Jane Eyre and the secrets of furious lovemaking

Wild Nights-Wild Nights!

Were I with thee

Wild Nights should be

Our luxury!....

Rowing in Eden

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor-Tonight

In Thee!

-Emily Dickinson, #249

In the spring of 1975, I found myself, rather to my own surprise and for the first time, theorizing about a novel. To be sure, I'd produced fiction myself, including not only a few published short stories, but also a vaguely experimental novel, the typescript of which was still rather hopelessly circulating among New York editors. But in the professional life as teacher and critic on which I had fairly recently embarked, I really considered myself a "poetry person." I'd been writing poems since I was a child and had studied mostly poetry-especially Romantic and modernist verse but the theory of the genre, too-in college and graduate school. My dissertation was on the poetry of D. H. Lawrence, and after I'd expanded, "booked," and in 1973 published it, I planned an intensive study of "death as metaphor" in nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry. As a product of sixties radicalism, moreover, I'd sworn only to write, on the one hand, Meaningful Books and, on the other hand, literary journalism (Meaningful Reviews and Significant "Think-Pieces"), and never, never to start grinding out academic hack articles like what Henry James once called "an old sausage mill." But now I was writing what would ordinarily be defined as an article, though I thought of it as an essay ultimately destined to become part of a book. And that article was about the novel Jane Eyre.

What had intervened to change my supposedly well-laid plans? Lots of intangibles, no doubt, but the proximate causes, so far as I could see, were, first, my youngest child, and second, the women's movement. When she was eight or nine, my daughter Susanna had begun devouring nineteenth-century novels, especially such female-authored standards as Little Women, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights. (My other two children read voraciously too, but had different literary tastes.) Nostalgically-for the books Susanna read were the ones I myself had loved best when I was growing up-I reread along with her, and as we discussed the books we often tried to explain to each other our feelings about episodes or settings each of us found particularly compelling. Susanna especially loved what she called "the wonderful tea" featuring seed cake and sympathy with which stately Miss Temple nourishes Jane and Helen amidst the desolation of Lowood. I was drawn over and over again to the sanctuary in the attic where, "wild and savage and free" as the young Cathy in Wuthering Heights, obstreperous Jo pens her blood-and-thunder Gothics, far from the pieties of superegoistic Marmee and long before meeting censorious Professor Bhaer. And, too, as I'd been when as a teenager I read Jane Eyre for the second time, I was delighted by the illicit glamour of the romance between Charlotte Bronte's "poor, plain, little" governess and her brooding master. When the socalled second wave of feminism crested in the seventies, I was more than ready-was indeed desperately eager-to understand the manifold ways in which not only is the personal the political (as the famous movement motto had it) but the literary is, or can be, both the personal and the political.

That we bring ourselves to what we read-that, as Emerson put it, our "giant" goes with us wherever we go-is hardly a new insight. In an era of cultural studies, new historicism, and gender theory, such a notion seems self-evident. Yet for those of us raised on the austere dicta of the New Criticism (Beware the extra-textual! Never look an author in the intentions! One ambiguity is worth a thousand histories!), it was profoundly exhilarating to find myself, as I had in the fall of 1974 at Indiana University, team-teaching what I sensed was a largely undiscovered literary tradition in the context of a history-the history of women-that I'd never myself been taught. In response to departmental needs, Susan Gubar and I were that term offering a course we called "The Madwoman in the Attic," so in my daily professional life I frequently found myself reflecting with considerable intellectual passion on books that in my personal life I'd lately been exploring far more naively. For indeed, though in some part of myself I must have understood even then that no reading is altogether innocent, the readings I'd begun doing with my nine-year-old daughter felt both innocent and sentimental, if only because they were not only outside my disciplinary "field," but they were also rereadings and rememberings, hence, recapturings, of experiences I'd had when I myself was at least a more innocent reader.

And a more innocent movie-goer! For surely my memories of such classics as Jane Eyre, Little Women, and Wuthering Heights were colored not just by my almost kinetic recollections of the fat gold armchair in Queens where, romantic and dreamy, I'd curled up to read them but also by the Hollywood versions of these books I'd seen in my growing up years, versions that amounted to a series of pop-culture exegeses of the nineteenth-century novel. If Jo was always already a tomboy played by Katharine Hepburn, Heathcliff was perpetually Laurence Olivier, stalking apart in a fit of Byronic "joyless reverie," while Rochester was inevitably an even more Byronically glowering Orson Welles. That Jane and Cathy were more dubiously identified with, on the one hand, the timid prettiness of Joan Fontaine and, on the other hand, the come-hither elegance of Merle Oberon testifies to a tension between page and screen that would prove productive for feminism-for weren't Fontaine and Oberon just the kinds of socially sanctioned female figures the Bronte heroines were struggling not to become? I didn't quite realize this when I first began my researches into books and movies past, but it would become clear soon enough, as I gained sophistication in the new field of women's studies.

What I did realize was that there was a commonality among these (and other) female-authored novels-as well as, very differently, among their film redactions-that went beyond the Gothic elements about which Jo March writes and among which Jane and Cathy live. In my first critical efforts at defining this commonality, I saw it as a shared discomfort with houses that issued in repeated and, to me, quite charismatic acts of defiance by all the heroines. Jo flees to the attic in order to escape the moralizings of the parlor, where she is obliged to act like a "little woman." Jane suffocates in the red-room where Aunt Reed imprisons her, then grows up to pace the battlements at Thornfield, brooding on social injustice. Cathy oscillates discontentedly between the oppressive squalor of Wuthering Heights and the bourgeois constraints of Thrushcross Grange. Soon the women's movement would provide me with a vocabulary through which to define these "patriarchal strictures and structures" that fostered what Matthew Arnold, writing of Charlotte Bronte, called "hunger, rebellion and rage" in so many of the heroines (and novels and authors) my daughter and I admired. But my uncertainty about the issues at hand was probably reflected in the first title I proposed to give the class Susan and I were planning for the fall of 1974: "Upstairs/Downstairs," after the popular television series.

