Jane Eyre Theme

           With the ending of the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë came an enormous emphasis on refusing to conform to the expected role of women during that time. I’m assuming it is around the early 1800s because of the references to books and authors that are made and sound to be fairly new to the readers. Jane seems to be battling with her role as a female constantly, for she never wants to take part in the inferiority that so many women are. The extent to which she wishes to be an individual, autonomous person is revealed by her reaction to her engagement to Rochester. For even though it was something she had wished for dearly, and even though it made her extremely happy, she began to have misgivings when she contemplated the fact that they were unequal in the eyes of society. She was a servant to him, and he was a rich man who was to provide her with beautiful jewelry and clothing and a comfortable place to live, and Jane feared that it would feel almost as if he was doing her a favor by marrying him. Yet again, like it was when she went to the school of Lowood, she would be a charity case; a burden in the eyes of society. This obsession to be on equal footing with her husband compelled her to write to her uncle and beg for the confirmation of her inheritance of his wealth. This way she would at least have similar fortunes to her potential husband. But, despite it all, as the split bench under the chestnut tree predicted, the two were to break apart.

The discovery of Rochester’s past, that he had already been married and that his wife was still alive, led Jane to abandon the engagement and run away. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, but she couldn’t bring herself to be someone’s mistress. She had too much respect for herself. Jane’s leaving Rochester was a turning point for her autonomy, for she had proved to herself that she was capable of being her own person, uncontrolled by men and by the rest of society. She had discovered her ability to break free from the most influential aspects of life itself.  The rest of the book puts an emphasis on that freedom, and eventually Jane finds herself able to return to Rochester and be with him without jeopardizing her individuality.  She was returning to a him as a wounded man, blinded from a fire. This put her in the position of being the caretaker, and the roles had been reversed from their previous engagement. Instead of being dependent on her husband, he was now dependent on her. But as their marriage progressed and he began to gain back his sight, Jane was able to experience the equality of love; the giving and taking that was in continual balance of each other.

            I would definitely recommend this story to anyone who loves novels of the seventeen and eighteen hundreds. It is an extremely compelling story, and it gives the reader a lot of opportunity to figure out aspects of the story before they are fully explained. This is a very exciting thing to do, because it makes the reader feel almost apart of the process of the novel. However, it is very difficult, but Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor was extremely helpful.  There was sickness that spread around the students at Lowood, there was an enormous amount of religion, there was rain, there was blindness, and much, much more. Foster helped me to see how the school was deteriorating the lives of the girls at Lowood, how much of Jane Eyre’s life was influenced by people who were attempting to accept God into their lives, he helped me see the way the rain could actually purify a person, and how that purification could be corrupted by a storm. He helped me view Rochester’s blindness as a representation of his situation when his true love had abandoned him, and as she came back the despair was lifted, along with his inability to see.

            Another reason to read Jane Eyre is directed more at female readers, for it has a lot of emphasis on not conforming to society’s ideals on what is acceptable and what is not. Jane’s role in life was, in society’s opinion, to marry well and live under the shadow of her husband. Although she did marry well, it was under her own conditions of equality, and this is something that can be very easily transferred to the present. Even now, women are treated as inferiors to society, as objects that have the sole purpose of objectification and exploitation. Jane's ability to refuse to conform to those expectations is something that every girl in today’s society should strive to possess.

Jane Eyre Blog Post #3

Very quickly after the Charlotte Brontë’s description of Jane’s time at Lowood in her novel, Jane Eyre, the story jumps a gap of about eight years. As a much older and educated woman, Jane becomes a governess and travels to Gateshead, where she meets the master, Rochester. Jane and Rochester’s feelings for each other are extremely evident; Jane finds herself increasingly distressed every time Rochester leaves for long periods of time, and Rochester constantly requests her presence, hints at his dark past, and at one point almost calls her “my love,” before catching himself.  All of this leaves the reader in no doubt that the two are either in love with each other, or at least very close to it. What creates the barrier between them is Rochester’s potential wife, Blanche Ingram, whom he would only be marrying for her beauty and she only for his money. The other barrier has to do with Rochester’s dark, foreboding history. He reveals to Jane, through a hypothetical story, that he had traveled to some foreign country and committed a “capital error.” Whatever this error was, it had been haunting him for his entire life. He felt the need to return to England, marry a respectable woman and thereby redeem him of what he had done.

