In construction, on the other hand, she is admittedly inferior to her predecessors, since her plots are melodramatic, and her characterisation is disturbed by a somewhat morbid analysis of unusual passion. Her feminine ideal has no parallel in the “sensibility” of Fanny Burney or the sprightly “calm” of Jane Austen. Its most distinguishing characteristic is, naturally, revealed in the attitude assumed towards man. The hero, the ideal lover, is always “the Master” of the heroine. Jane Eyre being a governess and Lucy Snowe a pupil, we might perhaps miss the full significance of the phrase; but even the strong-minded Shirley refuses Sir Philip Nunnely, because, among other reasons, “he is very amiable—very excellent—truly estimable, but not my master; not in one point. I could not trust myself with his happiness: I would not undertake the keeping of it for thousands; I will accept no hand that cannot hold me in check.”
Jane Austen once playfully accused herself of having dared to draw a heroine who had fallen in love without first having ascertained the gentleman’s feeling. This is the normal achievement—in Charlotte Brontë—not only of heroines, but of all women. It is, of course, almost inevitable that since, in her work (as in those of her sister-authors) we see everything through the minds of the women characters, we should learn the state of their heart first; but, in most cases at least, it is certain that we are in as much doubt as the heroine herself concerning the man’s feelings, and it is fairly obvious that often he has actually not made up his mind. The women in Charlotte Brontë, in fact, are what we now call “doormats.” They delight in serving the Beloved; they expect him to be a superior being, with more control over his emotions; less dependent on emotion or even on domestic comfort, appropriately concerned with matters not suited to feminine intellects, and accustomed to “keep his own counsel” about the important decisions of life.
It is her achievement to have secured our enthusiastic devotion to “females” so thoroughly Early Victorian; for the heroines of Charlotte Brontë remain some of the most striking figures in fiction. They are really heroic, and, while glorying in their self-imposed limitations, become vital by their intensity and depth. Jane Austen once quietly demonstrated the natural “constancy” of women; Charlotte Brontë paints this virtue in fiery colours across all her work. Her incidental, but most marked, preference for plain heroines—inspired, apparently, by passionate jealousy of popular beauty—serves to emphasise the abnormal capacity for passion and fidelity which, in her judgment, the power of easily exciting general admiration apparently tends to diminish.
A contemporary reviewer in the Quarterly—probably Lockhart—found this type of women disgustingly sly. The whole of Jane Eyre, indeed, fills him with holy horror, which is genuine enough, though expressed with most ungentlemanly virulence, and prefaced with the extraordinary suggestion that “Jane Eyre is merely another Pamela (!) ... a small, plain, odd creature, who has been brought up dry upon school learning, and somewhat stunted accordingly in mind and body, and who is thrown upon the world as ignorant of its ways, and as destitute of its friendships, as a shipwrecked mariner upon a strange coast.” Rochester, on the other hand, he finds “captious and Turklike ... a strange brute, somewhat in the Squire Western style of absolute and capricious eccentricity.” The book is guilty of the “highest moral offence a novel-writer can commit, that of making an unworthy character interesting in the eyes of the reader. Mr. Rochester is a man who deliberately and secretly seeks to violate the laws both of God and man, and yet we will be bound half our lady writers are enchanted with him for a model of generosity and honour.”
We cannot, to-day, detect the “pedantry, stupidity, or gross vulgarity” of the novel; nor do we distinguish so sharply between the sly governess—“this housemaid beau ideal of the arts of coquetry”—determined to catch Rochester, and the “noble, high-souled woman” who rejects his dishonourable proposals. The fact seems to be that masculine critics of those days regarded the expression of emotion as indelicate in woman. Was it this criticism, or merely her knowledge of men, that inspired that bitter passage in Shirley:
“A lover masculine if disappointed can speak and urge explanation; a lover feminine can say nothing; if she did, the result would be shame and anguish, inward remorse for self-treachery. Nature would brand such demonstration as a rebellion against her instincts, and would vindictively repay it afterwards by the thunderbolt of self-contempt smiting suddenly in secret. Take the matter as you find it; ask no question; utter no remonstrance: it is your best wisdom. You expected bread, and you have got a stone; break your teeth on it, and don’t shriek because the nerves are martyrised: do not doubt that your mental stomach—if you have such a thing—is strong as an ostrich’s: the stone will digest. You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind; in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob.”
Men could not conceive that any lady who was conscious of love had “really nice feelings” about it. Moreover, Jane Eyre is “a mere heathen ... no Christian grace is perceptible upon her.” She upheld women’s rights, which is “ungrateful” to God. “There is throughout a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God’s appointment.” Wherefore the “plain, odd woman, destitute of all the conventional features of feminine attraction,” is not made interesting, but remains “a being totally uncongenial to our feelings from beginning to end ... a decidedly vulgar-minded woman—one whom we should not care for as an acquaintance, whom we should not seek as a friend, whom we should not desire for a relation, and whom we should most scrupulously avoid for a governess.”
This outspoken, and unsympathetic, criticism is yet eminently instructive. It shows us all that Charlotte Brontë accomplished for the first time; and reveals the full force of prejudice against which she was, more or less consciously, in revolt.
It remains only to note that in the matter of style her critics at once recognised her power. “It is impossible not to be spellbound with the freedom of the touch. It would be mere hackneyed courtesy to call it ‘fine writing.’ It bears no impress of being written at all, but is poured out rather in the heat and flurry of an instinct which flows ungovernably on to its object, indifferent by what means it reaches it, and unconscious too.”
Passing to modern criticism, we find one writer declaring that Rochester’s character “belongs to the realm of the railway bookstall shilling novel,” while to another it seems “of all her creations the most wonderful ... from her own inmost nobility of temper and depth of suffering she moulded a man, reversing the marvels of God’s creation.”