Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre - Jane Eyre and I

Jane Eyre and I

For me reading Jane Eyre was no mere intellectual exercise; it was an experience which served to reflect a mirror-image of what I am. Jane's rainbows and cobwebs are mine; we are one. I think that she would be as engrossed in reading an account of my life as I was in reading hers. I see her reading Ruth Rosen on a stormy night, covers up to her chin, with candlelight flickering and wind whistling across the heath. I read hers tucked into bed, as wind rattled the windows and bellowed through the caverns of Trump Village. Every page of Jane Eyre seemed to uncover another similarity between us. One passage was particularly meaningful to me because I found it to be a melding of several characteristics:

No reflection was to be allowed now; not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet--so deadly sad--that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy (p. 323).

Here we see Jane as romantic, moral, passionate, vulnerable and highly principled.

My past grinds at my guts, but I realize now that I couldn't have done otherwise taking into account my romantic and moral inclinations, my passions, my vulnerability and high principles. Jane was tormented by her choices for the same reasons. Jacques Brel said, "Perhaps we feel too much and maybe that's the crime, perhaps we pray too much and there isn't any shrine..." But that's cynical, and defensive and incurable romantics like Jane and me would argue vehemently with Mr. Brel's lyric. To me (and probably to Jane) without passion and the Quest, life is a living death; without the willingness to do, to try and perhaps, to fail, we are automatons.

Philosophers and psychologists tell us that we do what we do because of what we are. As kindred spirits, Jane and I would find ourselves in emotional and ethical quandaries and flight would be the only choice. It is a flight fueled by principles.

Flight was Jane's only alternative when St. John Rivers proposed. He didn't seek marriage on the basis of love, but as a device to woo her into becoming a fellow-missionary. She was appalled by this bloodless, lifeless request.