Heat Rises:
Jane Eyre’s Ascension to Power
Jenny (Walicek) Clendenen
Critical Essay, West Valley College, 1999 | Nominated for Norton Prize, 2000
In 1847 England reacted with an indignant uproar to the publication of Jane Eyre, whose heroine was criticized for taking a feminist stance on gender roles, for implicitly criticizing Church doctrine, for disregarding class divisions, and for violating Victorian standards of personal morality. Modern scholars have continued this critical exploration of the sexual, religious, societal and moral boundaries tested by the author, Charlotte Bronte; the predominant scholarly focus is on the championship of women’s rights, particularly of those in the underclass. These issues, however, are simply the byproducts of a theme much grander in scope. Jane is not seeking equality. She does not want to change her world. She wants to rule it.
From a victimized girl, Jane metamorphoses into a woman completely in charge, not only of her own self and situations, but of everyone around her and their situations as well. This transformation stems from her evolving ability to control her passions: the more she controls her own self, the more she controls her circumstances and other people. By the last page she has reversed every role, achieving some sort of empowering advantage – financial, marital, emotional, sexual, familial, spiritual, or physical – over every remaining character in the book.
In the first chapter, Jane is out of control. Cruelly victimized by John Reed, she loses her temper and then spirals into near-madness in the eerie gloom of the red-room. As a result she loses even the little pleasantries in which she had once found solace. She is ostracized, segregated, forced to sleep in a closet, excluded from Christmas festivities and finally sent off to a prison-like boarding school. Her failure to control her passions has cost her dearly, and it is a mistake she will never make again.
She applies this hard-won lesson at Lowood, aided by the inspiring examples of Miss Temple and Helen Burns. Despite harsh conditions and the torments of the schoolmaster, her budding self-control is eventually rewarded with friendships, respect, an education, and independence. She is no longer the student, but the teacher.
Jane takes further charge of her self and moves to Thornfield, where she finds that her restrained passions exert a level of emotional control over the master of the house, Edward Rochester. This combination of power and passion excites her – she likes “vexing and soothing him by turns,” never “going too far,” but “on the extreme brink I liked to try my skill (Bronte 16).” When she visits Gateshead, she no longer feels controlled by her old nemeses, and in fact finds herself in command of Mrs. Reed’s very conscience. Returning to Thornfield, she learns that she has won Mr. Rochester’s heart, and she teases him for the entire engagement. Jane is no longer the tormented, but the tormentor.
In the elation of love and victory, her meticulously managed passions break their bonds and soar to new heights (dipping down only when she feels that Rochester is trying to regain the upper hand by his choice of gifts), but they are slammed back to earth when she learns of his deceit. By releasing her passions Jane has once again lost control of her self, of her circumstances, and of others. She must, from this low point, begin her struggle for power all over again.
Despairing, she depletes her remaining self-control to escape her situation, and relinquishes her passion to God. Soon she is starving, and realizes she must renew at least some of her passion to survive. It is only after she follows the fire (figuratively and literally) to Moor House that she regains and exceeds the respect, education and independence that she struggled for in the beginning. She learns new languages, heads her own school, lives on her own and becomes a financial benefactress to her cousins. Jane is no longer the saved, but the savior.
She also finds, as before, that she has a certain degree of control over the master of the house, but recognizes that St. John is attracted to the challenge of subduing her already restrained passions, and of using her for his own purposes. She rejects his proposal and follows her heart back to Rochester.
At Ferndean Jane achieves her ultimate power shift, attaining complete and utter control of herself, her destiny and her man. In Edward (“wealthy guardian”) Rochester’s first condescending proposal he had described Jane as “poor and obscure, and small and plain (23).” Now his demeaning words best describe his own state. Jane has reversed every one of her previous roles. She is no longer the ward but the guardian, no longer the commoner but the lady, no longer the governess but the stepmother, no longer the subordinate but the employer. She is in complete control.
