Jane Eyre Research Paper

‘Presentiments are strange things! And so are sympathies; and so are signs; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not yet found the key.’(p254)

Although largely perceived as a realist novel, much of ‘Jane Eyre’’s foundations are built upon fantasy. A hybrid thus emerges. The novel offers an insight into the prevalent notion of wild imagination in Victorian society. Threaded throughout the novel from the outset, are coincidences, visions, dreams and premonitions that serve to guide Jane in some way on her bildungsroman journey that the narrative centres around. There is a sinister undertone to Charlotte Brontë, ’s book, supported by the supernatural world, which is explored through mystical imagery of beasts and fairies,

Although Jane doesn’t state explicitly how she is feeling, the reader can infer her true emotions from her dreams. It can be deduced from her dreams that she connects to Rochester on a spiritual level, as he enters her dreams frequently. Moreover, the dreams would suggest that she feels she cannot protest to him or admit her doubts to him, so she instead dreams to release these pent up emotions, unable to do so in reality. This juxtaposition of reality versus Jane in her dreams (fantasy) is the foundation of the novel. ‘Despite her placid exterior, Jane still maintains a wild and active dream life.’ According to Maurianne Adams, Jane even pays "inordinate attention to the details of her dream life". Jane's dreams thus reveal the raw emotions she attempts to mask in order to be an ideal Victorian lady’. Jane has a dream of a chestnut tree where Rochester proposes to her splitting in half when struck with lightening. Mysteriously, this predicts the splitting of Edward’s loyalties, to Jane versus loyalties to conforming to the social expectations of marrying someone like Blanche, of a similar social status to him, demonstrating Jane’s supernatural ability to sense how he is feeling, making their love seem almost impossibly divine. Similarly, she dreams about being ‘tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea.’ Jane interprets the dreams

‘During the past week scarcely a night had gone over my couch that had not brought with it a dream of an infant: which I sometimes hushed in my arms, sometimes dandled on my knee, sometimes watched playing with daisies on a lawn; or again, dabbling its hands in running water. It was a wailing child this night, and a laughing one the next: now it nestled close to me, and now it ran from me’ (p339). Dreams of children in the novel are subsequently followed by unfortunate events. For example, when Jane wakes up she hears the murderous cry of Bertha, shortly after this, Jane is told that her aunt is dying and her cousin John has died. In another dream regarding children Jane experiences ‘a strange, regretful consciousness of some barrier’ dividing Rochester and her, symbolic of a growing emotional distance between them. Again, suggesting it is a bad omen to dream of