1. After the meeting with Mr. Brocklehurst, Jane finally expresses the depth of her outrage over the way Mrs. Reed has treated h
er. Although she “wins” the battle, she is left with ambivalent (mixed) feelings about her victory. Infer from the following passage why Jane has these ambivalent feelings.
I was left there alone--winner of the field. It was the hardest battle I had fought, and the first victory I had gained: I stood awhile on the rug, where Mr. Brocklehurst had stood, and I enjoyed my conqueror's solitude. First, I smiled to myself and felt elated; but this fierce pleasure subsided in me as fast as did the accelerated throb of my pulses. A child cannot quarrel with its elders, as I had done; cannot give its furious feelings uncontrolled play, as I had given mine, without experiencing afterwards the pang of remorse and the chill of reaction. A ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring, would have been a meet emblem of my mind when I accused and menaced Mrs. Reed: the same ridge, black and blasted after the flames are dead, would have represented as meetly my subsequent condition, when half-an-hour's silence and reflection had shown me the madness of my conduct, and the dreariness of my hated and hating position. Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned. Willingly would I now have gone and asked Mrs. Reed's pardon; but I knew, partly from experience and partly from instinct, that was the way to make her repulse me with double scorn, thereby re-exciting every turbulent impulse of my nature.
2. Consider how Jane the narrator characterizes Jane the child in the following conversation with Mr. Lloyd. Infer how she has come to her perception about poor people. Explore how the first person narrative reveals the growth of Jane from childhood to the adult narrating the story.
"If I had anywhere else to go, I should be glad to leave it; but I can never get away from Gateshead till I am a woman."
"Have you any relations besides Mrs. Reed?"
"I think not, sir."
"None belonging to your father?"
"I don't know. I asked Aunt Reed once, and she said possibly I might have some poor, low relations called Eyre, but she knew nothing about them."
"If you had such, would you like to go to them?"
I reflected. Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation.
"No; I should not like to belong to poor people," was my reply.
"Not even if they were kind to you?"
I shook my head: I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind; and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women I saw sometimes nursing their children or washing their clothes at the cottage doors of the village of Gateshead: no, I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.
3. In a Bildungsroman such as Jane Eyre, characters are often influenced to change and grow as a consequence of the places they go and the people they meet. Show how Jane has grown and changed as a consequence of her experiences at Gateshead and Lowood. By the end of her time at Lowood, how is Jane a different person than she was at the start?
4. The most important relationship in this novel is the one between Jane and Rochester. They first meet in chapter 12, and by chapter 15, there have been significant developments in their relationship. Show how their relationship has grown since their first meeting at the moment of Rochester’s being thrown from his horse. Predict how you think the relationship will continue to grow.
