Is Jane Eyre a feminist?

Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton? -a machine without feelings? … I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; — it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal, — as we are! (Brontë Vol. 2, p. 18) 

These are the words Charlotte Brontë wrote in 1847, these are the words Jane Eyre says directly before the proposal of marriage by Mr. Rochester. Are these words part of the fundamental paragon for the first proto-feminist wave that started in Victorian times? The answer to this question is, yes - but is Jane Eyre really a feminist? I tend to observe opposing motives; Charlotte Brontë seems to not dare to make a change. I am not oblivious to the context of the quote itself, nevertheless in composition this novel seems to be lacking feminist ideas of progress.

Jane Eyre will not marry for convenience yet decides independently to marry for love at the end of the novel. Her reasons besides passion and love are the mutual beneficences, this relationship between Jane Eyre and Mr. Edward Rochester have. Jane Eyre says, ‘perhaps it was that circumstance … that knit us so very close: for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand.’ (Brontë Vol. 2, p. 282) Mr. Rochester, who loses his eyesight and his right hand while trying to save his former wife, Bertha Mason from the burning ruins that are his home, Thornfield Hall. Hence, Jane understands herself to be equal to a disabled man.

A feminist novel uses a female protagonist as agent, a character that has her own articulate voice and realises her independence and desires. Jane Eyre is a paradigm of the Newer Victorian Woman and her darker antagonist Bertha Mason, the Madwoman in the Attic stands for old Victorian values of marriage of convenience – furthermore she is a symbol for the silenced female voice in Victorian society and marriage, which dies with Bertha Mason’s suicide. Jane Eyre has an antagonistic other in Bertha Mason, who reinforces the former pattern of the nineteenth century society. However, when light and angelic Jane Air is compared to the dark and ‘demon[ic]’ (Brontë Vol. 2, p. 71) Bertha Mason, this seems to be a relapse to the erstwhile image of the Angel of the House.

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Vintage Classics, 2009.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 2000.