Bikes and Books, Part 3: Jane Eyre

This is my son, Lucas. He's five and completely ferocious. He's as rough and tumble as they come, the action star of the preschool set. There are many things he doesn't understand. For example, he's a little shaky on cause and effect. He's not yet managed to make the connection between putting jello in the bathtub and having a time out. He also doesn't understand the designated hitter. And I could start an entirely new blog on what he doesn't understand about women (although at last count he was engaged to three girls in his class, so maybe he's figuring something out).

But hear me when I say this: Lucas gets motorcycles.

I don't mean that he understands the ins and outs of sprockets and gears and torque. He doesn't know a thing about checking compression or balancing tires. But he knows that motorcycles are loud, and he knows that they're fast. He knows that twisting the accelerator doesn't just open up the throttle, but that it opens up adventure and possibility. Lucas knows that a motorcycle can take you places you've never been, and that when the engine throbs beneath you it's like the beating of your own heart. He knows that on a motorcycle the road before him will be shiny and smooth and endless, peeling off into the sunset like a great white ribbon.

Jane Eyre knows this, too. At eighteen she's ready to set out on her own, to leave the only world she's ever known behind her. It's an archetypal transition, one familiar to Luke Skywalker, Huck Finn, Odysseus, Moses, and countless other heroes. Jane looks out her window, sees the hills on the horizon, and her soul cries out:

"My eye passed all other objects to rest on those most remote, the blue peaks. It was those I longed to surmount; all within their boundary of rock and heath seem prison-ground, exile limits. I traced the white road winding round the base of one mountain, and vanishing in a gorge between two. How I longed to follow it farther!"

Jane's longing is part of literary (and human) tradition, though in 1847, when Jane Eyre was published, women were neither expected nor encouraged to voice such typically masculine desire. Gender roles were fairly rigid, though as the Victorian era progressed social structures that had been considered immutable began to dissolve. In one of the most striking passages in the book, Jane herself gives voice to the once unthinkable notion that women might want more out of life than "making puddings" or "knitting stockings:"

"It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action, and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot...Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer...."

By allowing Jane to speak her innermost desires, her yearning for something more than domestic tranquility, Charlotte Brontë takes a poor, plain, and proud governess and inserts her smack dab in the middle of a literary tradition that has been more or less exclusively reserved for men. She makes Jane a human being, no more, no less. Because this desire, this tidal wave inside us thundering towards a distant shore, is part of what it means to be human. We all feel it, in one way or another. Emerson notes that "most men lead lives of quiet desperation." But Jane Eyre doesn't. She chooses, instead, the route chosen by Tennyson's Ulysses, who forgoes tranquility, opting rather "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

And when I look at my son on my motorcycle, I see Jane Eyre, eyes blazing, stepping on the carriage to Thornfield, heading for a new life, a new love, towards heartbreak and misery, towards joy and restoration, towards an indescribable future that's just over the horizon. I see him, like Jane, defiant and strong and yet at the same time, somehow fragile and timid, too little to get on or off the motorcycle by himself. He's such a contradiction, such a crazy nest of boy and man. And that, too, is part of being human. Even Jane, for all her fears of being domesticated, chooses to spend her life caring for the man she loves.

So hear me when I say this: Charlotte Brontë gets motorcycles.