Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, while generally within the Gothic genre, is separated from its origin by enough time that it loses the original Gothic plot structure. However, “Gothic atmospheric machinery continued to haunt the fiction of such major writers as the Brontë sisters” (“Gothic novel”) in the mid-nineteenth century. The machinery of mystery and terror in Jane Eyre is accompanied by noticeable realism and a domestic plotline that will be more fully developed in its succeeding genre, sensation fiction. Jane Eyre is also relevant to sensation fiction because it displays women both having and lacking social mobility in confinement; this binary seems to both suggest and dispose of female mobility at the same time.
The novel exhibits multiple systems of institutionalization meant to control women. Jane is first placed in a type of home orphanage with her aunt—the widowed sister-in-law to Jane’s father—and her cousins at Gateshead estate after the death of her parents. Her stay at Gateshead is like institutionalization because the Reed family treats Jane with the modeled social rejection of the poor, which is evident when her cousin John exposes the reason the family loathes her: “You are a dependent, mama says; you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not live here with gentlemen’s children like us” (8). In John’s words are powerful, underlying reasons why people were segregated by class during the Victorian era.
Dependency was incompatible with the standard of production at the time; poor people were unbecoming of a bustling national identity and were doomed by the same fate their family bore without formal titles that earned public respect. Additionally, women lacked the connection to property that men held, which displays a large part of the gender dynamic at work in support of the patriarchy. For these reasons, Mrs. Reed segregates young, vulnerable Jane from the family and turns the home into an institutionalized experience for her. Important to this institutional experience is the emotional treatment of Jane the inmate.
The family treats Jane cruelly through language, aggression, and confinement to the attic. Mrs. Reed’s capacity to overlook John’s cruelty, and to lock Jane in the attic stems from Jane being an unwanted dependent, and because the home is a somewhat impenetrable, private place, there is no accountability for her treatment. However, Brontë equips Jane with a voice when she retaliates with: “And that punishment you made me suffer because your wicked boy struck me—knocked me down for nothing. I will tell anybody who asks me questions this exact tale. People think you a good woman, but you are bad; hard-hearted. You are deceitful!” (30).
Jane’s character is doomed to suffer if she does not resist such brutal family treatment. She shows an ability to think for herself and empowers herself to defy authority with language in an attempt to separate herself from that suffering. While she cannot expose her aunt’s private behavior publicly, she threatens to share it with anyone who asks, creating a minor threat for Mrs. Reed. Although Mrs. Reed intends to force her into submission, Jane’s resistance to domestic obedience leads to her removal from the Reed family home at Gateshead.
Jane is then transferred to a place called Lowood Orphan School for girls. This transfer demonstrates the move from a home institution to a monolithic, institutional building. Leaving Gateshead provides only temporary freedoms for Jane, because she cannot initially understand the gravity and oppression of the institutionalization at Lowood.
Upon arriving at the building, Jane notes, “I dimly discerned a wall before me and a door open in it; through this door I passed with my new guide: she shut and locked it behind her” (35). Soon after she says, “I passed from compartment to compartment, from passage to passage, of a large and irregular building” (36). These two quotes are key in demonstrating the transfer of Jane’s life from private institution-like treatment in a home to life within the social infrastructure of an institution. This transfer is achieved through the literary device of the novel because the reader is allowed to follow Jane’s footsteps and enter institutionalization within a complex structure.
As Charlotte Newman argues, the effect of asylum buildings is significant. In her work, Newman gives concrete details about the English asylums known as workhouses. She discusses architectural studies in West Yorkshire, England and how they reveal that the “built form reflects and exposes the complex negotiation of national and local ideologies” (123-24). In her study, she explores the locations and structures of buildings to show the aforementioned negotiation. A small building reflected “functionality and economy,” a large building “dominance and authority” (127). The layout plan worked according to the needs of the inmates while also allowing guardians full control. Window placement, the height of the walls, and the use of locks and bars all functioned to both care for and control the marginalized population. Therefore, “the material form of the workhouse had to deter the idle, punish the immoral, reform the redeemable, and treat the physically unable” (124).