That I was rather taken aback when Susan quite reasonably objected to my title as not only vulgar but misleading shows, I think, how much I had to learn about the subject we were soon going to teach. Yet the replacement on which we quickly settled-"The Madwoman in the Attic"-was from my point of view, anyway, merely a more precise formulation of the argument I wanted to make about neighboring fictional spaces inhabited by turbulent spirits. Thus, when Susan and I decided that the course to which we'd given that name had been so illuminating, indeed, so intellectually transformative for both of us that we had to write a book based on what we'd been learning as well as teaching, it fell to me to write an article (out of which we'd develop a chapter) through which the madwoman of Thornfield Hall resonantly wanders, with her mystery breaking out "now in fire and now in blood, at the deadest hours of night" (239). And inevitably, of course, my article was both infused with and shaped by the extraordinary feminist excitement of the season in the mid-seventies that had inspired me to abandon my sixties snobbery about "articles," along with my bias toward poetry rather than fiction. Bliss was it in that spring to be alive, but to be embarking on a feminist analysis of one of the greatest and most influential novels in the female literary tradition was very heaven! My analysis was a product of its historical moment, and so it obviously emphasized just those aspects of Jane Eyre that dramatized issues to which we in the women's movement had begun to awaken with special passion in those years: the "hunger, rebellion and rage" fostered in both Charlotte Bronte and her heroines by a coercive cultural architecture; the subversive strategies through which author and characters alike sought to undermine the structures of oppression; and the egalitarian sexual as well as social relationships toward which the novel strove. That Bronte's earliest readers had themselves been struck by these elements in her work seemed to me evident, not only from Arnold's well-known phrase, but also from other remarks made by nineteenthcentury reviewers. Not surprisingly, I was particularly fond of Elizabeth Rigby's 1848 assertion that "Jane Eyre is throughout the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit" (Gilbert and Gubar 173-4), of Anne Mozley's 1853 comment that the book seemed to have been written by "an alien ... from society [who was] amenable to none of its laws" (423), and of Margaret Oliphant's 1855 observation that "the most alarming revolution of modern times has followed the invasion of Jane Eyre" (Oliphant 557).

There were, however, a few Victorian responses to which I paid less attention. I don't think, for instance, that I quite knew what to make of the clause that preceded Mrs. Oliphant's description of the "alarming revolution" that ensued after "the invasion of Jane Eyre": "Ten years ago we professed an orthodox system of novel-making. Our lovers were humble and devoted." And still less was I certain how to treat her further description of the book's distinguishing characteristic as its portrayal of "furious lovemaking"-a kind of lovemaking that she thought constituted "a wild declaration of the `Rights of Woman' in a new aspect." To be frank, seventies feminism was uneasy in the presence of the erotic, torn between Erica Jong's notorious celebration of the "zipless fuck" and Kate Millett's not unrelated claim that "there is no remedy to sexual politics in marriage" (147). Commenting on the writings of two contemporaries she much admired, Sylvia Plath and Diane Wakoski, Adrienne Rich noted in her influential "When We Dead Awaken" that "in the work of both ... [the] charisma of Man seems to come purely from his power over [woman] and his control of the world by force, not from anything fertile or life-giving in him," and this because of "the oppressive nature of male/female relations" (35-6). Within a decade, Andrea Dworkin would declare that (hetero)sexual intercourse virtually by nature entails a tyrannical master/slave relationship between male and female, with the man "communicating to her cell by cell her own inferior status ... shoving it into her, over and over ... until she gives up and gives in-which is called surrender in the male lexicon" (Dworkin 100). And such a diagnosis of desire would seem to have been a logical outcome of Plath's embittered "Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you" (Plath 223).

"Furious lovemaking" in Jane Eyre? Well, the oxymoronic phrase could be at least in part understood if one factored in the ferocity with which the novel urged "the 'Rights of Woman' in a new aspect." But from the born-again perspective of seventies feminism that new aspect had more to do with Jane's declarations of independence from Rochester than with expressions of erotic feeling for him. To be sure, I saw Jane's story as ending with a vision of egalitarian marriage that was a consummation devoutly to be wished, if only a utopian one. But how were we to understand the complex, at times tyrannical or even sadistic "lovemaking" that led to a fantasy of such bliss? When in moments of what sociologists call "introspection" I analyzed my own earlier responses to the relationship between Jane and her "master," I had to admit to myself that in my teens I'd wanted more than anything for her to run off with him to the south of France, or even indeed to the moon, where at one point he had playfully promised to bring her to "a cave in one of the white valleys among the volcanotops" (295). And why, after all, shouldn't politically astute readers wish that she and her lover had at least eloped, if not to the moon, to France? Such reallife literary heroines as George Sand and George Eliot had done as much! Why did feminist critics, of all people, have to accept the marriage-or-death imperatives built into what Nancy Miller called "the heroine's text"?

In those days, however, there seemed to be no middle ground between the banal rhetoric of the pulp novelist who declared that "Jane Eyre is one of the most passionate of romantic novels" because "it throbs with the sensuality of a woman's growing love for a man; there is the deep longing of the lonely heart in its every line" (Nudd 140) and Adrienne Rich's stern insistence that "we believe in the erotic and intellectual sympathy of [Jane and Rochester's] marriage because it has been prepared by [Jane's] refusal to accept it under circumstances which were mythic, romantic or sexually oppressive" (Nudd 140). Indeed, to many of us the "deep longing" of a woman's "lonely heart" for the "brute, / Brute heart of a brute like" a man appeared to be a radical weakness-a neurotic flaw-in the otherwise talented and politically correct Charlotte Bronte. Hadn't such feverish yearnings for the love of a (bad) Byronic hero left her vulnerable to Thackeray's rude ruminations on the "poor little woman of genius! The fiery little eager brave tremulous homely-faced creature! I can read a great deal of her life as I fancy in her book, and see that rather than have fame, rather than any other earthly good or mayhap heavenly one she wants some Tomkins or another to love and be in love with" (Lerner 199).

Rich's classic (and still brilliant) essay on Jane Eyre is entitled "The Temptations of a Motherless Woman," and it focuses on the moment, not long after Rochester's seductive plea to Jane that she flee with him to France, when the maternal moon rose to reveal a "white human form" gazing at the tormented governess and gloriously admonishing "'My daughter, flee temptation!"' Bronte herself had had to flee temptation (though she had done so with considerable ambivalence) when she left Brussels and her adored M. Heger. And as a feminist critic in the seventies, I knew that I too had to flee temptation. I had to rigorously repress my own desire for Jane's and Rochester's "furious lovemaking" to reach a romantic-and more specifically a sexualclimax and undertake instead a weary journey across the moors to a political position where, along with Charlotte Bronte and Adrienne Rich, I could rejoice in our heroine's new life as "a village schoolmistress, free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England" (386).

Still, wasn't there an element of bad faith in this reading? If as Judith Fetterley so persuasively argued, we women readers had long been acculturated to identify against ourselves when we perceived the world (and in particular our own gender) from a patriarchal, male perspective, weren't we identifying against ourselves in another way when we refused to acknowledge the rebellious sexual passion driving Jane's assertion to Rochester that "if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you" (281)? Though we might quite properly scorn the cliches of those who saw the novel as primarily a romance that "throbs with sensuality" and a book that "only the lonely" could have written, oughtn't we to have conceded that something about the "furious lovemaking" in the book was what made it ragingly popular in the first place? Or at least that the "`Rights of Woman' in a new aspect" had as much to do with something about the lovemaking as did the more obviously feminist striving toward equality?

