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the readers) sympathy. Her laughter is "demonic"; her figure "hideous." Jane is necessarily repelled, for this is an other quite truly other, lacking even the intelligence and sense of moral proportion so artfully voiced by Dr. Frankensteins doomed monster. When Jane first sees Rochesters lawfully wedded wife the reader is as shocked as she.
In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.
This secret wife lacks even a gender. She is it, and animal: "the clothed hyena rose up, and stood tall on its hind feet." Rochester mockingly addresses Jane as a "young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon." (Rochester confesses to having married Bertha, the daughter of a West India planter, in a trance of youthful "prurience" and to having discovered, after it was too late, that their natures were antithetical—her "pygmy intellect" was "common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher"; she was ***ually promiscuous—"her vices sprang up fast and rank"; and diseased—"her excesses had prematurely developed the germs of insanity." That Bertha Mason suffers from atypical general paresis, the consequence of syphilitic infection, must be passed by in silence since, in realistic terms, Rochester too would be syphilitic; and would infect Jane Eyre if she married him.)本论文由英语论文网 www.51lunwen.org整理提供
Jane Eyres hunger and that of Bertha Mason are not seen to overlap, for one is always qualified by intellectual scrupulosity and a fierce sense of integrity; the other is, and was, sheerly animal. Jane goes against the grain of her deepest wishes; she renounces emotional fulfillment in the service of an ideal that includes, as "Currer Bell" carefully notes in the preface to the novels second edition, "the world-redeeming creed of Christ." Janes self-banishment and the remarkably literal terms of her hunger—she comes close to starving after she flees Thornfield—identify her in fact as a kind of Christ: misunderstood, defiant, isolated, willing (almost) to die for her beliefs. The reiteration of "master" and "my master" in the narrative suggests Janes ultimate if not immediate acknowledgement of her place in the hierarchy of a civilized cosmos; in this, she strikes a chord of willful submission not unlike that of Emily Dickinson, whose insistence upon "Master" as a force in her emotional life carried with it an air of obsessive conviction. How seemingly passive, how subtly aggressive! Jane Eyre is the ideal heroine as she is the ideal narrator of her romance.
In recounting her story, Jane typically introduces a situation meant to provoke conventional associations on the part of the reader (to whom, as to a friend, Jane speaks candidly) and then, within a paragraph or two, deftly qualifies or refutes it. The narratives dialectic, it might be said, constitutes a plot motion of its own, quite distinct from Janes activities. A thesis of sorts is presented; but, should we respond to it, the narrator will set us right: for she is always in control of her narrative. We learn, with Jane, that what seems to be rarely is; even when Rochester disguis