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Jane Eyre's Two Relationships

In Jane Eyre by Emily Brontd, the character of Jane has relationships with Edward Rochester and with St. John Rivers, relationships that take on a very different character and that contrast different aspects of human interaction. The two men are very different, and their effect on Jane and the manner in which she deals with each illuminates the themes of the novel and illustrates the character of Jane in the structure of the novel. One of the primary concerns in the novel is with love, the meaning of love, and the ability of the individual to find love and to be worthy of it once found. Jane's relationships with these two men provide the basis for the analysis of this issue.

The two relationships represent different responses to the need for love and hence different kinds of love, and Brontd juxtaposes the two in order to make this comparison explicit. The St. John Rivers section seems to some readers to be a digression, one that could be removed without harming the flow of the main story, but in truth the section is necessary to make the comparison with Rochester and to illustrate alternatives for Jane. Joyce Carol Oates states that

the carefully transcribed section is required for symmetry's sake. Brontd's authorial strategy is to balance one kind of temptation with its obverse: if Rochester is all romantic passion, urging her to succumb to emotional excess, St. John Rivers is all christian ambition, urging her to attempt a spiritual asceticism of which she knows herself incapable (Oates xiii-xiv).

There can be no doubt that the story of the novel is Jane's and not the two men, and we meet Jane long before she meets either of them. The opening sequences indicate the life she has led. She is first seen when she is 10 years old and is living at Gateshead House with Mrs. Reed, her uncle's widow, and her three Reed children-Eliza, Georgiana, and John. John is a bully much indulged by his mother. He throws a book ...

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Jane Eyre's Two Relationships. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 20:01, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1690855.html