Reading for Health. Erika Wright

(1847)

      Young Jane Eyre’s assertion that she must “keep in good health” has more in common with Faust’s “Catechism of Health” than it does with Reverend Brocklehurst’s interrogation about hell.¹ The reverend’s doctrine of mortification, which is best exemplified by his mismanagement of Lowood, dismisses health as untenable and declares “worldly happiness” to be dangerous. Jane’s answer, therefore, is grossly uninformed, a symptom of her wickedness, stupidity, and obstinacy. The reader, of course does not see it quite this way, instead interpreting Jane’s reply as simply naïve or too literal, an honest response to a rigged question. But as Jane tells her story, and as her attempts to heed her own advice become intertwined with its telling, her rejoinder proves to be more savvy than we might first have appreciated; certainly it is more attuned to the exigencies of the world than is Brocklehurst’s subsequent parable of the sickly, psalm-loving child. The gap between Brocklehurst’s and Jane’s perspectives—health is nothing versus health is everything—signals more than a theological divide between a hypocritical clergyman and a willful young girl.² It draws attention to a crucial epistemological concern circulating throughout the nineteenth century that underwrites the physician’s authority to offer advice about and define health and the novelist’s capacity to intervene in this endeavor. The Reverend Brocklehurst may not care about health, but Jane certainly does—and so should we. Her story, I am suggesting, functions as an extended answer to this complex question: How can you keep in good health?

      The question of whether keeping in good health is possible looms large in the cultural imagination, and the answer offered by medical advisers of the period was a qualified yes. One can keep well, but it takes work. Eating the right foods, breathing fresh air, getting proper rest, and moderate exercise go a long way toward preserving health, but not everyone has the means or opportunity to take such care. And even if they did, deadly epidemics and inherited disease have a way of interfering with the best-laid plans. The Brontës’ own tragic family history attests to this reality: Charlotte’s mother and two of her sisters died when she was a child; the rest of her siblings died within a year and a half after the publication of Jane Eyre.³ Her father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, took copious notes on the vicissitudes of his and his children’s health. He worked diligently to keep them well and to find cures when they were not. As Sally Shuttleworth points out in her pioneering study Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, Reverend Brontë’s “fascination with medical science, and the inter-relations between the mind and the body, went far beyond the bounds of professional duty, . . . leading him to impose a rigorous regime on his entire family. Every symptom, whether of mental or physical ill-health, was closely scrutinized, and checked against the near-infallible words of his secular Bible, Graham’s Domestic Medicine.”⁴

      Reverend Brontë’s “bible,” like Faust’s catechism, promises to educate readers about the importance of health. In Faust’s case, the lesson takes the form of a repetitive performance in the hope that it will become a habit. Students must recite the catechism for “an hour, twice a week,” so that “the minds of the children [become] impressed with the true spirit of its doctrine”:⁵ health is a blessing, and preserving it is one’s duty. The problem for those who write about health is not only that medical knowledge about the body is uncertain and faulty but also that readers must be conditioned to take an interest in their health; they must work to cultivate a sense of health in order to keep it. John Milner Fothergill begins his Maintenance of Health (1874) by acknowledging this problem. He explains, “What is attempted here is to give such information about ‘the casket of the soul’ as will enable the lay reader to have some idea of his own frame and its physiology, and by describing what health is, and how variations from it are brought about, to give him some general impressions as to what to do in order to be well and to keep well.”⁶ The directive—know health and keep well—reverberates throughout Jane Eyre and throughout Victorian culture, becoming a defining feature of the stories Victorians told to and about themselves.