Gateshead Bronte's Use Of Gothic Elements In Jane Eyre

Focusing on Jane’s journey, readers encounter a drastic spike in gothic imagery once Jane finally releases her repressed emotions, a technique Brontë revisits upon the entrance of Edward Fairfax Rochester, who entrances Jane to choose a whimsical life of passion. From the very beginning of the novel at Gateshead Brontë plants the necessary gothic elements to begin developing Jane’s struggle with expressing emotions. During Jane’s time with her relatives she is regularly abused, consequently becoming accustomed to choosing silence over rebellion. Albeit, once she finally succumbs to her anger and physically lashes out against her cousin, John, Jane finds herself imprisoned in the abandoned Red Room. Alone, Jane mentally questions the abuse she

After Jane flees from Edward after learning about Bertha, his hidden bride, she begins a period of her life that lacks Brontë’s usual gothic elements. After being taken in by the Rivers, Jane encounters St. John, a stoic man who “tasks himself too far, lock[ing] every feeling and pang within” (Brontë 316). Compared to Edward’s excessive expressions, which allude to fairies and spirits, St. John represses all expression, only utilizing Biblical, rational allusions in his conversations with Jane. Withholding female gothic elements from Jane’s interactions with St. John and replacing them with Biblical allusions, Brontë clears Jane’s life of emotion and excitement, replacing it with hard rationality. Since Brontë tends to place gothic elements in scenes with heighted emotions, the replacement with biblical allusions highlights Jane’s lack of passionate interest. This new circumstance also leaves Jane insistently reminiscing to her time at Thornfield, depicting her wish to reside in a more emotionally expressive situation. Further along, when St. John later proposes to marry Jane, during each of the three separates occasions he remarks how his proposal isn’t out of love, but duty, saying, “Reason, and not feeling is my guide” (Brontë 320).

Drastically changing from her strict experience with the Rivers, Jane’s flight to return to Edward is marked by a sudden change of scenery. Instead of the moors and fields of Morton School, Jane travels to Ferndean through “a gloomy forest,” with timbers growing “thick and dark” (Brontë 366). In a literary criticism of Jane Eyre and Geoffrey Chauncer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale, “Fairies and Feminism,” Warren Edminster emphasizes the use of fairy related scenery in Ferndean as a direct commentary on the return and expression of both Jane’s feminine and expressive identities. Thus stated, Jane’s ultimate decision is one of emotion, forgoing a possible life of duty with St. John to be able to experience love, which Brontë compliments by utilizing gothic imagery in the scenery to create an otherworldly mood. After concluding a large section of Jane’s life that revolved around understating rationality—thus lacking gothic imagery—the reappearance of the gothic in turn with the reappearance of Jane’s emotional expression highlights Brontë’s use of the two in tandem. Especially once Jane reconciles with Edward, an aforementioned extremely emotional individual, readers begin to encounter more and more gothic imagery and moods in the remainder of the novel. In his signature way,