Mr. RochesterBy Sarah ShoemakerGrand Central Publishing, 2017
When a man courts another woman while keeping his wife locked in the attic, what exactly is going through his mind? And how have so many readers fallen in love with this man regardless? Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 masterpiece Jane Eyre introduced readers to Edward Fairfax Rochester, a brooding, mercurial Englishman who employs young Jane Eyre as a governess, only to lose his heart to her. Told from Jane’s perspective, the novel follows her from her bleak childhood to her post at Thornfield, Mr. Rochester’s estate, where she finds companionship and passion for the first time in her life. But on the day of their wedding, Mr. Rochester’s secret emerges – he’s already married to Bertha, a mad Jamaican woman who lives locked in the attic of Thornfield-Hall.After reading Jane Eyre with her local book club, Sarah Shoemaker, a former librarian, was astonished to learn that no literary novel had yet been written from Mr. Rochester’s point of view. In her acclaimed 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, the British author Jean Rhys included a section from Rochester’s perspective, but the larger purpose of the book was to give a voice to young Bertha. Rhys was born in Dominica, and Wide Sargasso Sea is considered a postcolonial response to Jane Eyre – which helps explain Rochester’s portrayal as an abusive white invader who oppresses Bertha, destabilizing her mental health before forcibly moving her to England.Shoemaker’s novel features an older Mr. Rochester telling the story of his life in first-person narration. This account addresses both Jane Eyre and, to a lesser extent, Wide Sargasso Sea, navigating thorny territory briskly and pleasantly. In each of the novel’s three sections, Shoemaker has an opportunity to answer the natural questions surrounding this type of project: what exactly makes her take on Rochester fresh? What aspects of his tale did Brontë and Rhys leave untold?Her response in the first section, where we follow Rochester’s childhood and youth, is to highlight both the differences and the similarities in Edward and Jane’s upbringings. The broad scope of young Edward’s experiences shows the opportunities available to wealthy male children of his time period, in contrast to Jane’s restrictive experiences at a school for poor or orphaned girls. But his childhood also has an eccentric quality that distinguishes him from other men. At the age of eight, he’s sent to an estate called Black Hill to be taught by Mr. Hiram Lincoln, who asks his pupils to design and build their own siege engine, gather plants to make blue war paint, and reenact ancient battles. At Black Hill, Edward makes two friends who become like brothers to him: a fragile, sensitive artist nicknamed Touch, and a roguish, athletic boy nicknamed Carrot. The descriptions of childhood friendship are some of the strongest in the novel, like when Rochester recalls how they spent their nights telling stories:
[S]ometimes Touch would make up stories of his own for us. As quiet and gentle as he was, he had a powerfully inventive imagination….He was four months younger than I, yet he seemed to have absorbed so much more of the world’s magic. I wanted to see things the way he did – to have his imagination and his kindness – and at the same time I wanted to be like Carrot, too, who was so sure of himself, who never doubted that life would always treat him well.
After Black Hill, Edward works as a clerk at Maysbeck Mill and becomes like a son to the mill’s owner, Mr. Wilson, before finishing his education at Cambridge. By following Rochester as he navigates the life of a scholar and businessman, and as he develops relationships with mentors, peers, and young women, the reader is struck with the fullness of his early life in contrast to Jane’s. But Shoemaker’s ultimate goal in this first section is to show that Rochester and Jane’s lives share an emotional core, despite their cosmetic differences. Touch and Carrot both die young, devastating Rochester and connecting him to Jane, who loses her only childhood friend to consumption. Like Jane’s aunt and cousins, Rochester’s father and brother ignore him, not bothering to see him for years at a time. Even during his studies at Black Hill, the sunniest time of his early life, Edward experiences periods of severe loneliness when all the other boys visit their families for holidays, leaving him alone for weeks. And Rochester and Jane also share a deep connection to Thornfield-Hall – a feeling that it’s their true home, and the only place they can find peace.The book’s second section, in which young Rochester moves to Jamaica and marries Bertha, responds to Wide Sargasso Sea by discarding every plot point invented by Rhys. Her book begins with Bertha’s childhood after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, but in Shoemaker’s, grown versions of Bertha and Rochester meet about a decade before the collapse of Jamaican slavery. Shoemaker also borrows no details from Rhys’s construction of Bertha’s family, or the fates Rhys gives those family members, reverting to a basic template consistent with what readers learn in Jane Eyre. And whereas Rhys explores the connection between madness and oppression, Shoemaker portrays Bertha’s mental instability as almost purely hereditary; her mother, brothers, and son all become mad at some point in their lives, framing Bertha’s decline as inevitable.In some ways, this version of Rochester voices the prejudices of his day. Bertha’s sensuality is what catches his attention when they meet: “She smiled at me, her lips parting to reveal perfect teeth, the hint of a tongue flashing between them. I felt as if she owned me already.” When he compares her to typical European girls, it’s her “wild” nature that sets her apart:
I imagined her soon tied to me forever in marriage, her wild, mercurial spirit so unlike those docile, simpering, boring, proper women like Mary MacKinnon. Life with Bertha would always be new, always exciting. I was mad for her; I was wild with longing. I could not wait to have her for my own.
