The Essay

The following is a braided essay about me and Jane Eyre. And my grandma Mary. And Charlotte Brontë. And love and power and sacrifice and stability. But mostly Jane and Grandma.

Writing creative nonfiction using family stories challenged my previous writing experience and helped further my storytelling capabilities. Reader, I truly hope you enjoy this essay and learn something new, whether it's about Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, my grandmother, me, or even how we all relate to the universal themes present in classic literature.

I Am No Bird; and No Net Ensnares Me

Audra Woehle

I. JANE EYRE, AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The first time I read Jane Eyre, I was a high school graduate with too much time on my hands. After years of assigned literature, I began selecting my own books to read. Jane Eyre was always a book I wanted to read, but always seemed a bit too daunting. It was too long, too boring, too dense, and too old. Even when I forced myself, I could only get through half of the first chapter with no further progress.

Jane Eyre on audiobook was the big change, especially since I’m prone to both boredom and car sickness whenever I’m on a two-day-long road trip to visit my grandparents. Through Chicago traffic, expansive Wisconsin farmland, and the Minnesota Northwoods, I followed Jane on one-and-a-half times’ speed from Gateshead Manor to Lowood School and Thornfield Hall. But soon I had arrived at my grandparents’ little lakehouse, and my progress slowed until it stopped in favor of freshman orientation and the weight of a new phase of life.

Still, I felt assured in quitting Jane Eyre because I knew that in a few short months I’d read the whole thing again in my first college English class. The books I read were again chosen for me, but this time around I found myself anticipating what happened once Mr. Rochester returned to Thornfield. This time around, I fell in love. This time around, I grieved Helen, I cried when Mr. Rochester begged Jane to stay, I felt Jane’s complicated feelings at Moor House, and my heart felt warm when Jane found her happily ever after at Ferndean. For the two weeks my class spent with Charlotte Brontë, I poured myself into and took comfort from a book I felt had so much to say nearly two centuries later.

 

II. THE MELCHIORS

My Grandma Mary and Grandpa Bob lived in the same single-story house for over fifty years. It’s small and old and whenever I’m there, I’m usually breaking into hives and sneezing fits because of the dust. It looks old, too, with cedar paneling and retro wallpaper lining each room. Still, each summer’s return feels as important as the last. Taking the final turn onto the long, wooded driveway is a homecoming met with endless hugs and greetings.

The time spent at my grandparents’ place is spent counting. When I skip down the three flights of stairs leading to the beachfront, I take note of the familiar pattern beneath my feet as I hit each step. From the foyer to the living room, there are endless amounts of books — travel books, science journals, photo collections, and old editions of Heidi or Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Huckleberry Finn. Then there’s the tchotchkes. Countless chickadee and even more owl figurines occupy any space they can, mimicking the timbered backyard beyond the windows. There, too, is the clock that sings a different bird call at each hour just as the grandfather clock sounds its heavy chimes. 

But the house does not just collect; it keeps. Heirlooms, from Great-great-grandmother Nilsine’s spinning wheel to furniture adorned with rosemåling. Encased in a windowed armoire are old books in a language I can’t understand, but still flip through, like a young child with a picture book, to see that old text and to smell that scent of paper’s slow decay. At my grandparents’ house, there’s no mistaking their Norwegian heritage.

 

III. JANE EYRE

Jane Eyre has been my favorite book since I first read it. One of its main draws at first glance is the romance. Jane, to me, has always seemed like a puppet or self-insert for Charlotte Brontë, a shrewd and homely and short-statured heroine that could have the romantic love (and sex) that Brontë never found. Brontë’s protagonist finds a Byronic hero in Mr. Rochester, who strikes a balance between coldness and vulnerability, and she writes a simmering slow burn, interjected with turns of phrase like “Make my happiness — I will make yours.” 

