“I Saw a Light, and I Thought a Ghost Would Come” (14):

The Spectre of Imperialism in Jane Eyre

Matt Riesling

Simon Fraser University

Preamble:

Thus far in this course we have dealt with a number of texts that are both colonial and about colonialism—and I think it’s important to recognize that there is a distinction. For this lecture, I want to change track somewhat. I will offer a post-colonial reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—a nineteenth-century novel that appears only peripherally aware of Britain’s colonial endeavours.

Short synopsis:

Jane Eyre is, of course, not on our reading list, so you’re not expected to have read it. However, this lecture has less to do with examining this particular text than it does with reading colonial literature in general. With this in mind, I’m going to do a very very brief plot synopsis, so even if you don’t know anything about the novel, you’ll be able to make sense of what I’m saying.

· There is a young orphan girl named Jane Eyre. She lives with her Aunt and cousins. They are very mean to her. At one point she is locked in a red room, she thinks she sees a ghost and she becomes violently ill.

· A doctor sees to her and, sensing that her current environment is unhealthy, suggests that her aunt send her away to a charity school; her aunt is happy to get rid of her.

· School is hard at first, but it gets better and she finds that she likes education.

· She grows up.

· She takes a job as a governess at a private estate.

· It is generally a pleasant experience—an almost idealized country manor—comfortable and inviting... except for the strange noises coming... from... the... attic.

· She falls in love the somewhat older lord of the manner, Mr. Rochester, but he seems out of her league.

· Creepy stuff happens:

o One night Jane wakes up and smells smoke in Rochester’s room. She rushes over and finds that Rochester’s bed is on fire while he sleeps. She douses the fire with water. Rochester wakes up and—very suspiciously—tells her to wait in his room while he goes upstairs for some reason.

· Eventually, Jane and Rochester fall in love and arrange a wedding.

· The night before their wedding she wakes up to find a specter standing over her bed:

o “a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back” (249).

· Rochester—very suspiciously—tells Jane that it was a just nightmare.

· They have their wedding, but it is interrupted by a man who objects to the union on the grounds that Rochester is already married.

· Rochester confesses:

· He had a wife named Bertha who became mad, so he locked her in the attic.

· Jane is disappointed so she leaves him—interestingly, and I think importantly, she’s disappointed in his polygamy more so than his treatment of Bertha.

· Jane goes of and does some stuff for a year or so.

· She eventually comes back to find the house is burnt down.

· It turns out Rochester is alive, though blind and scarred.

· He tells Jane that Bertha set the house on fire. He got hurt trying to save her but she died anyway.

· Jane is happy ‘cause now he’s single. They get married and have kids.

· Rochester’s eyesight returns.

· Yay, happy ending.

Okay, so now you know Jane Eyre.

What makes it a colonial novel?

So, in simple terms—crudely simple terms—Jane Eyre is a love story. The action takes place entirely in the English countryside, and Britain’s colonies get only passing mention.

· Why then, is it fair to do a post-colonial reading of the novel? Put another way, what makes Jane Eyre a colonial novel?

· Simply put, because it has no choice. Brontë’s education, ideologies, and world views, are informed by a colonial culture.

o This is not, however, to suggest that it has to be a pro-colonial text—nor does it necessarily mean that we are to condemn it if we are to decide that it’s not sufficiently anti-colonial.

· Instead, we should approach it from the premise that it is necessarily immersed in a colonial reality, and use this premise to help de-mystify certain elements of it, and, by extension, certain elements of western history and culture. This is the post-colonial project: to help us expand our understanding of western history in a way that that acknowledges the—often violent and always exploitative—materiality of our cultural history.

· What do I mean by materiality?

In short: Materiality = stuff; our culture, our habits, our ideologies, etc. don’t just happen magically; they’re dictated largely by the stuff we have, the stuff we want, how we use stuff, and how we go about getting it.

· In the end, this is what colonialism is all about: getting stuff—specifically, getting stuff cheap. Now, as we’ve seen throughout the other novels we’ve dealt with, colonialism has all sorts of mythologies attached to it that justify it. But all of these justifications are retroactive—in the first moment, colonialism is about getting stuff cheap.

Now the problem with this reality is that it’s not very nice. So, we make it nice. We tell stories about bringing good things to underdeveloped cultures. And we’ve seen this to a certain extent in the novels we’ve discussed so far in this course.

