Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (20 page)

One might argue that we should turn our sights backward toward the actual marriage between Catherine and Edgar, a happy enough little union until it is wrecked by Heathcliff’s return. The entire novel is framed by the contrast between the “proper” world of Linton’s Thrushcross Grange and the savage fierceness of Wuthering Heights, the abode of the Earnshaws and Heathcliff. At times the book reads like a Lévi-Strauss experiment that contrasts the “raw” with the “cooked,” as if Brontë were desperately trying to find a way to get the genie back into the bottle in the name of “civilization” and to conclude with some kind of social cohesion and development. These matters impinge fully on the theme of growing up. The entire rites-of-passage model, as well as the implied ethos of the Bildungsroman, is oriented toward an outcome of marriage and social adaptation. From an anthropological perspective, marriage and adaptation signal the young’s entry into society, into the human dance. But I invoke these concepts in order to question their validity in literature, not only in
Wuthering Heights
but in so much of what we have seen: Romeo, Juliet, Lazarillo, Pablos, Simplicius, Des Grieux, Manon, Rastignac, Pip, Huck, Benjy, and the Invisible Man have no wedding bells ringing for them, nor do they receive a regular paycheck as proper citizens doing their bit to uphold the social contract.

Could it be that great literature is always cautionary? Even countercultural? Or that the poet, as Blake said of Milton, is always of the Devil’s party? One thing seems to be sure: the old adage that “happy love has no history” seems to possess a kind of rock-bottom artistic truth, for the great works of art are invariably keyed to the problems and complexities of culture, what Freud rightly called civilization’s “discontents.” It is worth pausing a bit over this rather dark view of literature’s tidings. We will see that even books about love that finish “well”—and the next one we’ll discuss, Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
, does indeed finish well—can be fiendishly illuminating about the obstacle course, indeed the roller-coaster ride, needed to get to that “positive” finish line.

Jane Eyre
, Charlotte Brontë’s grand story of a young girl’s struggles for love, recognition, and authority, is one of the most famous “success stories” in English literature. Unlike in the world of Emily’s
Wuthering Heights
, manners, rules, and conventions have a real presence, as do social institutions, so that we can track Jane’s arduous path from misery to happiness and power; it is virtually a station drama, as well as an ongoing education. Jane is, as she herself says to her cold aunt Reed, desperate for love, for no human being can live without it. We see her experience an angelic version of such a bond at Lowood School, where she meets and adores the saintly, older Helen Burns, destined to die. Here Jane sees what goodness looks like, yet she cannot help noting that Helen dies as the victim of a cruel institutional culture, and the little girl determines to fight for what she wants. She then becomes a teacher in her own right, still yearning for happiness and fuller self-realization.

The crowning moment for love comes when she encounters Edward Rochester: an older man, haughty and virile, a wounded warrior with a secret. Brontë has cast their romance in quasi-mythic terms: she the elf creature, he the Gytrash of legend; she the spirit who will save him, he the proud male who must command. The scenes between these two people are wonderful reading: Rochester teases and taunts Jane, tests her; she responds in kind, timidly at first but increasingly spiritedly and feistily. Rochester’s pride, intellect, and forthrightness are what she has yearned to meet and worship all her life. Their exchanges have a zest and bite that jump out at us from the page, no matter how many times we’ve read this novel. We are very far from the raw savagery of
Wuthering Heights;
Charlotte is unrivaled in showing us how wit, nerves, intelligence, and feeling do their finest dance when two people probe each other in a drawing room, moving ever closer. We know they are falling in love well before the topic is openly discussed, and we sense also the distinction and superiority of each of them, the clear-eyed, unillusioned view of behavior and world that is being sounded. There is a wonderful freshness here, like a window being opened, causing us to realize just how mannered and stifling the rules of decorum in British high culture have to have been. For Jane, of course, such a love is unthinkable, given the social barriers between governess and gentleman; for Rochester, one senses a mix of yearning and anxiety, as if this grizzled man knows he has found something perfect yet is bound by some constraint that remains unvoiced.

