Bronte is also emphasizing the size of the room and the furniture-“festooned” and “ample”. She is also trying to emphasise the fact that the room is very rarely slept in.
Charlotte Bronte uses short phrases separated by semi-colons in this paragraph describing the red room and with each paragraph she builds up more and more detail. This creates a heavy impression. She uses similes-‘like a tabernacle’ and a tabernacle is religious, spiritual and you are not aloud to touch it so its like Jane cannot touch the bed or be near it also ‘like a pale throne’.
The next paragraph is balanced and sound- ‘this room was chill, because it seldom had a fire;’ it was silent, because remote from the nursery and kitchens’. This room represents Jane’s soul; it is chill because she has no passion to feed the fire of life. The life that Jane has known is the life of an orphan girl, shunned by her only relatives. Her soul is both silent and solemn because living as a servant in a mansion Jane was ignored. People of the upper class did not wish to associate with those of Jane’s low class. The only reason the red room was tidied was to preserve the memories of Mr. Reed. The only reason Jane was adopted was because Mr. Reed had requested that Jane be a part of his family. It’s like everything in the room was a secret-‘secret drawer’ with a ‘miniature of her deceased husband’ inside it keeping the room under a ‘spell which kept it so lonely’. The room is eerie and as though it has a personality.
The associations that she has with the room are the facts that Mr Reed died in that room. Jane is then frightened with each thought about John dieing there. These thoughts become more sharp and sudden and to show this they are split up using semi-colons- ‘’Mr Reed had been dead nine years; it was in this chamber he breathed his last; here he lay state;’ and so and.
Jane felt small she had a sense of her own size in that room. The furniture towered above her- ‘the bed rose before me’ and there was a ‘high, dark wardrobe’. As her time in the red room draws on, her fear and anxiety levels dramatically increase and she becomes spiritually overpowered. The sheer size of the space and furniture was so much bigger than her.
As she passes the mirror, her sub-conscience mind plays tricks on her because of her physical state-‘white face and arms specking the gloom’ and she thinks she sees the spirit of her dead uncle. This must be frightening for her or any child to be locked up in a room at such a young naïve age.
Jane can only have negative thoughts in that room. Jane feels frustrated because her brother and sister are much more misbehaved and naughty than her. Georgiana had a ‘spoiled temper’ and ‘acrid spite’ and John ‘twisted necks off pigeons’ and ‘killed the white pea-chicks’. The atmosphere is so deathly and frightening that she can only have horrible thoughts about everyone. She compares her family to destruction.
The day abandons her, the sun abandons her and leaving her to the world of darkness, night and ghosts- ‘Daylight began to forsake the red room. It’s as though she is angry against the sun and daylight because it’s leaving her with the darkness. The fact that they is heavy rain and ‘howling’ wind adds to the eerie atmosphere. Bronte uses similes- ‘cold as a stone’ as though she is stone dead.
The white bed and the last minute light on the mirror are ghostly. She occasionally turned a ‘fascinated eye towards the dimly gleaming mirror’ as though the mirror was drawing her in asking her to look at it.
She sees a light on the wall- ‘light gleamed on the wall’. She has more sudden thoughts that conclude that it could be a spirit. If I were a 10 year old in a spooky room like that at night and I saw what I thought was a spirit I wouldn’t know where to look what to do I would be too scared to move. Jane is the same- ‘mind was for fear’, ‘shaken’, ‘my heart beat thick’, ‘head grew hot’. Emotions build up on her she becomes agitated- ‘some thing seemed to be near me’ she becomes so frightened that ‘she rushes to the door’ and ‘shook the lock in desperate effort’.
Sound filled her ears even though it was deadly silent because previous thoughts and present thoughts where shouting at her in her head.
This was all written in the 1st person which helps the reader to understand how frightened Jane is because if it was written as the 3rd person Bronte would not be able to show the reader what the girl is thinking as well and it puts the reader in Jane’s position easier. The first person narrative is particularly effective when she asks herself what the light was on the wall- ‘ was it, I asked myself, a ray from the moon penetrating some aperture in the blind’ and when she has sudden thoughts broken up by semi-colons.
Bronte uses words like ‘swift’, ‘darting’, ‘rushing’, ‘suffocated’, ‘desperate’ and ‘streak’ to make the feeling in the passage more intense.