Since Bronte first published her bestseller in 1847, there have been at least forty dramas (several of them musicals), nine television versions, and ten movies based on the book, most of them focused on the complexities of its "lovemaking."I And when the writer herself was told of the first of these adaptations, a play staged in London just a few months after the novel's appearance, her instant reaction was to wonder "What ... would they make of Rochester?" and then to fear that what "they [would] make of Jane Eyre" would be "something very pert and very affected" (Nudd 137). Clearly she sensed the charisma of the interactions between her hero and her heroine, and she may have sensed, too, that along with Jane's feminist insubordination, her sexual aggressiveness-the indecorous demeanor with which she confesses her feelings to Rochester while rebuking what she considers his indifference ("Do you think I am an automaton?-a machine without feelings?" [281])-might be represented as "pert" or even "affected" in a setting where the personalities of the characters had been "woefully exaggerated and painfully vulgarized by the actors and actresses" (Nudd 137). What (in another context) one feminist critic rather dismissively called "romantic thralldom" may have been Bronte's problem in her frustrated relationship with Heger, but her fantasy of fulfillment liberated Jane into erotic as well as linguistic assertion.2 For this reason, the novel in which this "poor, plain, little" governess unabashedly tells her story very likely seemed scandalous to its earliest readers not just because its narrator was uppity and "pert" but also-perhaps more importantly-because she was uppity and frankly desirous.

Let me make it quite plain that I don't in any way want to repudiate earlier claims I've made about Jane Eyre. Rather, I want to elaborate, complicate, and enrich them by speculating that the perpetual fascination of this novel arises at least in part from its ambivalent obsession with "furious lovemaking," that is, from its impassioned analyses of the multiple dramas of sexuality. Like so many other (yes) romance writers, Charlotte Bronte created a heroine who wants to learn what love is and how to find it, just as she herself did. Unlike most of her predecessors, though, Bronte was unusually explicit in placing that protagonist amid dysfunctional families, perverse partnerships, and abusive caretakers. Unlike most of her predecessors, too, she endowed her main characters-hero as well as heroine-with overwhelmingly powerful passions that aren't always rational and often can't be articulated in ordinary language. This sense of unspeakable depth or fiery interiority imbues both Rochester and Jane with a kind of mystery that has always been charismatic to readers. But it was almost certainly the startling, even shocking intensity with which Jane publicly formulates unladylike eroticism as well as indecorous social resentment that struck so many Victorians as revolutionary. Here, therefore, Mary Oliphant's association of Bronte's book with Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman "in a new aspect" was not just accurate but perhaps unnervingly so. For even while Jane formulates a traditional feminist creed when she argues that "women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do ... 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" (141), her narrative dramatizes a "furious" yearning not just for political equality but for equality of desire.

That Jane Eyre introduced audiences to the "wild declarations" and egalitarian strivings of an unprecedentedly passionate heroine certainly explains why the novel has always had a special appeal for women, who tend to identifyand want to identify-with this compelling narrator's powerful voice. For the same reason, the work has often elicited different, at times less enthusiastic, responses from male readers, with some dismissing Jane as priggish (for refusing to succumb to her desires) and others disparaging her ferocity (in articulating those desires).3 Yet of course Bronte's novel broods as intently on the mysteries of male sexuality as it does on those of female eroticism, transcribing the fantasies of both sexes with uncanny clarity and (for its period) astonishing candor. To men as well as women, in other words, Jane Eyre tells a shifting almost phantasmagoric series of stories about the perils and possibilities of sexual passion. For indeed, as Elaine Showalter observed some years ago, a "strain of intense female sexual fantasy and eroticism runs through [even] the first four chapters of the novel and contributes to their extraordinary and thrilling immediacy" (Showalter 115).

To be sure, Bronte was working with plots familiar to many of her readers, who would have known, among other significant precursors, the Cinderella story Samuel Richardson told in Pamela and the Bluebeard tale of Anne Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho. But the author's genius in Jane Eyre consisted in the fervor with which she defamiliarized such received plots by putting them: together in a new way. In fact, as a number of comparatively traditional analyses have long since suggested, it's possible to summarize this novel's narrative with a National Inquirer headline: CINDERELLA MEETS BLUEBEARD! More particularly, a "poor, obscure, plain and little" but notably rebellious stepchild/orphan becomes the servant of a princely master, falls in love with him, and desires him intensely, even while finding herself used and abused by him. In fact, this not very acquiescent Cinderella sees her Prince Charming turn into Bluebeard, the jailor (and murderer) of wives, while she herself simultaneously toys with fantasies of seducing him and rebels against his sway by struggling to subvert his power. Bronte's book thus asks a number of crucial questions. For example, what if instead of wielding her broom Cinderella rages against (and amidst) the cinders? And what if Prince Charming is not just a charming aristocrat but a Bluebeard who elicits passionate desire in Cinderella? And at the same time, what if Bluebeard feels he has exonerating reasons for locking up his sexual past? Can, or should, a Cinderella like this one live happily ever after with such a Bluebeard?

To say that Jane Eyre "is" Cinderella and that Rochester "is" Bluebeard is of course to imply that they embody ideas of the feminine and the masculine in a particularly resonant way: an impoverished and orphaned dependent in a hostile household, Cinderella is, after all, condemned to a life of humiliating servitude from which she can only hope to escape through the intervention of an imperious man, and significantly, in the old tale, she finally achieves release through diminution. The ancient plot stresses not just her modesty (and the modesty of her needs), but also her physical daintiness-notably the tininess of her feet compared to those of her arrogant stepsisters, both of whom are literally as well as figuratively swollen with pride and ambition. As for Bluebeard, in the old tale he is depicted as a mysteriously predatory, dark ("blue"), even swarthy figure whose beard signifies an animal physicality frighteningly associated with his femicidal erotic past, and, more particularly, with the bloody chamber in the attic where he keeps the ghastly relics of past sexual conquests.

From one of the perspectives of the Victorian culture whose myths and anxieties Charlotte Bronte so eerily transcribed in Jane Eyre, then, to embody the feminine in Cinderella is to call attention to the physical, financial and emotional deprivation-in a sense, the diminution-endured by married as well as single women in a society where the "second sex" was politically, economically, legally, and erotically disempowered, a culture in which, according to the famous if apocryphal advice Victoria is said to have given one of her daughters, on her wedding night a good woman was supposed to "close her eyes and think of England!" Similarly, to embody the masculine in Bluebeard is to call attention not just to the public power but also to the often fatal private knowledge of sexuality attributed to men in a society that often claimed men were beasts-insisting that, as one of the post-Darwinian heroines of Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida put it, "a man is only a monkey shaved." And perhaps, in fact, because such images of the feminine and the masculine were both so pervasive and so troublesome for Bronte and her contemporaries, there is a sense in which all the female characters in the novel can be seen as variations on the theme of Cinderella, with special emphasis on the problem fleshly desire poses for that heroine, while all the men can be considered variations on the theme of Bluebeard's sexuality.

