Jane Eyre: 2014

Friday, 28 March 2014

Family

The main quest in Jane Eyre is Jane's search for family, for a sense of belonging and love.
However, this search is constantly tempered by Jane’s need for independence.
She begins the novel as an unloved orphan who is almost obsessed with finding love as a way to establish her own identity and achieve happiness.
Although she does not receive any parental love from Mrs. Reed, Jane finds surrogate maternal figures throughout the rest of the novel.
Bessie, Miss Temple, and even Mrs. Fairfax care for Jane and give her the love and guidance that she needs, and she returns the favor by caring for Adèle and the students at her school.
Still, Jane does not feel as though she has found her true family until she falls in love with Mr. Rochester at Thornfield; he becomes more of a kindred spirit to her than any of her biological relatives could be.
However, she is unable to accept Mr. Rochester’s first marriage proposal because she realizes that their marriage - one based on unequal social standing - would compromise her autonomy.
Jane similarly denies St. John's marriage proposal, as it would be one of duty, not of passion.
Only when she gains financial and emotional autonomy, after having received her inheritance and the familial love of her cousins, can Jane accept Rochester's offer.
In fact, the blinded Rochester is more dependent on her (at least until he regains his sight). Within her marriage to Rochester, Jane finally feels completely liberated, bringing her dual quests for family and independence to a satisfying conclusion.

Thursday, 27 March 2014

The Red Room

The red-room can be viewed as a symbol of what Jane must overcome in her struggles to find freedom, happiness, and a sense of belonging.
In the red-room, Jane’s position of exile and imprisonment first becomes clear.
Although Jane is eventually freed from the room, she continues to be socially ostracized, financially trapped, and excluded from love; her sense of independence and her freedom of self-expression are constantly threatened.
The red-room’s importance as a symbol continues throughout the novel. It reappears as a memory whenever Jane makes a connection between her current situation and that first feeling of being ridiculed.
Thus she recalls the room when she is humiliated at Lowood. She also thinks of the room on the night that she decides to leave Thornfield after Rochester has tried to convince her to become an undignified mistress.
Her destitute condition upon her departure from Thornfield also threatens emotional and intellectual imprisonment, as does St. John’s marriage proposal.
Only after Jane has asserted herself, gained financial independence, and found a spiritual family—which turns out to be her real family—can she wed Rochester and find freedom in and through marriage.

Bertha Mason

Bertha Mason is a complex presence in Jane Eyre.
She impedes Jane’s happiness, but she also catalyses the growth of Jane’s self-understanding.
The mystery surrounding Bertha establishes suspense and terror to the plot and the atmosphere. Further, Bertha serves as a remnant and reminder of Rochester’s youthful libertinism.
Yet Bertha can also be interpreted as a symbol. Some critics have read her as a statement about the way Britain feared and psychologically “locked away” the other cultures it encountered at the height of its imperialism.
Others have seen her as a symbolic representation of the “trapped” Victorian wife, who is expected never to travel or work outside the house and becomes ever more frenzied as she finds no outlet for her frustration and anxiety.
Within the story, then, Bertha’s insanity could serve as a warning to Jane of what complete surrender to Rochester could bring about.
One could also see Bertha as a manifestation of Jane’s subconscious feelings—specifically, of her rage against oppressive social and gender norms.
Jane declares her love for Rochester, but she also secretly fears marriage to him and feels the need to rage against the imprisonment it could become for her. Jane never manifests this fear or anger, but Bertha does.
Thus Bertha tears up the bridal veil, and it is Bertha’s existence that indeed stops the wedding from going forth.
And, when Thornfield comes to represent a state of servitude and submission for Jane, Bertha burns it to the ground.
Throughout the novel, Jane describes her inner spirit as fiery, her inner landscape as a “ridge of lighted heath” (Chapter 4).
Bertha seems to be the outward manifestation of Jane’s interior fire. Bertha expresses the feelings that Jane must keep in check.

