‘I Never Liked Long Walks’ 109
She broke forth as never moon yet burst from cloud: a hand fi rst penetrated the sable
folds and waved them away; then, not a moon, but a white human form shone in the
azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward. It gazed and gazed and gazed on me. It
spoke to my spirit: immeasurably distant was the tone, yet so near, it whispered in my
heart – ‘My daughter, fl ee temptation!’
‘Mother, I will’.^20Jane’s reality and fantasy intertwine, and the fantastical form in the sky, so simi-
lar to that which Jane had drawn in her youth at Lowood, now claims Jane as her
daughter.
But what does it mean to be the daughter of nature? Gaining a mother should
grant Jane a clearer sense of identity, but instead, Jane’s sense of identity, already
in a crisis, continues to fall apart. Aft er the scene at the church, she had asked:
‘where was the Jane Eyre of yesterday? – where was her life? – where were her pros-
pects?’^21 Soon, alone on the moor, she hardly knows what it means to be human
at all: ‘Birds began singing in brake and copse: birds were faithful to their mates;
birds were emblems of love. What was I?’^22 Jane is no longer Rochester’s bird, but
she has no identity with which to replace that which she lost. While the poetry of
Jane-as-nature’s-daughter may be lovely, this too-romantic identity swift ly crum-
bles in the face of real nature: Jane describes how ‘Want came to me, pale and bare’,
followed swift ly by her realization that ‘I was a human being, and had a human
being’s wants: I must not linger where there was nothing to supply them’.^23 Th e
fantasy of Jane as a daughter of nature has been tested and found impossible.
‘And What do the Women Do?’:
Gender and the Rural Economic Landscape
Jane’s fi rst re-encounter with human life is with its economic activity:
Recalled by the rumbling of wheels to the road before me, I saw a heavily-laden wag-
gon labouring up the hill, and not far beyond were two cows and their drover. Human
life and human labour were near. I must struggle on: strive to live and bend to toil
like the rest.^24To be human is to labour; Jane must join the rest of humanity, and she is recalled
to herself by the sound of the hard labour of trade and the sight of agriculture.
Humans must ‘strive to live and bend to toil’; Jane, in turn, must bear her own
load. But what load can Jane bear? Th e loaded wagon is not only a symbol of
human toil, but also a literal representation of the local rural economy around
Morton, where the work available is inaccessible to Jane. She cannot get work
as a driver or a drover, and she is too ill-equipped and unconnected to do any
labour available to women in such a place.