In this reading, then, the styles of what we now call "the feminine" available to Jane Eyre are variously represented in the stories told about a range of other female characters. The possibilities these subplots explore extend from extreme resignation to equally extreme rebelliousness, from suicidal self-abnegation to murderous passion.4 The angelic Helen Burns, for instance, is a kind of Cinderella who was abandoned, in effect "orphaned," when her father remarried. But her solution to what we might call the Cinderella problem deviates radically from the fairy tale ending. Opting for absolute repudiation of desire in the physical realm of the present, Helen consumes her own body (dying, indeed, of "consumption") for the sake of a spiritual afterlife. Similarly, though in a twist on the Cinderella plot that more closely evokes the traditional story, Miss Temple manages to escape the hardships of her job at Lowood through marriage to a Prince Charming. Yet her self-abnegation requires a rigidity that virtually turns her body to marble: by implication, indeed, she is repressing desire as well as rage when, in one famous scene, her mouth closes "as if it would have required a sculptor's chisel to open it" (95).

But there is yet another, even more disturbing mode of "the feminine" that Jane encounters on her desirous pilgrimage, and it is quite literally embodied in the slavish flirtatiousness that characterizes little Adele (Rochester's ward), as well as the hardheaded quid pro quo eroticism of the child's mother Celine (Rochester's French mistress), and even the practiced charm of Blanche Ingram (his supposed fiancee). As Jane clearly sees, each of these characters is eager to overcome her sexual helplessness in a male-dominated society by selling herself to the highest bidder. Prancing and flouncing like a living doll, Adele is plainly in training for the career of polished coquetry that in different ways shapes the destinies of Celine and Blanche, since if Celine openly prostitutes herself, Blanche is perfectly willing to sell herself on the marriage market. To Jane, who vehemently declares that "I am a free human being with an independent will" (282), all these modes of sexual slavery represent a degradation far more radical than the self-abnegation of the consumptive and the self-repression of the governess.

But if, taken together, many of these minor characters demonstrate to Jane the problems Cinderella faces in a male world, the "eccentric murmurs" our heroine hears echoing in her mind and in the corridors of her Bluebeard's chambers-the "low, slow ha! ha!" she herself associates with Grace Poole, but which Bronte also connects with Jane's own self-defined "restlessness"suggest that, whatever form it takes, female desire may breed dissatisfaction, resentment, and even madness. I have argued elsewhere that the intensity of this Cinderella's own anger at the inequalities she has had to face throughout her life is ultimately embodied in the source of the "eccentric murmurs" and "low slow ha! ha!" that haunt the third story of her master's mansion, for Rochester's mad wife, Bertha Mason Rochester, might be said to represent a kind of "third story" about Jane-as-Cinderella, a tale in which, instead of practicing unearthly renunciation or gaining earthly reward, the hapless heroine gives way to rage. Specifically, as I've also argued, Jane's own incendiary "hunger, rebellion and rage" are theatrically enacted by Bertha when the madwoman sets Rochester's bed on fire, when she attacks her own brother like a vampire, when she rips up Jane's bridal veil, and finally, most dramatically, when she torches the central symbol of Rochester's power, his ancestral mansion.5

At the same time, however, even while Bertha enacts Jane's rebellious rage at servitude, she may also be said to dramatize the sexual "hunger" that all the women in this novel either repress (in the hope of spiritual reward) or pervert (for financial gain)-sexual hunger that (as Showalter also noted in the seventies) some Victorian physicians thought could drive a woman to madness. The beautiful but dissolute daughter of a "Creole" (probably French and Spanish) mother, Bertha is most likely of European descent, although her upbringing in the hot West Indies has led to a tradition of critical speculations that she is racially mixed.6 Whether or not this is the case, she certainly appears to be "other" than Bronte's small, pale, outwardly austere and self-controlled heroine. Rochester himself describes her as a "fine woman, in the style of Blanche Ingram: tall, dark, and majestic" (332) at the time of their first meeting, and like Blanche, she is a woman who has willingly offered herself as a sexual trophy on the marriage market.

Unlike any of the Englishwomen we encounter in Jane Eyre, however, Bertha is the product of a symbolic as well as literal tropic in which desire flourishes, or so Rochester claims. After marriage, he tells Jane, "her vices sprang up fast and rank ... and what giant propensities [she had]!" (333-4). Although his language is guarded (he is after all talking to a supposedly pure English virgin), Victorian readers would certainly have been able to decode what Rochester is saying when he describes such "giant propensities" as causing his wife to be "at once intemperate and unchaste," noting that her nature was "gross, impure, depraved," and adding that "her excesses had prematurely developed the germs of insanity" (334). Even if she is not, in his phrase, "a professed harlot" (335), Rochester is explaining to Jane that Bertha's virtually nymphomaniac abandonment to excesses of desire-to the heat of lust-has "sullied [his] name" and "outraged [his] honor," while driving her to madness (336).

Significantly, too, the "third story" of Bertha's desire-driven madness has both masculinized and, as it were, animalized her (a not-so-surprising phenomenon in a culture professing that "men are beasts"). Thus, when Jane, Rochester, and the other members of the interrupted wedding party finally view the madwoman in the attic at Thornfield, she is described as a sort of beastly "it": "at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face" (321; emphasis added). A minute later, as Rochester strives to subdue her, she is revealed as "a big woman, in stature almost equalling her husband, and corpulent besides," who shows "virile force in the contest" (321) while the contest itself, taking place "amidst the fiercest yells and the most convulsive plunges" (322), is cast in terms that simultaneously evoke mud-wrestling and sexual intercourse.

Considered as a scene of instruction, this episode-with its overtones of what Mrs. Oliphant called "furious lovemaking"-would seem at the very least darkly monitory to a Cinderella who experiences herself as utterly enthralled by her Bluebeard. Shortly before the disrupted marriage, after all, Jane had struggled to check not only Rochester's desires but her own. In one of the novel's more explicit love scenes, the heroine's "master"-now her fiance-sits down at the piano and sings meltingly to her, but she quails when he "rose and came towards me, and I saw his face all kindled, and his full falcon-eye flashing, and tenderness and passion in every lineament" (301). My "task," she goes on to explain, "was not an easy one; often I would rather have pleased than teased him," for "[m]y future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world.... He stood between me and every thought of religion.... I could not, in those days, see God for his creature: of whom I had made an idol" (302). Sunk in the abyss of desire, this apparently decorous and dainty Cinderella may well be in danger of yielding to the same "giant propensities" that (as we will soon learn) turned her Bluebeard's first bride into a beast monstrously swollen or bloated ("corpulent"!) with intemperate sensuality. For from one Victorian perspective, the pious position that would seem to have been official dogma, it's not just rage and rebellion, but sexual hunger that threatens to leave a woman gibbering the "eccentric murmurs" and "low slow ha! ha!" of an animal imprisoned in an attic. At the same time, however, from a less officially pious point of view, it may have been, even pre-Freud, unsatisfied sexual hunger that could turn a lady into a tiger (or, as Jane Eyre later puts it, a "clothed hyena").