Jane Eyre is renowned for its intricate symbolism, but it is in the application of five particular “marker” symbols that the reader tracks the path of Jane’s progress. Numbers, colors (red and white), the moon, birds, and Thornfield Hall itself, enable us to see, before Jane and perhaps even before Bronte, the topography of the territory that Jane is treading.
The prevalent use of certain numbers reveals Jane’s physical and psychological circumstances. At Gateshead, the number is one. She is alone in the window seat, alone in the red-room, alone in the closet, alone in the nursery. She looks at pictures of isolated regions, a solitary bird, a single rock in the ocean, a stranded boat. One robin is her only friend. She listens to Bessie sing a prophetic ballad of an orphaned child. She departs Gateshead in the first month of the year. The number one represents Jane’s physical and psychological isolation, the base from which she begins her struggle upward.
The morning that she departs for Lowood, the recurring number becomes one-half. She has been awake for a half hour; she eats half her breakfast; she is leaving at half day at the half month by a half-moon on a half-hundred mile journey that will take her half-way to Thornfield. “Thus was I severed from Bessie and Gateshead: thus whirled away to unknown…regions (5),” says Jane. She feels torn asunder, figuratively cut in half.
Lowood is described in numerous twos, and in numbers divisible by two. There are two windows, two tables at two ends of the room, two fireplaces, two candles, two girls per bed, two girls per entry, two girls per exit, two rows of seats, two globes, two serving vessels, two wings of the building, eighty classmates, six girls per basin, four semicircles, and twenty adult girls in the class. Jane makes her first two friends here. The symmetry and divisibility of these quantities represents the severely structured, divisive qualities of her life at Lowood..
At Thornfield the significant number is three. Not only is the Hall three stories high, but the third floor is Jane’s favorite and (as we will later discover) the residence of the third point of a passionate triangle.
The night Jane meets Rochester she has left the house at three o’clock and has been at Thornfield three months. She spies three figures on the trail (Rochester, his horse and dog) and describes Rochester’s “three grim features (5)” of chin, mouth and jaw. In the dining room he selects three significant pictures from her portfolio. He enjoys her response to one of his questions, claiming “not three in three thousand schoolgirls (14)” would have answered him so. There are three women hired to help prepare for the party, where three charade games are played and Jane is the third to see the “gypsy”. Rochester exclaims three times, and later Mason calls “help!” three times (20). While she tends Mason, Jane focuses on three of the apostles and hears three sounds at three long intervals. Rochester tells Mason “drink! (20)” three times, and he responds to the drink three minutes after consumption. Jane says “three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not found the key.” John Reed had returned to Gateshead three weeks before dying, and Mrs. Reed had been speechless for three days after her stroke. Rochester is afraid Jane will stay away three months. Back at Gateshead, British Birds is on the third shelf. Mrs. Reed has been hiding John Eyre’s letter for three years. Rochester returns to London three weeks before Jane’s return to Thornfield. The exclusive reference to three’s imparts the idea that Jane, whether she knows it or not, is part of a triangle – and in trouble.
As she gets deeper into trouble, the number reduces to a mere one-half. After she accepts Rochester’s proposal, lightning strikes the old chestnut tree and splits it in half; she has a long conversation with it in which it is clear that its cloven halves represent Jane and Rochester. More separations follow: Rochester is out of town; Jane is sorting ripe from unripe apples as she anxiously awaits him. On the eve of her wedding, her veil is torn in half by Rochester’s other, if not better, half – a scene reminiscent of the temple veil that God ripped in half at the moment of Christ’s death.
On the eve of Jane’s wedding, the significant number changes escalates to four. It has been four weeks since the day of engagement and it will be four days before she finds refuge at Moor House. She encounters four crossroads at Whitcross. Her supplications are rejected four times. St. John, who saves her, bears the name of the fourth apostle. Jane becomes part of a foursome at Moor House and on the fourth day she is well again. Four generations of Rivers have lived at Moor House. St. John attends a sick woman four miles away. At four o’clock Jane leaves on a four-day journey to seek Rochester, and it is at four o’clock the next day that he proposes again, at Ferndean. Four is the number of the elements, which are Jane’s as well: air (Eyre), earth (her progress at Lowood, Thornfield, Marsh End, and Ferndean), water (her freedom from the Reeds and River), and fire (her passion for Rochester “the Vulcan (37)”). The prolific use of the number four means that everything is finally coming together for Jane.
