The Book Club: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë with Madeleine Kearns | The Book Club

Welcome back to the book club. I'm Michael Knowles, very excited to discuss one of the great novels, Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. You can see this is a very annotated copy. There is much to get into, but before we can get into it, in our fast-paced world, it is tough to make reading a priority. Well, it used to be. But at thinker.org, they summarize the key ideas from new and noteworthy nonfiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form. You can read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes, from old classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, to recent bestsellers like Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life. If you want, oh I don't know, to challenge your preconceptions, if you want perhaps to expand your horizons, if you want what we all know you really want, to sound smart at cocktail parties, then you can go to thinker.org. You don't have a lot of time though, so take the vowels out of there. T-H-I-O-K-N-K-R dot org. No E. No time for that. Thinker.org to start a free trial and put your mind in motion. Now we will put our minds in motion to help us do that. My friend Madeline Kearns is here. Madeline Kearns, staff writer at National Review, and a particular lover of Jane Eyre. Maddie, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me Michael. I can't help but notice we've been friends for some years now. Jane Eyre is not only a terrific book by Charlotte Bronte, it is also your cell phone case. Yes. Why is that? You know, I've really loved this book since I was about 13. I read Jane Eyre and I couldn't put it down. I think I read it in 24 hours. I just page after page just consumed it. And I think the reason was that I identified with Jane, but I also saw in her someone to admire, someone to look up to, someone who was a precocious wit, but more than that, a good person, a virtuous person. And it really shines through in everything she does. Jane Eyre is, in one sense, a love story. It's best known for being a love story. But I think before we understand it as a love story, we have to recognize that it is first and foremost a spiritual autobiography. Now, since you are precocious, witty, virtuous, I will give you the task, before we get into all the themes of this book, of telling us what it's about. What is the one minute summary of these 500 pages? I find it helpful to think of it in four parts. The first part is Jane's childhood, which is very unhappy. She's an orphan living in England and she's sent to live with an aunt who's not a blood relation and her children, who are very cruel to her. And she's very unhappy. And then she's sent to an all-girls boarding school. When she's 18, we move into part two, she's sent off to be a governess at Thornfield Hall. And there she falls in love with her employer, Mr. Rochester. And Mr. Rochester has a terrible secret, which he is concealing from Jane. He falls in love with Jane as well. And they plan to get married. But unfortunately, there is an impediment. He has a wife who's alive, living in the attic, totally mad. You know, it happens to, I won't say the best of us, but it has happened. And so they can't get married. So they can't get married, but she could at that point be his mistress, but she chooses not to. And that's crucial to understanding Jane and to understanding the book. She chooses not to, she runs away. And this takes us to the third part of the book, which is when she's living in exile with a clergyman, very stern Calvinist clergyman. That finally takes us to the final section when she is able to return to Mr. Rochester. But then she is called back by a sort of mysterious call. She's called back to Thornfield and she discovers that there's been a terrible fire and that Rochester is now free to marry because his wife was, in fact, killed in a very dramatic way. Terrible fire, yes. She jumped off the building, unfortunately. Or fortunately. Either way, they're free to get married. They're free to get married. And Rochester is a reformed man by the end of the book as well. I think he wasn't quite ready spiritually to marry her, but he is by the end. So one of the most famous lines in this book, and maybe one of the most famous lines in English literature, is this line, reader, I married him. And so, spoiler alert, I hope that you already read the book so you can not worry about that spoiler. But it has a happy ending and they do get married. There's a whole lot that goes on in the middle. The very fact that she addresses that line to the reader, as she addresses quite a lot, tells you something about the book. You say it's a spiritual autobiography of this character, Jane Eyre. What do you mean by that? Well, ultimately, this is about two people who fall in love but understand themselves to be immortal beings. And when one understands oneself to be an immortal being, the decisions that they make in love and life are slightly, shall we say, longer term. You're not only thinking, how's this going to work out for us in the next five to ten years? What's our five-year plan? You're thinking, how does this help your eternal destination of your soul, be it heaven or hell? And so that informs everything she does. And I was thinking about this earlier, but providence and the idea of God having a plan and providing for his creatures is something that features very strongly throughout the novel. In fact, you could even argue, as I would, that providence is such a strong theme and such a driver of the motion of the novel that it is actually a character in itself. And by providence, you mean God's grand