"Jane Eyre" Chapters 1 - 4

      For a class on Victorian Literature, I am again reading through Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece Jane Eyre.  For this post, I am focusing on the first four chapters of the novel, representing Jane’s time at Gateshead with the Reed family and her mistreatment there.  In particular, I want to briefly discuss the liminality of the novel and the action of thresholds in these first four chapters. 

            In Elizabeth Haird Bailey’s article “Crossing the Threshold with Jane – The Novel’s Liminal Elements,” she discusses the various ways that Jane is a character in-between states.  At Gatehead she is neither a true member of the Reed family, nor is she a servant.  Abbot emphasizes many times that Jane has even less right to be there than the servants, because she doesn’t work for her keep in the house.  Whenever we see Jane alone in Gateshead, it is also in a very luminal environment.  The windowseat in the first chapter, as Mrs. Bailey points out, is a place outside of the house proper, but not truly outside.  The Red Room is a place between life and death, haunted by the memory of Jane’s late Uncle Reed. 

            However, this theme of liminality is reinforced by the actions of thresholds in these first four chapters.  Jane – a character caught up in the in-between – seems to have a hard time crossing the various thresholds within Gateshead.  The first time we see this is when Jane is locked in the Red Room.  She is frightened by a mysterious light she sees in the room and attempts to escape, but finds the door locked.

 I was oppressed, suffocated; endurance broke down; I rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate effort.            

 (Jane Eyre, Chapter 2)

We find the other two impassable thresholds in Chapter 4.  In the first, we find Jane “tugging at the sash” of the window in the Nursery and secondly trying the breakfast room door which “for a second or two, resisted [her] efforts.”  How do these impassable barriers reinforce the liminality of Jane Eyre?

            The thing to remember is that Jane is a girl who does not belong.  She cannot easily pass these thresholds, because to pass a threshold is to enter from one state to another.  Because Jane cannot consign herself to a single state of being (i.e. family or servant), she cannot pass activate these thresholds.

            After Jane confronts Aunt Reed, however, she is able to easily pass through “a glass door” in the breakfast room because she has fixated herself in relation to her Aunt.  Before, Jane floated in a vagueness, hating her Aunt but striving for her favor – between hating and need for approval.  But when Jane says once and for all that she would never love her or call her aunt.  She swears off Aunt Reed forever.  When Jane stands her ground against her aunt, she breaks through thresholds of Gateshead.  It is a process that she must go through in every place she lives – Lowood, Thornfield, and the Rivers’ place.