The Secret History of Jane Eyre Read online

  Brontë makes Jane two years older than when she went to Cowan Bridge. Jane is more experienced and tougher than she was because Jane has been hardened by the rough treatment, emotional and physical, that she had to endure in the Reed home. Everything must have been worse for Charlotte: more terrifying, more overwhelming, more meaningless. This is one of the aspects of the novel’s Lowood scenes that, as she reassured her publishers, were worse in actual experience than what readers find in the book. The secret history of Jane Eyre is one that is at times of things too painful to send out into the world in a novel meant to be enjoyed. At the same time—just like Jane Eyre defying Mrs. Reed—Brontë as a writer insists on telling the truth. Mid-Victorian readers were appalled to learn from Elizabeth Gaskell that the school Jane had endured had been a real school and not some fiction cooked up by the superheated imagination of a writer. The indignant efforts on the part of Wilson’s defenders to gloss over how bad things had been failed. A subsequent century-and-a-half of research has concluded that Brontë’s account is factual. Things were that bad, indeed, worse.

  What Brontë writes in Jane Eyre is an indictment of criminal acts, a narrative of child abuse justified by social, economic, and religious hypocrisy that she presents as an integrated “system”—a term Mrs. Reed uses in praising it. Brocklehurst, during his visit to Mrs. Reed, proclaims, “Consistency, madam, is the first of Christian duties; and it has been observed in every arrangement connected with the establishment of Lowood.” This moment of candor will show Brocklehurst’s consistency to be that of impoverishing the girls physically and psychologically. Brontë has this clergyman forget the first—and indeed several other—Christian duties found in the Gospels, replacing them with organizational integration and rigor. Indeed the most apt parallel to this girls school is prison. Bondage, torture, humiliation—being buried alive. It’s as if the red-room has been turned into this institution.

  When Jane arrives at Lowood, exhausted by a long coach ride, she is led by an under-teacher “from compartment to compartment, from passage to passage, of a large and irregular building.” A dark and bewildering labyrinth, far larger than any place Jane—or Charlotte at age eight—has ever been in before; its size and complexity presents an architecture of power and domination. The forces that laid out and constructed these spaces are now enclosing and trapping the little girl moving through them. Jane hears the humming of voices and comes at last on “a wide, long room, with great deal tables, two at each end, on each of which burnt a pair of candles, and seated all around on benches a congregation of girls of every age . . .” There are more than eighty of them, “uniformly dressed in brown stuff frocks of quaint fashion, and long holland pinafores.” The humming sound comes from the girls’ “whispered repetitions” of the lessons they are learning. Number here is crucial. The total number of students in this very large room, its organization into numbered tables and benches, illumination by symmetrical and numbered candles illustrates how the system considers and treats the girls as undifferentiated integers. Each is simply another number. The students, a wide range of ages, are being forced into anonymity through regulated tasks and through uniform and drab clothes; they have become a hive of drones humming the essentially mindless repetition of lessons not to be considered or discussed, much less questioned, but rather simply memorized. “Silence!” and “Order!” shouts the teacher the next morning as classes begin. The students subside into “the low, vague hum of numbers,” an “indefinite sound.”

  The sense of imprisonment comes through in the regulated schedule. The school day is, as Jane Eyre tells us, “Business,” and time is defined by the sound of bells and the barked commands of the teachers. “Monitors, collect the lesson books, and put them away!” “Monitors, fetch the supper-trays!” Students are addressed by their last names. Older girls “monitor” the younger in a classic prison structure in which some prisoners are privileged to discipline the others. Rest comes in rooms with long rows of beds, two girls to each. When they awake in the chilly predawn, they wash in basins of cold water sometimes iced over by freezing temperatures.

