Jane Eyre's Fairytale Legacy at Home and Abroad

Constructions and Deconstructions of National Identity

Abigail Heiniger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317111306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di letteratura comparata

Exploring the literary microcosm inspired by Brontë's debut novel, Jane Eyre's Fairytale Legacy at Home and Abroad focuses on the nationalistic stakes of the mythic and fairytale paradigms that were incorporated into the heroic female bildungsroman tradition. Jane Eyre, Abigail Heiniger argues, is a heroic changeling indebted to the regional, pre-Victorian fairy lore Charlotte Brontë heard and read in Haworth, an influence that Brontë repudiates in her last novel, Villette. While this heroic figure inspired a range of female writers on both sides of the Atlantic, Heiniger suggests that the regional aspects of the changeling were especially attractive to North American writers such as Susan Warner and L.M. Montgomery who responded to Jane Eyre as part of the Cinderella tradition. Heiniger contrasts the reactions of these white women writers with that of Hannah Crafts, whose Jane Eyre-influenced The Bondwoman's Narrative rejects the Cinderella model. Instead, Heiniger shows, Crafts creates a heroic female bildungsroman that critiques fairytale narratives from the viewpoint of the obscure, oppressed workers who remain forever outside the tales of wonder produced for middle-class consumption. Heiniger concludes by demonstrating how Brontë's middle-class American readers projected the self-rise ethic onto Jane Eyre, miring the novel in nineteenth-century narratives of American identity formation.

Chapter 1 Faery and the Beast in Jane Eyre: Brontë's New Fairy Tale

DOI: 10.4324/9781315590349-1

Jane Eyre (1847) is a fractured fairy tale that confronts the gender power hierarchy traditionally reinforced in canonical fairy tales. As such, this novel has haunted the literary consciousness of women writers as an illusive hope that women may be written free of the confines of the patriarchal narratives. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë rewrites “Beauty and the Beast” with a heroine whose strategy is diametrically opposed to that of the self-effacing Beauties in her juvenilia, including The Spell.¹ Brontë transforms this fairytale plot by adding a changeling heroine. Although Jane Eyre is not literally a changeling any more than Edward Fairfax Rochester is literally a beast, the fairy-lore and fairytale characteristics of each are clearly recognizable. Furthermore, Brontë’s revision of the traditional fairytale plots through the addition of a changeling heroine is the pebble that starts an avalanche. Women writers throughout the nineteenth century and into the present have responded to Brontë’s strong heroine and reappropriated the fairy tale. Critics have been guided by the rewritings of Jane Eyre as much as, and in some cases more than, by the novel itself. By amalgamating fairy tales and fairy lore in Jane Eyre, Brontë created a powerful heroic female protagonist who could challenge the Victorian gender norms emerging in the mid-nineteenth century.

The changeling heroine in Jane Eyre is based upon the pre-Victorian fairy lore Brontë both read and listened to when she was growing up in Haworth.² Although the “Beauty and the Beast” plot is used extensively by Victorian women writers, the changeling heroine is a distinctive character in literature of the latter half of the nineteenth century.³ Within the novel’s historical and biographical context, the amalgamation of pre-Victorian fairy lore and the traditional “Beauty and the Beast” plot in Jane Eyre enables Brontë to negotiate the expectations being established for Victorian women by fairy tales with beautiful, good, passive heroines. The regional aspect of this fairy lore also gives Brontë’s heroic changeling a local, regional identity. This makes the changeling distinct from the exoticized heroines that populate Brontë’s juvenilia.

