Jane Eyre and the Pursuit of the Mother's Pleasure

Author(s): Kelly A. Marsh

Source: South Atlantic Review , Fall, 2004, Vol. 69, No. 3/4 (Fall, 2004), pp. 81-106
Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20064610

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 81

Jane Eyre
and the Pursuit
of the Mother's Pleasure
_Kelly A. Marsh_

That Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre gains her independ

ence of spirit, her place in the social structure, and even her
power as a storyteller at the expense of other women is an
argument that has come to influence our reading of the novel.
For example, Susan Sniader Lanser concludes that "Jane's
extraordinary narrative authority becomes insidious. [. . .]
Jane's voice can be empowered only through the silencing of
other women's voices" (192-93). Elisabeth Bronfen moves
away from strictly narratological considerations in her argu
ment that the actual deaths of other women, particularly of
Helen Bums and Bertha Mason Rochester, are presented in
the novel as crucial to Jane's education: "What is implied is
that Jane's psychic and social education requires not only an
encounter with death, in the form of identificatory doubles,
but also a destruction of death enacted successfully by virtue
of their sacrifice" (222). The idea that Jane's empowerment is
contingent on the sacrifices of other women has gained wide
acceptance, largely as part of the important and necessary
work of analyzing the colonialist discourses of Jane Eyre.
Persuasive though these readings are, we should not imagine
that Jane's character has now been fully understood, that her
motives and decisions are now completely clear. Indeed,
reconsidering the novel in a new context reveals hitherto
unexplored facets of Jane's relationships with other women,
beginning with her mother. In fact, Jane's quest, which seems
patently to be a quest to discover the self, appears upon clos

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82 Kelly A. Marsh

er examination to be fundamentally a quest to know her

mother, to discover in her mother's story her mother's pleas
ure, and thus to legitimize her own. To recognize this is to
gain a new understanding of Jane's character, her relation
ships, and some puzzling elements of her narrative.
Part of the appeal of Jane Eyre is that its heroine, an
orphan largely unprotected from the evils of the world,
makes her own way and relies on herself alone. Jane Eyre has
long been seen by readers and scholars as a character epito
mizing independence. She tells her own story, selecting for
her starting point the first moment when she begins to resist
those who oppress her and assert her own will. Jane's is very
much the story of a pilgrim's progress, as Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubar suggested in 1979, toward "the independent
maturity which is the goal of her pilgrimage" (350). The idea
of pilgrimage is reflected in the linearity of her narrative, in
which she overcomes one obstacle after another in her quest,
and indicates an orientation toward the future, toward that
famous final result, "Reader, I married him" (473). Jane
appears uninterested in the past and almost entirely self-suf
ficient. She rarely mentions her missing parents; it would
seem she does not regret their absence or need them. Barbara
Thaden argues that Jane desires to be seen as a "self-creation
ex-nihilo" (38). She is a character confident in the significance
of her own story, and she rarely addresses explicitly any his
tory beyond her own.
Implicitly, however, the past is very much with Jane;
indeed, a surprisingly appropriate comment made by
Rochester suggests that Jane's connection with the past is
much more complicated than it at first appears. When Jane
returns to Thornfield after attending at her Aunt Reed's
deathbed, she encounters Rochester in a twilit field and
informs him, "I have been with my aunt, sir, who is dead."
Rochester responds, "A true Janian reply! Good angels be my
guard! She comes from the other world?from the abode of

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 South Atlantic Review 83

people who are dead" (257). Rochester's exclamation res

onates through Jane's story, an apt description of her circum
stances on more than one occasion. When, in her infancy, she
is taken by relatives from the house in which her parents have
died of typhus, she indeed "comes [. . .] from the abode of
people who are dead." The early scenes at Gateshead empha
size that it is the site of her Uncle Reed's death, just as years
later it is the scene of her Aunt's death and inspires
Rochester's remark. Jane is educated at Lowood Institution;
when Rochester learns that she has spent much of her youth
there, he exclaims, "Eight years! you must be tenacious of
life. I thought half the time in such a place would have done
up any constitution! No wonder you have rather the look of
another world" (127). Lowood has been the home of very
many girls who are long since dead, including Helen Burns,
who dies in Jane's arms. Even Moor House is the scene of her
Uncle Rivers' recent death, and when Jane returns to
Rochester for the last time at Ferndean, she has come from the
ruins of Thornfield, where Rochester's wife leaped to her
death. How do we account for the surprising accuracy of
Rochester's observation? Why is this most independent and
future-oriented of young women figured so frequently in the
novel as a recent inmate of the past, as coming from "the
abode of people who are dead"?
A sociological reading would suggest that Jane's tie to
the dead is the fact that she is an heiress, that, in the end, this
poor orphan attains a respectable position in the society that
once cast her out, and does so through the reestablishment of
her connection to the past. Indeed, she reflects, upon hearing
of her Uncle Eyre's death, "the words Legacy, Bequest, go
side by side with the words Death, Funeral" (402). A narra
tological reading would emphasize that Jane is connected to
the past as a storyteller. As Margaret Atwood expresses it in
her Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, "all writing
of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated [.

