Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, a novel about an English woman’s struggles told through the writing of Charlotte Brontë, has filled its audience with thoughts of hope, love, and deception for many years. These thoughts surround people, not just women, everyday, as if an endless cycle from birth to death. As men and women fall further into this spiral of life they begin to find their true beings along with the qualities of others. This spiral then turns into a web of conflicts as the passenger of life proceeds and often these conflicts are caused by those sought out to be guides through the journey of life but merely are spiders building a magnificent web to catch its prey. In Jane Eyre, Brontë uses the literary elements of plot and character to convey the theme that a person often falls in love with a manipulator because she has little experiences of other forms of love and as a result she has to establish her own integrity.

Brontë uses the character element of opinions to show how some people often form conclusions about others and express them in their thoughts as either cruel or friendly. Since Brontë bases Jane Eyre as story told through a young lady the reader is allowed to experience her thoughts and reactions to those around her who make her very personality. As Jane is in her youth she develops these notions about her own family yelling at her cousin John saying, “You are like a murderer--you are like a slave-driver—you are like the Roman Emperors.” (p. 8) Not only showing that Jane has the intellectual maturity much greater than that of a normal ten-year-old but also that she finds John cruel and sees him becoming a bad man when he grows up. Due to Mrs. Reed’s lack of discipline John did grow as his cousin perceived causing his own demise and the relief of Jane for her cousin no longer could torment those lesser than himself. “Mr. Rochester continued blind for the first two years of our union: perhaps it was that circumstance that drew us so very near – that knit us so very close: for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand. Literally, I was the apple of his eye.” (p.578) Jane expresses her grief over Rochester’s injuries but emphasizes her constant love as everything that he has lost. Rochester appears completely opposite from the first time they met; he’s helpless just as Jane was when they first met and it is her in...

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...oach, nor will you stir one step to meet it where it waits for you.” (p.248) Rochester notices her fault and clearly points them out to her. Allowing a person to hear their own faults causes them to examine whether or not these accusations are true or not. In Jane’s case Rochester pinned out Jane’s faults and he’s doing his part to help her become more like him instead of being a shy, little, shrewd Quaker. The fortune-teller finally mentions Jane’s love for Rochester, but unknown to Jane the fortune-teller is Edward Fairfax Rochester. Jane hints toward this love but has clearly been manipulated by Rochester into his entanglement of love, which Blanche was thought to be in the center of. The main point of Rochester’s deception is to encourage Jane to except her love and express is to someone other than Rochester and to feel love for the first time if at all possible.

As Brontë’s novel is read over through the generations, the theme that a person can be manipulated into love and often times has to find her own integrity is passed on. By using many different elements of plot and characters she creates a novel forever found to be part of American Literature and English History.