While an artist uses a variety of colors and brushes to create a portrait, Charlotte Bronte used contrasting characters and their vivid personalities to create a masterpiece of her own. In her novel Jane Eyre, Bronte uses narration and her characters to portray the struggle between a society’s Victorian realism and the people’s repressed urges of Romanticism.
In order to discern between the Victorian and Romantic themes, Bronte selects certain characters to portray the perfect stereotype of each theme. Mademoiselle Celine Varens is the model of the Romantic attitude. Varens a “French opera-dancer” found herself as the “grande passion” of Mr. Rochester. The amour between Rochester and Varens started in a “complete establishment of servants, a carriage, cashmere, diamonds, dentells, etc.” and ended with Rochester “finding her out” with another man. Varens’ irrationality did not only affect Rochester, but also her child: “she abandoned her child and ran away with a musician or singer.” Celine Varens, a woman in a daring profession, led a life of passion, freedom and irresponsibility. Her life was ballad of adventure idolized by Romantics but frowned upon by society. Mrs. Reed is the perfect representative of Victorian realism. She had all the visual attributes found in a Victorian styled lady. She possessed gentry as the mistress of Gateshead Hall and her material wealth was made obvious by the luxuries found in her home –“a bed supported on massive pillows of mahogany, hung with curtains of damask”—and in her children “in their Muslim frocks and scarlet sashes.” Besides wealth and gentility, Mrs. Reed also maintained Victorian characteristics of insularity and censoriousness.
“Eliza, John and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing room: she lay reclined on the sofa by the fireplace and her darlings about her…”
Mrs. Reed literally maintains insularity – snobbishly creating an island of her and her children, detaching themselves from Jane. Lastly Mrs. Reed exercised censoriousness towards Jane on a continual basis until Jane was left with “a habitual mood of humiliation, self doubt, forlorn depression.” Jane’s state is the result of the Victorian need of moral severity, which was expressed by blame and disapproval. Bronte uses Varens and Reed to paint the contrast between the Romantics controlled by emotion, freedom and imagination and the Victorians who exhibit middle-class stuffiness and pompous conservatism.
But any author can capture the essence of two societies and illustrate the opposites in two opposing characters. Bronte’s talent lies in her ability to place the two contrasting attitudes in one person, allowing a conflict to grow, until a civil war is raging in a single person’s mind. Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester were to be Bronte’s vessels of such confusion. Jane Eyre was a child of Romantic desires. As a little girl she often acted upon deeply irrational and emotional impulses. These tendencies were very obvious to those around her. Helen, a schoolmate, tells Jane: “Hush Jane! You think too much of the love of human beings, you are too impulsive, too vehement.” Jane soon learned that emotions, rashness, and imaginative fancies were considered as faults by society. She learned that such tendencies must be erased or at least repressed. For a time, Jane successfully repressed such desires. “…School rulers, school duties, school habits and notions…such was what I knew of my existence.” Jane Eyre soon became the model governess. By being confined to Lowood School for eight years, Jane learned to be docile, humble, and modest woman and lived a quiet moral life. But this mundane existence was not enough for the hidden Romantic longings locked deep in her soul. “I desire liberty, for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer.” Although Lowood gave Jane the virtues expected by society, the same place was suffocating to Jane’s spirit who needed more than moral primness. The oppression she felt on her soul caused Jane to leave Lowood in search of freedom.
Mr. Rochester by surface was the typical Victorian gentleman. He was born of good name and owner of the Thornfield estate. He had inherited a wealth from his father, which he used to spoil his little ward Adele. Mr. Rochester has all the upper-class privileges expected: social status, luxuries and snobiness, traits of well to do Victorian characters. But unlike his counterparts such as Mrs. Reed he lacks the deep conviction of moral and conservatism. In fact he has done many things that would make Mrs. Reed blush. “I sought my ideal of a woman amongst English ladies, French countesses, Italian signoras, and German grafinnien. I could not find her.” Underneath all the Victorian pageantry, Rochester has simple needs and desires that need to be satisfied. He looked for companionship in ladies similar to that of his own prestigious ranking, but could find no one to satisfy his “dream.” Romantic tendencies cause Rochester to desperately look for love in the farthest corners of the earth. “For ten long years I roved about living in one capital then another; sometimes in St. Petersbourg; oftener in Paris.” Rochester’s aimless travels left him in the ties of nasty love affairs with mistresses; relationships starting with hope and ending in disappointment (“I now hate the recollection of the time I passed with Celine, Giacinta, and Clara.”). . Regardless of heartbreak, Rochester still searches for his female companion to quench his desires.
Jane’s search for freedom and Rochester’s search for any indication of a “realisation of [his] dream” led these two wanderers to each other.
“I never met your likeness Jane, you seem to submit, and you master me—a sense of pliancy and while I am twining the soft silken shein round my finger it sends a thrill up my arm to my heart. I am influenced—conquered; and the influence is sweeter than I can express…”
Somehow Jane, a repressed Romantic, and Rochester, a dream seeking Victorian, find themselves deeply in love. Rochester finally found his treasure in his little governess. Under the façade of docility and modesty Jane hides a feisty spirit. Rochester says that Jane “seems to submit” but it is really himself who is the “conquered.” Jane and Rochester’s mild differences but underlying force to satisfy their soul’s longings make them the missing components to each other.
Humanity has produced many writers, artists and musicians, but only select individuals become masters of their art. Bronte proved in Jane Eyre that she is a master of literature. She was able to bottle two conflicting attitudes of society into the characters of her novel. Through personalities like Mrs. Reed and Celine Varens, readers were able to understand Victorian realism and the Romantic age. As the novel developed, it led readers to assume that any union between these themes is impossible. But Bronte’s writing was able to make these two fighting foes combine into the single personalities of Jane and Mr. Rochester. Bronte’s talents lie in her ability to present two greatly contrasting attitudes through her narrations and characters and then successfully manipulate her fictional creations to compliment each other despite their differences.
