Abstract
People criticize Deus ex machina in a story because they think it is just a cop-out. They are right to be annoyed. But sometimes the artist really has no choice.
Connection to website’s theme
It is easy and tempting to dismiss Deus ex machina in art. But by figuring out why the artist needed to use it, we unlock a better understanding of art. Apply this same principle to what seems like an unreasonable action from others, and you begin to bridge the gap that separates them from you.
Introduction
This is a second article on the classic Jane Eyre, that builds on the first one. Here I want to begin by contrasting the book with George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion.
Pygmalion
In case you don’t know why the play is called Pygmalion, refer this.
When Shaw first wrote Pygmalion, he ended the play with Eliza acting disdainful towards Professor Higgins. The public clamored for a happy ending instead and we got what ultimately became the movie My Fair Lady. When Shaw saw the version where Eliza and Higgins marry, he was outraged. So much so that he add a sequel chapter “What happened afterwards” to his play where he outlines how Eliza married Freddie and what the rest of her life looked like. In fact, he was annoyed that people even needed to be explained this. You can read the whole text here.
The reason Shaw named his play Pygmalion is because “When Eliza emancipates herself – when Galatea comes to life – she must not relapse. She must retain her pride and triumph to the end.” To Shaw, if Eliza comes back to Higgins, all the pride and self-respect that she has attained under him would be destroyed. And it means that she can only act like a lady but doesn’t have enough self-respect to be a lady. If Higgins is to be as great a teacher as he claims, Eliza must leave him.
As we discussed in the previous article, this is a similar situation to the relationship between Jane Eyre and Rochester. If Jane is to remain the woman Rochester loves, she must leave him. And she does.
Realism vs. Romanticism
According to Shaw, there is no happily-ever-after for Eliza with Higgins. He says, “people in all directions have assumed, for no other reason than that she became the heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it. This is unbearable.” Shaw was a staunch supporter of showing realism in drama.
However, unlike Shaw, Charlotte Brontë was an advocate of romanticism. Which meant, she needed Jane and Rochester to have a happily-ever-after. Plus she had another motivation for reaching that ending. I have read in various places that Brontë specifically wanted to tell the story of a plain-looking woman, not a beauty, who still has a good life. Therefore, Jane must end up with Rochester and Brontë’s work cannot end with Jane leaving. Instead, these are the highlights of what follows:
- Jane finds out that she is wealthy in her own right because of the money left to her by a wealthy uncle.
- She finds a perfectly decent man who doesn’t love her but is willing to marry her and she rejects him. She decides to return to Rochester to find out how he is.
- Rochester’s wife dies, leaving him to be a not-so-eligible bachelor.
- He is not-so-eligible because he was blinded and maimed in the same accident that caused his wife’s death. But Jane loves him anyway and… they live happily ever after.
I flinch as I write this because I respect Brontë tremendously and I love the book Jane Eyre. But most of these subsequent developments use varying degrees of Deus ex machina.
Deus ex machina
Deus ex machina is a literary device used when a seemingly unsolvable problem in the story is resolved by unlikely circumstances. The name is derived from Greek plays where a God would be brought on stage using a machine to provide an unexpected resolution to the story. For example, imagine a story where James Bond is tracking a vicious Russian oligarch who is about to steal nuclear weapons. And the oligarch dies in a ski accident before he can put his plan into action, thus saving Britain. It makes for a very poor story.
To prevent these developments from obviously being Deus ex machina, Brontë mentions Jane’s rich uncle early on and there are examples of the violent and arsonist-like tendencies of Rochester’s wife throughout Jane and Rochester’s budding romance. However, these subsequent events are only tenuously linked to the first part of the story, if at all. Then why did Brontë construct the story as she did?
Brontë’s Deus ex machina developments
Jane’s rich uncle
Jane’s life was not influenced at all by having a rich uncle of whom she was unaware. Therefore, the dead uncle being rich is Deus ex machina. Then why would Brontë use it? Because Brontë wanted Jane to not be financially dependent on Rochester. But in 1800s England, this was a tall order. How could a well-educated but poor woman with no connections achieve financial independence? The answer was, she couldn’t.
Meeting St. John and Rochester
As mentioned before, Brontë wanted to write the story of a plain Jane, someone who wouldn’t get proposals because she was pretty. Again, in 1800s England, how likely was Jane to get married? Not likely at all. And hence the best Brontë thought Jane could hope for was a proposal for a loveless marriage. Meeting St. John was a Deus ex machina put in place for that proposal. In fact, Jane’s meeting Rochester is a Deus ex machina too, because there was nobody else in the novel who came even close to respecting Jane for who she was.
Death of Rochester’s wife
There was nothing in the story that was influenced by what kind of madness befell Rochester’s wife. She could have just as well been a harmless crazy person and not materially changed anything in the story thus far. Therefore, her burning down the house and leaping to her death is Deus ex machina. Brontë could have achieved the same end by other methods.
- Perhaps the laws of Britain and the Church of England change such that they begin to allow divorces for the reason of mental illness. Rochester divorces his wife, marries Jane and they live happily ever after.
