Jane Eyre

Where to find it: From “A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany” to “appearing before the eyes of belated travellers.” It comes just after Bessie and Miss Abbot lock Jane in. Editions differ in three small places here: the first edition of 1847 reads “kitchens”, “by undertaker's men” and “coming up out of”.

A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre¹; the two large windows, with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth²; the walls were a soft fawn colour with a blush of pink in it; the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly polished old mahogany. Out of these deep surrounding shades rose high, and glared white, the piled-up mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Marseilles counterpane. Scarcely less prominent was an ample cushioned easy-chair near the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne³. This room was chill, because it seldom had a fire⁴; it was silent, because remote from the nursery and kitchen; solemn, because it was known to be so seldom entered. The house-maid alone came here on Saturdays, to wipe from the mirrors and the furniture a week’s quiet dust: and Mrs. Reed herself, at far intervals, visited it to review the contents of a certain secret drawer in the wardrobe⁵, where were stored divers parchments, her jewel-casket, and a miniature of her deceased husband; and in those last words lies the secret of the red-room—the spell which kept it so lonely in spite of its grandeur. Mr. Reed had been dead nine years: it was in this chamber he breathed his last; here he lay in state; hence his coffin was borne by the undertaker’s men; and, since that day, a sense of dreary consecration had guarded it from frequent intrusion. My seat, to which Bessie and the bitter Miss Abbot had left me riveted, was a low ottoman near the marble chimney-piece; the bed rose before me; to my right hand there was the high, dark wardrobe, with subdued, broken reflections varying the gloss of its panels; to my left were the muffled windows; a great looking-glass between them repeated the vacant majesty of the bed and room. I was not quite sure whether they had locked the door; and when I dared move, I got up and went to see. Alas! yes: no jail was ever more secure⁶. Returning, I had to cross before the looking-glass; my fascinated glance involuntarily explored the depth it revealed. All looked colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality: and the strange little figure there gazing at me⁷, with a white face and arms specking the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit: I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp⁸, Bessie’s evening stories represented as coming out of lone, ferny dells in moors, and appearing before the eyes of belated travellers.

1. 1“stood out like a tabernacle in the centre” A tabernacle was the sacred tent of the Old Testament. The simile turns a dead man's bed into a shrine, so the room feels holy and forbidden at once, and the absent master still rules it.
2. 2“the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth” The piling of red, damask, crimson and pink saturates the room in one colour. Red suggests blood, danger and anger, and it mirrors the rage Jane has just been punished for, so the room seems to embody her feelings.
3. 3“like a pale throne” An empty throne implies an absent king. Mr Reed is dead, yet the room is organised around his authority, which is exactly Jane's situation in a house where a dead man's promise is the only reason she is there.
4. 4“This room was chill, because it seldom had a fire” The first of three matched clauses, chill, silent and solemn, each given a reason. The adult narrator explains calmly what the child felt as dread, and the sensible “because” clauses keep the Gothic under control even as the room frightens.
5. 5“a certain secret drawer in the wardrobe” The secret hidden in a room is a Gothic convention, and here the drawer holds nothing more sinister than papers, jewels and a miniature of a dead husband. The motif returns on a much larger scale at Thornfield, where the secret is a living wife.
6. 6“no jail was ever more secure” Hyperbole that names what the room is: a prison. Jane has just been called a wicked child and she thinks like a prisoner, which connects this scene to her lifelong fear of being confined.
7. 7“the strange little figure there gazing at me” Jane sees her own reflection as a stranger and a spirit. The split between self and image anticipates Chapter 25, where she sees Bertha's face in a mirror, and supports readings of Bertha as Jane's double.
8. 8“half fairy, half imp” Jane borrows from Bessie's folk tales to picture herself as uncanny, neither good nor bad. The folklore of the servants' hall feeds her imagination, and the same kind of tale colours her first sight of Rochester.

The question: Starting with this extract, explore how Brontë presents Jane's experience of being trapped. Write about how Brontë presents the red-room in this extract, and how she presents Jane's experience of confinement in the novel as a whole.

Where to find it: From “Anybody may blame me who likes” to “stranger than her laugh.” It comes early in the chapter, before Jane walks to Hay and meets Rochester.

Anybody may blame me who likes¹, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself in the grounds; when I went down to the gates and looked through them along the road; or when, while Adèle played with her nurse, and Mrs. Fairfax made jellies in the storeroom, I climbed the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim sky-line—that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit²; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen—that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach. I valued what was good in Mrs. Fairfax, and what was good in Adèle; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold. Who blames me? Many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature³; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third storey, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it—and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended⁴—a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence. It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot.⁵ Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags⁶. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. When thus alone, I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole’s laugh⁷: the same peal, the same low, slow ha! ha! which, when first heard, had thrilled me: I heard, too, her eccentric murmurs; stranger than her laugh.

