Jane and the Other Mrs. Rochester: Excess and Restraint in "Jane Eyre"

Abstract

lane Eyre is a didactic novel which subordinates the values of passion to those of restraint. Its central and readily demonstrable moral doctrine is that individualism must be subjected to time-honored human conventions and that romantic passion cannot be allowed to usurp the prerogatives of divine law. When Jane makes her crucial decision and leaves Rochester, this message is explicit in her stated and unqualified rationale for doing so, and it is implicit in the shape of the subsequent action, which is designed to show that her decision was correct. However, clarity is not persuasiveness, and an argument that would forbid a romance as compelling as this one must be persuasive indeed. If the denouement of the story, Jane's enrichment, liberation, marriage, and maternity, demonstrates the practicality of her earlier decision, the validity of the principle that underlies this decision is never substantiated. The novel never really justifies its premises; it merely and flatly asserts that Jane is correct. Were assertion the unique rhetorical mode of Jane Eyre, modern readers would be forced to accept a rather unconvincing and limited vision. However, Charlotte Bronte's opinions on passion and restraint are not confined to dictum and transparent parable as modes of expression. The specific substance of her argument is such that it cannot be demonstrated literally, and thus she must present it figuratively. Within a Gothic context rich in symbolic potential the novel presents a rhetoric that supports its fundamental imperative, and the key figure in this rhetoric is Rochester's mad wife, Bertha. A new twist on the old Gothic motifs of dark secrets, family curses, and monstrous or unearthly apparitions, she exists within a tradition that subverts the decorum of verisimilitude, and other conventions as well.' Within this less restrictive dimension she functions to communicate, through symbol, analogy, and example, a rationale for the moral bases of the novel. As the figurative representation of something unspeakable and as a projection of Jane's own dark potentials, Bertha is used to show why Jane must act as she does and why, despite the strength of opposing arguments and sympathies, the protagonist must decide to leave her beloved when his prior marriage is revealed.2