Jane Eyre by Charlotte

Chapter 27

325 ‘I wanted to be weak that I might avoid the awful passage of further suffering I saw laid out for me’ – Jane’s ordeal is immediately seen in terms of a journey through a place of suffering, perhaps analogous to Christian’s passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death in The Pilgrim’s Progress .

325 ‘Conscience, turned tyrant, held Passion by the throat, told her tauntingly, she had yet but dipped her dainty foot in the slough, and swore that with that arm of iron he would thrust her down to unsounded depths of agony’ – The Pilgrim’s Progress is, again, an obvious inspiration here, both in the use of imagined allegorical characters, and also in the use of the word ‘slough’, which inevitably suggests Bunyan’s famous ‘Slough of Despond’. In the idea of ‘depths’, the imagery also echoes the idea of drowning, used throughout the novel by Brontë and an important feature of the end of Chapter 26.

325 ‘you shall yourself pluck out your right eye; yourself cut off your right hand’ – Jane continues to see her coming ordeal most naturally in Biblical terms, and chooses powerful verses from the gospels to express her feelings: ‘And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell’ (Mt 5:29-30). Mentioning this now, in connection with Jane’s separation from Rochester and subsequent exile, unites her experience at this point in the novel with Rochester’s own later ordeal by fire: he will lose in actuality the use of one hand and one eye as a result of the injuries he suffers when Thornfield burns to the ground.

325 ‘I stumbled over an obstacle’ – Brontë continues her biblical analogies. The idea of a ‘stumbling block’ or a ‘stumbling stone’ is frequent in the Old and New Testaments, a representative example being, ‘When a righteous man doth turn from his righteousness, and commit iniquity…I lay a stumbling-block before him’ (Ezek 3:10).