Unit 5 Jane Eyre

You hate me and I hate you. We'll see who hates best.
(Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys)

Hatred is a profound, violent, extreme feeling that relates to utter dislike or

disapproval of a person or a thing. A theological definition would divide hatred into two forms
of expression: odium abominationis, which would translate as loathing, intense dislike of a
person's qualities, and odium inimicitiae which would suggest sheer hostility against a person,
some propensity to identify evil in that person. Psychologists describe it as an innate
emotional drive that is not necessarily antagonistic to love. Love and hate may co-exist just as
another form of conjunctio oppositorum, another version of the attraction of opposites. It is
worth noting that some other psychological traits can be defined in terms of hatred as the
proverb demonstrates: You cannot tell weak from strong until they hate.
Feminine hatred has come under focus with the ascent of 20th century theories about
the margin and the center. Large communities such as women, coloured people, third world
nations, had been pushed into social, cultural and political periphery by a center which
manifested like an institution or figure of authority. In the 20th century all these marginalised
groups achieved the awareness of their subordinate status and voiced their decision to break
free from the chains of a retrograde mentality and dishonourable place. Therefore women
rebelled and asked for changes in the status quo, former colonies regained political
independence and re-evaluated their relationships with the center, ethnic or racial groups
secured a place in the cultural, political and social context of their larger communities.
It is but natural to assume that feelings of hostility developed on the part of the
subordinate and the variety of forms they displayed is a telling proof of the versatile nature of
the bond that created them as well as of the conflicting essence of the issue. Cultural response
and emancipation occupied an important place in this liberation process, and literature in
particular played a leading part in expressing hatred, rejection, contempt for discriminatory
practices.
Women have always felt the same about patriarchal authority, whether they lived in
the 17th or 20th century, whether they were doctors, writers or home-bound wives. Hatred and
animosity were always with them when they were denied access to learning or professional
training, when they could not benefit freely from their own dowries, when they met any form
of infringement on their liberty. Many novels and poems written by women throughout the
centuries testify to the open or more veiled criticism of the position held by women in
patriarchal societies. Jane Eyre's long journey through the moors after she leaves Thornfield
heartbroken and scared of what might have happened to her is a metaphoric suggestion of 'the
essential homelessness - nameless, placeless and contingent status - of women' (Gilbert and
Gubar, 2000) in a society run by men.
Charlotte Bronte was one of the champions of females' rights. Her well known novel,
'Jane Eyre', published in 1847 as an autobiography under the assumed masculine name of
Currer Bell, gives contours to the imaginary Angria, a land where women feel free to be
angry, speak their mind and figuratively describe their condition. They are orphans, starving
for food and knowledge, are confined within the limits of their social boundaries and
ultimately rise in rage and madness against the institutionalized prison that society seems to
them. Although we now tend to view the novel as a Gothic one or a modern reworking of The
Ugly Duckling or Cinderella, at the time of its publication it was met with suspicion and
critiques mainly centered on Jane's rebellious character and the immoral nature of a self-
assertive smart governess.
Jane is the epitome of the outraged female soul who cannot hope for self fulfillment
based on her natural qualities and her training since she is not part of a financially secure elite.
To escape the confines of such a low status women at that time had either to choose a position
of governess, which implied a mixed status (they were or were not part of the family), or
marry into the rich world. Both alternatives were disgraceful options to an independent spirit
and a bright mind like Jane's who sought self assertion through her own efforts and natural
gifts.
The figure of Mr. Rochester on the other hand has been a subject of controversy over
the years, since readers generally tend to like him in spite of his deceitful strategies,
overbearing behaviour and male egotism. He is still viewed as a charismatic Macho, the
Prince Charming who quite unexpectedly falls in love with the plain looking, humble and
socially peripheral girl. The girl has nevertheless several positive features such as intelligence,
intuition, generosity, virtue, a gift for painting and a strong desire to be self-determining as an
individual, all of which were and still are greatly praised by British society. Recent studies
have insisted on Mr. Rochester's unacceptable behaviour to Jane and Bertha, his insane wife,
and labeled him as a sultan building a harem with innocent women. Readers still love him
because he represents Jane's only hope to escape poverty, loneliness and the dullness of a
governess life. Moreover he is the man Jane loves and wants to be united to and readers
always credit fictional women in love.
