"Jane Eyre", Charlotte Bronte (1847) - "But the privations (...) to put in a coffin"

Résumé du document

The excerpt under scrutiny, located in the first part of the novel, comes directly after the protagonist has accepted the harsh lifestyle of Lowood and declared she would rather be there and endure the never-ending privations than back at Gateshead. This passage acts as a sort of pause in the narration that, up to now, focused on Jane's words and actions, as it consists mostly in a description of the pleasure and relief spring brings to Lowood.

Extraits

[...] 276), endowing Nature with maternal instincts (“Nature seemed to me benign and good; I thought she loved me and I clung to her with filial fondness”) that are already appearing in this passage (l.41: “bosomed in hill and wood” reminds the reader of a maternal image, especially since, in the next page, we are presented with the image of maternal devotion in Ms Temple, which insist on this theme). II/ Outer landscape, inner landscape This brings into even greater relief the contrast created between the narrator's depiction of spring and her vision of winter, as the latter, on the other hand, is unequivocally described as the realm of death (the semantic series of death is omnipresent in the evocation of the wintry landscape : of course, the cold, whose relation to death is obvious, l.2 and 3 for example, then, “froze the very blood in our veins”, l and “stiffened in frost”, l that can not but remind on of rigor mortis, “shrouded in “mists as chill as death”, “purple peaks”, purple being one of the colours of mourning, “ranks of skeletons”, l.28), painted with darks colours (“brown while spring, in addition to the various colours used in its description, is constantly associated with light : l8 a sunny l.11 “brighter traces of her steps”, l.13 “golden-eyed pansies”, l.20 “sparkling eddies”, l29 : bright, serene l.30, placid sunshine”, l strange ground-sunshine”, l 36 “pale gold gleam”, l 68 “that bright May shone unclouded”, garden, too, glowed with colour”. [...]

[...] Moreover, we can then argue that the joyful, fast-paced description of spring, while being adapted to Jane's pleasant surroundings, also reflect her own state of mind, which is vastly improved by the freedom she writes so insistently about unwatched and almost alone”, l benefits from the usual properties of ternary rhythms and thus underlines the total freedom gifted to the protagonist by the confusion that has taken over the school). However, we must note that Jane does not enjoy complete freedom: l.16-17 great pleasure, which the horizon only bounded, lay all outside the high and spike-guarded walls of our garden”. [...]

[...] To support this theory, we can call attention to the fact that this garden contains lilies, which are, among other things, a symbol of forbidden love. The legend tells us that Persephone was picking a lily when Hades abducted her to make her his queen in the underworld. Moreover, the expression “strange ground-sunshine” is peculiar enough to be significant : traditionally, God and all that is good is associated with the heavens, and the ground and underground with chtonian and morally dubious or downright evil deities (or demons in the Christian mythos). [...]

[...] Moreover, the author creates some amount of suspense, as we said earlier, first by playing on the reader's curiosity this unwonted liberty and pleasure there was a cause, to which it now becomes my task to advert” then by insisting on the pleasant character of the scene depicted up till then with a rhetorical interrogation, only bring into relief its pernicious characteristics.) tells us that it has to be significant in the economy of the passage. As to the meaning of that perverted topos, we could see it as an instance of foreshadowing. Its moral could be that was is pleasant is not always what is best for one. [...]

[...] III/ Spring: perverting the topos and foreshadowing So far, the associations we have remarked upon have not seemed peculiar. However, if we take a closer look at the text, several elements suggest that all is not as straightforward as it appears : the light-hearted description of springs itself contains mortiferous elements : l.12, we are told of “purple auriculas” (as we said earlier, a less severe colour for mourning), l we encounter “verdure and shadow”, combining a symbol of life with one of death, l the “bright beck” is “full of dark stones”, the wild primrose plants, l.36, have a pale gold gleam, and grow in overshadowed spots, l the “scent of spice and apples” is contaminated by association to effluvia of mortality” l.67, and, finally, l.71, when we read the expression little beds” a few lines after the evocation of an hospital full of sick and dying children, the mind automatically supplies the image of row upon row of little beds occupied by little patients and superimposes it onto the “pink thrift and crimson double-daisies” of the actual, vegetal beds. [...]