Jane Eyre: Presence of the Moon

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Charlotte Bronte’s Victorian work Jane Eyre compares the vast changes of the moon to a woman’s mental stability. Within a critical essay by Alicia Renfroe called “Defining Romanticism: The Implications of Nature Personified as female in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre,” Alicia Renfroe acknowledges how the Moon depicts the changes in Jane Eyre’s mental stability. Three ways the moon represents the changes in Jane Eyre’s mind are shown as Jane was a child in the Lowood Institution, as she reached Thornfield Manor to become a governess and falls in love, and when she eventually breaks her heart as she flees Thornfield Manor. To begin with, Jane speaks to the moon on various nights as a child in the Lowood Institution, as if the moon is a motherly figure. For instance, Jane used “ …the light of the unclouded summer moon, entering here and there at passage windows, [enabling her] … to find it without difficulty” (Bronte 54). As Jane reaches Thornfield Manor to become a governess, the moon disappears from her life and Jane does not turn to the moon as a mother figure. For example, “the moon is conspicuously absent from Jane’s life at Thornfield until the night that she meets Rochester” (Renfroe 5). Throughout Jane’s travels to Thornfield the moon is nonexistent, but the reappears when Jane meets Rochester. Furthermore, the moon reappears once Jane meets Rochester at Thornfield Manor. The nature surrounding Jane Eyre “…gives a direct warning through the fury unleashed when Jane accepts Rochester’s proposal… Nature’s most assertive attempt to guide Jane away from Rochester” (Renfroe 6). Unfortunately, at this time the moon was not on the conscious of Jane and, therefore she does not heed the warning. Rochester becomes her new comfort as he will “take mademoiselle to the moon, and there [he] shall seek a cave in one of the white valleys

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