Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre as Adele Varens’ Governess—Feminism, Gender Roles, & the Victorian Era

hello and welcome to close reading classic literature with me dr octavia cox today i'm going to analyze charlotte bronte's brilliant victorian novel jane eyre which was first published in 1847. i'm going to analyze a section from chapter 12 of the novel a section which has often been celebrated as overtly and kind of stridently feminist i'm going to set it in its context within the chapter that it comes in in order to unpick it in a bit more detail especially given that the paragraph in question is book ended interestingly i think by passage on adele varun who is mr rochester's ward um and who jane eyre is the governess of so his bookend on the book ended on one hand by that and on the other with a reference to bertha mason who is of course mr rochester's wife the mad woman in the attic so there are two central questions that i want to think about first is there in fact a contradiction in the way that the narrative voice describes adele viral and jane eyre's own kind of cry against custom and if so what should we take from this contradiction on to the analysis then so i'm going to read through and analyze the opening of chapter 12 in the order that it appears in the novel in the text so i'm going to start with the passage on adele veron and then i'm going to follow on by analyzing the feminist statement you might call it by jane eyre's character in the kind of mind of the narrative voice who is also jane eyre and i'm going to do this with the purpose of exposing a contradiction perhaps if we think it is a contradiction within the narrative to start with adele veron like jane eyre herself adele varan is an orphan or at least she might be mr rochester's child but she is officially an orphan and jane eyre is her governess so in some sense then you can see her jane eyre as a kind of maternal presence uh in adel veron's life now at thornfield hall or at least a kind of pseudo-maternal presence and this is the text in relation to jane eyre's relationship with adele varun my pupil was a lively child who had been spoiled and indulged and therefore was sometimes wayward but as she was committed entirely to my care and no injudicious interference from any quarter ever thwarted my plans for her improvement she soon forgot her little freaks and became obedient and teachable now the word freak usually refers to someone who is a bit strange or a bit odd but in the past the word had other stronger associations it was it had uh it was associated more strongly with other things in the past so samuel johnson for example in his dictionary of the english language from 1755 defines freak as a sudden fantasy a humor a whim a capricious prank and the oxford english dictionary has a similar definition of freak a sudden causeless change or turn of the mind a capricious humor notion whim or vagary caprice or capricious the oxygen defines as if you're capricious then you're one who is guided by whim or fancy rather than by judgment so we're told adele soon forgot her little freaks the implication you could say from this is that adele is irrational and unthinking and she needs to be sort of taught a lesson and she needs to stop being irrational and unthinking and by extension the implication then is that women should grow up to suppress their whims their flights of fancy or perhaps their sudden changes of mind so from this sentence we can surmise that jane eyre police's adele varroa in order to ensure that she stays within ideologically approved boundaries and confines so we have one woman policing another not not yet quite woman or girl jane eyre irons out adele veron's liveliness she had been a lively child jane eyre irons out her waywardness she was sometimes wayward jaina makes adele forget her little freaks as i said forget her whims forget her fancies forget the elements of herself that are not wholly rational this is not a million miles from how jane eyre was viewed herself as a child which readers experienced in the opening chapters the opening main section of the novel she had been lively she had been wayward she had had little freaks and crucially she had resisted adult attempts especially the attempts of mrs reed her horrible aunt and mr brocklehurst the horrible head the person in charge of low wood institution the school that she had been sent to she resists those adults attempts to make her jane eyre had resisted those attempts by those adults to make her obedient and teachable in their terms what they consider to be obedient and teachable now of course there are differences jaina in her position as governess in her position of power and authority over at del vara is infinitely more benevolent than either mrs reed or mr brocklehurst had been to her when she was a child but to some extent we can see that the impulse is the same that girls should be obedient and not lively ultimately jane eyre in her role as governess wants to make adele veron obedient and teachable and no doubt of course if you have to be a governess then it makes your life much easier if your charge is obedient and teachable but there is something rather unsettling it seems to me in the narrative voices insistence on making adele docile and pliant which jane eyre the narrative voice refers to as her improvement being docile and client are the epitome of the victorian feminine ideal the paragraph in relation to adele varun ends with the narrative voice stating by her simplicity gay prattle and efforts to please inspired me in return with a degree of attachment sufficient to make us both content in each other's society again the narrative voice jane eyre praises adele for characteristics that might be seen as determinedly feminine and limiting restricting jane eyre praises her simplicity the implication here is that women should aim to smooth out complex or difficult aspects of their characters jane eyre praises her gay prattle women should aim to keep their aspect gay to be jolly to be happy to be cheerful to be carefree or at least appear to be those things and confine their conversation to prattle meaning small unimportant talk and this might seem a bit odd to us now but take for example charles darwin the evolutionist who would go on to publish on the origin of species which was published in 1859. he was weighing up whether or not to marry in about july 1838 he considered one of the pros of marriage to be female chit chat which we can see as being synonymous with gay prattle while a con of being married would be the loss of the conversation of clever men at clubs the notion of having conversation with a clever woman at home does not seem to have struck darwin as an option jane eyre also approves of adele's efforts to please women should make an effort to please those they want to inspire attachment in adele's efforts to please make jane eyre content to be in her company jane eyre and adele veron are both female of course so this is not about female male interrelations obviously but in this episode we do see jane eyre teaching the young girl that in order to elicit to inspire affection and attachment in another person she must be the one to make the effort to please the other and we might think