Similarly, the colors red and white indicate whether Jane is “hot or cold” in her quest for control. Red, the traditional symbol of life, love, passion, and aggression, indicates that Jane’s passions are being stoked to her advantage. Her frightening experience in the red-room served to expedite her departure from Gateshead. When she shows Rochester her drawings in the red drawing room, “the large fire was all red and clear” (14).” The big, red, hot fire in his bed is what brings them together, and puts her in charge – not only of that fire, but also of his fire. When he proposes he speaks of warming her on the moon with volcanic fire and Jane, upon returning to her room, checks to see if her fire is lit! It is firelight that leads her to Moor House, and the final fire at Thornfield that puts Jane in complete control. At Ferndean, before he knows she has returned, Rochester asks his servant for candles and a drink (fire and water) which Jane takes to him. There is a roaring fire right next to them. Red means that Jane is approaching her goal.
White, the traditional symbol for death and virginity, is a clear sign that Jane’s fires are being quenched. The bleak white scenes in Bewick’s History of British Birds are a metaphor for her own loveless childhood. White is a symbol of death, which takes Uncle John and Helen, and of marriage, which takes Miss Temple. The bedspreads at Thornfield, where the divisive guests will sleep, are all white. The drawing room where they snub her is white. Blanche, the competition, is white-skinned, white-named, white-dressed and unmistakably icy. Jane’s own white wedding dress seems ghostly to her and, indeed, the attempted wedding is what will separate her from Rochester. Bertha is wearing white when she rips Jane’s white veil. The priest who will cancel the wedding is wearing white. When the marriage is prevented, Jane thinks an avalanche of white words: pale, frost, white December storm, ice, drifts, snow, shroud, white on wintry Norway. When she arrives at Whitcross (White Cross) she must make a choice between four white roads. A white door is shut in her face in refusal of employment. White is not a good color for Jane, but as she tells St. John, “I am hot, and fire dissolves ice (33).”
Birds are a symbolic warning that Jane ought to watch her step. After her release from the red-room, Jane gets a treat on the bird-of-paradise plate she has always coveted, but its colors seem suddenly faded and lifeless. There are strange birds on the tapestries in Thornfield’s third floor rooms, a clue to the exotic origins of a hidden inmate. The picture Jane paints of the cormorant with its bracelet and gems is a parallel of her painting of Blanche, and the cormorant is biblically symbolic of “unholy carrion dwelling amongst desolation and despair” (Bolt). Bertha is described as having the voice of a wild condor, and of being a bird of prey. A nightingale sings nonstop on the night of Rochester’s proposal, a multifaceted symbol of both love and death. Thornfield is surrounded by crows, the traditional symbols of death and desolation. Crows, not doves, are circling the steeple on her first wedding day.
The moon, on the other hand, is an indication that Jane is on the right track. It streams through the window to illuminate Miss Temple on the night that she and Helen inspire Jane to academic achievement, and later rises over her in the garden as she first contemplates the spiritual ideas of heaven and hell. When Rochester proposes “the moon had not yet set, and we were all in shadow” (23), but it shows up the next night, right between the split in the chestnut tree. In fact, it is often shining through something else – bars of cloud, a narrow window, unveiled panes – and illuminating something important. Jane has a vision wherein the moon and then the virgin mother appear to her and urge her to leave Thornfield. When she does, she finds refuge with her cousins, named Diana, as in the goddess of the moon, and Mary, as in the mother of Christ. (Diana later marries a navy captain who follows the moon and stars, and Mary marries a clergyman who follows Christ).
