“I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously revived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.”
“‘Jane, do you mean to go one way in the world, and to let me go another?”
“The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway and asserting a right to predominate—to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last; yes, and to speak.”
“Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë has been on my “must read” list for years, and when the time arose when I could put it off no longer, I embarked on this difficult piece with a sense of optimism and anticipation. And while nowhere near an easy read, I found it to be more than worthy of the epic place in literature is has procured for itself, a memorable work that brings to the light one of the most complex and intriguing female protagonists in literary annals.
The opening pages depict the emotional and physical abuse that Jane suffers at the hands of her foster family, especially John, the 14-year-old son of her aunt, Mrs. Reed. Essentially orphaned at a young age, Jane is always seen as an outsider to the Reeds in their home, Gateshead, especially after her uncle passes away, but implores that Mrs. Reed look after Jane, who eventually assumes a “Cinderella”-like role in some ways. After many humiliations and abuses, the first signs of Jane’s independent, temperamental personality emerge when she rips Mrs. Reed to shreds in a very vindicating scene just before she is sent away to a religious boarding school.
“All John Reed’s violent tyrannies, all his sisters’ proud indifference, all his mother’s aversion, all the servants’ partially, turned up in my disturbed mind like a dark deposit in a turbid well. Why was I always suffering, always brow-beaten, always accused, forever condemned? Why could I never please? Why was it useless to try to win any one’s favor?”
“Thus was I severed from Bessie and Gateshead; thus whirled away to unknown, and, as I then deemed, remote and mysterious regions.”
At her distant new school, Lowood, we are exposed to the despicable conditions, where the girls are starved, exposed to the elements and subjected to other forms of abuse under the guidance of the horrific master, Brocklehurst, who reminded me of a former boss who also worshipped the hoarding of money. Under the pretense of religion—like so many—Brocklehurst is proven to be a wicked, evil man, not to mention a hypocrite whose wife and daughters make a showy exhibit of wealth in front of the poor girls. After Brocklehurst assassinates Jane’s character in front of the entire school, he unwittingly makes her a sympathetic figure to the other girls. It is in this setting that Jane meets her first and truest friend, Helen Burns, who becomes a martyr figure, similar to Simon in “Lord of the Flies.” Just as Jane is settling in and finding herself at Lowood, her friend Helen suffers a slow, painful death as a result of the exposed conditions of the school. In a truly sad scene, Jane says goodbye to her friend as she falls asleep in the dead girl’s arms.
“It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you …”
“‘Because I have been wrongly accused; and you, ma’am, and everybody else, will now think me wicked.’
‘We shall think you what you prove yourself to be, my child.’”
The story then jumps ahead eight years, launching Jane from 10 to 18. We learn that she has been taught to be a woman by one of the teachers, Miss Temple, and that Jane eventually becomes a teacher at Lowood herself. However, she becomes restless, and lamenting her passive, solitary life, her inner desire to rail against male chauvinism and strike out for activity and excitement eventually overcomes her. She submits an advertisement to become a governess within a home, which eventually leads her to Thornfield Hall—where the mercurial Mr. Rochester eventually brings her truly to life.
“I had had no communication by letter or message with the outer world; school rules, school duties, school habits, and notions, and voices, and faces, and phrases, and costumes, and preferences, and antipathies; such was what I knew of existence. And now I felt that it was not enough. I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon. I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it, and framed an humbler supplication; for change, stimulus; that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space. ‘Then,’ I cried, half desperate, ‘grant me, at least, a new servitude!’”
“It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world; cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted.”
After difficult interactions to start -- featuring intriguing verbal sparring -- Rochester and Jane eventually begin to see each other as equals, and Rochester eventually wears her down, almost forcing her to fall for him through sheer force of will. His secrets vex her and drag her on, leading her to wonder why he is so moody and malevolent toward his own past. Strange goings on in the middle of the night, seemingly overseen by the mysterious Grace Poole, seem to point out some unknown and unseen riddle. Fighting her passionate feelings, Jane uses all of her strength to put herself in her place and “keep to her caste,” forcing herself to deny all implications of a romantic connection between she and Rochester. This effort becomes ever more difficult with the arrival of a well-to-do set of Rochester’s friends to Thornfield Hall, highlighted by the beautiful, haughty Blanche Ingram, who appears to have caught Rochester’s fancy.
In a somewhat cruel dictate by Rochester, Jane is forced to sit in the corner of the parlor as these rich, shallow creatures vie for attention and money. She reads body language, taking a measure of the room and assigning values through what she sees and reads. Though she considers herself better than Blanche, Jane forgives Rochester’s faults and doesn’t blame him for pursuing Miss Ingram. However, the unexpected arrival of a fortune-teller changes the entire course of events, with the forward-speaking medium accusing Jane of having a small voice inside of her that maintains reason over passion. When a twist reveals that Rochester was posing as the fortune-teller, we see concretely that Rochester feels the same way toward Jane as she does to him. But when a stranger named Mason arrives from Jamaica out of nowhere, and more strange, middle-of-the-night events take place, we are further drawn into the unseen, unexplained mystery of Thornfield Hall.