I return to, and meditate on, "official" and less official positions because I want to claim, following Mrs. Oliphant's insight into the charisma of this novel's "furious lovemaking," that in her role as Jane's as well as Bertha's author and alter ego Charlotte Bronte was far more ambivalent toward female sexual hunger than has usually been conceded. Elaine Showalter's influential analysis of Bertha's sexuality, for example, depends heavily on Dr. William Acton's notion (articulated in his 1857 textbook on the "reproductive organs") that strong sexual appetite in women might lead to "moral insanity," to "nymphomania [as] a form of insanity" (Showalter 120). But more recent commentators-beginning most notably with Peter Gay-have significantly complicated our picture of Victorian attitudes toward the erotic, allowing us a more nuanced understanding of the "giant propensities" of desire that drive Jane as well as Bertha toward "furious lovemaking."7 In his incisive The Education of the Senses, Gay devotes a chapter to the sexually charged diaries of Mabel Loomis Todd, a woman only a generation or two away from the Brontes who was not only the mistress of Emily Dickinson's brother Austin but also one of the (notoriously insensitive) editors of Dickinson's poetry. Noting Todd's frequently and fervently expressed delight in the erotic, he argues that her experience was exemplary rather than exceptional-a joy in the kinds of "Wild Nights-Wild Nights!" of sexual "Rowing in Eden" for which Dickinson herself also expressed a passionate, if more obliquely formulated, desire. Indeed, Gay observes, by the 1880s, the Scottish gynecologist J. Matthews Duncan was insisting that "Desire and pleasure ... may be ... furious, overpowering, without bringing the female into the class of maniacs" (Gay 134; emphasis added), while Elizabeth Cady Stanton (with a candor rather like Jane Eyre's) was announcing "I have come to the conclusion that the first great work to be accomplished for women is to revolutionize the dogma that sex is a crime" (Gay 119).

Thus, yes, on the one hand, Jane herself-along with Charlotte Bronte, Dr. Acton, and Mrs. Oliphant-would second Rochester's contention that in imprisoning the snatching, growling, and groveling Bertha, Thornfield guards a heart of darkness no proper virgin should confront. Stanton had not yet, after all, revolutionized "the dogma that sex is a crime." "This girl," declares Rochester to the bemused Reverend Wood (who would have married the pair but now cannot) "knew no more than you .. of the disgusting secret" (320; emphasis added) in the attic. But on the other hand, like Stanton herself, Jane knows all too well the intricacies of that secret. Defining herself as "an ardent expectant woman" (323), she has to battle the desire that mounts in her even as she exerts her will to renounce Rochester. Just as "the clothed hyena [that was Bertha] rose up, and stood tall on its hind-feet" (321) before falling on Rochester in what he feared would be "the sole conjugal embrace I am ever to know" (322), so Jane responds to her master's seductive pleas by considering herself "insane-quite insane, with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs" (344). Her project throughout the novel, indeed, will be not (as most critics have thought) to eradicate but to accommodate and decriminalize this fiery and desirous animal self that marks her as a most unusual Cinderella: the mate rather than the prey of Bluebeard.

In the light of recent work on Victorian sexuality, what makes this point especially important is that after all, from Bluebeard's point of view the problem of the conjugal embrace-that is, how, when, where, and with whom desire should be satisfied-was also difficult to resolve. Was a "disgusting secret" about masculinity imprisoned in the virtually official sexual double standard of the age? If so, Rochester's story implies that it was not easy for men themselves to come to terms with the erotic "beastliness" that could easily drive a woman mad, despite the fact that an animal nature was supposedly part and parcel of their own sexual structure. Thus, just as Bronte rings changes on a number of Cinderella stories in order to investigate the life possibilities available to Jane, she offers virtuoso variations on the theme of Bluebeard to represent the life options available to Rochester. In particular, through the subplots she spins around a range of minor and major male characters, she comments on the choices made by the man Jane calls her "master" and specifically about what it would mean either to give in to beastliness or to try conquering it altogether. Unlike as the wealthy owner of Thornfield and the supposedly poor plain governess who tends his ward may seem, in fact, Bronte suggests that Jane and Rochester face comparable dilemmas. Just as Jane seems to have been forced toward either extreme resignation or equally extreme rebelliousness, Rochester appears to be confronted with the alternatives of masochistic self-abnegation or sadistic passion, even though the mystery of male sexuality inevitably plays itself out differently from that of female sexuality.

To be sure, at least the first of the beastly men Jane encounters as she moves toward adulthood is in fact the virulently anti-erotic clergyman Brocklehurst, whose wolfish countenance -"What a face he had ... ! what a great nose! and what a mouth! And what large, prominent teeth!" (64)-demonstrates "the horror! The horror!" of repression, even while (or perhaps especially because) this sanctimonious villain does act like a Bluebeard when in a grotesque parody of Christianity he punishes the bodies of the girls at Lowood with the ostensible goal of saving their souls, in the process murdering a number of them en masse. But an even more obviously beastly male character appears earlier in the book. Bronte depicts young Master John Reed as virtually a paradigm of the Victorian bad boy, wallowing in gluttony, sadism, and a host of other deadly sins. Even at fourteen, the boy Jane reviles as a murderer, a slave-driver, and a Roman emperor "gorged himself habitually at table, which made him bilious, and gave him a dim and bleared eye and flabby cheeks" (41). And after he has left Gateshead, we learn that he has become so degraded that even his mother, herself Jane's wicked stepmother, dreams that she sees "him laid out with a great wound in his throat, or with a swollen and blackened face" (261).

At the same time, however, Mrs. Reed's dreams of the most depraved and vicious of Jane Eyre's male characters seem curiously to evoke an opposite extreme. As Susan Gubar has cogently observed, the suicidally submissive Richard Mason, Bertha Mason Rochester's ingenuous brother, is laid out at the center of the narrative with a great wound in his throat and a "corpse-like face" (238). In a sense, then, if Brocklehurst and Master Reed demonstrate exactly how unattractive the role of Bluebeard is, the feminized Mason appears more like one of the fairytale villain's bloody victims. After having gone to visit the attic's inhabitant, Mason-who looks pale and feeble, "like a child" (240) and a sickly one at that-moans over the "trickling gore" (239) that flows from a hideous bite on his shoulder, reduced to whimpering terror of the sister who "sucked the blood: she said she'd drain my heart" (242). Can it be that some men are so horrified by the aggressiveness implicit in the equation of masculinity with bestiality that they attempt to repress even their own instincts of self-defense? Are some so distressed by their own animal potential to wound that they would rather be wounded? Or does Mason represent a male anxiety about being drained of vital masculine fluids?8

St. John Rivers, one of the most complex characters in the book, suggests that Bronte may have been toying with the last of these three alternatives. Rather than become a bestial Bluebeard or one of his drained emasculated victims, Rivers renounces desire altogether, at great cost and pain to himself. Admitting that he loves Rosamond Oliver "wildly-with all the intensity ... of a first passion" (399), he scorns this rapture as "a mere fever of the flesh," incommensurate with the "convulsion of the soul" (400) that convinces him to dedicate his life to missionary work in India. Yet when he attempts to coerce Jane into a loveless marriage that would, as she herself insists, "kill" her, it becomes clear that even the most apparently renunciatory of men may incarnate the femicidal threat symbolized by Bluebeard. Describing her "ecclesiastical cousin's ... experiment kiss[es]" as "marble kisses or ice kisses," Jane defines each as "a seal affixed to my fetters" (424) and fears that as St. John implores her to marry him an "iron shroud" (429) is contracting round her, especially because as his wife she would have to "endure all the forms of love (which I doubt not he would scrupulously observe)" though "the spirit" would be "quite absent" (430).