Wednesday, 26 March 2014

External Beauty vs Internal Beauty

Throughout the novel, Brontë plays with the dichotomy between external beauty and internal beauty.
Both Bertha Mason and Blanche Ingram are described as stunningly beautiful, but, in each case, the external beauty obscures an internal ugliness.
Bertha’s beauty and sensuality blinded Mr. Rochester to her hereditary madness, and it was only after their marriage that he gradually recognized her true nature.
Blanche’s beauty hides her haughtiness and pride, as well as her desire to marry Mr. Rochester only for his money.
Yet, in Blanche’s case, Mr. Rochester seems to have learned not to judge by appearances, and he eventually rejects her, despite her beauty.
Only Jane, who lacks the external beauty of typical Victorian heroines, has the inner beauty that appeals to Mr. Rochester.
Her intelligence, wit, and calm morality express a far greater personal beauty than that of any other character in the novel, and Brontë clearly intends to highlight the importance of personal development and growth rather than superficial appearances.
Once Mr. Rochester loses his hand and eyesight, they are also on equal footing in terms of appearance: both must look beyond superficial qualities in order to love each other.

Fire and Ice [Motifs]

Fire and ice appear throughout Jane Eyre. The former represents Jane’s passions, anger, and spirit, while the latter symbolizes the oppressive forces trying to extinguish Jane’s vitality.
Fire is also a metaphor for Jane, as the narrative repeatedly associates her with images of fire, brightness, and warmth. In Chapter 4, she likens her mind to “a ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring.”
We can recognize Jane’s kindred spirits by their similar links to fire; thus we read of Rochester’s “flaming and flashing” eyes (Chapter 26). After he has been blinded, his face is compared to “a lamp quenched, waiting to be relit” (Chapter 37).
Images of ice and cold, often appearing in association with barren landscapes or seascapes, symbolize emotional desolation, loneliness, or even death.
The “death-white realms” of the arctic that Bewick describes in his History of British Birdsparallel Jane’s physical and spiritual isolation at Gateshead (Chapter 1).
Lowood’s freezing temperatures—for example, the frozen pitchers of water that greet the girls each morning—mirror Jane’s sense of psychological exile.
After the interrupted wedding to Rochester, Jane describes her state of mind: “A Christmas frost had come at mid-summer: a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hay-field and corn-field lay a frozen shroud . . . and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and fragrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway. My hopes were all dead. . . .” (Chapter 26).
Finally, at Moor House, St. John’s frigidity and stiffness are established through comparisons with ice and cold rock. Jane writes: “By degrees, he acquired a certain influence over me that took away my liberty of mind. . . . I fell under a freezing spell” (Chapter 34).
When St. John proposes marriage to Jane, she concludes that “[a]s his curate, his comrade, all would be right. . . . But as his wife—at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked—forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital—this would be unendurable” (Chapter 34).

Gender Equality

Jane struggles continually to achieve equality and to overcome oppression.
In addition to class hierarchy, she must fight against patriarchal domination—against those who believe women to be inferior to men and try to treat them as such.
Three central male figures threaten her desire for equality and dignity: Mr. Brocklehurst, Edward Rochester, and St. John Rivers.
All three are misogynistic on some level. Each tries to keep Jane in a submissive position, where she is unable to express her own thoughts and feelings.
In her quest for independence and self-knowledge, Jane must escape Brocklehurst, reject St. John, and come to Rochester only after ensuring that they may marry as equals.
This last condition is met once Jane proves herself able to function, through the time she spends at Moor House, in a community and in a family.
She will not depend solely on Rochester for love and she can be financially independent. Furthermore, Rochester is blind at the novel’s end and thus dependent upon Jane to be his “prop and guide.”
Alongside Brontë's critique of Victorian class hierarchy is a subtler condemnation of the gender inequalities during the time period.
The novel begins with Jane's imprisonment in the "red-room" at Gateshead, and later in the book Bertha's imprisonment in the attic at Thornfield is revealed.
The connection implies that Jane's imprisonment is symbolic of her lower social class, while Bertha's containment is symbolic of Victorian marriage: all women, if they marry under unequal circumstances as Bertha did, will eventually be confined and oppressed by their husbands in some manner.
Significantly, Jane is consciously aware of the problems associated with unequal marriages. Thus, even though she loves Mr. Rochester, she refuses to marry him until she has her own fortune and can enter into the marriage contract as his equal.
While it is difficult to separate Jane's economic and gender obstacles, it is clear that her position as a woman also prevents her from venturing out into the world as many of the male characters do – Mr. Rochester, her Uncle John, and St. John, for instance.
Indeed, her desire for worldly experience makes her last name ironic, as "Eyre" derives from an Old French word meaning "to travel."
If Jane were a man, Brontë suggests, she would not be forced to submit to so much economic hardship; she could actively attempt to make her fortune.
As it is, however, Jane must work as a governess, the only legitimate position open for a woman of her station, and simply wait for her uncle to leave her his fortune.

