Book Review:Jane Eyre.

Jane Eyre is a novel of one woman's passion for a man who is initially above her in social status.Jane is an extraordinary young woman.She is a governess in the employment of her dashing Byronic master,Mr Rochester.He loves her passionately,however on her wedding day Jane discovers that Rochester is already married to a madwoman,Bertha Mason Rochester.Bertha is locked away in a lonely darkened attic in Thornfield Hall.Jane,having discovered the fact that Rochester is already betrothed,flees Thornfield wandering alone in physical and spiritual seclusion until she is taken in St.John Rivers,a pastor.Rivers has aspirations to form a liason with Jane.She rejects him,returns to Thornfield to discover that Bertha in a moment of insanity has burned Thornfield to the ground,leaving her beloved Rochester blind and alone leaving in Ferndean.Eventually Jane finds Rochester and decides to marry him.Jane Eyre was written at a time when women had a passive role in a highly patriarchal society.However Jane in many senses is a truly independent young woman;feisty and fiery causing some Victorian critics to find her unwomanly by their standards.This is a brilliantly crafted novel.Fire imagery predominates.At the beginning of the novel Jane is staying with her aunt,Mrs Reed.When Jane becomes defiant,she is locked away in the forbidding 'red room'where she believes the spirit of her dead uncle is wandering.In a moment of manic rage she bangs on the door of the room screaming to be let out.This very scene foreshadows the scene in which Bertha Rochester is discovered raging like an animal in her attic prison.Indeed two American critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar read the novel as an allegory similar to Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress'.They fascinatingly interpret Bertha Rochester as Jane's 'darkest double',for in a sense if Jane loses her sense of self-control she too has the potential to become a second Bertha Rochester.Their reading is validated to a certain extent if one examines the characters' names.For example, when Jane is sent to Lowood school for being seemingly defiant she meets up with a teacher called Miss Temple.Miss Temple as her name implies is appropriately spiritual in nature and calm.

The reader is made to empathise with Jane's spiritual journey through life as Bronte imbues Jane with flesh-and-blood realism although she is free-spirited as her name 'Eyre(Air)'implies.It is also a great novel because Bronte juxtaposes the gothic against realist elements to reflect her characters emotions.She even uses the device of pathetic fallacy whereby landscapes or natural phenomena tend to mirror characters' feelings.Thus when Jane feels betrayed by Rochester the Summer landscape turns to cold Winter.Although this novel was written over two hundred years ago to a certain extent its themes are relevant today insofar as many women take up disenfranchised positions in today's fast moving twenty-first century.For me Jane Eyre is fascinatingly full of fire.This is Bronte at her best as she gives Jane a truly resonant 'voice' in a highly patriarchal society.

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