But if the consequences of male sexual repression are represented by the "cold cumbrous column" into which the river of St. John Rivers's passion has frozen, the problems of unchecked male eroticism are most vividly dramatized in this novel by its Ur Bluebeard, Edward Rochester himself, for just as the mystery of female sexual hunger is incarnated in Bertha Mason Rochester, the mystery of male sexuality resides in her tormented husband. But while Bertha's lustful madness masculinizes her, Rochester's response to it feminizes (that is, disempowers) him in curious ways, or at least threatens to. Indeed, it is arguable that if in this Victorian psychodrama unfeminine sexual hungers may leave a woman gibbering like a corpulent animal in an attic, such inappropriate and unwomanly appetites are equally dangerous to men, reducing even a powerful "master" to a terrifying awareness that unless he asserts mastery over the female animal she may tear him apart. Does Bluebeard murder his wives because he fears that their inordinate desires might unman him? Do the possibilities of female sexuality imperil male passion? Although Rochester effectively represses whatever explicitly bloodthirsty impulses he may have, his confessions to Jane, after the wrestling scene in which his wife displays "virile force in the contest," emphasize his dread of feminization on several counts.

To begin with, as a second son who could not inherit property in a patrilineal culture where wealth passes automatically to the first-born male, Rochester believes himself to have been used by his father and brother as a tool to enable them to gain a fortune. Like Blanche Ingram, indeed, Rochester himself was commodified on the marriage market: his father (like Blanche's mother) arranged for him to be "provided for by a wealthy marriage" (332) that would also profit his relatives. Just as painfully, during the charade of his courtship in the West Indies, he was tricked by Bertha's family (who kept secret his bride's five year seniority as well as her mother's madness) because they wished to secure a man "of a good race." Like Queen Victoria's daughter, Rochester was supposed to sacrifice his youthful body to this marriage of convenience, and, if necessary, on his wedding night he was supposed to "close his eyes and think of England." At the same time, to further complicate the matter, the language with which he describes his earliest responses to Bertha reveals that her eroticism had at first "stimulated," "excited," and "besotted" him, even turning him into a "gross, grovelling, mole-eyed blockhead" (332-3). The symbolically foreign and beastly, "impure, depraved" nature he associates with his madly sexual wife remains "a part of me," he admits. That after consigning Bertha to Thornfield's attic he has indulged in erotic adventures with a series of foreign (and thus metaphorically alien and beastly) mistresses lends substance to this confession. What, Bronte seems to wonder, if female desire is simultaneously debilitating and contagious (to men), even while it is maddening (to women)?

In one sense, then, through its portrayal of "furious lovemaking" and its meditation on the dangers of desire, Jane Eyre investigates the problem that even a closely guarded wish for such lovemaking posed to both sexes in Victorian society. From this perspective, the secret in the attic is not simply Bronte's rebellion and rage against the subordination of women, but also her intuition that the social enforcement of such subordination was grounded in widespread fears of yearnings that, if not properly controlled, could turn into insatiable and deadly sexual hungers. Certainly, the novelist's Bluebeard is as frightened of beastly Bertha as is her Cinderella: if the madwoman at Thornfield instills in Jane a dread that she will turn into a grovelling, intemperate harlot besotted with desires of "giant propensities" for her "master," she also evokes in Rochester an anxiety that either his own virility will be found wanting in a sexual contest or that he will be turned into an instrumental "blockhead" who is himself subordinated to-destined merely to service!-a growling, snatching wild animal. In another sense, however, Jane Eyre's (and Jane Eyre's) preoccupation with "furious lovemaking" represents an unusually candid rejection of Victorian moral constraints. Indeed, it is arguable that an implicit repudiation of sexual double standards was a major source of the novel's power, for ultimately Bronte allowed her heroine to acknowledge, accommodate, and articulate her own as well as her mate's "giant propensities" without becoming either a clothed hyena or a sacrificial lamb.

Throughout the novel, indeed, Jane's gaze turns voraciously, even at times voyeuristically, toward Rochester, as she catalogs his bodily parts and properties in what amounts to a series of female-authored blazons. His "broad and jetty eyebrows, his square forehead, made squarer by the horizontal sweep of his black hair ... his decisive nose ... his full nostrils, denoting, I thought, choler; his grim mouth, chin, and jaw" (151) and "his great dark eyes" (162) all receive her close scrutiny, along with his "unusual breadth of chest, disproportionate almost to his length of limb," the "unconscious pride in his port" (164) and his hand that is "a rounded, supple member, with smooth fingers, symmetrically turned" and "a broad ring flash[ing] on the little finger" (231). When he confides to her what from any conventional Victorian perspective are the sexual improprieties in his past, she "hear[s] him talk with relish ... never startled or troubled by one noxious allusion" (177). Indeed, she explains, "my bodily health improved; I gathered flesh and strength" (177; emphasis added) while his face becomes "the object I best liked to see" (178). Growing ever less ethereal, more physical, she becomes ever more easily intimate with him, so much so that after she wakes him from his burning bed in chapter fifteen, she rather boldly remains in his presence while he gets "into some dry garments" (180), then huddles in his cloak for half the night in his smoky chamber while he goes to deal with "Grace Poole." And that at first he himself explicitly associates the ostensibly pale, pure governess with the ungovernable elements of fire and water that have engulfed him in his sleep-first inflaming, then flooding-surely has erotic resonance. "`In the name of all the elves in Christendom, is that Jane Eyre?' he demand[s], 'What have you done with me, witch, sorceress?"' (180). Nor is the significance of this interaction lost on Jane, who delightedly records the "[s]trange energy ... in his voice, strange fire in his look," then repairs to her bed, trying to "resist delirium" and "warn passion" though she is too "feverish to rest" (182).