Religion

Throughout the novel, Jane struggles to find the right balance between moral duty and earthly pleasure, between obligation to her spirit and attention to her body.
She encounters three main religious figures: Mr. Brocklehurst, Helen Burns, and St. John Rivers.
Each represents a model of religion that Jane ultimately rejects as she forms her own ideas about faith and principle, and their practical consequences.
Mr. Brocklehurst illustrates the dangers and hypocrisies that Charlotte Brontë perceived in the nineteenth-century Evangelical movement.
Mr. Brocklehurst adopts the rhetoric of Evangelicalism when he claims to be purging his students of pride, but his method of subjecting them to various privations and humiliations, like when he orders that the naturally curly hair of one of Jane’s classmates be cut so as to lie straight, is entirely un-Christian.
Of course, Brocklehurst’s proscriptions are difficult to follow, and his hypocritical support of his own luxuriously wealthy family at the expense of the Lowood students shows Brontë’s wariness of the Evangelical movement.
Helen Burns’s meek and forbearing mode of Christianity, on the other hand, is too passive for Jane to adopt as her own, although she loves and admires Helen for it.
Many chapters later, St. John Rivers provides another model of Christian behavior. His is a Christianity of ambition, glory, and extreme self-importance.
St. John urges Jane to sacrifice her emotional deeds for the fulfillment of her moral duty, offering her a way of life that would require her to be disloyal to her own self.
Although Jane ends up rejecting all three models of religion, she does not abandon morality, spiritualism, or a belief in a Christian God.
When her wedding is interrupted, she prays to God for solace (Chapter 26).
As she wanders the heath, poor and starving, she puts her survival in the hands of God (Chapter 28).
She strongly objects to Rochester’s lustful immorality, and she refuses to consider living with him while church and state still deem him married to another woman. Even so, Jane can barely bring herself to leave the only love she has ever known. She credits God with helping her to escape what she knows would have been an immoral life (Chapter 27).
Jane ultimately finds a comfortable middle ground. Her spiritual understanding is not hateful and oppressive like Brocklehurst’s, nor does it require retreat from the everyday world as Helen’s and St. John’s religions do.
For Jane, religion helps curb immoderate passions, and it spurs one on to worldly efforts and achievements. These achievements include full self-knowledge and complete faith in God.

