Jane Eyre
Prompt #22 · Jane Eyre
Prompt Type: Symbol/Motif
Natural landscapes—from the bleak moors to the fertile orchard at Thornfield—reflect Jane's emotional and spiritual states. Analyze how Brontë uses settings and natural imagery to externalize Jane's internal journey. Explain how it contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole.
Quote 1
“A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and fragrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway.”
Chapter 26
Argument
This pathetic fallacy externalizes Jane's emotional devastation upon discovering Rochester's marriage to Bertha; the violent transformation of Thornfield's fertile summer landscape into a frozen wasteland mirrors the sudden death of her romantic hopes and the freezing of her passionate nature.
Quote 2
“I felt the consecration of its loneliness: my eye feasted on the outline of swell and sweep—on the wild colouring communicated to ridge and dell by moss, by heath-bell, by flower-sprinkled turf, by brilliant bracken, and mellow granite crag.”
Chapter 30
Argument
After fleeing Thornfield, Jane finds spiritual renewal in the moors' desolate beauty, with the landscape's 'consecration' and 'loneliness' reflecting her need for isolation and self-recovery; the vivid natural imagery ('moss,' 'heath-bell,' 'granite crag') externalizes her gradual emotional healing through communion with nature.
Quote 3
Chapter 28
Argument
At her lowest point of physical and spiritual destitution, Jane personifies Nature as a maternal figure offering 'repose,' revealing how the natural world becomes her only source of comfort when human society has rejected her; this metaphor shows nature as both refuge and spiritual sustainer during her darkest moment.
Quote 4
“I am no better than the old lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield orchard. And what right would that ruin have to bid a budding woodbine cover its decay with freshness?”
Chapter 37
Argument
Rochester's metaphor of himself as the 'lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield orchard' directly connects natural imagery to emotional state; the ruined tree in the once-fertile orchard externalizes his physical and spiritual brokenness, while Jane's return represents the 'budding woodbine' that can bring renewal to the blighted landscape.
Quote 5
“I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing.”
Chapter 10
Argument
Early in Jane's journey at Lowood, her desire for 'liberty' is externalized through the natural image of prayer 'scattered on the wind,' showing how the landscape reflects her constrained spiritual state; the 'faintly blowing' wind suggests the weak possibility of freedom, contrasting with the later moors where nature actively offers her refuge.