jane eyre childhood essay

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Jane Eyre Childhood

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Jane Eyre Childhood

Jane Eyre opens with Jane remembering events from her childhood. Jane’s family is isolated and poor; Jane has no friends of her age and limited education. Jane’s sense of isolation, anger, and curiosity leads to rebelliousness against the adults around her: she throws a book at Miss Temple (her teacher), gives Rochester (her foster father) a black eye, and eventually leaves her aunt’s home to become a governess. Jane is never entirely comfortable in her new job as she struggles with questions of who she is, how much respectability she should have, where her loyalties lie, and whether or not Jane wants to be loved by Mr. Rochester.

Jane has grown up with little love or encouragement from others, so Jane looks inward to find the strength necessary for making decisions that affect her happiness. Jane knows herself through reflection on events from her childhood. One event especially stands out – Jane’s attack on Miss Temple at Lowood School. This incident presents Jane as an isolated child who has no power over what happens—as well as being angry about this helplessness—and Jane’s reaction to this powerlessness is violence.

Jane’s perspective on the incident is filtered through her memory, and Jane remembers herself as having been “a mere child in temper” (Chapter 1, par. 5). Jane has mixed feelings about the incident: Jane regrets hurting Miss Temple but also clearly remembers the reasons for her anger. Jane takes responsibility for what she did, but through this act Jane fights back against being completely powerless. The attack on Miss Temple proves that Jane can’t be easily pushed around or dominated by authority figures.

Moreover, at Lowood Jane learns that adults are not infallible—their implied cruelty towards students allows Jane to question their morality and voice criticism of them without fear of reprisal. The other event from Jane’s childhood which Jane mentions is her losing her parents in a shipwreck. Jane remembers this event very vividly, and Jane views the event as an act of God meant to punish Jane’s mother for breaking His laws. Jane is filled with guilt over her own survival while her parents perished at sea.

Jane feels that she should have died instead of them because Jane believes that Jane’s life is full of sin—she has “been a willful sinner” (Chapter 1, par. 6). Jane continues to blame herself for surviving when others don’t—even after it becomes clear that there was no one to blame but fate. The loss of Jane’s family leaves Jane feeling alone—orphaned not only in the physical sense but also in spirit. Jane becomes determined to have a better life after this loss, and Jane works hard at Lowood School—the only place Jane has found belonging.

Jane’s survival instincts lead her to try to make something of herself, but Jane also knows that she is unworthy; Jane views the incident as an act of God meant for punishment. “The child who by turns had been assaulted with stones, slapped in the face, torn by dogs, kicked by horses, worried by badgers, and scared by bulls; who had wandered about hungry and fatigued; who had crouched over bonfires on winter nights; who had run away barefoot in summer; whose clothes were torn or filthy; whose young companions were thieves and beggars…” (Chapter 1, par. 8). Jane is a child of the poor and of an orphanage.

Jane’s physical condition is very important to Jane’s development—she feels both self-conscious about it, as all children do, but she is also constantly aware that her outward appearance is a symbol of her current position in society. Jane learns from everyone who bullies or looks down on Jane that Jane has no power over her circumstances; she learns to doubt herself because others doubt Jane first. The other children at Lowood School are vain and given over to vanity; this means that they will never accept Jane until Jane becomes beautiful—which Jane knows isn’t possible for someone like her.

Jane’s position as a child is important in Jane Eyre because it makes Jane a pitiable character to the reader. Jane spends her childhood being looked down upon by those around her and is constantly being humiliated, even when she does nothing wrong.

In chapter one Jane says “My father’s sister Sarah..had been appointed my guardians- I saw them very seldom 1” (Bronte). This line tells us two things about Jane as a child. Firstly, it shows that Jane had no real parents so she was brought up by family members, not her parents which made Jane an orphan. Next, this emphasises how little Jane saw of her aunt and uncle which means that they were almost strangers to the young Jane who also emphasized Jane’s isolation as a child. Jane is an orphan and she lives with her aunt and uncle who are strangers to Jane; this makes Jane very isolated, alone and vulnerable.

Jane was extremely isolated because even though she lived with family the only people Jane communicated with were her brother John Reed (who tormented Jane) and Mr. Brocklehurst (who judged Jane). Jane interacts with Mrs. Reed when she goes to visit her cousins but it is under the scrutiny of Mr Mason or Martha Reed.

Being an orphan further added to Jane’s vulnerability in society because she had no access to money or power which meant that anyone could take advantage of or abuse Jane, for example when Jane went to Lowood School which will be discussed later. Jane’s position as a child has many effects on Jane. Jane becomes an outsider, always at the periphery of society and its ills because she is not part of it. Jane feels vulnerable, isolated and alone as a result of her position as an orphan in this period. Jane does not have parents so she cannot confide in them which further isolates Jane from those around her. Jane also has no access to money or power which makes Jane reliant on others for everything including work which once again emphasizes Jane’s vulnerability and isolation.

Chapter 1: “Reader I may not prolong the description of my   solitary   though sad   way   A being who had no relative but God-“(Bronte)

This line tells us multiple things about Jane as a child. Firstly, Jane’s position makes her very isolated and alone which Bronte emphasizes through Jane’s use of the word ‘solitary’ because it associates Jane with being by herself or isolated. Jane is not part of society so she has no one to confide in so Jane feels extremely lonely even though she is constantly surrounded by others. Jane does not have anyone to look after her either because she is an orphan so this contributes to Jane feeling vulnerable and unprotected often leading Jane to think that there was nothing for her but death.

Chapter 2: “I felt then, if I ever should love master, it must be because he first loved me” (Bronte)

This line tells us multiple things about Jane’s childhood. Jane has spent her child hood being looked down upon by others throughout which has led Jane to feel unloved and not worthy of love. Jane feels unworthy of love because she is an orphan, a woman, poor and of a lower class so Jane thinks that no one will ever love her. Jane also feels abandoned or forsaken by God so Jane thinks that the only way she will ever be loved is if someone else loves her first which makes Jane appear needy and desperate for attention.

Chapter 3: “I had learnt   to read   but I had read only such books as suited my age” (Bronte)

This line tells us things about Jane’s desires when she was growing up. Bronte uses the word ‘learnt’ here to make Jane appear eager for knowledge. Jane may have learnt much but Jane has not read many books which makes Jane seem uneducated because she was isolated her whole life. Jane did not go to school so Jane is also uneducated in that sense too however Jane does seem educated in the way that she speaks and acts making Jane very intelligent and intellectual even though Jane cannot really be compared with others who were educated because Jane’s education was different to theirs.

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Jane Eyre Childhood Essay

1. Introduction Jane Eyre is a fictional character in the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. My final paper will treat about the childhood of Jane Eyre and the evolution of his personality during the story making a connection with Victorian Era when the story was told. 2. Brief background of the book Jane Eyre : The Victorian Era In the Victorian era, when the Queen Victoria reigned in England, is a period with great changes in the English society. In the Victorian era occur the progress of science, the growth of trade and the religious questioning, which is reflected in all social strata. The transformation of England had profound consequences for the ways in which women were to be idealized in Victorian times. During the Victorian age …show more content…

Character: Jane Eyre described in the book Jane Eyre Jane Eyre is described as an ugly girl, skinny, and average intelligence. Jane was opposite of what is expected from a woman in the Victorian era. Women in the Victorian era had to be beautiful, elegant and with a different intelligence of what Jane …show more content…

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The novel in which Jane Eyre stars in can be seen criticizing many aspects of those times such as the role and nature of women, child negligence and social hardships for those in a lesser class. Jane Eyre’s alienation from society allows for a greater reveal of the story’s culture, values, and assumptions. It’s presented through the use of gender, class and character conflicts throughout the story. On multiple occasions, Jane is judged for the presented factors reflecting the type of society Jane lives in and what the times were like at that time.

Essay on An Analysis of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

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The "red-room" is a special place to Jane and what I mean by that is it’s where she never wants to return too. Both her and a character that is called Bertha are unfairly imprisoned in the very place they call home. For Jane that would be the Gateshead while with Bertha that would be the attic at Thornfield. While Bertha imprisonment represents a normal day for a women in the Victorian age, Jane’s is due to her status in the home of the Reeds.

Within the specter of the Gothic fictions arises the atmosphere of gloom, terror, and mystery with some elements of uncanny challenging reality.At certain points, the interactions between the conventions of the Gothic fictions with other thematic, ideological, and/or symbolic functions of the narrative would rather be challenging. However, though the analysis of Jane Eyre written by Charlotte Bronte, certain factors come into focus.The novel of Charlotte Bronte entitled Jane Eyre has showcased a lot of issues that specifies how women in that time have been depicted by the experiences that the protagonist of the novel has encountered. The novel was published in a time when women were only considered as display or jewels of the noble men and

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Visions of Jane Eyre: On Mothers, Labor, and the Places Children Hide

Lesley jenike: "we might say these are my children or this is my country , but we’re only fooling ourselves.".

“Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.” –Charlotte Brönte * Article continues after advertisement (new Image()).src = 'https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=546998bb-b9c0-4480-8c91-3e307220efff&cid=86b7c382-5e20-4129-84db-dea768f4d688'; cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "546998bb-b9c0-4480-8c91-3e307220efff" }).render("9b7a21a47fb44523b011db6d4f4cad23"); }); Remove Ads

I. Brokenhearted

A friend of mine tells me she remembers the womb. The womb was a red room, and in it, only a mirror made of blood in a frame made of tissue in which my friend watched her face become her face.

