The book that Jane chooses off the shelf is called ‘Bewicks History of British Birds’.
She describes the books as, showing “death white realms…shadow. The words in these introductory pages…gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea billow of and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.” The book is gloomy and depressing, which suggests that she selects such a book since she is a depressed child.
The red-room is the first in a series of literal and metaphorical imprisonments in the novel. Although Jane’s imprisonment in the red-room is real, she will encounter spiritual, intellectual, and emotional imprisonment.
“Say your prayers, Miss Eyre, when you are by yourself: for it you don’t repent, something bad might be permitted to come down the chimney and fetch you away.” Says Miss Abbot the lady’s maid. Abbot scares Jane who is only 10 years old.
Hours pass in the red room and she starts to get scared. As it says,
“ I grew by degrees cold as stone, and then my courage sank.” The rain was beating down, the wind howling, there is a child locked in a room where her uncle died and her courage slowly dies down with daylight.
Jane is geared up to expect a ghost as light shadows come through, she screams. This situation is auto- suggestive, Jane is self-suggesting that a ghost would come.
“Oh, aunt! Have pity! Forgive me!” screams Jane
“Silence! This violence is almost repulsive,” says Mrs Reed. Mrs Reed comes pitiless. She thinks that Jane is putting on a big act to get out of the red room. Jane is screaming with trepidation and Mrs Reed is once more being obdurate.
Jane’s banishment to the red-room exemplifies her inferior position with regard to the rest of the members of the Reed household.
Bronte raises certain social issues, such as child abuse, degrading treatment of orphans and Evangelicalism. Charlotte Bronte believed in class distinctions.
We learn about society through the attitudes of the characters.
Mrs Reed resents having Jane in the house. Jane Eyre begins her story as an orphan raised by a wealthy family, and this ambiguous social standing motivates much of the novel’s internal tension and conflict.
Jane asks, “Am I a servant?”
Abbot replies, “No; you are less than a servant.” This indicates that Abbot thinks very little of Jane just like Mrs Reed.
Bessie is decent sometimes to Jane. Abbot helps Mrs Reed with making Jane’s life a misery. Abbot was the lady’s maid therefore she was constantly taking orders from Mrs Reed as well as hearing what she has to say concerning Jane.
Bessie also shows kindness to Jane, she would tuck her up in bed and kiss her and sometimes she would bring her up something to eat.
Servants picked up the bad attitudes from Mrs Reed who always criticises Jane.
“If you don’t sit still, you must be tied down,” said Abbot. This is an act you do to a criminal not to a innocent 10 year old girl.
“You ought to be aware, miss, that you are under obligations to Mrs Reed: she keeps you; if she were to return you off you would have to go to the Poorhouse.” Bessie means this kindly; she does not want to see it happen.
Jane is classed lower than a servant. Servants work for a living. Servants think Mrs Reed is very kind to Jane. As a penniless orphan forced to live on the charity of others, Jane is a kind of second-class citizen. In some ways she is below even the servants, who certainly have no obligation to treat her respectfully.
Jane thinks of poverty as synonymous with degradation. Jane has been taught that being poor is a terrible thing. She doesn’t realise there is respectable poverty.
A total different aspect of abuse is the abuse all the girls suffered at Lowood. At Gatesead Jane is the only one suffering, at Lowood she doesn’t feel alone. The children at Lowood are treated as inferior.
He treats her as if she is a sinful adult. Jane observes later that she was treated like an adult who was loathed.
Jane reminisces about a rag-doll, her scrappy doll, the only thing she has to love.
“Who would think that the evil one had already found a servant and agent in her? Yet such, I grieve to say, is the case.” Mr Brocklehurst said this in front of the whole school not only is such a statement embarrassing yet it was also untruthful.
Mr Brocklehurt turns up at school and embarrasses Jane; she is distraught by the whole situation and is deeply hurt.
Some of the teachers at Lowood treated the children as inferior. But, there was Miss Temple who doesn’t abuse the children rather supplies them with the love and affection needed to survive, emotionally. Miss Temple kisses Jane and keeps her at her side, after the whole incident with Mr Brocklehurst.
“You two are my visitors tonight; I must treat you as such.” Miss Temple treats Jane and Helen as guests Miss Temple was once more showing her kindness to the children.
Miss Temple comforts Jane in a state of trouble, “Don’t be afraid, Jane, I saw it was an accident; you shall not be punished.”
In Mr Brocklehurst’s eyes what he was doing is right since in his religion it says, “If G-d wants you to be poor you will be.” Moreover, Mr Broklehurst didn’t want to get the children used to things that they wouldn’t have in the future.
Mr Broklehurst says the following to Miss Temple; “ ‘if ye suffer hunger or thirst for My sake, happy are ye.’ Oh, madam, when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt porridge, into these children’s mouths, you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls!”
“What is this girl with curled hair? Red hair, ma’am, curled – curled all over?
…I wish these girls to be children of Grace: and why that abundance? I have again and again intimated that I desire the hair to be arranged closely, modestly, plainly.”
Mr Brocklehurst feels that girls who are poor should not only act like poor children but should dress in a modest and plain way, even to the extent of their hair.
Members of the society never came to inspect Lowood’s conditions to see if they were not adequate, nor if Jane was happy at the Reed’s. Society was not much involved with communal projects besides for the payment.
Mrs Reed attitude is coloured by the fact that Jane is a lower standard in life and she doesn’t want her children to mix with a lower level of society.
There is a link between social class and the role of charity schools. You only go to a charity school if you are poor therefore; you are looked down upon if you go to a charity school.
Throughout the novel, Jane struggles to find the right balance between moral duty and earthly pleasure, between obligation to her spirit and attention to her body. She encounters two main religious figures: and Helen Burns. Both represent a model of religion that Jane ultimately rejects as she forms her own ideas about faith and principle, and their practical consequences.
Mr. Brocklehurst illustrates the dangers and hypocrisies that Charlotte Bronte perceived in the nineteenth-century Evangelical movement. Mr. Brocklehurst adopts the rhetoric of Evangelicalism when he claims to be purging his students of pride, but his method of subjecting them to various privations and humiliations, like when he orders that the naturally curly hair of one of Jane’s classmates be cut so as to lie straight, is entirely un-Christian. Of course, Brocklehurst’s proscriptions are difficult to follow, and his hypocritical support of his own luxuriously wealthy family at the expense of the Lowood students shows Bronte’s wariness of the Evangelical movement. Helen Burns’s humble and forbearing mode of Christianity, on the other hand, is too passive for Jane to adopt as her own, although she loves and admires Helen for it.
The most important thematic elements in this section are the contrasting modes of religious thought represented by Mr. Brocklehurst and Helen Burns.
The angelic Helen Burns and her doctrine of endurance represent a religious position that contrasts with Mr. Brocklehurst’s. Utterly passive and accepting of any abjection, Helen embodies rather than preaches the Christian ideas of love and forgiveness. But neither form of religion satisfies Jane, who, because of her strong sensitivity to indignities and injustices, reviles Brocklehurst’s shallow devotional displays and fails to understand Helen Burns’s passivity. As Jane herself declares: “when we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard . . . so as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again”. Helen’s doctrine of endurance and love is incompatible with Jane’s belief in fairness and self-respect.
In Bronte’s time, Evangelicalism had becomes inextricably bound up with social class and often involved those with social status dictating how social inferiors should behave.
