Reader, I Married Her

Sometimes I think the only reason I ever agree to do this survey course is that it gives me a chance to reread Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre was one of the first 'real' novels I read--I think I was maybe 14 at the time--and thirty years later I am still not tired of it. It is true that my relationship to it is much changed. Even when I was in college, I couldn't treat Jane Eyre like a novel. I had an irrational attachment to the characters and the narrative that made it very hard for me to consider questions of literary interpretation. I remember a discussion about it in section where the TA asked what it means that Rochester goes blind and loses his hand at the end (do I need a spoiler alert for this? Surely to God not). And off they all went speculating about it while I was thinking, "But that's just what happens!" And as for the novel's unconscionable treatment of Bertha, well, for a long time I just didn't want to hear it. Get away from me with your Madwoman in the Attic and your Wide Sargasso Sea, I cried.

Ah well. I learned.

At the beginning of Volume III, after the whole brouhaha at the church and the Dramatic Revelation of Bertha, Jane and Rochester have a long scene together in which they hash out what just happened. There's so much happening there one can't do justice to it all. But there was something that struck me this time around, because of the times that are in it, that I took for granted for a long time, and that is Rochester and Jane's argument about marriage.

"I am a fool!" he shouts, a few pages into it: "I keep telling her I am not married, and do not explain why." His 'explanation' is highly tendentious--there's a lot he has to say about his marriage to Bertha that someone less upset than Jane is at this moment would challenge--but the thing that struck me is Rochester's conviction, repeatedly expressed, that despite Bertha's continued existence and despite his inability to divorce her, he is not married in any meaningful sense. He is not married because he and Bertha never really loved each other; because she was never good to him; because she wasn't faithful; because he didn't know what he was getting into when he married her--now that I think about it, a lot of the things Rochester says about how he was manipulated into marrying her would be considered grounds for annulment by the Catholic Church or by the pre-1996 Republic of Ireland--and because in her MAAAAAAAAADNESS she is incapable of being a companion to him. Milton's arguments in favor of divorce made the same appeal to the idea that being each other's 'helpmeet,' being compatible, being committed to each other's mutual aid and comfort, is so foundational to the definition of marriage that the absence of this kind of cooperation actually negates the marriage. Rochester, being a Byronic hero and therefore given to sinning boldly when it comes to the pursuit of liberty, decides that he is free to marry because Bertha cannot be his helpmeet and is therefore disqualified as a wife. He forms this idea, takes Bertha to England, locks her up in Thornfield, and starts traveling the world looking for the woman who will be his real wife. His plan is initially to tell this woman about Bertha before 'proposing' to her--because in his own mind, when he's forming this plan, he's sure that the woman destined to complete him would be just as forward-thinking about the true meaning of marriage as he is.

Of course, when he discovers that this woman is Jane Eyre, he decides not to execute this plan, shrewdly suspecting that Jane is unwilling to sin boldly in this area. But this time around, I realized that when you subtract the obligatory Christian rhetoric, what Jane and Rochester really disagree about--what splits them up and sends her to wander homeless and starving through the countryside--is the question of whether, in the absence of a legal sanction, Rochester is capable of offering Jane something equivalent to marriage. Jane after all is not concerned about Bertha; as soon as Rochester tells her that Bertha was "at once intemperate and unchaste" Jane stops defending her. She no longer believes that his love for her was never real, and she has forgiven him his manipulations of her and trusts in the strength and sincerity of his love for her. The reason Jane refuses to run away with him is that she believes that unless Rochester can legally marry her, she can only ever be his mistress; and he says himself that "Hiring a mistress is the next worst thing to buying a slave."

But Rochester doesn't see it that way at all. He insists that Jane will be his wife, not his mistress--because in his mind, the legal aspect of marriage is "a mere social convention." In his mind, he can 'marry' Jane simply by committing himself irrevocably and exclusively to being Jane's helpmeet and partner for the rest of his life. He is perfectly willing to create for Jane, to the extent that it's possible, the social reality of marriage by moving far away from Thornfield and Bertha to a place where no one knows about his first marriage and presenting Jane as his wife. He doesn't want Jane to be his mistress. He wants her to be his wife; and he believes that he can make her his wife and be her husband without going through a legal or religious ceremony.

