A few years ago I received as a gift a fuzzy white blanket printed in script with the words, “I remembered that the real world was wide.” The quote was attributed to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, a book I have read at least five times and perhaps more. While I appreciated finding some Jane swag that wasn’t, for once, emblazoned with “I am no bird and no net ensnares me,” the words, and the sentiment behind it, seemed out of step from the plot as I remembered it.
At first glance, the quote feels at odds step with Jane herself. Her world seems impossibly small, her prospects in life circumscribed by social mores and the literal landscape of the world around her. A distance of twenty miles is like traveling to the moon—a trip, according to Mr. Rochester at one point in the book, made possible by fairy wings, which are just as real as the possibility of crossing the county. Jane is fiery and fierce, yes, but she is also poor and friendless, practical and self-effacing almost to a fault. Orphaned as an infant, she is raised by an aunt who mistreats her and ultimately sends her away to school. There, the students are fed and clothed poorly and are harshly disciplined; a typhus epidemic sweeps through the school and raises the alarm about the students’ malnutrition and general poor health. Jane is lucky to survive, and she stays on as a teacher until her beloved superintendent marries and moves on. She advertises for a position as governess and accepts the only one offered to her. She moves, at eighteen, some many miles to Thornfield, where she teaches Adele, a French orphan, and falls in love with Mr. Rochester, the lord of the manner.
Fate has other plans than happiness for Jane, however, and she departs Thornfield, expecting never to see it again. She wanders, at the mercy of the kindness of strangers, though she acknowledges that the people she meets owe her no responsibility. She is committed to a narrow worldview that dictates that she must be responsible for the goodness of Mr. Rochester’s soul, but no one in the world must bear the burden of her own wellbeing.
Fortunately, Jane’s story doesn’t end in destitution. In the end, the world is impossibly small and improbably connected—unknown family meddling in a romantic drama of which they know nothing about, still other unknown family intervening while ignorant of the blood ties that bind them to Jane. But it’s these close connections that keep Jane moving on her journey, both figuratively and literally, and geographic distance cannot, in the end, separate her from the love that is hers to have and to hold as long as she and Rochester live.
The rigid moral principles that drive Jane away from her happiness ultimately guide her to the generosity that confirms her place in her newfound families—the ones she creates out of necessity, desperation, and the conviction of fairness. Jane’s world grows bigger through her own force of will, and wider when she realizes she doesn’t have to follow a path she wasn’t meant to take.
Grey Sea & Sky 