In 1966 a female author who was born in Dominica, West Indies, to a Creole mother
of Scottish and Irish descent and to a Welsh doctor father, published a so-called prequel to
'Jane Eyre', a novel that told the story of Mr. Rochester's first wife, Bertha, in 'Jane Eyre'. The
author was Jean Rhys and the novel 'Wide Sargasso Sea'. The book was hailed as 'mesmeric
and unforgettable' by both public and critics, and won the W.H. Smith Award and The Royal
Society of Literature Award the year of its publication. Jean Rhys was a charismatic figure
herself. She had come to Great Britain when she was seventeen and tried several jobs before
starting to write. She published a few novels before 1966, none of which created the stir she
expected. Then, after a long silence, she came up with this small book that openly undermined
one of the most cherished literary figures in the whole history of English literature, Mr.
Rochester, and brought into relief one of the shadowy, fragmented characters that generally do
not have the readers' sympathy, his mad wife, Bertha. By this quite daring attempt to reverse
long established perspectives. Jean Rhys entered a long list of preceding rebellious women
writers who found various ways to attack both public and private values.
Being a woman and coming from the colonies in 1907 Jean Rhys felt twice
marginalised. Her frustrations were evident in the kind of life she led and in the types of
female characters she created in her novels. An overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction and
displacement turns her heroines into alter-egos of the author who views herself as an
untrained, unsuited, miserable immigrant who is barely able to survive in an unfriendly
country. What more obvious proof of hatred and hostility on the part of a female outsider than
to try and destroy one of the most powerful male images in British fiction by presenting him
as a helpless, alienated outsider in the Garden of Eden?
The novel is set in Jamaica in the 1830s and basically presents the circumstances of
Mr. Rochester's first marriage to a woman from the West Indies, Antoinette Cosway, and the
string of events that led to her insanity and subsequent confinement at Thornfield, England.
Antoinette comes from a formerly rich family of slave owners who, after the Emancipation
Act was passed and the father died, gradually decayed, feeling dislocated in a place where
racial issues infested all relationships. They now belonged to neither group. The Blacks called
them 'white cockroaches' and hated them utterly, while the Whites called them ‘white
niggers’, being too snobbish to accept her mother who came from Martinique and was a
Creole. After a couple of years of distress and poverty the mother marries a rich Englishman,
Mr. Mason, who has a son by a former marriage. One night their former slaves set their
beautiful mansion on fire and the family escaped a horrible death only because the rebels were
stunned to see the family parrot ablaze which was an ill omen. Antoinette's elder brother dies
as a consequence of his burns and her mother goes insane. The girl will only once see her and
is repelled to learn about her being repeatedly abused and under no proper medical care.
Antoinette will be sent to a convent where she will at least be far from the fretful outside.
When Mr. Mason dies he leaves her an important dower just to marry well and be happy. Her
stepbrother, Richard Mason, is but content to meet a penniless English gentleman of
aristocratic descent who would be glad to marry the beautiful, sensuous and mysterious
Antoinette. Edward Rochester comes onto the stage and after a short engagement period
marries Antoinette and they leave on their honeymoon to another island, where Antoinette has
an estate by her mother. The lush and luxuriant vegetation, the air heavy with scent and sound,
the climate so different from England's, the beautiful and enticing Antoinette, his recent
illness and slow recovery, all this confuses and startles inexperienced Edward. In the
beginning he is carried away by the difference from England he experiences every day.
Novelty has its charming secrets. But a letter coming from a man who claims to be late Mr.
