Eagleton's clever version of Jane Eyre

[beccaelizabeth]

Eagleton has a very clever theory about Jane Eyre, expressed with a clever trick.

The theory is that

The fundamental structure of Charlotte's novels is a triadic one: it is determined by a complex play of power relations between a protagonist, a 'Romantic-radical' and an autocratic conservative. In Jane Eyre these roles are fulfilled respectively by Jane, Rochester, and St John Rivers.

[p74]
Elsewhere he equates conservative with gentry and progressive with bourgeoisie, but also Romantic with gentry and realist with bourgeois. Somewhere the oppositions got in a tangle.

In Jane Eyre the choice between 'Romantic' and 'rationalist' is clear-cut: Jane rejects Rivers and opts for Rochester.*
* The roles themselves, of course, are considerably less clear-cut : both men combine 'Romance' and 'rationalism' indifferently proportioned measures.

[p83]
Now you might think that making a clear cut choice between men who are a blend of both is a contradiction. But here is the clever bit in how he presents the theory.

We find embedded in Charlotte’s work, for example, a constant struggle between two ambiguous, internally divided sets of values. [...] I call these patterns of value ‘ambiguous’ because the elements of one may be displaced or ‘inverted’ into the other; and this, indeed, is precisely the point.

[p4]
All those times it says ambiguous? Add to it repeated 'conflicting' and indeed 'contradictory'. He has made it so the fact that his theory contradicts itself and if you accept his binary oppositions the book says its own opposite actually proves his point.
*hats off* to Mr Eagleton, that's a good one.



Okay, past my frustration, I can actually see his point. (It only took me a bloody irritated week.)

His theory is that when Charlotte Bronte was writing there was tension between the landed gentry and the industrial bourgeoisie, a tension at the level of values and culture, as well as political tension and laws and money and all that. They were in the process of resolving these tensions to become the new ruling class together. CB's protagonists, Jane Eyre among them, live out these tensions, get pulled in different directions by different values, and then find a way to resolve them at the end of the book. At the end of Jane Eyre the resolution is that by living by the values of bourgeois meritocracy, working hard to gain independence, she providentially finds herself in a position to realise she was actually always rich and of a good family, that is always landed gentry through her Eyre and Rivers relations. By living as bourgeois she discovers she's secretly upper class. And then she gets to marry the passionate really rich really upper class guy having discovered this. So by hard work (middle class), birth and marriage (upper class), she earns her happy ending.

In this theory the bit where Rochester gets blind and loses a hand is the plot's revenge against the upper classes.

Okay, so far so I can see it.

The bit that annoys is all the specific bits in the middle. Like his unquestioned acceptance that because men have power power is masculine, so when women want to make choices they're being masculine and when Rochester gets helpless he's being feminine. I want to whap the guy with his book for that one. And then there's the other very clever contradiction=proof bit where Jane talking back to Rochester, ie disagreeing with him, is "flirtatious self-assertion". And Jane leaving him is a very clever plan to keep him. "She must demonstrate her quietly self-sufficient independence of Rochester as a way of keeping him tied to her, and so, paradoxically, of staying tied to and safely dependent on him." [p18] I don't even know, it made negative amounts of sense, except in that no means yes logic that I do not wish to comprehend.

He also calls Rochester "an oppressed younger son of the gentry". Yes, because being very rich, socially well connected, socially powerful, and able to lock one's wife in the attic is so oppressed OMG. Cry moar, patriarchy boy. (Yes yes, arranged marriage, boo hoo, but is he really the oppressed one in that? FFS.)

Also there's a bit where he says in CB's books "Submission is good, but only up to a point". I'm trying to think of any point where submission is in fact good. The consequences of passion he lists - being locked in the red room, being tempted to a bigamous marriage - are just as much the consequences of submission. If she went along with Rochester she'd be bigamous, if she stayed with Mrs Reed she'd build a red room in her head. But revolt, passionate outbursts, urgently breaking from the wishes of others, always leaves her in a better situation in the long term. When she fought back against getting her head bashed open with a book, she did get locked in the red room, but she also got to go to school. School tried to kill her, but it got better and she got the education she needed to avoid the fates of the Reed family (four kinds of unpleasant). Leaving Rochester was not an act of submission, but it lead her to finding her origins, her family of blood-and-affinity, her inheritance and financial independence. Submission to St John would have led to her early death. There's nowhere in the book where submission is in fact a good thing. Unless I've forgotten it entirely.