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 84 Kelly A. Marsh

..] by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and

to bring something or someone back from the dead" (156).
But what or whom does Jane wish to bring back? This we can
answer by noting one further connection between Jane and
the dead?one that usually generates a psychoanalytic read
ing?she is an orphan. Jane's story does not overtly concern
itself with the lives of her parents, but their lives, particularly
the life of her mother, who actually appears to Jane in a
vision, are very much at the heart of Jane's story. Although
we know very little about Jane's mother, and she has been, for
this reason, almost entirely discounted as a significant factor
in Jane's life, a close analysis of the key events in her narrative
reveals that, in many important particulars, Jane actually
relives the experiences of her own mother. As no one is able
to tell Jane any more than the bare outline of her mother's
story, her only access to it seems to be to repeat it.
Still, why does she need to know her mother's story?
Why her mother's story and not her father's? Traditionally,
the father's past, his story, is the one that fixes the social
standing of his offspring; indeed, Jane's inheritance of twen
ty thousand pounds is from her father's brother. However,
the one story the mother possesses uniquely is always the
true story of the conception of her child. Lawrence Stone
quotes the Roman jurist Gaius, who said, in essence, "mater
nity is a fact, paternity is a matter of opinion" (7). Only the
mother knows for sure whether the child's legal father is real
ly the only candidate for its paternity. The mother's story,
though it is the most true account of the origin of the individ
ual, is not the official story, and remains private. David
Lloyd, with reference to Frederick Engels's The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State, characterizes the moth
er's story further:

patriarchy never seeks to derive the truth claims

of its lines of descent (or ascent) from any final

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 South Atlantic Review 85

biological certainty as to the identity of the male

child, but rather from the legal fiction established
by the performative ceremonies of marriage.
Thus an appeal to a probability supported by leg
islative performance excludes the subversive
possibilities of another performance, that of
woman's possibly unbounded pursuit of pleas
ure. (80)

In order to exchange the "legal fiction" for the true story, the
child must appeal to the mother's private, unofficial version.
Such an appeal is potentially dangerous; it may be legitimiz
ing or not, it may support the child's claim on the father or
not. The mother's story is potentially subversive: it is poten
tially the story of her pleasure, even her pleasure outside of
marriage, that which, as Lloyd notes, "represents a complete
excess here: an excess beyond her identity as a mother,
beyond the end of conception" (81). Ultimately, Western lit
erature's most famous orphaned daughter learns her moth
er's story and finds that it is legitimizing, both of Jane's place
in the world and, perhaps most importantly, of Jane's own
pleasure.
The significance of Jane's search for her mother's story
is most obvious when Bronte's novel is considered in a con
text apart from the usual categories?the Victorian novel, the
bildungsroman, the romance, the governess novel. The novel
can also be placed, with reference primarily to its plot, among
literary works in which a character who has lost one or both
parents accesses the experience of a dead parent by reliving
that experience. Many such works have male protagonists,
and their stories provide a revealing contrast to Jane's. The
earliest and most influential example is the story of
Sophocles' Oedipus, who, when his father is dead, becomes
the King of Thebes and the husband of Jocasta, as his father
was before him. A particularly instructive example is Hamlet,

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86 Kelly A. Marsh

in which, as in Jane Eyre, the dead parent actually appears to

the child. When we first encounter Hamlet, he wants nothing
more than to return to Wittenberg, to resume the life he has
been living there, apart from Elsinore and all that it now rep
resents to him. However, when his escape from Elsinore is
blocked by Claudius as well as by the ghost of his father,
Hamlet begins repeating his father's experience in some
important particulars. He lives in his father's house again
after an absence of some time. He adopts his father's resent
ment of Claudius, and to some extent feels his father's will to
power, over Claudius and perhaps over Denmark. He shares
his father's anger at Gertrude's remarriage and obvious
pleasure in her marriage bed, and he indulges in a passion for
Ophelia that mimics his father's for Gertrude. Finally,
Hamlet dies his father's death, poisoned by Claudius.
David Lloyd's analysis of a parallel situation in
Yeats's 1938 play Purgatory suggests a way of understanding
what happens when these characters relive their parents'
experience. In Purgatory, in a scene much influenced by
Dante, an Old Man relives his mother's experience by watch
ing her as she, a soul in Purgatory, repeats her transgression
before his eyes. Her sin is the lust that prompted her to marry
"a groom in a training stable" and, in so doing, bring low a
proud family (34). After her death in childbirth, her husband
abused the land and finally burned the great house. The Old
Man has tried to atone, first by killing his father in the burn
ing house all those years ago, and now by killing his own son
in order to remove the threat of "passfing] pollution on" (39).
The Old Man is fixated on expiating this old sin, but he is dis
tracted by the vision of his mother's lust. Her story is delegit
imizing for him: although he is conceived within wedlock, he
is tainted by his father's low blood, and the destruction of the
long family line is effected in the Old Man himself as surely
as in the ruined house. He says of her punishment,

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 South Atlantic Review 87

But there's a problem: she must live

Through everything in exact detail,
Driven to it by remorse, and yet
Can she renew the sexual act
And find no pleasure in it, and if not,
If pleasure and remorse must both be there,
Which is the greater? (37)

David Lloyd situates this passage within Yeats's work in gen

eral, arguing that, for Yeats, remorse is "that emotion which
[...] chooses to assert that things might have been otherwise.
It is an appeal to the history of the possible, of what might
have been." Lloyd goes on to say that "The loose ends pro
duced by such a history are incompatible with [...] any rep
resentative aesthetic." Lloyd reminds us that "the tradition of
aesthetics has always located the effect of verisimilitude in
the domain of the probable, to the explicit rejection of the pos
sible," and uses this to theorize the conjunction the Old Man
posits between remorse and "the erotic pleasure of women"
(80). In effect, both belong to the possible. Remorse is the
story of what might have been, and the mother's story is
always fraught with the possibility of her extraneous pleas
ure. Lloyd posits that Yeats felt a need to try to control these
two emotions, which he found frightening, but that because
they are uncontrollable Yeats found in them "the faintest
gleam of an alternative" to established social and aesthetic
structures (79).
In Purgatory, the Old Man tries to control the remorse
and the pleasure of his mother, and fails. In his final speech,
he wails, "Twice a murderer and all for nothing" (39). The
Old Man is not so different from Oedipus and Hamlet, and
Lloyd's observations can be applied to them, as well. The suf
fering of Oedipus begins when he insists, against all advice,
upon attempting to redress past wrongs, to alleviate past
grievances. He finds he cannot atone, and, further, finds that

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88 Kelly A. Marsh

he is possessed of certain knowledge of the erotic pleasure of

his own mother. Hamlet is preoccupied with the attempt to
verify his father's story in order to know how to act himself,
and his only access to his father's story in all its detail is to
repeat his father's experience. In the process, Hamlet is con
fronted with his father's remorse for sins he was prevented
from confessing, remorse for a life he should still be living.
He is confronted with his mother's pleasure, which he expe
riences as delegitimizing: Gertrude's capacity for such erotic
pleasure outside of her marriage to King Hamlet potentially
calls into question Hamlet's own origins. For Hamlet, his
father's remorse and his mother's erotic pleasure are oppres
sive, paralyzing. They compel him to act?to try to contain
the possibilities they suggest?but no action of his can control
the forces they have set in motion.
The similarities between these stories and Jane's are
significant, as I shall demonstrate, but an important differ
ence is that, for Oedipus, Hamlet, and the Old Man, the end
is destruction and death. Putting aside the question of genre,
why does Jane's story end so very differently? It need not, of
course. Just as Hamlet contemplates suicide throughout the
course of the play, at one point is assumed, at least by
Claudius, to be dead, and escapes death at the hands of the
English king, Jane twice wishes herself dead, is in fact
declared dead at the age of fifteen by her Aunt Reed, and
escapes death a number of times. We witness Jane's survival
of the typhus epidemic at Lowood and her exposure and star
vation on the moors after she leaves Thornfield. We only
hear about her earliest escapes from the typhus epidemic that
killed her parents and from her Aunt Reed's ill will,
expressed in her desire, when Jane first comes to live with the
Reed family, "to put it [the infant Jane] out to nurse and pay
for its maintenance" (243), which may raise in readers' minds
the ghastly specter of nineteenth-century baby farming. For
Jane Eyre as for Hamlet, death comes very close. The differ

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 South Atlantic Review 89

ence between Jane and the others is that the male characters
sustain the belief that they can and must intervene in the past,
eliminate remorse just as they would like to eliminate their
mothers' excessive pleasure. The male characters undertake
to contain the forces of the possible; Jane, in contrast,
embraces these forces easily. Under ordinary circumstances,
legitimacy would not promise Jane, as a woman, the kind of
material gain it could mean for a man. Perhaps as a result,
Jane never feels compelled to try to mitigate the remorse
passed down from her parents, remorse for her mother's dis
inheritance and expulsion from her family as well as her early
death. Jane never allows herself to believe that she can some
how atone for the past. Most importantly, unlike her male
counterparts, she can experience the pleasure of the mother
as legitimizing, and so she does.
Jane's mother is generally considered at least irrele
vant and at most a force to be rejected or eliminated in the
interest of Jane's progress. At the height of the second wave
of the feminist movement, in 1972, Phyllis Chesler argued in
Women and Madness that "Female children are quite literally
starved for matrimony: not for marriage, but for physical nur
turance and a legacy of power and humanity from adults of
their own sex ('mothers')" (18). Adrienne Rich, the following
year, noted the strengths of Chesler's analysis and its conclu
sion that "the most [mothers] can do is teach their daughters
the tricks of surviving in the patriarchy by pleasing, and
attaching themselves to, powerful or economically viable
men" (Rich 91). Ultimately, however, Rich disagrees with
Chesler?later she even claimed that "To a large extent she
resorts to 'blaming th? mother' for the daughter's disadvan
taged position in patriarchy" (Rich 91)?and she clarifies her
disagreement in her essay on Jane Eyre. In Rich's view,
"Individual women have helped Jane Eyre to the point of her
severest trial; at that point she is in relation to the Great
Mother herself" (102). But by 1977 Elaine Showalter had