“I saw them smile, laugh—it was nothing; the light of the candles had as much soul in it as their smile, the tinkle of the bell as much significance as their laugh.”
“‘You never felt jealousy, did you, Miss Eyre? Of course not; I need not ask you; because you never felt love. You have both sentiments yet to experience; your soul sleeps; the shock is yet to be given which shall waken it.’”
“ … You, with your gravity, considerateness, and caution, were made to be the recipient of secrets.”
“When once more alone, I review the information I had got; looked into my heart, examined its thoughts and feelings, and endeavored to bring back with a strict hand such as had been straying through imagination’s boundless and trackless waste, into the safe fold of common sense.”
“That a greater fool than Jane Eyre had never breathed the breath of life: that a more fantastic idiot had never surfeited herself on sweet lies, and swallowed poison as if it were nectar.”
In a dramatic scene during a walk, Rochester is about to propose to Jane when he suddenly stops, and we are led to believe that he is presiding over an internal battle of whether he can both marry below his station and reconcile the past that chases him still. The writing leads us also to believe that Jane is unaware of what is truly happening, or that Rochester is on the verge of proposing to her. When the imminent passing of Mrs. Reed leads Jane to return after so many years, the Rochester subplot is interrupted and we are set onto a path that examines the vast differences in upbringing between Jane and her former cousins and tormenters, Georgiana and Eliza. Upon her return to Thornfield, there is a game of hide and seek in the orchard with Rochester, just prior to the tense offer of engagement. However, when lightning strikes down the tree in the orchard, it’s hard to miss the not-so-subtle promise of foreshadowing and foreboding involved in the potential union.
“‘Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, and full as much heart!”
“‘I ask you to pass through life at my side—to be my second self, and best earthly companion.’”
“But joy soon effaced every other feeling; and loud as the wind blew, near and deep as the thunder crashed, fierce and frequent as the lightning gleamed, cataract-like as the rain fell during a storm of two hours’ duration, I experienced no fear, and little awe.”
“On a dark, misty, raw morning in January, I had left a hostile roof with a desperate and embittered heart—a sense of outlawery and almost of reprobation—to seek the chilly harborage of Lowood, that bourne so far away and unexplored. The same hostile roof now again rose before me; my prospects were doubtful yet; and I had yet an aching heart. I still felt as a wanderer on the face of the earth; but I experienced firmer trust in myself and my own powers, and less withering dread of oppression. The gaping wound of my wrongs, too, was now quite healed, and the flame of resentment extinguished.”
In my estimation, it was a cowardly courtship by Rochester, who is cruel to Jane even if some mistake it as romantic and mysterious. He is always taunting, testing and teasing -- what if Miss Ingram had not balked at the revelation that his worth was a third of what she thought in his “testing” proposal to her? And soon after the engagement of he and Jane, Rochester sets about to try to change Jane, to make her more like Miss Ingram while retaining her independence and will. He is trying to turn her into something she is not, and slave imagery and aggressive terms are used to describe his efforts: dominate, seize, hold, grab, control. There are awkward, confusing and shifting points of view throughout this time, and Jane begins to exert her own power back into the relationship by, essentially, blue-balling Rochester. Under windy, roaring, suspenseful and tension-filled settings that evoke weather as a character, Jane speaks conspiratorially to the reader at times. She eventually has a premonition of Rochester leaving her and a child, then has a vision of a ghost -- but was it actually real?
As the wedding day arrives amidst the overwhelming feeling that something is way wrong, a stranger enters the church to protest the marriage as Jane and Rochester on the altar. Rochester is charged with being already married, with a living wife, and it is revealed that he is married to some kind of mad, drunk she-beast that lives in the attic. After Rochester threatens Jane with violence (again), she must decide between what she wants (Rochester) vs. what she knows is right (leaving him). She flees under cover of night, not trusting herself to resist Rochester to his face, and with no money or possessions, she arrives in the middle of nowhere. Following a manic search for food and work that almost leads her to death from starvation and exposure, Jane stumbles into Marsh End and Moor House, where two sisters and a brother take her in -- despite the fact that Jane is a bit unduly harsh to the maid, Hannah, in my estimation.
“She thought all was fair and legal; and never dreamed she was going to be entrapped into a feigned union with a defrauded wretch, already bound to a mad, bad, and embruted partner!”
“And now I thought; till now I had only heard, seen, moved—followed up and down where I was led or dragged—watched event rush on event, disclosure open beyond disclosure; but now I thought.”
“The whole consciousness of my life lorn, my love lost, my hope quenched, my faith death-struck, swayed full and mighty above me in one sullen mass.”
“Not a human being that ever lived could wish to be loved better than I was loved; and him who thus loved me I absolutely worshipped; and I must renounce love and idol. One drear word comprised my intolerable duty—‘Depart!’”
“No reflection was to be allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet, so deadly sad, that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank, something like the world when the deluge was gone by.”
