Jane Eyres Flight from Flight Essay Example For Students

Jane Eyres Flight from Flight Essay November 8, 2000The feminist literary critics, Gilbert and Gubar, claim, in their famous essay on Jane Eyre in The Madwoman in the Attic, that Jane tries different modes of escape from the imprisoning patriarchal Victorian society that is the setting of the novel. Escape through flight, escape through starvation.. . and escape through madness, (Dialogue 341) are the three they outline. In the traumatizing red room scene, Jane tries all of them, and then, as the novel progresses, each is given an entire section. She uses flight to escape from Gateshead, starvation to escape Lowood, and madness (via Bertha, Gilbert and Gubar argue) to escape from Thornfield Hall. But where is Jane aiming to go when she escapes? Gilbert and Gubar dont quite answer this, they say she is simply escaping from the strictures of a hierarchal society (Dialogue 369). They claim that Charlotte Bronte could not adequately describe a society so drastically altered that the matured Jane and Rochester could really live in it (Dialogue 370). This conclusion defines Jane as an ultimately negative heroine. That is, she is not trying to get to something, she is just trying to get away. Until the end of the novel, it is true that Jane herself does define her existence in terms of negatives. At Gateshead, her aunt, cousins, and the household servants, call her a rat (15), a bad animal (17), and a mad cat (18). By verbally degrading her, the child Jane does partially succumb to the labels. The narrator Jane admits that she didnt very well know what I did with my hands (17). Much as an animal simply behaves without thinking, so does she. She plays the role cast onto her and then rebels against it. In leaving Gateshead, she is essentially asserting that she is not an animal, despite what they all say. However, at Lowood, the boarding school to which she is sent, Mr. Brocklehurst, the schools primary owner, tries to pull her back down into the position of an animal when he visits and publically humiliates her. This girl, he says, might be one of Gods own lambs but instead carries on as an alien (78). Thus, at least, he gives her a choice. Knowing already that she is not an animal, and having already succumbed to and dismissed that lowly guise, Mr. Brocklehursts words propel Jane into trying the other option. Even her good Christian friend, Sarah Burns, dismisses the possibility for Jane to be human by saying that you Jane think too much of the love of human beings besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits (81). Likewise, when Jane has the pleasant experience of tea with Miss Temple, she describes them as having feasted on nectar and ambrosia (85). Again, the positive suggestion, though not explicit, from Miss Temple is along the lines of the supernatural and unearthly. Jane must be either an animal or supernatural, according to the few authority figures in her narrow life, and because she knows empirically that the first is horrid, and because both Sarah and Miss Temple reccommend the latter, while the unkind Mr. Brocklehurst reccommends the former, she opts for the supernatural route. In this state Jane arrives at her new place of servitude, Thornfield Hall. Appropriately, she falls in love with a man who incessently calls her by a variety of spritey names. From the first time they meet outside, Jane, he thinks, is a creature with powers to bewitch his horse and make him fall off it. Later he furnishes her with the nicknames elf, shade, dream, fairy, mermaid, angel, and other such fantastical presences. Much as the people of Gateshead placed her beneath the level of human, Rochester elevates her to a position equally distant, but above or parrallel to human. He does the same to himself at one point, saying that Jane must think him an ogre or a ghoul (303). This furthers the message he is already sending her that she is not human because it says that the man she is in love with isnt either. In two consecutive love scenes between Jane and Rochester, Jane realizes and asserts that being above or next to human is also not what she wants. I am no bird (284), she says in the first, thereby dismissing yet again her initial state. Then, a scene later, she says, I am not an angel.. . and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself (292). Within a few pages she has realized and moved past two of the roles that have secured her since the begining. But, it is not yet time for her to assume her humanity. BBS Piracy And The Copyright Essay Ferndean particularly is an unaffected place, there are no flowers, and no garden beds. Jane also revels in the company of those who are true humans, namely, the maimed Rochester, the faithful servants, and her two cousins, Diana and Mary, who she visits regularly. The last words of the novel are written by her rejected suitor, St. John, and, though he chose the path of thing in his life, he illicits from Jane human tears (502), and thereby she holds respect for him in helping her to be true. At the same time, Jane has been hurt by those who are not true in her formative years, and these are the types she will be able to avoid in her anti-social lifestyle. Her aunt and benefactress, Mrs. Reed lied to Jane about the existence and social standing of her other relatives (specifically Janes Uncle John). Similarly, Mr. Brocklehurst lectures Lowoods students about the Christian need to mortify the flesh while his own family dresses splendidly in velvet, silk and furs (78). These same models, both duplicitous in their own rights, turn around and call Jane a liar. She fully shows the reader that she is not by surrounding herself only with truth when she finally settles down. But, it is not that she is just defining herself as what they said she wasnt here. Here, she is taking hold of what she is. It happens to be the opposite of what Brocklehurst and Reed called her, but that only further demonstrates their own abilities to lie. In the colnclusion of the novel Jane doesnt say she isnt a liar because she is clinging to what she is. Unlike her fits of earlier (at Gateshead where she screams that shes not a slave all the way up to the red room, at Thornfield when speaking to Rochester, and says shes not a bird or an angel, and at Marsh End where she exclaims repeatedly that she will not marry St. John), at Ferndean she refrains from such negative claims. It stands out that for once she is not entangled cornered into a fit of denying. Unfortunately, the non-human parts Jane plays are assumed by other characters in the novel who then disappear with them, usefully allowing Jane to move on to being human. Its important that they do this so we, the readers, can see what could have become of Jane if she didnt persist in her quest to be human. Bertha, Rochesters insane first wife, assumes the animal role. What it Bertha was, says Jane of her first meeting with the woman, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell (327). Bertha conveniently disposes of this aspect of Jane by springing off the roof of the burning Thornfield Hall and killing herself. Needless to say, Berthas jump is connected with the very word spring to Janes animal-like behavior in the red room in her early childhood (my impulse was to rise from the stool like a spring, she writes(19)). The unmaimed, though psychologically tainted, early Rochester takes the supernatural part off Jane by walking just like a ghost around the grounds and in the orchard (475) after Jane leaves him but before the fire cleanses him. Finally, St. John carries the Gods instrument way of living to India, and he, along with it, die there. Jane Eyre certainly makes many escapes in attempting to align herself with her innate humanity. But, escape is not an end in itself as Gilbert and Gubar imply, that is too negative a formulation of the cathartic completion of this book. Instead, Jane stops allowing herself to be cast into unnatural roles and becomes what she is a human, who is positively free, as she herself defines humans, from those artificial categories. Bibliography Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London, Penguin Books Ltd. : 1996. (Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Mason). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Janes Progress from The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press: 1979. pp. 336-371.