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90 Kelly A. Marsh

revived Chesler's view by asserting of Jane Eyre, "There is

sporadic sisterhood and kindness between the women in this
world [...] but on the whole these women are helpless to aid
each other, even if they want to" (117).
Contemporary scholars have maintained Showalter's
view as the prevalent one, as evidenced by several more
recent arguments. Penny Boumelha contends, with reference
to Rich's analysis: "It has been suggested that there is a matri
archal story within Jane Eyre, of Jane's turning to and learning
from mother figures. There is the shadow of such a narrative
in the novel, but it is, I think, a defeatist one in which Jane
tests the limits of a mother-centred world and is turned back
to the patriarchal determinations of kinship and inheritance"
(134). She emphasizes this point in her analysis of Jane's days
wandering on the moors: "The mothering moon of myth and
the mothering earth of nature cannot fulfil the most minimal
needs of the woman as fully social being, and this fantasied
matriarchal world has no power within the world of social
organisation that is necessary for survival" (137). Margaret
Homans and Marianne Hirsch both suggest that Jane must
actively reject the mother in order to write her story. For
Homans, this means rejecting the mother's valuable gift of the
literal in order to enter the father's world in which the figura
tive is arbitrarily privileged. According to Homans, the
daughter "has the positive experience of never having given
up entirely the presymbolic communication that carries over,
with the bond to the mother, beyond the preoedipal period"
(13)?that is, her access to the literal. In reference to Jane Eyre,
however, Homans concludes that "the daughter's continued
close connection to her mother long past her entry into andro
centric culture" is "a connection that [. . .] a daughter who is
a figure for the novelist, whose main allegiance is to the
father's symbol making, finds very difficult to sustain and
finally rejects" (94). Hirsch returns to earlier formulations in
which the mother of the nineteenth-century heroine has noth

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 South Atlantic Review 91

ing of value to pass on to her daughter, who must reject both

her mother and her own potential motherhood (especially her
potential mothering of daughters) in order to tell her story.
Hirsch maintains that "For most nineteenth-century heroines
maternal absence actually engenders feminine fictions. Plot
demands the separation of heroines from the messages of
powerlessness and disinheritance which mothers tend to
transmit. Maternal stories are stories not to be repeated: from
the perspective of fictional plot, mothers can only be exam
ples not to be emulated" (168). Hirsch argues that the story
of Jane Eyre's mother is an example of this: "She is the victim
of the social constraints that delimit women's lives; but, from
a different perspective, she has to die so that her daughter
might have a story" (169). For all of these critics, mothers and
mothering in Jane Eyre are highly problematic and have little
to offer a questing daughter. However, to rest with this con
clusion is to overlook a number of crucial factors: the extent
to which her mother's experience has already determined
Jane's situation, the effect on her of hearing her mother's
story, the significance of her observation of other mother and
daughter relationships, and, most importantly, the ways in
which she explores her mother's life in her own. Jane's cre
ativity and her femaleness allow her to relive the experiences
of the dead without being possessed by them, without being
forced to repudiate them, and without reproducing the social
constraints that bound the dead in life.
The similarities between Jane's life and her mother's
have gone unnoticed at least in part because neither Jane nor
the reader knows very much about Jane's mother, Miss Jane
Reed of Gateshead, later Jane Reed Eyre. All we know is
what Jane overhears one servant telling another:

that my father had been a poor clergyman; that

my mother had married him against the wishes
of her friends, who considered the match

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 92 Kelly A. Marsh

beneath her; that my grandfather Reed was so

irritated at her disobedience, he cut her off with
out a shilling; that after my mother and father
had been married a year, the latter caught the
typhus fever while visiting among the poor of a
large manufacturing town where his curacy was
situated, and where the disease was then preva
lent; that my mother took the infection from him,
and both died within a month of each other. (26
27)

With so little to go on, arguing for Jane Reed Eyre's signifi

cance to Jane's experience would seem a difficult task.
However, the narrative reveals her mother's significance in
her life from beginning to end.
In the novel's opening scene, as her cousin John Reed
searches his mind for an excuse for abusing Jane, he arrives at
this one: "You have no business to take our books: you are a
dependant, mama says; you have no money; your father left
you none; you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentle
men's children like us [...]. Now, I'll teach you to rummage
my book-shelves: for they are mine; all the house belongs to
me, or will do in a few years" (11). Jane knows as she narrates
that Gateshead Hall will never belong to John Reed, that he
will succumb to addiction and suicide before he can become
Gateshead's master. Jane the child Cannot know this; never
theless, John's speech, in which he emphasizes her lack of
father-conferred rights even as he invokes his "mama" as an
authority, tells us that mothers have power in John's world.
John is fatherless as Jane is, and his reference to "gentlemen's
children" reminds us that the gentleman in question has been
dead nearly as long as Jane's own father. John has been
taught to think of himself as the master of Gateshead, but
Sarah Reed has more power over her son's future than may
be evident in this passage. Much later, when John seeks to

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 South Atlantic Review 93

take possession of the property, we are told that "Missis

refused," and this precipitates his suicide (232). A mother
dominates this section of the novel, and this may raise a
vision of Jane's own mother and a sense of her mother-con
ferred rights, those John would like to obscure. Marianne
Hirsch, who maintains the necessity for Jane of her mother's
death, nevertheless asserts that "her individuality is firmly
upheld by the class allegiance she can claim through maternal
certainty" (174). Apart from her class inheritance from her
mother, what Jane has of her is the Hall itself, her mother's
childhood home. We know that Gateshead does not change
much over time; when Jane returns to it after eight years, she
notes, "There was every article of furniture looking just as it
did on the morning I was first introduced to Mr. Brocklehurst
[. . .]. The inanimate objects were not changed [. . .]" (239).
This house has not changed at all in the eighteen years of
Jane's life, and we can assume that it was the same just a year
or two before that, when Jane Reed herself left Gateshead.
John endeavors to see in the house his future, but the entire
house is already a memorial to the past, and that past
includes the life of Jane Reed Eyre.
We first encounter Jane in her much-interpreted win
dow seat, and, although the scene in the drawing-room,
where Mrs. Reed "lay reclined on a sofa by the fire-side, and
with her darlings about her" (7), may seem like the center of
maternal warmth at Gateshead, Jane's own position is an ide
alized maternal space. Her description implies what she
never explicitly says, that this house is associated with her
mother. She tells us, "I was shrined in double retirement": in
the breakfast-room, a place associated with nourishment, and
in the window-seat itself, where "Folds of scarlet drapery
shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear
panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the
drear November day" (8). In this womb-like enclosure, Jane
is protected but not separated from the world; indeed, the

