When we talk about Jane Eyre, what else can we talk about?

Author: Zhang Muren

There are few novels like Jane Eyre that are overwhelming and don't know where to start, and in the face of a fanatical, masochistic and self-absorbed narrator like Jane, any "clichés" about women, class, marriage, and struggle make me ashamed, even though they are such important survival issues. As soon as it came out, the work set off the so-called "Jane Eyre mania" in British society, so talking about Jane Eyre was an attempt to join a century-long dispute and dialogue.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë was translated by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House

Written in the summer of 1846-1847, Charlotte Brontë's second attempt at fiction quickly gained the favor of smith, Elder and Company, publishers who had withdrawn from her manuscript, and eight weeks after the manuscript was sent, it was convenient to publish Brontë's future literary history. At the time, they did not know Brontë's true identity, and in order to avoid unnecessary prejudice due to the gender of the author, Brontë adopted a more neutral pseudonym: Kohler Bell. When it was first published, the novel was a huge commercial success and sparked a lot of discussion among readers.

There is no doubt that Jane is a rebellious fighter, but at the same time, the fairytale ending of the novel weakens the seriousness and thoroughness of her struggle to some extent. If this is a story about how an orphan who has lost both parents struggles with an unfair fate and eventually finds a home, the heroine Jane seems too lucky. While in Roward, she survived the devastating typhus fever that took the life of her friend Helen; upon learning the truth about Rochester's marriage, Jane left Thornfield in grief, and as she struggled in the harsh natural environment, Jane suddenly saw "a white mark on the wasteland" and followed it to the Rivers house that took her in next. Throughout the story, Jane practices "an unusually wide range of narrative possibilities" (Penny Baumeha): she has worked three jobs, lived in five families, been asked to marry twice, and learned three foreign languages. The plot of Jane Eyre is full of a kind of naïve cruelty and wanton behavior that the British scholar Eagleton described as "childlike" (and this writing style was pushed to the extreme in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights). When Jane's will was shaken and she was ready to accept St. John's marriage proposal, she suddenly heard the "crazy, weird and eager" cries of Rochester, thousands of miles away- "Jane! simple! simple! And for this reason rejected John outright. Bertha Mason, who prevented Jane and Rochester from marrying, died tragically in a fire she had caused herself (Jane was therefore completely innocent), and Rochester's eye disease and disability seemed to be punishment for him: he dared to conceal his marital status and involve the unsuspecting Jane in an ethical crisis that nearly killed her. Eventually, a legacy from an uncle they never met magically resolves the class divide between Jane and Rochester.

From the perspective of literary history, these plot arrangements and narrative jumps make Jane Eyre break away from the British realist novel tradition represented by writers such as Dickens and George Eliot, and it mixes different genres such as romance, Gothic, fairy tales and realist novels. Brontë's narrative exploration is related both to her extensive reading experience as a child and to the writer's attempt to borrow forms to solve a series of real-world problems that might not have been solvable in her time, concerning the living situation of women, about class differences, and the disturbing collision between the passions of romanticism and the rationality of industrial civilization.

