The Madwoman in the Mirror (Jane Eyre, Part 1)

This week on the podcast, Sharon Marcus introduces us to one of the most enduringly popular coming-of-age novels in all of English literature—Charlotte Brontë's 1847 Gothic thriller, Jane Eyre. 

Sharon Marcus is the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and editor of the Norton Library edition of Jane Eyre. Her research and teaching bring together literary theory, cultural and social history, and gender and sexuality studies.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Jane Eyre, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/janeeyre.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by Jane Eyre: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/01LKJVTZCkvRKnjwX5I2Nu?si=30b1cd2bd1804bf3.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.

Episode transcript at: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/janeeyre/part1/transcript.

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael Von Cannon producing, and today we present part one of our interview devoted to Charlotte Brontë’s great novel, Jane Eyre, with its editor Sharon Marcus. In this first episode, we'll learn who Charlotte Brontë was and how this great work came to be, the unforgettable characters that populate the novel, and the figure of the madwoman in the attic. Sharon Marcus is the Orlando Harriman professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of several books, including “Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England,” and more recently, “The Drama of Celebrity.” Welcome, Sharon Marcus! 

[Sharon:] Hi! Happy to be here. 

[Mark:] Well, we're really looking forward to talking about your edition of Jane Eyre. Maybe we can start by discussing how Jane Eyre came into being. Who was Charlotte Brontë?  

[Sharon:] So, Charlotte Brontë was a bit of a woman of mystery, in that underneath a pretty mousey, drab exterior, a very passionate, creative – sometimes tormented – person was inside, who expressed herself that way in her novels. And Jane Eyre is a great example of a character who does reflect something of the author who created her. Jane seems plain and little, but she's got a strong will, a temper, and a very, very big heart. Charlotte Brontë was the daughter of an Irish man who was an Anglican Minister living in the north of England. For a long time, people thought that Charlotte Brontë, uh, was very isolated from the main currents of her time, but a lot of scholars, including Juliet Parker and, um, Lucasta Miller and Claire Harmon, have shown us otherwise. That, you know, – and a great way to think about that is to imagine where Charlotte Brontë grew up. So, she grew up in a parsonage, which is the house that a minister lives in, in a town called Haworth. And she lived near a cemetery, because every church had a churchyard, and the churchyard had graves. And that presence of death from an early age was a big part of her life. Her mother died when she was young, her two older sisters died when she was young, and this was a common experience at the time, you know, and when she was born, 1816, the majority of children didn't live to be teenagers. Like, half – half the children who were born were dead by the time they were teenagers. And that was – her family exemplified that. After her mother died, an aunt came to live with them. That aunt turned out to be pivotal, because she left – she never married and she left a small inheritance to the Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, who – and they used it to devote themselves full-time to writing, briefly. And that's what gave us Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. So they're in this house next to the churchyard with the graves – kind of Gothic, kind of gloomy, kind of, you know, Halloween. But the house is at the top of a hill that leads directly – if you go down the hill to the main street of the town, you've got butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, stationers who sell books and paper and who let you mail things to London and receive magazines from London. So she grows up fully in touch with the currents of her time. 

[Mark:] So, was her education unusual for girls of that time? 

[Sharon:] It was typical, in that she didn't have any formal higher education, because no women did, uh, at that time. No women were admitted to Oxford or Cambridge. There weren't a lot of other colleges. There was one school in London that, right around the time Jane Eyre came out, started letting women take courses. But that, you know, that ship had sailed for Brontë, right? She was sent to a school – a notoriously punishing, Christian school, where – there's a good description of it in the novel. There's no food, everyone's freezing, it's very harshly disciplinary. So, um, did she get much of an education there? I – Not really. I think she was mostly self-educated. And I think that – what was unusual is that, as the daughter of a minister, she was in a very literate environment. There was a lot of attention to the Bible, but she was also – and this is not usual for the daughters of ministers or even the sons of ministers – allowed to read whatever she wanted. I think there might be some bright side there to not having a mother who was present, really keeping control over things. So, she and her three siblings, her brother Branwell, Emily, and Anne, they grow up – imagine if now you were allowed to play unlimited video games, watch any sci-fi fantasy TV series you wanted, and then do reenactments in your infinite spare time – that was how they lived. Except as writers. So they would read all these magazines coming in from London that were filled with news and poetry and stories, and they were – they were really up. Like, when you read Charlotte Brontë's childhood writing, her grasp of the Parliamentary debates and conflicts of the time rivals that of a specialist historian today. 