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94 Kelly A. Marsh

world intrudes all too soon in the person of her cousin. As

Jane's harsh treatment in this home immediately presses itself
on our attention, we may be tempted to find her sadly,
uniquely bereft of maternal protection and, in response, ger
minating the rebellious attitude that will soon precipitate her
expulsion from Gateshead. However, Jane is not unique in
this; in these particulars, Jane is reliving her mother's experi
ence. Jane Reed, whose mother is never mentioned and, in
any case, failed to protect her from the wrath of her father,
was alienated from her childhood home when her passion for
Jane's father motivated her to act against the wishes of her
family. Both Jane and her mother are cast out because of the
same prejudices on the part of those at Gateshead against the
more humble Eyre family, and because of their strong wills
and passionate natures.
For both women, Uncle Reed's kindness and favor are
a comfort, but he is unable to save either of them, demonstrat
ing persuasively that women are not alone in being unable to
protect the ones they love from the harshness of the world.
We know that Jane Reed's brother "opposed the family's dis
owning her when she made her low marriage" (243). Jane
Eyre's banishment from Gateshead is set in motion by the
incident in the red-room, her Uncle Reed's room, where she
recalls that he had saved her from an orphanage, and that "if
Mr. Reed had been alive he would have treated me kindly"
(17). The scene in the red-room has been interpreted by psy
choanalytic critics, very persuasively, given the context, as
evidence of Jane's oedipal issues. In this view, Jane defies the
mother figure, her Aunt, is punished by being locked in her
dead uncle's bedroom, and precipitates either a fantasied
consummation of a sexual relationship with the father figure,
her Uncle, as David Smith interprets the scene (137), or a
desire to do so followed by a "strong inner repression," as
John Maynard interprets it (103). These readings are support
ed by detailed analysis of the progress of the scene and of its

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 South Atlantic Review 95

imagery, and also by the fact that, much later, at what is often
read as the height of Jane's oedipal crisis, when she decides to
flee Rochester rather than marry him on unequal terms, she
writes that she "was transported in thought to the scenes of
childhood: I dreamt I lay in the red-room at Gateshead; that
the night was dark, and my mind impressed with strange
fears" (336). The two scenes are connected in Jane's mind,
and psychoanalytic arguments interpret the first episode as
full of oedipal implications and then carry its associations
over to the second.
However, the text establishes that the second vision is
a fuller realization of the first, and the second vision is clear
ly identified as Jane's mother. On Jane's last night at
Thornfield, she dreams of a figure that "gazed and gazed on
me. It spoke, to my spirit: immeasurably distant was the
tone, yet so near, it whispered in my heart?'My daughter,
flee temptation!' 'Mother, I will'" (337). Jane identifies what
she sees in her dream as her mother and claims that it is the
same as what she saw that long-ago night; therefore, we must
consider the possibility that what she sees in the red-room is
her mother, not her Uncle Reed. Although in the second
instance the eighteen-year-old Jane welcomes the vision, in
the first instance, the light is the herald of a vision Jane is too
afraid to see. Thinking of her Uncle Reed, Jane feels that "a
preternatual voice to comfort me" or "some haloed face,
bending over me with strange pity" are "consolatory in theo
ry" but would be "terrible if realized." As Jane herself notes,
however, "dead men, troubled in their graves by the violation
of their last wishes" return, not to comfort the victim, but "to
punish the perjured and avenge the oppressed" (17). The
spirit coming to comfort the child, then, must be another;
indeed, it is the spirit of her mother, just as the same spirit
later comes to advise her.
Although much of the imagery of the red-room has
been convincingly analyzed as masculine, Elaine Showalter