As Bertha loses her grip on sanity, Rochester reverts to stereotypes about witch-like, exotic island women, condemning her for her excessive sexuality, calling her “evil,” and claiming that he was “under her spell.” These stereotypical comments strengthen Shoemaker’s depiction; they’re the phrases that most 19th-century men in Rochester’s situation would use to describe an insane Caribbean woman.But at other moments, Shoemaker can’t resist the urge to cast Rochester as a man ahead of his time. When he takes a Jamaican servant and her daughter back to England with him, he explains to his British housekeeper that the servant is a single mother, lecturing, “In Jamaica, things are different, as I said. There is not always a husband….You will not disdain [her] for that.” And Rochester’s reflections on slavery often seesaw between Victorian and modern attitudes:
Does not the effect of unlimited power and the frequent witnessing of such severe punishment tend to harden the heart? Yes, I found, it does, although the whites of the West Indies would have said it is an unfortunate truth that must be accepted, for there is no way to grow and harvest sugar without it. But there is also no doubt that such power destroys the souls of those who wield it every bit as much as it destroys the bodies and spirits of those who suffer under it, and I was no exception, for I too easily slid into acceptance of the life of a Jamaican planter.
Even as he claims complicity with imperial power structures, he exhibits the consciousness of someone who’s studied Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness in a postcolonial literature class. This challenge to Rhys’s depiction of Rochester as a bumbling colonizer is complemented by an even more overt challenge to her description of him as a disgraceful husband. In Wide Sargasso Sea he’s emotionally abusive and openly unfaithful to Bertha. In Mr. Rochester, Bertha is the clear abuser:
[T]he moment I put foot to the veranda steps, she ran out of the house, dressed like a harridan, her black curls flying, her mouth spewing the most vile language I had ever heard. She rushed toward me, her face contorted in anger, and when I was within her reach she slapped my face. And then, before I could even react, she accused me, in full earshot of the whole household, of every indecency she could think of: desertion, drunkenness, unfaithfulness, even violence.Astonished, I tried to place my hands on her shoulders to calm her, but she screamed and backed away as if I had assaulted her.
The message is clear: there will be no reconciling with Rhys’s dark, disparaging portrayal. Shoemaker’s Rochester isn’t perfect, but overall he’s a well-meaning, upstanding man who’s a victim of malice and fate. The reader is given tacit permission to continue swooning over him.Still, up to this point, Shoemaker’s story makes a worthwhile contribution to the world of Jane Eyre. She adds nothing about Rochester’s first marriage that wasn’t revealed in his Jane Eyre confession speech following his failed wedding, but Shoemaker records the variety and intensity of his life before returning to Thornfield, and there’s value in experiencing his struggle over a period of years rather than reading about it in a few condensed speeches.But the third section, which chronicles how he meets and falls in love with Jane, exposes the weakness of Shoemaker’s devotion to Brontë’s original text. Up to this point, the greatest flaw in her writing is the occasional slip into anachronistic phrases: “She wore a dress of brilliant red with some sort of bangles on it, and that dress was cut in such a way as to leave little to the imagination;” “I was insanely jealous of [my lover’s] merchant, though I had no real cause;” “I had seen Bertha in acts of savagery and destruction before, and I could no longer put anything past her.” At one point, Rochester’s brother-in-law proclaims, “I would not grace your table for all the tea in China! I will never speak with you again!”But for the most part, Shoemaker maintains Rochester’s tone, using a simplistic, sterilized version of 19th-century writing. However, in the third section of the novel, she begins directly quoting a large percentage of Mr. Rochester’s speech from Jane Eyre – a misstep that highlights both Brontë’s particular, colorful use of language and Shoemaker’s relative blandness. Hoping to make Jane jealous, Rochester publicly parades his dalliance with a beautiful woman named Blanche Ingram. Shoemaker’s Rochester describes the situation as follows:
Jane could see, I was sure, the artifice behind nearly everything Miss Ingram said or did: the way the woman treated [my ward] Adèle, the absence of any originality of mind and the shallowness of conversation, no matter how showy she was in presenting herself. It would be immediately clear to Jane that she was far better suited as a companion to me than Miss Ingram would ever be.
