108 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
Jane’s romance with Rochester reinforces her affi liation with nature, as he
repeatedly reimagines Jane as a supernatural creature herself. He tells her that
she has ‘rather the look of another world ... When you came on me in Hay Lane
last night, I thought unaccountably of fairy tales, and had half a mind to demand
whether you had bewitched my horse’. When she tells him that she has no par-
ents, rather than pushing for details of her human history, he returns to the idea
that she is a fairy: ‘And so you were waiting for your people when you sat on the
stile?’^16 She is also, at intervals and repeatedly, an ‘elf ’, ‘sprite’, ‘changeling’ and
‘curious sort of bird’.^17 Part of the appeal of this characterization for Jane is that
it elides her own powerlessness; if she is a fairy, sprite or bird, then she is not at
the mercy or the goodwill of others. A vision of herself as an independent spirit
is appealing, even as (or perhaps because) it is being envisioned by Rochester – in
whose house she lives, and who pays her salary.
Th e problem with this characterization, however, is never clearer than at an
early climax of the novel, when Jane proclaims her equality to Rochester: ‘Do you
think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton? – a
machine without feelings? ... You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you, –
and full as much heart!’ Her speech is telling in that she argues for her humanity
in negative terms: she is not a machine, nor is she content to be ‘nothing’. She also
notably avoids any natural imagery here, even while Rochester’s reply attempts to
reassert the trope of Jane-as-natural-creature: ‘Jane, be still; don’t struggle so, like
a wild, frantic bird that is rending its own plumage in its desperation’. Her reply
explicitly rejects this imagery: ‘I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free
human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you’.^18 Jane has
long used sublime nature as an imaginative escape from her position of inequality
and powerlessness, but with Rochester, she wants real human equality.
However, Rochester continues to press this natural language, producing a
self-fl attering fantasy of her independence rather than acknowledging his posi-
tion of power. Even aft er the wedding debacle, Rochester’s last appeal to her
continues to evoke the inhuman: ‘Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild,
free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage – with a stern
triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it – the savage, beautiful
creature!’ Calling Jane a ‘thing’ and an ‘it’, Rochester continues to use the fantas-
tical bird images that deny Jane her humanity: ‘Of yourself, you could come with
soft fl ight and nestle against my heart, if you would’.^19
Ironically, it is Jane’s rejection of Rochester and his natural fantasy that
drives her into nature proper. In a ‘trance-like dream’ the evening aft er the rev-
elation of Rochester’s marriage, she sees the roof of Th ornfi eld – the house that
would have been hers – dissolve into clouds, leaving her with no protection.
In the absence of human aid, Jane’s imagination transforms the moon into a
maternal spirit of nature: