How
do you do,
I'm back after a hiatus. For the past few years, I was out due to an epiphany at how little time we have on this planet, especially with the recent COVID pandemic, that it seemed a waste to be making critical reviews of small matters. So, I never got into other blog entries I had plan to give while we were all staying home. That and my new job got in the way at times. But, now I decided to give another try at the blog again after a trip up to Washington DC and Middletown, Delaware, where in the latter I witnessed the musical Jane Eyre in the historic Everette Theatre. The production was brought to life by a local drama group under the name of God's Power & Light Company, itself doing many works involving Christianity and redemption.
At the time I beheld this play, it had been years since I read any novel by the Brontë sisters (especially as I was abstaining from works of fiction for Lent this year) and it seemed this one was a good way to get reacquainted with it. The way they had the music performed was great, with the right sort of talent to each character. The show's leading lady, Genevieve Aucoin, made a great Jane, showcasing all the highs and lows of the character. Matching her was Douglas Biggs performing an ancient looking Mr. Rochester with the same dynamic drive of George C. Scott. The rest nailed it in many ways: those playing the abusers of Jane looking mean, the gentle ladies being all vain as peacocks, and St. John Rivers' actor coming off as a nice guy, not to mention the comedy provided by some of the extras. If there was a detraction, it would be the costumes as they seemed all over the place in historical period with little suggesting Regency Britain, though Ms Aucoin did resemble Charlotte Brontë herself in one of her costumes. But then again, most of us don't go to plays for accuracy, except for accuracy to the story.
Having gone off track, I must point out I am writing of course about the book, not the play, so we'll end it by saying the performance was great and enjoyable. It wasn't until I got home before I cracked it open and read it.
Jane
Eyre is
Charlotte Brontë's famous novel, published in 1847, while her
sisters, Anne and Emily, were also writing (in case you didn't know,
Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering
Heights).
The Brontë sisters, and their brother Branwell, were the
offspring of Maria and Patrick Brontë, a rector Haworth,
located in West Riding of Yorkshire, in the UK, with Charlotte the
oldest of the bunch (she had two older siblings who died in 1825).
You might think it unremarkable of a woman who turned thirty would write up a book, but in that time it was something novel. Most women didn't write novels in England at the time and many had to use male pseudonyms in order to get their works published. A few were rebelling against the sexist notion that only men were writers back when the Brontës were growing up. They were girls when Mary Wolstonecroft Shelley became famous with Frankenstein and Jane Austen wrote her romances. However, Shelley and Austen were the exceptions, while Elizabeth Gaskell and George Elliot, contemporaries of the Brontë sisters, was yet to be known. Even the romantic novel genre, known as the for women by women genre, was largely a male dominated world.
Charlotte,
Anne, and Emily were basically rebelling against this world as they
used their talents as writers to write up poems and stories. They
each had their own style to their works, especially when you look at
the novels. In a harsh light, Emily Brontë's Wuthering
Heights is
a culminating and palpitating melodrama told by eyewitnesses, while
Anne's Agnes
Grey seems
relatively thin and likely made at white heat. Charlotte's book seems
sort of in between, while containing feminine sophistry and
sophistication common in many mid-19th century romance novels. It was
imitated here in the US by Augusta Jane Evans with her St.
Elmo,
with its own page after page of high strung dialogue and excessive
verbiage that most modern readers have to navigate through.
In Dawson's
Creek,
we hear a teacher's assistant in a college scene compare Louisa
Alcott's Little
Women to Jane
Eyre,
largely in the second half where Jo meets Professor Bhaer. Even The Sound of Music feels like a remake of Jane Eyre when you think about it, though it lacks the Gothic atmosphere.
Some
of the verbiage mentioned was because novels were originally read by
the elite of the day, whereas most people who could read simply read
the Bible, the Almanac, or newspapers, as they had too much to do
each day to read a novel. So, given the background, it's no wonder
many books of the time would have such vocabulary terms and sentence
structures that have fallen by the wayside in our every day dialogue.
This also explains why the story is set among the upper middle class
to the nobles in society with hardly anything added for the
commoners, yet Jane
Eyre also
challenges world by having its protagonist start as a poor girl.
Like in Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre begins as an orphan, only she is taken in by a family earlier in the story, and she doesn't get the happy ending Oliver got. Essentially, she got mistreated before Anne Shirley was even born. First she is sent to live with the Reed family, which include an aunt, but is treated as something like garbage. Her cousin, John, makes fun of her, her Aunt Sarah is mean to her, and even the housekeeper is harsh, while her Uncle dies before the story begins. So, she is abused by her relatives, often accused of lying by her own aunt.
