Jane Eyre by Charlotte

Pilgrim’s Progress is far from being the only paradigm that informs Jane Eyre. Equally important is the genre of gothic, and the Byronic superstructure that this can be reasonably paired with, because both genres represent textual archetypes derived from the Romantic movement, and, therefore, at odds, by and large, with Bunyan’s seventeenth century Puritan vision. In these strata of the novel, Rochester, Jane’s true love, rather than Rivers, is brought into focus, but more important even than this, the gothic genre allows an impressively convincing psychological portrait to be drawn of Jane herself.

Gothic melodrama, for example, is used intermittently to highlight a key feature of Jane’s character – her vulnerability and sensitivity to the irrational and the consequent strength she acquires through being forced to face her fears. The childhood trauma of the red-room both damages Jane and releases her. The ordeal of imprisonment is too much for the young Jane, who collapses, and it directly leads to her angry exchange with Mrs Reed and her subsequent ‘escape’ to Lowood. The pattern established here will be repeated several times in the novel: after that initial symbolic experience, her terror of confinement and constraint (and its constant association for her with death) is precisely what imbues her with her remarkable spirit and energy, allowing her to ‘conquer’, in succession, Mrs Reed, the Reverend Brocklehurst, Rochester (when he proposes that she become his mistress) and finally Rivers.

Her experience in the red-room focuses her childhood terrors upon the colour red itself (most naturally associated with blood), and on the supernatural invasion of her solitude by a ghostly light which ‘gleamed on the wall…glided up to the ceiling and quivered over my head’ (Chapter 2, 48-9). This incident foreshadows Jane’s various encounters with the insane Bertha Mason, who comes to represent those hidden terrors that lurk in the darkest corners of Jane’s psyche. Bertha leaves a mysterious candle outside Jane’s room on the night she first attempts to burn Rochester to death. When she later injures her brother, Jane is asked to stay with him while Rochester fetches a doctor, and her experience – confined in a room with a silent and wounded man – is implicitly compared to her childhood trauma:

I experienced a strange feeling as the key grated in the lock,…Here then I was in the third storey, fastened into one of its mystic cells; night around me;…I must dip my hand again and again in the basin of blood and water, and wipe away the trickling gore. I must see the light of the unsnuffed candle wane on my employment; the shadows darken on the wrought, antique tapestry round me, and grow black under the hangings of the vast old bed, and quiver strangely over the doors of a great cabinet opposite— (Chapter 20, p239)

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