Jane Eyre Passage Analysis
Passage 1 - (Gateshead; ch.1 p.9-12),
Passage 2 - (Gateshead; ch.4 p.39-42))
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre traverses the story of its heroine as she passes through a series of episodes in which she develops her personal agency in order to find her raison d'être. Beginning with Jane's defiance of her aunt, which engenders her discharge from an orphaned childhood in a dysfunctional, malefic household into the oppressive pedagogic regime at Lowood, the text depicts her struggles for moral fidelity as a governess romantically entangled, and subsequently disillusioned with, the bigamous Rochester; and finally, her return to him after a crisis of conscience in which she is forced to confront the nature of her true romantic desire. Brontë's prose throughout Passages One and Two is dialectical, contrasting; the narrator's early confession of her own 'undeveloped', 'imperfect' faculties arousing the reader to empathise with the young Jane, thus creating a harrowing dissonance within the passages when she is persecuted at the hands of her society. Jane Eyre's juxtaposition of the interior and the exterior elements of the human condition serves to show the importance of personal fortitude in a world wrought with hypocrisies and diametrically opposed paradigms; a world where a child is expected to be 'franker' and 'natural' yet concomitantly 'trained in conformity', a world where 'worldly sentiment' is not taught but 'mortified', quintessentially, a world where the only solution to the physical paradoxes of society lies not in the external but the internal, the metaphysical.
Brontë's concern with religious hypocrisy and the effects of an ecclesiastical pedagogy on the consciousness of a child is evidenced heavily in Passages One and Two. The author, through the use of esoteric language, obscures the division between Christian doctrine and pagan cults - Jane's paranoia paints with the same lexical brush both 'churchyard(s)' and 'phantom(s)', 'headstone(s)' and 'death-white realms', thus, positioning the reader to correlate the apparently refined practices of the Church with animalistic, heathen ritual. Biblical allusion in the second passage serves a twofold end - firstly, Jane's rejections of the Psalms as 'not interesting', and Brocklehurst's retribution with threats of a 'wicked heart' and damnation in a 'lake burning with fire and brimstone' are used to characterise religious doctrine. Through their acrimonious judgment of a young child, Brontë portrays the Church, and Brocklehurst as its representative, as hypercritical, an epitome of fundamentalism. Secondly, Jane's predilection for certain Biblical texts - 'Daniel....Samuel....Exodus....Job and Jonah', each of which recount the story of a persecuted individual who struggled against their epoch's Zeitgeist, foreshadow the fact that Jane, too, feels constrained by her social positioning and will attempt to liberate herself from it, as Daniel with the Assyrians, or Moses with the Egyptians. However, Jane Eyre's theological critique fundamentally rests, not on the paganish aspects of the Victorian Church, and neither on the exegetical significance of Jane's scriptural preference, but on its hypocritical depiction of the ideal child, and how such a depiction encroaches upon the child's ability to develop psychologically. Brocklehurst defines a 'Christian' child as one who displays 'humility', yet by the same token a 'worldly sentiment of pride', and Brontë highlights the contradictory nature of these adjectives through Brocklehurst's subsequent aphorism - 'Consistency, madam, is the first of Christian values' - the use of the lexeme ‘consistency' to describe a religious conditioning elementally inconsistent accentuating the hypocrisy of its speaker. The absurd nature of Lowood's demands on its pupils is further reinforced through Brontë's use of asyndeton in 'plain fare, simple attire, unsophisticated accommodations, hardy and active habits'' and polysyndeton in ' how quiet and plain all the girls at Lowood look, with their hair combed...., and their long pinafores, and those little holland pockets', both the use of, and lack of, conjunctions in straight succession herein making salient the unrealistic, utopian nature of Brocklehurst's vision of an idyllic childhood. This layering of qualities occurs again in Passage One, where Mrs. Reed’s demand that Jane acquire 'a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner-- something lighter, franker, more natural’ leads to Jane questioning her own value - ultimately undermining herself, 'humbled by the consciousness of (her) physical inferiority' to the rest of her peers. Brontë suggests that such negative self-appraisal apotheosises in desperation and a sense of hopelessness - the useofanaphorain 'howevercarefullyIobeyed,howeverstrenuouslyIstrovetopleaseher' highlighting this sentiment insofar as it portrays the futility Jane feels at being unable to ever be commensurate to her familial and religious expectations.
