Re-Reading Jane Eyre

Since I began my poetry project I’ve been re-reading Jane Eyre s-l-o-w-l-y.  Usually I have treated the book as a mad race to the scenes with Mr. Rochester (it’s a love story after all).  Keep in mind that I first read this book when I was just thirteen.  As I’ve added life experience my interaction with the book’s earlier scenes have changed.  The childhood scenes at Gateshead are painful now to read as a mother.  I’m struck by the clarity with which Bronte describes first post-traumatic stress disorder and then depression (before these terms were invented) in a child of ten.  The scene where Jane describes looking at a pretty plate she’d always wanted to touch and not caring, is heart-breaking. 

As a mom now, I find John Reed more menacing than ever.  A large boy of fourteen, recently sent home from school.  A thick, fleshy boy on the verge of manhood who has been used to indulging all his tastes and appetites.  Trapped in the house with him, is a thin and stunted Jane, who has been for years a convenient outlet for John’s sadism.  As a grown woman now, it’s not hard to see where this will all end up in a few years.  Perhaps that more than anything explains Jane’s miraculous escape (as it seemed to her at the time) to school.  It must have been obvious to the physician (apothecary) called to treat Jane’s bruised and cut head after her seizure in the Red Room.  He professes to be concerned for the child’s nerves, but I’m not so convinced that’s the only worry.

Aside from the new menace I feel from the opening pages - I am struck by one other thing that I missed through all these years.  Bronte chose to give both the torturer of Jane’s childhood and the cousin/potential suitor at the end of the narrative the same name.  The second character is St.John Rivers to be sure.  But it can’t be coincidence (even for a common name) that Bronte created this echoing connection between the characters.  They practically book nd the narrative.  Bronte (subtly – she was a minister’s daughter after all) connects St.John’s zeal with the abuse Jane suffered in her youth.