Consider for example:

· Kipling’s Kulu woman talking about the right kind of Sahib to bring justice to India (67).

· Marlow’s aunt praising him for, “weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways” (12).

But these stories only go so far to obscure the violent realities of colonialism. On some level we know they’re stories. Thus, there is always a fundamental disconnect between the cultural narrative of the colonizer and that culture’s material reality.

From a post-colonial perspective, I suggest Jane Eyre is readable as a novel of colonial anxiety: Broad thesis

Making the absent present:

An instructor once told me that if you can understand the first page of a novel you can understand the entire novel. I mostly agree, though I tend to take the position that once you understand a novel, you can understand the first passage. Either way, I think the first passage can be a very productive place to begin making meaning out of a novel. With that in mind, let’s look at the first paragraph of Jane Eyre:

The novel begins: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question” (5).

What do we get from this passage?

· Ultimately we get nothing; but we find a lot of it. She’s practically bludgeoning us with all of her nothing:

o “No possibility” of walking; the shrubbery has no leaves; there is “no company”; no outdoor exercise.

· And if we keep pushing we find even more nothing:

o “No possibility of taking a walk that day”—what day? “We had been wandering”—who is “we”? “Mrs. Reed” had no company—who is Mrs. Reed?

So, what’s up with the first passage? What’s going on with all this nothing? Well, it doesn’t appear to tell us much on the surface, but I think we can glean something very useful from all of the negative space—first and foremost, that it is negative space. She’s using this opening paragraph to alert us to the fact that she’s going to be utilizing negative space to craft her story.

Put another way, this opening passage makes absent present:

· It’s as though she’s saying: “There is absence!” “You cannot get the full story from what’s on the page!” “There’s more going on!”

And all of this negative space is indeed very useful because it prompts us to put pressure on the narrative—to look at what’s going on in the negative space. And what do you find in the negative space? Among other things, you find ghosts.

And what are ghosts? Of course ghosts are lots of things, but for the purposes of this lecture, I suggest that ghosts are the terrifying presence of absence—the anxiety that manifests out of the gap between the colonial narrative and its material reality.

For this reason, I think ghost imagery is a particularly productive way into a post-colonial reading of this text. As I mentioned earlier, the novel doesn’t appear particularly conscious of Britain’s dependence on its colonies as a source of wealth and resources; it is, however, entirely aware of all the exotic stuff around which the upper-class culture is constructed. Consider all of the stuff that Bronte mentions in the course of the novel:

Stuff:

China plates adorned with a “bird of paradise, nestling in a wreath of convolvuli and rosebuds”; muslin frocks, scarlet sashes; silk stockings; a crimson velvet robe; a shawl of some gold-wrought Indian fabric; a crimson scarf; Persian rugs; Tyrian-dyed curtains; several pianos; a rubber ball; tobacco; gingerbread; coffee and, of course, tea. What could be more British than tea? Except, of course, that tea is not native to Britain. In fact, British tea culture has a long and bloody history, which is entirely invisible in this classic image.

Now, I could go on with all of the stuff in the novel—there’s much much more than I’ve mentioned here—but I think you get the idea. I do, however, want to make it absolutely clear that this is not an indictment of international trade. Cultures trade with each other, which is fine; but this list does not include any European imports, for example. All of the stuff listed here comes to Britain by way of militaristic plunder.

Education:

Now, we can push this a little further by looking at a short passage involving Jane’s Colonial education. This passage occurs at the beginning of Jane’s time at the Lowwood Institution:

“A chapter having been read through twice, the books were closed and the girls examined. The lesson had comprised part of the reign of Charles I., and there were sundry questions about tonnage and poundage, and ship money” (46).

Now, remember when I said earlier that Bronte couldn’t help but write a colonial novel. This is exactly what I was talking about. This is Bronte’s education. At first it may seem relatively innocuous, but at its core, a modern industrial education prepares children to live in a colonial economy. Jane Eyre is a little girl, and little girls’ educations were mostly geared towards making them marriageable, but even so, she has to learn “tonnage and poundage, and ship money.” Why? Well, because these are important cultural concepts; these are the things you need to know to live in a colonial world. Not just how much international goods cost, but that part of your identity as a British citizen involves getting stuff from overseas—and part of what makes the British better than everyone else is how good we are at getting stuff from overseas. They’re not teaching girls the mathematics of trade so that the little girls can succeed in importation; they’re teaching it because it’s part of the narrative.

