‘I Never Liked Long Walks’ 115
lowed by a clarifi cation that separates Jane from the birds: ‘You are not gone: not
vanished? I heard one of your kind an hour ago, singing high over the wood: but
its song had no music for me.’^50 Rochester wants Jane herself, not a fantasy.
Th e novel’s conclusion, with Jane returning to live in seclusion with Rochester,
has received mixed responses from readers, who point out that Jane has become
a caretaker, living in a house to which Rochester had once declined to send even
Bertha.^51 Jane seldom interacts with any other society, and sees Mary and Diana
only once per year. I suggest two possibilities for reading the conclusion. In the
context of Jane’s movement through the English rural landscape, and her former
characterization as inhuman rather than human, this conclusion can be read as a
small victory: her struggle was never to triumph in human society, but to partake
in it at all; and by those standards, she has found a quiet success. Jane says that she
is happy with Rochester, and that she loves him, and this should count for much.
Her life might be read as the successful reconciliation of her ‘propensities and
principles’, and if it is not quite everything a feminist reader might desire, it is at
least in a mode of realism that is more sustainable than Jane’s initial romanticism.
Jane’s movement toward nature, while deeply felt, oft en crossed into the realm
of fantasy rather than reality, and when Jane found that this movement toward
nature and fantasy was unsustainable, her task was to relearn what it meant to
be human. In this context, her marriage with Rochester, despite their seclusion,
nonetheless becomes a happy conclusion of a balance between her impulse toward
the natural and her need for human society and security.
Yet I agree with Sharon Locy, who writes that there is ‘something sad’ in
Jane’s new position as Rochester’s helpmate.^52 We are left with a strange taste
of dissatisfaction, and I suggest that it is because the text’s glimpses of sublim-
ity have all but dropped out. Th e once-triumphant, transcendent insistence on
Jane’s individuality is gone; instead, Jane has found a quiet space between society
and the natural world. But can what is sublime in her nature – her independence,
her very humanity – be successfully comprised, or can it only be repressed? Can
we believe that she is no longer restless, and that her former ardent wishes to
see the world have simply evaporated? And even if they have – can this be read
as a happy ending? In describing her new life with Rochester, Jane says that ‘I
described to him how brilliantly green they were; how the fl owers and hedges
looked refreshed; how sparklingly blue was the sky’.^53 It is hard to compare this
rather generic description to her once-passionate description of ‘those trembling
stars that followed [the moon’s] course; they made my heart tremble, my veins
glow when I viewed them’ without some sense of loss.^54
Th at Jane so evocatively describes her restlessness in retrospect, aft er ten years
in Ferndean, suggests that traces remain. When she describes her early days at
Th ornfi eld, much earlier in the narrative, Jane changes to an unusual use of the
present tense: