Jane Eyre by Charlotte

141 ‘Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel’ – The passage which follows generalises Jane’s feelings of confinement to include all of her sex, and is typical of the feminism just beginning to dawn in the Victorian period. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women had been published in 1792.

141 ‘the same low slow ha! ha!’ – Bertha’s laugh is ironic, since her existence will come to puncture all of Jane’s dreams. Her presence also represents the confinement of a woman under far more extreme circumstances than those Jane is considering.

142 ‘Sophie…was not of a descriptive or narrative turn’ – Brontë is emphasising the flatness of all the characters surrounding Jane to prepare for the advent of Rochester. This even applies to a young woman from a foreign country.

142 ‘and given her her best wax doll…to play with’ – Adèle is frequently associated with dolls, implying her own essential nature as a pretty, entertaining plaything for some future husband. Jane does not particularly discourage her in this, and the implication is presumably that while some women (like Jane) are worthy of a life of true depth and awareness, there are plenty of women, like Adèle and her mother, who are not.

142 ‘a few coral treasures…the white worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path’ – It is possibly interesting that Jane’s description of her solitary winter walk includes images that imply the sea. She was earlier drawn to the wild, lonely seascapes of Bewick’s British Birds .

143 ‘On the hill-top above me sat the rising moon’ – and the sun has just set. This balance of female and male symbols prepares the reader for the advent of Rochester. Nearly all of the most significant moments in Jane’s life are associated with the moon.

143 ‘a positive tramp, tramp, a metallic clatter, which effaced the soft wave-wanderings’ – The male and the female are seen here in terms of symbolic sounds. Perhaps Brontë remembered the similarly dramatic advent of Sir Lancelot on his horse in Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott .

143 ‘as, in a picture, the solid mass of a crag, or the rough boles of a great oak, drawn in dark and strong on the foreground, efface the aerial distance of azure hill, sunny horizon, and blended clouds where tint melts into tint.’ – Finally, the symbolic contrast of male and female is made visually.