Alice Munro and Charlotte Brontë

It has become conventional to recognize in Jane Eyre a consistent pattern of doubling and displacement: specifically to see Bertha Rochester as acting out the narrator’s own anger against Rochester. Notoriously, when the madwoman burns down Thornfield, delivering over to Jane a subdued and handicapped husband, she is seen to be expressing Jane’s impulse to revenge and desire for control. But other details of the text are also interpreted along the same lines. Mary Poovey, for example, reads Bertha’s attack on Richard Mason as an expression of Jane’s rage against Rochester, who had just disguised himself as a gypsy fortune-teller to observe, test, and tease her (Poovey, 39). There is some doubt, though, about how much rage Jane would be feeling at her unmasked interviewer, whose reading of her character has been decidedly flattering. Though Rochester’s deception of Jane invites retribution, his surveillance, arguably, does not: the gaze of the master is a form of penetration that the text on the whole seems deeply to desire.