Summary: Chapter 36
Jane contemplates her supernatural experience of the previous night,
wondering whether it was really Rochester’s voice that she heard
calling to her and whether Rochester might actually be in trouble.
She finds a note from St. John urging her to resist temptation,
but nevertheless she boards a coach to Thornfield. She travels to
the manor, anxious to see Rochester and reflecting on the ways in which
her life has changed in the single year since she left. Once hopeless,
alone, and impoverished, Jane now has friends, family, and a fortune.
She hurries to the house after her coach arrives and is shocked
to find Thornfield a charred ruin. She goes to an inn called the
Rochester Arms to learn what has happened. Here, she learns that
Bertha Mason set the house ablaze several months earlier. Rochester
saved his servants and tried to save his wife, but she flung herself
from the roof as the fire raged around her. In the fire, Rochester
lost a hand and went blind. He has taken up residence in a house
called Ferndean, located deep in the forest, with John and Mary,
two elderly servants.
Summary: Chapter 37
Jane goes to Ferndean. From a distance, she sees Rochester
reach a hand out of the door, testing for rain. His body looks the
same, but his face is desperate and disconsolate. Rochester returns
inside, and Jane approaches the house. She knocks, and Mary answers
the door. Inside, Jane carries a tray to Rochester, who is unable
to see her. When he realizes that Jane is in the room
with him, he thinks she must be a ghost or spirit speaking to him.
When he catches her hand, he takes her in his arms, and she promises
never to leave him. The next morning they walk through the woods,
and Jane tells Rochester about her experiences the previous year.
She has to assure him that she is not in love with St. John. He
asks her again to marry him, and she says yes—they are now free
from the specter of Bertha Mason. Rochester tells Jane that a few
nights earlier, in a moment of desperation, he called out her name
and thought he heard her answer. She does not wish to upset him
or excite him in his fragile condition, and so she does not tell
him about hearing his voice at Moor House.
Summary: Chapter 38
Jane and Rochester marry with no witnesses other than
the parson and the church clerk. Jane writes to her cousins with
the news. St. John never acknowledges what has happened, but Mary
and Diana write back with their good wishes. Jane visits Adèle at
her school, and finds her unhappy. Remembering her own childhood
experience, Jane moves Adèle to a more congenial school, and Adèle grows
up to be a very pleasant and mild-mannered young woman.
Jane writes that she is narrating her story after ten
years of marriage to Rochester, which she describes as inexpressibly
blissful. They live as equals, and she helps him to cope with his
blindness. After two years, Rochester begins to regain his vision
in one eye, and when their first child—a boy—is born, Rochester
is able to see the baby. Jane writes that Diana and Mary have both
found husbands and that St. John went to India as he had planned.
She notes that in his last letter, St. John claimed to have had
a premonition of his own approaching death. She does not believe
that she will hear from St. John again, but she does not grieve
for him, saying that he has fulfilled his promise and done God’s
work. She closes her book with a quote from his letter, in which
he begs the Lord Jesus to come for him quickly.
Analysis: Chapters 36–38
Jane’s melodramatic discovery of the ruined Thornfield
and her recounting of the story of Bertha Mason’s mad and fiery
death lead to the novel’s last, brief stage at Ferndean, during
which Jane and Rochester are able to marry at last.
It is possible to question Jane Eyre’s
proto-feminism on the grounds that Jane only becomes Rochester’s
full equal (as she claims to be in the novel’s epilogue-like last
chapter) when he is physically infirm and dependent on her to guide
him and read to him—in other words, when he is physically incapable
of mastering her. However, it is also possible that Jane now finds
herself Rochester’s equal not because of the decline Rochester has
suffered but because of the autonomy that she has achieved by coming
to know herself more fully.