Normally, the more often I read this book the less sympathy I have for Rochester. But I found myself enormously compelled by his insistence that he can make Jane his wife--because, of course, it reflects in a distorted way many of the things that those of us who maintain long-term same-sex relationships believe. We are not, of course, bigamists. But in the bad old days, when legal marriage was as far out of our reach as it was out of Mr. Rochester's, many of us strove all the same to create whatever we believed were the essentials of marriage. We told ourselves and each other that we were married, in all the ways that mattered. The legal ceremony, the religious ceremonies, these are mere social conventions. Wife and wife, husband and husband. Without the law, without the church, without the social approval.

And yet I also can't help thinking in my heart of hearts that Jane is making the right decision by leaving him. And it isn't just because of the inexcusable things he's done--which, she tells us, she forgives him for before this conversation even gets rolling. It's because she's right, too. She knows something that he refuses to understand, which is that Rochester cannot marry Jane simply through an act of will. Without the legal foundation, it is in fact not marriage, and this has material and social implications of which Jane is keenly aware. If Rochester dies, there is no guarantee she will inherit. If he tires of her, he can abandon her, and no authority can force him to provide for her in any way, shape, or form. She will be his 'wife' for only as long as he chooses to make her that. And if one day he wakes up and decides once again that he's not married, Jane is ruined forever.

They're both right; and this is what makes that scene so wrenching. Jane almost goes for it. She can feel the strength of the bond between them and absolutely agrees that it transcends social conventions and legal forms. She still believes that she is Rochester's one and only true partner. But she is also well aware that the position Rochester thinks he can offer her does not exist. She knows that marriage is something that has to be conferred by church and state, and cannot simply be asserted by an individual. Not even by the irresistible Mr. Rochester.

It is, I think, very hard for straight people to understand the ambivalence that many of us have about marriage. But this sort of gets to it. I will fight anyone who tells me that the 20 years during which my partner and I loved each other before we got married were somehow incomplete, or second-rate, or Not Quite the Gold Standard, simply because our relationship was not legally recognized. Love, passionate love, faithful love, compassionate love, enduring love, all of these things exist independent of marriage and indeed some of us if pressed might say that our commitments may be stronger, our appreciation of each other more intense, precisely because we have had to keep our love alive in the teeth of opposition from all and sundry. And yet, we know that what we have been denied by being denied marriage is also real, and also matters. Like Jane, we know that the absence of that legal sanction leaves us intolerably vulnerable. The fact that so many of us willingly make ourselves that vulnerable--something Jane is ultimately not willing to do, partly because it would require her to challenge orthodox Christian doctrine--by entering into permanent relationships without either social approval or legal sanction is, though I say it myself, a testament to human courage, audacity, and optimism. But that doesn't mean that we don't need marriage.

It comforts me, I suppose, to rediscover just how much of a problem marriage has really always been, even for One Man And One Woman. Even before Bertha, the prospect of marrying Rochester is in many ways terrifying to Jane. Though marriage will make it much harder for Rochester to break off the relationship, it seems in most other ways to bring out the worst in him. Jane struggles throughout her entire engagement to prevent Rochester from taking possession of her--as marriage, she understands, will authorize him to do. The embrace of the State is not always warm; it is not always friendly. But in the wilderness outside the reach of the State's long arms, it can get pretty cold and desperate.

Reader, I married her. Actually, we married each other. Twenty years after we first fell in love; a year and a half after we had a child together. I like marriage. I want all of us who need its shelter to have it. At the same time, many of my thoughts about marriage, love, romance, and related matters would completely scandalize my fourteen-year-old self. Poor kid--still believing she was as plain as everyone told her she was, still straight as far as she knew, still just as sure as Jane is that no human has the authority, in matters of the heart and the body, to say, "Let it be right." At fourteen I was all Jane. At forty-four I'm all right with the fact that in order to realize Jane's dream of passionate, everlasting, mutual and equal love, I had to become just a little bit Rochester.