When Jane arrives at Lowood, she first notices a wall with a door in it, which means Lowood takes the shape of a large building with high walls, emanating dominance and authority. The action of her guide locking the door indicates the inmates are treated as prisoners who might escape. When Jane passes from compartment to compartment and from passage to passage, the structure gradually reveals itself as having multiple opportunities for compartmentalization and segregation from the outside world. The effect of Brontë’s description gives the reader a perceived experience of being institutionalized. It reaches a wider audience of readers who would otherwise be limited to the extremes of institutions and hindered from understanding the error in accepting them as solely advantageous.
In addition to the physical structure of the Lowood building, Jane Eyre exposes appalling yet common features within institutions. The orphan girls wear poorly designed clothing; they are usually half-starved and frozen during winter and a change in weather affects the girls immediately. Jane notes that “a keen north-east wind, whistling through the crevices of our bedroom windows all night long, had made us shiver in our beds, and turned the contents of the ewers to ice” (44). Cold weather led to one of the most endemic features in institutions—disease.
At Lowood the fog was believed to carry pestilence that “crept into the Orphan Asylum, breathed typhus through its crowded school-room and dormitory, and, ere May arrived, transformed the seminary into a hospital” (64-65). These conditions infect Jane’s inmate and friend, Helen, with sickness. The two grow close and dependent on one another so when Helen dies, Jane says it is not until days later: “I learned that Miss Temple, on returning to her own room at dawn, had found me laid in a little crib; my face against Helen Burn’s shoulder, my arms around her neck. I was asleep, and Helen was—dead” (70). Helen’s death has little dignity, and the orphanage does not tend to her when she becomes deathly ill, with the exception of Jane keeping her company.
Although the ideology behind the concept of orphan schools professes to help and protect parentless children, the novel reveals that putting ideology into practice does not equal its intentions, and instead puts young women at risk. Jonathan Andrews discusses the accommodations of the insane poor, and some of his research is relative to institutionalization at large. He states, “It is now generally accepted that, throughout the early modern period, there was a genuine, if variable, recognition as to the responsibility of a charitable, civilized society to clothe the poor,” and later writes, “metropolitan parish records reveal that clothing, both for the mad poor in the parish itself and for parishioners in private madhouses, workhouses and public hospitals, was typically frugal and irregular” (131-32).
Lowood Orphanage is designed for young girls with little to no money, who are otherwise poor, and whose accommodations are frugal and irregular. The literary descriptions of life within the building are an effective way of explaining how girls in orphanages were treated during a period of national growth and economic expansion. It draws attention to the unethical management of such institutions and portrays the real experience of Jane’s life there.
The third and most controversial form of institutionalization Jane Eyre characterizes is the solitary confinement of Bertha Mason. The premise of her confinement is explained by her husband and warden, Rochester, who testifies that his father and brother deceived him into marrying Bertha in the West Indies, for the purpose of acquiring £30,000. While in the West Indies, he discovers her “illness” and suddenly a “sweet wind from Europe” calls and instructs Rochester to “‘let her identity, her connection with yourself, be buried in oblivion: you are bound to impart them to no living being. Place her in safety and comfort: shelter her degradation with secrecy and leave her’” (263).
The first crucial issue here is the difference between cultures in England and the West Indies. Immediately placing the expectations of an Englishwoman on Bertha was not appropriate in her home country, as she could not adopt them quickly.
A second issue is the absence of a proper diagnosis of a medical condition. Rochester’s lack of medical and psychiatric experience makes him an unreliable narrator, and therefore the reader cannot trust that Bertha is mentally insane.
The third crucial issue is, had Bertha been properly diagnosed with a mental illness, it would be an understatement to claim that burying her in oblivion and confining her to the attic lacks the medical rehabilitation such a person would need. He did not give her the option of a private or public asylum and instead uses the concept of the asylum to create his own form in the attic. Next, Rochester attributes his responsibility of confining Bertha to the “sweet winds” from Europe, a displacement that is easily tied to the dominant patriarchal system and recalls the influence here of European colonialism on women’s bodies.
