Seduction and Betrayal Read Online Free PDF Page B

stopped. This enraged Charlotte Brontë for every possible reason. First it underscored her powerlessness: that no amount of intelligence, skill, or hard work seemed to alter. The lessons represented self-esteem, competence, and a chance to be near M. Heger.
    In the situation at the Pensionnat, Charlotte is very much like one of her heroines: a poor, clever teacher, rushing to fall in love with the master. The world the governesses inhabit, in the novels and in life, is a place of exclusion. These observant, high-minded, emotional women are desperate in the midst of a worldly social comedy that does not for a moment take them into account. Anne Brontë is thought to have fallen in love with a gay, flirtatious young curate, William Weightman, but this love was a secret suffering, a mute, hidden torment.
    Poverty is the deforming condition in love, as the Brontës see it. Poverty makes you unable even to admit your love; in Villette poverty turns Lucy Snowe into Dr. John’s confidante and pseudo-sister; it is unthinkable that he should have romantic interest in her even though he obviously values her highly, but merely in a restricted, excluding manner. During Mr. Rochester’s flirtation with the shallow Miss Ingram, Jane Eyre assesses her own values and yet can only express them in a negative evaluation of her rival. About Miss Ingram she thinks:
    She was showy; but she was not genuine; she had a fine person, many attainments, but her mind was poor.... She was not good; she was not original. She advocated a high tone of sentiment; but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity....
    Sympathy, pity, intelligence, goodness, genuineness — these are the charms Charlotte Brontë wishes to impose. There is something a little overblown in the heroine’s hope to press virtues upon men who are conventional, and even somewhat corrupt, in their taste in women. The heroine’s moral superiority is accompanied by a superiority of passion, a devotion that is highly sexual, more so we feel than that of the self-centered and worldly girls the men prefer. (This same sense of a passionate nature is found in George Eliot’s writing.) Charlotte Brontë’s heroines have the idea of loving and protecting the best sides of the men they are infatuated with: they feel a sort of demanding reverence for brains, honor, uniqueness. Mr. Rochester, M. Paul, and Dr. John in Villette are superior men and also intensely attractive and masculine. Girls with more fortunate prospects need not value these qualities but instead may look for others, money in particular. That is the way things are set up in the novels.
    When she arrived in Brussels, Charlotte Brontë was twenty-six and M. Heger was thirty-three. His wife was a few years older. The school, from the evidence of Villette , was a battleground of sexual conflict, intellectual teasing, international and religious contraries, and feminine competition. It was a stimulating and unnerving scene. Unconscious wishes drifted through the halls.
    Anything irregular in men fascinated Charlotte Brontë. Leslie Stephen may say that “Mr. Rochester has imposed himself on many,” but the fact is that Rochester is a creation of great originality and considerable immoral charm. He is a frank and sensuous man for whom the author feels a helpless admiration. He has had a daughter by a mistress and many other affairs. He has an insane wife up in the attic and yet he proposes marriage, or rather marriages, once to a selfish and ridiculous creature and then to Jane Eyre. Of course the idea of a bigamous alliance must be forsworn and Jane flees; still the notion is a beguiling one and has pressed up through the dream life of the author. She had thought of every maneuver for circumventing those stony obstructions of wives who would not remove themselves.
    At the Pensionnat Heger, the lessons stopped, trouble grew between Charlotte and Mme. Heger. Mrs. Gérin believes