In
three chapters, she is sent away to a boarding school, where the
tyrannical Mr. Brocklehurst is told of Jane's nature by her aunt,
which makes him bear down upon her. Brocklehurst comes across as a
dogmatic, religious leader who believes more in discipline than in
unconditional love, often coming down on the girls with no
hesitation, and he uses religion as a tool for the same reason. So
here, we get a sense that the idea of people using religion as a way
to keep the masses in line is not as new as one might think. People
actually subscribed to this in the past, especially in the Regency
England.
In
this way, Brocklehurst makes a nice contrast to Mr. Bumble: both mean
guys, both fat, both run a place full of children, both a product of
the Regency Generation. Yet, where Dickens' Bumble is fleshed out and
gradually goes from chlorotic bully to henpecked husband and
underling (essentially going from supposed villain to second fiddle
compared to Fagin and Sikes), Brocklehurst has no development. He
already has a wife and he has a family, who are better off than Jane
and the girls. And he is gone after an expose is done on the outbreak
of tuberculosis leads to many of his charges to die. At least, he
gets an ending just like with Bumble, where the mighty have fallen.
Jane
is then under the hand of Miss Maria Temple who clears her name of
the charges Brocklehurst made against her, while also being abused by
Miss Scatcherd, a mean sort of school teacher. Jane also befriends
Helen Burns, the girl who changes her life. Helen is depicted a
saintly girl who teaches others to turn the other cheek, something
that Jane has problems with. Yet, she gradually becomes close as the
latter is willing to go against the decrees and help her. Of course,
such saintly characters in novels at the time are doomed to die,
which is what happens to her before we reach chapter eleven.
So
we fast forward in a few chapters. We see Jane again as a young woman
(or teenager in modern terms), leaving Lowood to become governess in
the Thornfield Hall, making this suddenly feel like The
Sound of Music without
the music. Of course, it's not The
Sound of Music.
We meet only one child, Adele, a French girl who is ward to Mr.
Edward Rochester.
At
this point, the novel takes on a Gothic atmosphere. You might get the
image of Regency English countryside with green meadows blanketed by
fog and rain. The house of Thornfield takes it up to eleven in the
appearances of a castle (said to have been modeled after Haddon
Hall). Even the name is a combination of "thorn" and
"field", suggesting it a field of thorns, making one think
those vines coiling around the castle in "The Sleeping Beauty,"
to keep the Prince from Princess Aurora. It comes with this, while
having people speaking in hushed voices over matters, especially
concerning Rochester, who gives off vibes of the Beast. In fact, the
scenes in Thornfield give the impression of the fairy tale "Beauty
and the Beast," though Rochester is still a man. He is beastly
in his stern features and his lack of being open on his secrets. He
has Adele for a ward, but shows no intention of marrying her (they
used to do that back then), he lives alone in a large hall that has
some darkness about it, he mistakes Jane as an elf upon meeting her,
and he often is away for long periods of time, leaving the servants
to look after Adele. We also see a chestnut tree get struck by
lightning halfway through the novel, which becomes important to
symbolism near the end. Also, there is that demonic laughter heard
once in a while, along with screams. Once, a houseguest, Richard
Mason, gets bitten, but nothing is done other than tending to his
wounds.
In
addition to what first time readers would assume is a vampire living
in the mansion, but Jane is awoken in the middle of the night to a
fire, finding Rochester almost about to be burned to death. Quick
thinking on her part saves him and he sustained only a minor burn.
From this point, he begins to soften somewhat to Jane.
Center
point to Jane
Eyre is
the love story of Jane and Mr. Rochester. It is a kind of
May-December romance, with the man being older than the woman,
something that was also common in the time period. Of course,
Rochester isn't an old man (especially not in modern sense). In the
events of the book, he is described as being in his mid- to late
thirties, which makes him about the same age as I (may I be excused
for saying at the time of this blog entry I am thirty-seven years
old). He doesn't show up until chapter twelve, falling off his horse,
and thinking of Jane as an elf when it happens. So, they start out
with jabs that make one think "will they or won't they."