Social Class

Jane Eyre is critical of Victorian England’s strict social hierarchy.
Brontë’s exploration of the complicated social position of governesses is perhaps the novel’s most important treatment of this theme.
Like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Jane is a figure of ambiguous class standing and, consequently, a source of extreme tension for the characters around her.
Jane’s manners, sophistication, and education are those of an aristocrat, because Victorian governesses, who tutored children in etiquette as well as academics, were expected to possess the “culture” of the aristocracy. Yet, as paid employees, they were more or less treated as servants; thus, Jane remains penniless and powerless while at Thornfield.
Jane’s understanding of the double standard crystallizes when she becomes aware of her feelings for Rochester; she is his intellectual, but not his social, equal.
Even before the crisis surrounding Bertha Mason, Jane is hesitant to marry Rochester because she senses that she would feel indebted to him for “condescending” to marry her. J
Jane’s distress, which appears most strongly in Chapter 17, seems to be Brontë’s critique of Victorian class attitudes.
Jane herself speaks out against class prejudice at certain moments in the book. For example, in Chapter 23 she chastises Rochester: “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you—and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you.”
Although Jane asserts that her poverty does not make her an inferior person, her eventual ascent out of poverty does help her overcome her personal obstacles. Not only does she generously divide her inheritance with her cousins, but her financial independence solves her difficulty with low self-esteem and allows her to fulfill her desire to be Mr. Rochester’s wife.

Tuesday, 25 March 2014

Helen Burns

Helen Burns, Jane’s friend at Lowood School, serves as a foil to Mr. Brocklehurst as well as to Jane.
While Mr. Brocklehurst embodies an evangelical form of religion that seeks to strip others of their excessive pride or of their ability to take pleasure in worldly things, Helen represents a mode of Christianity that stresses tolerance and acceptance.
Brocklehurst uses religion to gain power and to control others; Helen ascetically trusts her own faith and turns the other cheek to Lowood’s harsh policies.
Although Helen manifests a certain strength and intellectual maturity, her efforts involve self-negation rather than self-assertion, and Helen’s submissive and ascetic nature highlights Jane’s more headstrong character.
Like Jane, Helen is an orphan who longs for a home, but Helen believes that she will find this home in Heaven rather than Northern England.
And while Helen is not oblivious to the injustices the girls suffer at Lowood, she believes that justice will be found in God’s ultimate judgment—God will reward the good and punish the evil.
Jane, on the other hand, is unable to have such blind faith. Her quest is for love and happiness in this world. Nevertheless, she counts on God for support and guidance in her search.

Monday, 24 March 2014

St. John Rivers

St. John Rivers is the opposite of Edward Rochester.
Whereas Rochester is passionate, St. John is austere and ambitious. Jane often describes Rochester’s eyes as flashing and flaming, whereas she constantly associates St. John with rock, ice, and snow.
Marriage with Rochester represents the abandonment of principle for the consummation of passion, but marriage to St. John would mean sacrificing passion for principle.
When he invites her to come to India with him as a missionary, St. John offers Jane the chance to make a more meaningful contribution to society than she would as a housewife. At the same time, life with St. John would mean life without true love, in which Jane’s need for spiritual solace would be filled only by retreat into the recesses of her own soul.
Independence would be accompanied by loneliness, and joining St. John would require Jane to neglect her own legitimate needs for love and emotional support. Her consideration of St. John’s proposal leads Jane to understand that, paradoxically, a large part of one’s personal freedom is found in a relationship of mutual emotional dependence.
While Rochester is a prototype of the fiery, passionate man, St. John Rivers is his opposite: cold, hard-hearted, and repressed.
His handsome appearance indicates moral and intellectual superiority — he has "a straight, classic nose; quite an Athenian mouth and chin" — and contrasts with Rochester's more rugged features.
Although St. John initially appears perfect, Jane soon detects a restlessness or hardness under his seemingly placid features; he is "no longer flesh, but marble" and his heart seems made of "stone or metal."
His reserve and brooding suggest a troubled nature, and his zealous Christianity offers him neither serenity nor solace. St. John's feelings about Christianity are revealed in his sermons, which have a "strictly restrained zeal" that shows his bitterness and hardness.
While Rochester vents his passions, St. John represses his. The iciness of St. John's character is most pronounced in his relationship with Rosamond Oliver. Although he "flushes" and "kindles" at the sight of her, St. John would rather turn himself into "an automaton" than succumb to Rosamond's beauty or fortune. His ambition cuts St. John off from all deep human emotions.
For Jane, this coldness is more terrible than Rochester's raging; she asks if readers know the "terror those cold people can put into the ice of their questions"?

