Passion and Madness in Jane Eyre

A detailed Summary of Passion and Madness in Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontė's Jane Eyre is filled with descriptions of emotional exchanges involving images of fire. Flame is associated with the passion that dominates Jane's emotions. Brontė uses the metaphor of fire to exemplify passion and to tie Jane's passion to madness. Bertha is linked to Jane and her passionate emotions through fire imagery. Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason are superficially opposing characters, but they are connected through the prevailing themes of fire, passion, and madness.

Fire in Jane Eyre also depicts this same notion of passion being an uncontrollable, almost violent force equated with madness. After the fiasco wedding, when Jane suddenly finds that her groom-to-be already has a wife, Rochester requests her pledge of fidelity in return for his pledge. Upon answering, Jane is apprehensive and is "experiencing an ordeal." (278) Jane describes her thoughts by saying that "a hand of fiery iron grasped my vitals. Terrible moment: full of struggle, blackness, burning! Not a human being that ever lived could wish to be loved better than I was loved." (278) This powerful image embodies Jane and Rochester's passion, and how Jane nearly succumbs to this powerful force. In Jane Eyre, the image of fire conveys the

Passion, however, eventually bears Jane away. Although the images in this passage illustrate Jane's confusion, they also explain just how powerfully Jane's emotions dominate her person. The word "feverish," for example, recalls the blaze that Bertha Rochester began in her husband's bedroom and equates the heat of Jane's passion with madness. Jane appears almost as emotionally overwrought as the crazed Bertha. Such uncontrollable emotions, of course, play a crucial role in the novel. Charlotte Brontė asks within her work how two people as passionate as Jane and Rochester can appreciate and enjoy one another. The test for Jane is to become "worthy of love," without "violating" her own "nature and morality". Brontė uses Jane's struggle with her fiery, passionate emotions likening to Bertha's madness to create more of a challenge for her to overcome and break these ties to Bertha, and prove to the reader and to Rochester that she can control her passion, and rule with judgement. By creating an emotional see-saw from the encounters between Jane and Rochester, Brontė indicates that these intense emotions, while demonstrating love between the two, show that the fire of Jane's passion proves to override judgement and is more explicitly associated with the likes of Bertha's madness.

"'I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you: their expression and smile did not (again he stopped) did not (he proceeded hastily) strike delight to my very inmost heart for nothing.... My cherished preserver, good night.' Strange energy was in his voice, strange fire in his look." (158)

Brontė employs the fire imagery in order to present character, and to impress upon us the need of Jane to find the balance point between the extremes she experiences. In encountering the extremes, she learns to unify the opposing elements in her life, and can arrive at the comfortable existence she experiences at Ferndean. The warmth of the domestic hearth (a controlled fire) is the final use of fire at the end (Jane meets Rochester leaning over "a neglected handful of fire" (456)). So the imagery of fire is not employed solely for the melodramatic effects of showing contrasting emotions, but for Brontė's pursuit of the importance of preserving the self and the spirit through passion, and linking this to Bertha's madness.

potentially destructive force in eroticism.

The key element of the late-night encounter reveals

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Approximate Word count = 1622
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English