Importance of Settings in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

Importance of Settings in Jane Eyre

Throughout Jane Eyre, as Jane herself moves from one physical location to another, the settings in which she finds herself vary considerably. Bronte makes the most of this necessity by carefully arranging those settings to match the differing circumstances Jane finds herself in at each. As Jane grows older and her hopes and dreams change, the settings she finds herself in are perfectly attuned to her state of mind, but her circumstances are always defined by the walls, real and figurative, around her.

As a young girl, she is essentially trapped in Gateshead. This sprawling house is almost her whole world. Jane has been here for most of her ten years. Her life as a child is sharply defined by the walls of the house. She is not made to feel wanted within them and continues throughout the novel to associate Gateshead with the emotional trauma of growing up under its "hostile roof with a desperate and embittered heart." Gateshead, the first setting is a very nice house, though not much of a home. As she is constantly reminded by John Reed, Jane is merely a dependent here.

When she finally leaves for Lowood, as she remembers later, it is with a "sense of outlawry and almost of reprobation." Lowood is after all an institution where the orphan inmates or students go to learn. Whereas at Gateshead her physical needs were more than adequately met, while her emotional needs were ignored. Here Jane finds people who will love her and treat her with respect. Miss Temple and Helen Burns are quite probably the first people to make Jane feel important since Mr. Reed died. Except for Sunday services, the girls of Lowood never leave the confines of those walls. At Low...

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... temperament than any she has had before and the walls that she finds herself within are attractive. At Moor House, Jane is exposed to a way of living she had never quite seen before and, having seen the reality of the world she had previously only imagined. She then takes a job as a teacher -- the only skill she truly has. She finds another home, and again it suits her prospects. The cottage is “a little room with white-washed walls and a sanded floor" and a bed to sleep in. Here at Moor house is where Jane learns what it is to be an independent woman. Of course the twenty thousand pounds from John Eyre's inheritance doesn’t hurt.

In the final setting of the book at Ferndean, this is the place at where Jane will settle down. At the ends she concludes at Ferndean where she has now been cast into the role of a mother and from here so concludes the book.