Cosway's natural son disturbs him completely all the more so as it reveals to him the madness
that goes in the family, about which he had not been informed, as well as an alleged affair of
Antoinette’s. He feels betrayed and his male pride is hurt. The feelings of exclusion that he
only vaguely perceived at the beginning of his stay transform now into a pathological form of
aggression. He feels hostility on the part of everybody, climate and scenery included, but
particularly on the part of his wife. He has been finally provided with the excuse to put into
effect his plan of leaving the island that has been haunting him for some time. Antoinette only
worsens things by asking her former nanny, Christophine, a black witch who practised obeah,
to help her regain his love. Realizing he was drugged into one more night of love, Mr.
Rochester hurts Antoinette in a most ungentlemanly way. It is now clear even to him that he
entertained inauthentic feelings for Antoinette. They fail to understand each other, their
motives and personal drama.
On the other hand the strain under which Antoinette has lived so far, the crude
revelations that shed a shameful light on her family (an insane mother and a debauched
father), her genuine love for her husband and her fear she might lose him shatter her. The
news that they will leave for England, a country she dreamed of at first but now hates, means
to cut the last ties she has with her former self, it means to uproot and transplant her into an
unfriendly environment. If she regarded it as a means of approaching him and integrating into
his universe faster, she is terrified now that this journey will estrange her from herself and the
price will not be a wonderful married life but a loveless existence shared with a total stranger.
It is now that he starts calling her Antoinette, Marionette, Antoinetta, Marionetta, and finally
Bertha in an attempt to give her a new identity, to change the woman into a puppet.
Love and promised happiness are replaced by hatred and mistrust. A huge cultural gap
separates the two, a vast unbridgeable gulf of mutual misunderstanding places them into
separate worlds at war. Perhaps she was weak and silly, perhaps he was too selfish and proud,
but hatred is too poisonous a feeling to live on.
The narrative voice is also important in the novel. The story of Antoinette’s childhood
and the convent period are recounted by Antoinette in her simple, naive manner, with large
sections of misleading suggestions or childish misunderstandings. The story of their
honeymoon and the terrible revelation about her family, her reactions and their departure for
England are told by Edward Rochester. This enables the reader to access his thoughts and
trace his changing moods and behaviour. The last part, the most disruptive and erratic, is the
story of the attic, told by a lunatic who mingles present and past, who does not realize she is
in England, who reveres the red dress she has brought along and reminds her of the sunny
climate home, of love, of fire. She mentally rehearses the final act when she sets Thornfield
on fire and throws herself from the battlements just because ’the man who hated me was
calling too, Bertha, Bertha’. You can guess different circumstances of Antoinette’s actions.
Rochester’s attempt to save her in ‘Jane Eyre’ has a totally new connotation now. He may not
have been the saviour he describes in his story but the invisible hand that pushed Bertha
down.
The author's own frustrations translated into images of violence, disruption and
tragedy. Antoinette's childhood is full of traumatic experiences starting with her father's death
and ending with the fire that burns down the Eden of her memories, the entrancing place
where she felt secure. Moreover, she is a prisoner of her dependency on both cultures, black
and white which she grew up with. She cannot face the split between the two and is
condemned to isolation. Her later schizophrenic seclusion into a world of fear and hatred
populated only with fantasies of memory is her ultimate response to the invasive, cruel and
destructive world outside.
Both novels abound in images of hatred. The anger and dissatisfactions of their
heroines reflect the two authors' reactions to the injustices they had to face and the inferior
status they were reduced to by the standards of a society which claimed to be just. There are,
of course, differences in imagery and general treatment of subject matter, character, authorial
voice but, basically, the two novels are the outcry of two gifted women who deserved a better
world.
In 'Jane Eyre' gestures of performance and force prevail because Jane is a fighter, she
will not have social or sexually discriminating laws silence her. She acts and performs all the
time. She is energetic and resourceful and even when she seems defeated or, on the contrary,
apparently fulfilled she has the inner force to step further into the future to find her place and
happiness. In 'Wide Sargasso Sea', on the other hand, icons of passivity and spiritual silence
are predominant. Antoinette prefers to withdraw into her shell and nestle a pearl of wrath
rather than speak her mind clearly or impose her will. Her sexual failure and subsequent
disastrous marriage epitomize the position of outsiders who fail a normal process of
integration precisely because they miss the point of their place in the new system.