Scary stuff:

So, again, Bronte foregrounds all of this colonial stuff. Right, the material reality of the culture is present. What’s absent, is the history. So we get this disconnect, or gap, between the stuff we have and how we got it. And this absence of history produces anxiety. And out of this gap comes our ghosts.

Recall, I mentioned that at the beginning of the novel, Jane is locked in a red room. She tries to bear her punishment stoically, but when night falls the room becomes terrifying to her.

What’s the significance of the red room?

· Red rooms are where ghosts reside. Right, we still see this in contemporary fiction, but if you see a red room in Victorian literature, you can pretty much expect it to come with a ghost.

“The red-room was a spare chamber, very seldom slept in; I might say never, indeed, unless when a chance influx of visitors at Gateshead Hall rendered it necessary to turn to account all the accommodation it contained: yet it was one of the largest and stateliest chambers in the mansion. A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth [...] the chairs were of darkly-polished mahogany” (10-11)

What makes the room red? All of the red stuff in it. And where does all of the red stuff come from? The colonies of course. Bronte itemizes all of the stuff that gives the red room its creepiness and it all comes from the colonies. It’s subtle here, but by describing the red room as she does, Bronte associates colonialism with ghosts.

Now, I’m being a little sneaky here, directly equating all of the colonial stuff in the room to the ghost that Jane thinks she sees. I haven’t told you, for example, that this is the room her uncle died in—and it’s her uncle’s ghost that scares her. However, I don’t think this hurts my argument at all in the sense that ghosts really only come from one place, and that’s history.

· If you think about it, what’s the archetypical ghost story? Someone with an unresolved history hanging around to rectify injustices. And you can’t exorcise the ghost without acknowledging the unaddressed history—giving it a proper burial or what not.

· If her uncle has a reason for haunting the room, then this reason is tied in with something unaddressed in her uncle’s history.

· But, we can’t forget that all of the stuff in the room also has a history. The mahogany bed and chairs have an unaddressed history too.

Did Charlotte Bronte intend for us to attribute the ghost in the room to the mahogany and curtains? Probably not. But it gets tricky because the most important ghost in the novel (there are a few) certainly is of colonial origin, and that’s Bertha Rochester.

And I think, if I’m stretching to find a colonial ghost in the red room, I don’t have to stretch very far to find a colonial ghost in Bertha Rochester. As I mentioned in my synopsis, the first creepy plot point occurs when Jane discovers Rochester’s bed on fire. This is what wakes her up:

“I started wide awake on hearing a vague murmur, peculiar and lugubrious, which sounded, I thought, just above me. I wished I had kept my candle burning: the night was drearily dark [...] A dream had scarcely approached my ear, when it fled affrighted, scared by a marrow-freezing incident enough.

This was a demonic laugh—low, suppressed, and deep—uttered as it seemed, at the very key-hole of my chamber door. The head of my bed was near the door, and I thought at first the goblin-laughter stood at my bedside—or rather, crouched by my pillow” (130)

And if this isn’t ghostly enough, consider the passage before their marriage wherein Jane recounts awakening to a creepy woman standing over her bed:

‘It seemed, sir, a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back. I know not what dress she had on: it was white and straight; but whether, gown, sheet, or shroud, I cannot tell’

‘Did you see her face?’

‘Not at first. But presently she took my veil from its place; she held it up, gazed at it long, and then she threw it over her own head, and turned to the mirror. At that moment I saw the reflection of the visage and features quite distinctly in the dark oblong glass.’

‘And how were they?’

‘Fearful and ghastly to me—oh, sir, I never saw a face like it! It was a discoloured face—it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments.’

‘Ghosts are usually pale, Jane.’

‘This sir, was purple: the lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed; the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes’ (205)

So who is Bertha? We learn about bertha when Rochester recounts his “sad” history to Jane right before she leaves him:

· As the second born son he was not entitled to his family’s fortune; but his father didn’t want him to be poor so he arranged for Rochester to marry Bertha Mason—the daughter of wealthy Jamaican planter.

