Jane Eyre by Charlotte

Several further archetypal texts can be discerned in Jane Eyre , particularly surrounding the person of Rochester, who creates various fictions around himself (and is, briefly, at the centre of a narrative of Jane’s concoction). This is where the novel alludes most clearly to fairy tale, the most notable example being Rochester’s idea of Jane as an ‘elf’ who entrances and bewitches him (a simple enough metaphor for falling in love), allowing him to shed the burdens of his social position and the expectations this creates, as well as giving him a supposed license to ignore the existence of his crazed wife. This fiction (unfair to Jane) is redeemed at the end of the book, when she truly becomes his ‘elf’ – the fairy who brings him final happiness when he thought all was lost. Jane’s own ‘fairy tale’ of Rochester is provided by the fleeting but rather fascinating reference to the Gytrash that is made by Jane at the moment they meet. Traditionally, the Gytrash generally led astray solitary travellers, but, occasionally, would actually assist them. This duality, for obvious reasons, suits Rochester perfectly.

The most obvious narrative, though, which involves Rochester is not that of a fairy tale, but of the Byronic hero, and it is this, more than anything else, which gives his character a definite trajectory, and one deliberately contrasted with St John Rivers’ pilgrimage. Whereas, Rivers’/Christian’s journey ends with death and the Celestial City, the Byronic hero, in his rejection of society’s habitual mores is destined for a life of struggle that is unlikely to end happily. There is an implied Faustian pact that goes with breaking the rules and this leads, inevitably, to the terrible fate that traditionally awaits would-be Don Juans.
Rochester, however, survives his painful denouement – and even the ordeal that follows it, when he comes close to sacrificing his life for Bertha and shows his true, and deeply heroic, nature. Jane’s subsequent return to Rochester is his salvation and so he is therefore given a character arc by Brontë that shows him overcoming his ‘Byronic’ nature and achieving the happiness of a settled family life – something almost unthinkable for a Manfred or a Heathcliff.

The use of such an array of archetypal texts in such a complicated and suggestive narrative structure is completely unprecedented in English fiction before the Brontës, and the techniques of Jane Eyre foreshadow the shifting genres of many of the more obviously ‘experimental’ novels of the twentieth century. Not only this, however, but Charlotte Brontë also uses these contrasting genres as a way of ‘correcting’ the literary archetypes of the past, and, furthermore, as a means of suggesting her own, most original, ‘preferred narrative’ for Jane.