The following is my selective retyping of this essay found in the back of the Norton Critical edition of Jane Eyre.

Jane Eyre is a novel looking at the female realities around her: confinement, orphanhood, starvation, and rage even to madness. Jane becomes the emblem of a passionate, barely disguised rebelliousness. Victorian critics understood this and disliked the “anti-Christian” refusal to accept the forms, customs, and standards of society. Jane refuses to submit to her social destiny, of which Elizabeth Rigby said: it pleased God to make her an orphan, friendless, and penniless. What horrified the Victorians was Jane’s anger. 

The story is of enclosure and escape. Everywoman in patriarchal society must meet and overcome oppression, starvation, madness, coldness. Jane’s confrontation with Bertha is an encounter with her own hunger, rebellion, and rage. 

Jane is on a pilgrim’s progress towards maturity, and there are problems she has to solve on the way to maturity. At Gateshead, the book opens with the remark that there was no possibility of taking a walk that day. Jane is excluded from the family, so she sits in the window behind the curtain. This is emblematic of the choice- stay behind the oppressive curtain, or go out into the cold loveless world. 

John Reed comes on the scene though and it results in his fat lip and Jane’s sentence to the red room. 

As Jane meditates on the injustice, she is faced with the option of escape through flight or escape through starvation, which will recur in the novel. But Jane finds a third possible escape: madness, through seeing ghosts. This opens up a larger drama that we find throughout the book. Jane’s anomalous, orphaned position in society, her enclosure in stultifying roles and houses, and her attempts to escape through flight, starvation, and… madness.  

It is her eagerness for a new servitude that brings Jane to Thornfield, where she will confront the demon of rage that has haunted her since her afternoon in the red room. Before the appearance of Rochester, she explores Thornfield. It is the house of Jane’s life. There is a long, cold gallery, where portraits of unknown ancestors hang the way the specter of Mr Reed hovered in the red room. Mrs Fairfax is assumed to be her employer when in fact she is just the housekeeper, the surrogate of an absent master, as Mrs Reed was for Mr Reed. But the third floor  holds enigmatic locked rooms guarding secrets. In the attic, Jane looks out over the world and articulates her desire for liberty. 

Many of Jane’s problems can be traced to her status as governess at Thornfield. Governesses were, and were not, members of the family, were, and were not, servants. The women at Thornfield represent negative role-models. The most important are Adele, Blanche, and Grace Poole. While Adele isn’t yet a woman, she is a little woman; cunning and doll-like. She longs for fashionable gowns rather than love or freedom, as her mother would. Where Miss Temple’s was the way of the lady, and Helen’s was the way of the saint, Adele and Celine’s are the way of vanity fair. 

Blanche is also a denizen of vanity fair, but Blanche teaches Jane that conventional marriage can be a prison, through the charade of Bridewell. But the charade also suggests that the marriage market is a game even scheming women are doomed to lose. 

Finally there is Grace, who, acting as an agent for men, may be the keeper of other women, but both are prisoners in the same chains. 

Jane’s meeting with Rochester is a fairy-tale, but his first action is to fall on the ice. He acknowledges her power, and though they begin as master/servant in one sense, in another they are spiritual equals. In time Jane falls in love with him because she feels them equals. 

After his long revelation of his past love life, Jane is shown to be his equal, and in fact he notices her unseduceable independence in a world of self-marketing Celines and Blanches. 

Jane, in a moment of despair upon hearing about Blanche, asserts that though she is poor, obscure, plain, and little, she has as much soul and heart as he does. 

Rochester then casts away his own disguise and professes that Jane is his equal. 

The Victorians were upset because the novel here is asserting that Jane is his democratic equal. 

But there were impediments. Rochester, despite some attempts to cast off the masks or disguises that give him mastery, still does need to cast it off, because the inequality exists.  

Once Rochester has secured Jane’s love, he almost immediately begins to treat her as an inferior. She senses this and resolves to keep him in check. His ultimate secret is of course Bertha, the literal impediment to his wedding. After the aborted ceremony, Jane learns that he had married her for status, sex, money, everything but love and equality. He regrets it, but Jane says she would have spurned such a union. 

Jane’s impediments are other. While she loves Rochester the man, she has doubts about Rochester the husband. She tells him that after 6 months the excitement of her love would dwindle. Jane’s life pilgrimage has prepared her to be angry at Rochester’s, and society’s, concept of marriage. As her fears and anger about marriage intensify, she is drawn back into her own past to re-experience the sense of doubleness that had begun in the red room. The first sign of this is the recurring dream of a child. The child represents Jane’s own childhood, her being orphaned. Until she reaches maturity, independence, and true equality with Rochester, she can’t let go of the orphaned alter-ego so easily, despite love-making, silk dresses, jewelry and a new name.  Another sign of this doubleness is Jane’s reflection in the mirror on her wedding day where she says she seems the image of a stranger. 

