BOOK
#59

Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Bronte





Review by Edward Tanguay
March 4, 1997

The perfect novel about maturing: a child who is treated cruelly holds herself together and learns to steer her life forward with a driving conscience that keeps her life within personally felt moral bounds. I found Jane as a child to be quite adult-like: she battles it out conversationally with Mrs. Reed on an adult level right from the beginning of the book. The hardship and the overcoming of this hardship in her childhood makes her extreme need for moral correctness believable. For instance, knowing her righteous stubborness as a child, we can believe that she would later leave Rochester altogether rather than living a life of love and luxury simply by overlooking a legal technicality concerning his previous marriage to a mad woman. Her childhood and her adult life are harmonious which gives the reader the sense of a complete and believable character.

Actually, well into this book I was afraid it was going to be another one of those English countryside, woman-gets-married novels. I was reminded of a friend's comment a few years back to "avoid the Brontes like the plague." But of course there is a little more than courting going on here. For example, if you compare Jane with one of Jane Austen's young women coming into society, you have a bit more adventure, roughness, and connection to nature. I don't think a Jane Austen character would wander around the forest, sleeping without cover in the wilds of the night to prove a moral point. Jane Eyre can get dirt under her fingernails--that's the difference. You also get more emotion in Jane Eyre, you feel with her, deep hate (for Mrs. Reed), religious conviction (with St. John), and eternal love (for Rochester). Austen polishes her characters much more so that they are "proper and presentable." Jane's whole connection to nature made her fascinating. Notice how the reader has a sense of what season it is during the book by the plethora of "nature" comments that the author gives. She trusts the simplicity and rhythms of nature. This adds to the natural demeanor that she already has in the story. A nice effect.

I feel the whole sleeping out in the forest thing was very important to this book. Jane is the type of character that needs to "run to the end of some spectrum" before she matures. She will either die doing it or become the person she wants to be. You get a sense of risk and iron-metal conscience which drives her to this. I think her bout with the forest has many purification symbols in it, and would be worth analyzing. She returns a larger person, not unlike Jesus returned a larger person from the desert (although for different reasons).

The Gothic overtones were nice: the haunted mansion with a hidden room and a dark secret. Also the image of the mad woman screaming on the burning roof and then plummeting to her death "ay, dead as the stones on which her brains and blood were scattered" adds to the slight dark corner of this book (didn't we see this before in Ivanhoe?). It's a minor element but an important one for the book's balance.

I would recommend this book to all young teenagers because of the examples of development of both characters: Jane and Mr. Rochester. Jane has an iron conscience which almost possesses her but she doesn't go over the edge and marry St. John (but she almost does it, which keep her life interesting . . . a fine balance.) And Mr. Rochester has an honesty and a good-naturedness which penetrates his whole life, yet his roughness and violence is smoothed out in the end without tainting his humor and sense of the eternal. One of most "honest" displays of character that I have read was the call-off-the-wedding scene with Mr. Rochester and the ensuing grand revealing of the "hag" and the comparison of his mad wife and the beautiful little flower he wants to marry. This scene is priceless in literature and tells us 95% of what we need to know about Mr. Rochester:

In creating the Jane-Rochester relationship, Charlotte Bronte produced a new animal. The give and take in their relationship created by their conflicting dual pigheadedness and eternal love for each other then intensified by their fondness for light conversation produced a new archetype of relationship. One can speak of a Jane-Rochester relationship now and mean something quite distinct (isn't this what literature is for?). Jane's conscience and restlessness combined with Rochester's bluntness and commandeering tones ("It would please me now to draw you out--to learn more of you--therefore speak.") prevent their love from becoming over-sentimental. I was glad to read that after the (hard-to-swallow) telepathic message discovery, that Jane did not feel the unimpressive need to proclaim that she, indeed, had been at the receiving end of the psychic SOS message. That she kept the little secret to herself gave her character. Also, the fact that the control of the relationship switches from Jane (the rescuer) to Rochester (the master) back to Jane (leading and caring for the blind and crippled man) gave depth to their relationship.

The book was nicely broken up into five sections: 

In each section, you enter a new geographic world with a new set of characters. This keeps the book fresh.

The forshadowing was nice. Notice Jane's dream of the mansion in which she finds "Thornfield hall ruined and desolate" and then it is realized. Also, the fact that her first contact with Rochester is lending her shoulder to help him, which she eventually does for the rest of his life.

I also liked Brontes constant stream of mysteries in this book. You continually are given a new mystery which pulls you along:  the servants saying to each other "oh, doesn't she know?" and the constant happenings at night in the mansion, as well as new characters for which hints are laid that they might be related to Jane, for instance, Mary, Diana, and St. John Rivers.

It took me a long time to really understand St. John, yet when I understood at the end that his religious conviction was like a steel-trap, I could understand his bizarre actions: staring into space, not answering Jane, his meloncholiness, his somewhat cryptic language. He simply had his mind elsewhere, which is probably why he ended up in India.

In fact, I am glad the book ended with the focus on the character of St. John instead of with Jane or Rochester, as it hints to us that the importance of the book is not about finding the right person, falling in love, and living happily ever after. The theme of this book is about following your conscience. In this regard, Jane and St. John both did the same thing in this story: They both had strong, driving consciences; they both were tempted but pursued their course; and they both found a satisfying life in the end. This book is not about developing a relationship with a romantic partner, but about developing a relationship and learning to follow and live in tune with your own moral conscience.

Edward Tanguay


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