Much as we should acknowledge the extent to which Jane is constructed in and by these complicated power-plays, we must also take into account the considerable rhetorical effort involved in occluding this entire process. In other words, if I have been emphasizing thus far the “excitation” and even the empowerment that attends Jane’s surveillance, I want now to focus on the “restraint” that turns that ex-citation back in upon itself, that makes expansiveness look like inwardness, so that Brontëan exteriority (the outdoorsiness of “open country,” “fresh air,” etc.) becomes indistinguishable from Brontëan interiority. It is as though Brontë were fending off Austen even before having read her: where mere introversion might recall Austen at her most oppressively “confined,” unchecked extroversion might suggest Austen at her most culpably social. Brontë avoids both of these pitfalls by means of a certain invagination. In a brilliant recent study of repression in Victorian fiction, John Kucich has written:

The most striking thing about expressions of passion in Brontë’s fiction is that they are most often histrionic—the performance of a mask that conceals, rather than reveals, an interior condition of desire. For Charlotte Brontë, passion implies the existence of an aroused, hypersensitive self that it simultaneously withholds. In her Byronically passionate male characters—and also in her female protagonists, though in more ephemeral ways—passion is a means of distancing others in order to preserve a desirable state of inward tension. By marking an inward instability, an eccentricity of the self to itself, passionate expression actually defeats any knowledge of its nature by others, and marks itself in opposition to them, rather than as a fusional impulse.…[P]assionate expression is a mark of estrangement and distance, of self-elaboration in isolation, which brings it very close to the Brontëan repression we usually think of as its adversary.^[17]

Kucich’s account of the virtual interchangeability of “passion” and “repression” in Brontë’s fiction as a whole confirms my own sense of the inextricable entanglement of “excitation” and “restraint” in Jane Eyre’s many acts of surveillance: as Kucich would suggest, the “inward tension” that defines Jane’s spectatorship arises not from a war of polar opposites but rather from the repeated collapsing of an opposition. Yet my argument differs from Kucich’s in two respects. First, I want to claim that, although the complicity of “excitation” or “passion” and “restraint” or “repression” seems to establish the solipsistic isolation that Kucich identifies as Brontë’s most distinctive effect, the “inward instability” of Jane Eyre at any rate is more social and more political than Kucich will allow, not so much an escape from Foucauldian relations of power as a heightened reinscription of them. Second, while I obviously agree that Brontëan passion is mainly histrionic, I want to look at the ways in which the histrionic, which Kucich rightly associates with the “mask that conceals,” is itself masked by Brontë. These two points may seem to contradict each other, the one claiming greater sociality in Brontë, the other arguing for greater reticence. But in fact I will also argue that Brontë is most responsive to social pressures precisely when she herself restrains and dissembles the dramas that her heroine at the same time rehearses so excitedly.

The persistence of a certain critical tradition begun by Brontë herself would indeed persuade us that the ruthless restraint that is an integral component of Brontëan theatricality functions instead as a guarantee against theatricality, that the dropping of a curtain in front of these dramas succeeds nonetheless in not looking like a theatrical effect at all: it seems instead to consecrate “the depth” (p. 46) or the “visionary hollow” (p. 46) that the cagey heroine first sights during her imprisonment in the red-room, and whose mapping and furnishing will be the program of the ensuing narrative. Protestations of antitheatricality thus proliferate unsurprisingly throughout the book, although they reach a kind of crescendo during the period immediately before the aborted wedding, when Jane is at pains to keep rejecting the “stage-trappings” (p. 288) of courtship. (And when, soon after that non-ceremony, Jane famously leaves Thornfield, she does so to avoid the implicitly theatricalizing fate of becoming the latest in Rochester’s series of mistresses.) Perhaps the oddest of all Jane’s deflections is her impatient observation that Rochester, who wants to deck her out in prenuptial finery, “would yet see me glittering like a parterre” (p. 296). While the immediate reference seems to be to the sense of “parterre” as an ornamental (or “Austenian”) arrangement of flower beds, one cannot help noticing, in this context of disavowal, the more specifically theatrical reference as well. Though prepared, even eager, to cast herself as the spectator par excellence—Mrs. Reed, for example, could never tolerate her niece’s “continual, unnatural watchings of one’s movements” (p. 260)—the heroine would evade any interpretation of her spectatorship as a spectacle in itself, meticulously effacing (or covering up) any hints of “glitter” in her ceaselessly vigilant prose.^[18]