scheme of things, sometimes even turning evil things to good. But there is a scheme. And you see this from the beginning to the end. There's a strange fact, though, which is when the book came out, it was derided by some critics as an anti-Christian book. And yet your reaction on reading it, my reaction on reading it, is this is one of the most Christian books I've ever read. That's right. I think a lot of that can be explained by the section where she is living with her cousin, Sinjin, spelled St. John, but pronounced Sinjin. You know, you people. We're two cultures separated by a common language, as they say. Quite. So he is very stern and really not very charitable. And it's not that he's incapable of love. He is, in fact, in love with a woman. It's that he conceives so strongly of religious duty as to be very cold and unfeeling. And in fact, he proposes to Jane in possibly the most unromantic, unpersuasive way possible. How does he do that? Well, he lists all of her faults and states rather straightforwardly he's not attracted to her and doesn't think she has much going for her. But would she like to be his wife and go with him on a missionary trip to India where they're very likely to die? Because that's God's will. And what's the catch? Where do I hold on? This sounds too good to be true. It obviously relates to he has a sense of predestination. And when she says, no, thank you, I think love and marriage go together. I think you have to really be in love to marry someone, or at least you have to love them to marry them. He takes this rather badly and thinks that this is a sign that she's not a member of the elect after all. So something to know here is there are these different ideas of Christianity. You have the Calvinists, represented by Sinjin, who say no free will, everything is predetermined, and you're either predetermined from before time to be in the elect or not. Your free will doesn't have much to do with that. And then there is this aspect of willfulness from her early days, the torment of growing up as an orphan with her aunt, then in the school. She has this will that is not always inclined toward good things, and it's not disciplined. And so they discipline her will as well. And it seems to be this tension between what nature has laid out. I mean, there's a number of lines here about nature. It keeps coming up, I guess, on this theme of providence. He'll say, Rochester, the glamour of inexperience is over your eyes, and you see it through a charmed medium. You cannot discern that the gilding is slime at the manor house and silk draperies cobwebs. The marble is sorted slate, and the polished woods, mere refuse chips and scaly bark. Now here in the woods, all is real and sweet and pure. Nature must be, this is another line later in the book, nature must be gladsome when I was so happy. Another line later in the book, I have no relative but the universal mother nature, I will strike her breast and ask repose. Nature seemed to me benign and good. What is it with all of this nature and how do we make sense of that and her free will? Yeah, so another thing that comes up time and time again is violence and the violence of passion, and that can be obviously, as you point out, found in the natural world. There's lots of, there's, I think at one point, lightning splits a tree in half after a crucial plot point. There's windswept moors. It's all very gothic. It's all very dramatic. There's a sort of natural violence in people too, original sin, if you're a Christian. And the great task that Jane faces from the beginning as a child, having inherited a set of very unfortunate circumstances, she is an orphan, she is treated very cruelly, is to find self-mastery. And so her passions, she's a very passionate child, she has sort of violent outbursts when she's treated very unfairly and unkindly, is to find a way of dealing with this. And in fact, this is also the same task that Rochester faces. He must learn to temper his passions. Now, you can go way to the extreme where you find St John and he is represented through ice, many references to him being icy and cold. On the other hand, Rochester is represented by fire. And so you have these two elements, fire and ice. And she says, feeling without judgment is a washy draft indeed, but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition. Yes. So I find that there is a moderate middle position between the fire and the ice. And I find that it's actually represented best in a character who would be very easy to overlook. It's the character of Helen Burns. And this is when Jane is at Lowood school for girls. And she finds her first friendship, her first female friendship, which as a woman is a very important first friendship. And she learns from Helen what it is to be meek and to be humble and to accept that which is beyond your control, that which providence has provided for with courage and a sense of perspective. So Helen is frequently humiliated and treated unfairly as well. And Jane says, how can you put up with this? Why aren't you screaming at these people and telling them where to go? And Helen explains, well, I'm a Christian and I turn the other cheek and I forgive and holding on to these things is so much worse than having that attitude. And then Helen faces her own death actually with the same sort of resignation. You may mistake to think it's just being passive. It's not. It's a willingness to move with and for providence and providential designs. This is something that Jane clearly learns then because when faced with Rochester, when it turns out that Rochester cannot marry her. So this is the juicy secret. This is the big scandalous moment because it seems that everything's going