Misreading “Jane Eyre”

Literature and the perils of the racial lens

It’s hardly news that mainstream discussion of culture today—whether popular or classical — is heavily politicized, and specifically dominated by “intersectional” identity politics. For evidence, look at the current “popular posts” at Literary Hub.

One asks why so little credence is given to Sylvia Plath’s alleged emotional and physical abuse by husband and fellow poet Ted Hughes (no prizes for guessing that the answer amounts to “it’s the patriarchy, stupid”). Another discusses “Dinesh D’Souza’s terrible book about fascism.”

And then there’s the most recent one: “Reading Jane Eyre While Black,” in which fiction writer and essayist Tyrese Coleman asserts that Charlotte Brontë’s beloved feminist classic is in fact an odiously racist tract which systematically vilifies and dehumanizes people of color.

In theory, such a claim isn’t particularly far-fetched. Literary talent and even broad humanistic views do not always safeguard against the prejudices of one’s time (see the anti-Semitism in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist). The taint of bigotry does not justify tossing a 19th Century novel into the dustbin of literary history, but it certainly can and should affect the way we see it.

But in this instance, the charge is almost entirely untrue — and in the end, Coleman’s essay says more about the pitfalls of identity politics than it does about Jane Eyre.

A disclaimer: I am not unsympathetic to Coleman’s perspective. She opens by recounting her experience as a book-loving young girl devouring “classics where the protagonists looked nothing like me” (from The Stranger and 1984 to Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre); then, at thirteen, discovering urban literature by black writers such as Terry McMillan and with it, a hunger to “read about people with the same skin color as mine.” Since then, she writes, she made “a conscious choice to envision every character in every book I read as black, regardless of how the author portrayed them,” in order to defy white-centered narratives.

Many cultural conservatives would respond that great literature transcends race, ethnicity, sex, and other demographic accidents. I don’t think that’s an entirely adequate answer. Of course it’s tragically self-limiting to identify only with protagonists of the same color (or sex); but in a culture that is not colorblind (or gender-neutral), a desire for at least some such protagonists is understandable. This is particularly true when the group to which you belong has been historically viewed as inferior. One needn’t be a “social justice warrior” to see that if you are (for instance) black, female, or Jewish, you are very likely to encounter passages in the Western literary canon that treat “your kind” as lesser human beings, or worse. I can relate to Coleman as someone who grew up a voracious reader and at times had to grapple with misogyny or anti-Semitism, casual or virulent, in some of my favorite books and authors. (Which is not to say, of course, that the Western canon is reducible to such bigotries: ultimately, its core is the affirmation of shared humanity.)

Unfortunately, the current toxic politicization of culture undercuts legitimate conversation about sexism, racism, and other troubling attitudes in older texts. And it promotes a blinkered, severely impoverished, deeply damaging approach to literature — damaging to both reader and literature. For evidence, look no further than Coleman’s essay.

Upon re-reading the novel, Coleman writes, she found it so saturated with vicious racism as to be irredeemable to her as a black woman (unlike, for instance, Pride and Prejudice): “Even if I wanted to, I would be barred from ever seeing any part of myself in Jane — because to be Jane would mean to be in direct opposition to myself.” Coleman is convinced that Brontë would consider her “a savage.” To celebrate Jane Eyre as a feminist classic, she asserts, is “white feminism … that erases women of color.”

To explain how she came to that conclusion, Coleman chronicles her re-reading of Jane Eyre — one that ends in “want[ing] to throw the book across the room.” From early on, she sees Brontë, in Jane’s voice, consistently describing “untoward and morally corrupt” characters as “dark and swarthy creatures,” with dark skin and hair. Jane’s tyrannical, abusive aunt Mrs. Reed has “dark and opaque skin”; her son, Jane’s bullying cousin John, “sometimes reviled [his mother] for her dark skin, similar to his own.” Later, there’s Miss Ingram, the rival for the heart and hand of Jane’s enigmatic employer Mr. Rochester: glamorous, shallow, mean-spirited, and “dark as a Spaniard.” While Coleman grants that these are not actually “characters of color,” she believes their complexion is used to signify a tendency toward “nonwhiteness or non-Englishness” — and, worse yet, toward evil.

Finally, we get to the infamous mad wife in the attic, Bertha Mason, who has long black hair and a “discoloured face” with “blackened inflation of lineaments.” Rochester explains to Jane that the woman he was tricked into marrying in Jamaica comes from a “mad family”: “Her mother, the Creole, was both a mad woman and a drunkard!” Coleman concludes that the ghastly Bertha is a racist stereotype: a “woman of mixed race” who is not only insane but barely human (she “snatched and growled like some strange wild animal”), and whose insanity “is predicated on the fact that she is not white.”

And it’s all almost entirely untrue.

First of all, it’s very unlikely that Bertha is “of mixed race.” Historically, the term Creole was used in the West Indies and Spanish America for all locally born people of European descent. (The word has had different meanings in different cultures and at different times, and has often included people of African or part African ancestry; but in 1847, when Jane Eyre was published, it almost certainly referred to white descendants of European settlers in South America and the Caribbean.) Indeed, the language used to describe Bertha’s face which Coleman indignantly quotes — “discoloured” and “blackened” — suggests that the natural color of her face is altered by the ravages of illness. (A few lines further down, Bertha’s face is also said to be “purple.”) Bertha’s brother Richard, who arrives as a guest at Rochester’s home several months before the mad wife is revealed, is described at various times as having a “pale” face and a “singularly sallow” complexion.

And what of the other characters whose dark skin and hair supposedly marks them as bad and not-quite-English? John Reed’s description suggests that he is not naturally dark-skinned but “bilious” from gluttony. Mrs. Reed does have “dark and opaque” skin, but her hair, in the very next words, is said to be “nearly flaxen.” As for Miss Ingram, it’s a bit of a stretch to say that her dark complexion is a marker of non-Englishness, considering that she is also the most desirable woman in local society. (Amusingly, her name is Blanche, i.e. “white.”)

Meanwhile, John’s sisters Eliza and Georgiana, who also torment Jane as children and are portrayed in a decidedly unsympathetic light as adults (the spinsterish Eliza is smart but cold, pedantic, unkind and arrogant while Georgiana is a vain, mindless, self-centered social butterfly preoccupied with snagging a high-status husband), are both very white: Eliza is “pallid,” while Georgiana is a pink-cheeked, blue-eyed beauty with golden curls.

It is also notable that the word “swarthy” occurs in the novel exactly once — and the character thus described is none other than Mr. Rochester. What’s more, the same passage describes him as distinctly “foreign,” in a scene where he dresses up in shawls and a turban for a costume charade at his party: “His dark eyes and swarthy skin and Paynim features suited the costume exactly: he looked the very model of an Eastern emir.” (“Paynim” is a now-obsolete term referring to non-Christians and especially Muslims.) So a book that supposedly demonizes “dark and swarthy” creatures as not-quite-English and not-quite-human actually has a dark and swarthy man of vaguely Arabic looks as its romantic hero.

Now, to be fair, this doesn’t entirely get Brontë off the hook as far as ethnic and “color” stereotyping. Rochester is a dangerous, passionate “bad boy,” a rebel against social norms (one who, moreover, can only wed the heroine after he has been punished, tamed, and symbolically castrated for his transgressions by losing an arm and nearly all of his eyesight in a fire). This type of character in European and American literature is often associated with exotic “dark” looks (“tall, dark and handsome,” though Rochester lacks the “handsome” part). But this doesn’t change the fact that Rochester is Jane’s soulmate and equal, someone she considers to be head and shoulders above the fairer-looking gentlemen of his social circle. He is, moreover, someone she unequivocally chooses over her other suitor, the blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned St. John Rivers. (What’s more, St. John, very English and very Christian though he is, is not entirely a “good guy.” He is “despotic” in demanding that Jane accompany him to India as a fellow missionary in a loveless marriage, and she rejects him with startlingly harsh words that he rebukes as “unfeminine”: “If I were to marry you, you would kill me. You are killing me now.”)