The descriptions of Thornfield indicate the physical and psychological condition of Rochester, an old English name for “a rocky fortress” or “a camp on the rocks (BN).” Thornfield is a “square hall (Bronte 11);” Rochester’s shape “harmonized in squareness with his physiognomy (13)” and he had a “square, massive brow (17)” and a “square forehead (13).” Likewise, Thornfield’s proportions are “not vast, though considerable (11);” its master is of “middle height and considerable breadth of chest (12).” The Hall is “gloomy (12),” Rochester is also “gloomy (13)” with “grim features (13).” Thornfield has a “wide, hoary front (12);” its owner has a “pale, firm, massive front (17).” The mansion is “stately and imposing (11);” the man is “like marble (13)” and has “excellent materials in him (15).” The Hall has “battlements around the top (12);” its master has “granite-hewn features (12),” and “broad and jetty eyebrows (13)” – at Ferndean, Jane “should dare to drop a kiss on that brow of rock (37).” Like Rochester, Thornfield’s front chambers are grand, but the third story corridor is “narrow, long and dim (11).” This floor is “a home of the past – a shrine to memory (11),” where he keeps his mad wife. He is well aware of what he and Thornfield have in common: in a fit of self-condemnation he declares “that house is a mere dungeon (11).” Later, Jane dreams that she is carrying the burden of a child, the same child whose weight prevented her from catching up to her fiancé in a previous dream. This burden represents her childish insecurities, and it rolls away when she finds Thornfield – and soon after, Rochester -- reduced to a fragile, shell-like façade. Only when both man and manor are both reduced to ruins does she achieve her ultimate triumph.
Jane is not a malicious climber; in fact, she profits at least as much by circumstance as much as by her own will and efforts. Quite literally and without fail, when other people lie down, Jane stands taller. Uncle Reed lies dying; she gets a place in his home. The typhoid-infected students lie ill; she grows robust on their uneaten food. They lie in their graves and Lowood is forced to improve; she gains a good education and control over her livelihood. Rochester lies on the ground in agony; she is in a position of control at their very first meeting. He lies in a burning bed; she is in control of his very life. Mrs. Reed lies dying from a stroke; Jane discovers she has a living relation. John Eyre lies in a coffin in the West Indies; she gets his money. Bertha lies broken on the ground; Jane gets her man. Thornfield is in ruins, and Rochester maimed; she gets complete control. Bronte may have surmised that her readers would be more receptive to Jane receiving the rewards of providence than the spoils of aggressive conquests.
Despite this bow to Victorian standards of femininity, the author has clearly rendered Jane morally superior to her mate. Rochester has committed a variety of sins ranging from the unethical to the illegal, including loveless marriage, intent to commit bigamy, adultery, the fathering of an illegitimate child, and deception. Nevertheless, Jane chooses this flawed, passionate but controllable specimen over the godly, dispassionate but controlling St. John.
Between Gateshead and Moor House Jane has learned that either too much or too little passion can be fatal. The losses of her clergyman father and her spiritual friend Helen have taught her that self-sacrifice and repressed passion are associated with death. The demises of John Reed and Bertha Mason have taught her that selfish, unrestrained passion leads to the same end.
Bronte opens the novel with the entrance of John Reed and closes it with the departure of St. John Rivers, each John representing the opposite end of the passion spectrum. Reed, who never learned to temper his passions, is debauched. Rivers, who firmly represses them, is divine. Yet there is more to compare than to contrast: they share a bloodline, a first name, water-related surnames, an extremely controlling nature, and an inability to subdue Jane. Most importantly, they both die.
Jane does not wish to equal either the flawed or the dead. She wants to rise above them. She wants to win. Her story is about finding the middle ground, the balance between fire and ice, nature and dogma, debauchery and divinity. It is by the skillful management of passion that she achieves domination over every other character, and lives happily ever after.
WORKS CITED
Bolt, Peter. “Jane Eyre’s Three Paintings: Biblical Warnings and Greek
Legends.” The Victorian Web. Online. Available:
<http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/bronte/cbronte/bolt7.html>
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Collins, 1847.
Dunn, Richard J., Editor. Jane Eyre (A Norton Critical Edition). New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, Inc., 1987.