well. Rochester, this very wealthy Lord of the Manor and Jane, this woman of no means whatsoever, but she's the governess in his house and they fall in love and they kind of toy with this and will they, won't they? And oh, is he in love with someone else? No, he's not. So it's all perfect. Why can't they get married? They can't get married because he has a wife who is alive, totally deranged and mad and living in the attic, who is also a very keen arsonist. Yes. Potential murderer and arsonist. Just keeps setting everyone on fire. It's a big problem. But actually the drama of the book really gets so good because they're right there in the church and that famous, if anyone has any objections, let him speak now or forever hold his peace. If you're going to bring something up, could you do it before that moment? Not when the priest is there and we're ready to go. Right, exactly. And yes, somebody points out that he is already married. And so at that moment, it's a huge decision for Jane because Rochester suggests, well, look, I know this isn't ideal, but why don't you just stay and be my mistress? Because really, who even needs to know about it? And it's hugely tempting for Jane. And Rochester's reasoning is, my life's been very hard. A lot of it's not been my fault. Some of it's been my fault, but a lot of it hasn't. I deserve, I'm entitled to get some happiness out of life. And so I'm going to grab at it and you should too. And Jane says no. She says no purely because it's wrong. It would be adultery and it would therefore be degrading to them both. This is not something that the modern world really receives very well. We are so into you do you, whatever makes you happy. If it feels good, do it. If it feels good, do it. If that means abandoning your wife of 20 years, why not? If that means abandoning your wife to become a woman, why not? As long as you're being true to yourself. And here is somebody who actually does the right thing just because it's the right thing. At huge personal cost. She not only has to tear herself away from this man she deeply loves, but she goes out onto the moors by herself at risk of death. She doesn't have any money. She doesn't have any food. No one's going to give her either of those things. She doesn't have any family, any friends. She literally almost dies. Yeah, she almost dies. And yet there's a really interesting part where just after she's found out that he's already married and she goes to her bedroom to figure out what she's going to do, she prays. And she prays Psalm 69. And, save me, O Lord, for the waters are flooding my soul. What is significant about the Psalms? The Psalms are I, me, me and God. This kind of intimacy and relationship. She realises as a mature adult, when she has most recourse to, when she has nothing else in the world going for her, she says, I want to do the right thing, but you're going to have to provide. And here comes this providence once again. Because the real action of the book, I mean, there are some saucy scenes and, you know, the nature reflect, but really what, where the action takes place is in her psychology and in her spirit. That's what the book is. The Germans call it a Bildungsroman. Am I pronouncing that correctly? I don't know. The Germans have this one. But it's a spiritual journey and it's really a psychological discussion with her. And so there is therefore another element that goes through the entire book, which we haven't really touched on yet, which is education. She starts out whining and self-pitying and not being completely untutored in virtue. And then a little later on, she begins to discipline herself. She says, ere long I had reason to congratulate myself on the course of wholesome discipline, to which I had thus forced my feelings to submit. Thanks to it, I was able to meet subsequent occurrences with a decent calm, which had they found me unprepared, I should probably have been unequal to maintain even externally. No matter what the world throws at her, she is now prepared to deal with suffering in a way that won't tear her down and leave her despairing, but actually could be sanctifying or edifying, build her up. Exactly. And actually it's a good contrast considering the way she does achieve that to the ways in which Rochester falls short in that department. So he really, as much as I think he's less endearing than she is at many points in the book, he's petty and sometimes manipulative actually. But he does want to be good. In fact, the reason that he loves Jane is because he recognises her virtue and he wants to be worthy of it. He wants to be good. She learns this and she learns it by adulthood and in adulthood, this virtue and self-discipline. He does not. He keeps failing in this department. And so Providence intervenes first through Jane and Jane saying no. And it's the first time he's really been told no, I think, in his life. And it's devastating to him. So she leaves him. So he's got nothing except for this lunatic wife, whom he never loved, by the way. It's not just that she went mad and then he thought, oh, I can't be bored with that. She was a very shallow person to begin with. But he then finds himself in this situation where he is tasked with taking responsibility for his commitment to her. And there's a moment, as I said, she's a keen arsonist. She sets the house aflame. And there is a moment in which he could easily have let her burn to her death. But he doesn't. He goes up into the burning building, makes sure all the servants are out, and he goes up to the roof where she is and he calls her by name and tries to get her to come down to save his crazy, lunatic, murderous wife. To save his crazy, lunatic, murderous wife. She jumps off