Accordingly, the narrative must obey a stringent logic of decor—and of decorum—in converting the shining plane of the red-room mirror, or the showy plain of an ostentatious audience, into a semimatte surface that will reflect only the visionary recessiveness (and “depth”) of an unimpeachably plain Jane. The lineaments, as well as the risks, of this logic may be glimpsed in a letter Brontë wrote describing how, during a rare trip to London, she and her sister Anne visited the opera in the company of their publishers:

We attired ourselves in the plain, high-made country garments we possessed, and went with [George Smith and his sisters] to their carriage, where we found Mr. Williams. They must have thought us queer, quizzical-looking beings, especially me with my spectacles. I smiled inwardly at the contrast, which must have been apparent, between me and Mr. Smith as I walked with him up the crimson-carpeted staircase of the Opera House and stood amongst a brilliant throng at the box door, which was not yet open. Fine ladies and gentlemen glanced at us with a slight, graceful superciliousness quite warranted by the circumstances. Still, I felt pleasantly excited in spite of headache and sickness and conscious clownishness, and I saw Anne was calm and gentle, which she always is.^[19]

Here, in an uncanny blurring of the distinction between fiction and reality, the author reenacts the role performed by her newly celebrated fictional surrogate, inheriting Jane’s excitement and reliving her restraint as headache, sickness, and embarrassment. Like Jane’s response to Blanche, Brontë’s internal drama masters and exceeds, in complexity, interest, and above all, emotional seriousness, the external scene that occasions it. In this edgy encounter with the London beau monde, the brilliance of the throng becomes a foil for the transcendent display of the provincial author’s (self)consciousness. What is remarkable in this account is its delicate balance between a scrupulously half-shamefaced exhibitionism and the tremulous yet invincible inwardness it nonetheless affirms. Where the gaze of her publishers and the “elegant young ladies”^[20] who accompany them threatens to turn Brontë into a spectacle, she transforms her own conveniently deglamorizing “spectacles” not only into a powerful instrument of vision but also into a protective barrier behind which a private drama of contemplation may take place unobserved. Thus shielded, she is free to “fe[el] pleasantly excited” but, more important, to “smile…inwardly,” quietly appropriating much of the “superciliousness” she ascribes to her sophisticated, but only superficially perceptive, beholders. By means of an ingenious reversal, not unlike that practiced by Jane Eyre in her surveillance of Blanche Ingram, the mere snobbery associated with “fine ladies and gentlemen” gets introjected and refined as the “genuine” (paradoxical, spiritual, virtually inexpressible) loftiness of the “high-made” “country spinster,” as Brontë calls herself elsewhere.^[21] Even the possibility of humiliation risked by the acknowledgment of “clownishness” gets preempted, thanks to Brontë’s absorptive emphasis on her “consciousness” of it.^[22]

This biographical vignette recalls still another scene from the novel that Brontë had just published. In this scene, a similar recuperation is performed, but with a telling difference. Soon after her arrival at Lowood, Jane, having dropped and broken her “slate,” is first “exposed to general view on a pedestal of infamy” (p. 99) but then, like her model of self-abasement, Helen Burns, “completely cleared from every imputation” (p. 106) of guilt. In a typically Brontëan pattern, humiliation only serves to establish the victim’s unfathomable depth of receptivity, which “no language can describe” (p. 99): the degradations of the outside ironically reaffirm the inviolability of the inside.^[23] Yet, despite the well-known autobiographical nature of her fiction, as well as the crafty literariness of her autobiographical writings, Charlotte Brontë will take chances in her private correspondence that she spares the central character in her more public work as a novelist. For Brontë’s drama of appropriation and reversal unfolds in a literal theater, too palpably social a place, whereas Jane Eyre enacts this scenario under the aegis of displacement: all of her “theatergoing” and all of her “acting” occur either within the overtly disciplinary space of the schoolroom or within the covertly disciplinary space of (someone else’s) home. Where Charlotte Brontë hides behind her spectacles in an actual site of spectacles, her fictional creation hides behind surfaces in settings less apt to invest them homonymically with a compromising glitter.^[24]

