(Cfr. Spiazzi, tavella, Only Connect, Zanichelli, vol.2, p. 639)

Plot

Jane is a penniless orphan, brought up by her cold and hostile aunt, Mrs Reed. Jane is sent to Lowood Institution, a very strict school, where girls are not given enough food and clothing. She decides to accept a job as a governess at Thornfield Hall by Mr Rochester and soon falls in love with him. Her stay at the Hall is disturbed by strange noises and frightening events. After spending some time at her aunt’s deathbed, Jane returns to Thornfield and Rochester proposes to her. She assents to marry him, but two nights before the wedding she wakes up and sees a figure standing by her bed and her wedding veil torn into two pieces. The wedding is interrupted by Richard Mason who declares that Rochester is already married to his sister Bertha Mason, a mad woman he married in the West Indies and who lives on the upper floor of the house, looked after by Grace Poole. Rochester asks Jane to stay with him, but she leaves Thornfield. One night she hears Rochester’s voice calling her and she returns to Thornfield Hall only to find out that the house has been destroyed by a fire caused by Bertha, who then threw herself downstairs and died. Mr Rochester was seriously injured in the attempt to save his wife from the fire; he is now blind and lives in another house. Jane visits him and assents to marry him. He finally recovers his sight just when his first child was born.

A woman’s standpoint

From the day of its appearance Jane Eyre has been credited with having added something new to the tradition of the English novel. The new quality is the voice of a woman who speaks with perfect frankness about herself; but Jane Eyre is also remarkable for its passion and intensity, which is usually taken as sufficient to counteract what critics regard as a sensational and poorly constructed plot. The novel presented passionate love from a woman’s standpoint in a way that shocked many readers, who considered that the author did not show a suitable lady-like reticence on the subject. The public preferred women to be presented with something of the unreality of romance; above all the heroine should be strikingly beautiful and rich. Jane Eyre is moderately plain, and this made her uncomfortably real; moreover, she falls in love with a man both rich and married to a mad wife.

Mode of narration

This situation is embedded in the main story, revealed retrospectively only at its climax; it is there not for the sake of sensation, but in order to produce the maximum conflict between conscience and compassion and to hold the reader’s sympathies in true balance. The novel shows the consequences of childhood experience in the fully-grown character, and rests largely upon the author’s own experience at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, and at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels, where Charlotte fell in love with Mr Heger but was not reciprocated. The use of the heroine as narrator is mainly responsible for the peculiar unity of Jane Eyre. All is seen from the point of view of the central character, with whose experience the author has identified herself, and invited the engagement of every reader. Jane continually occupies the centre, never receding into the role of mere reflector or observer. She gains awareness not by long introspection but by a habit of keeping pace with her own experience. The story is told in the first person; the language is straightforward and develops differently according to the style and mood of each character. This emotional use of language conveys the author’s concern with the nature of human relationships.

Gothic elements

The traditional "Gothic" convention is used, but in a personal way, from childhood terrors to all those mysterious and threatening sights and sounds that reveal the presence of some malevolent force and that anticipate the tragedy at Thornfield. Charlotte’s symbolic use of the Gothic demands a more complicated response than the simple momentary intensity of feeling sought by the early Gothic novelists. Even Jane is portrayed so as to evoke new feelings. As a girl she is lonely, "passionate", "strange", she experiences a nervous breakdown; she can be "reckless and feverish", at Thornfield she is restless, given to "bright visions". However, she is also strong-willed and responsible for her own decisions, like the final one to be Rochester’s wife, which she tells the reader directly: "Reader, I married him".

Thus Charlotte leads away from conventional characterisation towards new insights of human reality. In Rochester the old lustful villain is seen in a new perspective: he has the quality of a "Byronic hero", the stereotyped seducer becomes a kind of lost nobleman of passion. In Jane Eyre the discovery of passion unveils the lesser known realities of human life.