Jane
keeps up her ability to counter everything Rochester has in wits,
even as she works for him. All the while, she goes back and forth on
how she feels on him, knowing their stations. It's not that Jane is
lowly to Rochester, but the fact she is simply a governess while
Rochester is among the landed gentry, in addition to their age
difference. Not to mention, Rochester goes about with an air of
someone burning with passion, yet is held in check by both social
aspects and a secret. One has to remember men like him would live in
a world that saw respect to names important, as they had no titles to
that name, but they owned a great deal of land and they had wealth,
all of which was believed to be tied in with morals and behavior.
This explains why he often sneaks away for activities, but the secret
part comes in as the book progresses.
Edward
Rochester is a type of male character we call the Byronic hero, named
after Lord Byron, the Romantic English poet, whose works no doubt
were read by the Brontes. A typical Byronic hero isn't the squeaky
clean sort of guy, especially not those cardboard cut out heroes that
so featured a lot in the earlier novels, like with Tom Jones,
Candide, or Robinson Crusoe, or any of traditional heroes of the
eighteenth century. These are men (sometimes women) who often exist
outside of more social circles, often intellectuals, or simply people
of refined taste, who also exhibit some character flaw or some trait
that sometimes makes them less pleasant. Some fall under the category
of anti-hero, which most are familiar with. They are the kind who
often don't follow the rules of chivalry or do things people think
are politically incorrect, and yet are still the good guys. Some are
also evil, but not pure evil, which is enough to remind us we are all
sinners. These later kinds of characters will undergo a redemption
arc in the story and become the good guys in the end, often at the
price of their social standing, their fortunes, their loved ones, or
even their lives.
We've
had plenty in pop culture. In Star
Wars,
the chief villain, Darth Vader, became re-written as a Byronic hero
over time, especially once the prequels came. Same franchise had Kylo
Ren / Ben Solo in the Disney trilogy. In both cases, each man is evil
and becomes redeemed by an act of love. In Disney, the most popular
of the fairy tale movies was Beauty
and the Beast where
Beast is our Byronic hero who becomes redeemed by love. Even Severus
Snape in Harry
Potter (who
gets referenced in the introduction of the copy I read) is now seen
that way as he redeems himself through his love of Lilly and dies a
martyr against Lord Voldemort, after being such a jerk to Harry and
his friends through most of the series. Before him, Sirius Black was
a Byronic hero, but largely as he was an outcast through a crime he
didn't commit and was also redeemed in death while friend and fellow
Marauder Remus Lupin is beastly as a werewolf, but is made human by
Tonks. The list goes on and everyone one of them has questionable
qualities but ultimately a redeemable soul about them, that one can't
help but want their redemption.
With
Rochester, we see a Byronic hero with a noble man living secluded in
his hall with his servants and his ward, which brings to mind
The Beast. In the original fairy tale, we see Beast who is what he
is, yet becomes human again in the end through the love of Beauty.
The Disney version expands on it as we see Beast learn to be more
human and a gentleman, which pleases Belle and makes her see him as a
man instead of a beast. Unlike Beast, of course, Rochester has no
spell over him. He is only beastly in a symbolic sense.
He
spends most of the time seeking passion in his life, which soon came
to include Jane. And in Jane, he finds someone who is more than just
a person on his payroll. Jane is basically an equal in smarts (though
not in class), able to outwit him on numerous occasions. At the same
time, Jane sees in Rochester the source of a home after being
mistreated her whole life as an orphan. After going through such an
environment, Jane had toughened up and could handle anything
Rochester throws at her.
In
her article for JSTOR, "Sorry, but Jane Eyre Isn't the Romance
You Want It To Be," Erin Blackmore writes that Rochester
would "fit right in with the modern “seduction
community,” conducting a master class in negging as he reminds Jane
of her inferiority, then compliments her wit."[1] This perfectly
sums up the interactions in the meat of the novel, where from a
critical point of view we see an older man playing mind games with a
young woman, all because he can't or won't express himself. He does
this most when he hosts a party that allows allegeable ladies of
the region to come and present themselves. Among them is Blanche
Ingram, who spends her scenes flirting with Rochester in an attempt
to get him to marry her, while looking down her nose at people like
Jane. Again, classism shows, thus preventing Jane
Eyre from
passing the Bechdel Test. As a product of the time, Blanche can't
propose to Rochester. Instead, she must get him to propose to her,
something feminists of today would find both a sign of how far we've
come as well as showing one way women could have power in a male
dominated society.
