‘Deceit is not my fault!’

Jane’s outburst towards Mrs. Reed, before leaving her guardianship for good, suggests a great deal about where the English novel situates itself in national culture. Though we discussed in class that her rebellious retort is a bold presentation of female agency by Charlotte Bronte, the main point that the novel propagates is that Jane eventually overcomes these fits of passion and learns instead to forgive. This expression of unbridled, ungoverned female anger becomes most dangerous to the order of society. The Christian virtue of always speaking the truth and avoiding the sin of deceit is overshadowed by the duty of the female to control her passion and repress her rage. And if we look at the example of Bertha Mason, then repressed rage comes to represent repressed sexuality, the expression of which is absolutely undesirable in Victorian society.  Bertha Mason is an important character put in place to show exactly what happens when female sexuality is allowed to run rampant.

 As the story builds, we see how Jane comes into interaction with other female characters that embody the right kind of values of feminine virtue, be it Helen Burns, Miss Temple or even Mrs. Fairfax. These female are surrogates for absent powerful males in Jane’s life, and in fact serve as ideals of femininity that she tries to mold herself according to. The older Jane (as the narrator) retrospectively confirms, in her own words, how she was quite “out of herself”, when she was being dragged to the Red Room. She cannot even come up with a diagnosis for her state which accurately describes the fit of rage that would overcome her, almost as if it were something external and not from within her own disposition.