The fairytale elements in Jane Eyre have tantalized critics, who have chased Brontë’s fairytale allusions like an ignis fatuus through a marsh of literary and psychological theory in an attempt to identify the power of the novel and its impact on generations of readers and writers.⁴ Even when these fairytale tropes are dismissed as immature wish fulfillment by the scholarly community, this aspect of Brontë’s writing continues to invite critical scrutiny. “Cinderella” has been the dominant fairytale paradigm in scholarly readings ever since Gilbert and Gubar identified Brontë’s novel as a Cinderella tale in Madwoman in the Attic (2000). Their interpretation assumes Jane Eyre is a Victorian novel based upon a Victorian fairytale tradition; Gilbert and Gubar identify the heroine as one of the “real Victorian Cinderellas” (342). They claim that the fairytale motifs are ultimately disempowering because Jane “can no more become such a woman than Cinderella can become her own fairy godmother” (345). Although scholars have investigated a range of different fairytale allusions in this novel, they usually draw similar conclusions: the fairytale heroine is too weak to create her own happiness. Thus, fairytale readings typically situate Brontë’s female bildungsroman within a Victorian female narrative paradigm. These readings assume that the use of fairy tales and the fantastic in Jane Eyre resembles the use of the fantastic in Victorian art and literature.

While critics’ examination of several fairytale motifs in Brontë’s novel is certainly significant, women writers in the nineteenth century were particularly intrigued by the concept of feminine empowerment conveyed by the fairy-bride tradition in Jane Eyre. According to Carole Silver’s “‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’: Victorians and Fairy Brides” (1987), this fairy lore challenged the patriarchal social norms emerging in the nineteenth century, as the reaction of Victorian folklorists demonstrates. Amid the myriad, and often conflicting, messages conveyed by Brontë’s fairytale allusions, her fairy lore sets this novel apart from other narratives and may explain the attraction of Jane Eyre for nineteenth-century women writers. The pre-Victorian fairy offers an alternative construction of female identity and female power, which clashes with Victorian ideals of feminine passivity and domesticity. The fairy bride maintained her independence and her power after marriage; she could not be confined to the domestic sphere. Most prominent folklorists responded to the fairy bride as if it were a threat to Victorian values and attempted to explain it away as a lost figure from a “conquered race” (C. Silver 289). Silver contextualized this threat with Victorian legal battles over married women’s rights (C. Silver 284); the fairy-bride narrative was especially threatening because it challenged the hotly contested practice of stripping married women of any autonomy. Victorian folklorists claimed the fairy bride represented a lost matriarchal culture that was eventually subsumed by more powerful patriarchal cultures. By embedding the fairy-bride tradition in a narrative of progress that glorified the Victorian patriarchy, folklorists attempted to qualify and undermine the counterculture message: as a remnant of a lost culture, the narrative was no longer relevant.

Other scholarly fairytale readings of Jane Eyre do not even consider the pre-Victorian fairy-lore or fairy-bride tradition that Brontë merges with fairy tales.⁵ Gilbert and Gubar only note the fairy references in the novel as pejorative labels applied to the heroine by other characters (361–2).⁶ These scholars thus miss Brontë’s central transformation of the traditional fairy tale and her creation of a heroic female character.⁷ As Brontë worked out the “Beauty and the Beast” plot in her juvenilia, she recognized its insufficiencies as a cultural narrative for women. In Jane Eyre, she deals with the weakness of the “Beauty and the Beast” plot in relation to the power of the pre-Victorian changeling heroine. The changeling heroine becomes an alternative to the self-effacing female Beauties in Brontë’s juvenilia. Heroines featured in her earlier stories and novellas, such as Mary and Mina Laury in The Spell, find “a kind of strange pleasure in bearing the burden and carrying the yoke of him whose fascinations fettered [them] so strongly” (76). By contrast, the changeling is not enslaved by her love because she has her own rules and she respects those rules – she is not the captive, or captivated, Beauty who is subject to the rules of a Beast.⁸ Furthermore, the changeling relies on her own internal power and creates her own happy ending; she is a heroic female. She breaks out of traditional Victorian narrative paradigms for women. The potential for female empowerment embedded in the changeling character is one element this analysis contributes to fairytale readings of Jane Eyre. Contrary to Gilbert and Gubar’s claims, Jane Eyre can be her own “fairy godmother” (345).