I heard how a woman I work with witnessed her own birth (though she’s well past forty), by participating in a ritual: Buddhist meditation, Native American peyote, Catholic transubstantiation—whatever it was in whatever combination—she was shown an apparition of the red room turned inside out, the mirror made of blood shattering, the frame that held the mirror ripped to shreds.

She was terrified, also in awe . Trembling, weeping, she called her mom and said, “Mom, thank you.” Her mom replied, “Honey, I’m sorry you had to see that.”

Jane Eyre was locked in a red room when she was naughty. It shared some architectural details with other red rooms, but it was into its drawers and secret crevices that Mrs. Reed stuffed remembrances, not of her children, but of her husband and her money. We’ve all heard those legends about women who cram guns into their vaginas and are surprised when the guns go off. I might say the same of Mrs. Reed. By cordoning off her red room for punishment, she condemns Jane to a life of apprehension.

Looking back on her time at Gateshead Hall and in particular the red room, Jane says, “The housemaid alone came here on Saturdays, to wipe from the mirrors and the furniture a week’s quiet dust.” Where Jane might have found comfort, she finds “divers parchments.” Where she might have found a mother’s heart, she finds a painted miniature. Isn’t it rumored that Queen Elizabeth I carried with her—even unto her deathbed—a miniature of her own criminal mother? When Jane is locked inside the red room, she’s forced to recall what she doesn’t remember. How horrible. For both my friend who remembered and my coworker who saw the insides of their mothers, their mothers’ hearts appeared as enormous as the Koh-i-Noor diamond, and as inelegantly cut.

Of course, a fetus wouldn’t be able to see her mother’s heart; this is what I mean when I say no memory and no vision can ever be absolutely true—at least not scientifically. The insides of our mothers’ bodies are the only places that are most certainly past .

From then on, from there on, every room is just an echo of that first, red room, and we drift through them as women drifted through the Great Exhibition of 1851, pausing to look at the Koh-i-Noor no matter what humble station they occupied, whether kitchen maids or schoolteachers, daughters of businessmen or bakers. They stopped and looked because that diamond was a prize they’d never get their fingers on, or get on their fingers. Or wear on their heads. Or sparkling at their throats. That diamond is a memento of underground transformation, unseen processes proving there’s still mystery abroad, but to own it requires the luck of a good birth.

After the exhibition was over, Prince Albert hired a jeweler to recut the Koh-i-Noor into sixty-six facets, and in the process a large percentage of the diamond’s caret-count was lost. He was frustrated by that fact, but he softened when he saw the Koh-i-Noor nestled inside the queen’s brooch, and how what it lacked in heft it gained in light refraction. A mother’s heart, over time, is bowdlerized to meet the latest fashion.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 left in its wake a cache of oddities with nowhere to go. These days, call an artist after the show and she’ll come fetch her paintings. Naturally, the British refused to telegraph India and tell it to come get its sovereignty. So, in order to house unclaimed artifacts, new museums were built across London—a project spearheaded by Prince Albert himself, whose crowning achievement would become the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington.

In Bethnal Green another building went up, first as a matter of storage and later as means of educating the neighborhood’s working poor. Its black-and-white tile floors were made by women prisoners in Epping—the fish-scale motif meant to give wayward female inmates a sense of purpose and pride, and to delight, even hypnotize, museumgoers into a state of intellectual curiosity.

But many of these criminal women were mothers and sometimes fudged the pattern, until, well into the 20th century, the Bethnal Green Museum was renamed the Museum of Childhood—not a children’s museum in the way we understand it (STEM activities, interactive exhibits) but a museum about childhood .

Childhood to the English must be sad. There are objects in this museum that existed before childhood existed. But even before childhood existed, people must have considered how their offspring liked dolls, and how those dolls liked little houses. They must have discovered how their offspring liked to play at things like tea parties and matrimony, meanness and profiteering. They considered their offspring’s affinity for daydreams, aliases, and alliances. One child, for example, made his mother wake him twice each morning. The first time he would be himself, and the second time he’d be a fairy child lost in the wood. The mother grew exasperated after months of this, and so employed an automaton-mother to take over, thus saving time and psychic energy.

This “mother” is now on display at the Museum of Childhood, along with a picture book in which Circle, Square, and Triangle are playing hide and seek. Circle tells the others not to hide behind her waterfall, but Triangle is a rule-breaker and hides there anyway. When Circle searches for Triangle, she encounters another shape in the darkness, an unknown shape that must be conjured by her imagination, and so—if we’re being honest—the conjuring of a shape out of perceived darkness is just another way of saying I own you.

II. I Shall Rise Again

We might say these are my children or this is my country, but in saying so we’re only fooling ourselves. In another heartbreaking act of foolishness, a woman in Korea, through the magic of virtual reality, was able to see her dead child again.

In the mother’s VR goggles, her daughter—who died of leukemia in 2016—had only been in a park, crouching behind a camphor tree. Now she materializes, leaving off her long game of hide-and-seek. Wasn’t it Marianne Moore who said poetry is “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”? If neither the girl nor the park is real, then the camphor must be—the camphor tree behind which the imaginary girl hides. But the girl used to be a real girl, and this is the scope of her mother’s poetry:

“‘Mom, where have you been?’ she asks. ‘I’ve missed you a lot. Have you missed me?’”

I don’t know whether the game is played solely in the park, or if it moves inside, into a house, maybe the very house where the mother and daughter lived together, or maybe some other house—the palace little girls dream about, filled with enough rooms for a most sumptuous game of hiding and seeking: wardrobes, attics, off-limit wings. She might hide inside a red room.

She might tiptoe barefoot down a back stair, get lost in a box of very old things, never to be heard from again, only to rise again, now in Jane Eyre’s Lowood School, built to accommodate perspicuous observation but, against all odds, allowing for fine, shimmering secrets like silkworms in a lacquered box. Just out of sight, around corners, hidden inside the high rhetoric of religious obedience, in the shadowy oligopticon of Lowood’s communal bedroom, girls have their private visions, especially Jane Eyre herself who

wandered as usual among the forms and tables and laughing groups without a companion, yet not feeling lonely: when I passed the windows, I now and then lifted a blind, and looked out.

I remember the tumult of school. I was meant to be formed by teachers’ scrutiny, but really it was the diagonal looks, the trapezoids of “laughing groups,” notes passed surreptitiously in the shifting hierarchy children build, that gave me my shape, that and occasional glimpses out windows; through them, the scene’s diegesis becomes a collection of disconsolate images, my bored, sullen reflection pasted onto snow— grass—street, whatever world it is. No wonder I turned to poetry.

And the oligopticon is poetry’s friend, for unlike the panopticon it resists absolute surveillance, offering a space where not everything can be seen, but what can be seen is seen at close range: girlhood friendships, puberty, death, the mingling of social classes, democratic exchange. At Lowood, Jane Eyre sees the minute details of disease, malnutrition, abuse, hears conversations unspool themselves in doublespeak, learns to play hide-and-seek.

The oligopticon is French sociologist Bruno Latour’s term, coined in 2005 to describe the smaller, intimate spaces inside which larger systems are reified. The oligopticon seems to me an opportunity for both submission and resistance; if, for instance, Lowood’s intention is to solidify longstanding notions about the spiritual fragility of children generally and lower-class female children specifically, its administration will look for and find that fragility.

If, instead, the girls themselves want to see spiritual bravery, then they’ll see it, if only in a very small, three-inch-long mirror, for example. If they want to see a girl’s capacity to learn, to demonstrate complexity of thought, strength of character, then they’ll see that too, and, little by little, connections, however tremulous, will be made. Little by little, the master narrative will change.

It’s inside the oligopticon that Jane witnesses Helen Burns’s death—not just witnesses but absorbs it, hugging it close to her own body. This is Helen Burns who

looks as if she were thinking of something beyond her punishment— beyond her situation: of something not round her nor before her. I have heard of day-dreams—is she in a day-dream now? Her eyes are fixed on the floor, but I am sure they do not see it—her sight seems turned in, gone down into her heart: she is looking at what she can remember, I believe; not at what is really present.

Poor Jane. She’s only just “heard of day-dreams”—what my daughter calls the thing she does at night to put herself to sleep, the seeing-and-not-seeing she engages in. But engages is not really the right word—it’s more passive than that, like looking out a window onto a snowy street and letting the eyes cross slightly, lose focus.

After Helen dies, after Jane is lifted, weeping and brokenhearted, from the bed they shared, she tells us,

Her grave is in Brocklebridge churchyard: for fifteen years after her death it was only covered by a grassy mound; but now a grey marble tablet marks the spot, inscribed with her name, and the word “Resurgam.”

The tablet’s inscription means resurrection in the Christian sense (as a gift bestowed), but the Latin is translated, I will rise again, giving Helen herself some agency in the matter. Maybe Helen is telling Jane she’ll come out of hiding someday. Maybe Helen is speaking directly to Jane the skeptic who wondered aloud while Helen was still living, “What is God?” to which Helen responded, “My maker and yours, who will never destroy what He created.”

The creator of the “city of toys” in Consonno, Italy, never destroyed it, only abandoned it, though he (Count Mario Bagno) razed the original medieval town in order to build it. “When bulldozers began demolition in 1965, the residents had little, if any, notice. Several residents reported learning of the plans when they first heard the sounds of the bulldozer engines. The villagers gathered what they could and fled, narrowly escaping with belongings before the walls came down.”

This account comes from a website called Sometimes Interesting, which attempts “to uncover the history of the abandoned, forgotten, and unexplained”—a triptych of words each in its own sad, little frame, hung in the sky for Consonno’s refugees to point to. See, they said. See how they took our home and gave us daydreams instead?

