In the Victorian age when middle-class women were expected to conform to perhaps the most oppressive rules ever imposed on women in Britain’s history, there were still individual women who advocated the equality of the sexes and the independence of women. The most radical group in that time were members of that downtrodden class of genteel, educated women who were forced to earn their living as governesses, not just the ones who turned to writing but also the many anonymous women who showed their society that unmarried women without a fortune could survive and even prosper. Governesses “raised the consciousness” of Victorian women since they mostly taught girls since boys were sent to preparatory school at age eight; and the great majority of the readers who made novels such as Jane Eyre best-sellers were women who, as Enotes points out, had an “intense interest in the uncertain status of unmarried middle-class Victorian women” (3). It is the question of how an unmarried woman should live that engaged so many women and which the governess class tried to answer either by pursuing their profession or by their example or as literary models. In this way they created the women’s movement that culminated in the feminism of today.
The woman novelists rarely pursued an overtly political agenda but one former governess who dealt with the question of sexual equality directly was Mary Wollstonecraft. She spent a year as a governess and was said to have been an inspiring and caring teacher to Lord Kingsborough’s daughters. She gave up her position in order to concentrate on her writing. Wollstonecraft’s argument in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), is that women are not inferior to men, only their education is, and if that deficiency were corrected it might be possible to create a society based on equality and reason. As the anonymous author of the History Guide says, “Mary undertook the task of helping women to achieve a better life, not only for themselves and for their children, but also for their husbands. Of course, it took more than a century before society began to put her views into effect.” However, her ideas influenced the women who came after her, including Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë in whose novels reason was of the utmost importance in a relationship. Austen advocated “intelligent love” while Brontë insisted that reason must dominate passion if husband and wife are to be equals. These ideas were personified in Austen’s Emma Woodhouse (and contrasted by Jane Fairfax in Emma) and in Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and in that way Wollstonecraft’s ideas reached an even greater audience.
Indirect as their methods were, novelists influenced public opinion perhaps more than they intended. As Mike Edwards says about Charlotte Brontë, “though it was her readers rather than the author who saw her work as having a practical impact on society, her novels are thought to have helped to advance the movement towards equality of status for women” (134). One often-quoted passage from Jane Eyre, however, was clearly intended to address the issue of women’s equality with unusual directness:
Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings ….” (125)
This repeats the message sent decades earlier by Wollstonecraft, who had described uneducated, overly domesticated women as “gentle domestic brutes” and argued that women had to be educated in order to prevent the frustration caused by a confined existence which “transformed these angels of the household into tyrants over child and servant” (History Guide). It was the contrast between these gentle brutes and the independent, feisty governesses that caused the public to rethink the role of women in society. Of all these role models, Jane Eyre is the best-known.
In Jane Eyre, a small, plain and unsure young woman reports to Thornfield Hall after leaving Lowood Academy to take up her position as governess in the service of the Hall’s master, Edward Fairfax Rochester. Jane is the personification of Wollstonecraft’s “Unfortunate Situation of Females, Fashionably Educated, and Left Without a Fortune,” whose only hope for survival lies in her ability “to teach the usual branches of a good English education, together with French, Drawing, and Music” (63). Like so many women who had been educated beyond their station, she longs to see the world and live the kind of life she has read about, not to be cloistered for life in a house where she is neither one of the servants nor part of the master’s family, in a job that does not permit her to marry, and that does not pay her enough to ever realize her dreams. Jane knows that she is not beautiful yet she will not settle for anything less than a perfect marriage, not even if she does end up dying a spinster. Her education and experience have taught her that husband and wife must love each other equally, and that this state can only be achieved by controlling the passions and letting reason dominate. Therefore, even when Rochester expresses interest in her she clings to her principles. She almost succumbs to Rochester halfway through the novel but is is saved from herself at the last moment. When she learns the truth about the man she was about to marry she leaves him to go on an arduous journey that ends in Jane and Rochester finding each other once more, this time as equals.