Haworth's Gate to Faery

While the pre-Victorian North Country fairy lore that empowered Brontë’s heroine was not the remnant of a past matriarchy, it was lost to later literature. This distinction between pre-Victorian and Victorian influences is explicitly absent from most scholarly discussions of Jane Eyre.⁹ Written on the cusp of the Victorian era, Brontë’s first novel taps into an alternative fairy-lore tradition that challenges emerging ideals for women, but it is a performance that cannot be repeated. All Jane Eyre’s literary descendants, including Brontë herself in her final novel, Villette (1853), are dealing with that perceived lack of the changeling heroine and her pre-Victorian lore. Silver claims that Brontë’s heroine Jane Eyre is the last acclaimed portrayal of the fairy bride in British literature (C. Silver 292–4). The following chapters examine this loss, beginning with Brontë’s Villette, and suggest explanations for it.

Growing up in the North Country during the 1820s and 1830s, Charlotte Brontë was immersed in a pre-Victorian fairy-lore tradition. Brontë’s father, Reverend Patrick Brontë, was the Perpetual Curate of the Established Church in Haworth; the parsonage was on the edge of the Pennine Moors in West Yorkshire, part of the North Country.¹⁰ Unlike Victorian fairy lore, which developed a rather canonical set of tropes and ideology as it was mass-produced in art and literature, pre-Victorian fairy lore in Great Britain is regional and lacks set conventions. The golden age of fairy painting and literature was during the height of the Victorian Era.¹¹ This mass-produced fairy lore continues to govern and influence Western perceptions of this tradition. Thus, reconstructing a pre-Victorian fairy lore is challenging. It requires a shift in interpretive frameworks and material that predate the majority of fairy lore produced in Great Britain.

Brontë’s writing was a part of a fairy-lore tradition that was both oral and literary. Without constructing a dichotomizing framework of orality and literacy, I have detected the existence of alternative fairy-lore traditions with distinctive and powerful representations of womanhood that Brontë incorporated into Jane Eyre. This oral fairy lore is also particularly regional. Thus, Brontë’s powerful changeling is also a regional figure. While the literary sources available to the Brontës have been well established, only glimmers of the oral tradition remain, captured in the papers of the Brontë family and in the geography surrounding the Brontë parsonage.

In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Catherine Linton beguiled Hareton into taking her out to the moors, where he “opened the mysteries of the Fairy cave, and twenty other queer places” (153). This passage illustrates the direct connection between the land and pre-Victorian North Country fairy lore: “the mysteries of the Fairy cave” is a reference to fairy lore about a specific cave on the local moors. According to Jessica Lofthouse in North-Country Folklore (1976), fairy lore is literally tied to the land in the North Country.¹² Wuthering Heights suggests that the Brontës were a part of this tradition.

Lofthouse claims that some links between fairy lore and the local environment are overt, such as engraved stones marking the burial sites of fairy creatures (30). However, most stories are linked to the natural landscape, like the Fairy cave in Wuthering Heights. One such place is Jennet’s Foss and Jennet’s Cave on the Pennine Moors in West Yorkshire. This rather spectacular geographic location has perpetuated stories about the North Country’s distinctive fairy queen, Jennet. Lofthouse states:

The old, low-arched bridge has been replaced by a plain functional one. But take the path on the left bank to a bathing place fit for the Queen of Faery. The beck has its most dramatic moments here, plunging over black rocks in a waterfall called Jennet’s Foss, a veil of water half concealing Jennet’s Cave behind it. A place for water sprites or naiads … who chose such places to fiddle to the accompaniment of falling water. Old folk-tales make it a gateway of Faery, and Jennet its queen. (21)

Despite the popularity of William Shakespeare’s immortal fairy queen, Titania, the regional geography associated with Jennet has kept her stories alive in the North Country. According to Winifred Gérin’s biography Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius (1967), the Brontë children walked with Tabby and listened to her fairy lore (38–9). It is highly probable that a distinctive and popular landmark such as Jennet’s Cave would have been familiar to them.¹³ It may even be the cave Emily Brontë alludes to in Wuthering Heights. References to Jennet also appear in the proposal scene in Jane Eyre.

