For Shelly: The Awe of the Gothic

The moors that the Brontë sisters traversed daily to receive inspiration for their gothic novels.

Before reading the novel Jane Eyre, I had always written it off in my head as a book similar to the Austen novels and one that would surely spend too much time in parlors and in analyzing conversations. But once I read it as a part of my English Novel course, I was happy to discover quite a different novel all together. Although Jane Eyre is set in a similar time period and follows similar female protagonist patterns as many of Jane Austen's novels, the content takes an entirely different turn. Jane Eyre dwells in the ordinary but this ordinary is influenced and laced with the extraordinary and the often unexplainable.

Indeed it is upon this key difference that Charlotte Brontë based her chief criticism of Jane Austen in a letter she wrote to one of her literary agents after he encouraged her to read Pride and Prejudice and apply its principals to her own writing:

I got the book and studied it. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers—but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy—no open country—no fresh air—no blue hill—no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses. These observations will probably irritate you, but I shall run the risk.

It is these very elements of "open country," "fresh air," and "blue hill[s]" that work to create a sense of awe within Jane Eyre, a novel rich in “what throbs fast, full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through,” something Brontë went on in her letter to complain that Pride and Prejudice lacked profusely. (You can read more about this relationship between Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë in this article.)

The fact that Jane Eyre is a gothic novel tells us that the very premise of the novel is to feed upon a sort of pleasing and almost romantic type of terror. Jane, the protagonist of the novel, experiences multiple encounters with this sense of terror throughout her lifetime portrayed in the novel. Our first introduction to such experiences comes when young Jane is locked alone in a bedroom as punishment. She immediately begins to sense the horrors and unknowns that surround her, as evidenced in the following quote:

I began to recall what I had heard of dead men, troubled in their graves by the violation of their last wishes, revisiting the earth to punish the perjured and avenge the oppressed: and I thought Mr. Reed's spirit harassed by the wrongs of his sister's child, might quit its abode—whether in the church vault or in the unknown world of the departed—and rise before me in this chamber. I wiped my tears and hushed my sobs, fearful lest any sign of violent grief might waken a preternatural voice to comfort me, or elicit from the gloom some haloed face, bending over me with strange pity.

This event is only the beginning of a string of encounters with the sublime, such as hearing Mr. Rochester's voice whisper across the Moors, finding Mr. Rochester's almost subhuman wife trapped up in the attic, and the unusually mature spiritual inclinations of her friend Helen who she meets in boarding school.

I think the ideas and connections toward awe presented in this novel would be relevant to Shelly in her research of the connection to Jane Austen and awe. Although Charlotte Brontë professed that these elements were profoundly lacking within Austen's work, perhaps Austen simply sought to illicit awe through different mediums. Or perhaps she did work deliberately against this sense of the sublime so prevalent within Jane Eyre, and now her efforts are being counteracted by the throngs of fandoms intent on lifting up her novels to the highest of romantic ideals. Perhaps what Anthony Lane, a reviewer for the New Yorker, said is true: “What has happened is perfectly clear: Jane Austen has been Brontëfied.” Either way, I think using Jane Eyre to compare and contrast would provide a foundation for valuable insight into the connection between Austen and awe.