J.E. #4: Stern Features and a Heavy Brow

Brontë rebels against the marriage plot's standards for its hero in the Byronic Rochester.

Rather than Frances Burney's Lord Orville whose "person is all elegance" or Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy with "his fine, tall person, handsome features, [and] noble mien," Brontë creates a man marked by a "dark face with stern features and a heavy brow."In composing this unattractive immoral hero, Brontë creates a man more real than the two mentioned above.

It is this reality of character which helps her bring the concepts of the marriage plot out for trial. If a man could be perfect and never make mistakes, a woman should not be opposed to becoming his dependent. If, on the other hand, a man is not perfect, if he makes mistakes and acts selfishly, what right has he to lead a woman blindly through life?

The hero Rochester is first presented on a "tall steed" with a "lion-like" dog bounding before him; his gallant entrance is foiled, however, as the horse stumbles leaving him in the care of a poor governess. Jane states that had Rochester been "a handsome, heroic looking young gentleman" she would not have had the courage to insist upon helping him against his will. This scene "sets up a relationship of dependence with which the novel ends"--a dependence which would be viewed as unacceptable by the heroes of traditional marriage plot novels (Cervetti).

Through the imperfect, unattractive Rochester, Brontë not only rebels against expectations of the marriage plot but further relates to her readers that men are not what they are in literature (a point similar to the one she makes in The Professor about women) and therefore should not be elected supreme leaders over their wives.