Rochester

Despite his stern manner and not particularly handsome appearance, Edward Rochester wins Jane’s heart, because she feels they are kindred spirits, and because he is the first person in the novel to offer Jane lasting love and a real home.
Rochester's goal is self-transformation, a reformation to be enacted through his relationships with women. Longing for innocence and purity, he wants Jane to be the good angel in his life, creating new harmony.
Although Rochester is Jane’s social and economic superior, and although men were widely considered to be naturally superior to women in the Victorian period, Jane is Rochester’s intellectual equal.
Moreover, after their marriage is interrupted by the disclosure that Rochester is already married to Bertha Mason, Jane is proven to be Rochester’s moral superior.
Rochester regrets his former libertinism and lustfulness; nevertheless, he has proven himself to be weaker in many ways than Jane. Jane feels that living with Rochester as his mistress would mean the loss of her dignity. Ultimately, she would become degraded and dependent upon Rochester for love, while unprotected by any true marriage bond.
Jane will only enter into marriage with Rochester after she has gained a fortune and a family, and after she has been on the verge of abandoning passion altogether.
She waits until she is not unduly influenced by her own poverty, loneliness, psychological vulnerability, or passion.
Additionally, because Rochester has been blinded by the fire and has lost his manor house at the end of the novel, he has become weaker while Jane has grown in strength—Jane claims that they are equals, but the marriage dynamic has actually tipped in her favour.

Jane Eyre

Reading, education, and creativity are all essential components of Jane's growth, factors that help her achieve her final success.
From the novel's opening chapters to its close, Jane reads a variety of texts: Pamela, Gulliver's Travels, and Marmion.
Stories provide Jane with an escape from her unhappy domestic situation, feeding her imagination and offering her a vast world beyond the troubles of her real life.
She believes education will allow her the freedom to improve her position in society by teaching her to act like a "lady," but her success at school, in particular her drawing ability, also increases her self-confidence.
Jane confesses that artistic creation offers her one of the "keenest pleasures" of her life, and Rochester is impressed with Jane's drawings because of their depth and meaning, not typical of a schoolgirl.
Although artistic and educational pursuits are essential elements of Jane's personality, she also feels a need to assert her identity through rebellion.
In the opening chapters of the novel, Jane refers to herself as a "rebel slave," and throughout the story she opposes the forces that prevent her from finding happiness: Mrs. Reed's unfair accusations, Rochester's attempt to make her his mistress, and St. John's desire to transform her into a missionary wife.
By falling in love with Rochester, she implicitly mutinies against the dictates of class boundaries that relegate her, as a governess, to a lower status than her "master."
Besides rejecting traditional views of class, she also denigrates society's attempts to restrict women's activities.
Women, she argues, need active pursuits and intellectual stimulation, just as men do. Most of Jane's rebellions target the inequities of society, but much of her personality is fairly conventional.
Jane's personality balances social awareness with spiritual power. Throughout the novel, Jane is referred to as an imp, a fairy, a relative of the "men in green." As fairy, Jane identifies herself as a special, magical creature.
Connecting herself with the mythical beings in Bessie's stories, Jane is affiliated with the realms of imagination.
Jane's psychic abilities aren't merely imaginary: her dreams and visions have a real impact on her life.
For example, supernatural experiences, heralds of visions "from another world," foreshadow drastic changes in Jane's life, such as her move from Gateshead to Lowood, or her rediscovery of Rochester after their time apart.
Thus, Jane's spirituality isn't a purely Christian one — in fact, she rejects many of the Christian characters in the novel, such as St. John Rivers, Eliza Reed, and Mr. Brocklehurst — but a mixture of Christian and pagan ideas.
Like nature, Jane's God is filled with bounty, compassion, and forgiveness — qualities lacking in many of the spiritual leaders she criticizes in the novel.

Saturday, 22 March 2014

Key Quotes

God and nature intended you for a missionary's wife. It is not personal, but mental endowments they have given you: you are formed for labour, not for love. A missionary's wife you must - shall be. You shall be mine: I claim you - not for my pleasure, but for my Sovereign's service.

