The Bleak World of Bronte

Jane Eyre is not known for being the happiest of books. The underlying tone of the novel (in my case, the movie) is bleak and depressing. Mr Rochester’s calloused personality, the seemingly haunted and dark Thornfield hall, and Jane’s dreary, difficult life are all factors that play into the mood of the novel. It’s hard to believe that someone could write about these things without some part of it having been a reality, but during our visit to the Bronte parsonage, I began to understand that a lot of it had come from personal experience.

Charlotte Bronte had seen and dealt with a lot of difficult things in her short and dismal life. Living directly off a graveyard and next to the moors in a small, rural town with everyone around her sick and dying, she had lots of material to influence her writing. I noticed the parallels between Charlotte’s life and aspects of the book; for instance, some of the deaths she wrote about in her book mirrored that of her own family members. It is rumored that Lowood, the boarding school Jane attends in the novel, was influenced by the boarding school Charlotte attended and from which her two older sisters became ill and died. Thornfield, Mr. Rochester’s home and the place Jane eventually calls home, could have been built around the foundation of the lonely church next to the parsonage. The overall atmosphere of the Bronte parsonage has tangible aspects of a fictional world in which Jane Eyre is set.

Wandering the heath a not far from the Bronte’s home, I felt a connection to Charlotte, and to Jane as well. Jane’s character came more alive, understanding where her (albeit fictional) feet would have walked, taking in the landscape she would have witnessed, understanding where the inspiration for this virtuous yet sad character came from. I believe Charlotte put a lot of herself into Jane, using this character as an outlet to have someone to connect to. Jane is, in a sense, an extension of Charlotte -- who through all the hardship she experienced, comes out with a positive disposition. Perhaps we are seeing a reflection of Charlotte’s personality, furthering the parallel between the fictional novel and Charlotte’s reality.

The fact that Jane gets the ending she does is interesting, and in a way it reflects Charlotte’s. Both Jane and Charlotte get to partially escape the hardship of their lives and find happiness, however, it is not perfect. Even though Jane and Mr. Rochester find their way to each other in the end, Rochester has become blind, scarred and jaded. He does get better after realizing she has come back to him, but it doesn’t change the fact that he now has this affliction neither of them can fix. Charlotte, who also marries, dies young, only getting a few years with her loving husband and taking her unborn child along with her. Both experience loss even within the blessing of happiness. Of course, this is an unintentional reflection, seeing as Jane Eyre was published before Charlotte’s death, but the connection between authoress and her character remains. They both never really get the chance to experience the textbook “happily ever after”, which carries the theme of mortality and hardship throughout the novel.

My pilgrimage to the Bronte parsonage expanded my understanding of the novel, having glimpsed into Charlotte’s life and, in a sense, Jane’s. The brooding, dismal scene through which I walked allowed me a personal connection to these two women, and I finally was able to grasp the world in which they lived. What parts of the story felt distant and unrelatable suddenly became real as I gained this insight. I found it interesting to see that Charlotte could have allowed Jane to be anything, and instead she gave her a life similar to hers, with the ending being the only difference. Jane got to live a long happy life, something she’s seeking for throughout the entire book, and the outcome Charlotte ultimately could have achieved if she had have escaped her dreary life. Through Charlotte’s creativity, she was able to be set free from the shackles of her life, even if in her own personal reality it didn’t happen. Jane’s ending is still in those pages she wrote, existing as an extension of what Charlotte would have been and what she wished could happen.