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96 Kelly A. Marsh

contends that "The red-room [. . .] is a paradigm of female

inner space [...] With its deadly and bloody connotations,
its Freudian wealth of secret compartments, wardrobes,
drawers, and jewel chest, the red-room has strong associa
tions with the adult female body" (114-15). Showalter reads
this scene as the moment of Jane's "emotional menarche"
(113) and suggests that "It is thus as if the mysterious crime
for which the Reeds were punishing Jane were the crime of
growing up" (114). Showalter urges us to read the imagery of
the room as an expression of the adult female body, and sug
gests that the body is Jane's. However, particularly given the
precedent of the womb-like window-seat, we may reasonably
associate the red-room with Jane Reed, the maternal body.
This association need not utterly conflict with the more
straightforward Freudian reading: it is here, we might
assume, that Jane Reed's own oedipal drama played out. The
disinheritance of a daughter can be read as the father's
attempt to discourage suitors, thwart her plans to marry, and
keep her for himself. We should consider this among the
motives for Grandfather Reed's disinheritance of his "disobe
dient" daughter, and if Jane indeed arrives at an oedipal cri
sis in the red-room, she is repeating her mother's experience
in this as in other details.
Just as the second vision of her mother helps to con
vince Jane to leave Thornfield, this first, incomplete vision
helps to convince her to leave Gateshead when she is given
the opportunity. Jane has learned what she can of her moth
er from her mother's childhood home, and she must move on.
At the very moment when Jane is about to be liberated from
Gateshead by Mr. Lloyd, the apothecary, who suggests that
she be sent to school, Jane first learns her mother's story. Jane
Reed Eyre, her daughter learns, was disowned by her rela
tives, was taken among the poor by her clergyman husband,
and encountered typhus and death among them. In spite of
the fact that Jane has just told Mr. Lloyd, "I should not like to

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 South Atlantic Review 97

belong to poor people" (25), she is cast out from her Uncle's
house and forthwith transported to Lowood Institution,
which, as Helen tells Jane, "is partly a charity-school: you and
I, and all the rest of us are charity-children" (52). Jane is, her
wishes notwithstanding, among the poor, and in the care of
Mr. Brocklehurst, a clergyman; within a year typhus rages
through the school. Jane escapes the disease as her mother
did not, but she is declared dead of typhus by Sarah Reed in
a letter to Jane's uncle, John Eyre: "I said I was sorry for his
disappointment, but Jane Eyre was dead: she had died of
typhus fever at Lowood" (251). As far as her uncle knows,
Jane Eyre has died the same death as Jane Reed Eyre before
her. To a considerable extent, then, Jane is able to experience
her mother's experiences and thus to know them and her.
After Jane leaves Lowood and begins a new life at
Thornfield, she relives happier parts of her mother's experi
ence. Jane's mothering of Ad?le reflects Jane Reed Eyre's
experience of motherhood: it is brief, it is concomitant with
the flowering of her passionate love, and it ends in the child,
a female child, being sent away to a school with poor condi
tions and unforgiving policies, just as Jane was. Jane's expe
rience of love also reflects her mother's. Jane finds with
Rochester the kind of deep romantic love that her mother had
found with her father. Just as her mother's love transcended
the prejudices of the social world against interclass mar
riages, so does the love between Jane and Rochester tran
scend the fact of her inferior social status. Jane loves
Rochester, not to the exclusion of the mother, but as the moth
er had loved?with a passion that defies convention. That
Jane does not stay with Rochester despite all when she learns
of the existence of Bertha Rochester has been interpreted as
Jane's need to flee in accordance with the incest taboo.
Indeed, it is widely agreed that the family romance lurking in
Jane Eyre manifests itself in her relationship with Edward
Rochester. He is, as he himself points out, "old enough to be

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98 Kelly A. Marsh

[her] father" (140). Jane tells us, "I felt at times, as if he were
my relation" (153) and "I feel akin to him" (184). Rochester is
thus explicitly compared to a "relative," adding to the sense
that Jane sees in him a means of consummating the forbidden
sexual desire for the father. This and other evidence notwith
standing, we should consider ourselves warned when Mrs.
Fairfax observes, "He might almost be your father" and Jane
exclaims, "No, indeed [. . .] he is nothing like my father!"
(277). Ultimately, Jane does explore the forbidden drive
toward the father, but not in her relationship with Rochester.
In Rochester Jane finds a man who, like her, is without
parents, but who, like Hamlet and Yeats's Old Man, attempts
to mitigate remorse and abhors the erotic pleasure of women.
We are encouraged to think of Jane as the archetypal individ
ual on her solitary pilgrimage, but Jane, though parentless, is
provided with both maternal and paternal relations.
Rochester, on the other hand, is utterly alone. We hear of no
relatives of his whatsoever, except for a long line of the dead
stretching back even beyond "Damer de Rochester, slain at
Marston Moor in the time of the civil wars" (302). Rochester,
like Jane, "comes [. . .] from the abode of people who are
dead." Rochester's great hall, Thornfield, commemorates the
longevity of the family and their power; nevertheless,
Rochester stays infrequently at this great house. Jane eventu
ally learns why Rochester hates Thornfield; she discovers that
he has committed himself to the containment of remorse and
pleasure, that he has imprisoned both in an attic room. The
remorse is primarily Rochester's own, and the pleasure his
mad wife's, but, in Rochester's view, the blame lies with the
dead. He tells Jane, "Her family wished to secure me" (321)
and "My father, and my brother Rowland [. . .] thought only
of the thirty thousand pounds, and joined in the plot against
me" (322). In Rochester's own view, then, he inherits his bat
tle with the forces of the possible, just as the others do, and he
has spent years trying, just as ineffectually, to control them.