that this is all a bit odd that jane eyre values this quality that adele and makes an effort to please her given that jane eyre for herself resists the idea that as a woman it is her business to please others to diminish her own needs her own desires her own wants in order to please other people and to make others happy and that's something that many many readers over centuries have really valued in the character of jane eyre that she is independent that she will not submit to to pleasing others for the kind of sake of pleasing them even if it makes her would make her life easier in some ways she refuses to do that and that's admirable in the character of jane eyre so it's it seems odd that she seems actively to promote the opposite in her pupil adele but soon thereafter in chapter 12 the text moves into jane eyre's consideration of her rebellion against gendered customs and i move on now to consider that second section so later in chapter 12 the narrative voice makes a heartfelt plea against the oppression of women especially in the way that women are taught to be stagnatingly domestic and this section is often kind of held up and celebrated as a passage in the book that is overtly feminist it is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility they must have action and they will make it if they cannot find it millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine and millions are in silent revolt against their lot nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth women are supposed to be very calm generally but women feel just as men feel they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do they suffer from too rigid a restraint to absolute a stagnation precisely as men would suffer and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings to playing on the piano and embroidering bags it is thoughtless to condemn them or laugh at them if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex when thus alone i not infrequently heard grace paul's laugh jane is assertion that women feel just as men feel was revolutionary in the mid victorian period when women and men were positioned ideologically as complementary opposites an example of typical victorian attitudes of these kind of complementary opposites can be seen in sarah stickney ellis's a bit of a tongue twister sarah stickney ellis's popular conduct book the daughters of england published in about 1842 it was really popular and went through several editions and she writes in that as women then the first thing of importance is to be content to be inferior to men inferior in mental power in the same proportion that you are inferior in bodily strength and this was a common idea that women's weaker physical strength is evidence of their inferiority in mental power and we can see jane eyre countering such an idea through her use of outdoor kind of physical description women need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do it's really describing what women need in terms of something that might be considered part of the masculine sphere so they need exercise and they need to be outdoors they need to be in the field and we also see this in her kind of call to women to be active women must have action women want to do more so the idea of actually thinking of women as capable physically and jaina couches this in language that at the time would be considered to be part of the masculine sphere as i said exercise outdoors action that women want to do more and learn more that women are not naturally inferior in mental power but they have the conditions of restraint and stagnation imposed on them through domestic custom women need to exercise in the field they need action they need things to do too and not just be confined to the house and it's an interesting part of the symbolism of the idea of the angel of the house a woman should be the angel of the house because of course angels have this non-physical presence they they're in some ways above the mere kind of physical earthly realm so the feminine then is kind of couched in this imagery that takes them out of the earth takes them out of the field thinking about this passage and the earlier passage together then jane eyre condemns those privileged narrow-minded creatures who think that women ought to confine themselves but is not the narrative voice similarly narrow-minded in her earlier treatment of adele varun in this passage this feminist passage janae says the narrative voice i'm kind of using now to voice and jaina interchangeably that women are supposed to be very calm generally but isn't calmness exactly what jane eyre has been cultivating in adele veron eliminating her liveliness eliminating her waywardness eliminating her little freaks to become obedient and teachable or calm in other words for herself jane eyre does seek more than custom has dictated but doesn't that same jane eyre very much adhere to what custom has pronounced necessary in young women in rewarding adele with her affection because adele makes efforts to please her and may and because she becomes more docile and tractable by ironing out her liveliness i now want to turn briefly to bertha mason significantly jane eyre's solitary musings about female subjugation often are interrupted we're told by grace paul's laugh of course jane eyre at this time in the novel is unaware that it is in fact bertha mason or mrs rochester who strangely laughs at thornfield hall readers might applaud jane eyre's rebellious feminism and agree that millions of women are in silent revolt against their lot and rebel against the notion that women are supposed to be very calm but bertha mason's laughter serves as a reminder that to act on jane eyre's opinions to give in to the rebellions which ferment in the masses of life in victorian england could lead to social segregation to incarceration and to the accusation of madness jane eyre had claimed it is thoughtless to laugh at women if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex and this thought is interrupted by bertha's laugh is bertha the segregated incarcerated mad woman in the attic laughing metaphorically at the idea that gendered custom is so easy to overcome and laughing at the idea that all the privileged fellow creatures do is laugh at women who step outside of what custom has deemed acceptable what these two passages reveal here in chapter 12 it seems to me and this is perhaps unconsciously by charlotte bronte and do let me know your thoughts on on this in the comments but what the text here reveals to to me is how easy it is for women to collude in their own oppression to participate unconsciously in the perpetuation of customs that make women ultimately suffer so jane eyre can rail against gendered customs for herself and yet perpetuate them by teaching them to her female people thank you very much indeed for watching remember if you like what i do here on my channel where i analyze classic literature then do please subscribe and if you have liked the video then do please press the like button it helps me out in youtube's algorithm and let me know your thoughts what do you make of this seeming contradiction between the feminist jane eyre passage and jane eyre as a governess to adel varon i'd love to know your thoughts