St. John Rivers

St. John makes this statement when he is attempting to convince Jane to marry him and become a missionary in India. St. John's declaration that Jane is formed for "labour, not for love" emphasizes his belief that love and passion have no place in a moral life. St. John's argument of ownership also highlights his view of Jane as a subservient companion, not a woman with independent thoughts. Although Jane approves of St. John's morality, she is unwilling to sacrifice love to become the kind of woman that St. John wants her to be.
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question. I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.

Jane Eyre

This is one of the more famous quotations from the novel because it provides an immediate sense of Jane's personality, as well as her position of lonely inferiority among her cousins at Gateshead. In the first line, it seems as if Jane desires to take a walk and is upset that she cannot. However, with the addition of the later lines, it becomes clear that Jane actually dislikes long walks - even from the very beginning of the novel, Bronte informs the readers that Jane is an atypical character who will make some surprising decisions. This opening quotation also describes the extent of Jane's loneliness and unhappiness with the Reed family; it is because of her empty childhood that Jane thirsts for the family and love that she will find with Mr. Rochester at Thornfield Manor.
I knew you would do me good in some way, at some time; - I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you: their expression and smile did not - did not strike delight to my very inmost heart so for nothing. People talk of natural sympathies: I have heard of good genii: - there are grains of truth in the wildest fable. My cherished preserver, good-night!

Edward Rochester

This quotation occurs immediately after Bertha Mason has set Mr. Rochester's bed on fire and Jane has rescued him. Mr. Rochester discards his sarcasm for one of the first times in the novel and acknowledges that he feels a significant emotional connection to Jane. This intimate moment is only possible because of Mr. Rochester's vulnerable position, and both the reader and Jane begin to see some of the person who lives beneath his brooding and tormented exterior. Bronte will continue to explore the idea that Jane and Mr. Rochester are kindred spirits as the novel continues, but even these few lines lay the seeds for the fiery passion that will pervade Jane's relationship with Mr. Rochester.
I am very happy, Jane; and when you hear that I am dead you must be sure and not grieve: there is nothing to grieve about. We all must die one day, and the illness which is removing me is not painful; it is gentle and gradual: my mind is at rest. I leave no one to regret me much: I have only a father; and he is lately married, and will not miss me. By dying young I shall escape great sufferings. I had not qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world: I should have been continually at fault.

Helen Burns

This speech comes when Helen Burns is dying in Jane's arms at Lowood School. Although she only appears for a few chapters, Helen and her view of Christianity become very significant to Jane as she grows into adulthood. Helen argued for turning the other cheek: accepting the injustice and unhappiness of the earthly world because of the joys that await in heaven. Although Jane does not wholly agree with Helen's passivity, particularly in the face of the torments at Lowood, she admires Helen's strength of faith. Still, Jane fears for her friend's death and the inevitable loneliness that will come when she is gone. Helen strives to convince Jane not to be unhappy because she is finally fulfilling her destiny and finding peace with God.
Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and clerk, were alone present.

Jane Eyre

This quotation comes after Jane has gone to Ferndean and discovered the newly-blinded Mr. Rochester. Up until this point in the text, Jane has always maintained a subservient position to Mr. Rochester. However, with the inheritance from her uncle, Jane is now an independent woman and can take charge of her own destiny. Moreover, with the loss of Mr. Rochester's eyesight, he becomes vulnerable and dependent on Jane; he can no longer maintain his former position as the superior male. Thus, instead of using the subservient "He married me," in which Mr. Rochester is the dominating partner, Jane takes the superior in the relationship: "I married him." However, this inequality is resolved when Mr. Rochester regains the use of one of his eyes; Jane and Mr. Rochester are finally able to support a relationship of mutual respect and quality.
You never felt jealousy, did you, Miss Eyre? Of course not: I need not ask you; because you never felt love. You have both sentiments yet to experience: your soul sleeps; the shock is yet to be given which shall waken it.

