NOVEL
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte
SYNOPSIS:
The novel begins with a
ten-year-old orphan named Jane Eyre, who is living with her maternal uncle's
family, the Reeds, as her uncle's dying wish. Jane's parents died of typhus.
Jane’s aunt Sarah Reed does not like her and treats her worse than a servant
and discourages and at times forbids her children from associating with her.
She claims that Jane is not worthy of notice. She and her three children are
abusive to Jane, physically and emotionally. She is unacceptably excluded from
the family celebrations and had a doll to find solace in. One day Jane is
locked in the red room, where her uncle died, and panics after seeing visions
of him. She is finally rescued when she is allowed to attend Lowood School for
Girls. Before she leaves, she stands up to Mrs. Reed and declares that she'll
never call her "aunt" again, that she'd tell everyone at Lowood how
cruel Mrs. Reed was to her, and says that Mrs. Reed and her daughters,
Georgiana, and Eliza are deceitful. John Reed, her son, is very rude and
disrespectful, even to his own mother, who he sometimes had called "old
girl", and his sisters. He treats Jane worse than the others do, and she
hates him above all the others. Mr. Reed had been the only one in the Reed
family to be kind to Jane. The servant Abbot is also always rude to Jane. The
servant Bessie is sometimes scolding and sometimes nice. Jane likes Bessie the
best.
Jane arrives at Lowood
Institution, a charity school, the head of which (Brocklehurst) has been told
that she is deceitful. During an inspection, Jane accidentally breaks her
slate, and Mr. Brocklehurst, the self-righteous clergyman who runs the school,
brands her a liar and shames her before the entire assembly. Jane is comforted
by her friend, Helen Burns. Miss Temple, a caring teacher, facilitates Jane's
self-defense and writes to Mr. Lloyd,[clarification needed] whose reply agrees
with Jane's. Ultimately, Jane is publicly cleared of Mr. Brocklehurst's
accusations.
The eighty pupils at Lowood are
subjected to cold rooms, poor meals, and thin clothing. Many students fall ill
when a typhus epidemic strikes. Jane's friend Helen dies of consumption in her
arms. When Mr. Brocklehurst's neglect and dishonesty are discovered, several
benefactors erect a new building and conditions at the school improve
dramatically.
After six years as a student and
two as a teacher, Jane decides to leave Lowood, like her friend and confidante
Miss Temple. She advertises her services as a governess, and receives one reply.
It is from Alice Fairfax, the housekeeper at Thornfield Hall. She takes the
position, teaching Adele Varens, a young French girl. While Jane is walking one
night to a nearby town, a horseman passes her. The horse slips on ice and
throws the rider. She helps him to the horse. Later, back at the mansion she
learns that this man is Edward Rochester, master of the house. He teases her,
asking whether she bewitched his horse to make him fall. Adele is his ward,
left in Mr. Rochester's care when her mother died. Mr. Rochester and Jane enjoy
each other's company and spend many hours together.
Odd things start to happen at the
house, such as a strange laugh, a mysterious fire in Mr. Rochester's room, on
which Jane throws water, and an attack on Rochester's house guest, Mr. Mason.
Jane receives word that her aunt was calling for her, after being in much grief
because her son has died. She returns to Gateshead and remains there for a
month caring for her dying aunt. Mrs. Reed gives Jane a letter from Jane's paternal
uncle, Mr John Eyre, asking for her to live with him. Mrs. Reed admits to
telling her uncle that Jane had died of fever at Lowood. Soon after, Jane's
aunt dies, and she returns to Thornfield. Jane begins to communicate to her
uncle John Eyre.
St. John Rivers admits Jane to
Moor House.
After returning to Thornfield,
Jane broods over Mr. Rochester's impending marriage to Blanche Ingram. But on a
midsummer evening, he proclaims his love for Jane and proposes. As she prepares
for her wedding, Jane's forebodings arise when a strange, savage-looking woman
sneaks into her room one night and rips her wedding veil in two. As with the
previous mysterious events, Mr. Rochester attributes the incident to
drunkenness on the part of Grace Poole, one of his servants. During the wedding
ceremony, Mr. Mason and a lawyer declare that Mr. Rochester cannot marry
because he is still married to Mr. Mason’s sister Bertha. Mr. Rochester admits
this is true, but explains that his father tricked him into the marriage for
her money. Once they were united, he discovered that she was rapidly descending
into madness and eventually locked her away in Thornfield, hiring Grace Poole
as a nurse to look after her. When Grace gets drunk, his wife escapes, and
causes the strange happenings at Thornfield. Jane learns that her own letter to
her uncle John Eyre, which happened to be seen by Mr. Mason, who knew John Eyre
and was there, was how Mr. Mason found out about the bigamous marriage. Mr.
