Jane Eyre by Charlotte

Jane’s endurance of this adult ordeal corrects her collapse under psychological pressure as a young child – she endures, out of her remarkable strength of character, and because of her love and loyalty to Rochester. The urge to fly and escape, however, is still strong in her, and she dreams finally of the red-room during the night she prepares to flee from Thornfield:

I dreamt I lay in the red-room at Gateshead; that the night was dark, and my mind impressed with strange fears. The light that long ago had struck me into syncope, recalled in this vision, seemed glidingly to mount the wall, and tremblingly to pause in the centre of the obscured ceiling. (Chapter 27, 346)

It is at this moment of supreme struggle that a supernatural voice (that of Jane’s dead mother) intervenes with the instruction to ‘Flee temptation,’ which Jane obeys. On the next occasion that Jane is instructed in this way, it is Rochester himself who calls, at the moment when Jane is threatened by the constraining of her nature and the threat of early death contained in the temptation of St John Rivers’ offer of marriage. These direct supernatural interventions are made crucial to the plot – indeed, to an extent, they inform it. The ‘gothic’ notion of Jane’s mother looking after her beyond the grave, for example (which is foreshadowed in the original ‘red-room’ incident by Jane’s belief in Mr Reed as a ghostly protector), allows the reader to assume a supernatural element in her chance discovery of her remaining family. Both Jane’s mother and Mr Reed (who it should be remembered is Jane’s mother’s brother) are associated with ghostly lights, and it is, of course, just such a light, seen first of all as an ignis fatuus on the moors, that leads Jane to her cousins.

By this point of the novel, however, the ‘gothic’ plot of Jane Eyre is all but exhausted. The ‘demonic’ ordeal has been endured, and the strange occurrences at Thornfield revealed to be the activities of Rochester’s insane wife, Bertha. The story of Jane Eyre continues, however, and the theme of ordeal becomes a purely psychological one – the gothic trappings of the earlier chapters almost forgotten. Just as Brontë’s novel sloughs the skin of Pilgrim’s Progress , it also challenges the gothic conventions it temporarily embraces. In fact, all the most intensely ‘gothic’ moments simply serve to show the psychological intensity of Jane’s perpetual struggle against confinement and oppression, and provide an alternative narrative route for the heroine, who is finally ‘rescued’ by a supernatural voice from the tragic story of marriage to Rivers and early death. Gothic is therefore used most creatively by Charlotte Brontë to invoke a radical alternative to the conventional evangelical sentiments of Pilgrim’s Progress .