  Underlying the structure of this disciplinary system are two ruling assumptions. The first is that students are essentially unruly and undisciplined animals. This notion was widespread during the nineteenth century and given a darker implication when institutions were dominated, as Lowood was, by a Calvinistic religious ethic that stressed the wickedness deep in the hearts of children. The second, equally coercive and harmful is that the girls at Lowood are to be trained into subservience. As females they are secondary to men; as charity students they are socially inferior to others; economic realities dictate they will never have enough. The students at this institution must prepare themselves for male dominance, second-class social status, and drab moderation in all things. Their appearance dramatically symbolizes, as do the uniforms of prisoners, their interchangeability and lack of importance: “all with plain locks combed from their faces, not a curl visible; in brown dresses, made high and surrounded by a narrow tucker about the throat, with little pockets of Holland . . . tied in front of their frocks, and destined to serve the purpose of a work-bag: all too wearing woolen stockings and country-made shoes, fastened with brass buckles.” All, all. The rhythm of Jane’s prose chants the oppressive sameness. The biographer Winifred Gérin quotes the original Cowan Bridge prospectus which lists and describes with military precision the clothing students were required to bring. Flannel petticoats (two), white and black stockings, four brown Holland pinafores, pairs of stays, and so on. Significantly, the physical traces of female sexuality are covered over or cut off. Choked silent by the “narrow tucker about the throat,” expecting little in their “little pockets,” which are principally for carrying work, their dresses uniform in drab color and made of cheap, coarse cloth, their clunky shoes and woolen stockings anticipating the cold and the hard work. Everything to make them unattractive, clumsy, and sexless. All of this, on Brontë’s part, is simply reporting what she had witnessed and experienced, although it evokes much.

  For individuals who do not subordinate to the rules there is immediate physical discipline. There is no evidence that Charlotte had experienced or witnessed corporal punishment during her childhood at Haworth. Her father and aunt seem to have been loath to correct the Brontë children in this way. She must have been shocked to witness this kind of thing when she arrived at Cowan Bridge. Jane first sees ritual punishment given by a “little and dark” teacher named Miss Scatcherd, “smartly dressed, but of somewhat morose aspect” who has chosen to bear down on a student named Helen Burns, who has become Jane’s only friend and whose importance to the whole novel will soon emerge. Scatcherd issues an order, and Burns gets a bundle of twigs that she hands to the teacher “with a respectful curtsey;” then “quietly, and without being told, unloosed her pinafore, and the teacher instantly and sharply inflicted on her neck a dozen strokes with the bunch of twigs.” The teacher calls her “guilty of slatternly habits,” though as Burns herself later admits this refers to the fact that she is careless, forgets the rules, and reads books like Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas when she should be studying her lessons. “I cannot bear to be subjected to systematic arrangements,” she confesses. The ritual of punishment instituted by Brocklehurst is meant to humiliate Burns, to suppress her independence of mind and imagination. Burns cannot bear the “systematic” even as she’s being hurt for her rebellion.

  A punishment for all the girls is the miserable food. At her first breakfast, ravenous and faint, Jane hears the older girls whispering, “Disgusting! The porridge is burnt again!” Still she is so hungry that she devours a couple of spoonful’s only to realize she was eating “a nauseous mess.” Soon, “Breakfast was over, and none had breakfasted.” Since this is a religious school, each meal ends with a prayer, or, as Jane with bitter irony puts it, “Thanks being returned for what we had not got.” Brocklehurst’s school is bent on starving its pupils. We’re told that the cook, Mrs. Harden (her na
me an obvious pun), is “a woman after Mr. Brocklehurst’s own heart.”

  Brontë was convinced she had been physically damaged by her time at Cowan Bridge. Gaskell points out that should any teacher have voiced complaints on the subject, Wilson would reply to the effect that “the children were to be trained up to regard higher things than dainty pampering of the appetite, and . . . he lectured them on the sin of caring over-much for carnal things.” In Brontë’s novel Brocklehurst echoes these sentiments. The cook at Cowan Bridge during Charlotte’s time there was dirty and careless, serving sour milk, the “meat . . . a greasy stew with alien bodies floating in it.” To the students the whole place seemed to be pervaded by “the odor of rancid fat.” On Saturdays she served a kind of pie made from all the uneaten scraps of food from the “dirty and disorderly larder” accumulated during the week.

