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Imagery in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre Essay

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Imagery in Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte wrote the novel Jane Eyre in the mid-eighteen hundreds. In her novel she expresses her views on many important factors present during this time including social problems such as race, class, gender, and the role of religion. Each of these factors affects the way that the protagonist, Jane Eyre, grows as a person. Throughout the novel Charlotte Bronte uses images and symbols that either influence or represent Jane's growth. Bronte uses a common imagery throughout the novel reflecting images of "fire and ice." She also uses symbols in Jane's life such as the red-room, from her childhood, and the character Bertha Mason Rochester, during her time at Thornfield. Other characters who …show more content…

and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and fragrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway. My hopes were all dead." After leaving Thornfield and arriving at the Moore House, St. John, Jane's cousin, is described as an opposite to Rochester. He is described as "hard and cold" and his face was "still and pale as a white stone." St. John was frigid and stiff and his influence put Jane "under a freezing spell." After his marriage proposal Jane states that "as his curate, his comrade, all would be right ... But as his wife - at his side always checked - forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital - this would be unendurable." Charlotte Bronte also uses "ice" to describe barren landscapes and seascapes. She uses it to represent loneliness and emotional desolation, even death. Gateshead would be an example of Jane's physical and spiritual isolation. Also at Lowood she makes comments of freezing temperatures, for example the frozen pitchers of water each morning. This all represents Jane in a state of exile (Sparkotes).

Some very distinct symbols in Jane Eyre were the red-room, and in relation to that, the character Bertha Mason

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