Jane Eyre Analysis Of Nature Essay Example For Students

Jane Eyre Analysis Of Nature Essay Charlotte Bronte makes use of nature imagery throughout Jane Eyre, and comments on both the human relationship with the outdoors and human nature. The Oxford Reference Dictionary defines nature as 1. the phenomena of the physical world as a whole . . . 2. a things essential qualities; a persons or animals innate character . . . 4. vital force, functions, or needs. We will see how Jane Eyre comments on all of these. Several natural themes run through the novel, one of which is the image of a stormy sea. After Jane saves Rochesters life, she gives us the following metaphor of their relationship: Till morning dawned I was tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea . . . I thought sometimes I saw beyond its wild waters a shore . . . now and then a freshening gale, wakened by hope, bore my spirit triumphantly towards the bourne: but . . . a counteracting breeze blew off land, and continually drove me back. The gale is all the forces that prevent Janes union with Rochester. Later, Bront?, whether it be intentional or not, conjures up the image of a buoyant sea when Rochester says of Jane: Your habitual expression in those days, Jane, was . . . not buoyant. In fact, it is this buoyancy of Janes relationship with Rochester that keeps Jane afloat at her time of crisis in the heath:Why do I struggle to retain a valueless life? Because I know, or believe, Mr. Rochester is living.Another recurrent image is Bront ?s treatment of Birds. We first witness Janes fascination when she reads Bewicks History of British Birds as a child. She reads of death-white realms and the solitary rocks and promontories' of sea-fowl. We quickly see how Jane identifies with the bird. For her it is a form of escape, the idea of flying above the toils of every day life. Several times the narrator talks of feeding birds crumbs. Perhaps Bront? is telling us that this idea of escape is no more than a fantasy-one cannot escape when one must return for basic sustenance. The link between Jane and birds is strengthened by the way Bront? adumbrates poor nutrition at Lowood through a bird who is described as a little hungry robin. Bront? brings the buoyant sea theme and the bird theme together in the passage describing the first painting of Janes that Rochester examines. This painting depicts a turbulent sea with a sunken ship, and on the mast perches a cormorant with a gold bracelet in its mouth, apparently taken from a dr owning body. While the imagery is perhaps too imprecise to afford an exact interpretation, a possible explanation can be derived from the context of previous treatments of these themes. The sea is surely a metaphor for Rochester and Janes relationship, as we have already seen. Rochester is often described as a dark and dangerous man, which fits the likeness of a cormorant; it is therefore likely that Bront? sees him as the sea bird. As we shall see later, Jane goes through a sort of symbolic death, so it makes sense for her to represent the drowned corpse. The gold braceletcan be the purity and innocence of the old Jane that Rochester managed to capture before she left him. Having established some of the nature themes in Jane Eyre, we can now look at the natural cornerstone of the novel: the passage between her flight from Thornfield and her acceptance into Morton. In leaving Thornfield, Jane has severed all her connections; she has cut through any umbilical cord. She narrates: Not a tieholds me to human society at this moment. After only taking a small parcel with her from Thornfield, she leaves even that in thecoach she rents. Gone are all references to Rochester, or even her past life. A sensible heroine might have gone to find heruncle, but Jane needed to leave her old life behind. Half-Life Essay Making this claim raises the issue of the nature of St. John-has he a human nature, or is he so close to God that his nature isGod-like? The answer is a bit of both. St. John is filled with the same dispassionate caring that Gods nature provided Jane in the heath: he will provide, a little, but he doesnt really care for her. We get the feeling on the heath, as Jane stares into the vastness of space, that she is just one small part of nature, and that God will not pay attention to that level of detail. Similarly, she says of St. John: he forgets, pitilessly, the feelings and claims of little people, in pursuing his own large views. On the other hand, St. John exhibits definitely human characteristics, most obvious being the way he treats Jane after she refuses to marry him. He claims not to be treating her badly, but hes lying to himself: That night, after he had kissed his sisters, he thought proper to forget even to shake hands with me, but left the room in silence . What is important here is that St. John is more human than God, and thus he and his sisters are able to help Jane. From the womb, Jane is reborn. She sees the future as an awful blank: something like the world when the deluge was gone by. She takes a new name, Jane Elliott. With a new family, new friends, and a new job, she is a new person. And the changes go deeper than that. The time she spent in the heath and the moors purged her, both physically and mentally. Jane needed to purge, to destroy the old foundations before she could build anew. It is necessary to examine these scenes of nature in the context of the early to mid nineteenth-century. This was of course the time of the Industrial Revolution, when as Robert Ferneaux Jordan put it, there was a shift from the oolite, the lias and the sand to the coal measures. What had been the wooded hills of Yorkshire or Wales became, almost overnight, a land of squalid villages and black, roaring, crowded cities. Villages and small country markets became the Birminghams and Glasgows that we know. They were draining the fens and the flats. For Bront?, this posits the heath in Jane Eyre as something dated, the past more than the future. Jane therefore must leave it in order to remake herself. Another aspect of nineteenth-century England relevant to nature in Jane Eyre was the debate over evolution versus Creationism. Though Darwin didnt release On the Origin of Species until 1859, the seeds were already being sown; indeed, theres speculation that Charles Darwins grandfather adumbrated some of Charles theories. Lamark was the principle predecessor of Darwin in terms of evolutionary theory. Though he turned out to be completely wrong, he and others providedopposition for the Creationists of the first half of the nineteenth century. One of evolutions principles is survival of the fittest,and this is exactly what happens to Jane in the heath. Her old self is not strong enough, and must die. The new Jane she is forging is a product of natural selection. In fact, Jane is echoing the victory of evolution over Creation by the fact that it is humans who save her, and not God.