  All is done in the name of religion. The ironic boast on the stone tablet over the door to Lowood cites Matthew’s Gospel: “Let your light shine before men that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” Brontë knew her Bible. She knew that almost all of Jesus’ teaching recommends private, even secret charity, while he frequently excoriates public boasting about one’s virtue. But Brocklehurst has found a text to justify his pride. He commends himself on the show of his charity, despite its utter baselessness. This is religion, Brocklehurst style: “Sundays were dreary days,” Jane recalls, as she recounts marching miles from Brocklehurst’s church and a wind that “almost flayed the skin from our faces.” The late afternoon would be crowned by the “famished great girls” who would “menace the little ones out of their portion” of the scanty evening meal. During her stay at Cowan Bridge, Charlotte was “the youngest and the smallest girl in the school” and victim to the treatment Jane narrates: “Many a time I have shared between two claimants the precious morsel of brown bread distributed at tea-time; and after relinquishing to a third, half the contents of my mug of coffee, I have swallowed the remainder with an accompaniment of secret tears, forced from me by the exigency of hunger.” The practices of this Christian school have taught the larger and stronger to turn on the smaller and weaker and to take from them even the little which they have.

  Brontë depicts the inner spring for many of Wilson’s “disagreeable qualities, his spiritual pride, his love of power, his ignorance of human nature and consequent want of tenderness” in a celebrated scene when his stand-in character, Brocklehurst, visits the school. As Gaskell puts it, Wilson’s “love of authority seems to have led to a great deal of unnecessary and irritating meddling,” and on this day Brocklehurst catches sight of poor Julia Severn’s curly red hair and commands it to “be cut off entirely.” Then, turning on the other girls, he announces, “All those top-knots must be cut off.” To the quiet protest of the head teacher Miss Temple, “Julia’s hair curls naturally . . . ” he responds, “[W]e are not to conform to nature . . . my mission is to mortify in these girls the lusts of the flesh.” Brontë makes it clear that this form of religion is unnatural; it strives to kill what is natural and pleasing and needed. Here we get to the heart of one of the novel’s central arguments, and an argument that enraged many mid-Victorian readers. The wry but considered comment by the famous poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning aptly encapsulates what many thought that Jane Eyre expresses: a vision “half savage & half freethinking.” Indeed, to be natural is perhaps to be quasi-savage and certainly half freethinking.

  To show how close the girls are to sinfulness, Brocklehurst turns on Jane. Recalling Mrs. Reed’s accusation, he decides to make an example of her. He asks the girls to look carefully at her. “Who would think that the Evil One has already found a servant and agent in her?” His invective mirrors Wilson’s The Child’s Friend (1828) as it sternly warns the erring: “Are you living neglectful of God, forgetful of prayer, and ripening in sin? . . . What, oh what will become of you, should death strike an unexpected blow?

  ’Tis dang’rous to provoke a God,

  Whose power and vengeance none can tell;

  One stroke of his almighty rod

  Can send young sinners quick to hell.”

  Similarly, Brocklehurst goes on to warn the students that Jane is “an interloper and an alien.” They must be on their guard around her and shun her because “this girl is—a liar!” Here the rebellious novelist, the pale and slender daughter of a clergyman, defiantly depicts a hypocritical priest, terrified of women’s bodies to the point of seeking to mutilate them—“all . . . must be cut off.” She now has him falsely accuse a child before the whole institution endeavoring to alienate them from her, using the language and imagery of scripture to accuse her of exactly that fault which Jane has previously denied. Is it all a bit “savage” and “half freethinking”? Certainly. It’s a difficult fight they’re engaged in. Forced to stand in front of everyone “on a pedestal of infamy,” Jane struggles to master “the rising hysteria” moving through her, and lifting up her head “took a firm stand on the stool.” Striking a courageous pose, the little girl confronts everyone and steels herself for the worst.

