‘I Never Liked Long Walks’ 113
Th e chief appeal of the life she is off ered is its ‘most glorious’ and ‘sublime’
possibilities. For these, she would be willing to compromise some of her own
propensities for independence: ‘my body would be under rather a stringent yoke,
but my heart and mind would be free. I should still have my unblighted self to
turn to: my natural unenslaved feelings with which to communicate in moments
of loneliness.’^40 Th e imagery of the yoke evokes her earlier realization that she
must ‘strive to live and bend to toil like the rest’.^41
However, it soon becomes clear that Jane is not in the same position as St
John, free to travel to India to devote herself to service. As a woman, she would
have to go as his wife, give up all traces of her self, mind and body, and be ‘at his
side always, and always restrained, and always checked – forced to keep the fi re
of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry
... this would be unendurable’.^42 It is suggestive of her desperation that even this
rejection is a close decision: her anxiety over it stretches out over the six-week
span between St John’s proposal and departure. At the last moment, when her
inquiries about Rochester have received no reply, and when St John is at his most
‘sublime’, he can almost overcome her objections:
I stood motionless under my hierophant’s touch. My refusals were forgotten – my
fears overcome – my wrestlings paralysed. Th e impossible – i.e. my marriage with St.
John – was fast becoming the Possible. All was changing utterly, with a sudden sweep.
Religion called – Angels beckoned – God commanded – life rolled together like a
scroll – death’s gates opening , showed eternity beyond: it seemed, that for safety and
bliss there, all here might be sacrifi ced in a second. Th e dim room was full of visions.^43Jane’s vision here is as overwhelmingly sublime as any that nature has provided her
with, possibly even more so: her absolute paralysis indicates that she is in the sway
of a sublime force greater than herself. But unlike the sublime maternal nature that
guided her to leave Th ornfi eld, this sublimity is destructive: it totally paralyses
Jane, demanding total forgetfulness of her self, the opposite of the legitimizing
sense of individuality that she had originally found in sublime nature.
In the face of this destructive, masculine sublimity, Jane’s nature refuses to
compromise: her own individuality resurfaces with a hallucination of Roch-
ester’s voice calling ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’ Jane identifi es the voice as ‘the work of
nature. She was roused, and did – no miracle – but her best’. It is striking that
nature can only provide a series of uncertainties; Jane can only list the places
where the voice ‘did not seem’ to originate, with a series of negatives:
it did not seem in the room – nor in the house – nor in the garden: it did not come
out of the air – nor from under the earth – nor from overhead. I had heard it – where,
or whence, for ever impossible to know!^44