Jane Eyre by Charlotte

Chapter 2

44 ‘I resisted all the way; a new thing for me…’ – this emphasises the idea that Jane’s resistance to the oppression associated with John Reed is a crucial turning point in her early life. The final ‘turning point’ of the novel will be her resistance to St John Rivers, who is symbolically paralleled with John Reed by the novel’s plot.

44 ‘…or rather out of myself, as the French would say’ – the meaning refers simply to a childish tantrum, but Brontë’s use of the expression is meant to signal Jane’s emergence from her own psychological cocoon.

44 ‘Miss Abbott, lend me your garters’ – the threat of being physically bound to the chair is interesting. From this point on in the book, Jane will not be struck, nor will she be bound, nevertheless the psychological bonds that are placed upon her to restrain her spirit are much stronger than a pair of garters. Bessie chooses to apply mental restraints in place of the physical ones: ‘You ought to be aware, miss, that you are under obligations to Mrs Reed: she keeps you: if she were to turn you off you would have to go to the poorhouse.’

44 ‘But it was always in her’ – Miss Abbott’s pessimistic view of Jane is associated with Brontë’s characteristically negative portrayal of Evangelical Christianity. Rather than seeing children as being essentially good by nature, character’s like Miss Abbott see the young as more than likely to turn out bad (a consequence of an extreme Calvinist understanding of the doctrine of Original Sin). On very the next page, Miss Abbott invokes an avenging deity who will cause little children to suffer the pains of hell fire – ‘God will punish her: He might strike her dead in the midst of her tantrums, and then where would she go?’

45 ‘something bad might be permitted to come down the chimney and fetch you away.’ – Such scare stories are comical from an adult perspective, but they can terrify an impressionable child like Jane. She will be haunted by such ‘gothic’ terrors concerning death for much of her life, until she finally conquers them when faced with the genuine horrors she encounters at Thornfield. As here, they frequently symbolise her oppression by others.