What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.
Chapter 26 · Narrator
Context
Jane narrates her first sight of Bertha Mason, Rochester's hidden wife, in the locked attic room.
Analysis
Jane's uncertainty—'whether beast or human being, one could not... tell'—grammatically suspends Bertha between categories, using the passive construction to make the confusion seem objective rather than Jane's own judgment. The verbs that follow ('grovelled,' 'snatched,' 'growled') are all animal actions, while the qualifiers ('seemingly,' 'like some strange wild animal') try to pull back from that categorization even as the description builds it. The sentence's structure mirrors Jane's attempt to see a human being while her own language keeps producing a monster.
Essay Tip
Support a thesis that Brontë makes Jane an unreliable witness to Bertha by encoding class and racial anxieties into the narrative grammar itself—Jane claims uncertainty ('one could not tell') but her choice of verbs and similes has already decided, showing how observation is never neutral but shaped by the observer's need to justify what she is seeing.