 Hatred finds numberless forms of expression especially in the literary domain. The
very name Jane has: ’Eyre’ speaks for itself: ‘invisible as air, the heir to nothing, choking with
ire’ (Gilbert and Gubar, 2000).
Hatred can arise from an intense feeling of exclusion that enhances the awareness that
one is an outcast. Both novels start with paragraphs that render the absolute solitude of
orphaned girls.
‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day… I was glad of it: I never liked
long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home… with a
heart saddened… and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority…’ (Jane Eyre,
Chapter I)
The child Jane has a very acute notion that was instilled into her mind by her wicked
aunt, Mrs. Reed, that she is an intruder, that the Reeds’ house is not her home and she is
different from her cousins. A child who hates coming home even more than long walks is a
child essentially sad and humbled.
Antoinette’s confession starts in a similar tone:
‘They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were
not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies never approved of my mother…She was my father’s
second wife, far too young for him, they thought, and worse still, a Martinique girl…. I got
used to a solitary life, but my mother still planned and hoped…(Wide Sargasso Sea, Part
One)
Antoinette feels dislocated in her own community on racial grounds. Her mother is a
Creole (like Rhys’) and comes from a French colony. She speaks Patois and has come with
her maid, a black woman with expertise in obeah (West Indies sorcery). She is also very
beautiful, a disadvantage to a young widow in that remote place.
Denied discourse is another form of fueling anger and rage into innocent souls. Both
girls suffer deeply as a consequence of no proper family relationships and lack of
communication with their closest relatives.
The child Jane is refused the privilege of family warmth. She is constantly
admonished and rebuked and one evening she is ordered to find some place out of Mrs.
Reed’s sight and
‘…until you can speak pleasantly remain silent’
And so she will for many years until another evening when she finds out that life can
be sweet and love reciprocated. But, before Mr. Rochester reveals he has chosen the poor,
ugly, insignificant governess to be his bride instead of an aristocratic lady of perfect beauty,
there is a superbly dramatic scene in which she demands to be treated as a human being, on
terms of equality of spirit and humanity. She actually voices her author’s requirements of a
union between man and woman based on equality in every respect, beyond conventions or
social barriers.
‘Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and
heartless? You think wrong!…And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I
should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you….Let me
go…I have spoken my mind, and can go anywhere now.’
It is only now that she feels free from the constraints put on her tongue by her aunt
sometime in the past. It is now that she changes the discourse of a governess into one of a
free, indomitable spirit, ready to fight and find the path towards self-fulfillment.
 Antoinette, too, experiences lack of communication with her family. She deeply
resents her father’s death since he was a real companion to her. What she is left with after his
death is a cold mother, absorbed in her own fears and much more interested in her sick boy
than in her daughter. “Let me alone’ is what Antoinette hears from her mother so her affection
goes to her black nanny, Christophine and, for a while, to a black friend, Tia. Much later,
when both her mother and brother are dead, and she is for the first time truly happy,
Antoinette turns loquacious. Foolish by day, mysterious by night. Edward records the
difference between the two kinds of discourses. The nightly ones are almost always about
death and happiness. ’I never wished to live before I knew you,’ she confesses one night. Then
as a token of perfect love she makes a strange wish:
‘If I could die. Now when I’m happy. Would you do that? You wouldn’t have to kill me.
Say die and I will die…watch me die.’ ‘Die, then! Die!’ he retorts, coining a dangerous game.
In that isolated, unspoiled place, far from people and external pressure, in a perfect
natural setting the couple lives an Edenic life of self-absorption and relish of senses. She leads
him into her world by telling him stories of pirates, singing him songs, getting his hearing
accustomed to Patois, taking him for a stroll or swimming. She is a modern Scheherazade
weaving a nice fabric of words for alert ears. She offers all her treasures to her man. If ‘Jane
Eyre’ was full of repressed sexuality ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ is replete with sexuality, sensuous
allusions, lush background.
