Jane Eyre by Charlotte

39 ‘I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement.’ – This scene represents Jane’s isolation from the Reed family. Like the popular notion of a ‘Turk’, she is beyond the pale, though the image of her being ‘shrined’ implies something very precious about this little girl.

39 ‘the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day’ – this is precise in its symbolism. Jane does not literally suffer the ‘ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast’ that symbolises her exile from love, but emotionally she is at one with the weather outside. By contrast, the Reed children are ‘by the fireside,’ while Jane is isolated, contemplating images of exile, violence and death. This reflects the emotional coldness of her surroundings, and also her deep fear of being cast out on life’s journey (cf. ‘I never liked long walks’ above).

40 ‘the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray…the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast…the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.’ – These images of isolation and drowning (in the last example) are based on the accompanying illustrations to Bewick’s History of British Birds . The ‘wreck just sinking’ is in Bewick, though the ‘cold and ghastly moon’ is absent from the illustration. Its inclusion shows that Brontë wished particularly to establish Jane’s infantile fears of death right at the beginning of her journey.

40 ‘the quite solitary churchyard, with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees…’ – this is an exact description of an illustration from Bewick. It combines Jane’s sense of solitude with her fear of death.

40 ‘So was the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows.’ – The picture is found, exactly as described, in Bewick, and, as with the preceding image of the fiend on the thief’s back, introduces Brontë’s theme of Jane’s strong and fearful sense of the supernatural, as well as reinforcing her preoccupation with images of death.

40 ‘fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and other ballads’ – Bessie acts as Jane’s first surrogate mother (she is superseded by Miss Temple, then, to an extent, by Mrs Fairfax). Bewick seems to provide her with images that objectify her sad and solitary experience of emotional exile; Bessie’s fictions enchant her imagination with fantasies of emotional and intellectual fulfilment.