Victorian Visual Culture

Throughout our class, Jane Eyre has come up in different ways. I personally find myself returning to the novel frequently as it is one I have encountered at different points in my life, sometimes personal and sometimes scholarly. Most recently, I analyzed Jane Eyre for my final project in a Victorian Studies class I took last semester while studying abroad. (It was an intro level course, so I was glad to be able to expand my knowledge and continue the continuity of the course through Victorian Literature and Visual Culture at MHC.) For this blog post, I would like to return to that essay and add some of the new concepts that have come up in this class. 

In this paper, I conducted a comparative analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret, published in 1862. (To quickly summarize the latter, Lady Audley’s Secret centers around Lucy, a beautiful but mysterious woman who has recently married to a society man and is hiding a dark secret that slowly unravels around her.) I argued that both texts feature a key female figure with an “other” self that manifests both literally and figuratively. This “other” allows the heroine to transgress gender norms and temporarily escape patriarchal structures through taboo gender performance and violence. 

For Jane, her spiritual “other” manifests in the form of Bertha, Mr. Rochester’s first wife. Jane, after learning of her existence, understands her to be insane, but refuses to be with Mr. Rochester when he is married. The argument that Jane and Bertha are two sides of the same self was first put forth by the scholars Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their book of feminist literary criticism, “The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.” Gilbert and Gubar analyze the restrictive expectation placed upon Victorian women that they be “angels in the house,” demure, presentable, all-capable women who take care of their homes and raise children while living up to ideals of feminine virtue. This expectation was impossible to truly meet and so, I argued, many female writers (and, in turn, readers) crafted stories where alternate versions of themselves could be represented. Gilbert and Gubar claim that Jane’s interactions with Bertha are “the book’s central confrontation[s], an encounter…with her own imprisoned ‘hunger, rebellion, and rage, a secret dialogue of self’” (339). When Jane feels ambivalent about getting married, Bertha manifests in her room as a “fearful and ghastly” (Jane Eyre, 242) figure who destroys her wedding veil, a physical manifestation of Jane’s new role as a wife. Symbolically, Bertha represents strength Jane does not have; while Jane secretly wishes she could Mr. Rochester’s equal, both physically and emotionally, Bertha is described as “a big woman, in stature almost equalling her husband” (360). Their looks are juxtaposed against each other as well, with Jane continually described as plain and Bertha as “like some strange wild animal” with hair as “wild as a mane.” (Jane Eyre, 250). Gilbert and Gubar conclude that Bertha is “Jane’s truest and darkest double” (360) who helps her resist domesticity she does not want and unleash the anger she has been suppressing since childhood. 

I added to their argument by applying it to Lady Audley’s Secret, where the idea of the “other” manifests differently. In this case, the “other” comes in the form of an identity transformation, where we see a monstrous transgression of gender norms through Lucy’s breakdown as she attempts to conceal her secret. In a past life, Lucy was married to another man, who abandoned her and her child. She fled her old life and began anew, meeting a new man who offered her upward mobility and security. However, when old friends and foes come back into her life and make her fear exposure, Lucy goes to extreme lengths to protect herself. She attempts to muder several people, pushing one down a well and lighting an inn on fire with people still inside. She also transgresses expectations of feminine virtue by yelling at people, and being unabashedly determined to gain wealth and status through marriage. Thus, I argued, her “other” self manifested through this identity transformation, which sees her lashing out at the people—and, therefore, the patriarchal structures—that confine her. She ends the novel tragically, placed in an asylum to die by multiple men who colluded against her, so her “other” is unable to secure true liberation for her in the end. But nevertheless, the parallels between the two novels and the use of two selves to represent opposition to patriarchal subjugation remain. Ultimately, through transgressive violence, both women found freedom from patriarchy, if only temporarily. 

This was where my original argument ended. However, given the emphasis on visual culture in this class, I would like to point to several instances where we see visuality manifest in both novels. Firstly, both novels make much of women’s physical appearances as representative of their emotional state and role in society. Jane’s unremarkable physical appearance aids her characterization as someone who is selfless, kind, and morally pure. Conversely, Bertha’s “wild” appearance matches her descent into madness. (It may also be reflective of racialized narratives at the time, as some scholars have explored Bertha’s non-white racial identity that is explored very little in the novel.) Lucy is described as unearthly beautiful, which is what originally drew both her husbands to her. As she spirals out of control, the men around her describe her as monstrous and ugly to the point of no longer looking human. The novels also devote time to describing various symbols of femininity, such as Jane’s veil, and class, such as Mr. Rochester’s and Lucy’s estates. If I was redoing this project through the lens of visuality, I would be interested in exploring the ways in which other course themes, such as portraiture, plays a role in the films.

Works Cited:

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley’s Secret. Vol. 1–3. London, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: The Tinsley Brothers, 1862.

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: Smith, Elder & Co., 1847. 

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. New Haven, United States of America: Yale University Press, 2000.