Critical Essay, West Valley College, 1999 | Nominated for Norton Prize, 2000
In 1847 England reacted with an indignant uproar to the publication of Jane Eyre, whose heroine was criticized for taking a feminist stance on gender roles, for implicitly criticizing Church doctrine, for disregarding class divisions, and for violating Victorian standards of personal morality. Modern scholars have continued this critical exploration of the sexual, religious, societal and moral boundaries tested by the author, Charlotte Bronte; the predominant scholarly focus is on the championship of women’s rights, particularly of those in the underclass. These issues, however, are simply the byproducts of a theme much grander in scope. Jane is not seeking equality. She does not want to change her world. She wants to rule it.
From a victimized girl, Jane metamorphoses into a woman completely in charge, not only of her own self and situations, but of everyone around her and their situations as well. This transformation stems from her evolving ability to control her passions: the more she controls her own self, the more she controls her circumstances and other people. By the last page she has reversed every role, achieving some sort of empowering advantage – financial, marital, emotional, sexual, familial, spiritual, or physical – over every remaining character in the book.
In the first chapter, Jane is out of control. Cruelly victimized by John Reed, she loses her temper and then spirals into near-madness in the eerie gloom of the red-room. As a result she loses even the little pleasantries in which she had once found solace. She is ostracized, segregated, forced to sleep in a closet, excluded from Christmas festivities and finally sent off to a prison-like boarding school. Her failure to control her passions has cost her dearly, and it is a mistake she will never make again.
She applies this hard-won lesson at Lowood, aided by the inspiring examples of Miss Temple and Helen Burns. Despite harsh conditions and the torments of the schoolmaster, her budding self-control is eventually rewarded with friendships, respect, an education, and independence. She is no longer the student, but the teacher.
Jane takes further charge of her self and moves to Thornfield, where she finds that her restrained passions exert a level of emotional control over the master of the house, Edward Rochester. This combination of power and passion excites her – she likes “vexing and soothing him by turns,” never “going too far,” but “on the extreme brink I liked to try my skill (Bronte 16).” When she visits Gateshead, she no longer feels controlled by her old nemeses, and in fact finds herself in command of Mrs. Reed’s very conscience. Returning to Thornfield, she learns that she has won Mr. Rochester’s heart, and she teases him for the entire engagement. Jane is no longer the tormented, but the tormentor.
In the elation of love and victory, her meticulously managed passions break their bonds and soar to new heights (dipping down only when she feels that Rochester is trying to regain the upper hand by his choice of gifts), but they are slammed back to earth when she learns of his deceit. By releasing her passions Jane has once again lost control of her self, of her circumstances, and of others. She must, from this low point, begin her struggle for power all over again.
Despairing, she depletes her remaining self-control to escape her situation, and relinquishes her passion to God. Soon she is starving, and realizes she must renew at least some of her passion to survive. It is only after she follows the fire (figuratively and literally) to Moor House that she regains and exceeds the respect, education and independence that she struggled for in the beginning. She learns new languages, heads her own school, lives on her own and becomes a financial benefactress to her cousins. Jane is no longer the saved, but the savior.
She also finds, as before, that she has a certain degree of control over the master of the house, but recognizes that St. John is attracted to the challenge of subduing her already restrained passions, and of using her for his own purposes. She rejects his proposal and follows her heart back to Rochester.
At Ferndean Jane achieves her ultimate power shift, attaining complete and utter control of herself, her destiny and her man. In Edward (“wealthy guardian”) Rochester’s first condescending proposal he had described Jane as “poor and obscure, and small and plain (23).” Now his demeaning words best describe his own state. Jane has reversed every one of her previous roles. She is no longer the ward but the guardian, no longer the commoner but the lady, no longer the governess but the stepmother, no longer the subordinate but the employer. She is in complete control.
