Settings of Jane Eyre

The Settings of 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 Lowood, Jane
learns that knowledge is the key to power. By learning, Jane earns greater respect and
eventually, she becomes a teacher there, a position of relative power, all the more so
compared to what she left behind at Gateshead. Jane stays inside the walls of Lowood
for eight years. She has learned a great deal but all she finds for herself, when she does
finally decide to leave, is "a new servitude." The idea that she might be free in an
unbounded world is not yet part of her experience -- in a sense, it never will be.
Once again, Jane changes setting and circumstance and into a world that is
completely new to her experience. Thornfield is in the open country and Jane is free
from restrictions on her movements. Jane has always lived within confining walls and
even as a teacher at Lowood had to get permission to leave. She is still confined, in a
sense, but now she is living with relative freedom, but as she will discover later, Jane is
not equipped to live utterly free. Jane is an adult but to live she must be employed. .
After Mr. Rochester arrives, Jane feels it is finally time to have a family of her own, but
unwittingly, Jane becomes Mr. Rochester's mistress, not his wife. With that in mind
Jane decides to leave Thornfield even though Rochester tries desperately to convince
Jane to stay. At her stay at Thornfield, Jane learns what it feels like to be needed, by
both Adele and Edward Rochester.
What she finds next is that, in the free world which she often only could dream
of, she is incapable of surviving totally independent. At Thornfield, or even Gateshead,
she had the financial support to make mistakes as forgetting money without to much a
consequence. The world outside those walls is not so forgiving. She resolves to live
with Nature, but the next day she is found "pale and bare". She quickly ends up a
common beggar, eating food given to her because "t' pig doesn't want it."
Guided by a unknown forces, she stumbles upon Moor House and is taken in.
Soon she regains her health and is allowed to stay. The companionship of Mary and
Diana is perhaps the best suited to her intellect and 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.