The essay question is:

Discuss the portrayal of class within Jane Eyre. How far do you agree with Terry Eagleton’s argument that the novel is fundamentally conservative?

Meyer says Eagleton says

Terry Eagleton finds the novel the most conservative. He sees in Jane Eyre, as in all Bronte's novels, a struggle between individualistic bourgeois values and conservative aristocratic values. Eagleton reads Bronte's novels as "myths" that work toward balancing these values, in part through conservative endings in which the protagonists "negotiate passionate self-fulfillment on terms which preserve the social and moral conventions intact" by taking positions within the social system that has oppressed them earlier in the novel.

[Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975), pp. 4, 16]

It's conservative in that nothing much changes, the values are all kept intact and celebrated at once, the working class and gentry just get really cosy.

But something with so many tensions in, not just between different bits of middle class but with attitudes to the poor, or working class servants, doesn't just compress back down to a tidy ending. Jane takes a tour of a lot of different class positions and the disadvantages thereof. Readers at the time found it radical, worryingly so. Declaring the 'masters' tyrants who treat women as slaves, repeatedly, and having big speeches about how women need to think and learn and have things to do with their brains too, declaring equality even if it does get a bit strained, that's not conservative. So I don't think everything the novel brings up can get swallowed in one chapter of happily ever after.

Eagleton gets around the 'equality' thing by saying that independence is somewhere in between being poor and being rich, and hence not equal.

[Jane] wants a degree of independence in marriage - '"It would indeed be a relief," I thought, "If I had ever so small an independency"'. But it is, significantly, 'small' : she can hope to bring Rochester an accession of fortune, but hardly to get on genuinely equal terms. Independence, then, is an intermediate position between complete equality and excessive docility: it allows you freedom, but freedom within a proper deference.

[p29]
Having made up this definition it is then the way of saying Jane is never equal with Rochester.

"I told you I am independent, sir, as well as rich: I am my own mistress." Jane says.

"Jane does not finally claim equality with Rochester" Eagleton says. And technically this is correct, the E word is absent. But she does call Rochester's former state "proud independence", which he has lost now. So, not equality, but something he doesn't have. Superiority?

the primary terms on which CB's fiction handles relationships are those of dominance and submission. The novels dramatise a society in which almost all human relationships are power struggles; and because 'equality' therefore comes to be defined as equality of power, it is an inevitably complicated affair. Jane serves in the end 'both for [Rochester's] prop and guide', which is an interestingly ambiguous situation. It suggests subservience, and so perpetuates their previous relationship; but the subservience is also, of course, a kind of leadership. Whether she likes it or not, Jane finally comes to have power over Rochester. Her ultimate relation to him is a complex blend of independence (she comes to him on her own terms, financially self-sufficient), submissiveness, and control.

[p30]

The thing where they both have power over each other is apparently not equality.
Also, by dominance and submission, he does mean what you think. "The sexual expression of this transaction, as I have tried to show, is sado-masochism." [p75] Since there hasn't been anything about hurting each other in the bits I read I suspect it's just another instance of not unpacking all the parts of BDSM.

And I don't think he was talking about the ending, more the bits in the middle he defines as flirting, but

[Jane] settles for a vicarious expression of her own competitive [he says 'maleness' I think he means 'power'] through [Rochester]. She preserves the proprieties while turning them constantly to her advantage, manipulating convention for both self-protection and self-advancement.

[p31]
That's one way of seeing the end. And the middle. Only Eagleton writes it as Jane's calculation, when I'm not sure I'd say it was conscious on Bronte's part. It's just another compromise, if you can't shift the whole position of women in society, find a man to act through.


Now I know exactly what I'm arguing with, and what quotes I want to use from Jane Eyre. Well, roughly. I'll have to cut it down small.