According to legend, fairies are not only tied to the land in the North Country tradition, but they engage in mundane, local activities, such as going to market and doing laundry (Lofthouse 18–20). Their rural costumes and activities are a reflection of the local culture in miniature. Although female fairies are the most powerful and prominent in these stories, male fairies are mentioned frequently (Lofthouse 11–21). The fairies in the North Country tradition stories are very different from the decadent, hypersexualized, and infantilized fairies of later Victorian culture.

Fairy tales and local folklore were an integral part of life in the Brontë parsonage when Charlotte Brontë was growing up. In “‘That Kingdom of Gloom’: Charlotte Brontë, the Annuals, and the Gothic” (1993), Christine Alexander includes Ellen Nussey’s account of the amateur folklorist activity of the entire family.¹⁴ The Reverend Patrick Brontë led his children in collecting local stories from the oldest members of the parish in Haworth (Alexander 412). Branwell Brontë’s journal contains the few surviving examples of these tales, including the “Darkwell Gytrash” (Leaf 11, Verso). Although the gytrash is a fairy beast rather than a fairy, the tale has the same elements as Lofthouse’s fairy lore. The tale is closely tied to the local geography and the local people, and the fairy beast is relatively powerful. Like Jennet’s Foss and Jennet’s Cave, Darkwell is a farm on the moors near the parsonage. The gytrash is specifically tied to the place and the family living there; it appears before or after tragic events (Branwell Brontë Leaf 11, Verso). The evidence strongly suggests that the Brontës were familiar with the type of regional tales Lofthouse collected in North-Country Folklore.

Biographies of Charlotte Brontë by both Elizabeth Gaskell and Gérin recognize Tabby Ackroyd, the Brontës’ house servant, as the most significant source of folklore in Brontë’s life (Gaskell 63–6; Gérin 38–40). In The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), Gaskell states:

Tabby had lived in Haworth in the days when the pack-horses went through once a week … What is more, she had known the “bottom,” or valley, in those primitive days when the fairies frequented the margin of the “beck” on moonlight nights, and had known folk who had seen them … . “It wur the factories as had driven ’em away,” she said. (63)

Gérin emphasizes the connection between Tabby’s stories and the local environment, especially the moors.

In her tales, where resentment yet burnt at the disfigurement of a beautiful landscape and the abolition of a centuries-old way of life, Tabby became an unconscious poet, filling the hills and woods and streams with an anthropomorphic life in which she believed with all the force of her good sense and rustic piety. In the golden age before the mills had come, there had been fairies by the beck-side in the hollows … (38)

She not only told the Brontë children stories about the fairies inhabiting the local landscape; she also “walked with them on the moors” (39), taking them out into the world she filled with wonder. Tabby’s fairy lore was so real to the children that Charlotte Brontë thought she saw a fairy standing over her little sister Anne’s cradle, according to a letter included in Juliet Barker’s The Brontës: A Life in Letters (1998).¹⁵ However, Brontë’s literal belief in fairies is not as significant as her use of fairy tales and the fantastic to work through the trauma of loss. Gérin claims that the Brontë children all used fairy tales and magical stories to cope ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Jane Eyre’s Transatlantic Echo
• 1 Faery and the Beast in Jane Eyre: Brontë’s New Fairy Tale
• 2 Eve’s Legacy: Redemption and Writing a New Mother in Brontë’s European Progeny
• 3 The American Cinderella: A New Fit for Jane Eyre
• 4 Jane Eyre’s Lost Slipper: Worlding the Counterintuitive Brontë Effect in America
• Conclusion: Postcolonial Echoes of Cinderella
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Bibliography
• Index