Brontë takes
a moment to critique the "mercenary" marriages of the 1810s
through the Ingrams. Blanche and her mother are seeking Rochester
with no feelings of love or concern for his well being. They are
thinking of marrying a rich bachelor to continue their privileged
lifestyle. Thus, it sort of gets at what Jane Austen got into with
her novels, which often had scenes of women being courted by men of
wealth and means. One thing interesting is how Bronte has our
heroine, a girl of limited means, be the saintly woman that is a
better person, whereas the wealthy and sophisticated Blanche is
snobbish, allowing for the Madonna-Whore complex to be brought up and
subverted when applied to classes (ie, virtuous girl of limited means
vs whorish rich lady).
Jane,
of course, has a will of iron. She doesn't break to Blanche's
snobbishness and she doesn't yield to Rochester's manipulation, but
one time she does fall for his trick, when he is pretending to be a Roma woman
seeking to tell fortunes. The last I don't think needs any more
explanation. Will say that Jane does get jealous at the sight of
Rochester with Blanche, but almost never says something about it
until later. Eventually, Jane does break and lets Rochester know a
few things as she struggles with the possibility of going somewhere
else when Rochester announces his engagement to Blanche. "Do you
think I am an automaton?" she asks, "a machine without
feelings? ... Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and
little, I am soulless[sic] 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. I am not talking
to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even
of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as
if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet,
equal — as we are!"
Unlike
in Twilight (and
by the way, Rochester's first name is also Edward), where Bella Swan
already claims to be "unconditionally and irrevocably in love
with [Edward Cullen]" [2] very quickly, Jane takes her time in
expressing her sentiments of Rochester, who also takes time in
telling her his feelings. It is striking that through all this, Jane
actually falls for him when Rochester reveals the engagement a sham.
Finally, it all breaks down and the words of love are spoken. We are
halfway through when he finally tells her in the garden and asks her
to marry him.
Very
quickly, they set it up and it seems all is well, until Mason [the
guy who got bitten] walks in. He reveals that, surprise surprise,
Rochester is already married (dun! dun! dun!). Talk about something
you'd see out of a rom com, or a sitcom. Well, unlike in those
examples, Rochester admits he does have a wife and he kept her
hidden like Peter Pumpkineater, but not in a pumpkin. He takes
everyone inside and shows them the upper floor and reveals his locked
away wife, Bertha, as the source of the fire and the laughter.
Studies
on the brain were still novel at the time, but Brontë hits
on to the cognitive disorder that Bertha Rochester suffers. Instead
of locking her in a mental institution, Rochester choses to keep her
in his house, having a servant woman, who gets drunk often, watch
over her. The reveal does get problematic in modern eyes for three
points: one, a bit of contempt for the lower class is done in Grace
Poole being the one who watches Bertha, yet is also a drunk and
permits her loose, which should have gotten her fired; second, we
find out Bertha is mixed raced, from a Creole family in Jamaica, implying the madness is connected to
race; third, one might wonder why doesn't Rochester just get a
divorce, especially as he never really treated her well before then.
The third is explainable, in those days one couldn't get a divorce or
an annulment just because someone is getting demented. It was still
"till death do us part." Another thing to bring up is for
those thinking professional help is needed, because mental
institutions in the 1800s were basically prisons, unsanitary and run
by people who didn't know what was going on, yet were just as cruel
as the people Jane had met as a girl. Bertha was better off locked up
in the attic by her husband as she could have gentle care. The fact
her caretaker gets drunk on duty is barely stereotyping, as watching
out for her would likely drive anyone to the bottle. It only gets
questionable when one or another character makes it seem something of
Mrs. Poole's nature. Finally, we come to race, some of which is hard
to justify. In the early 1800s, race studies and cultural sensitivity
were yet to come by and people actually thought behaviors were
dictated by their ethnic background (hence why many books of the time
are populated by stereotypes and assumptions). So, it was common at
the time that people believed the madness she had was from impure
breeding, which could have been prevented by the parents simply
sticking to their kind, a line of thought now discredited (despite
what some people might claim that white people are born racists).
The
information we have on Bertha is she was wedded to Rochester by the
Masons because they saw him as part of the "Good Race",
implying it would be great for them. Rochester claims he thought he
loved her, only to realize he didn't as she slowly descended into
madness. One thing of note is we have no journals or writings of hers
quoted, since she apparently lost the ability to speak, thus we are
robbed of hearing of her tragic plight from her point of view, and
instead we are told it all from the perspective of her husband,
something most modern readers might critique Brontë on
(especially so since she is a woman). In fact, Jean Rhys went so far
as to fix that with a prequel, Wide
Sargasso Sea,
published in 1966, where we learn more about Bertha and her tragic
fall.
