Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre accurately demonstrate the hardship faced by orphaned children and penniless young women in nineteenth century English society. Women's status in society were depended on various factors, such as class, wealth and education. If you were like Jane Eyre, Diana and Mary, your only prospests to a comfortable life was to be an dependent to a rich family or if you were lucky to marry well. Without wealth, family and class it was difficult for young women without money to move up the social ladder. Being a working woman did not hold the role of dignity it holds today. Both Mr. Rochester's and St. John's offer of marriage to Jane is significant and must be examined carefully for their underlining implications and what prospect they offer to Jane.

Jane Eyre is a novel that explores Jane's growth and maturity. It also explored the reconciliation of reason and passion in a search for an equal relationship that is right for her mind and feelings. Jane's begins a life marked by desolation, isolation, misery and family tension which is further complicated in a love triangle between her feelings for Mr. Rochester and the urge of duty to St. John. In understanding the connection between Jane and her two suitors we must first have an understanding of her prior experiences with the opposite sex before Rochester and St. John. When Jane meets Rochester, she is innocent and chaste of passion. She is inexperience and raw to the passion and understanding of men. Her inexperience is one of the attraction that drew Rochester to her. As Rochester admits, " I envy you your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory... - an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment." [166]

Jane's prior experience with men before Mr. Rochester is limited to austerity and tainted by cruelty. Beginning with her early childhood experience with John, Mrs. Reed's pampered son, Jane is inflicted by his physical as well as his mental abuse. She tells us that," he bullied and punished me...every nerve I feared him, and every morsel of flesh on my bones shrank when he came near."[42] He is Jane's unpleasant and sadistic tormentor, for he is relentless in his ardor to humiliate and degrade her. He is a bully and he wails. Not only does he abuses Jane but he constantly humiliates her by reminding her of her station. He said to Jane, " you are a dependent...you have no money...you ought to beg, and not live here with gentlemen's children."[42] At Gateshead, Jane is deprived of love, of security, of education and of status. She is unloved and misunderstood, and the only relationship she forms are those of the victim with aggressor. Her reaction towards to the opposite sex is fear and subservience. She tells us that she was "habitually obedient to John."[42]

At Lowood, her situation had improved, for she finds the love of friends-Helen Burns and Miss Temple. It is here that she matures with the confidence in her abilities and a confidence in justice and support. It is also at Lowood that Jane finds the dignity of status. She testify that her time spent at Lowood furnished her with a sense of pride and ambition, " I bear my testimony to its value and importance."[115] However, at Lowood Jane's only male figure is Brocklehurst and again her view of men is negatively smears by his ascetic treatment of the girls. Brocklehurst represents cruel Christianity, substituting deprivation for discipline, repressing passion rather than tempering it. His argument in reprimanding Miss Temple about giving cheese and bread as a substitude for the burnt porridge was, " you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls."[95] Brocklehurst's hypocritical Puritanical rules about clothes and hair shed a cruel light on Christianity to Jane. It also reinforced the negative image of men Jane had already conceived and may have later repulsed her from St. John.

Rochester symbolizes unbridled passion and St. John represents inhuman religious zeal. Jane is torn between passion and duty. She is alternately solicited by Rochester, dark and saturnine in appearance, and St. John, fair, regular and Greek. Rochester is tortured, passionate, rebellious against God and convention; St. John is controlled, cold, hard, and is zealous in his religious mission. Her tears, she said, "produced no more effect on him than if his heart had been really a matter of stone or metal."[436] And when she refused, she noticed that he never loses control of his emotions, "controlled his passion perfectly." [439] St. John seem to lack human passion, while Rochester 's sensuality is excessive, unbalanced and uncontrolled. When he tells Jane to feel his pulse, he said, " feel how it throbs, and beware1"[331] His passion is as boundless as the fire Bertha set to his bed.[179] Rochester is rarely in control with his passion. He scream, " Jane! My hope - my love - my life!"[345] and he starts crying shows that he is not afraid of his passions. Rochester is controlled by passion to the point where it may lead to violence. He said, " I will try violence." [330] John has passion only for what Jane describes as " an austere patriot's passion for his fatherland," [ ] and " his stern zeal."[442] He is completely devoted to his religion.

Whereas St. John extract passion from his missions, Rochester draw passion from the relationship he forms with people. It is brought out in his reason for his marriage to Bertha and subsequently the account of his mad pursuit of women after the failure of his marriage. And although his passion seem boundless and consuming it is not without purpose. When he wanders through Europe like a "' will o'the wisp"[337] he is seeking not physical satisfaction alone but an ideal woman, but one that is, "good and intelligent." [337]

Jane's first meeting with Rochester is highly important to the relationship and the friendship she later develops with him in the novel. Because it is Jane who rescues Rochester at their first meeting, foreshadows and hints, that Jane will rescue and save Rochester from committing an immoral and illegal crime. As St. John termed it a "fraudulent and illegal attempt."[406] Jane is saved from Rochester's bigamous intentions, is tempted by his proposals, and rejects him.

