Consider the selfie. By now, itâs a fairly mundane artistic tradition, even after aprofusion of thinkpieces have wrestled with its rise thanks to the so-called Me Generationâs âobsessionâ with social media. Anyone in possession of a cheap camera phone or laptop can take a picture of themselves, edit it (or not), and share it with the world in a matter or seconds.
But before the selfie came âthe self,â or the fairly modern concept of the independent âindividual.â The now-ubiquitous selfie expresses in miniature the seismic conceptual shift that came about centuries ago, spurred in part by advances in printing technology and new ways of thinking in philosophy. Itâs not that the self didnât exist in pre-modern cultures: Rather, the emphasis the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century placed on personal will, conscience, and understandingârather than tradition and authorityâin matters of faith spilled over the bounds of religious experience into all of life. Perhaps the first novel to best express the modern idea of the self was Jane Eyre, written in 1847 by Charlotte BrontĂ«, born 200 years ago this year.
Those who remember Jane Eyre solely as required reading in high-school English class likely recall most vividly its over-the-top Gothic tropes: a childhood banishment to a death-haunted room, a mysterious presence in the attic, a Byronic hero, and a cold mansion going up in flames. Itâs more seemingly the stuff of Lifetime television, not revolutions. But as unbelievable as many of the events of the novel are, even today, BrontĂ«âs biggest accomplishment wasnât in plot devices. It was the narrative voice of Janeâwho so openly expressed her desire for identity, definition, meaning, and agencyâthat rang powerfully true to its 19th-century audience. In fact, many early readers mistakenly believed Jane Eyre was a true account (in a clever marketing scheme, the novel was subtitled, âAn Autobiographyâ), perhaps a validation of her characterâs authenticity.
The way that novels paid attention to the particularities of human experience (rather than the universals of the older epics and romances) made them the ideal vehicle to shape how readers understood the modern individual. The rise of the literary form was made possible by the technology of the printing press, the print culture that followed, and the widening literacy that was cultivated for centuries until Jane Eyreâs publication. The novel seemed perfectly designed to tell BrontĂ«âs first-person narrative of a destitute orphan girl searching for a secure identityâfirst among an unloving family, then an austere charity school, and finally with the wealthy but unattainable employer she loves. Unable to find her sense of self through others, Jane makes the surprising decision to turn inward.
The broader cultural implications of the storyâits insistence on the value of conscience and willâwere such that one critic fretted some years after its publication that the âmost alarming revolution of modern times has followed the invasion of Jane Eyre.â Before the Reformation and the Enlightenment that followed, before Rene Descartesâs cogito ergo sum (âI think, therefore I amâ), when the sources of authority were external and objective, the aspects of the self so central to todayâs understanding mattered little because they didnât really affect the course of an individualâs life. The Reformation empowered believers to read and interpret the scriptures for themselves, rather than relying on the help of clergy; by extension, this seemed to give people permission to read and interpret their own interior world.
To be sure, early novelists before BrontĂ« such as Frances Burney, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Mary Shelley contributed to the formâs developing art of the first-person narrator. But these authors used the contrivances of edited letters or memoirs, devices that tended toward underdeveloped characters, episodic plots, and a general sense of artificialityâeven when the stories were presented not as fiction but âhistories.â No earlier novelist had provided a voice so seemingly pure, so fully belonging to the character, as BrontĂ«. She developed her art alongside her sisters, the novelists Anne and Emily (all of them publishing under gender-neutral pseudonyms), but it was Charlotte whose work best captured the sense of the modern individual. Anne BrontĂ«âs novels Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall contributed to the novelâs ability to offer social commentary and criticism, while the Romantic sensibilities of Emily BrontĂ«âs Wuthering Heights explored how the âother,â in the form of the dark, unpredictable Heathcliff, can threaten the integrity of the self.
One of the greatest testimonies to BrontĂ«âs accomplishment came from Virginia Woolf, a modernist pioneer who represents a world far removed from that of Bronteâs Victorianism. âAs we open Jane Eyre once more,â a doubting Woolf wrote in The Common Reader, âwe cannot stifle the suspicion that we shall find her world of imagination as antiquated, mid-Victorian, and out of date as the parsonage on the moor, a place only to be visited by the curious, only preserved by the pious.â Woolf continues, âSo we open Jane Eyre; and in two pages every doubt is swept clean from our minds.â There is nothing of the book, Woolf declares, âexcept Jane Eyre.â Janeâs voice is the source of the power the book has to absorb the reader completely into her world. Woolf explains how BrontĂ«Â depicts:
⊠an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently.
It is exactly this willingnessâdesire, evenâto be âat war with the accepted order of thingsâ that characterizes the modern self. While we now take such a sense for granted, it was, as BrontĂ«âs contemporaries rightly understood, radical in her day. More disturbing to BrontĂ«âs Victorian readers than the sheer sensuality of the story and Janeâs deep passion was âthe heroineâs refusal to submit to her social destiny,â as the literary critic Sandra M. Gilbert explains. Indeed, one contemporary review complained, âIt is true Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength,â but the critic continues that âit is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself.â In presenting such a character, the reviewer worries, BrontĂ« has âoverthrown authorityâ and cultivated ârebellion.â And in a way they were right: âI resisted all the way,â Jane says as she is dragged by her cruel aunt toward banishment in the bedroom where her late uncle died. This sentence, Joyce Carol Oates argues, serves as the theme of Janeâs whole story.
But Janeâs resistance is not the empty rebellion of nihilism or self-absorption (consider how current practitioners of âselfie cultureâ frequently weather accusations of narcissism). Rather, her quest for her true self peels back the stiff layers of conventionality in order to discover genuine morality and faith. As BrontĂ« explains in the preface to the novelâs second edition (a preface necessitated by the moral outrage that followed the novelâs publication),
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last ⊠These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world.
In a letter to a friend, Bronte responded to her criticsâ objections by declaring, âUnless I have the courage to use the language of Truth in preference to the jargon of Conventionality, I ought to be silent ...â
The refusal of such a woman, who lived in such a time, to be silent created a new mold for the selfâone apparent not only in todayâs Instagram photos, but also more importantly in the collective modern sense that a personâs inner life can allow her to effect change from the inside out.