"You have no business to take our books; you are a dependent, mama says; you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen's children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mama's expense. Now, I'll teach you to rummage my bookshelves: for they ARE mine; all the house belongs to me, or will do in a few years. Go and stand by the door, out of the way of the mirror and the windows."

I did so, not at first aware what was his intention; but when I saw him lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm: not soon enough, however; the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it. The cut bled, the pain was sharp: my terror had passed its climax; other feelings succeeded.

"Wicked and cruel boy!" I said. "You are like a murderer--you are like a slave-driver--you are like the Roman emperors!"

I had read Goldsmith's History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero, Caligula, &c. Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never thought thus to have declared aloud.

[chapter 1]

I resisted all the way: a new thing for me, and a circumstance which greatly strengthened the bad opinion Bessie and Miss Abbot were disposed to entertain of me. The fact is, I was a trifle beside myself; or rather OUT of myself, as the French would say: I was conscious that a moment's mutiny had already rendered me liable to strange penalties, and, like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths.

"Hold her arms, Miss Abbot: she's like a mad cat."

"For shame! for shame!" cried the lady's-maid. "What shocking conduct, Miss Eyre, to strike a young gentleman, your benefactress's son! Your young master."

"Master! How is he my master? Am I a servant?"

"No; you are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep. There, sit down, and think over your wickedness."

[...]

Bessie answered not; but ere long, addressing me, she said--"You ought to be aware, Miss, that you are under obligations to Mrs. Reed: she keeps you: if she were to turn you off, you would have to go to the poorhouse."

I had nothing to say to these words: they were not new to me: my very first recollections of existence included hints of the same kind. This reproach of my dependence had become a vague sing-song in my ear: very painful and crushing, but only half intelligible. Miss Abbot joined in -

"And you ought not to think yourself on an equality with the Misses Reed and Master Reed, because Missis kindly allows you to be brought up with them. They will have a great deal of money, and you will have none: it is your place to be humble, and to try to make yourself agreeable to them."

"What we tell you is for your good," added Bessie, in no harsh voice, "you should try to be useful and pleasant, then, perhaps, you would have a home here; but if you become passionate and rude, Missis will send you away, I am sure."

[...]

My head still ached and bled with the blow and fall I had received: no one had reproved John for wantonly striking me; and because I had turned against him to avert farther irrational violence, I was loaded with general opprobrium.

"Unjust!--unjust!" said my reason, forced by the agonising stimulus into precocious though transitory power: and Resolve, equally wrought up, instigated some strange expedient to achieve escape from insupportable oppression--as running away, or, if that could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die.

[chapter 02]

I felt an inexpressible relief, a soothing conviction of protection and security, when I knew that there was a stranger in the room, an individual not belonging to Gateshead., and not related to Mrs. Reed. Turning from Bessie (though her presence was far less obnoxious to me than that of Abbot, for instance, would have been), I scrutinised the face of the gentleman: I knew him; it was Mr. Lloyd, an apothecary, sometimes called in by Mrs. Reed when the servants were ailing: for herself and the children she employed a physician.
[...]
"Don't you think Gateshead Hall a very beautiful house?" asked he. "Are you not very thankful to have such a fine place to live at?"

"It is not my house, sir; and Abbot says I have less right to be here than a servant."

"Pooh! you can't be silly enough to wish to leave such a splendid place?"

"If I had anywhere else to go, I should be glad to leave it; but I can never get away from Gateshead till I am a woman."

"Perhaps you may--who knows? Have you any relations besides Mrs. Reed?"

"I think not, sir."

"None belonging to your father?"

"I don't know. I asked Aunt Reed once, and she said possibly I might have some poor, low relations called Eyre, but she knew nothing about them."

"If you had such, would you like to go to them?"

I reflected. Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation.

"No; I should not like to belong to poor people," was my reply.

"Not even if they were kind to you?"

I shook my head: I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind; and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women I saw sometimes nursing their children or washing their clothes at the cottage doors of the village of Gateshead: no, I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.

"But are your relatives so very poor? Are they working people?"

