🌿 A Commonplace Boke

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

This is a reread. I read the book completely sometime in high school, and definitely tried to reread at least once or twice in the intervening years, but I don't think I ever got very far in those reread attempts. It's a long book

Spoilers below, obviously.

Things I feel the same about as before:

My favorite part is the scene where Jane meets Rochester.
- The key to that scene, for me, is that both of them are instantly bewitched by each other. Jane associates Rochester with a malevolent spirit (a gytrash), to the point where she's a little freaked out to see Pilot again at Thornfield and has to wonder if he's a real dog. Rochester thinks of Jane instantly as a witch/elf/fairy, is completely besotted, and is essentially never disabused of that feeling--he's as entranced by Jane when she comes back as he was on first meeting her, though at the end she seems transformed for him into a guiding light/benevolent spirit (maybe indicating his own moral/spiritual change?)
- I got on a bit of a kick for a few days, really wanting to see the story played out on screen, but every adaptation I watched disappointed me at that scene except the 1973 one. Jane does NOT cause Rochester's horse to fall. Jane is sitting on a stile, watching him fly by, when his horse slips on a patch of ice and he goes flying. That's the REASON WHY Rochester is so weirded out by the encounter: he's flying down an empty road at night, he's suddenly (and apparently out of nowhere) thrown from his horse, and when he sits up (dazed and injured), he sees this odd, witchy little person standing by him in the moonlight, offering to help him. THAT'S why the scene works: he legitimately isn't sure, for a moment, whether Jane is even human, to the point where he goes home and demands a description of her from Adele to make sure the person he met was actually her governess. He starts off his association with Jane from a place of enchantment, not annoyance. When he tells Mrs. Fairfax that Jane "began by felling his horse," he's joking about his strange meeting with Jane, not complaining about her actually felling his horse. The 1973 BBC miniseries with Sorcha Cusack and Michael Jayston is, as far as I can tell, the only version that gets this scene right, and so it will have to be officially my favorite version even if I'm not 1000% happy with the way Sorcha Cusack keeps sticking out her face at the camera.
- Jane and Rochester are dry, sarcastic people. They both acknowledge it. They understand each other. They have the same sense of humor. They respect each other as equals despite the vast gulf in age and status that divides them. That is why, despite all the hideous issues underlying their relationship, they still work as a couple.
The Gateshead and Lowood portions of the story basically hit the same for me on rereading as they did when I was a teenager. However, Bessie was MUCH more sympathetic for me now that I've spent years and years teaching children. You can see, even at the beginning, that she really does care for Jane and wants to help her.
I do not give one single shit about St. John. That part goes on way too long for me. I get that he's meant to be a foil for Rochester, and to show that Rochester works as a partner for Jane where a conventionally "good" and "attractive" partner would not. But those hundred pages or so really drag.
- I think it might just be that there's not really much tension in this section. At Gateshead and Lowood, Jane experiences intense injustice along with emotional and/or physical hardship, so the story is compelling. At Thornfield, there's the romance, plus the mystery, plus the presence of Rochester, to keep the story interesting. At Moor House, though, she's comfortable and safe and has a nice job and good friends. She's relatively happy and doesn't really need anything, and though she really misses Rochester, it's only occasionally mentioned. The only real tension in this section is the unvoiced battle of personalities between Jane and St. John, which isn't really enough for me in the context of 100 pages of day-in-the-life pastoral quiet.
- I almost feel like the actual novel Jane Eyre ends with her first night on the moor, where she's alone and penniless but has extricated herself from the situation that threatened to fatally entangle her: it cost her everything, but she won and came away with her soul intact. The remainder of the book can be read as a kind of self-indulgent sequel novelette penned by the author to wrap up all the loose ends.
That said, the reunion scene between Jane and Rochester is still my second favorite part of the book. Yes, Rochester is a morally reprehensible person and doesn't exactly deserve a happy ending, but it's still a VERY sweet scene.

Notes from this reread (April/May 2026)

Bessie's ballad about "the poor orphan child" in chapter 3 seems to foreshadow Jane's later journey across the moors.
In Chapter 14, I highlighted this quote from Rochester: "When fate wronged me, I had not the wisdom to remain cool; I turned desperate; then I degenerated" (p. 137). I thought this sounded very much like Jane when she was a child (her conversation with Helen about the foolishness of turning the other cheek), and might be a hint of what would have happened to Jane if she'd never met Helen or Miss Temple.
In chapter 17, Blanche looks around the room for Jane and says, "...is she gone? Oh, no! there she is still, behind the window-curtain." That was an interesting callback to the first scene of the story. (p. 175)
Religious stuff: I'm not really prepared or motivated to formulate a whole discussion of this, but you can't have Jane Eyre as she is without her religious faith.