Interestingly, while many of us seventies feminists concentrated on Jane's "wild declaration of the 'Rights of Woman"' in their old aspect, Bronte bestows on the ice-encrusted St. John Rivers the same awareness of her sexual intensity that informed Mrs. Oliphant's identification of the "alarming revolution" fostered by the novel's commitment to a "new aspect" of the "'Rights of Woman"' that would condone a female desire for "furious lovemaking." Though Jane never confesses to St. John her fear that "as his wife ... [she would be] forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital" (433), he nevertheless intuits her ineradicable passion. "'I know where your heart turns and to what it clings,"' he declares, adding censoriously, "'[t]he interest you cherish is lawless and unconsecrated. Long since you ought to have crushed it: now you should blush to allude to it. You think of Mr. Rochester?"' (439). But indeed, Jane doesn't merely "think" of Mr. Rochester. Rather, in a moment of mystically orgasmic passion she virtually brings him into being. As St. John prays over her, reading (tellingly) from the Book of Revelation inscribed by his namesake-a sacred text in which female sexuality, figured as the Whore of Babylon, is banished to the desert so that a new heaven and new earth can be constituted from the blood of the lamb-the "May moon shin[es] in through the uncurtained window" (442), as powerfully as the July moon had shone on the night at Thornfield when a glorious maternal figure bade Jane to "`flee [from] temptation."' Now, however, the same moon silently advises the heroine to flee to temptation, in a moment whose erotic charge is unmistakable:

All the house was still; for I believe all, except St John and myself, were now retired to rest. The one candle was dying out: the room was full of moonlight. My heart beat fast and thick: I heard its throb. Suddenly it stood still to an inexpressible feeling that thrilled it through, and passed at once to my head and extremities. The feeling was not like an electric shock, but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling: it acted on my senses as if their utmost activity hitherto had been but torpor, from which they were now summoned, and forced to wake. They rose expectant: eye and ear waited while the flesh quivered on my bones. (444)

In fact, what Jane discovers through this climax of impassioned epiphany is that the paradise for which she longs is not St. John's heaven of spiritual transcendence but rather an earthly paradise of physical fulfilment. And it is at this instant, of course, that she hears her "master's" voice and declares that she is "coming" to him. Her saintly-and sanctimonious-cousin had prayed "for those whom the temptations of the world and the flesh were luring from the narrow path" (442), had "claimed the boon of a brand snatched from the burning" (442-3). But although she had briefly seen "death's gates opening, show[ing] eternity beyond" and toyed with the notion that since "safety and bliss [were] there, all here might be sacrificed in a second" (444), she now, definitively, chooses "the burning" of her own desire for gratification "here" rather than "there": "My powers were in play and in force," she declares, explaining that she now willingly "fell on my knees; and prayed in my way-a different way to St John's, but effective in its fashion" (445; emphasis added).

That this "way" of prayer is defiantly different must have been, again, as clear to Mrs. Oliphant as it had been to St. John Rivers himself, for Bronte's heroine was quite frankly replacing a Christian theology of renunciation with a more hedonistic theology of love. Importantly, she does not know at this point that Rochester has been freed to marry her by Bertha's death. Instead, she determines to return to him with a lucid consciousness of the "temptation" he constitutes. The "spirit, I trust, is willing, but the flesh, I see, is weak" (446), comments the cousin whose "iron shroud" of morality she has experienced as a deadly-a "killing"-superego, but the ambiguity of her response to his warning hints that a deep skepticism toward received morality is driving her back toward the "furious lovemaking" she had only temporarily rejected: "'My spirit,' I answered mentally, 'is willing to do what is right; and my flesh, I hope, is strong enough to accomplish the will of Heaven, when once that will is known to me"' (446; emphasis added).

To be sure, those of us who know the story realize, as Jane does not, that the will of Heaven is for her to fulfil her desire within the bounds of lawful matrimony-but there is surely a sense in which that will (indistinguishable from the will of the narrative, after all) has chosen to reward her precisely for the acquiescence in temptation that underlies her challenge to the clerical custom St. John so frostily incarnates. Thus while there is no doubt justice in Adrienne Rich's claim that "we believe in the erotic and intellectual sympathy of [Jane and Rochester's] marriage because it has been prepared by [Jane's] refusal to accept it under circumstances which were mythic, romantic, or sexually oppressive," that assertion must be qualified by a recognition of the powerful Romanticism (with a capital "R") that shapes not just Jane's but Bronte's refusal of circumstances that are drearily quotidian, anti-romantic, or morally oppressive (105). In a proud denial of St. John's insulting insistence that she is "formed for labor, not for love" (428), Jane chooses-and wins-a destiny of love's labors.

As seventies feminism (rightly) saw it, of course, given the inequality of the sexes in nineteenth-century England if not in Bronte's imagination, the Bluebeard in Rochester had in some sense to be diminished, even mutilated, in order for the Cinderella in Jane to become whole. And the redeemed pair had to retreat into a world outside history so as to construct a personal story of fulfilled desire. Yet if the Rochester of Ferndean appears at first to be a "sightless Samson" who is "desperate and brooding" as "some wronged and fettered wild beast" (456), Jane's yearning gaze discerns in him still the physical properties that had first aroused her desire, and once more she lingeringly catalogs them. "His form was of the same strong and stalwart contour as ever: his port was still erect, his hair was still raven black," she tells us, confessing that she longs to "drop a kiss on that brow of rock, and on those lips so sternly sealed beneath it" (456).

There can be no question, then, that what Jane calls the "pleasure in my services" both she and Rochester experience in their utopian woodland is a pleasure in physical as well as spiritual intimacy, erotic as well as intellectual communion. "[E]ver more absolutely bone of bone and flesh of his flesh," Jane has reconstructed herself as literally part of her husband's body"his right hand"-in a postlapsarian Eden where she is also the "apple of his eye" (476), and he is her audience, fit though few. In the meantime, St. John Rivers-the quintessentially anti-erotic Bluebeard of self-denial-has been banished from an England where wild nights are now not the torment but the luxury of Jane and Rochester. It is no doubt to emphasize this point that the novel ends with an otherwise puzzling focus on the unmarried missionary's anticipation of death in faraway India ("My Master ... has forewarned me. Daily He announces more distinctly, 'Surely I come quickly!' and hourly I more eagerly respond, 'Amen; even so, come, Lord Jesus!"' [477]). With the exorcism of both the id-like Bertha and the superegoistic St. John from the plot, repression can be repressed, sacrifice sacrificed. Jane has come to Rochester, and St. John is coming to God.

