Gender, Autobiography, and Syphilis in Jane Eyre

The Puzzle of the Title Page

Published in 1847, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is structured like a puzzle. The title page reads Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, but the work is credited to Currer Bell, an apparently male pseudonym. The author's involvement with the text is therefore signposted from the moment we open the book — what does it mean for a work to be described as an "autobiography" but ascribed to a different writer? Obviously an autobiography can be ghost-written — it is unlikely that most celebrities who publish an autobiography have written these books without assistance — but a ghost-writer is not normally credited on the title page, which would more naturally read The Autobiography of Jane Eyre. Instead, the author is asking us to read the work as a fictional autobiography of a woman, written apparently by a man.

Now that we know the author is Charlotte Brontë, it is important to recall that the initial publication of the book presented a seeming act of ventriloquism. It is worth taking an overview of the story presented in Jane Eyre in order to interpret what it is saying about gender. In the conclusion we will return to the question of what the pseudonym Currer Bell signifies, but first we must understand what kind of female autobiography Brontë is writing.

Jane's Childhood and the Imagery of Confinement

Although the title page claims the genre of the work will be autobiography, the novel does not begin in any way that an autobiography normally does. The book's first sentence is "there was no possibility of taking a walk that day" (Brontë I). The story begins seemingly in the middle of action already underway, and we only gradually learn that Jane is a ten-year-old orphan living with her maternal uncle. Jane is presented as literate, and her choice of reading material seems to indicate something significant about her character — she admits to reading Bewick's History of British Birds, which sounds like a very Victorian way of signaling a desire for flight. Her interest in the book lies mostly in its catalogues of exotic far-off regions like "Nova Zembla," making it sound as though Jane would rather be anywhere but where she is (Brontë I).

Soon enough Jane uses her autobiography to express what she sees as the chief sentiments that afflicted her ten-year-old self, although she employs language that no ten-year-old would actually use. By the second chapter, Jane describes her uncle's house in terms that underscore the kind of confinement that would make a young girl dream of flying like a bird. It is worth recalling that Jane's last name, "Eyre," sounds like "air," and seems to point again to this desire for freedom. The description of the uncle's house makes it clear that this is a caged bird, as Jane puts it: "no jail was ever more secure… My blood was still warm; the mood of the revolted slave was still bracing me with its bitter vigour" (Brontë II). The images Brontë uses to establish Jane's personality as a child — birds desiring to fly free, confinement in jail, slavery — make it clear that, even at the age of ten, we are meant to understand this as a story of asserting independence and freedom.

Jane makes an appealing heroine from the outset because readers can identify with her insistence on making her own way in the world after her parents have died of an infectious disease. This point is underscored when Jane leaves her uncle's house for school and an epidemic of the same disease strikes the school but spares her. Jane ultimately rejects the school as too confining and decides to take a job as a governess.

It is at this point that Jane takes up residence in Thornfield Hall, where she eventually meets her mysterious employer, Mr. Rochester. The establishment of Rochester as the other central character in the novel is handled ambiguously by Brontë. On the one hand, his introduction is clearly designed to present a Byronic romantic hero, the person with whom Jane might fall in love and marry. However, Brontë undercuts his actual entrance with irony:

Rochester's Introduction and the Romantic Hero Undercut

It was exactly one form of Bessie's Gytrash — a lion-like creature with long hair and a huge head: it passed me, however, quietly enough; not staying to look up, with strange pretercanine eyes, in my face, as I half expected it would. The horse followed — a tall steed, and on its back a rider. The man, the human being, broke the spell at once. Nothing ever rode the Gytrash: it was always alone; and goblins, to my notions, though they might tenant the dumb carcasses of beasts, could scarce covet shelter in the commonplace human form. No Gytrash was this — only a traveller taking the short cut to Millcote. He passed, and I went on; a few steps, and I turned: a sliding sound and an exclamation of "What the deuce is to do now?" and a clattering tumble arrested my attention. Man and horse were down; they had slipped on the sheet of ice which glazed the causeway. (Brontë XII)

Rochester enters the book at first like a supernatural presence — his horse resembles a mythical creature too fierce to have a rider — but then Jane sees the man on its back and realizes it is just an ordinary traveler on horseback. Immediately after this dramatic entrance, however, Rochester and his horse both slip on the ice, and Rochester swears. This is deliberate on Brontë's part: the size of Thornfield Hall and its staff indicate that the owner is a formidable presence, yet Jane sees him humanized at the precise moment she sees him romanticized.

The relationship between Jane and Rochester — which will eventually end in marriage — mirrors precisely this first meeting, in its descent from romantic and terrifying idealization to vulnerable humanity. What transpires between them is almost like a therapy session, in which Jane tries to figure out Rochester's secret. That secret is configured in the book as an almost supernatural force within Thornfield Hall:

This was a demoniac laugh — low, suppressed, and deep — uttered, as it seemed, at the very keyhole of my chamber door. The head of my bed was near the door, and I thought at first the goblin-laugher stood at my bedside — or rather, crouched by my pillow. (Brontë XV)