Intimacy without immolation: Fire inJane Eyre

Abstract

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte portrays a fully realized heroine who challenges society's and fiction's conventional roles for women. In order to broaden her heroine's role, Bronte had to go beyond the genres open to her — the novel of manners, the Gothic, and the governess novel — to establish a new genre: the feminist fairytale. In establishing this genre, Bronte pinpoints Jane's specifically female dilemma: how to achieve intimacy and still maintain independence. At once beautiful and terrible, sustaining and destructive, fire is the perfect element to convey a sense of Jane's often conflicting desires. Bronte carefully establishes hearth fires as an index to how included and “at home” Jane feels. Similarly, Bronte uses metaphors of self‐sacrifice and immolation to indicate times when Jane feels her independence is being threatened. The hearth fires and the metaphorical fires are overshadowed by the “big” fires in the novel, but their consistent, unobtrusive use allows Bronte to reinforce her theme in ...