That Jane and Rochester have built their bower of bliss in a "nowhere" kind of place, however, has generic as well as theological significance, reminding us yet again that despite the richly observed texture of, say, the Lowood episode, Jane Eyre is more a romance in the mode of such diversely Gothic descendants as The Turn of the Screw, Rebecca, and Wide Sargasso Sea than it is a "realistic" novel in the mode of The Mill on the Floss or Middlemarch. In a sense, Rochester has brought "Mademoiselle" to the "cave in one of the white valleys" of the moon where he had fantasied to Adele that he would bring his bride-or at least he has lured her to the Minnegrotte, the sacramental Cave of Love where Tristan and Isolde consummate their love in the medieval romance.9 For it's arguable, indeed, that Jane Eyre's "furious lovemaking" participates as much in the mystical Romanticism of Wagner's nineteenth-century re-visioning of the Tristan plot as it does in the genres of fairytale, Gothic, and feminist polemic. Hard as it is to imagine a happy ending to the adulterous affair of Wagner's tortured lovers (could Isolde ever have said "Reader, I married him"?), the merging that Jane and Rochester achieve at Ferndean, as they become bone of each other's bone and flesh of each other's flesh, recalls the desire of "Tristan und Isolde" to eradicate the und and become "TristanIsolde" or, better, "nicht mehr Isolde! / nicht mehr Tristan! / Ohne Nennen, / ohne Trennen."I

Of course, if I return in conclusion to the comparisons of Jane Eyre-the-novel and Jane Eyre-the-movie that I attempted earlier in this revisionary enterprise, I'd certainly have to concede that none of the many screen translations of Bronte's novel are especially Wagnerian. On the contrary, the two best-known versions-the 1944 film directed by George Stevenson and the recent (1996) film directed by Franco Zeffirelli-generally speaking "read" the book as a paperback romance that "throbs with the sensuality of a woman's growing love for a man" because "there is the deep longing of the lonely heart in its every line." The proposal scene in the Zeffirelli movie is particularly banal. True, it offers erotic intensity. Indeed, the soulful kiss with which Charlotte Gainsbourg rewards the avowals of William Hurt was classed as one of the "ten best movie kisses of the year" in a 1996 film roundup. But, neither "furious" nor Romantically mystical, the lovers' embraces are determinedly healthy in a "sensitive" postmodern sort of way, as if Jane and Rochester had separately been taking lessons from Dr. Ruth. And even the madwoman in this film seems trendily sedated, less like "some strange wild animal" than a doped-up housewife in a neatly starched nightgown from a Victoria's Secret catalog.

Rather more appropriately, the proposal scene in the 1944 movie does feature a kind of operatic melodrama, with Jane (Joan Fontaine) cringing before a swaggeringly Byronic Rochester (Orson Welles) and the pair's confessions of love punctuated by Welles's wildly glittering eyes and counterpointed by a howling wind that suggests the onset of tempestuous desires, as well as a ferocious streak of lightning that cleaves the novel's infamous "great horse-chestnut" in one fell swoop. But there's hardly any "wild declaration of the 'Rights of Woman"' in either an old or a "new aspect" here, much less the sort of "furious lovemaking" that would have shocked Victorian audiences. What I think must have impressed me as a teenager, however, was the voyeuristic fixity of Jane's gaze at Rochester, a gaze that (as current film theory would have it) gave Joan Fontaine's otherwise incorrectly timid Jane a compelling epistemological authority.ll Equally impressive to me, also, must have been the extraordinarily powerful moment when, as if to convey the dangers presented by the "furious lovemaking" that might constitute an "alarming revolution," Stevenson's film positions us-its viewers-in the shadows with the unseen, howling madwoman, while Welles and Fontaine stand in a lighted doorway as if confronting the forces of (sexual) darkness only tentatively contained in the attic. In a brilliant stroke, Stevenson exploits a cinematic reticence comparable to Bronte's narrative secrecy: we never see the madwoman as Jane and Rochester see her; instead, we see the lovers as she-raging with pain and desire-sees them. Finally, perhaps, that fierce gaze of darkness is what Jane and Rochester, similarly riddled by desire, assimilate into themselves. And perhaps, too, their defiant acceptance of such darkness makes the "wild nights" of their Romanticism so compelling to me that once again, to my own surprise, here I am, theorizing about the novel in which they star.

Indeed, if Jane Eyre dramatizations are added to Wuthering Heights dramatizations and Bronte family history dramatizations, they constitute such a major industry that one "Wilella Waldorf" once wrote a comic editorial calling for a "National Society for the Suppression of Plays about the Brontes" (Nudd 137).

2 On "romantic thralldom," see Rachel Blau Du Plessis.

See, for example, Bret Harte's "Miss Mix by Ch-l-tte Br-nte" (1867), in which the smugly virtuous heroine leaves her childhood home at "Minerva Cottage" forever to enter the service and the arms of "Mr. Rawjester," the polygamous master of "Blunderbore Hall."

4 In reviewing these stories, along with those implicit in Bronte's representations of her male characters, I am drawing heavily on a talk entitled "Plain Jane Goes to the Movies" that I coauthored and delivered with Susan Gubar at the University of South Carolina in the spring of 1997. For the contribution that work has made to this section of my essay, as well as the part her incisive thinking has played throughout this piece, I am (as I have so often been throughout my career) deeply indebted and very grateful to my longtime collaborator.

See my "Plain Jane's Progress"; and Gilbert and Gubar.

For "postcolonial" readings of lane Eyre, see (among others) David 77-117, Donaldson, Meyer 69-95, Perera, Sharpe 26-53, Spivak, and Young.

In The Education of the Senses, Gay rejects as "derisive" and "little-challenged," the "tenacious misconceptions ... of Victorian culture as a devious and insincere world in which middle-class husbands slaked their lust [with mistresses and prostitutes] ... while their wives ... were sexually anaesthetic" (6).

I am particularly indebted to conversations with Susan Gubar for these observations about the textual function of Richard Mason as well as for a number of other points about the ways in which Bronte represents and interrogates received notions about male sexuality.

9 For a brief discussion of the Minnegrotte as an implied trope in lane Eyre, see Lerner 190.

Act II, Scene II: "Isolde: No more Isolde! / Tristan: No more Tristan! / Both: No more naming, / no more parting" (Wagner 19-20). For a further comment on this phenomenon (and the darkness of the Liebestod it often entails), see Bataille: "Only the beloved, so it seems to the lover ... can in this world bring about what our human limitations deny, a total blending of two beings, a continuity between two discontinuous creatures .... For the lover, the beloved makes the world transparent. Through the beloved appears ... full and limitless being unconfined within the trammels of separate personalities, continuity of being, glimpsed as a deliverance through the person of the beloved" (20-1). The rhetoric of mystical communion that marks the orgasmic moments when Jane and Rochester "hear" each other's calls is best explained in this context, as is Rochester's declaration in chapter twenty-three that "My bride is here ... because my equal is here, and my likeness" (282).

For a different perspective on the authority (or lack of it) associated with Jane's/Joan Fontaine's gaze in the 1944 Stevenson movie, see Ellis and Kaplan: "Cinematically, Jane is placed as Rochester's observer .... We retain [her] point of view, but her gaze is fixed on Rochester as object of desire, an odd reversal of the usual situation in film where the male observes the woman as object of desire in such a way that the audience sees her that way too. Interestingly, the reversal of the look does not give Jane any more power: Rochester comes and goes, commands and manages, orders Jane's presence as he wishes. Jane's look is of a yearning, passive kind as against the more usual controlling male look at the woman" (89). (I should confess, in response to this comment, that I have trouble understanding the distinction between a "yearning" look and a "controlling" look.)

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