In chapters one and two, Jane is attacked and bullied by her cousin John Reed, and she fights back. Her aunt is called by Jane’s other two cousins, Eliza and Georgina, followed by the maids Bessie and Abbot. They assumed she was the one in the wrong, and was sent to the “red room”. She struggles, and the maids start to tie her up but she agrees to sit down. The maids warn her to behave more, and they tell her that if she doesn’t her aunt wouldn’t be so kind to her as to let her stay. Jane is used to people telling her this. Then the maids tell her that if she doesn’t pray when she is left alone, something might come down the chimney and take her away. She is left in the “red room” for hours and hours, cold and hungry, and the red room is described through her eyes. This room was the room that her uncle had died in nine years before. She sees a light reflected on the wall and starts panicking; she runs to the door to try to get out and screams. The two nurses come running, and when they discover she is not ill, just terrified, and Aunt Reed arrives, they all leave her in disgust and punish her with another hour in the “red room”. Out of fear and panic, when left alone, Jane has a fit and faints. All these events in the first two chapters – Jane getting hit by her cousin, getting told off and the language used against her – “This violence is almost repulsive”, “Rat! Rat!” – builds up a feeling of sympathy for Jane.
The weather outside, at the start of chapter 1, reflects Jane’s life and mood as sad and dreary. In chapter 3, the doctor says she is depressed, and this is shown here. For example, “nipped fingers and toes” – Jane lives a horrible nipped life where everybody despises her and is mean to her. “Clouds so sombre” – Jane’s life is sombre, joyless and boring. “Leafless shrubbery” – the shrubs are leafless and bare with nothing to protect them from the weather, just like Jane has nothing and nobody to protect her from the Reed family, who treat her very badly. Using the background to sympathise with the mood is called pathetic fallacy. The author is setting the scene for the whole novel.
Jane Eyre escapes from family life by reading, because her life is so bleak, and everyone is so horrible to her, that reading helps her forget her situation and come into a different world of her own. This is connected to Charlotte Bronte’s own life as she writes books, and so probably also enjoys reading them. Jane is reading a book of birds, and some of the metaphors and imagery used to describe pictures in the book are like Jane’s life, for example “the broken boat stranded in a desolate coast” – this is a metaphor for her existence, as she is isolated with no love, fun or excitement. Jane thinks she is like the broken boat – “I was a discord at Gateshead Hall”. She thinks this because nobody at Gateshead Hall speaks to her with kindness.
John reed finds Jane reading. He thinks she shouldn’t be reading the book, as he sees it as his property. He teases her for a while then throws the book at her. John’s description makes him sound threatening: “four years older than I, for I was but ten; large and stout for his age, with a dingy and unwholesome skin;”
The language john uses, such as “rat” and “bad animal”, the fact that he calls her an animal shows that he is an unpleasant character, Jane gets treated like vermin, not like a human being.
John acts like he hates her using the house and he goes on at her about it being his house all the time. He makes her feel unwelcome and teases her for being a dependant. He uses language that makes her seem inferior to john and his sisters.
Chapter one ends in a fight between john and Jane. She is pinned down and man-handled away to the red room. The servants threaten her, saying something could come down the chimney and take her away if she doesn’t say her prayers. – “god will punish her. He might strike her dead in the midst of her tantrums, and then where would she go?”, “say your prayers, Miss Eyre, when you are by yourself; for if you don’t repent, something bad might be permitted to come down the chimney and take you away”. This must have terrified Jane, as the red room was the room her uncle had died in. Religion played a big part in their lives. Jane Eyre was a Victorian novel with different views to nowadays.
Jane’s social status in the house is below the servants, and she wouldn’t be surprised knowing this. Victorian women were very rarely independent, as there were few jobs for them, and once they married, all their money belonged to their husbands. Money made a difference to women.
The red room was very rarely slept in, it was huge, with a big bed and very grand, the use of red gives connotations of blood, anger, and fear. Jane Eyre’s uncle had died in this room nine years before, which would scare Jane. This makes us feel sympathy for her. The bed and the furniture are huge in proportion to little Jane, which makes us pity her too. Overall, the red room symbolises a prison physically and emotionally. Physically, she is not allowed out of the room. But emotionally she is stuck inside herself, with no one to help her and show her that she is worth more than what the reed family give her, so the red room is like her life, which keeps her withdrawn and sad.
John reed and Bessie the maid both comment on Jane’s position at Gateshead hall in chapters one and two. They make her feel inferior to everyone else. Victorian society treated women altogether as inferior, unintelligent and they had many limitations, and Jane has no parents and an aunt who hates her, so she is in a very helpless, negative situation. When Jane is in the red room, language techniques are used to show her anguish. At the end of chapter 2, Jane faints and has a fit. I think this happened to her because of the events and excitement of the day, and the fear of what she thought she saw in the room, and the hatefulness of her life, and the feeling of not being able to go on like that anymore. The writer is trying to create sympathy, and leaving the readers on a cliff hanger, making the end of this chapter tense and sad.
The reader is left feeling very sorry for Jane, they don’t feel as much sympathy now as they would have done when the novel was written, as back then Victorian women could have related to her and her difficult social position. The reader feels sorry for Jane throughout the two chapters because she is treated abominably by the household. Charlotte Bronte’s’ language creates sympathy for Jane because of the way she describes the house, the family and Jane’s life – “heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse”.
Jane’s position at Gateshead hall makes you feel sorry for her because she is stuck in a difficult position because she has no money, is not allowed a job and has no family apart from the reeds.