Rochester asks Jane to go with him to the south of France, and live as husband
and wife, even though they cannot be married. Refusing to go against her
principles, and despite her love for him, Jane leaves Thornfield in the middle
of the night.
Jane travels through England
using the little money she had saved. She accidentally leaves her bundle of
possessions on a coach and has to sleep on the moor, trying to trade her scarf
and gloves for food. Exhausted, she makes her way to the home of Diana and Mary
Rivers, but is turned away by the housekeeper. She faints on the doorstep,
preparing for her death. St. John Rivers, Diana and Mary's brother and a
clergyman, saves her. After she regains her health, St. John finds her a
teaching position at a nearby charity school. Jane becomes good friends with
the sisters, but St. John remains reserved.
The sisters leave for governess
jobs and St. John becomes closer with Jane. St. John discovers Jane's true
identity, and astounds her by showing her a letter stating that her uncle John
Eyre has died and left her his entire fortune of 20,000 pounds (equivalent to
over £1.3 million in 2011, calculated using the RPI[4]). When Jane questions
him further, St. John reveals that John is also his and his sisters' uncle.
They had once hoped for a share of the inheritance, but have since resigned
themselves to nothing. Jane, overjoyed by finding her family, insists on
sharing the money equally with her cousins, and Diana and Mary come to Moor
House to stay.
Thinking she will make a suitable
missionary's wife, St. John asks Jane to marry him and to go with him to India,
not out of love, but out of duty. Jane initially accepts going to India, but
rejects the marriage proposal, suggesting they travel as brother and sister. As
soon as Jane's resolve against marriage to St. John begins to weaken, she
mysteriously hears Mr. Rochester's voice calling her name. Jane then returns to
Thornfield to find only blackened ruins. She learns that Mr. Rochester's wife
set the house on fire and committed suicide by jumping from the roof. In his
rescue attempts, Mr. Rochester lost a hand and his eyesight. Jane reunites with
him, but he fears that she will be repulsed by his condition. When Jane assures
him of her love and tells him that she will never leave him, Mr. Rochester
again proposes and they are married. He eventually recovers enough sight to see
their first-born son
CRITICISM:
As a theoretical
approach, postcolonialism asks readers to consider the way colonialist and
anti-colonialist messages are presented in literary textsA postcolonial
approach to Jane Eyre might begin by considering the following questions: What
does the novel reveal about the way cultural difference was represented in
Victorian culture? How did Britain justify its colonialist project by imaging
the East as "savage" or uncivilized? What idea does the text create
of "proper" British behavior? Tentative answers to these questions
can be discovered by examining the novel's representation of foreign women,
especially Bertha Mason, and the colonialist doctrines of Jane and of St. John
Rivers.
One of the
colonialist goals of this novel is to create a prototype of the proper English
woman, someone like Jane who is frank, sincere, and lacking in personal vanity.
This ideal is created by Jane's attempt to contrast herself with the foreign
women in the text. For example, both Céline Varens and her daughter are
constantly criticized in the novel for their supposed superficiality and
materialism.
But Jane's
position is more conflicted than Rochester's: As a woman she is also a member
of a colonized group, but as a specifically British woman, she is a colonizer.
When she claims Rochester gives her a smile such as a sultan would "bestow
on a slave his gold and gems had enriched," she emphasizes the colonized
status of all women. Insisting that he prefers his "one little English
girl" to the "Grand Turk's whole seraglio," Rochester points to
Jane's powerlessness, her reduction to sex slave. Rather than becoming slave,
Jane insists she will become a missionary, preaching liberty to women enslaved
in harems. Her comments show the dual position of European women: both
colonized and colonizers. While Rochester reduces her to a colonized
"doll" or "performing ape," her comments show her
Eurocentric understanding of Eastern culture: She implies that she'll be the
enlightened Englishwoman coming to the rescue of poor, abused Turkish women.
All women are enslaved by male despotism, but the British woman claims a moral
and spiritual superiority over her Eastern sisters.