So,
Rochester is already married while playing mind games to get Jane,
but has he any redeeming qualities? His willingness to care for his
wife in a time when the insane asylums would have been worse on her
does make him redeemable. A lesser man would not only have kept her
hidden, but denied her existence (in the modern century, a lesser man would have also gotten that divorce as soon as she was committed). For another, he comes clean about
it rather than continue to live a lie. His taking in a ward is also
commendable, showing that not all orphans are doomed to the boarding
schools, the orphanage, the streets, or their graves, if one had the
heart to take one in. In return for the reveal, Rochester's standing in the public seems down, with people like Blanche running for the hills, while Rochester cools things with Mason. Thankfully, Adele is not in the picture, but Jane is and she is left wondering if Rochester is redeemable as they return to square one.
Rochester
still wants to marry Jane, or make her his mistress, and they can
live in France where no one knows them. While Jane forgives him for
the lies, she draws the line at being married to a bigamist or
becoming a mistress. Having nothing else but her good name, Jane
choses instead to leave Rochester, something feminists would take
delight in. I wouldn't be surprised if a modern rewrite of the book
would rather end here than continue.
But
we are not done yet. After leaving Thornfield, Jane goes out on the
streets, begging for her bread, and starving to death, thus showing
the danger to independence. Stripped from the life of luxury and a
place at the table with good food, she is now reduced to the beggar,
just shy of taking up the oldest profession in the world. Thankfully,
it doesn't come to that for she wouldn't even think of it. If she
said no to being a rich man's mistress, she would say no to being a
fallen woman. Yet, she gets sick and comes in the care of the Rivers
siblings. Diana and Mary Rivers, along with their housemaid, and
their brother, St. John, take Jane in, nurse her to health, and give
her a place to stay.
As
it turns out, they are cousins. This allows Jane to meet relatives
who are kind enough to her. She also spends time with St. John, who
basically spends most of his scenes talking to her as though she were
a child. In the play I saw, he seemed like a genuine nice guy, but he
comes across as condescending in the book. Just look at his statement
when he proposes: "You shall be mine: I claim you—not for my
pleasure, but for my Sovereign’s service." I don't think I
know any missionary who would have said such a thing to woo a woman,
but as a Catholic I don't know many missionaries with wives. I just
think the whole thing has as much emotion as the grinding of gears in
an automobile plant.
Then
Jane learns her rich uncle died and left her with twenty thousand
pounds Sterling, which in modern US dollars would be $2.24 million
(even then, that was a lot of money). Now Jane has money added to her
name and it gets St. John's attention. Wanting a share in this, and
make her his own, he proposes to her and invites her to come with him
to India as a missionary. Thankfully, Jane doesn't jump at it.
No
sooner does she get proposed to again, Jane hears someone calling her
name. When she guesses it to be Rochester, she goes to Thornfield to
see him. She gets there and finds the place burned down. She learned
Bertha had gone mad and set the place afire, then jumped to her
death. Rochester was able to get the servants to safety, but was left
blind and maimed from the event. Thus, we see him again now as a
broken, impotent, and melancholic man, now reduced in the eyes of
many. He has lost his main home, his mad wife, his good standing, his vision, and a hand, as well as the beastly nature about him. Yet, he is also repentant and longing to be a better man after
this episode. So, we get the sense that he is broken down and made
humble, thus ready for the final piece of the redemption arc.
So
Jane goes to him in the garden and tells him she has returned. After
missing her for so long, Rochester is delighted to see her again, but
assumes she is married. Jane tells him she is an independent woman
and she chose to come back to him willingly, and she intended to help
him with love. Thus she is no longer answering to him, but is only
coming out of her own will, which was revolutionary for the time.
They do have another bout of wit, with him asking, "Am I
hideous, Jane?" to which she answers, "Very sir; you always
were, you know." The moment does seem like a cliché, but
considering how Rochester changes at this point and doesn't hold it
against Jane, who doesn't care that he is no longer the strong man he
was, it does make for a happy ending in the two. When he proposes again, she says yes.
Of
course, we follow with chapter thirty-eight, essentially the weakest in
the narrative. It opens with Jane simply saying, "Reader, I
married him." Such a statement can be read in a matter of fact
tone and makes one wonder what was Brontë thinking when
she wrote it. She could have had Jane say, "We were married
shortly thereafter" or "We became man and wife at a later
date, during which time Rochester was more or less like himself."