Helen Burns seems to be Jane's original guiding light, but I'm not sure she's supposed to be a pure example: Jane cares a lot about justice and helping her fellow people, and if you take "turn the other cheek" very seriously then you really can't right injustices at all. Helen's faith and devotion are definitely meant to be emulated, but angels can't live on Earth, and if you want to do good works among your fellow humans then you can't be too perfectly saintly. Maybe, in Bronte's worldview, faith tempered with just a little thread of sinfulness is how you make the strongest version of a person? (I haven't read any of her stated views on the subject and really don't know.)
St. John Rivers is another flawed lodestone: he has faith, he has hope, he performs charity, but he doesn't any real love in his heart except for his homeland and his sisters. Jane thinks after watching him preach that listening to him didn't bring any joy or comfort, which I think is one of the main purposes of religion for Bronte and for her.
I thought it was interesting that the novel sort of implied that a person can dedicate their life to saving all of humanity, or to saving and protecting one person, and that those two motives are equally noble. Jane's return (as a sign of God's mercy) was very definitely the thing that led Rochester back to some sort of religion, and it's sort of implied that this result is as valuable and noble as if she had dedicated her life to preaching her faith in a foreign mission. (After all, the only genuinely supernatural moment in the story is the one where she prays for a sign and hears Rochester's voice, which makes it pretty clear that what God wanted Jane to do was go and find Rochester.)
Lots of preachers in this book: Jane's (presumably good-hearted) father, the corrupt and hypocritical Mr. Brocklehurs, the priest who failed to marry Rochester and Jane (who felt more like a secular functionary than a religious leader), and St. John, whose faith was so bright and hot that hurt those around him. And if you count Helen Burns and Miss Temple as religious leaders, which for Jane they basically were, you have a whole lot of different models to choose from. Miss Temple is clearly the ideal: teaching scripture and prayers to her students, but also offering material and emotional comfort to them whenever she was able. So I guess in Jane Eyre's world (and presumably in the author's view), the best religious guidance comes from people who quietly talk the talk while firmly walking the walk every day--and Jane herself seems to live her life by that principle.

The yew and holly bushes guarding the gate of Moor House make it feel like a holy, magical place set apart from the world, which I really liked. I loved all the tree symbolism in the story and could have enjoyed much more. (p. 346 and also mentioned later)
In chapter 35, St. John "gray-rocks" Jane in an attempt to punish her so she'll submit to his demand that she marry him. It backfires, however, and ensures he'll never succeed, because it actually shows her exactly how dangerous marrying her would be. "To me, he was in reality become no longer flesh, but marble; his eye was a cold, bright, blue gem; his tongue a speaking instrument--nothing more. / All this was torture to me--refined, lingering torture. It kept up a slow fire of indignation and a trembling trouble of grief, which harasse dand crushed me altogether. I felt how, if I were his wife, this good man, pure as the deep sunless source, could soon kill me, without drawing from y veins a single drop of blood, or receiving on his own crystal conscience the faintest stain of crime." (p. 406) (This is not so much an insight as something explicitly stated in the narration, but I'm noting it here because it didn't strike me nearly as much the first time I read it. As a teenager with no relationship experience, I just thought he was boring.)

I was just thinking "Rochester would never! Imagine Rochester emotionally abusing Jane like that!"
But then I realized that Rochester probably subjected some of his other partners to much, much worse, because he is not a kind man and does not have respect for anyone who doesn't meet his personal statndards. Sure, Bertha and Celine cheated on him, but poor Clara was guilty of nothing but being dull. I hope he was nice when he "fired" her, at least.