"I cannot tell; Aunt. Reed says if I have any, they must be a beggarly set: I should not like to go a begging."
[...]
Abbot, I think, gave me credit for being a sort of infantine Guy Fawkes.

On that same occasion I learned, for the first time, from Miss Abbot's communications to Bessie, that my father had been a poor clergyman; that my mother had married him against the wishes of her friends, who considered the match beneath her; that my grandfather Reed was so irritated at her disobedience, he cut her off without a shilling; that after my mother and father had been married a year, the latter caught the typhus fever while visiting among the poor of a large manufacturing town where his curacy was situated, and where that disease was then prevalent: that my mother took the infection from him, and both died within a month of each other.

[Chapter 03]

hmmm, that's totally too much to use for quotes already. And I need some other bits about 'slave'. Slave, revolt, master, mistress, class, caste, equal, independence. They'll have to be very short bits.


I have quite a lot of thinking here. Now I need to structure it as an essay. And answer the question properly.

Comments

[beccaelizabeth]

equality:
Chapter 14
their second conversation; the first was on her skills, their second is more of a negotiation for position.

Rochester:

The fact is, once for all, I don't wish to treat you like an inferior: that is" (correcting himself), "I claim only such superiority as must result from twenty years' difference in age and a century's advance in experience.
[...]
"Then, in the first place, do you agree with me that I have a right to be a little masterful, abrupt, perhaps exacting, sometimes, on the grounds I stated, namely, that I am old enough to be your father, and that I have battled through a varied experience with many men of many nations, and roamed over half the globe, while you have lived quietly with one set of people in one house?"

"Do as you please, sir."

"That is no answer; or rather it is a very irritating, because a very evasive one. Reply clearly."

"I don't think, sir, you have a right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience."
[...]
"I was thinking, sir, that very few masters would trouble themselves to inquire whether or not their paid subordinates were piqued and hurt by their orders."

"Paid subordinates! What! you are my paid subordinate, are you? Oh yes, I had forgotten the salary! Well then, on that mercenary ground, will you agree to let me hector a little?"

"No, sir, not on that ground; but, on the ground that you did forget it, and that you care whether or not a dependent is comfortable in his dependency, I agree heartily."

"And will you consent to dispense with a great many conventional forms and phrases, without thinking that the omission arises from insolence?"

"I am sure, sir, I should never mistake informality for insolence: one I rather like, the other nothing free-born would submit to, even for a salary."

"Humbug! Most things free-born will submit to anything for a salary;
[...]
[I] was thrust on to a wrong tack at the age of one-and- twenty, and have never recovered the right course since: but I might have been very different; I might have been as good as you-- wiser--almost as stainless. I envy you your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory. Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure--an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment: is it not?"

"How was your memory when you were eighteen, sir?"

"All right then; limpid, salubrious: no gush of bilge water had turned it to fetid puddle. I was your equal at eighteen--quite your equal. Nature meant me to be, on the whole, a good man, Miss Eyre; one of the better kind, and you see I am not so.
[...]

That conversation starts with him asking her if he's handsome, and then having the idea that probably develops into their getting married. On the second conversation he has that idea.


Chapter 25
Rochester has played at making Jane jealous by pretending to go after Blanche.
Jane is not amused.

"No: you must stay! I swear it--and the oath shall be kept."

"I tell you I must go!" I retorted, roused to something like passion. "Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?--a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!--I have as much soul as you,--and full as much heart! And 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. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;--it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal,--as we are!"

"As we are!" repeated Mr. Rochester--"so," he added, enclosing me in his arms. Gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on my lips: "so, Jane!"

"Yes, so, sir," I rejoined: "and yet not so; for you are a married man--or as good as a married man, and wed to one inferior to you--to one with whom you have no sympathy--whom I do not believe you truly love; for I have seen and heard you sneer at her. I would scorn such a union: therefore I am better than you--let me go!"

Eagleton ignores this when he says "Jane does not finally claim equality with Rochester" - or he's weaseling with 'finally'. She claims equality, she claims superiority!

The only bit Eagleton pays heed to is Rochester's echo - "My bride is here," he said, again drawing me to him, "because my equal is here, and my likeness. Jane, will you marry me?"