Yet, where theological pressures mentally obstruct Jane Eyre’s heroine, socioeconomic pressures play a more pertinent, physical role in constraining her quotidian activities. Jane, by virtue of being an orphaned female child in an upper class household, is repeatedly reminded of, and persecuted for, her lowly position, both by Mrs. Reed and by her son John. This societal chasm is evidenced through the use of vocatives for the Reeds in ‘Master Reed’ and ‘your excellent benefactress’ - whereas Jane receives no such address herself, being called a ‘naughty little girl’ and a ‘bad animal’. The ‘red moreen curtain’, which separates Jane from the familial hearth, symbolises a division of blood between her and the rest of the family - both the blood of her late uncle by which she is being protected, and the differences in lineage, and thus social class, between her and the Reeds. The prose herein reflects the effects of this social conditioning on its narrator - the use of ’shrined’, ’shut’ and ‘separated’ expressing Jane’s lack of human contact; this is revisited later in Passage One, where Jane's choice of 'volume' reflects her tendency to struggle against societal obstructions; through 'Bewick's History of British Birds', the author establishes an objective correlative - the 'bird' symbolising both Jane's imagination and the freedom she desires, and the 'solitary rocks and promontories' representing Jane's aloof nature. In this way, Brontë suggests that to emancipate oneself from societal norms, one must accept the ineluctable consequence of solitude, of mental and physical ostracisation from one's own community; Jane's being 'kept at a distance' is not merely the division between the 'breakfast room...and the drawing room', but an ideological, social division, which supersedes, in Mrs. Reed’s mind, the familial duty she owes to Jane. However, although Brontë repeatedly uses objects such as curtains or novels in a symbolic manner, the most prominent form of the physical symbolising the metaphysical in Jane Eyre is through that of the natural world representing the protagonist’s psychological register. Passage One’s elaborate descriptions - the ‘cold winter wind’, the ‘sombre clouds’, the ‘forlorn regions of dreary space’ - lend the Passage, and the text as a whole, a tenebrous, subfusc undertone; the pathetic fallacy here both capturing the bleakness of Jane’s existence in the Reeds’ household, and, through its vast illustration of the natural landscape, portraying how Jane is dwarfed, rendered minuscule by societal dynamics far outside her control.
Nonetheless, Brontë’s heroine refuses to be surmounted by these forces - she is individualistic, driven to overcome and break the seemingly omnipotent barriers that her culture has erected for her. The use of possessive pronouns in ‘I formed an idea of my own’ highlight Jane’s tendency to think independently, to disobey the ‘orthodox’ stereotype - even at a young age, her curiosity is not suppressed by the limits of her what Victorian society deems ‘forbidding’. Further, through establishing Jane as a steadfast yet physically unattractive and financially disadvantaged female protagonist, the author critiques the stereotype that beauty and wealth are imperatives should a female prosper materially; a stereotype evidenced when Brocklehurst’s daughter correlates the ‘plain’ nature of Lowood’s pupils with ‘poor people... (who’d) never seen a silk gown before’. Although Jane may not possess the ‘silk gown’ of riches nor the ‘attractive manner’ of a more sightly child, Brontë asserts that her personal qualities are of far greater significance than her lack of beauty - through Jane's use of polysyllabic lexis in 'accumulation' and 'conception', for example, the author stresses the importance of intellect; through her stoic resolve to 'repress (her) sob(s)' in the face of being 'repulsed' and 'cut to the heart' by her sardonic benefactress, the importance of tenacity; through her delight in perusing literature and knowledge, the importance of personal initiative. This is, essentially, Jane Eyre's cardinal precept - that regardless of whether 'aversion' or 'unkindness' be sown on our external paths, that our anima, our internal, personal agency - as Jane's, should triumph, so we can be ‘happy: happy at least in (our) way(s)’.