[Mark:] In your description of the Brontë sisters, and I think they've become almost mythical in how we conceive of them, was it mutual support? Was there rivalry? What were the dynamics of these famous siblings? 

[Sharon:] That's a really interesting question. I think there was some kind of healthy competition. What in Jane Eyre, Jane herself refers to as emulation. She hears a servant talking about girls who go to school and learn French and learn to play the piano and draw, and she says she feels a sense of emulation, which is a very, um, old-fashioned word meaning “competition,” where you want to imitate someone to become like them, not to defeat them. So I think that they were all sort of racing to see who could write the most in their ongoing fantasy sagas. I mean, they were basically writing serial versions of Game of Thrones together. Branwell and Charlotte worked in a pair and they had an imaginary world that they wrote about. And Emily and Anne worked in a pair. And so there were these different tales of Gondal and Angria. They would write a miniature script and make these books that now, I guess, we’d maybe call scenes? Um, there's not a lot of stories about any competition between them. I think they were – they were each other's world, so – and there wasn't really anything to compete for. I think the father was a bit distant and probably fairly equal in his affection for the kids. You never get a sense that anyone was anyone's favorite. There were certainly shifting relationships among them. As Branwell got older, he was an alcoholic and a gambler, and, you know, one of the other things that was there on that main street minutes away from the house were, of course, pubs and bars. And so he'd go get really drunk and then stagger home. And you can tell from the letters that the sisters started feeling very upset about this.  

[Mark:] One of the things, Sharon, that emerges from your introduction is how prolific Charlotte Brontë was as a young – even as a young girl, as you're describing, wrote constantly. So, getting to Jane Eyre, where does that fit into her life and to her career? 

[Sharon:] She starts out writing fantasy fiction and genre fiction, too, I would say, that is really not realistic. You know, there's just everything, like, pirates, kidnappings, there – there’s supernatural elements. Then she goes to Brussels to learn French so that she can earn more money as a governess, but I think also because she had a burning desire to see the world and leave England, which was pretty unusual for someone of her limited resources and class. And there, I think, she got exposed to new influences and she really wanted to publish. One thing that is so interesting about the Brontë sisters is, again, we tend to think of them as recluses and crazy geniuses, just sitting, you know, scribbling in their rooms. But they wanted to be published! The two younger ones self-published their first novels. Brontë really wanted to be published by an established press, so she writes a first novel called “The Professor” and it doesn't – it gets rejected. And eventually she sets it aside. And then she listens to the feedback she got from the editors who don't like “The Professor.” And she just – They said, you know, “Not enough happens.” So she decides to write a novel that has a little more incident, a little more mystery, a little more suspense. She picks up some tricks from Gothic novels, she throws in a madwoman, she gives us a byronic hero, there's a very strong romance plot, and a really strong voice. “The Professor” does not have a female, first-person narrator; Jane Eyre does. And everything clicks, but she still gets rejected over and over and over again. And she just wouldn't quit. She kept going down the hill to that stationer store and saying, “Okay, I can't afford a new covering that will show that this hasn't been returned to me 18 times, but I'm going to pay for the postage. I want you to send it to Smith and Elder.” So, the story goes that a reader at the press started the book, couldn't put it down. Gave it to his boss, Smith. He couldn't put it down. And they think, “We have a hit on our hands.” And they were right. The book came out in October, 1847, and by April, 1848, it was in a third edition. And that hardly ever happened back then. I mean, people would publish 3,000 copies of a book – you know, it was like academic books now. You publish 3,000 – print 3,000 copies and you're lucky if the print run sells out in the author's lifetime. So, it was an immediate success, in the sense that people were talking about it and reading it and saying, “this is an interesting, remarkable book.” 

[Mark:] So, why does Charlotte Brontë publish under a pseudonym? 

[Sharon:] You know, as a scholar, I'm going to say no one's absolutely certain. But, based on the intense research people have done, what I would say is: All the sisters published under pseudonyms. I think they were worried about their positions as minister’s daughters. It's a small town, everyone's talking, and the books they're writing are not decorous. Wuthering Heights has a lot of violence and sex and adultery and shenanigans. The book that Anne publishes is all about revealing the secrets of a marriage that is really unhappy and involves alcoholism and adultery. And Jane Eyre involves a would-be bigamist. Uh, and Jane, in general, is a difficult character who's not always exemplifying the Christian principles of meekness and humility. So, they're not writing books that exemplify virtues – which a lot of people did at the time. So I think they wanted to protect their father, first and foremost. But it's interesting, because when they pick their pseudonyms, they pick these, um – today I think we would say non-binary pseudonyms. They decide they're going to be Currer, Acton, and Ellis. So they—  

[Mark:] Very interesting, yeah.  

