Sunday 14 December 2008

Looking For Mr. Rochester

Polidori, the author of The Vampyre, may well have been fictionalising his own crush on Lord Byron in describing his literary protagonist as having ‘formed his object into a hero of romance; and determined to observe the offspring of his fancy, rather than the person before him.’ The hero as an imaginative projection of desire is, of course, central to the history of the novel - trailing resonant poetic clouds that go right back to Milton’s sexy Satan. The ultimate malcontent, Lucifer, as has often been observed, gets the best lines and so becomes the compelling focus of Paradise Lost. And this privileging of the bad boy has gone on to become a staple of fiction.

My own first pre-pubescent literary crush was on Mr Rochester. His saturnine countenance, but even more the teasing double speak that marks his verbal seduction of the poor, plain little governess, made it as hard for me, as it was for Jane, to see the real object behind the Byronic aura of this English gentleman. For Mr. R comes complete with all the seducer’s props: big house, horse and carriage, jewels galore, and a frowning opacity that serves like an odurate wall to repel any insolent investigation into his personal life. It wasn’t until I was much older that the tinsel of Bronte’s masterful creation began to shed its gilt. A pathetic liar and bigamist? Yes. As well as being a sadist who incarcerates and dehumanises a wife who may or may not have had mental health issues! And yet ... still I couldn’t quite get over him. Searching in vain for tempestuous-browed, frock-coated gentlemen amidst the irritable throng of bowler-hatted clerks who patronised the Charing X library where I worked as a library assistant. Then the BBC went and cast the grimly delicious Timothy Dalton, he of the swooping vowels, as Mr R and I was lost all over again. Now I had a clearer picture of the object of my fancy. Jut-jawed, cleft-chinned, raven-haired and with a voice that was erotically baritone. But if there were any Byronic heroes still remaining to haunt the highways and byways of these post-lapsarian times, they weren’t, as far as I could tell, to be found on the prosaic streets of London. So I went back to the books; grew older, and sagely acknowledged that Mr Rochester and the rest of his devilish tribe were best left to skulk in the foothills of fiction.

It was around this time, the early eighties, that I first read Jean Rhys’ incomparable riposte to Charlotte Bronte. Wide Sargasso Sea spoke to me like Keats’ Belle Dame, in language strange and true. Language even a Bronte couldn’t envision. In effect, a sensuous prose poem! And Rhys’ recreation of Mr Rochester’s wife not only gloriously prises Bertha from her musty attic, but it sets out a whole new female agenda for the Byronic hero which Charlotte, unlike sister Em, could never have begun to imagine.

For Rhys’ Rochester is a creature of sexual ambivalence. Byronic in his paradoxical social unease and sense of entitlement, he is basted on the narrative spit of attraction versus repulsion. In desiring a woman whom society teaches him to despise, his very sense of selfhood is threatened. (Interestingly, Rhys omits Rochester’s name from her fiction.) And therein lies the problem. For if the romantic hero is to retain potency he must remain masterful. He must not be safely domesticated. He should above all remain a seducer rather than a husband. And yet ... Rochester needs the money. Big Houses athwart the moors have to be maintained. And status, too, is important. Mr. R wants the plaudits of that same society he professes to scorn. Like any actor, he needs an audience. So ... he fakes it. A real marriage takes place to the Creole heiress. But once the dowry is secured, Mr R resumes his old life, and with her indoors conveniently shut away, he can pretend to be single; carry on the bachelor life as before, singing his tormented arias in the grand opera of seduction. And the outcome we all know from Bronte’s fiction is, of course, the foregone conclusion to Rhys’ own novel. The hell fire that ignites Thornfield Hall would seem to signal the demise of the Byronic hero, that ultimate desire object -now hobbled; a lame Vulcan - in the marriage project that wraps up ‘women’s fiction’.

And Yet ...! Read Rhys again. The metaphorical flames of her fiction are those of an Eve realising, late in the day, that the devil was in her all along. The devil who wasn’t up to the job of keeping her with him in that pre-lapsarian bliss. Who let her sidle off with poor-old, dully reliable Adam into hard graft and bloody childbirth. From the sweet ease of the garden of Eden into the fetters of wedlock. Read Rhys again! Incendiary fiction. And like Copperfield, admit you want to be the hero/mistress of your own life. Or at least your own psycho drama; as I did, sitting down to write my slant on the Byronic hero as object of desire, in the novel, Lily: The rain fell heavily, like nuptial rice, - I wrote - the morning Jonathan Hopgate brought home a limp bride who would begin dying in the east wing at High Withens.

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