Charlotte Bronte uses the romantic genre in Jane Eyre to explore her ideas about love and marriage. What ideas about marriage do you find in Jane Eyre?

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Charlotte Bronte uses the romantic genre in Jane Eyre to explore her ideas about love and marriage. What ideas about marriage do you find in Jane Eyre?

I am looking at a passage in the 24th Chapter, where Jane has awoken on the morning after Mr Rochester’s proposal in the orchard. Throughout this passage Jane contemplates the idea of marriage and expresses her worries and fears with the perplexed Mr Rochester. After this Jane realises that her love for him conquers all her potentially hindering feelings for the future.

Charlotte Bronte presents this passage as a way for the reader to really empathise with Jane’s position. We seem to travel the same emotional rollercoaster, understanding Jane’s feelings of fear and apprehension for the future, but also this passionate love for Mr Rochester.

At the beginning of the passage it is clear that the feelings of the previous night are being reverberated. Jane experiences a feeling of full and complete happiness on her awakening, she describes this as her ‘jubilee’. She runs out in to the ‘brilliant June morning’ giving money to the poor, and admiring the singing of the birds. These things are really typical of the romance genre.

Their romantic love is also shown through their dialogue: Mr Rochester says ‘Jane, you look blooming, and smiling, and pretty’. Jane is in this ‘unreal’, almost euphoric state, only for a very short time. She is brought back to reality with the strange comprehension of the new name of ‘Jane Rochester’. It only takes the slightest thing to remove her from this state of mind that everybody shares on being in love. On describing the feeling that was aroused on hearing Mr Rochester say her name-to-be, Jane says ‘it was, I think almost fear’.

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Although this period of engagement is supposed to be a really happy time, where nothing will impede the marriage and where ‘Love is blind’, Jane immediately begins to analyse every possible problem that may occur. This may be because of the social position she has been in all her life. She has always been in the seat of a spectator, observing all the things that could potentially go wrong in a marriage, and thus leading her to be too aware of her future. Also, with the fact that she has been so damaged and become so delicate through her childhood ...

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