Jane Eyre is renowned for its intricate symbolism, but it is in the application of five particular “marker” symbols that the reader tracks the path of Jane’s progress. Numbers, colors (red and white), the moon, birds, and Thornfield Hall itself, enable us to see, before Jane and perhaps even before Bronte, the topography of the territory that Jane is treading.
The prevalent use of certain numbers reveals Jane’s physical and psychological circumstances. At Gateshead, the number is one. She is alone in the window seat, alone in the red-room, alone in the closet, alone in the nursery. She looks at pictures of isolated regions, a solitary bird, a single rock in the ocean, a stranded boat. One robin is her only friend. She listens to Bessie sing a prophetic ballad of an orphaned child. She departs Gateshead in the first month of the year. The number one represents Jane’s physical and psychological isolation, the base from which she begins her struggle upward.
The morning that she departs for Lowood, the recurring number becomes one-half. She has been awake for a half hour; she eats half her breakfast; she is leaving at half day at the half month by a half-moon on a half-hundred mile journey that will take her half-way to Thornfield. “Thus was I severed from Bessie and Gateshead: thus whirled away to unknown…regions (5),” says Jane. She feels torn asunder, figuratively cut in half.
Lowood is described in numerous twos, and in numbers divisible by two. There are two windows, two tables at two ends of the room, two fireplaces, two candles, two girls per bed, two girls per entry, two girls per exit, two rows of seats, two globes, two serving vessels, two wings of the building, eighty classmates, six girls per basin, four semicircles, and twenty adult girls in the class. Jane makes her first two friends here. The symmetry and divisibility of these quantities represents the severely structured, divisive qualities of her life at Lowood..
At Thornfield the significant number is three. Not only is the Hall three stories high, but the third floor is Jane’s favorite and (as we will later discover) the residence of the third point of a passionate triangle.
The night Jane meets Rochester she has left the house at three o’clock and has been at Thornfield three months. She spies three figures on the trail (Rochester, his horse and dog) and describes Rochester’s “three grim features (5)” of chin, mouth and jaw. In the dining room he selects three significant pictures from her portfolio. He enjoys her response to one of his questions, claiming “not three in three thousand schoolgirls (14)” would have answered him so. There are three women hired to help prepare for the party, where three charade games are played and Jane is the third to see the “gypsy”. Rochester exclaims three times, and later Mason calls “help!” three times (20). While she tends Mason, Jane focuses on three of the apostles and hears three sounds at three long intervals. Rochester tells Mason “drink! (20)” three times, and he responds to the drink three minutes after consumption. Jane says “three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not found the key.” John Reed had returned to Gateshead three weeks before dying, and Mrs. Reed had been speechless for three days after her stroke. Rochester is afraid Jane will stay away three months. Back at Gateshead, British Birds is on the third shelf. Mrs. Reed has been hiding John Eyre’s letter for three years. Rochester returns to London three weeks before Jane’s return to Thornfield. The exclusive reference to three’s imparts the idea that Jane, whether she knows it or not, is part of a triangle – and in trouble.
As she gets deeper into trouble, the number reduces to a mere one-half. After she accepts Rochester’s proposal, lightning strikes the old chestnut tree and splits it in half; she has a long conversation with it in which it is clear that its cloven halves represent Jane and Rochester. More separations follow: Rochester is out of town; Jane is sorting ripe from unripe apples as she anxiously awaits him. On the eve of her wedding, her veil is torn in half by Rochester’s other, if not better, half – a scene reminiscent of the temple veil that God ripped in half at the moment of Christ’s death.
On the eve of Jane’s wedding, the significant number changes escalates to four. It has been four weeks since the day of engagement and it will be four days before she finds refuge at Moor House. She encounters four crossroads at Whitcross. Her supplications are rejected four times. St. John, who saves her, bears the name of the fourth apostle. Jane becomes part of a foursome at Moor House and on the fourth day she is well again. Four generations of Rivers have lived at Moor House. St. John attends a sick woman four miles away. At four o’clock Jane leaves on a four-day journey to seek Rochester, and it is at four o’clock the next day that he proposes again, at Ferndean. Four is the number of the elements, which are Jane’s as well: air (Eyre), earth (her progress at Lowood, Thornfield, Marsh End, and Ferndean), water (her freedom from the Reeds and River), and fire (her passion for Rochester “the Vulcan (37)”). The prolific use of the number four means that everything is finally coming together for Jane.