Spiritual equality, yes, but JANE claims it. And it's about love, and avoiding arranged marriage, which she has previously said is about CLASS.

I have not yet said anything condemnatory of Mr. Rochester's project of marrying for interest and connections. It surprised me when I first discovered that such was his intention: I had thought him a man unlikely to be influenced by motives so commonplace in his choice of a wife; but the longer I considered the position, education, &c., of the parties, the less I felt justified in judging and blaming either him or Miss Ingram for acting in conformity to ideas and principles instilled into them, doubtless, from their childhood. All their class held these principles: I supposed, then, they had reasons for holding them such as I could not fathom. It seemed to me that, were I a gentleman like him, I would take to my bosom only such a wife as I could love; but the very obviousness of the advantages to the husband's own happiness offered by this plan convinced me that there must be arguments against its general adoption of which I was quite ignorant: otherwise I felt sure all the world would act as I wished to act.

[chapter 18]

So she's saying she is better than him because she would scorn to marry without love, and she says all his class held these principles, of marrying for connections and interest, and not love. So she's saying she's better than all his class because she wouldn't marry without love. That's not just a claim of spiritual equality before god, that's moral superiority of her class over his.

Rochester hears her claiming equality. "I have seen what a fire-spirit you can be when you are indignant. You glowed in the cool moonlight last night, when you mutinied against fate, and claimed your rank as my equal." [ch 24]

Mrs Fairfax, the other upper servant in the house, another dependent, and someone with real equality [ch 11], is dubious about the match.

She looked at me bewildered. "I could never have thought it. He is a proud man: all the Rochesters were proud: and his father, at least, liked money. He, too, has always been called careful. He means to marry you?"

"He tells me so."

She surveyed my whole person: in her eyes I read that they had there found no charm powerful enough to solve the enigma.

"It passes me!" she continued; "but no doubt, it is true since you say so. How it will answer, I cannot tell: I really don't know. Equality of position and fortune is often advisable in such cases; and there are twenty years of difference in your ages. He might almost be your father."

"No, indeed, Mrs. Fairfax!" exclaimed I, nettled; "he is nothing like my father! No one, who saw us together, would suppose it for an instant. Mr. Rochester looks as young, and is as young, as some men at five-and-twenty."

"Is it really for love he is going to marry you?" she asked.

I was so hurt by her coldness and scepticism, that the tears rose to my eyes.

"I am sorry to grieve you," pursued the widow; "but you are so young, and so little acquainted with men, I wished to put you on your guard. It is an old saying that 'all is not gold that glitters;' and in this case I do fear there will be something found to be different to what either you or I expect."

"Why?--am I a monster?" I said: "is it impossible that Mr. Rochester should have a sincere affection for me?"

"No: you are very well; and much improved of late; and Mr. Rochester, I daresay, is fond of you. I have always noticed that you were a sort of pet of his. There are times when, for your sake, I have been a little uneasy at his marked preference, and have wished to put you on your guard: but I did not like to suggest even the possibility of wrong. I knew such an idea would shock, perhaps offend you; and you were so discreet, and so thoroughly modest and sensible, I hoped you might be trusted to protect yourself. Last night I cannot tell you what I suffered when I sought all over the house, and could find you nowhere, nor the master either; and then, at twelve o'clock, saw you come in with him."

"Well, never mind that now," I interrupted impatiently; "it is enough that all was right."

"I hope all will be right in the end," she said: "but believe me, you cannot be too careful. Try and keep Mr. Rochester at a distance: distrust yourself as well as him. Gentlemen in his station are not accustomed to marry their governesses."

[ch24]

So on the basis of station, money, and age she sees inequality and an attempt to exploit Jane, who she saw treated as a pet, fondly but not with these equalities.

The difference in fortune preys on Jane too.