  When the span of time for her to endure this exposure has ended, when Jane, now left alone, abandons herself to tears wishing to die, her friend Helen comes to her through “the long, vacant room.” She brings “coffee and bread,” sacramental succor for Jane’s despair, and again as with Bessie in sisterhood she consoles her. As always in this novel, Charlotte is remembering her sisters, Emily and Anne, and their shared life together.

  Brontë remembers another sister as well. During the afternoon of her first full day at Lowood, Jane Eyre finds herself sent to the school garden—it’s the end of January, “all was wintry blight and brown decay . . .” While the strong girls run about and play games, “sundry pale and thin ones herded together for shelter and warmth in the veranda,” where frequently she hears “the sound of a hollow cough.” Any mid-Victorian reader would sense in the details of this scene the implicit warnings of incipient illness and death.

  It is here Jane first meets Helen Burns in the cold afternoon air apart from the others reading Rasselas. As Jane recalls, “her occupation touched a chord of sympathy somewhere.” Jane senses a kinship with Helen. Both, she can already see, are quiet, thoughtful, and involved in books. But Charlotte wishes to imply more. As early as 1830, in one of her first youthful writings, Brontë provides these words to her narrator: “It is the fashion nowadays to put no faith whatsoever in supernatural appearances or warnings. I am, however, a happy exception to the general rule. And firmly believe in everything of the kind.” Like him, Jane has been fearful of the ghostly return of those who though dead are troubled by continued injustice to the living. In this scene Brontë introduces her heroine to the figure of her dead sister Maria.

  When Charlotte was an adolescent and student at Roe Head in the early 1830s, she would talk with Ellen Nussey about her two dead sisters, Maria and Elizabeth. Her love for them was intense; a kind of adoration. “She described Maria as a little mother among the rest, superhuman in goodness and cleverness.” But what touched her most of all “were the revelations of her suffering.” Charlotte recalled “her prematurely-developed and remarkable intellect, as well as the mildness, wisdom, and fortitude of her character.” Maria was a great reader of newspapers from a very young age, and visitors marveled at her ability to discuss current affairs at great length in a lively and engaged fashion.

  Elizabeth Gaskell’s account pictures Maria as “grave, thoughtful, and quiet, to a degree beyond her years,” shadowed by her oncoming death. Unable to enjoy the simple pleasures of childhood, she was already living “the deeper life of reflection.” This gloomy portrait fits Helen Burns who is, trait for trait, virtue for virtue, Brontë’s portrait of her older sister. As she wrote to her publisher: “she was real enough: I have exaggerated nothing here: I abstained from recording much that I remember respecting her, lest the narrative should sound incredible.” Charlotte created Helen in part to record the truth about Maria’
s life and suffering. Gaskell writes with great sympathy about this. “Helen Burns is as exact a transcript of Maria Brontë as Charlotte’s wonderful power of reproducing character could give her. Her heart, to the latest day on which we met, still beat with unavailing indignation at the worrying and the cruelty to which her gentle, patient, dying sister had been subjected.”

  It is in Brontë’s account of the “cruelty” Maria suffered at Cowan Bridge that we encounter both Charlotte’s intense love for her sister and the curbs and limits which she imposed upon her novel. Yes, we have the scene in which Miss Scatcherd—the woman’s name was actually Miss Andrews—strikes Helen with a bundle of sticks. However, there was much that Brontë chose not to include. The most remarkable example of this intentional omission was recalled years later by a school friend. One morning Maria, suffering from illness, had a blister (i.e., acidic ointment spread on the skin to draw out diseased fluids) applied to one side and when the wake-up bell was rung, she moaned out that she was so ill, she wanted to stay in bed. However Miss Andrews was nearby so “the sick child began to dress, shivering with cold, as . . . she slowly put on her black worsted stocking over her thin white legs.” Abruptly Andrews bolted from her room, grabbed “the sick and frightened girl . . . by the arm, on the side to which the blister had been applied, and by one vigorous movement whirled her out into the middle of the floor, abusing her all the time for dirty and untidy habits. There she left her.” Staggering to her feet, Maria managed to get dressed and then trembling and haltingly, she got down stairs to the school room, only to be punished for being late.