Is Jane Eyre anything more than a superior, if idiosyncratic, Mills and Boon Romance?

The guidelines for writing a Mills and Boon Romance novel state certain criteria, including that it should:

…deal with the love between a man and woman, a love that is resolved happily in the end.  The emphasis is on the shattering power of that love to change lives, to develop character, to transform perception… Any situation may be used – from those that confront concerns such as divorce, affairs, illegitimacy or the problems of materialism, to those bordering on fairy tales.

On first reading the novel it would seem that Jane Eyre does contain some of these characteristics: the incredible romantic attraction between Jane and Mr Rochester; their subsequent love affair; Jane’s disinheritance and ultimate retrieval of her legacy; their marriage at the termination of the novel.  However, Jane Eyre cannot be seen merely as a Romance, and it is the idiosyncrasies in the style in which it is written which characterise it as something distinctly unique in terms of Victorian literature.

        Jane Eyre was written in 1948 and can be said to fall under the genre of the Victorian Governess novel.  These novels explore the concerns of the middle-class woman in employment in the nineteenth-century.  At the onset of the novel we know that Jane is an outsider in the house of her cousins: she is socially excluded from their lives.  Therefore she is of a lower social status.  This theme is continued when Jane becomes a governess and through this medium Bronte is able to chart the development of Jane’s development and also focus on her social position.  Boumelha reinforces this when she points out that there are several references to slavery in conjunction with Jane’s predicament, she states that they allude to:

…the slaveries of paid work as a governess and of dependence as a mistress.

  Jane represents the classless individuals in society; they are neither aristocrats nor paupers.  The upper echelons of society perceive her as a threat to their authority, a view shared by Kim Reynolds and Nicola Humble, they state that:

The governess is threatening at first because she is déclassé, and therefore represents the ever-present possibility of a loss of social status: and second, because she is an outsider established at the heart of the family.     

However, Jane is an outsider before she becomes a governess; she is an orphan, something which generally only happened to the lower ranks of society.  This device of orphanhood is quite common in Victorian literature and reflects not only social realism, but also enables Bronte to chart Jane’s struggle for survival in a patriarchal world.  According to Kim Reynolds and Nicola Humble:

        …the orphan became an emblem which, when decoded,

is seen to be fraught with radical implications.  The first of these is centred on the orphan-heroine’s freedom to act, and to work.

  Her persecution at the hands of John Reed symbolises her unhappy childhood at Gateshead Hall:

All John Reed’s violent tyrannies, all his sisters’ proud indifference, all his mother’s aversion, all the servant’s partiality, turned up in my disturbed mind like a dark deposit in a turbid well.         

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Marxist readings of the novel concur with this, and state that there is a social frame underpinning the story.  Jane’s individual will is contrasted with the conservatism of the bourgeoisie and conflicting ideologies are a characteristic of the novel.                

The beginning of the novel can be said to be fairly autobiographical and contains some elements which correspond to events in Bronte’s own life.  There are clear parallels between Jane and Charlotte.  For example, Jane’s schooldays at Lowood are accurately portrayed and can be said to be similar to Charlotte’s own schooldays at Cowan Bridge.  Elizabeth Gaskell states that ...

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