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Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Read volume 2, chapter 8, from the beginning to ‘his mind was
unconscious and quiet.’ How is language used in this passage to
convey state of mind? Then consider briefly how this passage relates
to the novel as a whole.
The passage uses a device that recurs throughout Jane Eyre. George Henry
Lewes noted it as Brontë’s ‘strange power of subjective representation’1
and Virginia Woolf admired the way Brontë ‘calls in nature to describe a
state of mind which could not otherwise be expressed’2. This extract
illustrates how Brontë ‘seized those aspects of the earth which were most
akin to what [she] imputed to [her] characters’. Those ‘lovely spaces of
summer weather [were] not ornaments applied to decorate a dull page or
display the writer’s powers of observation – they carry on the emotion and
light up the meaning of the book’3. This effect of externalising the internal,
what Ruskin called the pathetic fallacy, is achieved through word choice,
syntax and the interplay of generic expectations.
The passage describes a bucolic setting; ‘skies so pure’, ‘suns so radiant’,
in a ‘splendid’ Midsummer. Literary conventions associated with romantic
poetry are used; word inversion (‘wave-girt’, ‘rest them’), literary
terminology (‘cliffs of Albion’, ‘gloaming’) and the use of aliterative
phrasings, ‘panting plain and scorched summit’ and ‘furnace flame’. It
includes a direct quotation from Campbell’s Romantic poem The Turkish
1
2
3
Course Reader: Realisms, Ch4 p89
Course Reader: Realisms, Ch4 p89
(ibid)
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Lady. Brontës prose has the hallmark of Wordsworth and Coleridge in this
figurative celebration of the individual imagination which verges
occassionally on the sublime, ‘the light of red jewel… extending high and
wide, soft and still softer, over half heaven’. Non-realist modes such as
this manage to operate within a broadly realist framework and rather than
disrupt the fiction they enhance it.
Throughout all the descriptive paragraphs there is a vivid appeal to the
senses: the odour of cigar smoke mingles with ‘Sweet-briar and
southernwood, jasmine, pink, and rose’; green fields and white roads
contrast with ‘sombre skies’ with their ‘red jewel’; the sound of a
‘nightingale warbling’ and the ‘crackle of the pebbly gravel’ combine to
create a sensual feast that is emblematic of Jane’s heightened senses.
There are luxuriant descriptions of fruit that Rochester admires and the
scent of the flowers he inhales. This atmosphere of fertility and fruition
iterates Jane’s feelings of longing and desire. The concluding line of the
previous chapter had told us, ‘never had [Jane] loved him so well’. This
chapter opens by manifesting Jane’s psychological and emotional state
through metaphor and symbol.
Reference to biblical typology is made explicit in the fourth paragraph and
the paradisiacal characteristics of this orchard garden, described by
Rochester as ‘here… all is real, sweet and pure’4, might alert the reader to a
prospective Fall. Despite her embarrassed attempts to avoid his company,
4
Jane Eyre, Oxford World’s Classics p215
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Rochester’s uncanny appearance in fragrance, shadow or person bewilders
and mystifies Jane; shades of the Gothic enter Eden. There is something of
the Gothic about the ‘great moth’ that so fascinates Rochester. It
prefigures Bertha’s appearance, the other ‘night-rover’ at Thornfield.
Throughout Jane Eyre there is recurrent use of the subjective
representation of Nature to personify Jane’s interior landscape. The
seasonal cycle of Nature frequently correlates to the cycle of Jane’s
fortunes. As the typhus epidemic at Lowood recedes ‘bright, serene May’
evinces traces of hope which are metaphorically linked to descriptions of
hills ‘rich in verdure’ and ‘sparkling eddies’. In the passage from V.II,
C.VIII we sense Jane’s emotions parallel the Midsummer topography and
climate which generates a harmony between the literal world and the
metaphoric. At other times seasonal imagery contrasts with the literal to
dramatise emotions. For example, after the aborted marriage ceremony
and the disclosure of Bertha Mason, ‘A Christmas frost had come at
midsummer’, and Jane becomes ‘a cold, solitary girl again’. The ‘Italian
days’ become sunk under ‘a frozen shroud…spread, waste, wild, and white
as pine-forests in wintry Norway’. The discord between the literal and the
figurative is a more obviously literary device. It is the subtle interweaving
of description and psychology, as illustrated in this passage, that
characterises Bronte’s distinctive prose style within a realist text.
Both sun and moon eventually take their place together in the midsummer
sky, ‘while sunset is thus at meeting with moonrise’, and it symbolically
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connotes an equilibrium which may be between the two recurring extremes
of Jane’s temperament, rage and self-control, it may have gender
associations of sun (male) and moon (female) in harmony. The moon
appears at important narrative moments; in the red room, Jane’s departure
for Lowood, it is associated with Helen Burns, on Jane first seeing
Rochester, in Jane’s watercolours (recalling Bewick’s pictured thoughts),
on hearing Bertha’s cry, the proposal, in the dream that tells Jane to leave
Thornfield, in the confrontation with St John and in Rochester’s dream of
Jane after the conflagration at Thornfield. The moon accompanies Jane’s
journey through the novel5 and may be associated with the cycles of Jane’s
narrative; calm followed by crisis and recurrent themes including the
search for divine reassurance, the threat of lunacy and the search for a
home.
Sexual symbolism occurs throughout the passage: the cigar smoke; the ripe
fruit; blooming Nature ‘the dew-beads on their petals’, the fall of ‘honeydew’ and the ‘giant horse-chestnut’. This evokes Jane’s erotic feelings for
Rochester.
The narrative voice in the extract moves subtly through a sequence of
tenses and between: subjective description - ‘A splendid Midsummer’; plot
narration - ‘Adele, weary…had gone to bed’; thought quotation – ‘“I can
slip away unnoticed’”; dialogue – ‘“Look at his wings”’; and direct address
to the reader, ‘It is one of my faults…’, all within the framework of first
5
There are 65 references to the moon in Jane Eyre
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person narrative. This complex shifting of the readers position creates a
vitality to the writing that animates the passage.
The major generic shift occurs in V.II, C.XI with the direct invocation of
the Gothic on the discovery of Bertha Mason in the attic, but the generic
complexity of this hybrid novel recurs by the end of C.VIII when the
pastoral bliss so far described is riven by the melodramatic storm and the
symbolic splitting of the horse-chestnut tree.
The repetition and contrast of figurative imagery throughout Jane Eyre and
Brontë’s personification of Nature as illustrated in this passage makes for
rich and resonant readings of a schematic and complex text.
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Bibliography
Botting, Fred. 1996. The New Critical Idiom : Gothic (New Critical Idiom),
London, Routledge.
Brontë, Charlotte. [1847] 2000. Jane Eyre, ed. by Margaret Smith, with an
introduction and revised notes by Sally Shuttleworth, Oxford World’s
Classics, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Gilbert, S.M. & Gubar S. 2000 The Madwoman in the Attic, London, Yale
University Press.
Hogle, Jerrold E ed. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction
(Cambridge Companions to Literature), Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press.
OU Team. 2000 The Nineteenth Century Novel: Realisms, ed. by Delia da
Sousa Correa, London, Routledge/Open University
OU Team. 2000 The Nineteenth Century Novel: A Critical Reader, ed. by
Stephen Regan, London, Routledge/Open University
Showalter, E. 2003 A Literature of Their Own: from Charlotte Bronte to
Doris Lessing London, Virago
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