Advertising as Imperial Agency in Jane Eyre
The trade of the governess is a recycled one; the more experience and skills the governess acquires, the more valuable her work becomes. When a crisis arises within Jane Eyre, Jane comforts herself, knowing that she can always reenter the market: “let the worst come to the worst I can advertise again” (JE, 161; Marcus 209). Unlike the production of material goods, where unused or unwanted matter is thrown out, human skills are stored up and increase in value. In a letter written in 1840 to Ellen Nussey, Bronte attempts to comfort herself about the prospect of living with an unruly employer with “my motto is ‘Try again.’” Bronte also consciously contemplates the intimate proximity governesses have to their work and how the vicinity of the domestic sphere contains governess work, separating it from the public market while defining a governess solely according to her physical work. In a 1839 letter to her sister Emily, Bronte writes, “I see now more clearly than I have ever done before that a private governess has not existence, is not considered a living and rational being except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfill.” The exclusion of “living and rational” from a governess’s life suggests a death of human vitality; thus, a governess worker is like a machine, which mechanically mothers and educates. [5] Poovey, Peterson, and others have located the anxiety Victorians exerted over the role of a governess as being a barrier between the lower and middle classes; the governess was to output motherly responsibilities without usurping the role of the mother. Governesses were expected to fulfill a conflicting role of one that must exude Victorian matronly morals without becoming the matron herself.
Comparing the role of a governess to the role Bertha plays for Rochester also becomes complicated. Bertha both represents money made from goods and the human hands that made those goods. However, unlike unwanted materials, she cannot be easily disregarded; rather she has represented goods and must be stored, boarded up, and hidden. Bertha’s name even stands in for ship imagery. According to the OED, “berth” was defined as “to board, cover or make up with boards” while berthing referred to “the upright planking of the sides and various partitions of a ship.” [6] Bronte implicitly and explicitly uses the metaphor of an imperial ship in relation to Jane’s journey from Lowood to Thornfield. The three paintings by Jane that Jane allows Rochester to view are presented as physical materiality of Jane’s subconscious or dreams, but like later dreams of Bertha, the paintings also seem to narrate Bertha’s peril at the hands of Jane and Rochester. The first painting resembles clouds “rolling over a swollen sea,” “a half-submerged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large…its beak held a gold bracelet;” below the mast “a drowned corpse” with only a visible limb is painted, suggesting the bracelet had been torn from it. The image of white clouds floating over a swollen sea, within imperial context, conjures images of goods being transported cross the ocean, ships that are “swollen” with commodities produced from a lower class, a “swollen” or blackened race. The cormorant, either a black bird or greedy person, has reclaimed the desired commodity as represented in the bracelet.[7] But the image is conflictive and divided because of the fair-armed corpse, who is sinking beneath the once buoyant ship. It further suggests a divided class self for Jane, what McClintock may associate as “the material division of women by labor and class” (98). Bertha’s home in the attic is similar to space in the lower part of a ship for the storage of goods. When Jane awakes from the cry of Bertha in the attic, ship imagery reappears: “I [Jane] distinguished through plank and plaster” (JE, 287). Rochester tries to control the crowd gathering in the gallery, which “were bearing down on him like ships in full sail…and dangerous he looked: his black eyes darted sparks” (JE, 288). While Jane gains agency because of Bertha’s confinement, Rochester loses agency and by the end of the novel, he needs to be cleansed and redeemed. Bertha becomes symbolic of a ship within which Jane is able to sail on her imperial journey.
