Jane Eyre by Charlotte

Chapter 12

140 ‘solemn doctrines about the angelic nature of children’ – Whereas Evangelicalism tended to emphasise the impact of original sin on the child, the Romantic movement had tendencies to go to the opposite extreme, regarding children as paragons of nature unsullied by the vices of adulthood. Jane’s ‘ par parenthése ’ at the beginning of this paragraph, is meant to signal that she is writing is an ironically elaborate style, as a contrast to her blunt, ‘I am merely telling the truth’ which follows. The use of French, however, is perhaps not particularly elegant in stylistic terms.

140 ‘I climbed the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim sky-line — that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit’ – Jane has moved from the confinement of Lowood to Thornfield, but she still desires a richer life, seen metaphorically here as one encompassing an extensive natural ‘prospect’. This is cleverly personalised, since Jane has talked of Mrs Fairfax and Adèle in her previous paragraphs, so the reader senses it is someone as much as something that Jane is searching for. Upon a second or subsequent reading, Jane’s relative confinement may recall Bertha’s imprisonment. Jane has passed her cell to reach the leads.

141 ‘I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold.’ – These lines foreshadow the entrance of Rochester. Applied to him, they make an interesting comment on the novels ideas on ‘goodness’, particularly when Rochester is compared to the more conventionally ‘good’ Rivers.

141 ‘the restlessness was in my nature’ – Jane senses her confinement and continually desires release. Ironically, she thinks such things as she is pacing ‘the corridor of the third storey, backwards and forwards.’ She feels ‘safe’ here, but as well as suggesting the confinement of Bertha Rochester, Brontë is also hinting to the reader that this corridor contains a danger to her future prospects that Jane will find impossible to overcome.

141 ‘quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence’ – Jane’s yearnings are clearly established as romantic and passionate ones, not more spiritual yearnings associated positively with Helen Burns and negatively with Rivers.