While the romance is equally appealing and important, it’s not the main attraction. Yes, it’s eloquent and intricate and quixotic, but most of all, it’s cathartic. Jane Eyre at its core is a Cinderella, rags-to-riches type story. Jane begins her story as a poor, lonely orphan sent from an abusive home to an abusive school. She begins her first romance with her employer — a man over a decade her senior — against her better judgment, and leaves him when a life with him means a compromise of her morals. At the story’s end, Jane is reunited with an atoned Rochester, an inheritance, and an affirmation of her autonomy; she has the upper hand. Every step of the plot is intentional and satisfying, validating in equal measure Jane’s moral convictions and defiance and leaving her with a storybook ending.

 

IV. THE FRIENDLY NUMBNESS OF DEATH

I can remember being a girl and feeding chickadees from my hand. The light weight of their tiny bodies and the gentle grip of their talons placed me in a fairytale. One by one, each bird landed, plucked its livelihood from my palm, and flew off — I wonder what happened to them at each of their ends. Maybe you’ve seen a bullet pierce a game’s breast or a falcon overpower a sparrow. Maybe you’ve even seen the pictures of the plastic that hugs aluminum cans together, ensnaring and choking the life out of a gull. Once, in elementary school, I helped make pinecone bird feeders and we hung them in the trees outside the library windows. Every trip to use the media center after that meant seeing the unmoving bird with its foot stuck in the scales of a cone. Those are all violent, painful deaths, but birds rarely drop from the sky altogether when their hearts cease. Every bird must die, but we never see how, and they simply replace themselves with offspring in a ceaseless cycle. A chickadee will die, but birds are undying.

 

V. BERTHA MASON

Jane Eyre — the book and the character — is not always easy to like. Jane can be judgmental and thorny, and she strikes a confounding balance between low self-worth and high self-respect. The book itself is full of long, winding roads of language barely accessible to a modern audience. Even if I appreciate Brontë’s lingering prose and imagery, I just as well know that it’s caused many high school students to tear out their hair at the root.

But the most off-putting matter in Jane Eyre, and what always complicates my love for the book, is Bertha's treatment. Bertha Mason, or rather, Bertha Rochester, is the mad wife of Jane’s employer, kept hidden away on Thornfield’s third floor. She’s less character and more plot device. Her echoed, mad laughter that reverberates through Thornfield drive mystery while her attempt to set Mr. Rochester’s room aflame pushes him closer to Jane. Bertha’s mere existence is an impediment to Jane and Rochester’s twisted romance as long as she lives. So, when Brontë requires a neat bow for the end of her narrative, Bertha is the sacrificial lamb, throwing herself from Thornfield’s roof so that Jane may have her happy ending.

In 1847, it might have been easy to pin narrative crises on a figure like her — foreign, dubiously white, and mentally unstable. If Bertha is the measuring tape, the strong-willed, rebellious Jane is a perfect English rose by comparison. But these are post-Yellow Wallpaper, post-Wide Sargasso Sea times. The wife in the attic is a tired trope and, more importantly, Bertha deserves some humanity. 

 

VI. MARY MELCHIOR

I have always felt closest to my Grandma Mary. My mother’s older sisters were six and eight years older, and my parents waited longer to have children, so all my cousins were too old for playing the games a five- or six-year-old girl was interested in. My grandma would play with me anyway when I brought out the decades-old Fisher Price Little People set. She would hide the creepy Norwegian troll dolls away in a closet so I could sleep soundly at night. She would (and still does) set up tea parties, always giving me the December teacup embellished with illustrated holly. 

I love my Grandma Mary, but I’ve also always felt perplexed by her. I know from my mom that she used to a liberal, a democrat, whatever you want to call it. She told off her mother for using racial slurs, voted for Mondale in 1984, and volunteered at Planned Parenthood. But over the course of the nineties and aughts,  after her daughters moved out, got married, and had children of their own, she became more and more like my grandfather, concerned with immigrants and the unborn, and whatever else. The grandmother I grew up with was kind and caring, but I’ve also had to reconcile that with how her beliefs have only drifted further from conclusions of her own making and toward a mirror of my grandfather.