But things are less simple than I have indicated (as readers of the novel know). Not merely are there some huge unwelcome surprises and secrets out there, waiting to explode, but the actual texture of the Jane/Rochester relationship merits a closer look. Charlotte Brontë is more akin to Dostoevsky than we realize, for her view of human affection is, at some profound level, keyed to insult and injury. I say this because there is more than a little sadism on show here: Rochester does not hesitate to sing the charms of his buxom (wellborn) fiancée, Blanche Ingram, to the little wrenlike governess Jane, telling her of his (bogus) plans for marrying the full-bodied Blanche, of his determination to send governess Jane away to Ireland to work in another family. He asks Jane to be ready to sit up with him the night before his marriage (to Blanche), so that he can expatiate on Blanche’s beauty:

I confess to seeing in these lines—do not forget: Jane is tiny, poor, and
plain;
this matters—a kind of sadistic cruelty that fully matches the more sensational stuff found in
Wuthering Heights
. Growing up—the education of the heart—entails lessons of this stripe also. Rochester intentionally brings her to tears more than once. He bullies her, taunts her, toys with her, all with the intention of finding out what she is truly made of. He is no snob, but he is indeed her moneyed, propertied employer, and we are never allowed to forget the social hierarchy that is in place. (Consider those “Yes, sir” replies of Jane’s and tell yourself that these two people are falling in love: this is one way of gauging the depth of class structure in mid-nineteenth-century England; Rochester’s later marriage proposal is no less hierarchical in its manner.)

And Jane? When she’s not crying, she’s loving it. She fantasizes surveying him, mastering him, even “penetrating” him (as the text’s metaphor “looking into the abyss at her leisure” has it). She prefers him to more insipid fare, likening his saltiness to a ragout. Moreover, once he has come clean about the Blanche charade and announced his desire to marry her, she also starts to dish it out. She upbraids him for his grandiose wedding plans, for his extravagant gifts and language. She won’t be dresssed like a doll; she won’t be part of his seraglio. She dismantles an entire Romantic construct of gallantry and effusive love. She is prickly, briny, vinegary. She plays with him. These exchanges are also delicious, in my view, especially if we think back to Romeo and Juliet or Des Grieux and Manon and wonder where the irony was, where the kidding was. Love has many tonalities, and the spirited mixing it up between this young girl and older man—she snappish, he not minding it—ranks high on my list as a persuasive account of how would-be lovers might talk.

But as all readers know, this love story will be interrupted by the discovery of a first wife locked in the attic, Bertha Mason Rochester, a corpulent, bestial madwoman bent on destroying Rochester if she possibly can. Yet Jane’s lessons in love continue. Rochester pleads with her to stay with him, but she will not compromise her integrity; she bolts, leaves Thornhill, loses the little money she possesses, begs for food, for garbage. Almost dead from starvation, she is at last taken in by the Rivers family, where soon enough she receives the attentions of St. John Rivers, a would-be missionary who flexes his muscles as well, trying to subdue her into becoming his wife and accompanying him to India, albeit sans passion. Again she is tempted. Force seduces, mesmerizes. But in extremis she hears the voice of Rochester calling, leaves Rivers, returns to find Thornhill burned down, Bertha Mason Rochester dead, and Rochester himself blind and missing a hand. He has been, as they say in the military, “softened.” He can now be married.

Did I mention that Jane has conveniently inherited a deal of money in the interim? Brontë is keeping her books, and it is clear that Jane is to be catapulted into power, just as Rochester is to relinquish a good bit of his, so that a marriage can finally take place. I have wanted to trace the stages of this famous love story in order to emphasize the marathon course of little Jane Eyre. There’s no gouging here, as in Emily’s novel, but a cult of power and an underlay of brutality nonetheless. Jane Eyre’s story has elements of a “pilgrim’s progress” in it, for she encounters and overcomes obstacle after obstacle in her search for love and self-affirmation. But the arduous journey makes us realize that “falling in love” is a dicey and reductive term for gauging the affairs of the heart, even with the young. Each of the texts we’ve looked at is larded with time and conflict, and each traces an evolution in human feeling, a schooling of self through the experience of love. Because this is a nineteenth-century novel written by the daughter of a reverend, it ends, as it must, with a marriage. I ask my students, when I teach
Jane Eyre
, whether such an outcome makes sense to them in the twenty-first century. One wonders: could the discovery of passionate love lead elsewhere altogether?

And modern love? Love across borders? Marguerite Duras’s signature would seem to be racially crossed lovemaking—understood as social taboo and erotic stimulant—as is evident in her classic film
Hiroshima Mon Amour
, in which a Frenchwoman has torrid sex with her Japanese lover while remembering her tragic affair with a German soldier during the Second World War; sexual desire moves from somatic to ideological event, and we are meant to ponder how “difference” attracts and repels, how the murderous violence of war might yield to the interactions of bodies on a bed. We are a far cry from the love plots seen up to now: beyond feuding families or class differences within a culture, the love story now reaches across continents and oceans, bridging races, spanning great divides.

Duras’s acclaimed novel of 1984,
The Lover
, seems at once to be working those issues, while also constituting a modern installment of the themes from
Romeo and Juliet, Manon Lescaut, Wuthering Heights
, and
Jane Eyre:
star-crossed, class-crossed young lovers now recast as a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old French girl who has a love affair with a man from north China. Hence the private love story is contextualized in a new way, with broad ideological ramifications: the (mis)fortunes of a modest French family in Indochina, the exoticism of a colonial regime entering its death throes, the deep-seated prejudices regulating the reciprocal views of the French and the Chinese, and the experience of sexual initiation as the life-altering liminal adventure of a young woman soon to leave the colonies for France.

And there are superbly wrought scenes of both erotic intimacy and familial tumult. The accounts of lovemaking between the young girl and her Chinese lover have a sensual pith that make the lush rhetoric of both Shakespeare and Prévost, as well as the Brontë sisters, seem operatic and overblown, for the physical rules supreme in this book, and the great metaphysical flights of the earlier texts have no place in this spare but intense encounter of bodies. Duras stands out for her unblinking focus on how bodies interact, how they live a life of their own, how they trigger sensations and thoughts, how all-powerful this can be, how different it is from received views of “love.” There is nothing here about stars or birds or lightning or love being an innocent passion. Nor is there anything about blinding beauty or ravishing appeal. Jane Eyre’s sense of her obligations to herself is reprised by Duras but reoriented drastically in the direction of a libidinal personal awakening that has no truck with fond notions of relationship and marriage.

Further, we soon learn how deep the contempt for the Other goes when it comes to erotic matters. Loving “in the wrong direction”—at the core of each text we’ve seen—is a crash course in xenophobia. One does not easily forget the evocations of meals in extravagant Chinese restaurants, offered and paid for by a lover whom neither of the French brothers, gorging themselves with food, will even speak to. The girl herself turns silent, shares momentarily in the absolute contempt of her delicate lover. It goes without saying that the girl’s family treats her as a whore, leading to scenes where the mother beats her brutally while the older brother stands, listening, on the other side of the door. But then, the book is democratic in its view of prejudice, and we know that the Chinese lover’s rich father has the same contempt as the French do, is certain that the girl is indeed a whore, interested only in getting to the lover’s money. (Parallels between the Chinese father and Des Grieux’s father are not lacking: each old man is outraged by the sluttish choices of the son, each holds on to the purse strings.)

Yet everything I have written thus far about
The Lover
is misleading. To see it as a frank, uncensored account of young love in a colonial setting, to see it as the clash of generations or of cultures, is not so much wrong as it is peripheral. Those features of the narrative are real enough, but they do not explain the book’s disturbing power. To begin with, it breaks all traditional rules of storytelling. There is no real chronology. Over and over, the narrative returns to the key event of the (now-old) narrator’s life: the ferry crossing when she was fifteen and a half, when she was approached by a wealthy Chinese man who is transfixed at the sight of her, with her gold lamé high heels and her man’s flat-brimmed hat, a brownish pink fedora with a broad black ribbon. (Here is this girl’s own adolescent perspective on a threshold moment, inseparable from her clothes—the sort of thing unimaginable in Shakespeare and unimagined in Prévost and the Brontës.) At any moment this scene returns, and the old narrator knows that it somehow contains within it her entire life to be. About the adult life that followed, we get virtually no coherent information, just scrambled tidbits: a career, a drinking problem, intellectual circles in Paris, mention of a dead child, a deported husband, a father’s death, but thrown in as trifles, weightless, not related to the Main Event.