Indies Poovey, Mary, 3, 141 n. 3 Porteus, Beilby, 60–1 Prince, Mary, 138 n. 11 race, 52, 119–20, 143 n. 3 and empire, 38, 107 and theories of, 33, 105 see also Creole, the racism, 17, 105, 107 and slavery, 19, 112, 120, 124–5, 126 Reckord, Mary, 12, 114 Rees, Abraham, 32, 33 Rhys, Jean, 119–20 Wide Sargasso Sea, 7, 104, 114, 143 n. 3 Rigby, Elizabeth, 5, 20, 28, 72, 80–1, 82–3, 84–5, 88, 91, 108 rights, 81, 120, 123, 126 dignity, 117, 118–19 (financial) freedom, 18, 25–6, 30, 65, 70, 86, 101, 108 see also women Romany people, 89–90 Rowell, George, 95–6 Roy, Parama, 67–8 Sadoff, Diane F., 86 Said, Edward, 130 n. 3 The World, the Text, and the Critic, 2 Saville, John, 81, 84 Scott, Walter Marmion, 3, 10–11, 132 n. 11 self and imagination, 57–8, 141 n. 3 realization of, 54, 58 Sharpe, Jenny, 2, 23, 26, 32, 48, 50, 52, 138 n. 8

169

Sharpe, Sam, 14, 17–18, 123 Shuttleworth, Sally, 3, 54, 55, 56, 72, 80, 130 n. 4, 132 n. 10, 138 n. 10 slavery, 65, 85 and abolition of, 3, 9–10, 11, 15, 48, 50, 61, 104, 115–16, 118 and Christianity, 9, 11–12, 14, 15–19, 25, 30, 115, 123, 134 n. 21 contestation over, 7, 12–13, 14–15, 17, 25, 80, 105–6, 120, 146 n. 25 and cruelty, 41–2, 47, 112–13, 114–18, 120, 138 n. 11, 144 n. 12 as despotism, 105, 107 domestic, 23–4, 26, 61 Smith, John (missionary), 14–15 Smith, Margaret, 6, 94, 96–7, 98, 132 n. 10 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 2, 26, 52 Stepan, Nancy, 33 Stephen, George, 134 n. 25 Stephens, John Russell, 5–6 Stevenson, John, 79 Stevenson, Robert Louis Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, 6–7, 131 n. 7, 144 n. 12 Stoneman, Patsy, 6, 94, 96 Brontë Transformations, 5, 97 Taylor, Miles, 99 text and context, 3 and historical contingency, 2 see also novels theatre melodrama, 97 and morality, 123–4, 146 n. 26 Victoria Theatre, 93–7, 103 theology and the heart, 68 Thomas, Ronald, 27, 78–9 Thomas, Sue The Worlding of Jean Rhys, 2, 114 Thormählen, Marianne, 68, 69, 141 n. 5

170 Index Tillotson, Kathleen, 1 Turley, David, 36 The Culture of English Antislavery, 4 Vincent, Eliza, 94, 96 Vindication of the Rights of Men, A (Wollstonecraft), 44 Viswanathan, Gauri, 62 Voyage to South America, A (Juan and Ulloa), 33, 137 n. 3, 137 n. 6 Warner, Ashton, 117 West Indian Humanity: II (pamphlet), 42 West Indies, 36, 43, 66, 137 n. 5, 138 n. 9 planter class in, 9, 12, 14, 17, 35–6, 41–2, 49, 112, 114–20, 123, 131 n. 1, 135 n. 36, 144 n. 9, 145 n. 14, 146 n. 22 slave revolts in, 3, 9, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 25, 46, 47, 48, 71, 105, 108, 121, 133 n. 15, 133 n. 19, 144 n. 4 slavery in, 9, 17, 35, 41–2, 46, 48–9, 104, 105, 111, 117, 119, 121, 122, 146 n. 20, 146 n. 27 see also Creole, the; slavery

West Indies and the Spanish Main, The (Trollope), 32 Whitfield, Catherine, 115, 116, 117–18, 123, 145 n. 14, 146 n. 20 Wilberforce, William, 60 Williams, Carolyn, 27, 29, 67, 69 Williams, Raymond, 83, 86 Williams, W.S., 92, 130 n. 1 Winant, Howard, 51 women and conceptions of femininity, 41 and restlessness, 71, 72, 76, 77, 78–9, 82, 84, 101, 141 n. 3 and social position of, 71–7, 85, 105, 113, 139 n. 1 use of faculties, 55–6, 72, 74, 76 women’s rights, 52, 74, 126 see also marriage Wood, Marcus, 134 n. 22, 135 n. 38 worlding, 2, 130 n. 2 Worlding Project, The (Wilson and Connery), 130 n. 2 Wyrick, Deborah, 106 Young, Robert J.C., 21 Zonana, Joyce, 23, 73

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