Sorry, but Jane Eyre Isn’t the Romance You Want It to Be
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SPOILERS!!
#brontefest

Trial, judgment, punishment
“Arraigned at my own bar,Memory having given her evidence of the hopes,wishes,sentiments I had been cherishing…Reason having come forward and told, in her own quiet way, a plain unvarnished tale, showing I had rejected the real, and rapidly devoured the ideal”
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Between the epithets and the pictures, what self-flagellation!

“fool”
“fantastic idiot”
“Poor stupid dupe!”
“Blind puppy!”
“disconnected, poor, and plain”
“indigent and insignificant plebeian”
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Adele referred to as a “thing” and “it” by Rochester while Jane relates to her as “a lonely little orphan.”
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France/England

“Gallic sylph” vs. British gnome”

But later…

“slime and mud of Paris” vs. “wholesome soil of an English country garden”
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Both Rochester and Jane use the word peculiar to describe each other.

Jane has a “peculiar mind” according to Rochester.

“I thought to myself Mr Rochester is peculiar” (echoing Mrs Fairfax’s “He is rather peculiar”).

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Rochester avows Jane’s “soul sleeps: the shock is yet to be given which shall awaken it.” He likens the shock to “flood,” “breakers” and “life’s stream…broken up into whirl and tumult.”

His prediction comes true at the end of the chapter. Sleepless Jane is “tossed on an…unquiet sea.”
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It’s a match!
“and though you are not pretty any more than I am handsome…”
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Rochester’s characterizations of Jane become less one dimensional as the chapter progresses.
“Young lady”->”Little girl”->”neophyte”
->”Sententious sage”->”curious sort of bird”
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#Brontefest

"I should never mistake informality for insolence: one I rather like, the other nothing free-born would submit to, even for a salary.”

#Brontefest

This chapter!! 🤯The banter! I highlighted so much!

"I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high."

#Brontefest

R to J

"You must be tenacious of life."

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A present has many faces to it, has it not? and one should consider all, before pronouncing an opinion as to its nature.”

“Miss Eyre, you are not so unsophisticated as Adèle: she demands a ‘cadeau,’ clamorously, the moment she sees me: you beat about the bush.”