106 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
a sublime fantasy of nature to the real nature of the moors to a social, economic
landscape – and in all three, Jane fails to fi nd a place for herself. In facing her with
three equally inhospitable versions of the English landscape, the novel literalizes
Jane’s impossible situation in trying to assert her independence.
I begin at the novel’s beginning , examining how Jane’s limited options as a
dependent young woman cause her to search for sublimity and individuality in
a sublime nature. Th is theme culminates in her romance with Rochester, whose
repeated characterizations of Jane as an elf or bird reinforce both her affi liation
with nature and her individuality, but also troublingly characterize her as inhu-
man. In the second part of the essay, I examine how Jane’s fl ight from Th ornfi eld
and subsequent wanderings through a rural economic landscape undercut her
affi liation with nature, and emphasize that she must fi nd some way to compro-
mise her instincts for the sublime with a more practical need to support herself;
here, she fi nds a potential model in St John Rivers, who works to accommodate
his own restlessness by dedicating his life to God. But while St John is free to
seek the sublime in India while maintaining his independence and sense of self,
Jane, as a woman, is not. Although the novel ends with Jane’s happy marriage to
Rochester, the traces of sublimity in the text all but drop out, leaving the reader
with the uneasy sense that Jane’s happy ending may have come at a cost: as she no
longer seeks to assert her selfh ood through the sublime, it is unclear whether she
continues to assert her selfh ood at all.
‘Of Th ese Death-White Realms I Formed an Idea of My Own’:
Sublime Nature and Jane’s Individualism
Th e novel opens with Jane avoiding the chilly assessment of her Aunt Reed
and the open physical abuse of her cousin John Reed by tucking herself into
a window seat with Bewick’s History of British Birds. But despite her position
and her choice of naturalist reading material, actual British birds are not Jane’s
focus, nor is the ‘pale blank of mist and cloud’ visible through the window.
Instead, she reimagines the images and descriptions of nature in the book: ‘Of
these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-
comprehended notions that fl oat dim through children’s brains, but strangely
impressive’. Jane chooses the vignettes here – not of birds, but of the book’s more
Gothic elements, which she supplements with her imagination. Nature itself is
not an escape or refuge; Jane remains cosily tucked in her window seat, skipping
over the birds in her book. But as an ‘idea of [her] own’ or as a set of ‘half-
comprehended notions’, Bewick’s n a t u r e o ff ers a sublime escape: ‘Each picture
told a story; mysterious oft en to my undeveloped understanding and imper-
fect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting’. Jane describes a mixture of partial
comprehension, imagination and emotion that imbues nature with a Burkean