and... Splat. Splat. That's it. End of her. And then the house collapses. And again, Providence provides him safe passage, but he's left blind and they have to remove one of his arms or hand, I think. And so what you have here is actually a sort of symbolic purification, if you're going to continue the religious interpretation of the book. Because actually, when he's first in danger of death, again, Providence and Jane come in handy, his wife has set his bed on fire. Jane comes in to his room and it says in the novel that she baptised him. So she puts the flames out of water. Then at the end of the novel, he is redeemed because that which made him sin has been subdued. He's lost his hand. He's been blinded. But more than that, his passions have been tempered. And so it is only then, first, theologically, once his wife is no longer alive... Then he's free to remarry. That he's free to remarry. But I think more than that is that he is now sufficiently humbled, actually, in order to really take ownership and responsibility for his own moral choices. Which, to your point about education, is the theme of the book, because it's not just simply the books that you read and the places that you go. Rochester is a wildly, worldly, experienced man. He's done many things, been to many places, had many affairs. And initially he tries to sort of lord over Jane about this and say that he is her superior. And she points out that actually it's what you did with your experience that matters. I always like that line from the philosopher David Bentley Hart, who said that wisdom is innocence recovered at the far end of experience. It's a good line. Yes. And I think that Rochester, his purification, his redemption, is a little more painful than Jane's in some way. Physically, certainly. Physically, yes. There's this line before he gets it, before Rochester gets that Jane is not just going to live with him as his mistress. There's a line, she says, Hiring a mistress is the next worst thing to buying a slave. Both are often by nature, and always by position, inferior. And to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading. And here this would be, she's explicitly describing a man who hires a mistress. That is degrading to him. But it would be degrading to her, to live with her moral inferior, Rochester. It would bring her down to that level as well, and it would not be a happy ending. Right. And that actually, the first time that she declares her love to him, she says, it is my spirit that addresses your spirit, as if we have passed through the grave and stand before the feet of God, equal as we are. But it's that thing. And similarly, he keeps calling her a bird, like a bird in a cage. And she says, no, I am a free human being with an independent will, which I exert now to leave you. Sounds a little feminist to me, as many critics have remarked. I think, frankly, the reason that this continues to be taught in schools is because all the educators have convinced themselves, this is the feminist novel. Do you agree with that? Well, it depends what you mean by feminist, I suppose. Certainly, when Charlotte Bronte was writing this, this was a statement. Women were essentially the property of their husbands. They were second-class citizens in many ways. And I think that Jane is obviously not under any illusions about her being of equal dignity to Rochester. So sure, it's feminist in that sense. I think, though, you can overemphasize that point and lose the bigger picture, which is not so ideological. It's not about her claiming autonomy or using sex as a weapon or any of the things that feminists propose. In fact, the real reason that Jane does what she does is to protect the virtue of chastity, which is just about the last thing any feminist ever thinks to mention, which is ridiculous considering how important it is in protecting and preserving women's interests. Women's dignity. Yes. And there's this great line, it's maybe my favorite line of the book, my favorite exchange, where she breaks up with him, where she says, no, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to be your mistress. I guess probably modern feminists would say, yeah, of course, we'll be polyamorous and get the lady in the attic involved. But she says, no, we're not going to do that. And he says, then you will not yield. She says, no. He says, then you condemn me to live wretched and to die accursed. His voice rose. I advise you to live sinless and I wish you to die tranquil. Chilly. That's powerful stuff. I think here, though, you just have more proof that sometimes no is the most powerful thing a woman can say. He desperately wants to be with her to the point where he will do what is morally insane. He knows it's wrong. There's a line she says, which I'll have to paraphrase because I haven't marked it quite so well as you, where she says that laws and principles are not for times when there are no temptations, but for times such as these, when you are very tempted to break from what you know to be right and wrong. And actually her exit post-breakup is so dramatic because she does it in the dead of night because she doesn't trust herself to sort of announce it. She sneaks down the stairs. She even touches the doorknob to enter his room, thinks better of it, pulls away, and then just runs. Flee from temptation. Flee from temptation, which is, again, I don't think the feminist reading, because I think they think it more like the power dynamic was all off and she wanted to regain power. She wanted to go be a middle manager at some company. It was only when she was financially independent that she was able to come back. And once he had been maimed and crippled, she could say, okay, now we're