The complexity of Jane's role is also here. She was filled with an inexhaustible, no-where passion and longing, an inexplicable frenzy which, on the one hand, frightened her, and she often appealed to reason ("but I regained my sanity, emphasized principle, and immediately restored my feelings to normal"), and on the other hand, she was perpetually in a state of dissatisfaction and lack. Jane said frankly, "I would be called greedy and dissatisfied. There's nothing I can do, there's something tumultuous in my personality, and sometimes it stirs me up in pain." Brontë repeatedly borrows landscape descriptions to highlight the heroine's restless inner world, she infinitely longs for the far side, but the terrible thing is that the far side is always a relative concept. Jane's eight years of routine life in Roward made Jane "tired", and when she stared out the window, her eyes tracking "that white road winding around the foot of a mountain and disappearing into the canyon between the two mountains", Jane couldn't help but exclaim: "How I wish I could continue to follow it!" ”。 She immediately began to pray, praying for freedom, and "this prayer seemed to be dispelled and melted into the breeze." So she "gave up the prayer and envisioned a more humble supplication, for change, for excitement." And this plea seems to have been blown into the vastness of the universe as well." Eventually, Jane cried out in near despair, 'At least give me a new kind of hard labor!' ’”。 When Jane had settled down in Thornfield House, she was tormented by this calm routine, and when she "looked far away from the isolated fields and hills and the bleak horizon", Jane cried out again: "I long for my vision beyond that limit, so that my gaze can reach the bustling world, to the vibrant towns and regions that I have heard but have never witnessed". Similar mental activities appear repeatedly in Jane's life experiences, and the imagination of distant places and changes constitutes the source of motivation for the story to advance and develop. At the same time, Jane's active call to hard labor makes it difficult for the reader to inflict rash sympathy on her, and even any sympathy from others seems to dissolve the sanctity of her actions. As early as the first part of the novel, Jane borrows her own experience of corporal punishment to show how suffering and humiliation can be transformed into a sublime experience. When Jane was forced to "stand on the stage of humiliation and show off" because she accidentally broke the writing board, and was in pain to "breathe hard and her throat tightened", Helen walked past her and cast a look that gave Jane great support, which she explained as: "It is as if a martyr, a hero walking by a slave or a victim, and in an instant passing on the power to him". By analogizing the self as a "slave" or a "victim," Jane experiences a martyrdom-like sublimeness and solemnity from this self-imagination.

Like Jane in the novel, Brontë makes a living as a governess, a profession that brings more opportunities for her to reach out to the upper class and use her talents, and on the other hand, it brings more humiliation and humiliation, because it is essentially a service-oriented profession. Brontë, whose intellectual pretenses and economic embarrassment plagued him, confessed in a letter to her friend Alan Nassi: "The fiery imagination sometimes devours me and makes me feel the blandness of society. Brontë understands how writing and imagination can give everyday passion and meaning to the banal (a game she and her sisters grew up playing), and she asks her protagonist, Jane, to join the narrative, fall in love with the narrative, and through flashbacks, allow Jane to constantly regurgitate the emotional experiences that have been inspired by the past. Jane describes: "This story was created by my imagination and will continue to be told. The story is also brought to life by the events, lives, passions and feelings that I aspire to but do not have in my actual life." In her intimate relationship with Rochester, Jane constantly fulfills an almost morbid thirst for passion through self-deprecation and self-humiliation, because nothing touches the emotions of her own existence more strongly than humiliation. In that (once) deafening confession, Jane shouted, "Is it because I am poor, obscure, mediocre-looking, and thin, and I have no soul and no heart?" - Didn't you think wrong? My soul is as rich as yours, and my heart is as full as yours! If God had given me a little grace and plenty of wealth, I would have made you as inseparable as I am now, and I am not speaking to you according to custom, convention, or even flesh and blood, but my soul is in dialogue with your soul, as if the two of us were walking through the grave and standing at God's feet, equal to each other — as it was! Paradoxically, however, Jane is not the best spokesperson for equality, and the love between her and Rochester is fraught with power struggles and the erotic imaginations that inspire it (although the novel does not directly state the latter). With flashbacks, the narrator Jane is able to return to this emotionally tense moment in her memory, and, through words, she once again humiliates her former self. Brontë, who is well versed in the intensity and exuberance of shame, has Jane repeatedly judge herself and humiliate herself: "Well, Jane Love, listen to your verdict: Tomorrow, put the mirror in front of you, draw your own portrait in chalk, paint it realistically, don't downplay your flaws, don't omit rough lines, don't try to erase obnoxious irregularities, and put 'Portrait of a Lonely, Mediocre-looking Governess' on the book underneath the portrait. "The mirror and the painting allow Jane to act as both the gazer and the object of the gaze, a dramatic imagination of self-discipline and self-surrender, and a compensatory experience of power by a politically disabled and vulnerable individual through self-humiliation and abuse, it is a metaphor for writing, in the original version, Brontë had long ago prophetically named the novel Jane Eyre: An Autobiography.

"The phrase 'man should be content with a peaceful life' is meaningless. They should have action, and if they can't find it, they should create it themselves." If the imaginative plot settings of Jane Eyre can no longer convince contemporary readers, then at least we can use reading to try to experience, write, and imagine how to create meaning.

(The author is a doctor of literature and a lecturer at the School of Foreign Languages, East China Normal University)

Source: Wen Wei Po