How To Grift A Reader
A Cursory Look At How Two Writing Masters Get The Job Done
by F.R.R. Mallory
November 17, 2006

The world wants to be deceived.
~Sebastian Brant

Through the contrasting of a bleak, drear landscape and violence against an orphaned child both Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations use the first chapter of their works to romanticize indifferent characters and establish the opportunity for both authors to explain and justify the behavior of these characters as they become predacious later in the novels.

Dickens begins three paragraphs in with "this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard...the dark flat wilderness...intersected with dykes and mounds and gates...the low leaden line beyond...and the distant savage lair...was the sea" (Dickens 9). Bronte answers with "I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard, with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall...the fiend pinning down the thief's pack behind him, I passed over quickly: it was an object of terror" (Bronte 21). In each of these passages the author sets the stage immediately before the introduction of an older male character depicted as 'brute' or in Bronte's case, perhaps 'fiend' where this male character will savage the orphaned child.

It appears essential to both authors, in their effort to attain the reader's unquestioning sympathy for the orphaned character, to emphasize the looming shadow of threatening death. Dickens reinforces death during Pip's flight from the convict by describing the sight of, "a gibbet (gallows) with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping towards this latter, as if he were...going back to hook himself up again." (Dickens 12). Bronte with similar gusto torments her orphaned child with a description of "the black, horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows" (Bronte 21).

In yet another echo, both authors choose to use an older male figure as the initial tormentor, subtly suggesting the absence of the orphans' dead fathers and the lack of protection caused by that absence. "You fail...and your heart and your liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate...that young man has a secret way of getting at a boy...will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him open" (Dickens 11). This passage stretches the relationships now established between the invisible young man and the visible young man, Pip. This creates the extended idea that the ability to torture, torment and do evil is passing through this invisible tearing open between Pip and the young man adding to Pip's promised complicity in the scene. To some degree this scene is iconic in its representation of Pip trading (his life) or perhaps his (morality) for the promise of safety.

Bronte delivers her 'fiend' through John the young master of the house when he summons Jane before him and "without speaking, he struck suddenly and strongly...that is for the look you had in your eyes...you rat! ...the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it. The cut bled, the pain was sharp" (Bronte 23). In this sequence it becomes curious to note that John and Jane are in fact masculine to feminine reflections of the same name offering a similar glimpse into the inside to outside, visible to invisible exchange between brutalizer and victim. It is also curious to note that Bronte prefaces this assault by informing the reader that John's assaults are not seen or heard by his mother, even when she is in the same room when they occur. This peculiar staging introduces the question of the reliability of Jane's account.

At the end of such violent chapters it is difficult, as a reader, not to feel great empathy for the terrible experiences of these young orphans. The authors direct us to focus on the orphans' lack of parents, on their absence of protection from mean and cruel people. Yet in both stories we quickly learn that these orphans have not been turned out penniless into some home for indigent orphans. In fact, both children have been brought into the homes of relatives. They are provided with food, shelter, clothing, free time to play, and even educational opportunities. Yet these conditions are further leavened by the introduction of a continuing tormentor, a true villainous presence in the form of the 'mean mother archetype'. In both cases, the older women have been stripped of their personal identity (their first name) and reduced to a patronized identity - possession or wife of ______. This goes even further to suggest the torment is passing through the women at the behest of their possessors; husbands or a larger more vague governing structure reducing the female to object and tool and doubling the victimization.

Both authors, by keeping the reader focused on the abuse, subtly support this 'victimizing' of the narrator's primary caretaker, in this way beginning the pattern of caricatured viewpoint that skews and undermines the reliability of the narrator's account of what occurs in the novel. By using the first person point of view, the author limits insight or a broader viewpoint of the situation from outside of the interests of the narrator (and author) and allows for the accentuation of bad traits in secondary characters beyond supportable limits.

By creating a sympathetic framework early in the novels, the reader becomes complicit with the primary character, and the author's, questionable behavior choices establishing the role of silent participant or a representation of community (cultural) support for these behaviors or ideas. In this way the technique is highly manipulative and suspect, leaving the reader questioning not only the reliability of the narrative but the motives of the authors in their choice to use this story structure. In the end the reader is left with dull coin for their effort and reminded that all the shine came from polish, not supported on close inspection.

Works Cited

Bronte, Charlotte, Beth Newman, ed. Jane Eyre. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1996

Dickens, Charles, Edgar Rosenberg, ed. Great Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999

Charlotte Bronte
1816-1855

Charles Dickens
1812-1870

These two writers were certainly contemporaries and in Jane Eyre and Great Expectations you can see other similarities in subject choices. Since Great Expectations was written after Jane Eyre there has been controversy from the very beginning that Dickens borrowed from Bronte when he wrote his novel. He vehemently disagreed but the suggestion persists to this day.

Each of these authors defined something unique. With Dickens it seems to be the concept of writer as celebrity. In modern terms Stephen King might be representative of the influence that Dickens wielded in his own day. With Bronte, she seems to have peeled back the English veil to look at its dirty little secrets prompting the beginnings of a move toward civil and social rights for women and children.

Style-wize, I think that both of these authors are not too easily read. In Dickens case you might begin to suspect he was being paid by the word therefore wordy was better.

Neither novel is particularly sophisticated in terms of novel structure or plot and in fact both seem to wander around a bit trying to figure out what novel structure is. When I read these books, this time, I did not end up feeling satisfied by their resolution and I felt that both authors relied on contrivances to resolve their story lines, techniques which stretched the believabilty factor very thin.

I'm less certain these books would sell if they were being written today.

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