Jane Eyre

This quotation, part of Jane’s outburst to her aunt just prior to her departure from Gateshead for Lowood School, appears in Chapter 4. In the passage, Jane solidifies her own orphanhood, severing her ties to the little semblance of family that remained to her (“I will never call you aunt again as long as I live,” she tells Mrs. Reed). Jane asserts her fiery spirit in her tirade, and she displays a keen sense of justice and a recognition of her need for love. Along with familial liberation, the passage marks Jane’s emotional liberation. Jane’s imprisonment in the red-room has its psychological counterpart in her emotional suppression, and it is not until she speaks these words to Mrs. Reed that she feels her “soul begin to expand.” Lastly, the passage highlights the importance of storytelling as revenge and also as a means of empowerment. Jane declares that she will “tell anybody who asks me questions this exact tale”—via authorship, Jane asserts her authority over and against her tyrannical aunt.

In this quotation, near the end of Chapter 27, Jane asserts her strong sense of moral integrity over and against her intense immediate feelings. Rochester has been trying to convince her to stay with him despite the fact that he is still legally married to Bertha Mason. His argument almost persuades Jane: Rochester is the first person who has ever truly loved her. Yet she knows that staying with him would mean compromising herself, because she would be Rochester’s mistress rather than his wife. Not only would she lose her self-respect, she would probably lose Rochester’s, too, in the end. Thus Jane asserts her worth and her ability to love herself regardless of how others treat her.

The passage also sheds light upon Jane’s understanding of religion. She sees God as the giver of the laws by which she must live. When she can no longer trust herself to exercise good judgment, she looks to these principles as an objective point of reference.

Jane’s allusions to her “madness” and “insanity” bring out an interesting parallel between Jane and Bertha Mason. It is possible to see Bertha as a double for Jane, who embodies what Jane feels within—especially since the externalization of interior sentiment is a trait common to the Gothic novel.

The description of Jane’s blood running like “fire” constitutes one of many points in the book in which Jane is associated with flames.

This passage occurs in Chapter 34. St. John Rivers has just asked Jane to join him as his wife on his missionary trip to India. Jane dramatizes the interior conflict involved in making her decision. In many ways, the proposal tempts her. It is an opportunity to perform good works and to be more than a governess, schoolteacher, or housewife—the roles traditionally open to women. Jane’s teaching jobs at Lowood, Thornfield, and Morton have all made her feel trapped, and she would not mind enduring hardships for a cause in which she truly believes. Yet, St. John’s principles—“ambition,” “austerity,” and arrogance—are not those that Jane upholds.

Misguided religion threatens to oppress Jane throughout the book, and St. John merely embodies one form of it. He also embodies masculine dominance, another force that threatens Jane like a “stringent yoke” over the course of the novel. Thus she describes St. John’s “warrior-march” and notes his assertion of his “masterhood.” Jane must escape such control in order to remain true to herself, for she realizes that her conventional manner of dealing with oppression—by retreating into herself, into the recesses of her imagination, into conversation with herself—cannot constitute a way of life. In her rejection of Rochester, Jane privileged principle over feeling; she is now aware of the negative effects such emotional repression can have. Feeling, too, must play a role in one’s life: a balance must be struck.

This passage appears in Chapter 12, in the midst of Jane’s description of her first few weeks at Thornfield. The diction highlights Jane’s feelings of imprisonment (she paces the corridors like a creature caged), and her longings for freedom and equality. Jane’s words are also relevant to Brontë’s own experience as a writer, and to the general condition of Victorian women.

The images of restlessness and pacing, of feeling “stagnation” and “too rigid a restraint,” are examples of the book’s central theme of imprisonment. In addition to instances of physical imprisonment, Jane must also escape the fetters of misguided religion (represented by Brocklehurst), of passion without principle (represented at first by Rochester), and of principle without passion (represented by St. John Rivers)—not to mention those of society.

Brocklehurst, Rochester, and St. John may also threaten Jane with the fetters of patriarchy, which is the specific force Jane resists in this passage. Jane extends her feeling of entrapment to her fellow women, and these sentences constitute Brontë’s feminist manifesto. As she describes the “doom” to which “millions are in silent revolt against their lot” “are condemned,” Brontë criticizes what she believed to be stifling Victorian conceptions of proper gender roles. The passage explicitly states that the Victorian wife suffers from being metaphorically “locked up.” Bertha Mason, who is eventually rendered nearly inhuman when her neglected, suppressed feelings turn to madness and fury, may be viewed as a symbol of the imprisoned female’s condition.

The passage suggests that Brontë’s writing may have been her means of coping with such rage. Jane describes her retreat into her own mind, to find freedom in her imagination. While Brontë’s greatest triumphs were the result of such self-retreat, her heroine’s achievement is the balance she strikes between her need for autonomy and her desire to be an active member of society.

This, one of the final passages of Jane Eyre, summarizes the novel’s “happy ending.” Its implications have generated much debate over the way Brontë chose to conclude her book. Some critics view Jane as having sacrificed her autonomy—no longer her own person, she and Rochester have merged, sharing one heart, each possessing the “bone” and “flesh” of the other.

One might also argue that Jane relinquishes her powers of thought and expression—two characteristics that have defined her for most of the novel. Suddenly, the otherwise imaginative Jane equates her “thinking” to her conversations with Rochester—she even finds the conversations “more animated.” Similarly, although ten years have elapsed since the wedding, the otherwise eloquent Jane suddenly claims that she is unable to find any “language” to “express” her experiences during this period.

Other critics interpret this passage in a more positive manner. It can be read as Jane’s affirmation of the equality between her and Rochester, as testimony that she has not “given up” anything. The passage is followed in the novel by a report on St. John Rivers. Jane writes: “his is the spirit of the warrior Greatheart . . . his is the ambition of the high master-spirit. . . .” (Greatheart serves as guide to the pilgrims in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.) Emphasizing St. John’s desires for “mastery” and his “warrior” characteristics, Jane describes a controlling patriarch. While Rochester may have been such a figure at the beginning of the novel, his character has changed by its conclusion. He has lost his house, his hand, and his eyesight to a fire, and the revelation of his youthful debaucheries has shown him to be Jane’s moral inferior. Rochester can no longer presume to be Jane’s “master” in any sense. Moreover, Jane has come to Rochester this second time in economic independence and by free choice; at Moor House she found a network of love and support, and she does not depend solely on Rochester for emotional nurturance. Optimistic critics point to Jane’s description of St. John as her reminder that the marriage she rejected would have offered her a much more stifling life. By entering into marriage, Jane does enter into a sort of “bond”; yet in many ways this “bond” is the “escape” that she has sought all along. Perhaps Brontë meant Jane’s closing words to celebrate her attainment of freedom; it is also possible that Brontë meant us to bemoan the tragic paradox of Jane’s situation.