Edward Rochester and the margins of masculinity in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea.

As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar note, Edward Rochester's first appearance in Jane Eyre is by way of a pratfall, while his dog comes off looking more myth-like and masterful than he (351-52). The "spell" of the Gytrash is broken by the actual appearance of Edward, who as a "human being, broke the spell at once" (Jane Eyre 115). Gilbert and Gubar note that this incident indicates that "the master's mastery is not universal" (352), and indeed, it would appear that each of this Edward's attempts at playing the patriarch in England, like those of Rhys's Edward in the West Indies, ultimately demonstrate the limits of his power and his own insufficiency. The first exchange between Edward and Jane illustrates this dynamic. Though it would be easy to read their first conversation as an example of Edward's assumption of the position of the Socratic "master" leading Jane by induction with questions that he can already answer "correctly," the doubts raised by Rhys's Rochester suggest another possible reading. When Edward asks "Whose house is this," and "Do you know Mr. Rochester," he is asking Jane to participate in the dominant narrative which authorizes him as the master. By asking Jane to acknowledge his status, rather than simply declaring it to her (as does the young John Reed, for example) Rochester is revealing that his "mastery" is only the result of his being recognized by a believing audience of "servants." When it is revealed that Jane is the Governess--neither Edward's class equal nor his inferior at Thornfield (Eagleton 35)--her helping Edward and delivering the letter for him function not so much as affirmations but as suspensions of Rochester's desire for recognition. Aside from and in addition to her own "spunks," Jane's ambiguous class status as a Governess prevents her from being an adequate mirror for Edward. In addition, Jane has learned that in the game of the dominant narrative, the master's recognition as a subject must come at the expense of her own. Her experiences with John Reed and Mr. Brocklehurst have shown her the stakes in the legitimacy game, and although she cannot escape England and its ideological imaginings, she can nonetheless exploit her marginal position as Governess to allow her some means of negotiation with, rather than subjection to, these narratives.

It is precisely this refusal to submit to patriarchal discourses that makes Jane the only fit match for Edward. As Parama Roy quite correctly notes,

Jane and Rochester are both victims of the conventions of the English landed class--he by virtue of being an insider, she...by virtue of being an outsider. It may not unreasonably be argued that Rochester's miseries and corruption stem from his subservience to the demands of his situation. (719)

They are "right for each other" because each realizes the fictive nature of the dominant ideologies of gender and class. This does not mean, however, that they can run off together to a paradise outside of ideology. Rochester's wish that "I were in a quiet island with only you; and the trouble, and danger, and hideous recollections removed from me" (205) does not represent anything like an adequate solution to the problem of his and Jane's antagonistic relation to the discursive structures in and under which they live. The attempt to escape to a place of wholeness, where there is no ideological contradiction and no lack evident in an imagined "Edward Rochester," is an unfulfillable fantasy. If he is to create an "Edward Rochester" that can live with Jane Eyre, then he must attempt to embrace ideological contradiction, lack, "hideous recollections," and the disruptions that they bring to the gender and class fiction that he is expected to live up to.