The “treacherous slate” (p. 97) that Jane accidentally breaks is only one of many such surfaces, although its fracture and symbolic reconstitution prove exemplary: hoping to “escape notice” (p. 97) by using it to “conceal [her] face” (p. 97), the heroine finds herself betrayed by the very object that should have protected her; but instead of branding her as a “liar” (p. 98), as Brocklehurst would have it, her “obtrusive” (p. 97) exposure and consequent shaming produce the opposite effect of wiping the slate clean, restoring to Jane the medium on which she may hence inscribe the indescribable signs of her integrity. And since the slate—a surface whose associations with pedagogical compulsion, happily enough, clear it from any suspicion of borrowed glamor—is both what one writes on and what one hides behind, self-inscription is identified with self-effacement, thereby allowing the autobiographer to elude any “imputation” of theatricality. Writing, we are asked to believe, even writing about oneself, is not like acting: it is what one does instead of acting. The form of “restraint” typically adopted in Jane Eyre, then, appears less voluntary, and less ambiguous, than that imposed in the passage about the “spectacles,” just as writing forgoes its associations with the social luster of professional authorship—especially successful professional authorship—to assume instead the protective covering of (home)work. If less ambiguous, however, this strategy is nothing if not paradoxical, for while the relative abjection of Jane Eyre seems to bar her from “society” in the seductive, specialized sense of a pleasure-seeking elite, it would also have the enabling effect of exempting her from society as a whole.

In order to examine more closely the process thanks to which Jane can say, equivocally, “I appeared a disciplined and subdued character” (p. 116), let us return to Jane’s surveillance of Blanche, paying particular attention to the way Brontë frames and thus, oddly enough, detheatricalizes it. It is important to recognize that, by placing Jane “behind the window-curtain”—by having her “shr[i]nk…into the shade” (p. 205), like Fanny Price—Brontë discreetly draws a veil in front of the heroine’s performance, occulting its rivalrous histrionics and offering it instead as further evidence of an otherwise inarticulable inwardness. Indeed, if the entire episode of the Ingrams’ visit threatens to become an Austenian comedy of manners, Brontë neutralizes that danger through an equally Austenian countermeasure, according to which the heroine, furtively but avidly consuming the all-too-glittering spectacle of aristocratic role-playing, thereby demonstrates the vast, even inestimable capacity of her own consciousness.^[25] (It is this kind of gourmandise, one suspects, that has earned Brontë her reputation for what Matthew Arnold, albeit disgustedly, called “hunger, rebellion, and rage.”^[26] Throughout this episode, whenever Jane might seem to be standing in front of a curtain (whether “literally” or “figuratively”), the narrative recontextualizes her so that she ends up standing behind one. As the Ingrams and their party approach the house, Jane watches them from the window, “taking care to stand on one side, so that, screened by the curtain, I could see without being seen” (p. 195). When she comes downstairs to introduce Adèle to the guests, Jane is relieved to be screened once again:

Fortunately, there was another entrance to the drawing-room than that through the saloon where they were all seated at dinner.…The crimson curtain hung before the arch: slight as was the separation this drapery formed from the party in the adjoining saloon, they spoke in so low a key that nothing of their conversation could be distinguished beyond a soothing murmur.

Yet Jane’s inability to overhear their conversation actually has the same effect as her unimpeded visual consumption: in both cases, what is ultimately secured for her is a saving opacity. And that her opacity is both the antithesis and the double of their meretricious brilliance becomes clear a few paragraphs later:

A soft sound of rising now became audible; the curtain was swept back from the arch; through it appeared the dining-room, with its lit lustre pouring down light on the silver and glass of a magnificent dessert-service covering a long table; a band of ladies stood in the opening; they entered, and the curtain fell behind them.

As soon as this “band of ladies,” having made a lavishly lit entrance, stands in front of the curtain, that curtain looks very much like a curtain on a stage, and the ladies appear bathed in all the culpable “lustre” of the will to dazzle: for a brief but resonant moment, the decorative match between the “crimson-carpeted staircase” of the opera house and the crimson curtain of the private home hints at the larger and more problematic resemblance between public theater and an unstably “domesticated” theatricality. As long as it is Jane, however, who stands in the same spot, both she and the backdrop look quite different: far from setting her off, as a foil does a jewel, the curtain sets her apart, marking her distance from and inaccessibility to the resplendent company on the other side. Like Charlotte Brontë’s spectacles and the young Jane Eyre’s slate—like a whole series of Brontëan surfaces, for that matter—the curtain validates the self not by revealing it but by obscuring it. Always a consumer (rather than an object to be consumed), Jane will not perform the “ladylike” function of being served up like some temptingly unwholesome “dessert.” Even though she and the “band of ladies” occupy the same position in front of the curtain, Brontë manipulates this “screen” so that, in the space of a single page, it serves—or appears to serve—two radically incompatible purposes. By virtue of the author’s scenic legerdemain, an anamorphic illusion splits the screen-as-enhancing-backdrop from the screen-as-protective-cover, thereby disrupting any visible continuity between the “ladies” who stand flamboyantly before the former and the governess who stands meekly before—which is to say, behind—the latter.^[27]

This is by no means the only place in the novel where Brontë stages as a distinction, even as an opposition, what might easily look like a similarity. In the novel’s crucial opening scene, Jane is punished for her want of a properly “sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner” (p. 39), by her exclusion from the Reeds’ family circle:

A small breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there. It contained a bookcase; I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement.

