Jane Eyre and the Metaphysics of Love

By Michael Millerman

“And the first seeds of the longing for justice blow through the soul like the wind.”

To interpret Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre in terms of socio-historical background

or aesthetic ideology is to mistake a candle for the sun. Some critics, like Terry Eagleton
and John Sutherland, have done just that. They have filtered the light of eternal truth
through a lens of social relativism. The loss, however, is theirs, not ours. To use Bronte’s
own words: “…narrow human doctrines, that tend only to elate and magnify a few,
should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ” (Preface, 20). Let us,
then, extinguish the flame of materialist literalism and examine the metaphysics of Love,
in Bronte’s terms, not Marx’s. The following brief analysis will perhaps convince the
reader that the relationship between Jane and Rochester represents the nature of a love
that strives to be synthesized in and through the Divine.

The paroxysm that lands Jane in the “red room” early in the novel marks an
important transition: an awakening of her self to her self (II, 28). She becomes keenly
aware of the injustice caused by the imposition of another’s will on one’s own. Much
like Rousseau’s Emile, she must now strengthen and cultivate the instinct of amour de
soi, love of self, and come to see herself not as a cogwheel of society, but as an agent of
natural freedom. This fundamental realization guides Jane along a path of courage and
justice; a path founded on principles whose truth she has discovered for herself. It is not
without difficulty and sacrifice, however, that Jane maintains her autonomy.

Rochester’s plight is a different one. He is, by nature, superior, as he himself

relates to Jane (XIV, 155). His speech is adorned with wit, his tastes refined. In stark
contrast to Miss Eyre, whose introversive wanderings far surpass her experience of the
world ‘out there’, Rochester “has traveled a great deal, and seen a great deal of the
world” (XI, 124). His problem is not want of material satisfaction. Compunction of
conscience, resulting from a shameful past, oppresses his spirit and stifles any possibility
of genuine happiness. “I started, or rather […] was thrust on to a wrong tack at the age of
one and twenty, and have never recovered the right course since,” he confides to Jane,
explaining himself as a ‘common-place sinner’ who did not have the wisdom or strength
of heart to stand firm in the face of bad fortune (XIV, 155-6).

Rochester finds in Jane the very heavenly innocence that he longs to regain for
himself. With penetrating insight, he discerns in her both the infinite capacity for love
and the stubborn refusal to give it any reign over established independence. When Jane is
under the impression that she sits in the company of a magic-woman, a gypsy
fortuneteller, (though she actually sits before a disguised Rochester), she is forced to face
a reality about the state of her soul:
 You are cold, because you are alone: no contact strikes the fire from you that is in
you. You are sick: because the best of feelings, the highest and the sweetest given
to man, keeps far away from you. You are silly, because, suffer as you may, you
will not beckon it to approach; nor will you stir one step to meet it where it waits
you.’ (XIX. 217-8)

We can perfect our individual characteristics, but sublime synthesis is in relation; a truth
which Jane has not yet had the pleasure of realizing. It becomes Rochester’s purpose,
both for his own good and hers, to sublimate her amour de soi from one of protective
reservedness to one of harmonious completion. Or, as he says to her in his gypsy guise,
“Chance has meted you a measure of happiness . . .. She has laid it carefully on one side
for you. I saw her do it. It depends on yourself to stretch out your hand and take it up:
but whether you will do so, is the problem I study” (XIX, 221).

With an appeal to the sanction of God, Rochester proposes a marriage on the

grounds that a love proclaimed divine ought to be judged by divine standards (XXIII,
278-9); yet, it is for this reason that the marriage does not take place. Before Rochester
can accept Jane as his wife, a speaker interjects to declare an impediment to the
proceedings, namely that Rochester’s ‘secret and shameful’ mad wife from a previous
marriage, Bertha, is still living. The witness who corroborates this claim is Mason,
Bertha’s brother (XXVI, 314). Practically speaking, a conspiracy seems to be the only
explanation for Mason being present to object to the ceremony. In a symbolic sense,
however, the particulars of the situation represent a universal idea. Rochester can keep
his secret (Bertha) tucked away in the furthest reaches of his manor, but what secrets can
be kept from God at the altar? If their love is destined, it cannot be tainted by impurity.

