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.