equal. But that's not the point. She really did that for the reason that it was the right thing to do. Yes. If the crazy old lady upstairs had been dead, they just would have gotten married. Yes, of course. It wouldn't have mattered how much money she had or what sort of stature. This does bring up a kind of supernatural moment that comes right before their, and I guess causes, their reuniting, which is she's asleep and she hears him yell out, Jane, Jane, Jane. And she, he's obviously 100 miles away at least, and she calls out to the wind, I'm coming, I'm coming. And later, by the end of the book, he describes this moment where he really did call that out. And he really did hear her saying that. Where is it between the natural and the supernatural? Where are they really living? I think it's, this is where providence again becomes almost a character, not just a theme, is that the idea that God is deeply involved in a direct and intimate and personal way in our affairs and can, if he chooses to, intervene with supernatural means is something that I think we've to understand in order to be able to understand these types of events. And certainly that's the way that Jane understands it. And I think by the end, that's the way Rochester understands it as well. And he thanks providence too. And there's a, he almost explicitly, I mean, I think he actually does explicitly, but from, I think it's this providence theme and character that you've hit on is the only way to make sense of it. Because if let's say the book were totally different and Jane were not this abused little orphan, let's say she were raised in a nice, happy household and she had all the wonderful privileges and she had an easy life. And then let's say Rochester wasn't this guy who made an error. He didn't commit a crime, but he made an error early in life by marrying this crazy lady. And he paid for that and he regretted that and he suffered much from that. And let's say that they didn't end with her having gone through all of this torment and him being physically maimed and deformed, they wouldn't be as happy and joyful at the end. It was actually only through suffering, only through all of those terrible things they endured that they had a happier ending than if they had had a pleasant go of it the whole time. The final line is from Sinja, this character, this ornery Calvinist preacher guy who goes off to India. And it's strange almost, it seems strange at least that he would get the last line of the book. He says, my master, he's dying now, he says, my master has forewarned me. Daily he announces more distinctly, surely I come quickly and hourly I'm more eagerly respond. Amen, even so come Lord Jesus. He's saying, take me, take me, let's go. I'm dying and I couldn't be happier. Why is that the last line of the book? It doesn't make sense if you conceive of Jane Eyre primarily as a love story, but if you conceive of it as a spiritual autobiography, there is this sense that, and it was slightly modelled, I think Bronte slightly modelled it off the Pilgrim's Progress, that this life doesn't last that long and your decisions really matter long term. And by long term I mean eternity, which is a long time. So the way in which we interact with one another, be it romantic or friendship or anything else for that matter, really matters because you will be facing at some point your death. And a very good illustration of that is when Jane goes back to her aunt on her aunt's deathbed. Her aunt wants to see her. It's not perfect contrition, but she is sorry and the reason she's sorry is because she doesn't want to go to hell. And she realises that she was cruel and also deprived Jane of important information about her family. And Jane chooses in that moment to forgive her, which would be very understandable if she'd chosen not to, especially because it was sorry but not really. But she chooses to forgive her again because of this perspective. And I think that's where the feminists miss out, is they don't really get that. In fact, all the feminist interpretations, they just sort of gloss over the theological stuff and say, yeah, well, that's what people spoke in those days. But anyway. Yes. The beginning of the book and the very end of the book and everything in the middle and everything that animates the book, forget about that for a second. Let's just talk about gender theory or something like that. But of course, her point is much deeper, as you say. This life doesn't last forever. And there are more important things, even than the love you might have for this wonderful guy or for this wonderful girl. You've got to get your loves and your desires in order because this life isn't going to last very long. And this show, unfortunately, isn't going to last very long. So we're going to have to leave it there. I would say for those who have spent however many minutes with us now, one of the great consolations is by reading this sort of edifying literature, by working on our own virtue and our education, then we might have hope for a longer bit of fun than just 25 or 35 minutes. Maddie, thank you for being here. Where can people find you? Nationalreview.com or Madeline Kearns on Twitter. Wonderful. For now. And then hopefully, you know, after a good long life in eternity, we'll all be able to see you there as well. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Book Club. We'll see you next time. Thank you so much for watching this episode of The Book Club on PragerU. PragerU is a 501c3 nonprofit organization, so we rely on donations from viewers like you to keep this content on the air. Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution today to help keep this content coming. Thank you very much.