All that’s left of the first Consonno is its 13th-century church and its little graveyard filled with so many Helen Burnses, so many promises of resurrections, that the earth itself decided to show; having been leveled by dynamite, its rock pulverized, the earth let loose landslides so devastating that Bagno’s second Consonno was deserted and left to rot deep in Lombardy, plans for Italy’s folly-rich playground permanently delayed, until they came. They came to Count Bagno’s Italian Las Vegas, his fantasyland, his city of toys, to spray-paint graffiti on Doric columns. To have sex on top of cannons. To dance in empty storefronts.

As Helen Burns says, no creator would (absolutely) destroy what he created, and if we know where to look, the fountains, pagodas, the minaret-topped arcade reveal themselves, rising from the subalpine forest like the spires of a church inside which there is, as Bruno Latour tells us, “no control and no all-powerful creator, either—no more ‘God’ than man—but there is care, scruple, cautiousness, attention, contemplation, hesitation and revival.”

In the context of Consonno what I mean is this: graffiti, bird shit, bonfire parties in the ashram of an old hotel lobby, the ritual of discovery and revival—as if every pilgrim is the first to see and recognize the place for what it is—is the gorgeous reverse of a shining city on a hill. Care, scruple, cautiousness, et cetera: these are intimacies gone unseen panoramically, gone unrewarded systematically, but revealed by delicate negotiations between what’s hidden and what’s found.

In 2017 the Nascondino World Championship in hide-and-seek was held at Consonno, followed by “hidden concerts” in the city of toys’ ruined buildings, though they remained “structurally unsound” and possibly dangerous, rendering every happened-upon musician as vulnerable as a child. The game’s players themselves weren’t children, though they had been once and wanted to be again, all four hundred of them confined to an obstacle course just beyond Consonno—a rolling lawn with hay bales, plastic rocks, barriers for hiding behind, and, of course, trees: cypress, cherry, laurel, spruce. There were food trucks, live feeds, men and women decorating their bodies with dirt and leaves, announcers giving the play-by-play in lush northern Italian accents.

And watching the footage from very far away, I can still see the specific joy in their faces; everything else falls away. I see a young woman crouching behind a pile of firewood tapped on the head by a young man sprinting past her, and she—shining in her Day-Glo shorts—rises to full height and strides, disappointed surely but laughing, to center field, shaking out her long hair and shouting, Ti sono mancato? Ti sono mancato? And all of Consonno—the ancient town that’s gone, the newer town only half there, and the town yet to be built—calls back, Sì, mia cara! Sì, and she, simply by rising, raises me with her.

III. Even in Arcadia, Here I Am

The blemishes and irregularities in the floor at the Museum of Childhood are likely glossed over by the casual visitor, but if one looks closely, every line begins to move. Every tile is, in some way, wrong .

Inmate Florence Maybrick said, “In the winter the prisoners get up in the dark, and breakfast in the dark, to save the expense of gas. The sense of touch becomes very acute, as so much has to be done without light. Until I had served three years of my sentence, I had not been allowed to see my own face. Then a looking-glass, three inches long, was placed in my cell.”

When the mirror arrived at last, it only showed Maybrick pieces of herself—some forehead, a slice of chin—depending on the tilt of her head. The prisoners at Epping who mended clothes and made tiles were missing their own mothers, their own children, and some were tossed into solitary confinement where the only thing they saw was the day’s residue on the back side of an eyelid.

Looking into her mirror, Maybrick saw, instead of a nose or a mouth, a stitch, then another stitch. The women who made the tiles saw, instead of a cheek or a brow, the kiln and the fire. The fire and the kiln. No wonder the floor’s pattern fails at precision. No wonder they couldn’t see the overall effect. They weren’t, in fact, allowed to.

When Jane Eyre is tossed into the red room, she sees dust on the mirror instead of herself. She sees the massive bed “like a tabernacle” and a white chair “like a pale throne.” She sees the “divers parchments” and “jewel-casket”—the whole room under “the spell” of the “last words” that “kept it so lonely.” She means Mrs. Reed’s miniature of her dead husband—not words at all, but an icon, though she requires words to describe it. It isn’t a stretch to imagine Jane is thrown into a kind of church, made to stare at its symbols, then articulate them in the only way she can. She’s an outsider suddenly inside , trying to remember something there is, in fact, no way to remember. Like the womb. Like the mother’s heart.

Only in this moment, Jane is trying to remember a god she’d never met, and the red room as that god’s inner sanctum. It’s terrifying to her, blinding in its effect. “I suppose I had a species of fit: unconsciousness closed the scene,” she tells us, then a new chapter begins. It’s a chapter about losing one kind of vision but gaining another.

Once, during Mass, I followed my classmates up to the altar and let the priest drop a wafer in my hand. “Body of Christ,” he said, and made the sign of the cross over me. I put the wafer in my mouth, letting it dissolve rather than chewing; this is how I saw the other kids do it.

It wasn’t until a few days later that I learned I’d committed a sin. I wasn’t confirmed. I had no right to take the wafer, put it in my mouth, and let it dissolve, as the other kids had done. I’d been, for all intents and purposes, an outsider suddenly inside , trying to remember something there is, in fact, no way to remember. And the effect on me was a “species of fit”—namely, the feeling that I was a splinter of glass under the skin, an irritant in the eye born of my own badness, a terrible girl.

After this—my foundational mistake—I felt myself irrevocably described as an outsider who’d somehow wormed her way in. And if, as the priest said, I’d indeed eaten the body of Christ—why, then, Christ was swimming inside a sinner, my body holding his body in a sort of prison, and when he looked in my own red room’s mirror, he saw only pieces of himself. How could he be whole now, in me, here?

Erwin Panofsky, German American art historian and refugee, wrote a monograph on Arcadia, that miraculous pastoral place, arguing that the Latin phrase Et in Arcadia ego has been wrongly translated by some poets and artists as I once lived in Arcadia too, when it was King George III—that madman—who said it actually means, Even in Arcadia, here I am. Panofsky tells us that, according to George’s interpretation, in Arcadia “human suffering and superhumanly perfect surroundings create a dissonance. This dissonance, once felt, had to be resolved, and it was resolved in that vespertinal mixture of sadness and tranquility.”

But resolution is a forced conversion, or, at best, false speech in a lonely room. The dissonance Panofsky describes is love, and love must be allowed to spread, to seep under doorways, over dormers, to creep inside the bowdlerized heart, unconfined and unconfirmed, given access to everywhere.

But since there’s no such place as everywhere , someone gave it an address, called it the Museum of Childhood, and now displays its impressions behind glass. It categorizes its holdings not necessarily by time period but by kind: all the sight gags are grouped together—the 19th century’s myriorama, thaumatrope, and kaleidoscope along with the 20th century’s View-Master. And all the dolls—an ancient wooden figure, an 1850s Autoperipatetikos (the Walking Doll), an 1880s Johnny the Dunce that “plays a sad tune” on his toy violin, and a 1980s Cabbage Patch baby with a face like a prune.

It was a tranquil Christmas morning in the 1980s when I walked up the hill with my new Cabbage Patch doll to show Melanie, who answered the door holding her own Cabbage Patch doll. I was looking into a very sad mirror.

And it was in the 1980s when nurses came to elementary schools and systematically screened children for scoliosis, though they’d been doing it for nearly a century, first to catch disease-made spinal curves, then to surveil for the idiopathic version, meaning: no discernible cause. Because no one knows where idiopathic conditions come from, they are prime opportunities for moralizing. Government programs branded scoliosis a sort of slippery slope, a dangerous curve that with time and lack of intervention might become a deeper twist, a disastrous turn of events that, like drugs or sex, could lead to severe pain, maybe even death. I was never consigned to a back brace, though I heard some kids were. Looking at my X-ray was like looking into a very sad mirror.

In 2014 when an anesthesiologist felt my back before plunging the epidural needle deep in the middle of the night, I was reminded that my spine isn’t right. “Did anyone ever tell you,” he said, “that you have…” Because of my crooked spine, the epidural didn’t take , and I spent all night vibrating in pain—a pain so righteous that when I closed my eyes, I saw red, red, red, red , pulsing. I thought to myself then, I really must write a book someday . It’ll be about Jane Eyre and mirrors and wombs and toys and researchers in China who constructed a classroom made entirely of glass because, they hypothesized, exposure to natural light would help prevent myopia in children, and it worked—somewhat.

But the classroom was hot, sometimes uncomfortably so, and the children grew luminous, and the pages of their books far too bright to see. From the outside, their parents looked in (because they could) and saw the children put their hands over their eyes. “Bet you can’t see me now,” the children said, and though all the parents agreed that they in fact could see their children, they lied and said (because this is a game, after all) that they couldn’t, calling out, “Where, oh where did my little baby go?” and with that, their children—absolutely and without flourish—vanished from view.

________________________________________

This essay was originally published in Issue 113 of Image under the title “Labor.”

Lesley Jenike

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Jane Eyre: Tapping into childhood

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Logo of British Library.

Open pages of 'Child's First Tales'.

Title — Childhood in Jane Eyre.

Professor John Bowen, University of York, sits in Bronte Parsonage.

PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:

They're real pioneers, I think, in presenting childhood experience to the world. So, if you look at earlier novels, say Jane Austen, for example, children aren't very important to that at all, but suddenly in the mid-19th century there is a suddenly a whole string of important novels with children absolutely at their centre.

Title page of Oliver Twist.

Oliver Twist is one. Wuthering Heights is another — you think how important the early childhood years of Heathcliff and Cathy are. David Copperfield is another, then Great Expectations.

A handwritten letter.

