Tying the Knot in the Economic Warp of Jane Eyre

Abstract

A prominent pattern in the weave of Jane Eyre's station, attitudes, and narrative is her finances, skewed by lineage and wont. Jane's fortune and psyche are as warped when she becomes wealthy and a writer as when she was a young, anxious outcast whom poverty demeaned and challenged. Her memoirs critique religious hypocrisy, male chauvinism, and economic degradation, but also expose her pernicious outlook on matrimony and Mammon, in contrast to a proclaimed wedded bliss. “[T]he same catastrophe — marriage” (228; ch. 19) — that she wryly predicts for romances, real and fictional, is a stigma on her character. Jane Eyre records a twisted lesson about an heir straitened by serving too many masters. Jane, knowing she has mistaken wealth for a panacea, not a dangerous pharmakon, is no feminist paragon in a conventional rags-to-riches tale, but rather a disillusioned, haunted woman whose mendacity is a function and mainstay of her knotted, (under)privileged life. When she often wants “a facile word or plausible pretext… to get [herself] out of painful embarrassment” (277–78; ch. 23), candor shades into equivocation. Neither marriage nor writing makes an honest woman of her. Portraying herself as independent and principled, Jane at the end of her narrative rope seems to attain what her cousin, St. John Rivers, calls “the selfish calm and sensual comfort of civilized affluence” (417; ch. 34). However, Jane often feigns placidity, and Ferndean is “deep buried in a wood … [an] ineligible and insalubrious site … no opening anywhere” — which makes her think she “had taken a wrong direction and lost [her] way” (455; ch. 37).