It is also true that, while Bertha Mason is not “a woman of color,” her background does mark her as “exotic.” When Rochester tells Jane the story of his disastrous marriage, he talks about the night he nearly resolved to shoot himself until “a wind fresh from Europe” brought about a storm that cleared his mind; that was when he decided to return to Europe, conceal his marriage, and seek a fresh start. Coleman, for some reason, attributes this line to Jane as she resolves to leave Rochester after the failed wedding — an odd error, considering Jane is in Europe at the time. But yes, the “sweet wind from Europe” is deliberately contrasted to the oppressive heat of the Caribbean. Is this meant to be a contrast between civilized Europe and exotic, “savage” foreign lands — or between “home” and and a strange place where Rochester has found only grief? Probably a bit of both. But even if it’s the former, it’s a pretty minor sin for a 19th Century British author.

Lastly, it is true that Brontë generally has a tendency toward ethnic stereotyping. When Rochester’s tale gets to his life after returning from the West Indies and locking Bertha away, his mistresses are a multinational gallery of stereotypes. The first, of whom Jane already knows — the late mother of Rochester’s little ward Adèle, for whom Jane was hired as a governess — was French and a fickle, unfaithful, fashion-loving coquette; she was followed by an Italian who was “unprincipled and violent,” and then a German who was “honest and quiet” but dull and spiritless. (This is also part of a more general Brontë tendency to write minor characters, especially unattractive ones, as caricatures — such as Eliza and Georgiana, the two sisters of opposite temperaments.) In the final chapter in which Jane gives the reader a brief update on what happened after “I married him,” we are told that Adèle was sent to a good school where “a sound English education corrected in a great measure her French defects.” I find this more amusing than obnoxious, but it is, to be sure, a weakness in Brontë’s outlook.

Yet Coleman’s passionate indictment misses a great deal of complexities in Jane Eyre, starting with Jane’s own “marginalized” status for much of the novel: a young single woman of genteel birth but poor and kinless, and plain to boot. (Oddly, Coleman describes her as “comely,” which really makes one wonder how closely she read the novel; Jane’s lack of comeliness, as both a child and an adult, is a fairly prominent theme in the narrative.) Some critics think the mad and bad Bertha is in some sense Jane’s shadow self (Rochester at one point describes Jane as “savage”); this interpretation certainly fits with Jane’s rebellious temper, but also with Brontë’s penchant for dualities. (It is interesting, for instance, that while Jane’s ruin comes from the “exotic” Caribbean — Richard Mason’s arrival to stop her marriage to Rochester by revealing the existence of his Creole wife — her salvation comes from another “exotic” place: an uncle in Madeira, off the African coast, leaves her the money that makes her an independent woman and allows her to marry Rochester as an equal.)

And one item in Coleman’s indictment is truly baffling: among the offenses that she mentions struggling to get past is Rochester jokingly calling Jane a “little niggard.” (It has to do with her refusal to return some money he gave her.) There have been actual incidents in which people and publications were accused of racism for using the word “niggardly,” and using it may be ill-advised considering how similar it sounds to a racial slur. But surely a professional writer (and an attorney) has to know that it is not actually a racial slur and could not have been intended as one? Surely the editors at Literary Hub, if such exist, must be aware of this?

This is not to pick on Coleman. The problem is that the racialized analysis she offers is today’s cultural mainstream, both in the literary press and in academia. And, because is it seen as the voice of the “marginalized” — as “punching up” against the white supremacist, patriarchal (or, in this case, “white feminist” tradition) — it gets very little pushback or criticism. In the comments at LitHub.com, a few people challenged Coleman’s reading of Bertha as mixed-race or “niggardly” as a slur, but there were far more responses along the lines of, “Wow. I never thought of Jane Eyre this way (which is exactly your point.) Thank you for helping me see better.”

In 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay called “The Prevention of Literature,” the theme of which was the stifling of creativity and thought by supposedly progressive intellectual orthodoxy (which in his time was communist). If Coleman’s reading of Jane Eyre represents the dominant intellectual fashion of our time, the prevention of literature is happening right here and now.