If not crimson, this curtain is at least red, and its power to induce a corresponding blush of embarrassment in the would-be “unsociable” text has not gone unexploited. In a recent reading of Jane Eyre, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak performs an adroit deconstruction of this scene, uncovering it as precisely a theatricalization of selfhood: grounded in this “scene of the marginalization and privatization of the protagonist,” the subsequent narrative may proceed to naturalize “[t]he battle for female individualism” as it “plays itself out within the larger theater of the establishment of meritocratic individualism, indexed in the aesthetic field by the ideology of ‘the creative imagination.’ ”^[28] Rather like Jane Austen when she surfaces as the disruptively parodic Mrs. Norris, Spivak unpacks that ideology by deploying the theatrical metaphor in a frankly deidealizing way.

Nor are she and Kucich, who also emphasizes Brontë’s histrionics, the only critics to have insisted on pulling back the curtain that Brontë draws in front of her protagonist. Terry Eagleton, in his demythifying book on the Brontës, also seeks, in the aggressively noisy manner of the finale of Mansfield Park, to show theatricality writ large in a work that endeavors tirelessly to write it small. Eagleton anticipates my questioning of the heavily advertised contrast between Jane Eyre and a character like Blanche Ingram:

Jane, who shares Blanche’s liking for “devilish” men, knows better than she does how they are to be handled—when to exert her piquant will and when to be cajolingly submissive. .…Jane moves deftly between male and female roles in her courtship of Rochester; unlike Blanche, who is tall, dark, and dominating like Rochester himself, she settles astutely for a vicarious expression of her own competitive maleness through him. She preserves the proprieties while turning them constantly to her advantage, manipulating convention for both self-protection and self-advancement.^[29]

While they have very different critical styles and even different political agendas—one traditionally “Marxist,” the other more ambitiously “Marxist-feminist”—both Eagleton and Spivak direct the corrosive trope of “theatricality” against what they see as a certain (petit-)bourgeois success story. Instead of joining Gilbert and Gubar in celebration of “plain Jane’s progress,” these two critics read that narrative as an allegory of the brilliant career of bourgeois or bourgeois-feminist ideology in general, a career whose success has depended in large part on its ability to mask or dull its very brilliance. Both, therefore, take us behind the scenes of this exemplary tale, exposing Brontë’s painstakingly achieved antitheatrical illusion so as to reveal what goes on behind the scenes—on the far side of the curtain—as an elaborate, highly tendentious scene in itself.

It should be clear by now that my own approach to the novel is closer to the demystifying school of Brontë criticism than to the celebratory one. But my aim in acknowledging and describing these prior interpretations has not been merely to take my place in line, a place that all too easily becomes a hiding place, a place behind. If it is important not to “cover up for” Charlotte Brontë by covering up theatricality along with her, it is equally important not to cover oneself in the prestigious mantle woven and worn by previous unmaskers. As we have seen, a certain unmasking is already dramatized in the novel itself: but what is most instructive about Jane’s desire to “pluck the mask” from Blanche, just as Brontë would “raise the gilding” (p. 36) from her own miniaturized Vanity Fair, is that the ensuing act of demystification, precisely because of the “excitation” it induces in the demystifier, has to subject itself to “ruthless restraint.” As we have also seen, the ruthlessness of this restraint affects both the object and the subject of demystification, although we have devoted more attention to the latter, since potentially violent self-discipline continues to seem somewhat anomalous in a novelist who invokes images of “open country” and “fresh air” to advertise her art.