· Rochester moved to Jamaica after college and met Bertha whom he found exotic and alluring; he describes her as, “tall, dark, and majestic” (268).

o Pay attention to the adjectives used to describe her: Jane talks about Bertha’s thick dark hair; her discouloured savage face; her swelled dark lips and her black eyebrows.

o Rochester describes her as tall dark and majestic.

o Now, I think it would be somewhat unfair to the novel to assert that Bronte equates dark features with badness—Rochester, after all, is also possessed of dark features; however, it is fair to say that Bertha is not-so-subtlety racialized and eroticized. (Compare the above descriptions to Kurtz’s presumed Mistress in Africa.)

· The novel is somewhat ambiguous as to Bertha’s racial heritage. Her mother was Creole, which, in Jamaica in the nineteenth century would probably mean some mix of European, African, and/or Indian heritage; however, the word could simply mean a white European naturalized by birth in the West Indies. We can’t be sure which meaning Bronte intended—but, since both meanings of the word were in use, it strikes me as very probable that Bronte is being deliberately elusive. I suspect she means to plant the idea that Bertha may be part African, but this is tricky for narrative purposes, because an English gentleman would not marry an ethnic Creole. Still, it’s going beyond the text to say with confidence that Bertha is partially black. All we can say for sure is that she comes from Jamaica.

· Bertha’s family is anxious for the union because Rochester is “of a good race” (268)

· “race” primarily meaning lineage—“he was of a good family”—but it also carried with it modern notions of the word. Right, so again, race is foregrounded, but it’s foregrounded in a very fuzzy way.

· So they get married and they’re happy for a while, but then she goes mad: a hereditary madness from her mother’s side: right, from her Creole side—a colonial madness.

· Rochester is unhappy and he doesn’t know what to do. Shortly thereafter his father and brother die leaving him with the entire family fortune and he has an epiphany.

· He moves back to his family estate and locks Bertha away, so nobody knows about her except for a woman who is paid to tend to her.

· He then travels Europe hoping to forget about her—which, while it may seem callous (and indeed is callous) was not a particularly unusual way of dealing with the mentally ill.

· He returns home occasionally to check on the place. One day he sees Jane Eyre there and decides to stay because he loves her.

So with this story, I think Bronte provides us with an excellent—and very typical—narrative of colonization. Who were the men that traveled to the colonies and made the real profits? They were very often youngest sons who had names but not fortunes. They had capital to arrange ships and security, but not to live as gentlemen in England. Right, nobody wanted to go to the colonies except for a few odd adventure seekers. And their time in the colonies was meant to be temporary. Get the money you need then go back to England and forget where all of your stuff comes from.

But, in this instance Bertha becomes the embodiment of colonial Britain’s refusal to acknowledge the history of its wealth. She won’t let Rochester forget where his stuff comes from. She manifests as a terrifying figure, and it can’t be a coincidence that she brings retribution in the form of fire. Right, in the Narrative they’re enlightening:(if you recall from Heart of Darkness especially) they’re bringing the torch of civilization. And as Kate has already mentioned, the idea of fire as a civilizing force spans western civilization:

It can’t then be a coincidence that Bertha Rochester—this embodiment of colonial anxiety—uses this same fire as a weapon.

Conclusion:

Now, a modern reader would be forgiven for being entirely critical of Jane and Rochester, and by extension, Bronte. However, I tend to be a bit more forgiving of the novel—perhaps because I like it.

I don’t think Bronte fully acknowledges the exploitative conditions upon which her culture rests. It’s hard not to judge Jane and Rochester as both ignorant and cruel to some extent.

That said, as we’ve seen, the novel entirely blind to the realities of colonialism. Why is there so much colonial stuff? Why did Bertha have to be from Jamaica and not, say, Finland or America? More importantly, I think, Bronte almost parallel’s Jane’s imprisonment in the red room, to Bertha’s imprisonment in the attic. And, again, I think it’s entirely significant that Bertha’s primary weapon is fire.

Rather, I suggest that Bronte presents us with a partial acknowledgement. An awareness that something is going on behind the page. She never quite connects Bertha and Jane; and she never quite accuses Rochester of exploitation. But I think she provides us with enough clues to fit the story together ourselves if we choose.