Similarly, the colors red and white indicate whether Jane is “hot or cold” in her quest for control. Red, the traditional symbol of life, love, passion, and aggression, indicates that Jane’s passions are being stoked to her advantage. Her frightening experience in the red-room served to expedite her departure from Gateshead. When she shows Rochester her drawings in the red drawing room, “the large fire was all red and clear” (14).” The big, red, hot fire in his bed is what brings them together, and puts her in charge – not only of that fire, but also of his fire. When he proposes he speaks of warming her on the moon with volcanic fire and Jane, upon returning to her room, checks to see if her fire is lit! It is firelight that leads her to Moor House, and the final fire at Thornfield that puts Jane in complete control. At Ferndean, before he knows she has returned, Rochester asks his servant for candles and a drink (fire and water) which Jane takes to him. There is a roaring fire right next to them. Red means that Jane is approaching her goal.
White, the traditional symbol for death and virginity, is a clear sign that Jane’s fires are being quenched. The bleak white scenes in Bewick’s History of British Birds are a metaphor for her own loveless childhood. White is a symbol of death, which takes Uncle John and Helen, and of marriage, which takes Miss Temple. The bedspreads at Thornfield, where the divisive guests will sleep, are all white. The drawing room where they snub her is white. Blanche, the competition, is white-skinned, white-named, white-dressed and unmistakably icy. Jane’s own white wedding dress seems ghostly to her and, indeed, the attempted wedding is what will separate her from Rochester. Bertha is wearing white when she rips Jane’s white veil. The priest who will cancel the wedding is wearing white. When the marriage is prevented, Jane thinks an avalanche of white words: pale, frost, white December storm, ice, drifts, snow, shroud, white on wintry Norway. When she arrives at Whitcross (White Cross) she must make a choice between four white roads. A white door is shut in her face in refusal of employment. White is not a good color for Jane, but as she tells St. John, “I am hot, and fire dissolves ice (33).”
Birds are a symbolic warning that Jane ought to watch her step. After her release from the red-room, Jane gets a treat on the bird-of-paradise plate she has always coveted, but its colors seem suddenly faded and lifeless. There are strange birds on the tapestries in Thornfield’s third floor rooms, a clue to the exotic origins of a hidden inmate. The picture Jane paints of the cormorant with its bracelet and gems is a parallel of her painting of Blanche, and the cormorant is biblically symbolic of “unholy carrion dwelling amongst desolation and despair” (Bolt). Bertha is described as having the voice of a wild condor, and of being a bird of prey. A nightingale sings nonstop on the night of Rochester’s proposal, a multifaceted symbol of both love and death. Thornfield is surrounded by crows, the traditional symbols of death and desolation. Crows, not doves, are circling the steeple on her first wedding day.
The moon, on the other hand, is an indication that Jane is on the right track. It streams through the window to illuminate Miss Temple on the night that she and Helen inspire Jane to academic achievement, and later rises over her in the garden as she first contemplates the spiritual ideas of heaven and hell. When Rochester proposes “the moon had not yet set, and we were all in shadow” (23), but it shows up the next night, right between the split in the chestnut tree. In fact, it is often shining through something else – bars of cloud, a narrow window, unveiled panes – and illuminating something important. Jane has a vision wherein the moon and then the virgin mother appear to her and urge her to leave Thornfield. When she does, she finds refuge with her cousins, named Diana, as in the goddess of the moon, and Mary, as in the mother of Christ. (Diana later marries a navy captain who follows the moon and stars, and Mary marries a clergyman who follows Christ).
