Plus que tout autre roman féminin du XIX^e siècle, Jane Eyre est l’expression d’une révolte. Tout le roman n’est qu’un long cri de souffrance et de colère. Certaines scènes de l’enfance de l’héroïne sont d’une violence extrême. Le premier acte de rébellion se situe au tout début du roman, quand son indignation, plus forte que sa terreur, la pousse à se défendre contre l’agression de son cousin, un adolescent brutal et tyrannique qui la persécute continuellement. Une remise en question des schémas convenus du XIX^e siècle apparaît de façon plus élaborée dans un monologue intérieur fréquemment cité :

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex^[1]. 

1) Write a text – before or after this passage.

2) Analyse : Ce passage a souvent été commenté. Voici deux lectures intéressantes, parce que fort différentes, voire opposées. Virginia Woolf considère que l’indignation et la colère de Brontë limitent l’expression de son génie :

One might say, I continued, laying the book down beside Pride and Prejudice, that the woman who wrote those pages had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped, and thwarted^[2]?

Note : thwarted [tho:tid] = frustrated, en français, contrariée, frustée, etc…

En d’autres termes, la conscience de l’oppression et l’expression de la colère ne devraient pas apparaître en littérature. C’est un principe que Virginia Woolf applique d’ailleurs à la lettre : ses romans témoignent d’une autocensure remarquable, si l’on considère ses vues sur la question des femmes, qu’elle développe dans ses essais, A Room of One’s Own et Three Guineas, par exemple. Voici maintenant l’analyse que fait Rich du même passage de Jane Eyre :

The phrase (« anybody may blame me who likes… ») introduces a passage which is Charlotte Brontë’s feminist manifesto. Written one hundred and twenty-six years ago, it is still having to be written over and over today, in different language but with essentially the same sense that sentiments of this kind are still unacceptable to many, and that in uttering them one lays open to blame and to entrenched resistance^[3].

Rich pense au contraire que non seulement ce type d’expression n’est pas incongru en littérature, mais encore qu’il est important de lui donner place.

3) Write your own analysis.

[1] Charlotte Brontë, op. cit., p. 111.

[2] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, (1928), London, Panther Books, Granada Publishing, 1963, pp. 66-67.

[3] Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, Selected Prose, 1966-1967, Norton, 1979, p. 178.A