Edward Rochester

This speech occurs when Mr. Rochester tells Jane about Adele's origins and his affair with Celine Varens. Mr. Rochester's assertion that Jane has never felt love is not necessarily false. At this point in her sheltered life, Jane has barely experienced familial love, not to mention romantic love. Mr. Rochester's conclusion about Jane's emotional experience also emphasizes her inferior position in their relationship. Because he has experienced many kinds of love, Mr. Rochester is ultimately wiser and thus, superior to his naive governess. However, Bronte suggests that Jane actually possesses far more wisdom and clarity about love that Mr. Rochester: she is the only one of the two who is able to resist the call of animal passion and resist the temptation to become his mistress.
Why, I suppose you have a governess for her: I saw a person with her just now - is she gone? Oh, no! there she is still behind the window-curtain. You pay her, of course: I should think it quite as expensive, - more so; for you have them both to keep in addition...You should hear mama on the chapter of governesses: Mary and I have had, I should think, a dozen at least in our day; half of them detestable and the rest ridiculous, and all incubi - were they not, mama?

Blanche Ingram

Jane overhears this speech by Blanche Ingram during one of the social gatherings at Thornfield. Blanche expresses the upper-class prejudice against governesses and other members of the lower-class. Instead of respecting governesses for the work that they must do, Blanches mocks them openly and without any consideration for Jane's presence in the room. In her mind, a governess is nothing more than a servant and worthy of even less respect. This attitude is one that Jane constantly faces as a governess; Mr. Rochester is the only member of high society who ever treats her with respect.
She bit me. She worried me like a tigress, when Rochester got the knife from her...She sucked the blood: she said she'd drain my heart.

Richard Mason

This speech takes place after Richard Mason has been attacked by Bertha. Although Mr. Rochester forbids Jane and Richard Mason to speak about what has occurred, Jane cannot help overhearing this clue to the mystery of Thornfield. Through Mason's description, Bronte is able to present Bertha's nature as bestial (as a tigress) and even vampiric, a term in itself that alludes to the Gothic literary tradition. Not only is Bertha akin to the animal world in all its chaos, she is even carnivorous and attempts to suck the life out of her brother in the same way that her presence threatens to suck the life out of Mr. Rochester's happiness with Jane. Bertha's uncontrollable animal nature comes in stark contrast to Jane's placidity and rationality; although Jane possesses some of the same fiery passion that Bertha has, Jane is able to control her inclinations with her humanity.
If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should - so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.

Jane Eyre

This speech occurs during one of Jane's conversations with Helen Burns at Lowood. Although Helen prescribes to the idea of "turning the other cheek" when mistreated, Jane believes that people should defend themselves to ensure that they are never mistreated again. Jane is unable to mirror Helen's passivity at Lowood and her passion and strength of character will help her to overcome many obstacles in her life. Eventually Jane learns to hide her passion and anger at injustice, but Mr. Rochester will still recognize a kindred spirit beneath her calm exterior.
You must be on your guard against her; you must shun her example: if necessary, avoid her company, exclude her from your sports, and shut her out from your converse. Teachers, you must watch her: keep your eyes on her movements, weight well her words, scrutinize her actions, punish her body to saver her soul; if indeed, such salvation be possible for (my tongue falters while I tell it) this girl, this child, the native of a Christian land, worse than many a little heathen who says its prayers to Brahma and kneels before Juggernaut - this girl is - a liar!

Mr. Brocklehurst

Mr. Brocklehurst represents the worst kind of Christianity in the novel. His evangelical sermons, extreme stinginess, and cruel treatment of his students come in sharp contrast with his family's luxurious lifestyle and his embezzlement of school funds. In this particular scene, Mr. Brocklehurst demonstrates the extent of his cruelty by tormenting Jane with false accusations in front of her school peers. Although Mr. Brocklehurst is eventually removed from his position at Lowood, he remains one of the worst obstacles that the child Jane must overcome in order to continue her quest for independence.