Intro
In case you haven't read this classic, or seen any of its zillion movie adaptations, let's recap. The heroine and namesake of Jane Eyre is a young orphan girl who grows up with a cranky aunt and gets packed off to boarding school. Fast-forward and she's out in the world as a governess (glorified babysitter) looking after a little French girl at a mansion called Thornfield, where she falls in love with her grouchy boss, Edward Rochester. Eventually they're set to tie the knot when it turns out he's married to a crazy lady who runs around on all fours in the attic. Not your typical bridal shower.
All of this sounds pretty conventional, right? (Until the four-legged-former-wife part, we mean). Are you wondering what's so feminist about a marriage plot? No worries, dear reader: Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar are gonna help us figure this one out.
Quote
"I tell you I must go!" I retorted, roused to something like passion. "Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?—You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you,—and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. 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!"
Analysis
Listen to that firebrand go! As you may have guessed, Jane, being the narrator of the whole book, is the one speaking here. That fact, which gets readers to know her deepest thoughts throughout the book, was a pretty incredible thing in Charlotte Brontë's day, so far as feminist reading goes. It wasn't all that often that female characters got to have a voice of their own.
This oh-so-famous passage highlights one important fact: Jane thinks of herself as Edward's equal. In 1847, that was a pretty mindboggingly big deal. In fact, it's downright revolutionary for Jane to put herself on equal footing with the man she loves—and to his credit, this is exactly why Edward loves Jane so much: he knows she's his equal too. If you forget the imprisoned lunatic wife, that's pretty cool for a rich white dude in 1847.
Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) is named for Bertha Mason Rochester, the secret wife herself. In their reading, the novel performs "rebellious feminism," as Jane makes her way out of a life of loneliness into a marriage she's pumped for, and it's marriage of equals. Our plucky protagonist never has to feel like a loner ever again (once the nasty first wife's out of the way, of course).
As if that wasn't enough feel-good feminist fare, Gilbert and Gubar make one other really big, important, future-criticism-changing argument about Jane Eyre: they say that the biggest tension in the novel isn't the tension between Jane and Ed, but the tension between Jane and Bertha instead.
Rather than reading Bertha as a unique character in her own right, Gilbert and Gubar read her as Jane's "truest and darkest double." For them, she represents all of Jane's repressed "hunger, rebellion, and rage," and, by the same token, she represents Charlotte Brontë's "imprisoned" passions too. So by having an insane counterpart, Jane gets to surpass all those dark feelings and end up happily ever after—as much as any lady could be in the 19th century, anyway.