Jane Eyre’s Childhood as a Precedent for All the Trouble

Jane Eyre’s childhood as a precedent for all the trouble.

Jane Eyre’s literary success of the time has been cheaply commercialized. In other words, Bronte’s novel never got the appreciation it deserved, in the areas it deserved. Many 19th century critics merely assigned literary themes to their reviews to “get it over with”. Critics commended Jane Eyre for everything from its themes to its form. However, their surface examinations amount to nothing without careful consideration of the deeper underlying background in Jane’s life where their hasty principles originate. The widely discussed free will of Jane’s, her strong individuality, and independence are segments of a greater scheme, her life. For example: Jane’s childhood serves as the most important precedent for all of the self-realism although this purpose is widely disregarded. Even though “many have celebrated Bronte’s carefully wrought description of her protagonist’s first eighteen years for its vivid pathos, no one has as yet accorded this childhood its deserved weight in the novels ultimate resolution.” (Ashe 1) Jane Eyre’s genius develops in a series of internal reactions to external circumstances rather than shallow judgments about those internal happenings.

The external circumstance is Jane’s childhood while the internal happenings are Jane’s emotional struggles. These emotions later become labeled as themes of “reason”, “passion” or “maturation”. However these emotions do not merely stand by themselves. Jane Eyre is about dealing and reacting to fate and her actions in the face of unchangeable circumstances. Jane’s fate consisted of her disaster of a childhood. “From the vantage of modern child psychology Jane’s background-ten years spent at Gateshed barren of affection or adult encouragement, and eight years at Lowood School marked by severe physical privation, to the cheerless philosophy of Helen Burns- can only exempt Bronte’s heroine from common standards of morality or human incentive.” (Ashe 2) Jane Eyre’s obscure motivations to deal with Mr. Rochester’s love in that arbitrary cold manner is a trait which takes root in her childhood trauma.

Jane’s childhood trauma results as a product of her times at Gateshed and Lowood. There were a series of irreversible problems that Jane had to deal with. She was born an orphan into a house devoid of love or respect for her. It is not overly emotionally healthy to live with the “ostracism by the Reed family and the unrelenting anxiety over the chidings of the servants, the violence of John Reed, and the punishments and berating of Mrs. Reed.” (Ashe 10) Evidently, Jane had this lifestyle since she was little. This can be inferred from Mrs. Reeds loving statement “I hated it the first time I set my eyes on it-a sickly, whining, pining thing” (7)

Jane was not only resented but also lacking any kind of love to balance her out. We know this right away when she is reading her book and she notes “there were certain introductory pages I could not pass quite as a blank. They were those of the solitary rocks and promontories” (9 ) In addition she mentions how she could not pass ober descriptions of “forlorn regions of drear space” (11) Jane also mentions she “cannot tell that sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard” All of this language symbolizes her emotional distress. “The coldness of the winter scenes in Bewick emphasizes the loneliness of some humans” (Chitham 9) All of the places and factors mentioned are representative imagery for her loneliness. Jane is a prisoner within her solitude thus alluding to the name of the setting, Gateshead.

In addition to loneliness, Jane often experience helplessness in Gateshed.. Jane exclaims, “Why could I never please? Why was it useless to try to win anyone’s favor? ” (14) Then she discuses how even with all of Georgiana and Eliza’s negative traits they are happy and she is not. Jane desperately seeks an answer for her unhappiness, “I could not answer the ceaseless inward question- why I thus suffered;” (18)

In attempts to explain her loneliness, Jane realizes her role as an outcast. Seeing she did not belong at Gateshead, she readily admitted “I was a discord at Gateshed halls; I was like nobody there” (10) This feeling of being continuously an outcast was transferred on to Lowood where she was maliciously isolated by the headmaster of the school. He specifically told his students to “shun her example if necessary. Avoid her company, exclude her from your sports and shut her out from the universe” (40) On top of even her brutal isolation, because she did not “believe in psalms” (35), Jane’s first and only friend died promptly.

Whereas at Gateshed Jane only suffered from, “human attention meant criticism” (Markley 4) at Lowood Jane starved and