But really, Jane Eyre has the most important role of all of those, because it's really the first time you get someone narrating… not by a child but from a child's point of view, or from a child's perspective, and bringing you so close to what it feels like to be a child. And she immediately influences, say, Dickens, who then goes to write David Copperfield. So, it's enormously influential. It's like a whole terrain of human experience that comes through into the novel through Jane Eyre. So, earlier romantic writers like Wordsworth or Blake has written poetry, thinking about the child and valuing the child's experience, but Jane Eyre has a unique importance in bringing that to the novel.

Text — The Brontes' childhood.

Now, their own childhood was in some ways, you know, unique like no other childhood, really. And also very unhappy, because their mother dies when they're very young, their elder siblings die, and they then get sent to this terrible school, which is the basis for Jane's account of her childhood in Jane Eyre. And it must've been a very difficult time for both of them. The threat of death was imminent there, but also the whole understanding of childhood, of Carus Wilson, who's the head teacher, was so different from those romantic ideas of the child being someone who should be fostered and helped to grow. So that evangelical Christians in this period felt that children were intrinsically sinful and that it was important to break their will early on. And so Carus Wilson writes, for example, a set of little stories called Child's First Tales, and they're very scary, and they're meant to be scary — they're about children who are hanged, or sent to jail or who are punished, and there's a constant emphasis on suffering and on early death.

Ann Dinsdale, Collections Manager, The Bronte Parsonage Museum, sits in the Bronte Parsonage.

ANN DINSDALE:

This is actually a book that would've been in use at school at that time. It's written by Reverend Carus Wilson and it's dated 1836. And they're full of quite grim stories intending to frighten children into good behaviour. So, we get terrible accounts of the punishments that were inflicted on naughty children. And these are illustrated by sort of gruesome little woodcuts of children who are struck down dead for telling a lie, um, punishments for things that we would consider quite… well, not really terribly serious nowadays. So, the book ends with quite a distressing story called Mother Dead, with an illustration, and it's two poor girls whose mother has died.

'The big girl takes the sheet off the face to have one more look. The least girl cries at the foot of the bed. She can't look up. They have lost their best friend.' And the story goes on to say, 'My dear child, have you a mother? Thank God that he spares her to you. These poor girls did not know how dear their mother was till she was gone. They may have been bad girls, they may have made their poor mother's heart ache, and if so, they could say, "Oh, if she would but come again, I think I'd vex her soul no more." Mind, my dear child who reads this tale and do not vex your mother. If God takes her from you, it may be in his wrath.' So, this is the kind of distressing story that was being doled out to these very young children. Quite disturbing stuff. And whatever the situation at Cowan Bridge and whether it really was the basis for Lowood, I think these books tell you, really, all need to know.

Text — Tapping into childhood perceptions.

Her father, Patrick Bronte, goes away and comes back with some toy soldiers for them, and the children are very, very excited by this, and they write little accounts of them. And then those 12 soldiers, they give names to them, they start to create biographies for them. They then start to create a world in which they live. They create little magazines about them called The Twelves.

Open page from the magazine created by the Bronte children.

And from these toy soldiers, they populate a world, really, they create a whole country in Africa.

A hand-drawn map.

And then… It shows the way that play can mutate or changes into fiction for them, and the two are so closely bound together. And that, I think, is one of the reasons why they're such, um, uniquely creative authors, why they can make such a huge difference to what the novel is, because they seem to have this kind of taproot back into very early childhood experiences without inhibition. So they can tap all those quite primal emotions and feelings and fantasies, and at the same time give them adult control and discipline and shape.

Text — Filmed at the Bronte Parsonage.

Text — Directed by Anna Lobbenberg, Cinematography by Joseph Turp, Edited by Joseph Turp.

Text — With special thanks to Ann Dinsdale and John Bowen.

SUBJECTS:   English

YEARS:  9–10

How was childhood depicted in English literature in the mid-nineteenth century?

In this clip from The British Library, two experts in the works of the Bronte sisters discuss the manner in which children were regarded in the 1800s and consider the significance of Charlotte Bronte's accounts of childhood in Jane Eyre.

This clip is one in a series of four.

Acknowledgements

Video © British Library.

Production Date: 2016

Metadata © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia Ltd 2012 (except where otherwise indicated). Digital content © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). Video © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). All images copyright their respective owners. Text © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Jane Eyre: Fairytale and realism

Jane Eyre: Who is Bertha Mason?

Jane Austen: The novel and social realism

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Jane Eyre Characters with Analysis

August 25, 2024

This article will provide a comprehensive list of characters in Charlotte Bront ë ’s Jane Eyre . Though Jane and Mr. Rochester are the two gothic spires of this text, there is a whole host of characters who populate the manors and moors. If you need it, here’s a summary of the text to help you out as well as the 7 Best Quotes in Jane Eyre with Analysis . 

While you can certainly use Project Gutenberg’s searchable Jane Eyre , I continue to recommend the Oxford World Classics text for its helpful endnotes and footnotes. 

Major Characters in Jane Eyre with Analysis

As the protagonist and narrator, Jane’s interior life is the whole point of the novel. Remember – Jane Eyre is an “autobiography” written from a future where Jane and Mr. Rochester are happily married (with at least one son). That is not to say that the events of the novel are unimportant. However, far more important is how Jane understands these events as shaping her present self. Indeed, Jane Eyre was revolutionary precisely because of this focus on the private, emotional development of its main character. (The literary critic Daniel Burt calls Charlotte Bront ë “ the first historian of private consciousness. ”)  

We first meet Jane, she is ten years old girl and in the care (if it can be called that) of her aunt, Mrs. Reed. We find out later that Jane’s father was a poor clergyman who married a woman from a wealthy family. Jane’s maternal grandfather was so irritated with his daughter’s choice of husband that he cut them off financially. When Jane’s mother and father both catch typhus and die, Jane is left in the care of Mr. Reed, her mother’s brother (who dies soon after). 

Jane Eyre Characters (Continued)

Though Mrs. Reed has three children – Eliza, John, and Georgiana – they shun their cousin Jane. Of the three, the fourteen-year-old John is particularly cruel. When Jane stands up for herself against John’s bullying, Mrs. Reed throws Jane in the “red-room.” Jane thinks she sees a ghost and is terrified. She begs to be released, but Mrs. Reed pushes her back into the room, where Jane subsequently faints. 

In response to her “disobedience,” Mrs. Reed sends Jane off to Lowood academy, where Jane will spend the next eight years – six as a student and two as a teacher. Eventually, Jane bores of Lowood and advertises her services as a governess. Within a few weeks, Jane is off to Thornfield Hall to take care of Adele, a young French girl in the care of Mr. Edward Fairfax Rochester. 

When Jane finally meets her boss, Mr. Rochester, she is (justifiably) wary. He seems an angry, tempestuous man. ( Their subsequent romance has not aged well. ) Though it takes time, Jane eventually confesses her love to Mr. Rochester, who reciprocates. Things go pear-shaped when they try to marry. [Spoiler alert!] Unbeknownst to Jane, Mr. Rochester is already married to Bertha Mason, an insane woman that he keeps imprisoned in on the third floor of Thornfield Hall. 

Such is Mr. Rochester’s passion for Jane that he suggests that they move to France and live as husband and wife away from the prying, prudish eyes of English high society. Though Jane is tempted, she refuses to be led astray by her feelings for Mr. Rochester. She has no intention of being a rich man’s mistress. In an impressive act of will, Jane leaves Thornfield without telling anyone.

She makes it as far as “Whitcross.” After paying for her travel, Jane has no money – she then accidentally forgets her suitcase in the coach. Penniless and possessionless, Jane begs for food and sleeps outside. After three days of this, near death, she knocks on the door of a house and is taken in by Mary, Diana, and St. John Rivers. Through a series of unlikely events, Jane 1) inherits a fortune, 2) finds out that Mary, Diana, and St. John are her cousins, and 3) decides to split her inheritance equally with them. ( I’ve written a chapter-by-chapter summary here. )

Her financial future secured, Jane turns her eyes to the future. St. John has taken a shine to Jane and proposes marriage (and a missionary existence in India). Though Jane is enamored with St. John’s intellect and Christian faith, she refuses to marry someone she doesn’t love . Like her rejection of Mr. Rochester earlier in the novel, Jane manages to resist the seductive allure of giving her existence over to another’s will.

Having rejected St. John, Jane turns her thoughts back to Mr. Rochester (it’s been a year since she left him). She returns to Thornfield to find it burned to the ground. When Jane asks around, she finds out that Bertha Mason set the house on fire and subsequently killed herself. Mr. Rochester managed to save all the servants but was blinded and maimed in the fire. Jane goes to him immediately, rekindles their romance, and marries him within the month. 

At the end of the book, Jane reflects on her path and feels that her success is a result of her having stayed true to her own inner compass instead of submitting to the will of others. 

Mr. Rochester 

Mr. Edward Faifax Rochester is Jane’s boss (suitor, and (eventually) husband). Much has been made of Mr. Rochester’s brooding, Gothic vibes, but his main narrative purpose is to prompt Jane to trust herself. Remember, Mr. Rochester asks Jane to marry him under very false pretenses. It’s not until Jane is kneeling at the altar with him that she finds out that Mr. Rochester has been married for fifteen years to a crazy lady he keeps on the third floor of his mansion. 

Mr. Rochester’s subsequent proposal – that they move to southern France and live as man and wife – is tempting. While Jane loves Mr. Rochester, her Christian faith will not let her live as a man’s mistress, crazy wife or not. The intensity of Jane’s feelings for Mr. Rochester makes her decision to leave him more poignant. 

