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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Some ten years ago, Laurence Lerner undertook to remind people with an interest in Jane Eyre that the madwoman in the attic is not in fact a major character in Charlotte Brontë's novel. In a piece of suave polemics, he pointed out that nobody who insists on having someone play the role of Jane Eyre's double will be short of candidates. Lerner's review of the options includes the following possibility:
Is not Rivers a double for Jane? More insidiously and more dangerously than Helen [Burns], he represents the urge toward duty from which she needs to free herself in order to act out of pure love. Rivers quite consciously represses his sexuality, knowing his love for Rosamund Oliver, and putting it aside in order to be a missionary and demand a wife toward whom he feels no sexual attraction. Jane similarly repressed her own sexuality in placing duty before her love for Rochester.
While this tongue-in-cheek suggestion does not look very promising, it should be pointed out that St John Rivers, unlike Bertha Rochester, plays a literally dominant role throughout a sizeable part of the novel. It is surprising that generations of readers have found St John so ‘unmemorable’, to quote a recent writer on Charlotte Brontë.
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