This kind of passage is serviceable, but it doesn’t compare to Brontë’s mastery. Her original Rochester, as faithfully recorded by Shoemaker, says the following to Jane about Miss Ingram:
To you I can talk of my lovely one, for now you have seen her and know her. She’s a rare one, is she not, Jane?....A strapper – a real strapper, Jane: big, brown, and buxom; with hair just such as the ladies of Carthage must have had.
Immediately, Brontë’s Rochester leaps off the page in a way that Shoemaker’s version never does. Brontë’s superb dialogue makes him poetic and sardonic; gentle phrases like “my lovely one” and crude, evocative words like “strapper” and “buxom” seem out of place in this new, sanitized interpretation of her hero. For contemporary writers using 19th-century narrators, it’s probably inadvisable to quote the Victorians – for the most part, our use of the English language simply can’t compare to the rich vocabularies and stylishness of their work. But Shoemaker’s dedication to Brontë’s original story also prevents her from taking advantage of the way that two people often have entirely different recollections of the same conversation. She works dutifully within the confines of Brontë’s dialogue, choosing to perfectly align Jane and Rochester’s memories instead of allowing Rochester his own priorities.Shoemaker’s clear love for Brontë’s novel also restrains her imagination about Mr. Rochester’s motives. One of the strangest scenes in Jane Eyre features Mr. Rochester dressing as an impoverished gypsy woman to trick his house guests into hearing their fortunes. In Mr. Rochester, we follow his thought process:
How could I fairly have expected [Jane] to speak her mind in front of the whole company, this plain, polite little creature who held her emotions so thoroughly in check? Of course she would not have spoken. Clearly I needed both to increase the urgency for her, to drive her to confess, but also to do so in private. I set to thinking.One morning, I managed to absent myself on the excuse of business in Millcote….Before I left, I begged of Grace some old ragged gowns and shawls of Bertha’s, which would suit me nicely, as Bertha was as tall and large as most grown men. I made a few more stops on the road to Millcote and then took a room at the inn. Though I entered that room as a landed gentleman, after a careful toilette I emerged and slipped down the back stairs, unnoticed, an elderly Gypsy woman.That evening I appeared at Thornfield’s kitchen door, got up in my disguise. The performance was not difficult for me, after my theater days at Trinity College, where I was inevitably cast as the ugly character, the witch, the depraved person.
These descriptions successfully connect his motivations and his actions, but apart from trivial details (the fact that the clothes were Bertha’s and that Rochester has theatrical experience), the reader doesn’t learn anything that couldn’t have already been deduced from reading Jane Eyre. Clearly Mr. Rochester wanted to deceive Jane into revealing her affections. Shoemaker focuses on the skeleton of the situation – how Mr. Rochester plans and travels and dresses. But she never stops to add character or atmosphere to her descriptions. Imagine how Mr. Rochester feels standing before a mirror, dressed as a gypsy woman: his amusement and doubts, his internal monologue as he revels in his transformation, his fantasies about the confessions Jane might make. Mr. Rochester focuses on questions of “how,” and rehashes Brontë’s quotes and implications to address “why,” but as a novel it never pushes beyond the surface level of its possibilities. This Mr. Rochester is a straightforward narrator, never engaging in tangents or losing himself in lyrical descriptions. He has little sense of drama, and although he often tells readers about his anguish and passion, his removed delivery means we rarely feel them.Mr. Rochester shows no lack of knowledge and respect for Brontë’s novel, but that in itself is the problem with this tale; Shoemaker is too diligent a fan, and lacks the vision or will to take risks. The irony is that Brontë’s Rochester would hardly give such a compassionate retelling of his own life. One imagines castigations, lamentations, and biting asides. Instead, we get a portrait of a relatively boring man who happens to have lived an interesting life – the opposite of Jane Eyre herself.____Jennifer Helinek is a book reviewer living in Russia.
