Jane Eyre - Chapters 24-29:
I find the engagement of Jane and Mr. Edward Rochester to be, if not the weirdest, certainly one of the most odd engagements ever. It starts out where both are passionate and giddy, as one would expect a newly engaged couple to be. However, the next morning when Jane wakes up and comes out of her slumber back to the realities of the previous night, she allows her doubt to overcome her joy and she begins to be unkind, aloof, and odd towards Mr. Rochester. He, in return, begins to describe putting her in fancy dresses, jewels, and making her beautiful - not only to him - but to everyone else in the world around them. It is stated almost as though he feels some need to make her appear commensurate with a class closer in proximity and status to his. Jane is scared and seemingly put off and requests to simply, for the next month until their marriage, act as a nothing more than Adela's governess. To top it all off, Jane finally restates for the reader that despite her stated wishes, she is falling more in love with Mr. Rochester every day. I believe Bronte creates this contradiction between the two of them to show that their marriage is bringing two people together into lives they have previously been unaccustomed to and both are still figuring out how to adjust. Jane is clinging to the comfort of her solitary, plain life and scared to branch out beyond that comfort zone. Therefore, she shuts out Mr. Rochester and his ideas. His end of this conflict is far more confusing. I cannot discern whether he simply wishes to give her all he can, due to how much he loves her or due to his own sense of longing and loneliness. I prefer to believe it is a little of both. For the rest of their engagement, Jane is cold, shows no love or compassion toward Mr. Rochester, and stays as aloof, strict, and non-emotional with him as she can be. She tries to say strictly professional, except in their few personal encounters in which she is often unkind and disrespectful to him, despite his attempts to be cordial and loving to her. At the start of their engagement, to support my supposition and foreshadowing, Mrs. Fairfax mentions to Jane that it is likely that there is some ulterior motive other than love as to why Mr. Rochester is marrying Jane. Mrs. Fairfax states that Jane is not extraordinarily beautiful or considerably wealthy, and that she has little to no stature of importance in society; therefore, there must be another reason. I iterated before that most likely, smooth sailing would not lie ahead for the 'happy' couple. Sadly, I was correct.
A few nights before the wedding, Jane woke to see a woman who was a goblin looking creature that tore her veil in half and stared at her in the face before leaving. Jane tells Mr. Rochester of this occurrence, but he assures her it is just Grace Poole. He further asserts that it is a figment of her imagination that she looked so ugly. At this moment, I was quite sure that the woman was most certainly NOT Grace Poole and that Jane, as I always knew her to be, was not an idiot, but rather tragically fooled, just as the others in this story are, into believing that the woman upstairs was no more harmful than the demure Grace Poole. Mr. Rochester assured that there was nothing to worry about. Sadly, Jane was soon to discover that nothing was what it seemed, and I soon discovered that my hypothesis, while not entirely correct in the smallest detail, were foundationally correct. At the wedding, all that had been hidden was unveiled. The reader, along with Jane, finds out that the woman locked away in the attic is not Grace Poole. Rather, she is Bertha Mason, the wife of Mr. Edward Rochester and the sister of Mr. Richard Mason. As a reminder, Richard Mason is the man from earlier in the novel at the party who ended up getting attacked by his sister. He is the same man who, while injured, who prevented from speaking to Jane, because Mr. Rochester did not want her to discover the secret of his wife. He kept this from Jane, because he was already in love with her, and he did not want to prevent her feelings from growing for him. He was hoping she would fall in love with him. Such news would have prevented that event from occurring. Grace Poole, as I predicted, was in fact a nurse to the mystery woman and knew of her situation, which is why she covered for the laughing, the noise, and the multiple strange encounters with the woman. Not only was her job to nurse her, but the less well-known, yet equally important, part of her duties was to help conceal the woman and maintain the secret Mr. Rochester had upheld for so many years now.