 

VII. MARY KOCOUREK

My great-grandmother Olga is like a mythological figure. She died in 1999, nearly five years before I was born, and her last words were prayers in Norwegian. Grandma Mary tells me she was bright and a good seamstress, that she played piano by ear, that she enjoyed going dancing and playing bridge. That her biggest shames were her smoking and her divorce.

There are no pictures from when Olga and my great-grandfather eloped in 1932. They both came from Lidgerwood, a small town in North Dakota’s southeastern corner. They were both the youngest; she was the last of seven to a couple of Norwegian immigrants, and he was the last of four in a Czech family. Despite being six years apart, they’d gone to high school together — Olga skipped a few grades — where she was homecoming queen and he was co-captain of the football team.

I can only speculate about what that marriage was like. Maybe they’d rushed into an expected marriage, thinking someone from back home was the best or only option, only to find regret after two children — my grandmother in 1935 and her brother in 1939. Maybe everything started to crumble under financial strife when the Depression and the Dust Bowl hit North Dakota. Maybe they had loved each other, at least for a time.

No matter how it was, my great-grandfather left home in 1942 to find military construction work out west, eventually ending up in Los Alamos. He would only make short visits home, and Great-uncle John would only remember the image of his father as the back of man walking away. Once, Great-grandma went to visit him. She took a bus to Santa Fe with one of her sisters and walked the streets until they saw him, not alone or with the two men he left with, but with another woman. Just like that, she went from a Jane to a Bertha, a footnote of some other woman’s great love story, who became a footnote in someone else’s. By 1948, Olga divorced her husband and she moved with her children to Fargo. Mary didn’t see him for another twenty-three years, when she and her own family visited him in California. He died just a few years later.

The time spent at my grandparents’ place is best spent counting. Counting steps, counting books, counting trinkets, counting birds. Counting heirlooms and relics and ancestry. At my grandparents’ house, there’s no mistaking their Norwegian heritage, except for the one small Czech flag that hangs by the door.

 

VIII. GOOD NORWEGIAN GIRL

My grandmother will tell you she found her voice through conservative politics. She’ll tell you she was a meek, timid, “good Norwegian girl” before she started to listen and think and speak for herself. I have my doubts. Grandma was born in the middle of the Great Depression. The Second World War was her childhood, and the Korean War made up her teenage years. Her parents divorced when not many had, and had spent the rest of her life searching for a promise of stability, a promise that looked like a white picket fence, a life-long marriage, and a fairytale ending.

In 1954, just before Grandma Mary started nursing school, she went on blind date with a boy named Bob who lived just across the Red River in Moorhead, Minnesota. They hit it off and continued to date for four years while they each went to school and married in 1958.

My grandpa Bob adored my grandma Mary. You can see it in their wedding photos where he gazes upon her admiringly as she slices into a four-tiered cake. You can read it in their saved anniversary cards. I could see it in every summer visit. They were married for nearly sixty-five years until he died in 2023. 

My grandfather was also very, very conservative. He had a large collection of guns, he denied climate change in spite of his earth science background, he was a member of the NRA, he listened to Rush Limbaugh, and he could watch Fox News for hours on end. I don’t know what he might have been like five, six, or seven decades ago, and I don’t know about my grandma, either. I do know, though, that she married him a democrat and raised her daughters a democrat. Then, once the three girls were out of the house, she began to make the switch.

It sounds funny, but I blame Bill Clinton for my grandmother’s conservatism. He, according to her, reminded her too much of her own father. Then again, it probably made her marriage a whole lot easier when she agreed with her husband. Perhaps she had less of an obligation to defend the best interests of her daughters with them finally out of the house, and maybe the promise of a stable marriage, stable beliefs, and a stable life was the only promise she needed.

