how is young john depicted jane eyre?
Answers
Unlike these naughty children from the morally improving literature, Jane is a defiant child, who is fully convinced of the rightness of her rebellion. She likens her mood to that of a ‘rebel slave’ with her ‘heart in insurrection’ (ch. 2). Subtle connections in language are thus created with the figure of Rochester’s ‘mad wife’, who we will meet later on, who is of mixed race, and from the slave-owning West Indies. In her anger and passion, Jane is far removed from the conventional model of the Victorian child who should be ‘seen and not heard’. Instead, she is part of new, emerging, more sympathetic attitudes to childhood, which stressed that adults should pay attention to the feelings and sufferings of children. They were not just blank slates until adulthood, but capable of even more intense emotional suffering than adults. In her book, Household Education (1849), the writer Harriet Martineau noted that it had not been fully understood how much a child can suffer from fear, and few parents ‘know anything of the agonies of its little heart, the spasms of its nerves, the soul-sickness of its days, the horrors of its nights’. Her description of her own terror of a magic lantern, and the shadows it cast, offers remarkable parallels with Jane’s terror of the flickering light when she is locked in the red room
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