Unlike any other literature, Jane Eyre has, over the years, become a personal aura of existence to me. I would be walking home from school, or sitting in the classroom, and this gush of Jane-Eyre-ness would rise and engulf me, and bring me to tears. It is an image, of a brown hue, golden and withered at the same time. It is of two black figures, one with a bonnet and one with hat, melting into the sunset. It is melancholy and sweet, like dust and honey entwined. Often, it is something with the wind, that exempts me temporarily from my flesh and all that oozes from it, and fills me with a tranquility that flows as a brook, but with no sound and no motion. My mind, in reminiscence, is at peace, for once.
At times, I know that I am inside the pages, inside the story, where nothing is too bright. All that is kindred at the heart of being human vibrates within, but carries no less force in penetrating the reader’s soul.
I have always regarded Jane Eyre as a rather sad story, despite the reunion and the vows of great love. Contemplating my assertion as I read it again, I say that it is not the story per se that is sad, but the entire truth of love. I see vulnerability and cowardliness, thoroughly expressed in the form of Mr. Rochester. “O what tangled webs we weave, when we first learn to deceive.” Intricate indeed was Mr. Rochester’s web. The man who controls has never really been in control; in his hand he held the apparatus to exercise control, but she was the one with the power. This man is an expert in the game of seduction, but the blooming is the dying, and love comes after the chandelier is fallen and the ball room deserted and blown to ashes by the golden wind of time. Jane tread on this ruin, and found him buried, all naked, as a pure soul awaits there, at the gate to a world unchanged, but where all shines with glory. Therefore I forgive him. He is but a child of innocence.
“Yet all man kills the things he loves…… The coward with a kiss, the brave man with a sword.” And the hopeless, with a vow. “Gentle readers, may you never feel what I then felt. May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.” I laugh as Albert Camus, and cry as Shakespeare never do.
I see that it is deep into the night. The silhouette of branches are swaying on the glass of the window. They are like hands, reaching, reaching for a past bygone, and a future unknown.