I have not touched on the morally reprehensible behavior of Rochester in any of these notes, because once you step away and really think about what he did, that's the only thing you can really think about. Regardless of the circumstances, he forcibly imprisoned a human being in a small attic room for ten years and tried to swindle his eighteen-year-old employee into a bigamous marriage that would eventually have ruined her life.
- Yes, I've read Wide Sargasso Sea. I don't remember it much. It was very postmodern and expressive, with a very unreliable narrator, and I remember being disappointed that it didn't tie in more solidly with the main narrative of Jane Eyre. Looking at a plot summary, it directly contradicts the history of Bertha Mason as stated in Jane Eyre: that Bertha was five years older than Edward, that they lived together for four years before her mental illness manifested, and that she (apparently) cheated on him with multiple different people and basically destroyed his reputation before he tried to divorce her. I guess Jean Rhys was working from the thesis that Rochester was lying about all that, but I'll go with the assumption that he was telling the truth.
- Assuming he was telling the truth, Rochester was in a difficult situation.
  - He couldn't legally divorce his wife, because her mental illness made her unable to take care of herself. (It seems that, historically, it might actually have been possible, but we're working from the assumption that he was absolutely forbidden by law to divorce his wife on grounds of infidelity because she had, in the course of their disastrous marriage, become legally insane.)
  - He also couldn't live with his wife normally, as "man and wife," because her illness made her homicidally violent.
  - There wasn't much in the way of real mental health treatment at the time, and basically no pharmaceuticals (except laudanum, etc. I guess at least he didn't keep her drugged.)
  - He could have had her committed to an asylum, but really at the time that wouldn't have been less cruel than locking her up in the attic with a trusted servant. At least in the attic she had a warm room and plenty of food.
  - He could have kept her locked up in their home in Jamaica, but that wouldn't really have been morally better than locking her up in his house in England. In Jamaica, he would have had no friends or society (as his wife had publicly ruined his reputation), but Bertha could have had visits from her family and might have done better. In England, Rochester had plenty of freedom, but Bertha had no company except Grace Poole, which probably made her condition deteriorate a lot. So either solution would have been bad for one of them, but keeping Bertha at Thornfield was much crueler than keeping Rochester in Spanish Town.
  - Assuming that Rochester was telling the truth about his wife's behavior early in their marriage, he would have had full moral grounds to end the relationship even if he couldn't divorce her. He couldn't exactly throw her out on the street (as her husband, he was legally required to provide for her), and probably couldn't leave her unsupervised in a large flammable house that she was likely to burn down. But he could certainly have afforded to buy a small property, hire some nurses and orderlies, and have her cared for privately there for the duration of her life. Her family could have visited to make sure she was being taken care of properly, and he could have sailed away to England and never thought of her again. Shitty behavior, yes, but understandable, and Bertha would have had a much happier life. What would Jane Eyre have looked like then? Would Rochester still have slept his way around Europe, maybe/maybe not fathered a daughter with a French opera dancer, and had to hire a governess to take care of her? He would have been much more ready to marry Jane in that circumstance. Would news of the marriage still have made its way to Madeira? How would the wedding scene have played out if "he has a wife still living!" referred to a random woman in Jamaica and not an imprisoned psychiatric patient living in his actual house?
  - Anyway, on the "keeping his wife locked in the attic" score: Deeply shitty behavior, and even given a limited range of choices, he probably could have done much better. His choices in dealing with his wife almost certainly led to her eventual death. And that's assuming he was telling the truth.
- As for the "swindling his eighteen-year-old employee into a bigamous marriage that would have ruined her life and left her with no reputation, no assets, and no legal protection when the truth came out:
  - Jail. Jail forever. Jail for a hundred million years.
- As I was reading, I realized that Jane and Rochester reminded me of certain couples in alternative social circles in the late 90s/early 2000s. She's a teenager, not conventionally attractive, not used to any male attention, and experiencing freedom and like-minded companionship for the first time in her life. He's a much older man with a string of unsuccessful relationships in his past and a deep bitterness towards women he holds responsible for his suffering. He likes her because she's pure and untainted. He tells her she's much older and wiser than other girls her age. She already suspected this herself, and so she's very happy to be confirmed as "not like other girls" by a person she looks up to. She considers herself to be a grown woman in a relationship of equals, while he considers her his delicate little girl-muse who must be protected and cherished. They're both a little Goth.
  - In the real world, I think these relationships generally fall apart when the girl grows up a bit and realizes she's married to a predatory loser. I guess in this book it works out because both of them were forced to grow up after it came out what Rochester did, and because of the equalizing effects of Rochester's loss of physical power and Jane's gain of financial power. Even so, Rochester is very, very, very lucky things worked out for him the way they did.

