Jane Eyre's Childhood and Popular Children's Literature

In her description of Jane Eyre's childhood with the Reed family at Gateshead, Charlotte Bronte evokes an intense quality in Jane's experience. Jane's fears and indefinable longings transform her surroundings into something larger and more threatening than real life. It is possible that this section of the book is also transformed by Jane's memory, for she is recalling it as an adult, and certainly Jane's precocious accusations of Mrs. Reed (if not her resentment itself) are less like what a child might have said than what an adult, remembering an oppressed childhood, might wish too late that she had been able to say. This mixture of a child's feelings with an adult's ability to express them contributes to Jane's effectiveness as a character. But her significance as a child character becomes more evident when she is compared to the characters in some children's books popular in the generation or two before Bronte wrote, many of which presented a sanctimonious and unduly optimistic view of the child's capacity to adjust to the adult's need for family harmony and order. Judging from Jane Eyre, these books did not do justice to the child's feelings. However, the characters of the Reed children and some aspects of Jane's experiences at Gateshead are partly based upon these other works. Bronte seems to have recognized their influence on a child's fantasy life and used them as a source of material, while rejecting their simplifications about the child's nature. Some of the power of Bronte's novel comes from qualities it shares with these children's books, inadequate as they usually are.

Bronte, unlike most contemporary children's writers, imagined at least some children as having intense and complicated inner feelings which could not be expressed within the genteel environment. Such a child, like Jane, having to exist without love and without understanding or acceptance in a place like Gateshead, might naturally have hostile feelings. Too timid and powerless to try to express them, except under immense pressure, this child might well appear nasty and withdrawn, unloving instead of unloved. The contrast between Jane's usual sullen appearance and her unexpectedly violent outburst causes her to be thought of as evil; the Reed family and their servants connect her general unresponsiveness with some kind of intrinsic moral flaw, although they give her nothing to respond to positively. This lack of insight into reasons for a child's failure to express affection is shared by the Reed family and the majority of children's writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. All too often, these writers treat the child's loving behavior as a commodity which he can exchange for parental approval; certainly, the visible appearance of this behavior seems more important than whether it is truly felt, because such writers assume that a normal, virtuous child will feel (and ought to feel) love for his or her guardians. Bronte's sympathetic analysis of Jane's character implies a rejection of this attitude towards the child, held by many of her contemporaries who wrote for children.

However, there are a few works, then as now seeming highly ambiguous in their intentions (Gulliver's Travels, for example), which Bronte also uses, for the specific purpose of evoking the heroine's ambiguous ideas about herself. One might consider these works also to be "children's literature," but perhaps in the sense that they articulate problems or feelings about human nature that children, even more than adults, could not verbalize, although children might experience these problems with greater immediacy. Bronte uses these works as symbols, to give concrete expression to Jane's feelings at times when these feelings are so confused as to be beyond description. One effect of Bronte's insight into this relationship between literature and inarticulate feeling is that Jane Eyre itself becomes a book of this type.¹

Generally children's books of that time taught their readers that they had a role in society as children, distinct from whatever their future roles as adults...