Jane’s rejection of Mr. Rochester also allows for him to become a better (more Christian) person. His eventual blinding and maiming strip him of his arrogance and haughtiness. By the time Jane returns, he is a humble, middle-aged man, finally ready for the love of a nineteen-year-old girl.  

St. John Rivers 

Like Mr. Rochester, St. John exists as a sort of test for Jane’s self-determination. The brother of Maria and Diana, St. John is driven to be a missionary. He proposes marriage to Jane because he sees in her a worthy helpmeet for his missionary life. (While he not-so-secretly burns for the wealthy Rosamund Oliver, he knows that missionary life would be a poor fit for her.) 

Jane is very nearly convinced by St. John’s religious fervor. Though he is presumptuous and aloof, she understands the allure of giving over her will to such a force. If she were to marry St. John, Jane would cease to suffer from the burden of self-determination. Ultimately, Jane cannot betray her belief in the value of romantic love. She rejects St. John’s conventional understanding of Christian duty in favor of finding her own way in the world. On the last page of the book, we find out that St. John is ailing in India and will soon die. 

Bertha Mason

Though she doesn’t speak a single line in the text, there’s no doubt that Bertha Mason is a major character in Jane Eyre . Like her mother before her, Bertha suffers from “congenital madness.” Mr. Rochester implies that his marriage to Bertha was rushed by both families. The Rochesters wanted the Masons’ wealth and the Masons wanted someone to take Bertha off their hands. 

We find out that the strange laughter Jane hears from the servants’ quarters is Bertha (though Mr. Rochester blames Grace Poole). Though Grace is supposed to keep watch over her, Bertha escapes whenever Grace hits the gin too hard. On one occasion, she tries to burn Mr. Rochester in his bed. In another, she sneaks into Jane’s room and tears Jane’s bridal veil in half.

Mrs. Reed takes Jane in when her parents die of typhus. Though she is Jane’s aunt, there is no love lost between the two. Indeed, the only reason that Mrs. Reed bothers with Jane is because she promised her late husband that she would take care of her. Mrs. Reed is consistently unkind to Jane and keeps her away from her own children, John, Eliza, and Georgiana. 

A few years after Mrs. Reed sends Jane to Lowood, one of Jane’s uncles comes searching for her. It turns out that this uncle has made a fortune and would like Jane to be his heir. In an act of particular spitefulness, Mrs. Reed tells him that Jane died at Lowood. We find out later that Mrs. Reed couldn’t bear the thought of Jane’s conditions improving.  After her son, John, dies (implied to be suicide), Mrs. Reed has a stroke from which she does not recover. 

Minor Characters in Jane Eyre with Analysis 

Helen burns.

When Jane arrives at Lowood, she befriends Helen Burns. While an excellent student, Helen is frequently punished by the teachers for being “slatternly.” Like many of the characters in Jane Eyre , Helen exists to highlight Jane’s unique refusal to conform. Helen accepts every punishment she receives without protest, believing that this world is merely preamble to the next. Helen dies of consumption soon after Jane’s arrival at Lowood. 

Mrs. Fairfax

Distantly related to Mr. Rochester, Mrs. Fairfax manages Thornfield Hall. It is she who hires Jane as governess. 

Blanche Ingram

Before Mr. Rochester can admit that he loves Jane, he courts Blanche Ingram to make Jane jealous. Because Jane finds Blanche so thoroughly boring, Mr. Rochester’s interest in her lowers Jane’s opinion of him. In a testament to her shallowness, Blanche’s interest in Mr. Rochester wanes when she comes to believe that his fortune is smaller than expected. 

Mary and Diana Rivers

Sisters of St. John, they welcome Jane into their home after she flees from Thornfield. When Jane discovers that they are her cousins, she shares her inheritance with them and invites them to return from London to live at their ancestral home. 

Rosamund Oliver

Rosamund is the wealthy woman who St. John is in love with. She also funds the school that Jane works at while in Morton. While Rosamund’s father makes it clear that he would accept St. John as a son-in-law, St. John refuses, knowing that Rosamund would never consent to being a missionary. 

Adèle Varens

Adèle is the ten-year-old French girl who Jane teaches at Thornfield. Though her paternity is unclear, Mr. Rochester might be her father. 

Celine Varens

The French opera dancer with whom Mr. Rochester has an affair, she claims that Adèle is Mr. Rochester’s daughter. Mr. Rochester ends his affair with Celine after he learns that she has been unfaithful and is only interested in his money. 

Georgiana, John, and Eliza Reed

After bullying Jane in the first four chapters of the text, we don’t hear much from Georgiana, John, and Eliza until Mrs. Reed has a stroke. When Jane returns to care for her aunt, we are reintroduced to her cousins. John has led a dissolute life and killed himself over gambling debts, Georgiana is a beautiful, if vapid, society lady, and Eliza has become a stern woman destined for the nunnery. 

One of Mrs. Reed’s servants, Bessie is one of the only people who is (sorta) kind to Jane during her childhood. Before Jane leaves for Thornfield, Bessie comes to visit Jane and tell her news of Mrs. Reed and her cousins. She later marries the Reeds’ coachman.

Mr. Lloyd is the apothecary who visits Jane after her fainting spell in the red-room. A kind man, he recommends to Mrs. Reed that Jane be sent to school. When the headmaster of Lowood (Mr. Brocklehurst) claims that Jane is a liar, it is Mr. Lloyd who attests to Jane’s good character. 

Miss Temple

Miss Temple is the only teacher at Lowood who is kind to Jane. When Miss Temple marries and leaves Lowood, Jane realizes she too wants to set out on adventures. 

Mr. Brocklehurst

As the headmaster of Lowood, Mr. Brocklehurst is responsible for the atrocious conditions at the school. A strict, tyrannical Christian, he keeps Jane and the other girls on the brink of starvation so that they can better focus on God. 

Grace Poole

Grace Poole is Bertha’s caretaker at Thornfield. Whenever something weird happens, Mr. Rochester blames Grace Poole. We find out later that Grace keeps a bottle of gin in her room. Bertha escapes whenever Grace gets drunk. 

Richard Mason

Richard is Bertha’s brother. When he comes to visit Thornfield, Bertha attacks him, nearly killing him. Upon hearing that Mr. Rochester plans on marrying Jane, he comes to the wedding and exposes his bigamy. 

Jane’s long-lost uncle, he leaves Jane 20,000 pounds in his will. 

Wrapping Up – Jane Eyre Characters and Analysis

While Charlotte Bront ë ’s Jane Eyre is focused on the moral and ethical development of its eponymous narrator, the text also provides a detailed depiction of the various strata of Victorian society. From governesses to coachmen, nobles to beggars, Jane Eyre weaves a rich tapestry of characters and classes. 

If you’ve found this article useful or interesting, you can also check out my summaries and analyses of 1984 , Frankenstein , The Great Gatsby , Hamlet , The Crucible , Beloved, Brave New World , The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , and Macbeth . 

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Devon Wootten

Devon holds a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing & International Relations, an MFA in Poetry, and a PhD in Comparative Literature. For nearly a decade, he served as an assistant professor in the First-Year Seminar Program at Whitman College. Devon is a former Fulbright Scholar as well as a Writing & Composition Instructor of Record at the University of Iowa and Poetry Instructor of Record at the University of Montana. Most recently, Devon’s work has been published in Fugue , Bennington Review , and TYPO , among others. 

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“Such dread as only children can feel”: Childhood trauma in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

“For me,” Jane begins, following the incident in the red room, “the watches of that long night passed in ghastly wakefulness; ear, eye, and mind alike strained by dread: such dread as children only can feel” (Brontë 20). Saturated as Charlotte Brontë’s  Jane Eyre is with unnerving or unsettling sensations, what is fascinating is how these sensations and images work in conjunction to articulate trauma—particularly trauma as it is experienced by a child. There is a striking poignancy to Jane’s specification that the dread she feels in this moment is “dread as  children only can feel” (emphasis mine). A closer reading of red room incident reveals that the text corresponds to two strands of contemporary nineteenth-century psychiatric and sociocultural thought: the construction of “the child” as a fixed, knowable object and the navigation and representation of physical and psychological shock or “trauma.”

For the most part, early to mid-nineteenth-century psychiatric and sociocultural discourses on “the child” and “trauma” treated the terms as unrelated subjects, with child psychiatry conceptualised as a specialised medical field and the notion of “childhood trauma” as a psychiatric condition of its own developing only in the last third of the century. Jill L Matus argues that the term “trauma” is “not just a concept formulated by medical and psychological discourse in isolation. It is highly dependent on social and cultural ideas about suffering, accountability, responsibility, reparation and victimhood” (7). In early- to mid-nineteenth-century Victorian medical and psychiatric fields, “trauma” did not exist in its elastic, multifaceted form as it does today, but the Victorian reconfiguration of that term, such that it pointed outside of a physical wound and towards a mental state (7), coincided with physicians “[coming] to believe that the sudden and severe effects of a violation of the physical self were mediated by the nerves, consequently formulating the notion of ‘nervous shock’” (Micale and Lerner 10). Jane, in her account of the moments after the red room incident, participates in this evolving concept of physical and psychological nervous shock by citing the medical and psychiatric rhetoric presented here, stating that her experience “gave my nerves a shock” (Brontë 20) and later referring to her “racked nerves” (20). Curiously, Jane also includes the fact that “I feel the reverberation [of the shock] to this day” (20). Her suggestion that shock is in some way linked to body and mental memory, that its “reverberations” or echoes can be felt months or years following the cause, reflects the emphasis gradually placed by Victorian psychiatrists on “the capacity for powerful emotional experiences to leave enduring traces upon the mind—to carve new channels or neural pathways in the brain that shaped subsequent psychological experiences” (Vrettos 202). It also suggests that trauma “turns out to be not an event per se but rather the  experiencing or  remembering  of an event in the mind of an individual” (Micale and Lerner 20). The fact that Jane experiences these “enduring traces,” what she terms as “fearful pangs of mental suffering” (Brontë 20), as an adult despite the cause of the shock occurring as a child also prompts a more nuanced reading of what it is for  the child to experience shock or trauma and how childhood trauma has lasting effects on adult subjectivity.

