Jane Eyre

Please respond to the following questions thoroughly. Use specific examples from the text in your responses.

1.  Discuss two scenes that show the ambiguity of Jane’s social class. What are Jane’s opinions of the upper classes and the lower classes? What does the novel say about the social class system in England? Does Brontë critique the system or support it?

from Cliffsnotes.com

2.  After Mason's visit to Thornfield, Jane asks herself, "What crime was this, that lived incarnate in this sequestered mansion, and could neither be expelled nor subdued by the owner?" What crime does Bertha represent? Why does Rochester keep her at Thornfield?

3.  Brontë populates the novel with many female characters roughly the same age as Jane—Georgiana and Eliza Reed, Helen Burns, Blanche Ingram, Mary and Diana Rivers, and Rosamund Oliver. How do comparisons with these characters shape the reader's understanding of Jane's character?

4.  What is the balance of power between Jane and Rochester when they marry? Does this balance change from the beginning of the marriage to the time ten years later that Jane describes at the end of the novel? In a romantic relationship, does one partner inevitably dominate the other?

Questions 2-4 from Greatbooks.org

5.  Jane Eyre shares many qualities with the gothic novel: an orphan girl sent to a large estate with a mysterious landlord, a creepy housekeeper, and strange noises in the night. With these formulaic entrapments, Bertha might seem merely a plot device to lend the novel its “supernatural” elements. However, books have been written about this “madwoman in the attic.” What purposes does she serve in the novel both in terms of revealing the characters Jane or Rochester and in terms of revealing theme? At several points in the novel, for instance, Brontë juxtaposes Jane's musings about women's social restraints with the mysterious laugh that Jane attributes to Grace Poole. Why?

6.  In what way could the ending of Jane Eyre be considered a happy one, not in the sense that the characters’ lives are now carefree and prosperous, but in the sense that some sort of moral or spiritual growth has occurred for both Jane and Rochester?