104 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
gest that this vulnerability is not unique to Jane, but a common condition for
women. Aft er setting up nature as Jane’s imaginative escape from reality, the
novel shows the danger of this romanticization: Jane loses her place in any social
or economic structure, turns to nature instead, and as a direct result almost dies.
Her long walk is at the heart of the novel’s questions about her individual and
social identity, self-creation and self-understanding ; following it, she must learn
to reconcile her tendency toward individualism with a realistic understanding of
her situation and prospects.
Yet the novel is not simply the story of Jane’s re-education about the unfeasi-
bility of an escapist fantasy of nature. Th ere are moments in the text where nature
becomes more than a fantasy, developing an almost-supernatural, Gothic con-
sciousness of its own, undeniable and powerful, intervening in the text at decisive
moments. Nature embodied comes to Jane in the form of the celestial mother that
appears to her on the night she leaves Rochester, and later in an aural hallucina-
tion of Rochester’s voice calling to her just as she is on the verge of agreeing to go
to India with St John Rivers. Even within a text that emphasizes Jane’s fundamen-
tal inability to be free, and which shows that a fantasy of nature is an imperfect
solution to the repressive conditions in which she fi nds herself, a sublime nature
still breaks through the narrative as a powerful force. Th is force eventually desta-
bilizes the very essence of Jane’s work to integrate herself into society: the sublime
nature at the heart of Jane Eyre, which is wrapped up in Jane’s own individualist
nature, cannot integrate or compromise for mere economic considerations, and at
moments of crisis – when Jane is on the verge of making some compromise – it
fi ghts back. Even while Jane works to integrate herself into human society, the
novel asks whether her eff ort is worth the sacrifi ce, or even possible.
Th is dynamic is the essence of what Robert B. Heilman fi rst identifi ed in
Brontë’s novels as the New Gothic, which takes the Gothic tropes of Ann Rad-
cliff e or Monk Lewis – wild landscapes and mad, hidden wives – and while
acknowledging their conventions (sometimes by undercutting them with
humour), uses them to explore the eff ects of repressive social institutions on the
individual.^3 Since Heilman, Jane Eyre’s Gothic elements have been the subject of
much critical inquiry, from the fi rst mention of the supernatural g ytrash to Jane’s
double in Bertha Rochester.^4 However, Jane’s engagement with and movement
through the novel’s sublime nature has received less attention. Th e novel’s land-
scapes are classic Gothic sublimity, with a Burke-inspired understanding of the
eff ects of striking and dangerous landscapes upon the individual’s imagination:
Jane’s reaction to the novel’s nature is powerful, individual and not quite control-
lable.^5 For much of the novel, Jane courts this sublime nature as a way of revelling
in her individuality: her reactions to it are her own and no one else’s; even the
analytic Rochester is baffl ed by the nature paintings that she completed at Low-
ood, asking ‘who taught you to paint wind?’.^6 Th is movement toward nature is