[Sharon:] —but they're clearly, they're not common names. So they also, I think, didn't want their publishers to be able to know if they were male or female. And the reason for that is that they felt that women were judged more harshly for depicting the seamy side of reality than men, and that a, right? – a publisher and editor might say, like, “Oh, who's this woman who's writing about all this, like, spicy, dirty laundry? No!”— [Mark:] Yeah. [Sharon:] — Whereas, if they thought maybe a man wrote it, they would be like, “Yes, what a rousing and vigorous author we have on our hands!” 

[Mark:] Sharon, one topic that comes from your introduction that you, uh, I was really fascinated by is your description of the madwoman in the attic, which has come to take on a lot of traction. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about that and how it applies to Jane Eyre.  

[Sharon:] In the book, as – Jane spends the first part of the book as a child, being rebellious, going to school, having a hard time learning to get a little more tractable, and – and in part of being more tractable, she gets a job as a governess. So there she is in this big house – big, fancy house. The man of the house isn't there, and every time something happens that makes Jane a little unhappy or uneasy or restless, she hears the sound of a laugh – a low, mirthless laugh coming from up in the attic. Sometimes she hears it below her. So there's a famous scene where she goes up on the roof and looks out at the big sky and says, “I wish I had room to roam. I wish I could exercise my faculties more.” And she makes a very impassioned plea for women to have more liberty, and then there's a paragraph break and it says, “and sometimes when I was up there I heard Grace Poole laugh.” But Grace Poole doesn't just laugh, Grace Poole comes out of her room and tries to burn the man of the house in his bed. She stabs people. She bites people. The night before Jane's wedding – I'm not gonna say to whom… [Laughter] – goes up in Jane's room and rips her bridal veil in half. So she's a pretty terrifying figure, even before we meet her. And, in fact, one of the things that makes her so terrifying for so long is we don't meet her. She's this shadowy presence – We don't even know if she's real or she's a ghost. She seems to be really different in these nocturnal maraudings than the Grace Poole we see during the day. So “what does Grace Poole stand for?” has been a big question. So, I think, you know, it's the madwoman in the attic. You just hear the phrase and you're like, “Oh, right. The things we shut up and repress but they find their way out.” And there's a fear we have of others’ desires and rage and terror, that we also have sometimes about our shadowy selves, that the madwoman in the attic represents. So, I think just on a – on a gut level, it's an amazing device, because it's mysterious and packs a punch. You can't not react to the phrase, and you certainly can't not react to the things that the madwoman does in the book. From a literary interpretation point of view, as people teaching this novel, as students reading it and trying to learn to analyze a novel, it's also fascinating because there's so many different ways to interpret the madwoman in the attic. We can interpret her as Jane’s double – she expresses all the things that Jane suppresses. For example, discontent with the very idea of being married at all. Oh, we think Jane wants to go into this marriage, and in the book itself, there – the marriage that the madwoman interrupts is one that Jane very much wants – but maybe Jane's a little more ambivalent about it. We think that Jane has gotten a lid on all the rebellious, fiery outbursts that she has as a child. But maybe the madwoman is stalking Thornfield, expressing all the things that Jane has learned that as a mature adult you don't. And then, starting in the 1980s with the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, people started noticing that this is also very much a novel about whiteness and British Empire, and that Jane is very – Jane is a feminist but she's very much what we would see as a kind of imperialist feminist. When she wants to express her belief that women have souls, she says, “You know, I don't think the way people who are Muslim think. I'm a Christian woman, and I believe I have a soul.” And when she wants to imagine herself having more power, she's like, “I'm going to go free the slaves from the sultan's harem.” So there's a lot of orientalism and imperialism ideas of white, British, Christians as having a superior belief in the equality of men and women, which, you know, historically wasn't true. [Laughter] The British were pretty committed as a society to inequality between men and women. And there we can see the madwoman in the attic, who is often depicted as darker-skinned and savage and animalistic – using a lot of the language that was used for when British imperialists encountered people from what we now call the global south. There you can see that maybe the madwoman in the attic isn't just Jane’s double – maybe she's her other. The person that she depicts as less than human so she can feel more securely human.  

[Mark:] Would that figure have been treated differently at the time of Jane Eyre’s original publication versus how we talk about it now in the 21st century? Has it manifested itself in somewhat of a different way? 

