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Authors: Sheila Kohler

Tags: #Fiction, #General

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BOOK: Becoming Jane Eyre
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She saw him the next morning in the large, sunny classroom where they took their lessons. He taught literature at his wife’s school and also at the one for boys next door. From the moment he entered the classroom, he seemed transformed. The dark beetle had become a black swan, the rarest of birds. Monsieur H. sailed in fast, wings spread, obviously in an altered, expansive mood. He was already talking fast, moving his hands furiously through the bright air, as though he were on urgent business. Now, as he mounted the platform, she noticed the broad chest, the strength of the legs, the smiling mouth, the intensity of the black eyes.
He commanded his pupils to sit up and listen. “
Ecoutez
,” he trumpeted with authority, and his gaze roamed the room fiercely, searching for an inattentive gaze. He was obviously enjoying himself, the admiring looks of this crowd of young women. When he had their complete attention, he proceeded to read from Racine’s
Phèdre
in a fine, deep, resonant voice. He rendered Hippolyte’s lines with such feeling and so much expression that, despite her limited French, she forgot where she was, swept away. When he came to a breathless halt and looked around the classroom and the silent, awestruck pupils, she thought,
I am falling in love, falling in love with language, with these sensuous words
.
She listened to him as he analyzed what he had read, probing and darting with daring and eloquence. Despite her limited understanding of the language, she was immediately aware of this man’s original mind, his deep comprehension of the many layers of the difficult text. She watched him use all his enthusiasm, his strength of mind and body, to claim the attention, and the hearts and minds, of these young women. Suddenly, she became aware, her mouth was open and her breathing shallow.
Then he handed back the girls’ homework, his pupils coming up to claim their work. She saw his expression change again and again, withering one pupil with the movement of lip or nostril and elevating the next with the upturn of an eyebrow. Some wept; others beamed, their faces lit with delight. Sometimes he would produce a little gift for a favorite student who had pleased him particularly, bringing forth something, a bonbon or
gourmandise
from one of his numerous pockets, like a conjuror from a hat.
She knew she wanted to please this man, to see his expression alter, to delight his eyes. She wanted one of his sweet gifts.
CHAPTER THREE
Glimmerings
H
er father stirs beside her. He gropes in his darkness, and she arrests his wandering hand and imprisons it in both of hers.
“Read me something, dear child, will you? You are my vision. God bless you, child, and reward you,” he says. Gone is the old autocratic tone, the aggravation barely concealed beneath the pious Christian pronouncements, the threats of punishment for sins.
Sitting by her blinded, silenced father, she dares to take up her pencil and write for the first time in her own voice. She writes from experience, using what she knows of life, of literature, of love, plunging into the midst of her tale, not wasting the reader’s time or trying her patience with lengthy preliminaries.
This time, she will not hide behind the persona of a man, as she did in her novel
The Professor
, with its two brothers in conflict, or as her younger sister has at the start of her book: no Crimsworth, no Lockwood. Nor will she use the Byronic heroes from her early works: no Wellesley, no Townshend, and above all, no Chief Genius Branii, to tell his tale of war, blood, mire, death, and disaster.
She remembers the direct, engaging voice of Robinson Crusoe—indeed, she feels like Robinson Crusoe, abandoned on her desert island—and she writes as though recounting her own adventures. “An autobiography,” she writes at the top of the page. She will make them think this is the truth, and it will be.
In their rejection letter, the editors have asked for an exceptional incident. She will give them one—no: many of them. She will give them mystery. She will use compression and little explanation, plunging into action. Above all, no grumbling. She will write out of rage at injustice and arrogance, the religious humbugs, the exploiters.
She works on the first scene, writing rapidly, seeing it all vividly, the shadowy picture emerging fast from the darkness of her mind, this shadowy room: the rainy, gray November day, the aunt’s bitter words to the child. “She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance,” the aunt tells the child, her darlings clustered around her before the fire.
This new story of an orphan develops with a kind of urgency she has never known before. She has read and written so much, from such a young age. She knows the child’s position in this alien family will yield a steady stream of pathos. She knows how to create suspense by putting a fragile creature in immediate jeopardy and by making her fight back with spirit and justice. “What does Bessie say I have done?” she has the child retort to the aunt. Let the editor, the reader, put this down!
She contrasts the plain, ten-year-old girl with her richer, better-looking cousins. She invents a bully, a fourteen-year-old boy, John Reed—drawn from her days as governess—a fat child who gorges himself on cakes and sweetmeats. He has sallow skin and two spoiled sisters. How she has suffered at the expense of spoiled children whose doting parents could find no fault in them! She makes her heroine small for her age, delicate, and, like herself, plain. She conjures up a disapproving aunt, a mercurial servant girl.
Charlotte knows about the structure of stories and novels: her beloved Bunyan, Scott, Byron, the German Romantics, the French novels, the great Thackeray, Dickens, Carlyle. She has listened to her teacher’s admonitions to imitate classic works. She remembers the fairy tale, where there is an abandoned child, a Cinderella, the parents absent or dead, the aggressor brought swiftly onto the scene. She knows readers will recognize themselves here, all those who had too many brothers and sisters, who were lost in the midst of the solitude of a large family, as she was—or those who had no family at all. An orphan is not so far from a middle child, a third child, soon to be one of six motherless children, with their remote father shut away in his study, muffled in grief. She will avoid mawkishness by creating the complexity of a real child’s mind: this child will be no angel.