When he learns about her family and her bastard brother insinuates she had an affair
when younger, Paradise turns into Hell for him. His masculine pride is hurt to the point that
he wants to answer back. He makes love to the silly, black maid they have, making sure
Antoinette learns about it. The result is devastating for her. She gets drunk and transforms into
another person.
‘Then she cursed me comprehensively, my eyes, my mouth, every member of my
body… ‘
The language of love turns into the language of hatred. Cursing is a vicious form of
the discourse of love. On the other hand, Christophine blames Antoinette’s present state on
Edward: she will not eat, speak, or sleep.
‘You want to force her to cry and to speak.’
Words and tears are natural means of self expression. But Antoinette refuses now to
take active part in life. The interior spring that gave balance to her moods gave way for good
reasons. She will gradually enter a world of her own and wear the cloak of a schizophrenic
that will protect her from further disasters.
From now on hatred becomes a modus vivendi. Edward feels oppressed, alienated, an
ignorant outsider. He feels like a woman. He comes to hate everything connected to her, the
luxuriant vegetation, poetry, music. Then in a pathetic outburst he launches their last game
together:
‘If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heavens. No more damned magic.
You hate me and I hate you. We’ll see who hates best. But first I will destroy your hatred.
Now. My hate is colder, stronger and you’ll have no hate to warm yourself. You will have
nothing.’
The contest of hatred is a deadly game. He again feels superior in that he is more
suited for hating, because of his stiff upper-lip or the cold climate at home or simply being a
man. He definitely feels more qualified. He succeeds in obliterating her hatred. In his eyes
hatred was the essence of her beauty, of her femininity.
 ‘I saw the hate go out of her eyes. I forced it out. And with her hate her beauty. She
was only a ghost.’
When they prepare to leave the island the process is over.
‘She was staring out at the distant sea. She was silence itself.’
His last thoughts before quitting the place of his humiliation are suggestive of his
mood. He will never recover from this feeling, never be a normal person. Hatred has sown so
deeply the seed of wrath that he will be on a perpetual quest after his lost innocence.
‘I hated the place. I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated
the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never
know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I
hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all
my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.’
It is noteworthy that Bertha in ‘Jane Eyre’ is not only Jane’s opponent (impediment to
her marriage to Mr. Rochester) but also her double. She is the projection of Jane’s repressed
sexuality and rage and from the very beginning she becomes the agent of Jane’s desires. She
acts for Jane and always as a response to her inner drives. She embodies Jane’s disguised
hostility to Mr. Rochester and their marriage. After he makes sexual confidences to Jane,
Bertha tries to incinerate him and purify him of his past experiences. When Jane is torn
between mixed feelings about her marriage Bertha appears in white ‘whether gown, sheet or
shroud I cannot tell’. Her last action of destroying Thornfield and part of Mr. Rochester
himself, is also in consonance with Jane’s desire to destroy the citadel of masculine power and
marry a lesser Mr. Rochester. In fact throughout Jane’s stay at Thornfield Bertha acts as a
warning spirit and by performing Jane’s secret fantasies she ‘provides the governess with an
example of how not to act’ (Gilbert and Gubar, 2000). Bertha’s death will finally exorcise
Jane of her furies and will allow the ‘marriage of equality’ that she wished so much.
In conclusion both novels provide examples of how hatred can work proficiently in
fiction, how versatile the devices of rendering hatred can be and how this repelling feeling can
create so much beauty. Both women writers deeply resented segments of their contemporary
societies and mentalities. Their literary works were disguised vehicles for the criticism of
racial, gender and social discriminations.

Bibliography:

1 Gilber, S. M. and Gubar S., 2000, The Mad Woman in the Attic, The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, Yale Nota Bene, Yale University Press, New Haven
and London
2. Stanley, T. F., Jean Rhys. 1979, A Critical Study, MacMillan Press LTD, London and
Basingstoke
3. Galea, I., 2000, Victorianism and Literature, Dacia, Cluj-Napoca
4. Klein, M. and Riviere, J., 2001, L’amour et la haine, Editions Payot et Rivages, Paris