Elizabeth J. Donaldson discusses women’s mental illness and disability studies in literature in her article, “The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Issues.” Donaldson notes that, “Many factors, not the least of which is the proliferation of feminist criticism and reading practices, have contributed to Bertha Mason’s paradigmatic status and to contemporary readers’ newfound sympathy. Perhaps most notably, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1985), a prequel to Jane Eyre, has influenced a generation of readers’ responses to Brontë’s character” (99). Donaldson’s mention of Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel that tells the untold story of “Bertha,” along with her discussion of women’s mental health, is imperative to the conversation about Bertha’s improper diagnosis and her state of being a foreigner in England, which leads to the sympathy readers have (or do not have) for Bertha’s unfortunate fate.
Contemporary readers with even the slightest awareness of feminism can sympathize with Bertha due to her glossed voice—she lacks self-explanation and self-defense. The treatment of Bertha helps readers understand the lack of cultural awareness that contributed to the suppression of her cultural identity and that led to a false diagnosis of “madness.” Rhy’s Wide Sargasso Sea is an important pairing with a discussion of Jane Eyre because its revisionary nature gives a character like Bertha the opportunity to share her traumatized past and fulfills a literary challenge prompted by Jane Eyre to understand her wrongful confinement.
Rochester’s actions towards Bertha are reflective of deeper cultural concerns about women who we find in Victorian novels.
While we cannot assume Brontë’s exact concerns about women, evident in her use of an authorial alias is her awareness of female oppression and her own form of resistance to it. Rochester’s agreement to bury Bertha’s identity and hide her degradation in secrecy shows a complete subjugation of her person while he maintains his autonomy. Women were vulnerable to confinement, yet as a foreigner Bertha was even more vulnerable to permanent confinement.
A scholarly study of the admissions of asylum patients, “Distancing the mad: Jarvis’s Law and the spatial distribution of admissions to the Hamilton Lunatic Asylum in Canada, 1876-1902,” gives a detailed and mathematical account of the distribution of asylum patients. The study focuses on the research of American physician Edward Jarvis from 1850, and surveys “the perceived phenomena of diminishing numbers of admissions from areas of increasing physical distance to asylums” (Smith 2364). The statistics from this article help shed light on the complication of Rochester’s decision to remove Bertha from her country and place her in solitary confinement in England.
Smith’s findings show that the largest numbers of asylum patients come from the county in which the asylum exists, while the length of stay for patients who travel the furthest is significantly longer than other patients. He also notes that the likelihood of readmission was greater for those living closest to the asylum (which will be revisited in the next novel). One of the most interesting points this argument makes is that the “bivariate correlation” shows a 95% confidence level that the duration of stay is longer or permanent the greater the distance traveled: “family members at a greater distance would be more likely to leave patients in the asylum for longer durations, or even indefinitely” (Smith 2372). These findings are sad, in consideration of families who love the committed person. However, these findings are particularly disturbing when a woman like Bertha Mason is removed from another country and hidden in solitary confinement. Bertha’s situation is that of an unpredictable outlier in the concept of institutionalization, yet Brontë’s novel makes the abuse a more familiar concept.
In one text, Charlotte Brontë reveals three forms of female confinement, and the power dynamic between marginalized women and the dominant culture. Jane Eyre reflects the middle-class social norms at a time period when men utilized cultural power to subjugate women. Although the concept of institutionalizing people with special needs could be described as philanthropic, the result is often a socially acceptable segregation of unwanted people. Bertha’s character gives the reader an example of a foreign woman who needs to be controlled and who eventually dies in confinement without a voice or consent. From Jane’s rejection at Gateshead, to the poor living conditions at Lowood, to Bertha’s unfortunate captivity and death, Brontë’s work—still today—asks the reader to consider how vulnerable women can be treated unfairly.