Jane Eyre :: essays research papers

Ten-year-old orphan Jane Eyre lives unhappily with her wealthy, cruel cousins and aunt at Gateshead. Her only salvation from her daily humiliations, such(prenominal) as being locked up in a "red-room" (where she thinks she sees her beloved uncles ghost), is the kindly servant, Bessie. Jane is spared further mistreatment from the Reed family when she is sent off to school at Lowood, but there, downstairs the hypocritical Evangelicalism of the headmaster, Mr. Brocklehurst, she suffers further privations in the austere environment. She befriends Helen Burns, who upholds a doctrine of Christian forgiveness and tolerance, and is taken under the wing of the superintendent, degenerate Temple. An outbreak of typhus alerts benefactors to the schools dread conditions, Mr. Brocklehurst is replaced, and Jane excels as a student for six years and as a teacher for two. Jane finds employment as a governess at the estate of Thornfield for a junior-grade girl, Adle. After much waiting, J ane finally meets her employer, Edward Rochester, a brooding, detached man who seems to have a dark past. Other oddities around Thornfield include the occasional beastly laugh Jane hears emanating from the third-story attic. Rochester always attributes it to modify Poole, the seamstress who works up there, but Jane is never fully convinced, and the fire she has to put out one night in Rochesters bedroom plants further doubts. Meanwhile, Jane develops an attraction for Rochester, not based on looks (both are considered plain) but on their intellectual communion. However, the higher social standing of the beautiful young woman Ingram seemingly vaults her above Jane. Though Rochester flirts with the idea of marrying Miss Ingram, he is aware of her financial ambitions for marriage. An old acquaintance of Rochesters, Richard Mason, visits Thornfield and is severely injured from an attackapparently from Gracein the middle of the night in the attic. Jane, baffled by the circumstances, t ends to him, and Rochester confesses to her that he made an error in the past that he hopes to overturn by marrying Miss Ingram. He says that he has another governess position for Jane lined up elsewhere. Jane returns to Gateshead for a while to see the dying Mrs. Reed. When she returns to Thornfield, Rochester says he knows Miss Ingram is after him only for his money, and he asks Jane to marry him. Jane accepts, but a month later, Mason and a solicitor, Mr. Briggs, interrupt the ceremony by revealing that Rochester already has a wife Bertha Mason, Masons sister, a lunatic who is kept in the attic in Thornfield.