 

IX. ONE I WOULD HAVE DIED TO SAVE

Charlotte Brontë’s short life was spent, in part, watching her loved ones die around her. Her mother died when she was five, likely due to cancer. She became the eldest child through tragedy, when she watched her two older sisters die of tuberculosis at boarding school. At thirty-two, her only brother, Branwell died. Emily Brontë caught a cold at his funeral and died within the same year. Anne, the youngest, died the next year. “There’s little joy in life for me and little terror in the grave; I’ve lived the parting hour to see of one I would have died to save,” Charlotte wrote of Anne’s death. She watched as each of her siblings died in order, all from tuberculosis, as she cared for her blind, elderly father, Patrick. She married in her last year of life but died due to pregnancy complications. Still, according to her death certificate, she died the same way as her sisters and brother: tuberculosis.

The gothic quality to each of the Brontës’ works, the way they all fell one by one like dominoes, enshrines them all in a tragic legend. Even so, I’m hesitant to buy into the idea that Charlotte Brontë was all grief and sombreness. She lived a life, albeit short, of creative sisterhood, and her vivacity lives in the poetic, spirited, sometimes melodramatic worlds she built with her words. She took the good and the bad and wrote a world that was sometimes beautiful and sometimes tragic, a fictitious life that was at times stable and other uneasy. Perhaps that’s why it still feels so relevant, so profound even today.

Four years ago, my aunt died of heart failure. Her husband went out to get the mail and returned to find her unresponsive. She spent her last moments alone, and her parents lost their middle daughter. In the months afterward, my grandparents faced it the way they faced most heartbreak: with stoicism and the slightest grief. I only saw my grandmother cry when we scattered her daughter's ashes in the lake she played in as a girl.

Then, just a few months ago, my grandfather died. The family reunion the summer before was spent watching him quickly decline to the point where he sometimes wouldn’t recognize his wife of nearly seven decades. By autumn, when the northern Minnesota trees turn a rich amber and the red pines drop their needles, he lived in a nursing home and died a few weeks later. By the end of the year, their home of fifty years was winterized and Grandma moved into an apartment in town.

That old home, the fern green one-story cabin that overheats and makes me sneeze, the place where I spent twenty of my summers, will be sold to the neighbors this August. My grandmother’s children and grandchildren will go through her heirlooms, her books, her furniture, and her wares and decide what’s worth keeping and what’s not.

I say all this because stability is not a promise. Jane Eyre is simply a story, and Charlotte Brontë gave her a fairytale ending with guaranteed stability the moment she wrote the final words of the final page. If the novel continued like real life, it would not be quite so idyllic. Maybe Jane, like Charlotte, would die of pregnancy complications. Maybe Rochester, nearly two decades older than Jane, would die and leave Jane a widow for the rest of her years. Maybe, despite all they had overcome to be with one another in the first place, they would fall out.

Bertha Mason knew instability. She married a man only to find herself confined in his home, watching as he fell for someone new, younger, and saner. And so she acted out until she could be heard, setting fire to her husband’s bed, tearing apart his new love’s wedding veil, and laughing from her confinement until no one could deny her existence.

I don’t know exactly what it’s like to be Jane or Mary or Bertha or Charlotte. Perhaps I don’t know what it’s like to have an unstable upbringing, with no father or no mother or no parents whatsoever. The promise Grandma Mary sought, though, was not so much of a promise at all. Conservatism might look shiny with its promises of self-empowerment or stability. Independence. Individualism. Law and order. In reality, it’s less an assurance and more a façade, more a sacrifice. Perhaps, for a time, my grandmother felt secure — in herself, her path or maybe in her marriage and family. It might’ve felt liberating to feel she finally had the answer.

 

X. MOURNING

Most birds never live out their whole lives. They succumb to sickness or the cold or wounds inflicted by their predators, and they know when their moments are few. They hide themselves away for the imminent, embracing themselves in the cavity of a tree trunk or in the tangled limbs of a shrub, waiting for a quiet end if their hunters don’t feed on their weak bodies first. If anything remains after scavengers have fed, the bodies of delicate bones and feathers decompose easily and quickly. But because they hide themselves away and die alone, we never really have to mourn.