Jane Eyre Quote Analysis

Rochester recounts how, trapped in his marriage to Bertha in Jamaica, he reached such despair that he briefly considered suicide, calling his life 'hell.'

Rochester borrows the language of Christian damnation—'hell,' 'bottomless pit,' 'burning eternity'—but then inverts it: he claims his earthly life is worse than any afterlife punishment, so he has 'a right to deliver myself from it.' This is a direct challenge to Christian doctrine, which forbids suicide. Rochester is positioning himself as so uniquely tormented that conventional moral rules do not apply, which is the same argument he will later use to justify bigamy. The rhetoric of exceptionalism runs through all his self-justifications.

Use this to argue that Rochester consistently frames himself as exempt from moral law because of the extremity of his suffering—Brontë allows us to hear the self-pity in his language, which undermines his claim to victimhood.