Lines I highlighted:

"I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste." (p. 27)
I liked what Helen said about goodness on p. 59: "'Well, then, with Miss Temple you are good?' / 'Yes, in a passive way; I make no effort; I follow as inclination guides me. There is no merit in such goodness.'"
Nice quote p. 69: "Such is the imperfect nature of man! Such spots are there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes like Miss Scatcherd can only see these minute defects, and are blind to the full brightness of the orb."
"...in the tranquillity she imparted there was an alloy of inexpressible sadness." (p. 71)
"There is something in that....I know there is, because it does not sound too sweet." (p. 87)
"...obliged to be plain--for I had no article of attire that was not made with extreme simplicity--I was still by nature solicitous to be neat." (p. 100) Couldn't be me! I wonder if this is part of the "opposites attract" between Jane and Rochester. He doesn't strike me as a particularly neat person.
"...traces of half-effaced embroideries, wrought by fingers that for two generations had been coffin-dust." (p. 107)
"And yet it is said the Rochesters have been rather a violent than a quiet race in their time. Perhaps, though, that is the reason they rest tranquilly in their graves now." (p. 107)
"Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot." (p. 109)
"But I don't mean to flatter you: if you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it." (p. 136)
"...and all had a sweeping amplitude of array that seemed to magnify their persons as a mist magnifies the moon." (p. 170)
"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..." (p. 209) Great little gruesome moment in chapter 20; I wouldn't have minded a bit more of that vibe.
"...little birds were just twittering in the blossom-blanched orchard trees, whose boughs drooped like white garlands over the wall..." (p. 214)
"I never laughed at presentiments in my life..." (p. 219)
"The gaping wound of my wrongs, too, was now quite healed; and the flame of resentment extinguished." (p. 226)
"...there is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow-creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort." (p. 244)
"'Turn back: on so lovely a night it is a shame to sit in the house; and surely no one can wish to go to bed whiel sunset is thus at meeting with moonrise.'"
"'Station! station--your station is in my heart, and on the necks of those who would insult you, now or hereafter.--Go.'" (p. 262)
"He rose and came towards me, and I saw his face all kindled, and his full falcon-eye flashing..." (p. 271)
"I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol." (p. 272) This seems to be the real crux of why the relationship between Jane and Rochester couldn't have worked: she wasn't as much of a fanatic as St. John
"...not I, but one Jane Rochester, a person whom as yet I knew not." (p. 273)
"...as yet, however, they might be said to form one tree--a ruin, but an entire ruin." (p. 274)
"One idea only still throbbed lifelike within me--a remembrance of God: it begot an unuttered prayer: these words went wandering up and down in my rayless mind, as something that should be whispered, but no energy was found to express them." (p. 294)
"...I was for a while troubled with a haunting fear that if I handled the flower freely its bloom would fade--the sweet charm of freshness would leave it. I did not then know that it was no transitory blossom, but rather the radiant resemblance of one, cut in an indestructible gem." (p. 311)
"'...Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?'...Still indomitable was the reply: 'I care for myself....I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad--as I am now....'" (p. 314)
"...the gleam was such as the moon imparts to vapours she is about to sever." (p. 316)
"...the future....was an awful blank: something liket he world when the deluge was gone by." (p. 317)
"...a safe, still night: too serene for the companionship of fear." (p. 320)
"I must indulge my feelings; I so seldome have had an opportunity of doing so." (p. 383)
"...I might have turned a little pale, for I felt as if this kiss were a seal affixed to my fetters." (p. 394) St. John casting a nonconsensual religious spell on Jane, which she fortunately is able to break away from.
"'Oh, St. John!' I cried, 'have some mercy!' / I appealed to one who, in the discharge of what he believed his duty, knew neither mercy nor remorse." (p. 397)
"'Once more, why this refusal?' he asked. / 'Formerly,' I answered, 'because you did not love me; now, I reply, because you almost hate me. If I were to marry you, you would kill me. You are killing me now.'" (p. 408)
"God did not give me my life to throw away..." (p. 409)
"The dim room was full of visions." (p. 414)
"Where there is energy to command well enough, obedience never fails." (p. 415)
"Who would be hurt by my once more tasting the life his glance can give me?" (p. 419)
"There was no harassing restraing, no repressing of glee and vivacity with him; for with him I was at perfet ease, becasue I knew I suited him; all I said or did seemed either to console or revive him. Delightful consciousness! It brought to life and light my whole nature: in his presence I thoroughly lived; adn he lived in mine." (p. 431)
"I hold myself supremely blest--blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine." (p. 445) This must have been Bronte's ideal of marriage, and might have been why she held out so long against getting married (I know Rochester was allegedly based on a married mentor Bronte was in love with, and maybe she thought that if she couldn't have that relationship, it wasn't worth having one at all). I guess stories like this must have contributed a lot to the Western ideal of the love-marriage.