without lines: The ‘gipsy’ in Richardson’s Pamela says the same to Pamela: ‘I can’t tell your fortune: your hand is so white and fine, I cannot see the lines’ (p. 260).
4. magic-lantern: The primitive optical show provided by the magic lantern had been known for over a century, often operated by a mendicant conjurer to beguile simple people.
5. diablerie: Black art.
6. blackaviced: Dark-complexioned.
7. inward treasure: According to Christian doctrine, conscience is inborn in every soul. It represents the ‘treasure in heaven’ commended by Christ in Matthew 6:21: ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’
8. passions … heathens: Reference to Psalm 2:1: ‘Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?’
9. Strong wind … still small voice: In 1 Kings 19:11–12, ‘behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.’ The prophet Elijah’s hearing of the ‘still small voice’ occurs when he is alone and at the mercy of his enemies: ‘I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away’ (14).
10. ‘the play is played out’: Perhaps a misremembering of the witches’ prognostications in Macbeth, I. iii. 37: ‘Peace! the charm’s wound up.’
11. Did I dream still: Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: ‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream?/ Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep?’ (ll. 79–80) is used to account for the far-fetched gypsy narrative. There may be an implication that Jane has been mesmerized.
12. eld: Age.
13. ‘Off, ye lendings’: A melodramatic and somewhat absurd allusion to Shakespeare’s King Lear, III. iv. 107.
14. lean on me, sir: For the second time, Jane reverses the roles of male master-protector and female subordinate-dependant: in Ch. XII, ‘leaning on me with some stress’, Rochester is guided to his horse; in Ch. XXVII Rochester recalls, ‘I must be aided, and by that hand.’ The theme finds its climax in Rochester’s blindness: ‘I led him out of the wet and wild wood’ (Ch. XXXVIII).
CHAPTER XX
1. soaked in blood: In Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, the bridegroom ‘was found lying on the threshold of the bridal chamber, and all around was flooded with blood’. The attacker, his bride, reacts with ‘grinning exultation’, ‘gibbering’ and gesturing ‘with the frantic gestures of an exulting demoniac’ (ed. J. H. Alexander, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995, pp. xxxiii, 260).
2. key … lock: The scene in the attic reprises elements of the scene in which Jane is locked in the red-room in Ch. II.
3. a great cabinet … arch-traitor: Massive Tudor or Stuart cabinet, each of whose panels is decorated by a picture of one of the twelve apostles: Charlotte Bront? emphasizes the sepulchral quality of this dominating object through its association with Christ’s passion and death. The presence of an image of Christ hanging on the cross implies that the piece was Roman Catholic (since Protestant representations show an empty cross). Charlotte Bront? had doubtless seen the Eyre family’s apostles’ cabinet while visiting North Lees Hall, Hathersage in July 1845. The apocalyptic tenor of the scene is reinforced by the demonic presence of Judas among the apostles, the human representative of Satan. The reference to ‘the wild beast’, suggesting the Beast of Revelation, is however immediately qualified by the insistence on ‘a deep human groan’.
4. sucked the blood: Bertha is associated with the Romantic motif of the vampire, a reanimated corpse which feeds on the blood of the living. Goethe’s Die Braut von Korinth (The Bride of Corinth), 1797, features a female vampire; this was translated into English in Blackwood’s in July 1844, where Charlotte Bront? will have read it only three years before the composition of JE. However, if Bertha is a living corpse of a wife, the novel encourages its reader to consider who destroyed her and why her spirit should want redress.
5. my pet lamb: The parable of the rich man’s sacrifice of the poor man’s ‘one ewe lamb’ (2 Samuel 12:1–9) is a recurrent motif.
6. sun … eclipse: Allusion to Samson’s blindness in Milton’s Samson Agonistes: ‘O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,/Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse’ (80–81): the reference preludes Rochester’s stigmatization by blindness, in recompense for sexual