- Or perhaps the wife dies of complications from her mental illness itself. Rochester marries Jane and they live happily ever after.
- Or maybe the brother of the wife grows a conscience and comes back, not to ruin Rochester’s wedding to Jane, but to declare that he has convinced the church to dissolve Rochester’s previous marriage because it was based on deception. Rochester marries Jane and they live happily ever after.
As we can see, whatever the nature of the Deus ex machina, we must somehow get rid of Rochester’s wife for the story to reach happily ever after.
Why did Brontë have the madwoman in the story in the first place? My guess is because she wanted to show that Jane and Rochester’s love persists even in impossible circumstances. It wouldn’t have been much of a test of love if Jane could have married Rochester without a hitch.
This is one place where I think Brontë need not have used Deus ex machina. But her axioms are different than mine. We will discuss this in detail in the next section.
Rochester becomes blind and Jane marries him anyway
Brontë pulled a Rapunzel at the end of the novel (you know, with the princess marrying the blind prince and her love giving him sight) to show the depth of love that Jane has for Rochester. But the reason for this development is that Rochester must suffer a fate where “God had tempered judgment with mercy”. Otherwise, his poor treatment of Jane goes completely unpunished.
Avoiding Deus ex machina
Why Brontë needed Deus ex machina
As we have discussed in this article, we want art to be idealistic. What kind of a statement would it make if plain and poor Jane (a) stayed poor, (b) never met anyone other than Rochester who even took any interest in her as a woman, (c) never married Rochester because his wife lived forever, or (d) married Rochester but he never repented for how poorly he had treated her? We can’t have that. Therefore, within the context allowed by Victorian standards, Brontë did what she needed to do. She used Deus ex machina. After all, she is a romantic.
Could Brontë have avoided Deus ex machina? Can we?
Other than having Rochester’s wife not die at a time convenient for the novel, I do not think that Brontë could have avoided Deus ex machina in her novel and still stayed true to the reality of a plain, poor woman of the times. Victorian standards and culture stifled people, and women in particular. Mercifully, we do not live in that kind of culture anymore. If we give some modern twists to the story, perhaps we can do what Brontë could not. We can avoid Deus ex machina. And we can give thanks to Brontë for imagining the results, even if she had to resort to Deus ex machina in her time to get them.
Jane is wealthy in her own right
In today’s age, women can earn their way to wealth. What if we let Jane make her fortune on her own? We know Jane is extremely capable. Perhaps, Jane could have advertised for her services again and found another benefactor who sees how good she is at teaching and helps her build a successful school. That was how she met Rochester to begin with. And then, she would not be dependent on Rochester for money.
Jane is adequate wife material
Jane deserves a wonderful man who appreciates her for her soul and heart, someone like Rochester. The question we must ask here though, is whether Rochester is the only man in England who can look past Jane’s plainness. People may not have respected hearts and souls back then. But times have changed.
Why not have Jane meet another good man? Of course, we do not want to diminish Rochester’s value to Jane. Therefore, we could make Jane realize that the regard from this other man cannot hold a candle to the passionate love that Rochester feels for Jane. Jane realizes that no amount of love from another man, no matter how wonderful, can make her feelings shift away from Rochester. This would mean Jane chooses Rochester despite good options and not because he is the only one who could ever love her.
Rochester’s wife
This is one place where I wish Brontë had not resorted to Deus ex machina. I don’t share her world view that the greatest romance is one that is impossible to attain. In my view, the greatest romance is the one where the lovers share the deepest attitudes, values and beliefs, regardless of the attainability of happily-ever-after. A romance that cannot be attained is tragic but is neither better nor worse than one that can be attained based on that single characteristic alone. Therefore, in my view, the crux of the story could have been just as good, if not better, had Brontë killed off the madwoman before Jane meets Rochester, as I have explored in my novella rewrite.
Rochester’s repentance
Brontë realized that Rochester needed to repent for his treatment of Jane. But if the novel includes a thriving career for Jane and alternative romantic interests, we can make the love story even stronger. We can have Jane return to Rochester after having achieved tremendous self-respect. Instead of pushing Rochester down in the ladder of eligibility, Jane can now be raised. Then Edward Rochester need not be made blind on this account. And as for Rochester suffering for his sins, we can give him other ways to achieve redemption. That is another idea I have explored in the rewritten novella.
Conclusion
An important principle of constructing stories is that what happens in the story must be indispensable to the story. In other words, what happens must be a logical conclusion of what the characters choose to do with the initial set of circumstances. In fact, the circumstances must enhance the characters’ choices and consequences and those consequences also cannot be random. The setup must dictate the nature of the characters and the consequences of the story, and the consequences must result from the choices, not from the circumstances, of the characters. Anything else is Deus ex machina.
A great writer will sometimes resort to Deus ex machina if the reality of their times does not allow for an ideal life. After all, art is about being idealistic.
For comments or questions on this article, please email nayana@tobeandwhattobe.com
Article image courtesy: Giacomo Torelli – The image was cropped to the plate mark and converted to jpeg format (quality level 10) with Photoshop CC 14.2.1, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34459337