As for the literary critic, it ought not to surprise us that his or her “ruthlessness” should find an external object, whether in the canonical text, in its author, in its protagonist, or in some composite scapegoat: as popular usage implies, “criticism” has a certain reputation for being mean. In its relentlessly prosecutorial style, Eagleton’s reading, for one, epitomizes this destructive tendency—a tendency perhaps less obvious to academic critics than to those outside the profession. For though many of us are intermittently or vaguely aware of the aggressivity that informs our work in general, we may ignore not only the ceaselessness of its ruthless excitations but also the professional deformation whereby we restrain or repress them, to say nothing of the ruthlessness with which we do so. Indeed, our very ignorance of that deformation betokens the thing it both “actively” disregards and “passively” fails to know.^[30] If these quotation marks would blur the hierarchical distinction between a deliberate act of ignoring and an involuntary state of unknowing, this is because I want to bring contemporary demystifying critics—who, in their apparent self-possession, might recall the reserved but savvy, ironic, and newly empowered Charlotte Brontë we glimpsed at the opera—a little closer to that even less glamorous and even more carefully guarded avatar of “the writer,” the governess named Jane Eyre. For if Jane represents the writer disciplined, it is hard to tell whether that discipline is self-discipline or rather the effect of certain imperious external constraints, whether it is administered willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously. Indeed, as we have seen, Brontë’s disciplining of the self that writes has the peculiar consequence of transforming what ought to look like a subjection to social control into what looks instead like a savingly asocial or at least antisocial condition. Likewise, those of us who practice a deidealizing literary criticism most eloquently attest our embeddedness in the social precisely when, “accepting” the restraints of our discipline, we discreetly withdraw from the scene of our own readings.

Critics’ techniques of withdrawal can be as sophisticated as those practiced by, or upon, Brontë’s heroine. Eagleton’s reading may itself be a study in the “competitive maleness” he identifies in Jane, yet its deftly self-distancing effect of analytic mise en abîme at the same time renders it an impressive exercise in the art of “vicarious expression” he attributes to her as well. Spivak, for her part, thematizes the veiling of her own authorial performance as a pragmatic refusal to theatricalize the “author” of the novel along with its protagonist: she chooses “rather strategically to take shelter in an essentialism which, not wishing to lose the important advantages won by U.S. mainstream feminism, will continue to honor the suspect binary oppositions—book and author, individual and history.”^[31] And it is no doubt clear that my dilation upon other critics’ defenses has served a dilatory and defensive purpose in its own right. One might argue, moreover, that this chapter’s relative generality or even diffidence thus far with respect to the specific social—for example, sexual and class—determinants of Jane’s behavior has served as a not-so-reliable screen for certain rather undelightful social aggressivities of my own. Yet I hope that it will not seem merely defensive if I suggest, first, that this diffidence is in large part a temporary response to the necessity for a preliminary analysis of Brontë’s own evasion of social specification, and, second, that the interpretive ruthlessness it would occlude is itself a response to my fear that, as a teacher who writes, as a disciplined subject, far from being safely superior to Brontë’s literary governess, I am in fact insufficiently differentiated from her.

In the next section of this chapter, I will attempt to specify the social role that, precisely by virtue of its Brontëan “unsociability,” the demystifying school of literary criticism has in common with the “disciplined…character” known as Jane Eyre.^[32] It might be objected that, even if this analogy demonstrates a structural affinity, it may seem to overlook the obvious difference between the overwhelming “subjectivity-effect” of Brontëan discourse and the constitutive facelessness of most academic criticism. Yet I hope that what follows will be justified by its delineation of a performative dimension that academic “objectivity” might share, surprisingly enough, with Brontëan “subjectivity.” For if we can see what it is that effects that “subjectivity,” we may be able to see not only how effectively it responds to social pressures, but also how closely the decorum of criticism maintains an active repression not unlike Jane Eyre’s. If, in our more or less ruthless unmasking of that unmasker in the text, a certain transferential logic apparently compels us to repeat the double gesture whereby Jane catches others in the act of theatricality while at the same time concealing the traces of her own theatrical implication, we can at least attempt to analyze that logic, to interrogate the motives that sustain us in this productive inconsistency. We can ask, that is, not only how a curtain gets drawn in front of a certain drama of reading, but also why and on whose account it may be useful, as Spivak suggests, thus partially “to ignore the lessons of deconstruction.”^[33] Obviously, not all dramas of reading are the same, and the annals of recent criticism would no doubt show that there are many ways of “ignoring” deconstruction while seeming to honor it. The point is not to totalize diverse readings of Brontë’s novel, much less to collapse those readings into the equally spurious totality of the different readings performed in the novel. Rather, I hope to consider some of the strategies that governesses who write may share with other teachers who, in different ways, take up the pen to inscribe theatricality in the novel.