The descriptions of Thornfield indicate the physical and psychological condition of Rochester, an old English name for “a rocky fortress” or “a camp on the rocks (BN).” Thornfield is a “square hall (Bronte 11);” Rochester’s shape “harmonized in squareness with his physiognomy (13)” and he had a “square, massive brow (17)” and a “square forehead (13).” Likewise, Thornfield’s proportions are “not vast, though considerable (11);” its master is of “middle height and considerable breadth of chest (12).” The Hall is “gloomy (12),” Rochester is also “gloomy (13)” with “grim features (13).” Thornfield has a “wide, hoary front (12);” its owner has a “pale, firm, massive front (17).” The mansion is “stately and imposing (11);” the man is “like marble (13)” and has “excellent materials in him (15).” The Hall has “battlements around the top (12);” its master has “granite-hewn features (12),” and “broad and jetty eyebrows (13)” – at Ferndean, Jane “should dare to drop a kiss on that brow of rock (37).” Like Rochester, Thornfield’s front chambers are grand, but the third story corridor is “narrow, long and dim (11).” This floor is “a home of the past – a shrine to memory (11),” where he keeps his mad wife. He is well aware of what he and Thornfield have in common: in a fit of self-condemnation he declares “that house is a mere dungeon (11).” Later, Jane dreams that she is carrying the burden of a child, the same child whose weight prevented her from catching up to her fiancé in a previous dream. This burden represents her childish insecurities, and it rolls away when she finds Thornfield – and soon after, Rochester -- reduced to a fragile, shell-like façade. Only when both man and manor are both reduced to ruins does she achieve her ultimate triumph.
Jane is not a malicious climber; in fact, she profits at least as much by circumstance as much as by her own will and efforts. Quite literally and without fail, when other people lie down, Jane stands taller. Uncle Reed lies dying; she gets a place in his home. The typhoid-infected students lie ill; she grows robust on their uneaten food. They lie in their graves and Lowood is forced to improve; she gains a good education and control over her livelihood. Rochester lies on the ground in agony; she is in a position of control at their very first meeting. He lies in a burning bed; she is in control of his very life. Mrs. Reed lies dying from a stroke; Jane discovers she has a living relation. John Eyre lies in a coffin in the West Indies; she gets his money. Bertha lies broken on the ground; Jane gets her man. Thornfield is in ruins, and Rochester maimed; she gets complete control. Bronte may have surmised that her readers would be more receptive to Jane receiving the rewards of providence than the spoils of aggressive conquests.
Despite this bow to Victorian standards of femininity, the author has clearly rendered Jane morally superior to her mate. Rochester has committed a variety of sins ranging from the unethical to the illegal, including loveless marriage, intent to commit bigamy, adultery, the fathering of an illegitimate child, and deception. Nevertheless, Jane chooses this flawed, passionate but controllable specimen over the godly, dispassionate but controlling St. John.
Between Gateshead and Moor House Jane has learned that either too much or too little passion can be fatal. The losses of her clergyman father and her spiritual friend Helen have taught her that self-sacrifice and repressed passion are associated with death. The demises of John Reed and Bertha Mason have taught her that selfish, unrestrained passion leads to the same end.
Bronte opens the novel with the entrance of John Reed and closes it with the departure of St. John Rivers, each John representing the opposite end of the passion spectrum. Reed, who never learned to temper his passions, is debauched. Rivers, who firmly represses them, is divine. Yet there is more to compare than to contrast: they share a bloodline, a first name, water-related surnames, an extremely controlling nature, and an inability to subdue Jane. Most importantly, they both die.
Jane does not wish to equal either the flawed or the dead. She wants to rise above them. She wants to win. Her story is about finding the middle ground, the balance between fire and ice, nature and dogma, debauchery and divinity. It is by the skillful management of passion that she achieves domination over every other character, and lives happily ever after.
WORKS CITED
Bolt, Peter. “Jane Eyre’s Three Paintings: Biblical Warnings and Greek
Legends.” The Victorian Web. Online. Available:
<http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/bronte/cbronte/bolt7.html>
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Collins, 1847.
Dunn, Richard J., Editor. Jane Eyre (A Norton Critical Edition). New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, Inc., 1987.