"That is my wife," said he. "Such is the sole conjugal embrace I am ever to know—such are the endearments which are to solace my leisure hours!"
Chapter 26 · Edward Rochester
Context
Rochester has just forced Bertha's violent struggle into restraints and now presents her to the witnesses, gesturing toward her and then toward Jane.
Analysis
The repetition of 'such' hammers out a bitter parallelism—'Such is... such are'—using the demonstrative pronoun to point at Bertha as if she were evidence in a trial. The elevated diction ('conjugal embrace,' 'endearments which are to solace my leisure hours') belongs to sentimental marriage rhetoric, but here it describes being physically attacked and bitten. This grinding irony forces the witnesses to see the gap between the social fiction of marriage and the violent reality Rochester has been living.
Essay Tip
Use this to argue that Rochester stages his own suffering by performing the contrast between marriage ideology and lived experience—he speaks in the language of domestic sentiment precisely because it cannot contain what he is showing them, exposing marriage law as a structure that can trap people in living nightmares.