Jane eventually accepts a modest position as a teacher at a village schoolhouse that was arranged by St. John Rivers, the priest who had taken her in at Moor House. Here Jane encounters Rosamond Oliver, a beauty who evokes memories of Blanche Ingram even as she vexes St. John and makes him question his dedication to the faith. At this point, Brontë launches into a strange soliloquy on the death of poetry in the middle of another thought and scene. Eventually, the stoic and reserved St. John confides in Jane about his plight; over time, it is revealed that St. John and his sisters that rescued Jane are actually her cousins, and that Jane has been left 20,000 pounds after the death of their shared uncle. She eventually splits the money with her cousins, which allows her to buy a family in some ways.
“Glorious discovery to a lonely wretch! This was wealth indeed!—wealth to the heart!—a mine of pure, genial affections. This was a blessing, bright, vivid, and exhilarating!—not like the ponderous gift of gold—rich and welcome enough in its way, but sobering from its weight.”
She returns to live at Moor House with her cousins, and over time, she eventually becomes dominated by St. John, who almost places her under some kind of spell as part of his efforts to coerce her into becoming his missionary wife. Though he scorns her subtly even as he pursues her, St. John relies on smooth religious rhetoric, nearly convincing her that a loveless marriage in the service of the Lord is the right fate for her. He wears her down and gets her caught up in his rapture, but just as she is on the verge of relenting, she sees a vision and hears confusing voices that appear to be those of Rochester in pain. Never having been able to shake the memory of Rochester after a year, she yields to the vision and elects to go back to Thornfield to determine whatever became of Rochester.
“Perhaps you think I had forgotten Mr. Rochester, reader, amid these changes of place and fortune. Not for a moment. His idea was still with me, because it was not vapor sunshine could disperse, nor a sand-traced effigy storms could wash away; it was a name graven on a tablet, fated to last as long as the marble it inscribed.”
“I was tempted to cease struggling with him—to rush down the torrent of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there lose my own. I was almost as hard beset by him now as I had been once before, in a different way, by another. I was a fool both times. To have yielded then would have been an error of principle; to have yielded now would have been an error of judgment.”
After a long journey, Jane arrives to find that Thornfield has burnt to the ground, and she eventually discovers that Rochester went blind and lost a hand while saving servants during the fire. Seemingly now possessing the power and upper hand (pun intended) in the relationship, Jane tracks Rochester to a remote forest cottage, where she sort of beings to taunt and tease Rochester. There is a school of thought that posits that the maiming and disfiguring of Rochester is, in essence, an effort on Brontë’s part to literally and figuratively cut him down to size. When he learns that it is truly Jane and not a vision, Rochester reveals that he has (sort of) found religion; conveniently, this makes it possible for Jane to still be sort of a missionary wife in some ways, keeping her “promise” to God that St. John kept holding over her head. She agrees to serve as Rochester’s eyes and hands, leading to a simple ending that is abrupt, but fitting for the story. In the conclusion, we learn that Rochester regains his sight, but this ending chapter dwells somewhat strangely on St. John’s demise, with little commentary on the long-awaited Jane-Rochester union.
“‘I have little left in myself—I must have you. The world may laugh—may call me absurd, selfish—but it does not signify. My very soul demands you; it will be satisfied; or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame.’”
“All my heart is yours, sir; it belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.”
“You are no ruin, sir—no lightning-struck tree; you are green and vigorous. Plants will grow about your roots, whether you ask them or not, because they take delight in your bountiful shadow; and as they grow they will lean toward you, and wind round you, because your strength offers them so safe a prop.”
In terms of the actual writing, Brontë has a tendency to fall back on dry, stilted language at times, then resorts to flowery, exaggerated prose in other areas. Her long, hard-to-follow sentences are riddled with semicolons, and she also relies on the technique of addressing the reader directly on occasion, a somewhat unexpected and off-putting tactic. Brontë also helps to round out Jane’s character and introduce us to some of her inner thoughts through Jane’s talented, symbolic paintings. Like many of the true classics, “Jane Eyre” is heavily dependent on strings of coincidences, and perhaps it is the challenge of a modern audience to quell the cynicism that comes so naturally to us, and just embrace the story overall and accept the unlikely, connected events.
Overall, just at moments where we think that Jane has been portrayed as too perfect and multitalented, we are revealed a side or edge to her character that is flawed. At times, I feel Brontë relies too much on descriptions of how plain and unappealing Jane is in terms of looks as a way to diminish the other, too-neatly-described aspects of her character. All in all, however, it is a more than worthwhile read, touching in some parts and poignant in others. It contains social commentary, examination of gender roles, analysis of the caste system, questions of morality vs. responsibility, and thoughts on sexual mores. As one of the landmark books that features a heroine, it is refreshing in some ways to be introduced to a fiercely independent female with a growing realization of what she truly wants and a temperamental mind as well as a thoughtful one.
“ … For our honey-moon will shine our life-long; its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.”
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