[Sharon:] Well, no one writing about the book when it came out compared Jane to an imperialist. I think their imperialism was so taken for granted that nobody really even flagged the language of savagery, the racialized terms that are used to describe the madwoman. And people did, at the time, flag her feminism, but what they mostly reacted to was the – what they mostly reacted to was the somewhat taboo nature of Jane's feminism. That she has feelings that aren't really pretty feelings, and women weren't supposed to so openly express unpretty feelings. And so, in that sense, they certainly would agree that the madwoman is a madwoman and is bad and dangerous. I think that it's only in the 1980s and after with the rise of critical race theory and black feminist theory and various – and understandings that orientalism as a discourse was also very gendered, and an awareness of the limits of white feminism that doesn't take race into account, that people began to see that this book that we always thought was a feminist manifesto wasn't necessarily a manifesto for whiteness, but took whiteness for granted as the superior trait. 

[Mark:] And, final question about this, do we see a version of the madwoman in the attic in other feminist literature? And I'm asking this because, of course, the iconic work of literary criticism called “Madwoman in the Attic.” So is there something iconic about this that we keep coming back to or that other writers revisited? 

[Sharon:] Absolutely. If you think about a book like, uh, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, it's about someone confined to her room as part of a rest cure, because people thought, “oh, women will feel so much better if we imprison them in their bedrooms.” [Laughter] And she starts seeing all these figures in the wallpaper. So she's kind of the madwoman in the attic, the figures are kind of the madwoman in the attic – The sense that there's this alternate self who's both dangerous and generative is a feminist trope. 

[Mark:] With the time that we have left, Sharon, I'm wondering if we can go through some of the major characters and you can give us a guide of what to look for and perhaps how to approach these figures. And let's start with Jane Eyre. What do we need to know about her? 

[Sharon:] So, one thing we need to know about Jane is we meet her as a child, and over the course of the novel, she goes from being 10 to being 18-20 and she changes a lot. So as you read the novel I would say, ask yourself how she's changing. And if you want to bump that up to a one more notch of literary critical sophistication, keep in mind that there's really at least two Janes in this novel – and I'm not talking about young Jane and old Jane. I'm talking about narrator Jane and character Jane. Because the whole novel, we learn at the end, is being narrated when she's about 30. So this is, uh, everything's being reflected through the sensibility of someone who's considerably older than Jane is, even at the end of the book. And, you know, generally speaking, even today I think people feel that a 30-year-old is much more mature than a 20-year-old. Um, I know 30-year-olds think so. [Laughter] They never want to hang out with 20-year-olds. [Laughter] Um, so as you read, ask yourself, how is the narrator commenting on the character and what does that tell us about how the character’s grown? And, I guess, the main things I would say we have to keep in mind about Jane is, you know, don't judge a book by its cover, right? She seems plain and little and small, but she's really a – she's a firecracker and she's really smart and she's not at all limited in her desires or her intellect. She's – she's really a testimony to how a woman doesn't have to be beautiful to be worthy of literary interest, which is still kind of a radical idea. 

[Mark:] And you refer to Jane's growth in the context of a bildungsroman, where the novel is sort of unapologetically investigating her coming of age.  

[Sharon:] Yes.  

[Mark:] So, does she come of age in sort of a traditional mean, through life experience and formal education and relationships? 

[Sharon:] Yes, and no. Because, of course, as a female character she doesn't have a huge range of experience. She doesn't have a lot of options for her education. She has very limited choices when it comes to work. But, I think the thing that Jane Eyre does as a bildungsroman that's really distinctive, is that we start out thinking Jane is a character who really wants liberty – unrestrained freedom. She's going to speak out, speak her mind, denounce injustice. And then it seems like there's going to be this fairy tale outcome where she'll get exactly what she desires. Again, no spoilers, so I'm not gonna say about what that is. [Mark:] Of course. [Sharon:] What she has to learn – and this comes at the center of the book and it's her pivotal moment as a, as someone who's growing up – is that instead of liberty, which is unrestrained freedom, she's going to have to go for independence, which is being able to assert herself but in a way that recognizes the claims of others, the claims of society. So, the pivotal moment in the book comes when she says, “I'm going to respect the law. I'm not going to follow my heart – not because I think my heart is wrong or bad, but because I believe in social conventions.” And that's not how we usually think of Jane Eyre. We think of Jane Eyre as defying social conventions. So, in the first part of Jane Eyre, she tells her aunt how unfair she is and she says, “Speak I must!” And that's the Jane that we kind of love. You know, the one who's just going to be out there. But when, in the center of the book, she has to make this really hard decision that represents her maturity, she says, “I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad”— 

