The Other, Liminal Spaces and Plot

Photo Credit: Clare Benson

While I was reading Jane Eyre today, there were two specific parts of the text that held my attention. I was interested in these parts because they brought to the fore relationships with the Other that I thought raised questions about how to approach Jane Eyre as a narrative. 

The first episode was the one in which Mr. Rochester disguises himself as the ‘Sibyl’ or the gypsy fortune-teller. Here, it appears as though Mr Rochester had to don the mantle of the Other, a person who was of a different gender, class and even race, in order to access Jane’s feelings. The second episode is perhaps more nuanced, as it consists of both Jane’s description of Bertha Mason as well as Mr Rochester’s own description of his marriage to his wife. In this instance, Bertha exemplifies all that is Other; she is described as being animalistic, insane, a terrible wife given to bouts of passion and a person who comes from ‘hell,’ which is how the West Indies is described. She is not European, yet she is of European descent, which prevents her complete Otherisation, as is wont to happen in a more Orientalist analysis of this same episode. What happens is perhaps a more traditional view of the result of consigning someone to the role of the ‘Other’; it alienates them, and creates chasms within other relationships as well. Not only did Bertha, as the Other, become unable to sustain her own marriage with Mr. Rochester, even Jane and Mr. Rochester’s relationship was torn apart because of her existence. Therefore, there are two distinct ways in which the space of the Other has been utilized within this text so far: an instance in which it provides increased access between characters, and the other in which is creates large distances between the same characters. Utilizing this space as a narrative tool, then, is an intriguing prospect. 

In the first instance, when Mr. Rochester disguises himself as the gypsy, the reader is already aware of the fact that Jane loves him. She struggles against her feelings because of social conventions that she has had drummed into her, the same conventions that she lives by and are her livelihood. However, the gypsy scene, as I will refer to this instance from this point, is a moment of discovery, or perhaps reaffirmation, for Mr. Rochester. In this episode, he is able to definitively articulate the turmoil that Jane feels. “The forehead declares, ‘reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: casting vote in every decision. Strong wind, earthquake shock, and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience’” Mr. Rochester declares as he looks upon her face as the gypsy, the moment increasing the access that he has to Jane’s feelings (282). Not only is it a moment of discovery, or a reaffirmation of what was previously only speculative, it is also a moment of reconciling the distance between Jane and Mr. Rochester. Considering their social standing, he a part of the gentry and her employer while she a mere governess and his employee, I also argue that this increased access could not have been granted in a moment in which the Other was not present. The presence of the Other makes spaces liminal, releases them from the rigid imprisonment of societal riles, thus making them more conducive to bringing together characters who should not be so under an existing social paradigm. 

In the second instance, Bertha is made the Other very effectively. Jane’s own description of Bertha thrusts upon her a bestial identity – “whether beast or human, one could not, at first sight, tell” (380) – further compounded by her insanity and Mr. Rochester’s own description of her and his plight – “dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste” (397) – push her into a space that is completely alien to the one occupied by society.  Like the gypsy scene, this instance also uses the Other in interesting ways. Firstly, as it was an instance of the Other that brought Jane and Mr. Rochester closer to each other, it is a similar instance that drives them apart. However, this is not a completely inaccessible space; it is a liminal one. I chose here to look at this partially through the lens of Said's theory of Orientalism. Bertha is all that which describes the Orient in the 19^th century, except for the fact that she is of European descent, and that she is bound by marriage to European, indeed English, society. Thus, the liminal space, once again, is created, where she is the Other and not Other simultaneously, just as Mr. Rochester was both himself and the gypsy in the gypsy scene. I think that in some ways, because the characters were granted access to each other in a liminal space, distance has to be created in a similar space as well. Bertha, then, had to be mad, had to be associated with the Orient, in order to access this liminal space again. 

I realize that the arguments and connections I am making as I write this post, and as I read the book, seem a little farfetched, but I found it interesting that Bronte seemed to use the Other to create liminal spaces for plot development.