Where passion tempts, resolve must reign; one results in despair, the other in
triumph. What causes Jane, against the tempest of her passions, to journey out into
uncertainty, with no destination and little hope? On the night that Jane has bid ‘farewell,
for ever!’ to Rochester, she falls into a ‘trance-like dream’, which takes place in the red-
room at Gateshead - the same room that served as constant reminder of her dependence
and lack of freedom during her childhood. A light seems to tremble in the center of the
ceiling, which gives way to clouds, high and dim, revealing,

[…] Not a moon, but a white human form […] in the azure, inclining a glorious
brow earthward. It gazed and gazed on me. It spoke to my spirit: immeasurably
distant was the tone, yet so near, it whispered in my head – ‘My daughter, flee
temptation!’ ‘Mother, I will.’ (XXVII, 344)

This voice cuts through the tumultuous uproar of her soul, and she realizes at once upon
waking that she must align her will with Fortune, despite the “stormy, scalding, heart-
wrung tears” (XXVII, 347); as it is said: everything is in the hands of Heaven, except the
fear of Heaven. And so dear Jane enters into her ‘dark night of the soul’. No family, no
friends, no money, no food, no home; nothing but an undying love for Rochester, and the
company of God. Whilst contemplating “His infinitude, His omnipotence, His
omnipresence”, Jane intuits the inherent order of creation and realizes that “the Source of
Life was also the Saviour of spirits” (XXVIII, 349).

Jane, initially a victim of imposed will, but eventually strengthening her own, has
proceeded to a principle much higher than those she has held thus far: nothing
advantageous or disadvantageous happens in any part that is not suitable to and in
harmony with the totality (St. Augustine, 2). This principle demonstrates itself clearly in
the remainder of the novel. Jane chooses to trust in the Wisdom of Providence, not the
Voice of Temptation, and soon discovers what a prudent decision she has made. She is
taken in, cared for, and nurtured (physically and intellectually) by a family (consisting of
a saint, a moon goddess, and the mother of Christ – or, at any rate, their namesakes…)
she soon learns is her own. She comes into wealth through the gracious benefaction of
infinite improbability. Thoughts of Rochester, however, continue to distress.

The loveliest melodies are those plucked on the strings that bind man’s heart to
God’s. Act in accordance with the best, and it shall befall you. Jane’s emersion from her
‘dark night of the soul’, marked symbolically by her arrival at ‘Whitcross’, is
characterized by a complete faith in harmony, despite the fact that she has turned away
from the one object in the universe that she most wholly loves, Mr. Rochester. Thoughts
of Rochester permeate Jane’s entire being and burn in the deepest recesses of her soul; so
too does hopelessness of reunion. John Rivers himself perceives this in a conversation
with Jane, as she tells him of ‘a point on which I have long endured painful doubt’: “I
know where your heart turns, and to what it clings,” says St.John, “Long since you ought
to have crushed [the interest you cherish]: now you should blush to allude to it. You
think of Mr. Rochester” (XXXV, 442). And so, when Rivers proposes to Jane (appealing
not to love, but duty) she is right to respond that ‘she could decide if she were sure that it
was God’s will’ (XXXV. 447), being uncertain of her own.

It is at this moment in the novel that the religious and romantic tensions find their
synthesis in a most beautiful fashion, and harmony is finally bestowed on a love long ago
proclaimed divine. Jane entreats the Heavens for a sign, and it is provided. The voice of
Rochester speaks to her soul, calling out her name, in pain and desperation, and with a
new unwavering resolve, she sets out to find him. “It was my time to assume
ascendancy. My powers were in play, and in force,” Jane tells us (XXXV, 448). “I
seemed to penetrate very near a Mighty Spirit; and my soul rushed out in gratitude at His
feet,” (XXXV, 449). We soon learn that Rochester really had called out to her at that
moment and it is no surprise that their love is eventually, at long last, realized in mutual
bliss and perfect harmony. As Goethe writes, “It is true symbolism when the particular
represents the more general, not as dream and shadow, but as the living, present
revelation of the unfathomable” (qtd. in Miller, XIV).

This, then, is what emerges from the pages of Jane Eyre when we allow it to
speak for itself. As Ruth Yeazell perceptively notes, to uncover and experience the
essence of Jane Eyre requires a certain amount of ‘necessary faith in miracles or
extrasensory perception’ (Yeazell, 127). A transcendentally naïve reading makes it
impossible to discern the novel’s deeper meaning from it’s surface expression. The
essential beauty available to the reader consists in the realization that “hanging before
one’s eyes and passing through one’s ears is the absolute itself;” a celebration of the
Divine (Earle, 100). Keeping this in mind, we can soar like eagles to the brilliance of the
sun instead of circling, like flies, the weak flicker of candlelight.

Hildegard of Bingen, 12th century mystic

“The truth is that the greatest artists took their art with the very greatest of seriousness
bordering on that holy terror appropriate to a ceremony for God Himself. Indeed, can
one have an “interest” in such matters? And if the serious artist worked under a
dedication, so did his appropriate fellow celebrants. Both worked or saw and heard in
reverence: God – or the absolute – might appear; is one “interested” in an evocation of
the holy? All of which is a far cry from expecting the artist’s self to appear, or from
worshipping the rules of the game, its presiding critics, let alone hoping for bitter social
comment disguised as a drama, poem, picture, or building.” (Earle, 99)