Finally, in the appearance of Bertha, the most threatening avatar, Jane sees the Bertha does what Jane wants to do: Jane secretly wants to tear the garments up, Bertha does it. Jane would like to put off the wedding day, Bertha does it. Resenting the mastery of Rochester, she wishes to be his equal in size and strength, Bertha is nearly that. Bertha, in other words, is Jane’s truest and darkest double- the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self that Jane has been trying to repress ever since Gateshead- these two characters represent the socially acceptable, conventional personality and the free, uninhibited, and sometimes criminal self. 

Jane’s desire to destroy Thornfield, the symbol of Rochester’s mastery and her own servitude, will be carried out by Bertha.  

Some writers have noted that Bertha is the symbol of what happens to a woman who tries to be the fleshly version of the masculine élan. Just as Jane’s instinct for self-preservation saves her from earlier temptations, it must save her from becoming this woman by curbing her imagination at the limits of what is bearable for a powerless woman in the England of the 1840’s. While Bertha acts out Jane’s secret fantasies, she at least provides her a lesson of what not to do. 

But Bertha also acts like Jane in ways. She is imprisoned, running backwards and forwards, like Jane pacing backwards and forwards on the third story…. and she is also the ‘bad animal’ like ten-year old Jane, imprisoned in the red room. Bertha’s appearance- goblin, half dream, half reality, recalls Rochester’s epithets for Jane as a malicious elf, sprite, changeling. 

Despite all the habits of harmony she gained in her years at Lowood, that on her arrival at Thornfield, she only appeared disciplined and subdued. She has repressed her rage and it will not be exorcised until the death of Bertha frees her from the furies that torment her and make a marriage of equality possible- and a wholeness within herself. 

Her pilgrimage away from Thornfield is signaled by the rising of the moon, which accompanies other events in the novel. Her wanderings on the road are a symbolic summary of the wanderings of the poor orphan child which constitute her entire life’s pilgrimage. Jane wanders far and lonely; starving, freezing, stumbling, abandoning her few possessions, her name, and even her self-respect, in search of a new home. But here she meets the Rivers- good relatives that free her from the angry memories of the wicked step-family. She has also torn off the crown of thorns that Rochester offered and rejected the unequal marriage he proposed. She has now gained the strength to discover her real place in the world. She concludes she was right when she adhered to principle and law. But her progress will not be complete until she learns that principle and law in the abstract don’t always coincide with the deepest principles and laws of her own being. Her earlier sense that Miss Temple’s teachings had only been superimposed on her native vitality has already suggested this to her. But her encounter with St John Rivers cements in thoroughly. 

Where Rochester offers a life of pleasure, a marriage of passion, and a path of roses (with concealed thorns); St John offers a life of principle, a marriage of spirituality, and a path of thorns (with concealed roses). If she follows St John, she will replace love with labor. But Jane’s repudiation of both Helen’s and Miss Temple’s spiritual harmonies hint that she will not accept St John’s offer. 

Rochester represents fire, and St John represents ice. But Jane, who has struggled all her life, like a sane version of Bertha, against the cold of a loveless world, ice will not do. St John, like Brocklehurst, is a pillar of patriarchy. Brocklehurst removed Jane form imprisonment only to immure her in a valley of starvation. Rochester tied to make her a slave of passion. St John wants to imprison her soul in the ultimate cell- the iron shroud of principle. 

This attempt to imprison was certainly difficult to resist, especially on the heels of Jane congratulating herself on her adherence to principle. But her escape is facilitated by two events: she finds her true family, and comes into her inheritance. Now she is literally an independent woman. But her freedom is also signaled by the death of Bertha. The plot device of hearing each other’s voices is the sign that the relationship for which both lovers had longed is finally possible. 

Ferndean is stripped and asocial, buried deep in the woods out of the way. This suggests isolation of the lovers in a world where egalitarian marriages are rare, if not impossible. Perhaps Bronte was unable to envision a viable solution to patriarchal oppression, and the only thing to do was isolate oneself from it as much as possible. 

While I don’t know if this analysis is on point or not, I the points I’ve rewritten here interesting. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into the analysis, and it was interesting to read symbols and connections that I’d never thought of. It’s the reason I bought the Norton critical edition- because I was hoping to read what other people had thought about the novel. I thought it was interesting