Why read? No, really. Why should I spend hours of my precious time reading some dusty 150-year-old book from an age long gone? Could Jane Eyre deliver something more than the thousand gothic thrillers we find on Netflix? Something different than the epoch dramas colorfully bursting out of the same streaming service? I say it can and it does. Because Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is Great Literature. It is more than a good book which delivers a good entertaining story for the dark season. It offers more than simple gratuitous entertainment, forgotten as soon as the book is closed. When read with an open mind, Jane Eyre is a guidebook on how to be authentic in a world full of hardship and how to hold the upper hand in a relationship which is anything else but predestined. 

what is Jane Eyre “about”?

Put simply, Jane Eyre is about a lot of things. Social classes, morality, religion, life of an educated young woman in Victorian society, it is a rise against hypocrisy, a call to honesty and authenticity. “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day”, the story starts. Pretty soon we realize that adult Jane is telling the story of her life and “that day” lays the foundation of her entire development. The story starts at Gateshead, where Jane, an orphan, is living with her cruel aunt and cousins. Jane is a child full of passion who cannot stand injustice, and this is what causes the rage of her aunt, who eventually sends Jane to Lowood, a strict school for girls. At Lowood Jane has a hard life but learns to control her passion and meets Helen Burns, who, with her stoicism and optimism, has a great influence on Jane’s own character development. Years later, Jane leaves Lowood for Thornfield, where she is to be the governess of Adele, Mr. Rochester’s ward. Mr. Rochester is an unpleasant and gruff rich man, but a relationship of love and mutual respect and admiration develops between the two. When Mr. Rochester’s past comes to light, Jane faces her greatest challenge yet and the reader joins Jane on a journey of forgiveness and self-realization. 

how to be in control

One of my favourite scenes of the book is when Jane and Mr. Rochester meet. The book is full of references to fairy tales and folklore, but this scene is nothing else but fairy tale. Mr. Rochester (though at this point Jane doesn’t know yet it’s him) appears from a distance on his horse and has his black dog by his side. The dog is “a lion-like creature with long hair and a huge head and strange pretercanine eyes”. The horse reminds Jane of “a North-England spirit which, in the form of a horse, mule or a large dog, haunted solitary ways”.  

But this is not the kind of fairy tale to which Disney has got us used. This is, I think, the exact moment when Brontë rises against convention and gives her heroine the power. The man on the horse has an accident and falls. Jane, humble and respectful, always addresses Mr. Rochester with “sir”, but without her help, Mr. Rochester would have been left stranded. And this is only the first time when he is in dire need of her help. Her humbleness and her being almost invisible while offering much-needed help allows Mr. Rochester to maintain his statute as being, at least apparently, in command. He gives her orders in his rude way of speaking and, as she often says, she “obeys”. But Jane’s decision to obey is her own. “If even this stranger had smiled and been good-humoured to me when I addressed him; if he had put off my offer for assistance gaily and with thanks, I should have gone on my way… but the frown, the roughness of the traveller set me at my ease”. 

This is how the relationship between Jane and Mr. Rochester starts. In the point where he is completely dependent on her, even though he acts as giving commands. In the point where the decision to help him or not is in Jane’s hands. And this is how it will stay for the rest of their love story. Mr. Rochester will try to force things on Jane, he will accept her help with grumbles and criticism, he will try to romanticize their story beyond the reality of it. But she will always set limits, she will always have it her way, she will never let him forget who she is. And this is how, counterintuitively maybe, she stays in control. Both of herself, and of the relationship. 

know when to say no

‘It would not be wicked to love me’ 

‘It would to obey you’ 

Someone who is in control knows that she can’t say yes to everything, can’t “obey” mindlessly. And Jane knows when to say no. Jane initially accepts Mr. Rochester marriage proposal, but has a change of heart when Mr. Rochester’s past comes to light. She could say yes to love, but that would mean going against her principles. The situation is reversed later, when Jane meets St. John Rivers, a cleric with strict principles of morality. She rejects his marriage proposal not because it would go against her principles, but because it would go against herself. 

stay true to yourself

I was determined to show him divers rugged points in my character before the ensuing four weeks elapsed: he should know fully what sort of bargain he had made, while there was time to rescind it. 

The weeks of blissful happiness after Jane accepts Mr. Rochester’s marriage proposal are actually not so blissful. Jane is determined to keep him “cross and crusty” because she knows that her own nature would not allow her to behave like a love-stricken, mindless, bride. Mr. Rochester intends to lavish riches on her, put her in a carriage and take her through Europe, while enjoying the tranquility of love with “a very angel as his comforter”. But Jane is not one to be passive. “I am not an angel”, she laughs at him. She sees through his idyllic image of love which would turn her into a mere object at his side and rejects it. If Jane Eyre is to turn into Jane Rochester, she doesn’t want to be anything else than what she is: a governess in a plain dress, earning her rightful keep.  

take the initiative, if risky

I almost expected a rebuff for this hardly well-timed question, but, on the contrary, waking out of his scowling abstraction, he turned his eyes towards me, and the shade seemed to clear off his brow. 

The thread that runs below the story in Jane Eyre is that Jane lives in a society where women have their place. They’re supposed to be noble, humble, puritanical. Angels, in one word. At Lowood, Jane learns to keep an appearance, but at her core she is fiery, passionate, outspoken. When Mr. Rochester tells Jane of his adventures with Celine Varens, she is curious and wants to know the end of the story. The direct question she addresses him tears him away from his contemplation of Thornfield and her curiosity is satisfied. Yet this would not have been very “ladylike” behaviour, especially considering the subject of their conversation. In a later scene with St. John, Jane guesses his hidden affection for Rosamund and encourages him to talk to her about his feelings. St. John speaks openly to Jane about his feelings, something he would have never done if she hadn’t shown such “audacity”.  

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In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf criticizes Charlotte Brontë for letting her anger at an unjust, patriarchal society shine through Jane Eyre. And indeed, Brontë does that. Jane is angry, burns red hot throughout the story, but learns to control her fury and repurpose it into a life lived by principle and law. Because she is angry at the institution of marriage and how men use it, she says no to marriage twice. Because she is angry at being caged into the fantasies of a man of power, she stays true to herself. Because she is angry at how women are “supposed” to behave, she takes risky initiatives. And this gives her ultimately the power, this puts her in control of her relationships with men. I don’t know any Netflix drama which does that, do you?