1. 1“Anybody may blame me who likes” Jane expects the reader to disapprove and challenges that disapproval before she has even made her point. The defiant opening turns a private confession into an argument with the reader.
2. 2“I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit” Jane stands on the roof looking at the horizon, and the physical limit of the view becomes the limit of her life. The long, piling sentence with its repeated “that then” enacts the longing it describes.
3. 3“the restlessness was in my nature” Restlessness in a woman was usually treated as a fault to be corrected. Jane calls it her nature, which makes it something to be answered rather than cured, and prepares for the general claim that follows.
4. 4“a tale that was never ended” Jane feeds her mind on stories of her own making. The phrase invites us to see the novel itself as that tale, told by a woman who could not find enough life and so created it.
5. 5“Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot.” The vocabulary of politics, “condemned”, “revolt” and then “rebellions”, widens Jane's frustration into a social condition. She speaks for millions, not for herself alone.
6. 6“making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags” A deliberately trivial list of the accomplishments expected of women. Placed after the grand language of faculties and rebellions, it produces a bathos that mocks those who would limit women to such tasks.
7. 7“I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole’s laugh” The argument breaks off for the Gothic mystery. Virginia Woolf called this “an awkward break”; another reading sees the laugh as the answer to the passage, since the woman locked upstairs is the most extreme case of a woman confined.

The question: Explore how Brontë uses language and structure to present Jane's frustration in this extract. Then explain the importance of Jane's longing for a wider life elsewhere in the novel.

Where to find it: From “I tell you I must go!” to “which I now exert to leave you.” In the orchard on Midsummer-eve, when Jane believes Rochester is to marry Blanche Ingram.

“I tell you I must go!” I retorted, roused to something like passion. “Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings?¹ and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup²? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little³, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you,—and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;—it is my spirit that addresses your spirit⁴; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal,—as we are!⁵” “As we are!” repeated Mr. Rochester—“so,” he added, enclosing me in his arms, gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on my lips: “so, Jane!” “Yes, so, sir,” I rejoined: “and yet not so; for you are a married man—or as good as a married man⁶, and wed to one inferior to you—to one with whom you have no sympathy—whom I do not believe you truly love; for I have seen and heard you sneer at her. I would scorn such a union: therefore I am better than you—let me go!” “Where, Jane? To Ireland?” “Yes—to Ireland. I have spoken my mind, and can go anywhere now.” “Jane, be still; don’t struggle so, like a wild frantic bird that is rending its own plumage in its desperation⁷.” “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me⁸; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.”

1. 1“Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings?” A run of rhetorical questions, broken by dashes, gives the speech the rush of real anger. An automaton is a machine that looks human, which is exactly how a governess was often treated: useful, and not expected to feel.
2. 2“my drop of living water dashed from my cup” “Living water” is Christ's phrase for the gift of grace in John 4:10. By using it for Rochester's company, Jane gives her love a spiritual weight and makes losing him a kind of spiritual starvation.
3. 3“poor, obscure, plain, and little” Four short adjectives list every disadvantage the world holds against her, each one of them social or physical. Jane names them only to deny that they reach her soul, so the list sets up the reversal that follows.
4. 4“it is my spirit that addresses your spirit” Jane moves the argument beyond class and gender to the soul, where she claims all people are equal. It is her most radical claim, and she makes it by using the language of Christian belief rather than rejecting it.
5. 5“equal,—as we are!” The punctuation forces a pause before the most important words. Rochester immediately repeats them and turns them into an embrace, taking her argument as a declaration of love before she knows that he loves her.
6. 6“you are a married man—or as good as a married man” Dramatic irony. Jane means Blanche Ingram, but Rochester really is married, to Bertha. A first-time reader shares Jane's ignorance; a re-reader hears the truth she cannot yet know.
7. 7“like a wild frantic bird that is rending its own plumage in its desperation” Rochester's image makes Jane a creature to be calmed and held, and faintly blames her for her own pain. The bird recalls the book she was reading in Chapter 1, Bewick's History of British Birds.
8. 8“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me” Jane rejects his metaphor outright and replaces it with a plain statement of human freedom. The verb “exert” at the end of her sentence makes freedom something she does, not simply something she claims.

The question: In this extract Jane insists on her equality with Rochester. Explore how Brontë presents this in the extract, and explain the importance of equality between Jane and Rochester elsewhere in the novel.