The redeeming qualities in Rochester are established by his love for Jane. You are also inclined to pity him more because of the injustice done to him by his father and brother.At Thornfield, Jane's need for human love and independence is fulfilled. She has the dignity of her work and she also meets her intellectual equal in Rochester. He gives her passionate love and friendship. Her relationship with Mr. Rochester satisfies her mind and passions. Jane's ultimate concept of her true soul mate and the ideal of love and equality, is seen in Mr. Rochester and no one else.

When Jane leaves Thornfield, she is again desolate and her needs are both emotional and elementary. She is weary, she is lost and she is hungry. She is reduced to a beggar. She is without home, work, companions and most of all her beloved Rochester, at this point she has resolve to die. She cries in anguish to providence, " I can but to die... and I believe in God. Let me try to wait His will in silence." [361]But she is heard and rescued by St. John Rivers. Although she was again exposed to austerity and the cruel she had known in childhood, she is "spared the humiliation," by the Diana and Mary's kindness to her.[366]

John Rivers offers her a life that is as she puts it "this calm, this useful existence."[393] Although, at nights she is tormented with the romantic dreams of reunion and recapturing of the passions she felt with Rochester, "strange dreams at night."[393] Jane comes to realize that St. John is right in describing himself as "hard and cold," and would "hardly make a good husband." [418] He even admits this vice to Jane in "Know me to be what I am - a cold, hard man."[400] She adds, It would be a trying thing to be his wife."[418] There is noted significance that Brocklehurst and St. John Rivers are described in similar images.

Both Brocklehusrt and St. John attack the flesh. When St. John admitted his shortcomings to Jane he said, " When I colour, and when I shake before Miss Oliver, I do not pity myself, I scorn the weakness. I know it is ignoble: a mere fever of the flesh: not, I declare, the convulsion of the soul." [400] And this is important, since Jane rejects St. John because of his lack of passion. But she was even tempted to stay with him because of his passion and he loved her, she said that, "Think of his misery; think of his danger; look at his state when left alone; remember his headlong nature: consider the recklessness following on despair - sooth him; save him; love him...who in the world cares for you? " [344] By marrying St. John she would be stifling her passionate nature. Her passionate nature woud ultimately die in the loveless and purposeful marriage he offered her. She tells him this also, " because you did not not love me..If I were to marry you, you would kill me." [438]

Rochester tempted her to forgo duty, convention and reason for human love that from the beginning she needed and valued. St. John tempts her to forgo the affections, and passions for the sake of his ideal for duty and service. St. John has an imperfect understanding of Jane. He tells her that he has recognized in her "a soul that revelled in the flame and excitement of sacrifice."[429] He is right about her capacity for sacrifice, but wrong about the nature of her "flame and excitement." It is here that we see human expectations verse human nature. She would find a glorious occupation in going to India with him. She admits that this would "satisfy him-to the finest central point and farthest outward circle of his expectation."[430] However, after her reunion with Rochester she tells Rochester that, he suits her, "To the finest fibre of my nature." [470] Jane's lost of Rochester makes her feel the appeal of leaving England and finding a mission "to fill the void left by uptorn affections," [430] but although she will find compensation and satisfy St. John, she will not satisfy herself.

St. John's proposal of marriage is tactless and passionless, for he says, "It is not personal, but mental endowments they have given you: you are formed for labour, not for love." [428] Jane almost consents to his passionless proposal out of a sense of duty to God and a need for purpose, "All was changing utterly with a sudden sweep. Religion called - Angels beckoned - God commanded - life rolled together like a scroll." [444] She is revived out of this near madness by the telepathic summon of Rochester's voice, " Jane! Jane! Jane!" [444] Rochester's proposal and courtship of Jane was romantic and passionate. He courted her under moonlit nights and serenaded her with fervent love songs.

It is obvious why Jane chose Rochester over St. John. Although St. John would have offered Jane a life of purpose and spiritual satisfaction, but Jane knows that this was not what she really wanted. After experiencing the love, the flood of passion from Rochester and the awakening of her own passion, it would have been the death of Jane to forfeit and refuse Rochester a second time. Jane saw her second chance of happiness with Rochester and grabbed it. She tells us why she could not marry St. John but only Rochester because, " he does not love me: I do not love. He loves ( as he can love, and that is not as you love)," another and he only wants from her a " suitable missionary wife. "[468]

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre Penguin Classic; Ed. Qd Leavis; New York: USA. 1985.

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