But no, we get, "Reader, I married him." It's redeeming quality is the wording being structured to where the woman had dictated things, becoming more active than say, "Reader, he married me." In short, the woman has taken command in this one sentence.
From there, it
goes downhill with Jane uncharacteristically boasting of how closer
she was to her husband than any other while speaking of what happened
to the others. Earlier, she met with Mrs. Reed, who confessed to why
she mistreated Jane and explained her son hung himself after getting
into a bad life. She reveals St John later went to India and never
married, yet his sisters did marry. Meanwhile, Jane and Rochester
adopted Adele as their stepdaughter, then had a son, who arrived as
one of Rochester's eyes recovers. At least the last was the one good
part, but one can't help but think Brontë could have ended
at chapter thirty-seven, but at the time most people wanted the
characters to either get married or to die at the end.
That
is the story that is in this almost six hundred paged novel (I got a
friend who called reading it a feat). When it first was published,
with Brontë using a man's name, critics were negative
about it. Elizabeth Rigby called it "anti-Christian" and
even American critics called it "immoral." The view
softened after Brontë's death, with it appearing to be less of
an irreligious work and more like an allegory of perseverance and
forgiveness, plus the story of a saintly girl redeeming a beastly
man.
Many
things to take note is how it is in the Regency era, yet nowhere is
Napoleon or the Prince Regent mentioned. Regardless, it was written
in the 1840s, with the dawn of the Victorian era, thereby making the
book a world in passing. The Industrial Revolution had transformed
English society by the time Brontë set her pen to paper.
Men like Rochester, whose wealth was accumulated by land, worked upon
by servants, and passed down from father to son, were still around,
but were soon replaced by men of business, those whose wealth came
from profits, dug up in the mines, factories, or the office. First
wave feminism was seen in England when Brontë wrote Jane
Eyre,
and soon the Brontës would have no reason to use male names
when writing books. In a few generations, women could hold jobs in
offices, become breadwinners, and even vote in politicians. The
concept of the master race would become more noticeable and men like
St. John Rivers would justify imperialism by calling it "white
man's burden" (which is tempting to make Jane seem woke for her
time by turning his proposal down). Above all, the Christian based
morality that ran England for centuries was becoming increasingly
superseded by a secular one. Even the Bible went from occupying the
center piece of British society to being replaced now by novels
like Jane
Eyre and
the scientific method.
Even
the concept of a saintly girl redeeming a beastly man appears to be a
retiring trope in the modern pop culture due to increased awareness
in domestic abuse and such, with increasingly romance stories
avoiding the trope all together. I do think abuse is an issue that
needs to be dealt with. At the same time, what of those who want to
reform? Are we to cast them aside like those who don't want to reform
while we live in this new black and white world? And if a woman is
strong enough to handle such actions and her strength and wit causes
a man to change, what does that say of the scene? To me, it shows
there is always a chance for change to everyone. What's needed is
neither a push nor pull, but a will.
There are people out there in need of help like Mr. Rochester and the real life mad wives in the attic comes in other forms. It might be some addiction to substances, anger issues, a job that he can't leave and it won't let him go no matter how wicked it is, as well as larger issues like poverty and circumstances. Perhaps one reason I like how it ends is the thought of someone who will see the real you and let the world know that the good inside you can be drawn out. Think of it, meeting someone who loves unconditionally, won't let what is said of you dictate decisions, while encouraging you to give it your own, to see the beauty in this world, to see a light side to humanity, and tells you you are not alone. Jane Eyre does show the dark side of the world, with its cruelty, and even those in need of redemption can have a bad side to them. But if they didn't, what have they to be redeemed from?
Perhaps we all are like Rochester with the wrong ideas in the mind and in need to be brought down and humbled before we can see the beauty in this world. Some of us even need a real Jane Eyre, who is also seeking love after living a life without it. We can also give that love to real Jane Eyres, allowing them to know forgiveness sooner. If we could do all that, perhaps, the world would be a better place.
[1]
Blakemore, Erin. "Sorry, but Jane Eyre Isn't the Romance You
Want It To Be" (2019) accessed 2023. https://daily.jstor.org/sorry-but-jane-eyre-isnt-the-perfect-romance-you-want-it-to-be/
[2] Meyer, Stephanie. Twilight. pg. 208 (2005).
