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.