With the figure of the master/lover, EDWARD ROCHESTER, Charlotte reached the parting of the ways between the early obsessive dream creation of her Angrian chronicles and the experience of real life. Rochester is invested with the conflicting attributes of the real-life Belgian professor, Constantine Heger, whom Charlotte had loved, and much of the Byronic swagger of the imaginary Zamorna. With Rochester, Zamorna makes his last appearance in Charlotte Brontes writing, and it is a notable one. The romantic ideal of Zamorna, conceived in girlhood and evolved for over ten years throughout a voluminous literary output, died hard with its author just because of her unrealized love for her Belgian professor. Zamorna was there, ever present, in her mind, in compensation for the deprivation of her lot.
For two-thirds of Jane Eyre it is Zamorna/Rochester who sustains the plot; without the strong element of Zamorna in the character, which accounts for his French liaisons and his illegitimate daughter (just as in "Caroline Vernon," where the selfsame situation exists), there could have been no attempted seduction of the innocent Jane Eyre and the tale would have lost both its drama and its moral significance, which rests on her rejection of dishonor.
The seduction theme had figured twice before in Charlotte's novelettes, written in her early twenties, and had been treated there in two conflicting ways. Caroline Vernon, barely sixteen, was shown as succumbing with rapture to seduction by Zamorna and being ruined in consequence. The far more mature Elizabeth Hastins is shown as rejecting the dishonorable proposals of Sir William Percy. The fact that she loved him and had no alternative prospect in life but hard work and loneliness turned her rejection into a moral victory. At no age was Charlotte Bronte a moral prig (especially not in her early twenties) and the reasons she gave for Elizabeth's decisions were not, she made abundantly clear, so much out of virtue as out of self-respect. "I'll never be your mistress," she answers Sir William, "I could not without incurring the miseries of self-hatred .. . ."
It is for this self-same motive that Jane Eyre rejects the solicitations of Rochester and by so doing takes the first decisive step in English literature since Clarissa Harlowe toward redressing the inequality between the sexes. A good woman, according to Richardson, could not survive the loss of her virtue. Charlotte Bronte declared that a good woman, like any decent man, could not live without self-respect. Urged by Rochester with the most compelling arguments not to abandon him because of the existence of his maniac wife, Jane withstands his fire throughout the hours of a thundering night, the storm outside reflecting the tempest in the lovers's minds. Reminded by Rochester that she has no one to be injured or offended by any act of hers, since she is alone in the world--"Who in the world cares for you(i)? or who will be injured by what you do?" he pleads. "I (i) care for myself," answers Jane. "The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself . . . " (ch. 27).
With that reply Rochester's attempted seduction crumbles; he has no argument to oppose it. He is answered by an equal in judgment and a superior in honor. It is the second time in the book that the author claims equality for her heroine with her hero. The first incident occurs when Jane anticipates Rochester's declaration of love by avowing her own feelings for him. It was so novel a departure form the conventional canons of fiction that it shocked and startled the literary establishment and the books first readers. it was considered a grossly coarse thing for a woman to declare her love for a man--and for an author to describe it--even a reputedly male author like Currer Bell. Jane Eyre commits tow faults against Victorian female delicacy when she declares her love--as yet unsolicited--for one man and rejects another, later in the book, on the score of not (i) loving him. Such statements were tantamount to admitting a knowledge of the passion of love not permissible in a decent woman. Hence the savage comment by Elizabeth Rigby who, reviewing Jane Eyre in the Quarterly Review (December 1848), expressed the opinion that if the unknown author of Jane Eyre were a woman, as some suspected, the "she was one who must have forfeited the society of her own sex."