Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte?

In his letter to Joseph Twichell, Mark Twain criticizes Jane Austen thus, “Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone”. Perhaps Twain is being rather unreasonably harsh on Austen but her works have always received mixed reviews pertaining its social and political implications. Often celebrated as a social realist, her fiction reveals and subtly mocks the class nature and power hierarchy of English middle and upper class society. A social satire, it represents the lives of women in the then English society as the perceived inferior, second class citizens. Beginning in the 1980s a lot of feminist and Marxist criticism has emerged that deals with these particular aspects in Austen’s work.

In popular culture too Jane Austen reigns as the unrivaled storyteller with over hundreds of film and TV adaptations of her novels. I, personally, was an ardent admirer of Austen’s works as a teenager having read almost all her works from Pride and Prejudice to Persuasion. There was a magic element in all her fiction, the soothing feeling of the countryside, the calm and composed ladies who defied restrictions subtly. And there was Mr Darcy, like Captain Wentworth, who became the quintessential romantic heroes, chivalrous and ideal, the epitome of all ‘masculine’ virtues. But that was when you were seventeen or eighteen years old and the older you get the less you seem to be in sync with Austen’s world or agree with Austen’s construction of the idealized woman. In fact I find Austen’s works to be fantasies that are more like the classic and hundred times better versions of the Mills and Boon series.

Born a little later than Austen, yet included in the same category of English women writers, is Charlotte Bronte who perhaps offered the most acute criticism of the existing social institutions and the radical portrayal of womanhood through her 1847 novel Jane Eyre. The novel is a bildungsroman or ‘coming-of-age’ narrative of the titular female protagonist Jane Eyre, who as an orphan, poor, female and plain had to stand up to the challenges in her life. When it was first published the novel received such harsh criticism for its rebellious, unfeminine titular character and the apparent unchristian values she aspired. Elizabeth Gaskell in her book The Life of Charlotte Bronte, writes about an incident that Bronte shared with her sisters (who were writers themselves), “She once told her sisters that they were wrong - even morally wrong in making their heroines beautiful as a matter of course. They replied that it was impossible to make a heroine interesting on any other terms. Her answer was, 'I will prove to you that you are wrong; I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours.’

Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, in spite of the situations in her life, is highly passionate, rebellious, fearless, challenging the notions of Victorian femininity and hence fiercely beautiful. She bravely questions and stands up against all those who invariably tries to chain her spirits and unlike the Austen women, demands equality with Mr Rochester, the male counterpart in the novel.  When her school master (who is shown to be cruel and a hypocrite) accuses Jane of being a ‘bad girl’, disobedient and rude and tells her that wicked children when they died went to hell, Jane retorts by saying “I must keep in good health and not die”.  Jane Eyre is no fantasy. Even the love that develops between Jane and Mr Rochester is far from being the fairy tale romance in Austen where the gentleman falls for the modest and lovely heroine. She tells Rochester (who is above her class and also her employer), “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart” and demands to be treated as his equal. She says, “I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal — as we are!” This individualistic and highly spirited character of a female was at the time of its publication not less than revolutionary feet for its author. Jane declares in the novel, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will”.  The very spirit of Jane Eyre is not just that it challenges and thus becomes a counter hegemonic voice to the conservative social institutions in Victorian society but also incorporates into itself the revolutionary vigour of the then ongoing political agitations by the working classes including the right to vote and other labour rights.

Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre in the 2011 movie adaptation of the same.

While all of Austen’s heroines (except Fanny Price) inhabit safe waters, Jane Eyre fearlessly shows us a social reality that is hard and unjust and a girl who morally and virtually withstands it all. While Austen is about romance and marriage, Jane Eyre is about survival and the test of one’s character and principles in the most arduous situations. And while Jane Austen’s women seem to be petite and modest and always composed, emblems of idealized womanhood, Jane Eyre challenges these notions of femininity and rebels against it. Jane asserts, “I am not an angel and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.”

Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte? My answer is Charlotte Bronte over and over again. Jane Eyre has all my love and admiration as she is the beacon of rebellious hope in the face of unjust social laws that privileges only those based on class, race and gender.