[Mark:] Yeah. [Sharon:] —as she is. And then she says, “There I plant my foot.” I think if you want to have a good sense of Jane as a character, that phrase “there I plant my foot” is great. It's all, you know, monosyllables, really simple words. It's literally grounded; it's physical; it's earthy. And she – at the end of the day she's not a dreamer, she's not, uh, she's not Milton’s Satan, like a glorious rebel. She's trying to figure out how to be herself in the real world. And that's what makes her so fascinating. 

[Mark:] Yes, excellent. Okay, Edward Rochester. 

[Sharon:] So, Edward Rochester. Everybody calls him Rochester, I'm gonna call him Edward— [Laughter] [Mark:] Yeah, right. [Sharon:]—because you call characters by their first name.  

[Mark:] There you go.  

[Sharon:] So, Edward. You know, brooding, mysterious, comes into the novel riding up on a horse in the moonlight. Uh, whimsical, capricious, does – you know, abruptly changes the subject, pays close attention then doesn't pay attention at all. Like, typical seductive behavior, supposedly. If you read, you know, manuals about how to pick up women they'll always say like, “Yeah, don't, you know, don't be too nice.” But, of course, underneath it all, a real teddy bear and kind of vulnerable and has been disappointed in life and is trying to start over. Um, and he is willing to break the rules. And, of course, that's part of his appeal, but it's also what Jane has to learn to navigate. 

[Mark:] St. John. 

[Sharon:] Oh my God, him. [Laughter] So, he's the kind of upright, stern, totally disciplined – if this novel were written now, he would probably be a marine, you know? He's like really buttoned up tight, he's got all his impulses under control, he's got a plan, he's sticking to it, and he'll bring other people along for the ride but he is not interested in what other people want at all. And so, that's something, interestingly, Jane presents is actually something that might sweep her up into his path, and she has to learn how she's going to deal with a will that is even stronger than her own. 

[Mark:] Mm! [Sharon:] But no fun. He's really not a fun character. [Laughter]  

[Mark:] Tell me about, uh, Adele.  

[Sharon:] So, when Jane gets a job as a governess in this big house with a madwoman in the attic, she has one student – an eight-year-old named Adele. Um, Adele, it turns out, holds quite a bit of a key to Rochester's character. She's his “ward.” I'm putting that in air quotes – I'm not going to give more details because that's actually one of the really interesting parts of the novel, where Rochester – Edward, see I keep doing it – where Edward, um, confesses to Jane about his past. This is one of the things that, um, reviewers were very shocked by, that a 35-year-old man would be talking to the 18-year-old governess about his past – his past loves – uh, outside of marriage – and in marriage! And it's what made many of them think the novel was written by a man. They were like, no woman would write a scene like this. Adele is kind of like a little doll. She's very French, it's very stereotype, she cares a lot about her frocks and dancing and getting attention and being on display, and she's a depiction in the novel, I think, of very stereotypical femininity that Brontë wants us to dismiss. But it's significant that over the course of the novel, Adele also changes. And so I think that's Brontë saying none of this stuff is fixed. It's all subject to education and convention, and if you decide you don't want women to be little dolls, they don't have to be. 

[Mark:] Well, we have other characters which we might put off to the next episode when we have you back, Sharon. But maybe we can end with Helen Burns. 

[Sharon:] Helen Burns is a friend that Jane makes at school. And I think this is the first time in Jane's life that she has made a friend, because before this she was living with cousins as an orphan in her, in her aunt's household – cousins who really ostracize her and even abuse her. Helen, you know, Helen seems like she might be a bit of an angel character, but she's very firm about the fact that she's not angelic. But she does represent for Jane, and to Jane, that you can be a little more self-controlled and, uh, not always be having tantrums and fits and outbursts and just, like, chill. [Laughter] Take a step back. So, I think Helen is an interesting example of, sort of, horizontal peer learning of maturity in the novel. Like, in the novel, you don't always – in this novel, Jane doesn't always learn to be a grown-up from other grown-ups. She learns to be a grown-up from her friend, Helen. 

[Mark:] That's a great run through. Sharon Marcus, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast, and we look forward to having you back! 

[Sharon:] Thank you! 

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of Charlotte Brontë's great novel, Jane Eyre, edited by Sharon Marcus, is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description of this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles. 

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