Anja Opačić Prof. Tatjana Jukić-Gregurić The Victorian Novel: Poetics and Politics 25 January 2022 Independence and authority in Jane Eyre In the opening of her article One or Several Jane Eyres, Nancy Armstrong writes about the preconditions Jane must meet so that she can have a home of her own and assume the power in the domestic sphere. Armstrong is determined that “her [Jane’s] renunciation of inherited privilege is but one of a series of preconditions that Jane has to meet before she is qualified to perform a role capable of punishing, if not annihilating anyone who tries to dominate her” (Armstrong 215) and “to establish a home of her own…Jane must do so by means of her resources as woman” (215) instead of accepting the “potential power [that] came from the male benefactor” (215). However, this argument is fallacious for a few reasons which will be further discussed. When St John Rivers breaks the news to Jane that she has come into money, she is so stunned as to not being able to give any verbal response to the news, already thinking about the responsibility of possessing and managing wealth. However, when she inquires St John how he knows about this, he tells her that his full name is St John Eyre Rivers and that she is his family. The news of newly acquired wealth left her motionless, but the news of having at last found her family made her overjoyed, saying, “this was a blessing, bright, vivid, and exhilarating;—not like the ponderous gift of gold: rich and welcome enough in its way, but sobering from its weight. I now clapped my hands in sudden joy—my pulse bounded, my veins thrilled” (Brontë 381). “Jane turns down the role of heiress, which St. John urges upon her, and prefers a competency to a fortune” (Pell 414), not because of the source of her fortune, but because she wants to help her family. Thus, she makes a decision to divide the inherited twenty thousand pounds between St John Rivers, his sisters Mary and Diana and herself, seeing this gesture as “the human justice of sharing with those she loves, whose needs she has experienced, by whose labors she has benefited“ (Pell 416). Her cousins are not wealthy – Diana and Mary are governesses and St John is a “poor and obscure” (Brontë 350) clergyman. Despite St John being against her decision, asking her to think carefully about it, she is adamant in her decision. She still gains her financial independence from her uncle’s money, but what Armstrong fails to underline is that Jane’s strong moral principles and nonmalleable nature are where her authority and power lie, and which will not be aggravated by the independence that is granted to her by “a male benefactor” (Armstrong 215). Since childhood, Jane has been decisive and has had a strong sense of justice and equality– she fought back John Reed at Gateshead, fiercely opposed Helen’s stoic obedience and enduring the harsh punishment she did not fully deserve at Lowood, and left Mr Rochester, painfully as it was, after finding out about his wife hidden in the attic. Through all her trials and tribulations, she remained true to herself and always tried to do the right thing. When she was falling in love with Mr Rochester, there was one thing on her mind that kept her from fully indulging in her feelings, and that was the fact that she was “disconnected, poor, and plain” (Brontë 159). During the time of their courtship, Jane felt uncomfortable being showered with gifts from Mr Rochester, saying, “’Don’t address me as if I were a beauty; I am your plain, Quakerish governess'” (Brontë 256). She decides to write to her Uncle John to inquire whether there is a possibility of him leaving some legacy for her. She seeks independence and family, and before she secures herself both, she cannot enter a union such as marriage. Instead of letting herself be Mr Rochester’s mistress, she leaves him and wanders around English moors, only to stumble upon the Moor House and find in there her family and the independency she has longed for. She is no longer poor nor without connections. Jane is ready to take on, only under her conditions, the role of the wife. St John asks for her hand in marriage, but she refuses because that would be a loveless marriage, not what she desires. She seeks for equality and respect in her partner not for someone to subjugate. “The legacy that Jane receives from her uncle in Madeira makes possible her reunion with Rochester and also significantly redefines her relationship to patriarchal structure” (Pell 415) because, upon seeing him, she notifies him, “I am independent, sir, as well as rich: I am my own mistress” (Brontë 430). Mr Rochester is blind and without his left arm, rendered functional for marriage because he is no longer able to indulge in the courtship scene, thus he can keep his marriage vows. They both enter marriage as new people – Jane as her own person, and Mr Rochester as a changed person, no longer burdened by his past. Jane marries him because she believes him to be her equal, not because she wants to discipline him; the wounds have already subjugated him, which she notices when they reunite – “it was mournful, indeed, to witness the subjugation of that vigorous spirit to a corporeal infirmity” (Brontë 435). She finds happiness in being of service to him, and he finds happiness in letting her help him: “Never did I weary of reading to him; never did I weary of conducting him where he wished to go: of doing for him what he wished to be done. And there was a pleasure in my services, most full, most exquisite, even though sad—because he claimed these services without painful shame or damping humiliation. He loved me so truly, that he knew no reluctance in profiting by my attendance: he felt I loved him so fondly, that to yield that attendance was to indulge my sweetest wishes” (Brontë, 447). Jane comes to wealth and finds her family because her late uncle has left her inheritance, which does not make her path to independence any less worthy than earning money on her own. Her wish for dividing the money among her relatives only accentuates her empathic and just nature, instead of emphasising on rejecting male as the source of her independence. She has become her own person, financially independent and content, finally ready to end up in a marriage full of love with a person she truly feels to be her equal. Jane does everything under her own conditions, but she does not feel the need to exercise authority over her partner. In giving and receiving she finds happiness, mutual understanding and the key for a long healthy marriage. Works Cited Armstrong, Nancy. “One or Several Jane Eyres?” Victorian Review, vol. 42, no. 2, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016, pp. 215–22, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26809573. Accessed on 26 Jan. 2022 Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Alma Classics, 2014. Pell, Nancy. “Resistance, Rebellion, and Marriage: The Economics of Jane Eyre.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 31, no. 4, University of California Press, 1977, pp. 397–420, JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2933083. Accessed on 26 Jan. 2022