She remembers her aunt’s preference for the other children. She makes up a child who dares to ask what most would want to ask of the uncomprehending adults around her, had they the courage—a bright, brave, imaginative child, the child she would have liked to be. Like Charlotte now in the somber room, turning the pages of a familiar book, this child is glad of a quiet moment to study the pictures, the words that both echo the loneliness in her heart and carry her away from her solitary place in this family. She dreams of shadowy realms, frozen wastes, uncharted territories. The child is almost happy.
The desolate day outside, the loneliness of the child within the heart of the family, leads to the reading of the book, the escape into pictures, into a dream world. She creates a moment of hope, a slight pause before violence. Perhaps things will be better for her heroine in her hideout, in her world of dreams. Perhaps things will be better for Charlotte, too, starting this new book, alone with her father at her side. Her spirit lifts.
The name of her character and of her book comes to her casually, as she is busy with other things. She thinks of it as she adjusts her father’s blanket and lifts a cup to his lips, as he stirs, mutters something, stretches out a hand.
“Are you really there, my dear?” he asks.
“Of course, Papa,” she says, but she is not really there. She plunges on and on into the silvery depths. She floats through the autumn night and leaves this place behind.
It comes to her out of thin air. She is not sure if she has heard such a name. Was there someone she knew with that name? Does it come from the family arms she once saw in a church, or the river she knows well, the beautiful valley of the Ayre? Or is it a name that comes from air, perhaps, or fire? Fire and ire will be in the book: rage at the world as it is.
Unfair! Unfair!
Ire and eyer: she is the one who now sees in her father’s place. She has become the voyeur, the observer. Plain Jane, Emily Jane, her beloved sister’s second name, Jane, so close to Joan, brave Joan of Arc, Jane so close to Janet, Jeanette, little Jane. A name that conjures up duty and dullness, childhood and obedience, but also spirit and liberty, a sprite’s name, a fairy’s name, half spirit, half flesh, light in darkness, truth amid hypocrisy, the name of one who sees: Jane Eyre.
CHAPTER FOUR
Love
S
itting at her father’s bedside, she has a vision of her French teacher, Monsieur H. She sees him striding fast into the classroom, waving a paper in his hands with that enthusiasm and certainty in his judgment. He draws himself up, staring at her with his intense gaze. She realizes that the paper he holds is hers. He reads from it in his expressive voice, adjusting his glasses. Will he commend it or heap coals of recrimination on her head?
She has written about Napoleon in the freedom of a language that increasingly belongs to her teacher. It is a language of head and heart, of glitter and gleam, a language that she is distanced from and yet now closer to than any other, because of him, a language of enchantment: French.
He trumpets, “
Ecoutez!
” and obtains in an instant the complete attention of a roomful of girls in all their youthful giddiness. “Now listen to this. Observe the range, the promise here. This is lively writing. Pay attention, girls—you’ll hear something different, something rare.”
She is not used to compliments. She feels her cheeks flush with pleasure. He has recognized her gift. Her body spins. The whole classroom, with its blackboard, its wooden desks, and its stolid Belgian pupils, swims around her.
She remembers the vacillating spring weather: bright one day and wet the next. As she walked in the garden, how brightly the beds flowered, how darkly the high wall between the boys’ and the girls’ school cast its shadow on the grass, how sweetly the sounds of the city came to her, like the constant murmur of the sea. How quickly she and Emily learned French, swallowing it down with great joyous gulps until their Master said one day,
“Voilà le Français gagné!”
She remembers his wife, lying flushed, happy, and exhausted in her canopied bed, smiling at her, as she hesitated at the door with her bouquet of roses clutched in her hand. She welcomed her into the room, patting the bed to invite her to sit close beside her, to admire the new baby she held in her arms. A rush of tears came into her eyes at the sight of the tiny pink creature.
“Would you like to hold him?” the wife asked, but Charlotte didn’t dare.
“Yes, yes,” the new mother had insisted, and thrust the little bundle like an offering into her shaking hands. Would she ever carry a baby within her? She lifted the warm infant and kissed his head, inhaling his scent. With this small, helpless being in her arms, she thought quite peculiarly that she would be willing to do anything, anything, to protect this child, if she was called upon to, if he was dependent on her care.
And her teacher, her Master. He seemed in a feverish state during those early days, rushing from one class to the next in his savage-looking old coat or his old-fashioned slouch hat, arriving sometimes unexpectedly in the early morning as she walked alone in the garden.
“Mademoiselle est bien matinale,”
he would say, pressing her hand in greeting and offering his arm. They walked together under the blossoming fruit trees, the apple, the pear, and the cherry, strolling among the spring flowers, daffodils, tulips, primroses, and fragrant herbs.
In the dim light of her father’s room, she recalls the twilight hour and the fluttering of the young girls in muslin dresses like moths in the gloaming between the shadowy trees. She watched him speak with the girls and realized he was not to them what he was to her.
BOOK: Becoming Jane Eyre
6.79Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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