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

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marry Blanche Ingram when Jane confesses her love to him, and he in return confesses his for her. At every stage, rochester is living a lie, whether it be the lie in the attic or the lie that he is going to marry Blanche. He wants to be with Jane and is willing to deceive her to achieve his end. He has become dependent on her in a way that is not healthy, and she realizes this when he asks that she run away with him to France and be his mistress. She flees the house with no clear idea of where she is to go. That is solved for her when she meets the Rivers family. Much of the novel seems to be devoted to forces that take the lovers apart, forces which may be in large part Rochester's own fault, but which nonetheless send Jane far from his home. Prior to learning the truth, Jane has been especially blind to the mysteries of the house and of Rochester. The novel is seen entirely through her eyes, and yet she fails to act on much of what she sees. She is willing to attribute most of the eeriness of the house first to the brooding nature of the man who owns it and second to the ravings of Grace Poole, who serves as a mask for the true insanity in the attic. In effect, she has been swept along by her ideas of romance as gathe

Category: Literature - J