As part of the gothic genre, Charlotte Bronte's
Jane Eyre is a narrative of darkness, shadows and eerie light.
With imagery, Chapter 2 of this novel highlights the contrast between Jane's passionate
nature and her terrible isolation, themes of the novel. Locked into the room in which
Mr. Reed died, Jane perceives the red carpet, dark mahogany furniture, dark red damask
curtains and crimson bedcovers against the ghostly, glaring whiteness of the pillows of
the "pale throne" of Mr. Reed's deathbed.
The room is
chill as no fire is ever built in it and it is only used as a vault for Mrs. Reed's
jewelry and valuables, that she periodically checks. Alone in the dark, Jane
contemplates her sad state of always being made to
suffer:
What
a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon! How all my brain was in tumult,
and all my heart in insurrection! Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the
mental battle fought! I could not answer the ceaseless inward question--why
I thus
suffered....
Like the room,
Jane is in "discord" in Gateshead Hall; she feels that there is no harmony with Mrs.
Reed and her children. As she contemplates these thoughts in the crimson darkness of
her passions and the room, Jane sits looking at the shroud of "the white bed and
overshadowed walls." She, then, worries that her sobs might awaken the spirit of Mr.
Reed, who could appear with "a strange pity" for her whom he wanted cared for after his
death. Jane feels that "the swift darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from
another world," and she involuntarily cries out, alerting Bessie and Abbot, who rush to
the door. Their actions anger Mrs. Reed, who tells Jane that her ploy will not release
her from her punishment; she shoves Jane back into the room, and poor Jane falls
unconscious.
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