How do Jane’s experiences at Lowood contribute to her development?

How do Jane’s experiences at Lowood contribute to her development?

Before arriving at Lowood Jane lived at Gateshead, with her aunt and

three cousins. She was unloved and treated badly, and had already

developed a determination to stand up for herself and fight for her

independence. The young Jane had baffled Mrs Reed, who could obviously

not understand “how for nine years you could be patient and quiescent

under any treatment, and in the tenth break out all fire and

violence”. At Gateshead she is unhappy and when Mr Lloyd questions her

after the “red-room incident”, she is shown to be naïve and ignorant

of life. She has no real picture of honest, decent, working people and

her experience of poverty is limited to her aunt’s nasty comments

about her relatives and to the few poor villagers she has seen. Jane

is not religious yet, as the logical answer to Mr Brocklehursts

question reveals, and she again shocks him with her comments about the

psalms. Her sense of injustice, would not allow Mrs Reed to insult her

and call her deceitful, forcing her to speak her mind. Jane identifies

herself with the role of mutinous slave, likening her cousin to a

slave driver. She appears to be afraid that she will never find a true

sense of home or community, Jane feels the need to belong somewhere,

to find "kin", or at least "kindred spirits."

After Jane’s open act of rebellion, she is sent to Lowood. An

institution run by Mr Brocklehurst, whose mission it is to “mortify in

these girls the lusts of flesh”. Lowood institution is based upon

Charlotte Brontë’s own experiences at the Clergy Daughters School,

Cowan Bridge, which she attended at the age of 8, with her sisters. As

in “Jane Eyre”, typhus broke out at the school,...

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...brance of God” is the same as when she

acknowledges to herself her love for Rochester, where she says that

Rochester has become so important in her life that he even displaces

religion and stands between her and God.

Jane also has the power of forgiveness in her. She is ready to forgive

Mrs Reed for her wrongs and she returns to Thornfield to find and

forgive Rochester. It is possible for her learnings from Lowood to be

forgotten or ignored in a trice. She stoops low to begging when she

leaves Rochester and when she lets St. John take over her feelings,

but regains them at both times, refusing his proposal of marriage and

being taken in by the Rivers.

Lowood made Jane a capable woman with morals, who knew her place. It

was all that she needed to have back in the 19th century when at the

time the book was written, women were considered inferior to men.