Her story affected millions of women, not just as a romantic love story but also as a moral tale. Perhaps on a less conscious level the novel changed the way people regarded governesses. These women were not just employees but in many cases were intelligent, observant women who might well be superior to the people who employed them and who judged them accordingly. An example of this occurs in Jane Eyre when Rochester is giving a dinner for his fashionable house guests, among them the beautiful Blanche Ingram, the daughter of an aristocrat whom it is said he intends to marry. After the dinner Blanche sees Jane hiding by the window which inspires her to give Rochester her views on governesses, or “the tribe” as she calls them. “Mary and I have had, I should think, a dozen at least in our day,” she says, loud enough for Jane to hear, “half of them detestable and the rest ridiculous, and all incubi all the same” (129-130), incubi being defined as “oppressive, nightmarish burdens” (Dictionary.com). Blanche and her mother exchange offensive stories of governesses employed in the past, yet Rochester makes no attempt to stop them or to remind them that one of “the anathematised race was present” (130). In fact, at the end of the Ingrams’ critique he chivalrously agrees with everything they say. However, Jane has examined the guests just as mercilessly and, as a result, is much less concerned with the Ingrams’ unkind comments than with Rochester’s apparent love for the unworthy Blanche. His moral failing hurts her more than her own unrequieted love for him, a fact she makes him aware of later. Not only did governesses have minds but they also had bodies. They had to repress their sexuality but, as shown here, the very fact that they were single turned them into a rival to all other women, all the more so since those women were bound by conventions that did not apply to governesses. Although nothing is said about this in the novel, it may be assumed that when Blanche Ingram hears that Rochester intends to marry the unassuming governess, she will begin to question the premises on which she had built her self-esteem. It is by endowing the literary governess with moral and intellectual qualities as well as sexuality that women writers reminded the reading public that these obscure women were a possible threat to the established order.
Jane Austen explored this theme thirty-two years before Charlotte Brontë. In Emma Austen created a governess who would trouble many Victorian ladies: Jane Fairfax. Jane was adopted by the Churchills who raised her to earn her living as a governess and she is about to embark on her new career when she visits her relatives in the village of Highbury. The beautiful, elegant woman at once becomes the center of speculation and intrigue all because she is a single, seemingly independent woman. She was supposed to accompany the Churchill family on a trip to Ireland but then was sent to Highbury, allegedly because she had had an affair with a married man, Mr. Dixon. That is what Emma chooses to believe. Emma also thinks Mr. Knightley has fallen in love with Jane and although Emma has not admitted to herself that she is in love with him, she resents Jane’s beauty, style and above all her superior musical ability. The vicar’s new wife, Mrs. Elton pities the single girl and takes her under her wing, doing her utmost to find her a governess’s position somewhere other than in Highbury, presumably to prevent her husband from falling to temptation. Her presence in Highbury society, then, is subversive because she is a threat to the other women, and an example of what can happen to an accomplished woman when no longer supported by her family or a well-to-do husband.
By teaching the children in their care, by the contribution they made to the houses that employed them, by means of essays and novels, governesses and former governesses and those who sympathized with them, made their society conscious of the predicament of these women and, by extension, of the women who had chosen the security of a marriage of convenience over the dangers of pursuing their dreams. With the appearance of Vanity Fair, Agnes Grey and Jane Eyre in 1847 governess literature reached its high point. After that, governesses mostly appeared in melodramas and finally, in 1898 an anonymous governess narrated Henry James’s Turn of the Screw; a woman who had surrendered her identity to her master and the children in her charge and vanished into madness; but by then the New Woman was already on the march.
Works Cited
Anonymous. “Mary Wollstonecraft, 1759-1797.” The History Guide. Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History. Web.
Anonymous. “The Governess in Nineteenth-Century Literature.” Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Penguin Books, 1984.
Edwards, Mike. Charlotte Brontë: The Novels. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
www.enotes.com