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 South Atlantic Review 99

Finally, the mad Bertha Rochester burns Thornfield, throwing

herself off its battlements in the midst of the conflagration.
Rochester is blinded and maimed as he runs through the
burning house in his failed attempt to save her. Diane
Hoeveler's description of Rochester after the fire comprises
the prevalent interpretations of what has happened to him:
Jane's "gothic hero has been tamed and ritualistically
wounded. [...] He is daddy wounded; he is the safe husband;
he is the punished patriarch; he is man. Or rather, he is the
weakened man that the gothic feminist must have if she is to
live with a man at all" (204). The incapacitation of Rochester,
then, is a disempowerment that is, in effect, a punishment for
his actions toward Bertha and toward Jane. Yet we can go
further and include in our assessment the immediate cause of
his injuries: what wounds Rochester is the weight of history,
embodied in the house itself. We are told, "As he came down
the great stair-case at last, [. . .] there was a great crash-all
fell" (452). Thornfield falls as surely as Elsinore and the great
house of the Old Man's family. Rochester's inability to accept
the forces of the possible?remorse and a woman's pleas
ure?causes this fall, and only Bertha's death and Jane's
example save him.
Jane may appear to have little sympathy for the mad
woman in the attic, but a discovery she makes during her first
days at Thornfield suggests that she identifies with
Rochester's wife more fully, and more consciously, than is at
first apparent. During her first tour of the great house, out
side, as she later learns, the third-floor room in which Bertha
is imprisoned, Jane notices "half-effaced embroideries,
wrought by fingers that for two generations had been coffin
dust" (111). In contrast to most of the house, which commem
orates the rapaciousness of Rochester's father and brother
and their ancestors, this room includes a memorial to femi
nine lives lived within the hall. Jane writes, "All these relics
gave to the third story of Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home

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100 Kelly A. Marsh

of the past: a shrine of memory" (111). Mrs. Fairfax, in sym

pathy with Jane's impressions, remarks that "if there were a
ghost at Thornfield Hall, this would be its haunt" (111). Thus
is Bertha Rochester named a ghost, but Bertha is not dead: she
is a living memorial to centuries of Rochester women. Jane
enters this room again to nurse Richard Mason after Bertha
attacks him, and once more when Bertha's identity has been
revealed, both times noticing tapestries wrought, no doubt,
by Rochester women. The connection this implies between
Bertha and "fingers that for two generations had been coffin
dust" inspires her, when Rochester asks, "If you were mad,
do you think I should hate you?" to answer him, "I do indeed,
sir" (317). Jane assumes that what has happened to Bertha
Mason Rochester can happen to any woman. Although
Rochester faults his father and brother for the disaster of his
marriage, his wife's "giant propensities" do not escape his
blame (323). Critics have argued that Jane projects her own
instincts and desires onto Bertha and that they are contained
by Bertha's demise. As Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope
explain, "Bertha is the literal equivalent of Jane's negative
inner vision of sexuality; when she understands her own pas
sion as separate from Bertha's, she is free to value her own
sexuality and to love Rochester. Rochester's wound and the
death of Bertha, therefore, symbolize the resolution of Jane's
ambivalence about sexual passion" (167). This argument is
convincing, but the fact that Jane must flee Thornfield in the
night or risk giving in to her own desires suggests that Jane's
passion is not separate from Bertha's but the same, and she
has seen the catastrophe it might precipitate enacted in Bertha
Mason Rochester's ruined life.
For this reason, Jane must continue on her quest to
learn the rest of her mother's story. Jane has "propensities"
of her own, and she needs to know how far they are likely to
take her. The most likely source from which she might learn
this information is her own mother. Jane learns at Thornfield

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 South Atlantic Review 101

that the mother's life predicts the daughter's. Rochester

thinks of Bertha as a memorial to her own mother: "Her
mother, the Creole, was both a mad woman and a drunkard!
[. . .] Bertha, like a dutiful child, copied her parent in both
points" (306). To him she is "the true daughter of an infa
mous mother" (323). Bertha is not the only woman who is
depicted as a reproduction of her mother. Jane observes that
Ad?le sometimes manifests "a superficiality of character,
inherited probably from her mother" (152). Of Blanche
Ingram we are told that "Her face was like her mother's"
(181). At Moor House, the servant, Hannah, tells Diana and
Mary: "your mother wor mich i' your way, and a'most as
book-learned. She wor the pictur' o' ye, Mary" (352). Faced
with this seemingly inescapable continuity between mothers
and daughters, and, by extension, among all women, Jane
must learn the rest of the truth about her own mother, also a
woman of great passion, before she can put herself, as she
longs to do, in Rochester's power.
In addition to placing Jane in a new relation to her
mother and the other women she encounters, seeing Jane in
this light explains more fully the necessity of the Moor House
section of the novel, which has seemed to some commenta
tors extraneous and puzzling. Perhaps Jane must move on
from Thornfield for a time before committing herself finally
to Rochester, but why must the circumstances of that moving
on be entirely dependent on the unrealistic coincidence that
Jane wanders in the countryside for days only to faint from
inanition on the doorstep of her paternal relatives, of whose
existence she has heretofore been entirely ignorant? Why is
St. John Rivers given such a critical role in the novel? Why
does he speak the novel's final words? At Moor House, in her
relationship with St. John, a clergyman and her father's
nephew, Jane learns the rest of her mother's story.
Her mother, in the form of the vision, gives Jane the
strength to leave her great love. Her mother, in the persona