All of this weighs on the mind of Jane, who nevertheless continuous to have feelings for him. Finally, Rochester makes certain of Jane’s feelings towards him by claiming that he is marrying Blanch. He does this to see if she'll react in a jealous way. She does, in fact she cries, and he asks her to marry him, and the events that followed were very exiting to read. I was able to make exact connections between what Thomas Foster writes in his How to Read Literature Like a Professor, and what I was reading in the pages of my book.  When Rochester proposed to Jane, they had been sitting on a bench outside under a chestnut tree. Right after the proposal it began to rain and the two hurried back to the house. They were running through this downpour, getting soaking wet, and they were overcome with joy at their confessed love for each other. Everything else in their lives seemed to be absolutely irrelevant, like it had all disappeared. It was the perfect example of rain’s “cleansing” traits. Their discomforts were, for the time being, washed away. They entered the house, and as Rochester removed Jane’s sopping wet jacket, he kissed her.  Everything seemed perfect, except for the fact that the housekeeper saw the kiss, and was extremely appalled by it. But then, as the two were sleeping, the storm got worse. A lightning bolt struck the bench where they had been sitting, and split it in two. It was no longer merely a cleansing rain. Rochester and Jane’s relationship suddenly seemed doomed.  The splitting of the bench revealed the possibility of their bond somehow being broken in the future. 

Jane Eyre Blog Post #2

       There is a school, a sort of finishing school, that Jane Eyre is sent to by her aunt.  It's name is Lowood, and it is almost as terrible a place as the house Jane had been forced to live in for those first eight years of her life. But now she has encountered a different kind hardship. She must carry on in a place that supplies terrible food, which results in her constant hunger. She becomes increasingly cold; her wash bin is full of ice, not water. The school is for charity, it receives pay from the relatives of children who have lost their parents, but it is not nearly enough. This shows that even though Jane is an intelligent, confident, and talented girl, she is merely a burden to her society.  She is used to being scolded, but not used to having to swallow her replies. This is a lesson that only experience will be able to teach her. For she is only a child when she sees her friend, Helen, being yelled at and beaten by their tyrant of a teacher, Mrs. Scatchard. And she cannot for the life of her understand why Helen wouldn’t fight back at that woman. But Helen presents some very good-natured, and also religious reasons for holding her tongue when she is scolded, and not crying when she is hit.  She doesn’t want to be a burden to her family by causing them grief from her misbehaving. She believes that everyone must deal with the fate that God has given them, which, to me, hints at the Calvinistic beliefs. Predestination, which is the idea that one’s life is guided by fate alone and not by choice, is a very central part of that religion.

         There are more hints toward religiousness in Helen, for Jane calls her tolerance a “doctrine of endurance,” of which she cannot relate. Jane believes that one should be good to those who are good to them, and vice versa. This would permit one to strike back at those who struck them. None of those ideals play out very well with predestination, which is why Jane is so in awe when she hears Helen talking about her beliefs.  And she becomes even more shocked when Helen goes as far as to tell Jane to forgive Mrs. Reed of her cruelty, because life is too short for “nursing animosity.” It angers Jane to hear of any sort of sympathy being dealt out for her aunt, which I believe is understandable when you consider the fact that Jane is so young. Throughout this whole story I keep forgetting that she is still a child. She thinks and talks so intelligently and never seems to want to do childish things. But it is when she talks to Helen about getting back at the teacher for scolding her that her childishness shows itself. She has a temper, one of huge contrast to Helens.

Jane Eyre Blog Post #1

As I began reading Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, a description of an extravagant room began to take place. It is where Jane was locked away as punishment for striking the mistress's son. Jane is not a servant, nor a member of the mistress’s family. The mistress, Mrs. Reed, for reasons not yet specified, took Jane in. She is basically a charity case, although no one in the house seems to be very fond of her. My mind, while reading this book, is always on the lookout for some similarities to Charlotte Brontë’s sister Emily’s book, Wuthering Heights.  This is because I know their writing styles resembled each other in some ways.  Already, on page 8, I have found one. I had a feeling, as the room was being described with it’s “curtains of deep red damask”, “darkly polished old mahogany”, and “snowy Marseilles counterpane”, that it was of much significance, otherwise the narrator wouldn’t have gone so in depth with the description.

There was a huge emphasis on how vacant the room was of any life whatsoever. No one slept or whiled away time at all in that room. The only action it got was a cleaning from the maid, who swept away “a week’s quite dust”.  At that point, I had a feeling that the room had either been witness to something tragic, or had belonged to someone that underwent a tragedy, or both, because why else would a room of such grandeur be left untouched? This hunch was proven right in the next sentence, with the “secret of the red room” (the red room is it’s name).  It was, in fact, the former bedchamber of Mrs. Reed and her deceased husband. It was the very place where her husband died. The only person who ever enters the room, besides the maid, is the mistress when she wishes to reminisce over her old jewels and a portrait of her husband.

The parallel I have found between the stories of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights has to do with both novels beginning with a description of a room, one in which hardly anyone ever enters. Both rooms hold the memories of someone who was extremely important to the master/mistress of the house, and who was lost in an extremely tragic way. In Wuthering Heights, it was Catherine Linton’s room, which was only ever entered by a heartbroken, angry Heathcliff (the master), or the maid. In Jane Eyre, it’s the master and mistress’s room, which is only ever entered by a nostalgic, forlorn Mrs. Reed (the mistress), or the maid. There is one more similarity that I have just now realized, and it is that the introduction of the rooms to the reader is through the narrator, who happens to be a foreigner to the room; someone who doesn’t belong there.