On her wedding day, as the clergyman asks if Rochester takes Jane to wife, someone yells out that the wedding cannot go on. There is a problem! That's how this was all unveiled. Poor Jane! This person announces that Rochester already has a wife! Mr. Mason and lawyers present are upset with Mr. Rochester, feeling he is betraying Bertha Mason, his wife and about to commit bigamy. To quiesce the rumblings and explain his predicament, he takes everyone to the house so that they can see, firsthand, his agony and the condition of his wife. He wishes for them to see the hideous, crazy person woman Berthat has become! During this whole encounter, Jane describes the events as if she were just an object, powerless to stop it, all of her dreams of love and happiness are cold and dead. The world is spinning around her, and she can hardly believe what is happening. She says little to nothing during this entire event. My heart just breaks for her and what she must be feeling. Putting myself in the very position she is living in, I imagine standing on an alter, being hopelessly in love yet looking like a complete fool, knowing not what to do because your blissful reality has just come crashing down around you. How tragic!
At this point in the novel, of particular interest is what Jane learns further of her uncle and the events that lead to this wretched event on her special day. It seems that John Eyre, Jane's uncle, told Mason about Rochester's intent to marry Jane. Jane had written a letter to her uncle advising him of her upcoming nuptials. John Eyre then told Mason of the event, an Mason, knowing of Rochester's existing marriage to his sister, came solely to stop the wedding!
Finally, once everyone has left, after seeing Bertha, Jane retreats to her room and begins to feel as though she has to leave. She then has a heart-wrenching encounter with Mr. Rochester in which they both cry, and he begs her not to leave. Her conscience reasons with her that, despite her love for Rochester, she must leave before temptation and love take over her senses, and her ability reason and form logic. This is not a life she could ever live and feel comfortable in assuming. She decides it is not a sound judgement to stay. She feels further justified in such a decision and develops a firm resolve to leave. My heart breaks for Jane and, frankly, for Edward Rochester. Although I had imagined, several chapters ago, that some harm might befall their relationship, I never imagined it would be as catastrophic as this.
Jane flees into the night and presses on, in spite of her inner conflicting battle of returning to him, because she so desperately loves him. After a long carriage ride to another town, Jane finds herself with no more money, barely any food, no home, and no friends or family to support her. Instead, she encounters coldness, harsh and unresponsive people. Finally, after four days, she ends up at the door of a clergyman who is away from home, but his sisters are there, as well as their housemaid. At first, the housemaid tries to turn Jane away with only a penny and here Jane accepts the fact that she will most likely die. However, the man of the home, the brother, returns and decides to take Jane in. After some discussion, the sisters ( Diana and Mary ) and the brother ( John ) decide to allow Jane to stay till she is no longer ill. Finally after a few days, Jane regains her strength and they begin to ask her a myriad of questions: from whence she came, her background, her former friends, her family, etc. John however, unlike the rest of them, studies Jane with less of an innocence than the others. He is not rude toward her, rather a little more pensive. Some of John Rivers' attributes remind me of that of Mr. Rochester. His inquisitive eyes, his trying personality, yet the gentle comfort of his approval, and his discreet care for others, despite his outward robust nature, all pays tribute and reminisces of Mr. Rochester. Did it also remind Jane of him? If so, she does not say so. Jane proceeds to advise the Rivers clan that she has no family. She describes her life before this (leaving out her real name), and she even speaks some of Mr. Rochester, but does not go into great detail. She then reveals her intentions of her present and soon to be new life, as states she should be known as " Jane Elliot." Mr. John agrees to help support her, but he does not describe in what way. With room and board, or a job perhaps? I am left here with many questions, such as: will Mr. Rochester return to Jane? Will she eventually return to him? Will a romance brew between Jane and John, instead? How is John planning on helping Jane get on her feet? Luckily, Charlotte Bronte wrote nine more chapters for the readers curiosities to be quenched and their questions to be answered. If I am betting, I would say that, eventually, Mr. Rochester will return to Jane's life. In what way, I do not know and dare not to hazard a guess. I do imagine that some kind of friendship or close relationship will emerge between Jane Elliot (Eyre) and John Rivers. To that end, I am both excited and nervous as to the outcome of that union. Perhaps there will be two women at inner war with one another: a past, Miss Jane Eyre, and a present, Miss Jane Elliot. It is only yet to be discovered how the past will meet and deal with the present and how, together, the two will shape the future.
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