Her suggestion that shock is in some way linked to body and mental memory, that its “reverberations” or echoes can be felt months or years following the cause, reflects the emphasis gradually placed by Victorian psychiatrists on “the capacity for powerful emotional experiences to leave enduring traces upon the mind—to carve new channels or neural pathways in the brain that shaped subsequent psychological experiences” (Vrettos 202).

“The child” as a legal entity and as a “real,” self-contained object separate from the adult remained a relatively new notion following its recognition and construction in the eighteenth century (insofar as “the child” may be understood as a fixed, knowable object, subject to and shaped by the adult onlooker). The nineteenth-century child built upon and conflicted with the eighteenth-century child of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, challenging Locke and Rousseau’s concepts of innate innocence or an embodied form of  tabula rasa by positing the child as a much more complex and implicitly destabilising entity. Child psychopathology, however, only gained momentum following the widespread acceptance of Sir James Crichton-Brown’s essay “Psychical Diseases in Early Life” (1860), which was monumental within medical and psychiatric fields in that it located child nervous disorders as a product of both physical  and physiological factors. Building on Crichton-Brown’s essay, Charles West in his  Lectures on the Diseases of Infancy and Childhood (1868) emphasises the role of affect in child nervous disorders, stating that for the child, “though the intellectual powers are imperfectly developed, the feelings and the impulses are stronger, or, at least, less under control, than they become with advancing years” (214). Brontë appears to pre-emptively acknowledge West’s statement in Jane’s consideration of her affective state as a child and her trouble with articulating those “strong” feelings at the time of their occurrence, with Jane stating that “children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings” (Brontë 23). The notion that children could, in fact, feel in such strong ways responded to what Sally Shuttleworth calls the “peculiarly engrossing” question of child terror and fear in Victorian society, as child terror and fear “ran so directly counter to constructions of blithe innocence, or associationist models of childhood, which stressed the lack of accumulated experience in the child mind which might give rise to such extreme emotions” ( The Mind of the Child  42). Jane evokes these “extreme emotions” by placing emphasis on the immensity of her younger self’s emotional responses during and after the red room. During the incident Jane describes herself as “oppressed, suffocated” (Brontë 17), her movements and gestures “wild, involuntary” and “desperate” (17), and as consumed by “frantic anguish and wild sobs” (18). Waking from unconsciousness, Jane observes that “agitation, uncertainty, and an all predominating sense of terror confused my faculties” (18), followed by a “ghastly wakefulness; ear, eye, and mind were alike strained by dread: such dread as children only can feel” (20). 

The day after the incident in the red room, Jane acknowledges that she feels “physically weak and broken down” (20) but largely focuses on what she calls “an unutterable wretchedness of mind: a wretchedness which kept drawing from me silent tears; no sooner had I wiped one salt drop from my cheek than another followed” (20). She links this “unutterable wretchedness of mind” to her “racked nerves” (20), which were “now in such a state that no calm could soothe, and no pleasure excite them agreeably” (20). This association between a state of mind and the condition of nerves, that they are inextricably linked and influence one another, articulates a particular anxiety circulating in early to mid-century Victorian society: the relation between mind and body, or mind and matter. Dominant Victorian psychiatric opinion insisted on keeping the mind and body distinct from one another in order to distinguish the “higher faculties” of reason, faith, or exercise of will from the “lower faculties” of sense, desire, or emotion (Rylance 450). Brontë, however, disrupts this hierarchical notion throughout the novel, linking powerful emotional sensations and physiological reactions in moments of shock or distress to such an extent that the authority or influence of those “higher faculties” is destabilised. When Jane encounters the ghostly light in the red room, she not only experiences intense emotional reactions, but intense physiological ones too: “My heart beat thick, my head grew hot: a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings: something seemed near me” (Brontë 17). Jane is consumed by “frantic anguish and wild sobs” (18), unable to maintain the divide between mind and matter or to exert the logical authority of the mind over the illogical submissiveness of the body, such that upon being forced back into the red room by Mrs Reed, Jane recalls that “I suppose I had a species of fit: unconsciousness closed the scene” (18). There is only one other instance in which Jane “became insensible from terror” (284): apprehending the “lurid visage” (284) of Bertha Mason in her room in Thornfield.

Returning to those “reverberations” of nervous shock Jane experiences, the notion that trauma leaves traces upon the body and mind begs a closer examination of how trauma comes to infiltrate and distort Jane’s daily life following the red room incident. For example, when Jane attempts to find comfort in  Gulliver’s Travels and to seek “in its marvellous pictures the charm I had, till now, never failed to find—all was eerie and dreary; the giants were gaunt goblins, the pigmies malevolent and fearful imps, Gulliver a most desolate wanderer in most dread and dangerous places” (21). To Jane, a child already preoccupied with visions of grim yet mysterious landscapes inhabited by phantasmal figures, that which had previously afforded stability and wonder is suddenly distorted. The contents of her “cherished volume” (21) become contaminated by an experience that Jane cannot necessarily psychologically articulate or process—limited as she is by what she as an adult interprets as her “undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings” (9)—but the latent effects of which begin to manifest in her perceived reality. To an extent, Jane comes to resemble Gulliver as this “desolate wanderer,” emerging from the red room irreversibly affected by a traumatic experience that is never fully processed but altogether encompassing.

To Jane, a child already preoccupied with visions of grim yet mysterious landscapes inhabited by phantasmal figures, that which had previously afforded stability and wonder is suddenly distorted.

Brontë’s choice to have Jane as the adult narrator engage in this intensive cataloguing of child terror and nervous conditions through psychiatric rhetoric and affect positions the text as a compelling example of early literary representations of childhood trauma. Upon its publication  Jane Eyre  was lauded for its “natural” or “real” depiction of interiority and emotional life (Shuttleworth,  Charlotte Brontë  3). By engaging with contemporary nineteenth-century psychiatric and medical discourses surrounding “the child” and “trauma” and offering a compelling case in which those two terms may mutually inform one another,  Jane Eyre exemplifies “the ways in which literature could infuse, and indeed direct, the formation of child psychiatry and its categories of perception and understanding” ( The Mind of the Child  53).Matus expands on Shuttleworth’s notion of literary significance of psychiatric and medical categories of trauma, stating that “literature is important to the historicisation of ideas about trauma precisely because trauma is a culturally and historically constructed concept; the medical and psychological discourse that helped to produce it ought to be seen in relation to its ambient culture” (53).  Jane Eyre , then, emerges as an immensely important text in the historicisation of  childhood trauma in the early to mid-nineteenth century.

Works cited

Brontë, Charlotte.  Jane Eyre . Edited by Margaret Smith, Oxford UP, 2008.

Matus, Jill L.  Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction . Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Micale, Mark, and Paul Lerner.  Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930 . Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Rylance, Rick. “Convex and Concave: Conceptual Boundaries in Psychology, Now and Then (But Mainly Then).”  Victorian Literature and Culture , vol. 32, no. 2, September 2004, pp. 449-62.  Cambridge University Press , doi:10.1017/S1060150304000592. Accessed 16 Nov. 2019.

Shuttleworth, Susan.  Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology . Cambridge University Press, 2009.

—.  The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840-1900. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Vrettos, Athena. “Displaced Memories in Victorian Fiction and Psychology.”  Victorian Studies , vol. 49, no. 2, Winter 2007, pp. 199-207.  JSTOR , www.jstor.org/stable/4626277. Accessed 28 Nov. 2019.

West, Charles.  Lectures on the Diseases of Infancy and Childhood , Philadelphia: Henry C Lea, 1868.

“The red room was a square chamber” via  Jane Eyre Illustrated ( http://janeeyreillustrated.com/Bedford_1.htm ). Public Domain.

“How dare I, Mrs Reed? How dare I? Because it is the truth” via  Wikimedia Commons ( https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:P30b.jpg ). Public Domain.

“He fixed his eyes on me very steadily” via  Jane Eyre Illustrated ( http://janeeyreillustrated.com/Garrett_1.htm ). Public Domain.

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Table of Contents

• Chapter III
• Chapter VII
• Chapter VIII
• Chapter XII
• Chapter XIII
• Chapter XIV
• Chapter XVI
• Chapter XVII
• Chapter XVIII
• Chapter XIX
• Chapter XXI
• Chapter XXII
• Chapter XXIII
• Chapter XXIV
• Chapter XXV
• Chapter XXVI
• Chapter XXVII
• Chapter XXVIII
• Chapter XXIX
• Chapter XXX
• Chapter XXXI
• Chapter XXXII
• Chapter XXXIII
• Chapter XXXIV
• Chapter XXXV
• Chapter XXXVI
• Chapter XXXVII
• Chapter XXXVIII
• Alliteration
• Character Analysis
• Foreshadowing
• Historical Context
• Literary Devices
• Personification
• Quote Analysis

Study Guide

• Charlotte Brontë Biography

Teaching Resources

• Jane Eyre Allusion Activity
• Jane Eyre Character Analysis Lesson Plan
• Jane Eyre Teaching Guide

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by Charlotte Brontë

Last Updated July 5, 2023.