Glad was I to get him out of the silk warehouse, and then out of a jewellers shop: the more he bought me, the more my cheek burned with a sense of annoyance and degradation. As we re-entered the carriage, and I sat back feverish and fagged, I remembered what, in the hurry of events, dark and bright, I had wholly forgotten--the letter of my uncle, John Eyre, to Mrs. Reed: his intention to adopt me and make me his legatee. "It would, indeed, be a relief," I thought, "if I had ever so small an independency; I never can bear being dressed like a doll by Mr. Rochester, or sitting like a second Danae with the golden shower falling daily round me. I will write to Madeira the moment I get home, and tell my uncle John I am going to be married, and to whom: if I had but a prospect of one day bringing Mr. Rochester an accession of fortune, I could better endure to be kept by him now."

[ch24]
They're bringing Adele around with them, a living reminder of how the last time Rochester kept a woman turned out. She tells him in so many words "I will not be your English Celine Varens."
When Rochester makes an unfortunate reference to seraglios Jane tells him to go buy a slave if he wants one, and "don't consider me an equivalent", and if he should try it she would become "a missionary to preach liberty to them that are enslaved". It's a biting little exchange that says precisely what is going to happen next, in an ironic kind of way.

"I would consent to be at your mercy, Jane."

"I would have no mercy, Mr. Rochester, if you supplicated for it with an eye like that.

Indeed, by the time she has him at her mercy, his eyes are rather different.

Jane insists "I shall continue to act as Adele's governess; by that I shall earn my board and lodging, and thirty pounds a year besides." But Rochester refers to Jane's employment as "governessing slavery", mixing up slavery and salary. Jane refuses his redefinition and continues with her job. By the time of their actual marriage Jane no longer needs to earn her keep, being independently wealthy, and she can't be a governess to Adele any more, but she does work for Rochester in another capacity.

Chapter 24 is one big renegotiation of their status, one that Rochester is not undertaking in good faith, having skipped a rather important bit of information. Jane is holding on to her principles and making sure he knows it. Conventional romantic language doesn't way her, when he sings to her her sharp retort is "he had talked of his future wife dying with him. What did he mean by such a pagan idea? I had no intention of dying with him--he might depend on that."

If St John had heard her then, he would have known not to get started.

Jane's exercise of personal power, rejecting Rochester and standing alone, is, to be fair to Eagleton, always rather well received by Rochester, and Jane knows it. "He was kept, to be sure, rather cross and crusty; but on the whole I could see he was excellently entertained, and that a lamb-like submission and turtle- dove sensibility, while fostering his despotism more, would have pleased his judgment, satisfied his common-sense, and even suited his taste less." I don't agree that she's doing it just to keep him, but rather to keep herself, her own definition of self, to not be remade in some other image. "a weapon of defence must be prepared--I whetted my tongue"; and despite what sounds to me like the start of physical abuse ("a pinch on the arm", "a severe tweak of the ear."), Jane is happy with the results - " "I can keep you in reasonable check now," I reflected; "and I don't doubt to be able to do it hereafter: if one expedient loses its virtue, another must be devised." " [chapter 24]

Lastly, the moment Jane realises StJohn is her equal is when he proposes marriage to her. She refuses, he gets angry, and she realises:

had silently feared St. John till now, because I had not understood him. He had held me in awe, because he had held me in doubt. How much of him was saint, how much mortal, I could not heretofore tell: but revelations were being made in this conference: the analysis of his nature was proceeding before my eyes. I saw his fallibilities: I comprehended them. I understood that, sitting there where I did, on the bank of heath, and with that handsome form before me, I sat at the feet of a man, caring as I. The veil fell from his hardness and despotism. Having felt in him the presence of these qualities, I felt his imperfection and took courage. I was with an equal--one with whom I might argue--one whom, if I saw good, I might resist.

[chapter 34]
When he was acting the saint she felt him superior, but when he is just fallible and grouchy, full of 'hardness and despotism', she can resist, as an equal. The ideology of spiritual superiority that is one of the instruments of patriarchy, the idea the man has to lead the woman to god and she can't get there on its own, falls apart to reveal the despotism underlying it. Jane consents on his plan, if and only if she goes as curate and fellow-missionary, again equal before god and defined again by her employment not her marriage. St John refuses this, because she would still be able to change her mind. Marriage as an instrument of control, as a means of removing all further choices from a woman, is unmasked in the raw. Patriarchy with no veils on.