"Jane Eyre" and the Rage of the Excluded

Seeking something classic to listen to, I found a free version of Jane Eyre, and thought, I haven't read that since I was 17, why not? I'm enjoying it, and I'm here to tell you that Mr. Rochester is a lot sexier and more interesting than Mr. Darcy.

But what struck me this time around was the attitude toward class and social distinctions.

When Jane Eyre was published in 1847 many readers found it a disturbingly radical book. Reviewers for conservative journals in particular attacked it, saying that is was an "angry book," seething with hatred of good society and proper morals. Here is an example, from wikipedia:

We do not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.

In fact Charlotte Brontë was a Tory who had zero sympathy for anyone involved with labor agitation or radical politics.

I agree, though, that it is an angry book. It is full of scorn thrown at rich people who pose as better than the rest of us, but are in fact not. The mistake those reviewers made was thinking that because Brontë could be downright savage about particular rich people and their hypocrisies, she opposed economic inequality and the divisions of social class.

Not at all. She was perfectly happy about the existence of an aristocracy, she was simply mad that she wasn't an aristocrat.

Jane Eyre says over and over that she is just as good as all the rich people who are snotty to her. Not, mind you, that everyone is as good as they are, or that the average working person is, only that *she* is. There is, for example, a scene where Jane says that "nothing free born" would submit to be treated with insolence just because she is paid a salary. Mr. Rochester responds, "Humbug! Most things free-born will submit to anything for a salary." This is not challenged, so we are left thinking that it is true, and thus that Jane is not like "most things free born." If the rest of them submit to insolence, it is only what they deserve for their weakness. Jane will not, thus proving her superiority to them. A few lines later Rochester says, "Not three in three thousand raw school-girl-governesses would have answered me as you have just done." As a one-in-a-thousand girl, Jane surely belongs in the upper class.

Then there is a drawn-out bit in which Rochester seems on the verge of marrying a rich local beauty, Miss Ingram. This vapid personage is certainly his match in status and accomplishments. But she fails at love; she cannot win Rochester's heart. As a poor governess, Jane knows that she should not even think of competing for Rochester's affections, but she finds Miss Ingram so annoying she cannot help pondering how much better she would do. If, she thinks, "Miss Ingram had been a good and noble woman, endowed with force, fervour, kindness, sense", she could have retired from the field, but her sense that she is really the better woman keeps her watching and seething.

Why can she not influence him more, when she is privileged to draw so near to him? . . . When she failed, I saw how she might have succeeded. Arrows that continually glanced off from Mr. Rochester’s breast and fell harmless at his feet, might, I knew, if shot by a surer hand, have quivered keen in his proud heart—have called love into his stern eye, and softness into his sardonic face; or, better still, without weapons a silent conquest might have been won.

And when Rochester finally proposes marriage to Jane, he says, "My bride is here, because my equal is here, and my likeness. Jane, will you marry me?"

I mention this because I feel that it is a theme that runs at least through modern European history and maybe far beyond. Very often the rebels against the status quo don't really want to change the system, they just want to join the elite, and often they are people close enough to the top to have a good idea what things are all about.

Not, mind you, that this is always true; there have been plenty of rebels who really did want to smash the system, and plenty who were of truly humble birth.

But how important has the rebellion of the almost-rich, almost-insiders been in history? 

I remember reading that in 1776 some British cynic said the whole American rebellion thing could be settled by handing out fifty knighthoods and making George Washington the Duke of Virginia. I suspect that by 1776 it was too late for that, but if such an approach had been tried in 1765, things might have gone very differently. (Unfortunately for that plan, George's court was willing to spend a million pounds and ten thousand lives to keep control of the colonies, but absolutely not to treat a colonial as an equal.) Welcoming rebel leaders into the fold has, I think, defused many revolts.

Anyway I see Charlotte Brontë as yet another in the long line of smart, capable people who criticized aristocratic society because it burned their hearts when ignoble idiots treated them as inferiors.