Jane Eyre: The Red Room
From the start of this chapter, Jane’s fear and suffering is more about the pain she receives at the hands of her family than the effects of the paranormal. Although on the face of it, the vivid descriptions (‘every nerve I had feared him, every morsel of flesh on my body shrank when he came near me’) make the scenes feel very ‘Gothic’, in fact they are not, because they are not about ghosts and monsters, but real life (even though it is a ‘real life’ that many people today could not identify with). The scene is focused more on the facts of reality: Jane has no money, no possessions, and therefore, in the eyes of many, she is not important: ‘you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us’. There are many places in the chapter where the book adopts a Gothic feel, for example when John attacks Jane, and she fights back. John is depicted as a monster, ‘a tyrant’, and phrases such as ‘pungent suffering’ make the reader feel as though he is much more than just a nasty schoolboy. Jane loses control over herself; ‘I don’t very well know what I did with my hands’. She acts almost as though she is possessed, a theme that definitely belongs to the Gothic genre. The lady’s-maid refers to her behaviour as ‘wickedness’, a word that has distinct connotations with the Devil, very much a part of the Gothic stereotype. Insanity is also referred to (‘she and Miss Abbot stood with folded arms, looking darkly and doubtfully on my face, as incredulous of my sanity’); also a dark theme, and perhaps a hint as to what is to come later with Bertha.