Extended Character Analysis

Jane Eyre is a calm, intelligent, and reflective woman who, throughout Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, grows spiritually and emotionally with every life event. Due to the untimely death of her parents, Jane is placed into the hands of her aunt, Mrs. Reed. Unwanted and mistreated by Mrs. Reed, Jane experiences traumatic events throughout her childhood. She is abused by her cousins, who, at the guidance of their mother, dislike and disparage Jane.

When Jane is attacked by her cousin John, Mrs. Reed blames Jane for inciting him and punishes her by locking her in the “red room” where Mr. Reed died. This causes Jane to become very ill. The apothecary, Mr. Lloyd, convinces Mrs. Reed to send Jane to Lowood Boarding School—a school for orphans—which Mrs. Reed believes is fitting for Jane’s “position and prospects.” In her last attempt to hurt Jane, Mrs. Reed tells the school’s headmaster, Mr. Brocklehurst, that Jane is a liar.

At Lowood, Mr. Brocklehurst keeps the school under strict conditions: he stresses religious adherence and gives plain clothing and meager food to the girls. When he sees Jane make a loud noise during his visit to the school, he places her on a stool and publicly shames her for being a “liar.”

Despite this, Jane is still able to foster meaningful relationships with those around her, including her close friend Helen Burns. Helen left a great impression on Jane in their short time together, teaching her much about morality and kindness. Helen’s death is yet another example of the hardships Jane faces.

Yet, Jane is successful in school, and with the care and attention of her teacher, Maria Temple, she becomes a teacher at Lowood. Jane’s early childhood, although filled with maltreatment, is the reason she grows to be such a steadfast character. Her traumatic experiences at her aunt’s home and in her school give Jane a complex, inward, and careful mind. She is able to understand how and why her aunt and cousins ostracized her for not fitting into their preconceived idea of what a child or person should be like. This background leads to Jane’s independence, self-reliance, and spiritual understanding of herself as an adult.

Jane desires liberty but realizes it is unattainable. She instead settles with finding a new “servitude,” which leads her to become a governess at Thornfield. Due to her past, Jane expects little in life to be pleasant. She is thus surprised when Mrs. Fairfax, Thornfield’s housekeeper, is kind to her and treats her as a visitor.

Thornfield, where Jane works as a governess, is home to the next stage of growth for Jane; she meets an equal in Mrs. Fairfax and develops as a governess to Adele Varens. Although she has a comfortable career surrounded by pleasant people, Jane still feels an inward desire to mingle with higher society and to experience more of the world. This desire reflects Jane’s struggle to fit in her given and expected place in society.

From childhood to adulthood, Jane is trapped within the constraints that have been placed on her by others. She feels that “it is thoughtless to condemn [women], or laugh at [women], if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”

When Jane first meets the owner of Thornfield, Mr. Rochester, she feels that he is “changeful and abrupt,” and that Mrs. Fairfax did not do him justice by describing him as a “peculiar character.” Jane, however, has the resiliency and humor to deal with Mr. Rochester’s quirks, and she finds a kindred spirit in Mr. Rochester and grows to love him. Jane’s time at Thornfield is mostly spent teaching Adele and becoming better acquainted with Mr. Rochester. Her time at Thornfield, however, is interrupted when Mrs. Reed, who is on her deathbed, asks to see Jane.

Displaying her understanding and kindness, Jane tries to reconcile with Mrs. Reed, even though Mrs. Reed still shows undue hatred toward her. Mrs. Reed told Jane’s only uncle, John Eyre, that Jane had died of typhus at Lowood. Although Mrs. Reed does not apologize, Jane benefits from this knowledge.

Returning to Thornfield, Jane navigates the stormy waters of loving and courting Mr. Rochester. After making sense of Mr. Rochester’s confusing actions—including his pretended preparations for a wedding with Blanche Ingram, an upper-class woman—Jane finds that once she is actually betrothed to him, their relationship is different than she expected. She struggles intensely with the loss of identity that marriage brings. Mr. Rochester begins to treat her differently, giving her expensive jewelry and clothes and placing expectations upon her. Jane, as an always independent, inwardly free woman, has a hard time adapting to this change. In fact, Jane finds it hard to even write her name as “Mrs. Rochester,” showing that the loss of her name is a large part of her loss of identity.

When Jane finds out the truth about Mr. Rochester’s wife, Bertha, she leaves him. However, for Jane, the decision to leave Mr. Rochester is one between caring for another and caring for herself. Jane then places herself in a self-imposed purgatory: with no food or extra clothing, Jane wanders the moors, all her prospects lost.

The Rivers family finds her on the moors. They nurse her back to health and, when they learn about her level of education and teaching expertise, they help to establish her as a teacher for a small village school nearby. They eventually learn that they are related to Jane, and they agree to share with her the inheritance that Jane’s uncle, John Eyre, has left behind. St. John, Jane’s cousin, offers to marry Jane and take her along on a missionary trip to India. Although Jane appreciates her cousin’s gesture, she knows that she does not love him and refuses his proposal.

Near the end of Jane Eyre, Jane thinks she hears Mr. Rochester calling her name. Although she is comfortable with the Rivers, Jane realizes she cannot stay with the Rivers family and that St. John would not love her as Mr. Rochester did. Jane decides to leave the moors and return to Mr. Rochester.

In keeping with her strong and individualistic character, Jane decides to marry Mr. Rochester. Having lost his sight and his hand, Mr. Rochester has changed drastically from his previous self. He is able to see where his morals led him astray, and he can see the consequences of his mistakes. The decision being hers, the novel’s final chapter begins with Jane’s exuberant declaration of matrimony: “Reader, I married him.”

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Jane Eyre , novel by Charlotte Brontë , first published in 1847 as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography , with Currer Bell (Brontë’s pseudonym) listed as the editor. Widely considered a classic, it gave new truthfulness to the Victorian novel with its realistic portrayal of the inner life of a woman, noting her struggles with her natural desires and social condition.

When the novel begins, the title character is a 10-year-old orphan who lives with her uncle’s family; her parents had died of typhus . Other than the nursemaid, the family ostracizes Jane. She is later sent to the austere Lowood Institution, a charity school , where she and the other girls are mistreated; “Lowood,” as the name suggests, is the “low” point in Jane’s young life. In the face of such adversity, however, she gathers strength and confidence.

In early adulthood, after several years as a student and then teacher at Lowood, Jane musters the courage to leave. She finds work as a governess at Thornfield Hall, where she meets her dashing and Byronic employer, the wealthy and impetuous Edward Rochester . At Thornfield Jane looks after young Adèle, the daughter of a French dancer who was one of Rochester’s mistresses, and is befriended by the kindly housekeeper Mrs. Alice Fairfax . Jane falls in love with Rochester, though he is expected to marry the snobbish and socially prominent Blanche Ingram. Rochester eventually reciprocates Jane’s feelings and proposes marriage. However, on their wedding day, Jane discovers that Rochester cannot legally marry her, because he already has a wife, Bertha Mason , who has gone mad and is locked away on the third floor because of her violent behaviour; her presence explains the strange noises Jane has heard in the mansion. Believing that he was tricked into that marriage, Rochester feels justified in pursuing his relationship with Jane. He pleads with her to join him in France, where they can live as husband and wife despite the legal prohibitions, but Jane refuses on principle and flees Thornfield.

Jane is taken in by people she later discovers are her cousins. One of them is St. John , a principled clergyman. He gives her a job and soon proposes marriage, suggesting that she join him as a missionary in India. Jane initially agrees to leave with him but not as his wife. However, St. John pressures her to reconsider his proposal, and a wavering Jane finally appeals to Heaven to show her what to do. Just then, she hears a mesmeric call from Rochester. Jane returns to Thornfield to find the estate burned, set on fire by Rochester’s wife, who then jumped to her death. Rochester, in an attempt to save her, was blinded. Reunited, Jane and Rochester marry. Rochester later regains some of his sight, and the couple have a son.

The book was originally published in three volumes as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography , with Currer Bell listed as the editor. (The Lowood section of the novel was widely believed to be inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s own life.) Though some complained that it was anti- Catholic , the work was an immediate success. Jane Eyre ’s appeal was partly due to the fact that it was written in the first person and often addressed the reader, creating great immediacy. In addition, Jane is an unconventional heroine, an independent and self-reliant woman who overcomes both adversity and societal norms. The novel also notably blended diverse genres . Jane’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of moral realism. However, her close escape from a bigamous marriage and the fiery death of Bertha are part of the Gothic tradition.

Jane Eyre inspired various film, TV, and stage adaptations , including a 1943 movie that starred Orson Welles as Rochester and Joan Fontaine as Jane. Jean Rhys ’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) offers an account of Rochester’s first marriage.

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Charlotte Brontë

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Jane Eyre: Introduction

Jane eyre: plot summary, jane eyre: detailed summary & analysis, jane eyre: themes, jane eyre: quotes, jane eyre: characters, jane eyre: symbols, jane eyre: literary devices, jane eyre: quizzes, jane eyre: theme wheel, brief biography of charlotte brontë.

Historical Context of Jane Eyre

Other books related to jane eyre.

• Full Title: Jane Eyre: An Autobiography
• When Written: 1847
• Literary Period: Victorian
• Genre: Victorian novel. Jane Eyre combines Gothic mystery, a romantic marriage plot, and a coming-of-age story.
• Setting: Northern England in the early 1800s.
• Climax: Jane telepathically hears Rochester's voice calling out to her.
• Point of View: First person. Jane recounts her story ten years after its ending.

