Jane’s righteousness is at times reminiscent of that in Jane Austen’s teenage parody
of Mrs Radcliffe,Love and Freindship. Some readers suspect that Jane Eyre is used by
her creator as a fantasy vehicle; others enjoy the trip. Matthew Arnold wrote that
Charlotte’s mind contained ‘nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage’, a view which
suggests that the psychology of the book is at odds with its external Christianity – a
charge which had also been brought against Richardson’s Pamela; or Virtue
Rewarded (1740),in which a poor girl also marries a gentleman.
Jane E yre works as much through its atmospheric writing as through the moral
urgency of its narration. The Brontës are the first novelists, or romance-writers, to
endow landscape with Wordsworth’s sensitivity and burden of meaning.Jane Eyre
uses description with a new symbolic suggestion and delicacy, as in the description
of the horse-chestnut tree in Rochester’s park and of the red room at Aunt Reed’s.
The nightmarish red room signals the Gothic key of a work which steers by the stars
ofpassion,ordeal and trauma. Jane’s ‘master’, his mad Creole wife locked in the attic,
the foiled bigamy, Jane’s surprise legacy, the telepathic call across the moor, and the
blazing Hall, are all machines of Gothic romance, a genre which the Brontës had
adopted in childhood. For some readers, these archetypes are appropriate to
romance and psychologically powerful. The Gothic trades in fantasy, which can be
used playfully, as by Horace Walpole, or intellectually, as by Mary Shelley. If its
conventions are taken seriously, it can only escape absurdity by avoiding cliché. The
seriousness of Charlotte Brontë’s effort to define emotional integrity is compro-
mised by a Gothic tradition debased in its stock devices and their stock responses.
Thus the blind Rochester is ‘a sightless Samson’ and ‘a caged eagle whose gold-ringed
eyes cruelty has extinguished’. Untransmuted archetype and autobiography loom288 10 · FICTION
The Brontë sisters, by their
brother Branwell Brontë,
c.1834. Oil on canvas, later
much folded. Left to right:
Anne, Emily, Charlotte. The
figure of Branwell (centre)
has been removed, probably
by himself.