My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol.
Chapter 24 · Narrator
Context
At the chapter's end, Jane reflects in retrospect that during this period Rochester had become so central to her life that he displaced even her relationship with God.
Analysis
The astronomical simile of Rochester as an eclipse blocking the sun (God) gives precise scientific form to the spiritual danger Jane describes: an eclipse is temporary but total, obscuring what is actually larger and more permanent. The final phrase 'of whom I had made an idol' breaks the simile's frame by naming her behavior as idolatry—a sin—and the past tense 'had made' marks this as retrospective judgment, Jane the narrator condemning what Jane the character was doing.
Essay Tip
Use this to argue that Brontë builds the novel's moral crisis into its structure through tense—the narrating Jane repeatedly signals that her past self was dangerously mistaken, so that Rochester's fall from his pedestal is linguistically predicted long before Bertha appears, making the interrupted wedding a correction the narrator has been promising all along.