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 102 Kelly A. Marsh

of "the universal mother, Nature," keeps her alive during her

four days in the wilderness without food or shelter (340).
Jane writes, "as I was her child: my mother would lodge me
without money and without price" (341). Thus, under her
mother's protection, Jane is thrown into proximity with the
man who, unlike Rochester, indeed resembles Jane's father.
When St. John has discovered the truth about Jane's identity
and her relationship to him, he reveals his knowledge to Jane
by telling her a story they both know: "a poor curate [...] fell
in love with a rich man's daughter: she fell in love with him,
and married him, against the advice of all her friends; who
consequently disowned her immediately after the wedding.
Before two years passed, the rash pair were both dead, and
laid quietly side by side under one slab" (399). This "rash
pair" are Jane's parents, of course, but, as St. John tells the
story without the particulars, it can also be read as a projec
tion of his own future. Like his uncle, Jane's father, St. John
is a "poor curate." The most immediate candidate for the
"rich man's daughter," of course, is Rosamond Oliver, whom
St. John loves and who, as he well knows, would surely die
young if she agreed to share the life he has planned as a mis
sionary in India. However, St. John does not ask Rosamond
Oliver to marry him; he asks Jane, and she is the focus of St.
John's projection. Jane, though not a rich man's daughter, has
just found out that she, too, is an heiress, and she knows very
well that she "should not live long in that climate" (436). It is
St. John and Jane who potentially fit the template of her par
ents' story.
Even though David Cowart has established that,
"There is maturity [. . .] in Jane's rejection of Rivers in his
sternly paternal aspect in favor of the virile and husbandly
Rochester" (37), St. John has rarely been considered in detail
with reference to Jane's oedipal issues. This may be largely
because, in contrast to Rochester, St. John refuses passion and
rejects infatuation and lust in favor of more spiritual consid

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 South Atlantic Review 103

erations. Still, to use this contrast to argue that St. John is

without sexual motivation is to go too far. Moments after St.
John has made his proposal, Jane is already realizing that, as
his wife, she would be forced to "endure all the forms of love
(which I doubt not he would scrupulously observe)" (426).
Jane dislikes this idea, but she admits to Diana: "I can imag
ine the possibility of conceiving an inevitable, strange, tortur
ing kind of love for him" (438). Jane attributes the "inevitabil
ity" of such feelings to St. John's "heroic grandeur," but we
can see that the attachment is inevitable in a deeper psycho
logical sense, for here is the man, at last, who is "like my
father" (277). Jane clearly envisions their physical relation
ship, and, certainly, so does St. John. He wonders, "How can
I, a man not yet thirty, take out with me to India a girl of nine
teen, unless she be married to me? How can we be for ever
together?sometimes in solitudes, sometimes amidst savage
tribes?and unwed?" (430). He even accuses her of suggest
ing they live together in sin when he admonishes her, "I
before proved to you the absurdity of a single woman of your
age proposing to accompany abroad a single man of mine. I
proved it to you in such terms as, I should have thought,
would have prevented your ever again alluding to the plan.
That you have done so, I regret?for your sake" (435). Jane
easily dispenses with any scruples on grounds of propriety,
so his continued insistence must be on other grounds. With
his repetition of their ages, it becomes clear that, while he
eschews romantic love, St. John sees sex in the light of a bio
logical imperative. Jane's instinct is correct: her cousin would
"scrupulously observe" "all the forms of love." St. John is
Jane's final opportunity to learn her mother's story by living
her mother's life. Jane shares the first and last parts of her
mother's name, Jane Reed Eyre, and St. John calls forth the
other part in her: "I could resist St. John's wrath: I grew pli
ant as a reed under his kindness" (441, emphasis added). St.
John presents the chance for Jane to marry, as her mother did,

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104 Kelly A. Marsh

a clergyman, for her to live out her mother's life with her
father's near kinsman, and no doubt follow her mother to an
early death.
Finally, however, Jane knows all of her mother's
story, and she has found it legitimizing. Jane Reed Eyre's
story is one of passion and pleasure that resulted in a legiti
mate daughter, with a paternal legacy as well as a maternal
one, who has found pleasure of her own, validated by knowl
edge of her mother's experience. St. John proposes a journey
to the Underworld, but Jane's journey is complete, and she is
free to refuse him. As Jane concludes her narrative, she gives
the words of St. John's letter pride of place at the end of her
narrative: "Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!" (477). Robert
Keefe interprets Jane's choice as a kind of victory for death, "a
peculiar coda which lies athwart the seeming optimism
which Bronte's art has temporarily attained" (129). On the
contrary, this choice is a gesture meant to honor the source of
Jane's final happiness, to memorialize what the dead have to
offer the living. She knows that St. John's most recent letter
is also his last?he is, essentially, already dead, and his words
come from "the abode of people who are dead" (257). Jane
commemorates the dead, but she is, as ever, "tenacious of
life" (127). Jane knows, as St. John cannot, the secret that
Margaret Atwood expresses when she says that although we
are compelled to "descend to where the stories are kept; all
must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the
past" (178).
Jane's own journey to the Underworld provides her
with hard-won wisdom, confidence in her own vision, and a
solid presence in the world of the living. In contrast to
Oedipus, Hamlet, Yeats's Old Man, and Rochester himself,
Jane embraces the forces of the possible. She attempts neither
to alleviate the remorse of her dead parents nor to deny their
pleasure. She has sought her mother's story by repeating her
experience, and she has found that story legitimizing, both of
her social position, marked by her inheritance, and of her

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 South Atlantic Review 105

pleasure, marked by her reunion with Rochester. She has

become a reader of "half-effaced embroideries" and has dis
cerned in them the unofficial story of women's pleasure, and
thus her own.

Mississippi State University

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