Extra Credit for Jane Eyre

Bells and Brontës: The Brontës became a literary powerhouse when Charlotte, Emily, and Anne all wrote successful first novels. Each sister published under a masculine-sounding pseudonym based on their initials. Charlotte Brontë became "Currer Bell"; Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights (1845-46) as "Ellis Bell", and Anne Brontë published Agnes Gray (1847) as "Acton Bell." Women could enter the marketplace as writers and novelists, but many writers, including the Brontës and Mary Anne Evans ("George Eliot"), used male pseudonyms to keep from being dismissed as unimportant.

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by Charlotte Bronte

Jane eyre themes.

The main quest in Jane Eyre is Jane's search for family, for a sense of belonging and love. However, this search is constantly tempered by Jane’s need for independence. She begins the novel as an unloved orphan who is almost obsessed with finding love as a way to establish her own identity and achieve happiness. Although she does not receive any parental love from Mrs. Reed , Jane finds surrogate maternal figures throughout the rest of the novel. Bessie, Miss Temple , and even Mrs. Fairfax care for Jane and give her the love and guidance that she needs, and she returns the favor by caring for Adèle and the students at her school. Still, Jane does not feel as though she has found her true family until she falls in love with Mr. Rochester at Thornfield; he becomes more of a kindred spirit to her than any of her biological relatives could be. However, she is unable to accept Mr. Rochester’s first marriage proposal because she realizes that their marriage - one based on unequal social standing - would compromise her autonomy. Jane similarly denies St. John's marriage proposal, as it would be one of duty, not of passion. Only when she gains financial and emotional autonomy, after having received her inheritance and the familial love of her cousins, can Jane accept Rochester's offer. In fact, the blinded Rochester is more dependent on her (at least until he regains his sight). Within her marriage to Rochester, Jane finally feels completely liberated, bringing her dual quests for family and independence to a satisfying conclusion.

Jane receives three different models of Christianity throughout the novel, all of which she rejects either partly or completely before finding her own way. Mr. Brocklehurst 's Evangelicalism is full of hypocrisy: he spouts off on the benefits of privation and humility while he indulges in a life of luxury and emotionally abuses the students at Lowood. Also at Lowood, Helen Burns 's Christianity of absolute forgiveness and tolerance is too meek for Jane's tastes; Helen constantly suffers her punishments silently and eventually dies. St. John, on the other hand, practices a Christianity of utter piousness, righteousness, and principle to the exclusion of any passion. Jane rejects his marriage proposal as much for his detached brand of spirituality as for its certain intrusion on her independence.

However, Jane frequently looks to God in her own way throughout the book, particularly after she learns of Mr. Rochester's previous marriage and before St. John takes her in to Moor House. She also learns to adapt Helen’s doctrine of forgiveness without becoming complete passive and returns to Mr. Rochester when she feels that she is ready to accept him again. The culmination of the book is Jane’s mystical experience with Mr. Rochester that brings them together through a spirituality of profound love.

Social position

Brontë uses the novel to express her critique of Victorian class differences. Jane is consistently a poor individual within a wealthy environment, particularly with the Reeds and at Thornfield. Her poverty creates numerous obstacles for her and her pursuit of happiness, including personal insecurity and the denial of opportunities. The beautiful Miss Ingram's higher social standing, for instance, makes her Jane's main competitor for Mr. Rochester’s love, even though Jane is far superior in terms of intellect and character. Moreover, Jane’s refusal to marry Mr. Rochester because of their difference in social stations demonstrates her morality and belief in the importance of personal independence, especially in comparison to Miss Ingram’s gold-digging inclinations. Although Jane asserts that her poverty does not make her an inferior person, her eventual ascent out of poverty does help her overcome her personal obstacles. Not only does she generously divide her inheritance with her cousins, but her financial independence solves her difficulty with low self-esteem and allows her to fulfill her desire to be Mr. Rochester’s wife.

Gender inequality

Alongside Brontë's critique of Victorian class hierarchy is a subtler condemnation of the gender inequalities during the time period. The novel begins with Jane's imprisonment in the "red-room" at Gateshead, and later in the book Bertha's imprisonment in the attic at Thornfield is revealed. The connection implies that Jane's imprisonment is symbolic of her lower social class, while Bertha's containment is symbolic of Victorian marriage: all women, if they marry under unequal circumstances as Bertha did, will eventually be confined and oppressed by their husbands in some manner. Significantly, Jane is consciously aware of the problems associated with unequal marriages. Thus, even though she loves Mr. Rochester, she refuses to marry him until she has her own fortune and can enter into the marriage contract as his equal.

While it is difficult to separate Jane's economic and gender obstacles, it is clear that her position as a woman also prevents her from venturing out into the world as many of the male characters do – Mr. Rochester, her Uncle John, and St. John, for instance. Indeed, her desire for worldly experience makes her last name ironic, as "Eyre" derives from an Old French word meaning "to travel." If Jane were a man, Brontë suggests, she would not be forced to submit to so much economic hardship; she could actively attempt to make her fortune. As it is, however, Jane must work as a governess, the only legitimate position open for a woman of her station, and simply wait for her uncle to leave her his fortune.

Fire and Ice

The motifs of fire and ice permeate the novel from start to finish. Fire is presented as positive, creative, and loving, while ice is seen as destructive, negative, and hateful. Brontë highlights this dichotomy by associating these distinct elements with particular characters: the cruel or detached characters, such as Mrs. Reed and St. John, are associated with ice, while the warmer characters, such as Jane, Miss Temple, and Mr. Rochester, are linked with fire. Interestingly, fire serves as a positive force even when it is destructive, as when Jane burns Helen's humiliating "Slattern" crown, and when Bertha sets fire to Mr. Rochester’s bed curtains and then to Thornfield Manor. The first of Bertha’s fires brings Jane and Mr. Rochester into a more intimate relationship, while the second destroys Thornfield and leads to Bertha's death, thus liberating Rochester from his shackled past. Although the fire also blinds Rochester, this incident helps Jane see that he is now dependent on her and erases any misgivings she may have about inequality in their marriage. Although Brontë does not suggest that the characters associated with ice are wholly malignant or unsympathetic, she emphasizes the importance of fiery love as the key to personal happiness.

Gothic elements

Brontë uses many elements of the Gothic literary tradition to create a sense of suspense and drama in the novel. First of all, she employs Gothic techniques in order to set the stage for the narrative. The majority of the events in the novel take place within a gloomy mansion (Thornfield Manor) with secret chambers and a mysterious demonic laugh belonging to the Madwoman in the Attic. Brontë also evokes a sense of the supernatural, incorporating the terrifying ghost of Mr. Reed in the red-room and creating a sort of telepathic connection between Jane and Mr. Rochester. More importantly, however, Brontë uses the Gothic stereotype of the Byronic hero to formulate the primary conflict of the text. Brooding and tortured, while simultaneously passionate and charismatic, Mr. Rochester is the focal point of the passionate romance in the novel and ultimately directs Jane’s behavior beginning at her time at Thornfield. At the same time, his dark past and unhappy marriage to Bertha Mason set the stage for the dramatic conclusion of the novel.

External beauty versus internal beauty

Throughout the novel, Brontë plays with the dichotomy between external beauty and internal beauty. Both Bertha Mason and Blanche Ingram are described as stunningly beautiful, but, in each case, the external beauty obscures an internal ugliness. Bertha’s beauty and sensuality blinded Mr. Rochester to her hereditary madness, and it was only after their marriage that he gradually recognized her true nature. Blanche’s beauty hides her haughtiness and pride, as well as her desire to marry Mr. Rochester only for his money. Yet, in Blanche’s case, Mr. Rochester seems to have learned not to judge by appearances, and he eventually rejects her, despite her beauty. Only Jane, who lacks the external beauty of typical Victorian heroines, has the inner beauty that appeals to Mr. Rochester. Her intelligence, wit, and calm morality express a far greater personal beauty than that of any other character in the novel, and Brontë clearly intends to highlight the importance of personal development and growth rather than superficial appearances. Once Mr. Rochester loses his hand and eyesight, they are also on equal footing in terms of appearance: both must look beyond superficial qualities in order to love each other.

Jane Eyre Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Jane Eyre is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Why did Jane go to the party?

Jane attends the party out of curiosity, she leaves because Rochester's guests are rude and arrogant.

What is it that you most admire about Jane?

I think this is asking for your opinion rather than mine. What do you admire about Jane? Is it her sense of independence as a woman in a patriarchal culture? Is it her thirst for education? Is it her resilience?

Why was Jane so invested in the ingrams?

I think your quesstion is embodied in the character of Blanche Ingram. The young and beautiful society lady who is Jane's primary romantic rival. Jane is convinced that the haughty Miss Ingram would be a poor match for Mr. Rochester, but she...

Study Guide for Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is a book by Charlotte Brontë. The Jane Eyre study guide contains a biography of Charlotte Bronte, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Jane Eyre
• Jane Eyre Summary
• Jane Eyre Video
• Character List

Essays for Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is a novel by Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

• Women in Literature: Examining Oppression Versus Independence in Henry V and Jane Eyre
• Jane Eyre: The Independent and Successful Woman Of the Nineteenth Century
• Mystery and Suspense
• In Search of Permanence
• Jane's Art and Story

Lesson Plan for Jane Eyre

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Jane Eyre
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Jane Eyre Bibliography

E-Text of Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is an e-text that contains the full text of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.

• Chapters 1-5
• Chapters 6-10
• Chapters 11-15
• Chapters 16-20

Wikipedia Entries for Jane Eyre

• Introduction