Is Charlotte Brontë’s Edward Rochester, the darkly sardonic hero of Jane Eyre, really a woman in disguise?
Was Sir Leslie Stephen’s 1877 Cornhill Magazine review of Jane Eyre which first suggested it, meant to outrage readers? He argues that Rochester, that archetypical Byronic hero loved by so many female readers, is, in reality, a ‘spirited sister of Shirley’s (Charlotte Brontë’s eponymous heroine from her novel of 1849) though he does his very best to be a man, and even an unusually masculine specimen of his sex.’
It certainly gave me a shock. Rochester a female? He of the flashing eyes, the furrowed brow, the angry strides, the dominating hero of one of my favourite novels? Surely not. And then I remembered Tim, a student in my adult ‘A’ level English evening class when we were studying Jane Eyre. I asked my students what they thought of Rochester and the women made comments like ‘powerful’, ‘dominant’, ‘alpha male’, and ‘what more could one ask of a hero?’ .
Tim, however, disagreed. ‘I think he’s an absolute pillock!’ he growled. There was a stunned gasp.
(Lord Byron, Charlotte Brontë’s original inspiration for Mr Rochester?)
So who was Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904)? He is perhaps best remembered as editor of the first Dictionary of National Biography. He was also father of the writer Virginia Woolf and her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, both part of the Bloomsbury Group who revolted against Victorian sexual, social and artistic mores.
Stephen obviously also enjoyed being controversial, as we can see from his debunking of Rochester’s masculine identity. He thought that Charlotte Brontë meant Rochester to be a sophisticated man of the world, one who has experienced its dark side, but ‘he really knows just as little of the world as (Jane) does…. He is supposed to be specially simple and masculine, and yet he is as self-conscious as a young lady on her first appearance in society, and can do nothing but discourse about his feelings and his looks…’ The moment I read this, I could see that he was right; Rochester does go on about his ugliness.
Stephen continues, ‘Set him beside any man’s character of a man, and one feels at once that he has no real solidity… He has, of course, strong nerves and muscles, but they are articles which can be supplied in unlimited quantities with little expense to the imagination.’
Could it be that Stephen himself was disconcerted to discover what women really wanted in a hero – the ability to talk about his emotions, say – however unrealistic that might be. One might argue that Charlotte’s temerity in daring to create a Rochester who was attractive to women readers was more than equalled by male authors, like Charles Dickens, creating female characters – Dora Copperfield in David Copperfield springs to mind – who conformed to their own fantasies of a sweet, ignorant and desirably passive female.
Reading Woman from The Ladies’ Pocket Book
Stephen was also appalled by Rochester’s ‘attempt to entrap Jane into a bigamous connection by concealing his wife’s existence,’ it is a ‘piece of treachery for which it is hard to forgive him.’ Rochester, he adds, is ‘a knave for trying to entrap a defenceless girl by a mock ceremony.’
What is interesting here is that I don’t think that Charlotte herself saw it the same way. She thought that the young Rochester being deliberately trapped into marriage with a dangerously unstable woman was far more immoral. His marriage was invalid in the eyes of God.
Even now, 170 years after it was published, Jane Eyre still has the power to divide opinion.
Photos of Charlotte Brontë, Lord Byron and Sir Leslie Stephen courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
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