or power of swallowing.
17. I thought of Helen Burns … dying words: Helen’s penultimate words were words of hope in the love of a divine Father; her last significant utterance was, ‘“I like to have you near me”’ (Ch. IX).
18. to her: Mrs Reed’s restless fluctuation between second and third person in relation to Jane represents a narrative device which records complex feelings: the resort to third person is an attempt to distance Jane, under the influence of fear engendered by guilt. Mrs Reed’s deathbed speeches reprise their conversations in Chs. I–IV. The reviewer in The Christian Remembrancer shrewdly exposed the vengeful authorial agenda here: ‘All the expression of tenderness and forgiveness, on the part of the injured Jane, is skilfully thrown in so as to set off … the unconquerable hardness of the dying sinner’s heart’; the deathbed is presented like a ‘barbarous execution in the mind of the beholder’ (CA, Vol. III, pp. 20, 19).
19. demanded water: This recalls the parable of Dives and Lazarus in Luke 16:19–31. When the rich man, Dives, goes to hell, he asks Abraham to send the beggar, Lazarus, from heaven, to ‘dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue’ (24); his request is refused, for between the blessed and the accurst there is ‘a great gulf fixed’ (26). Ironically, Jane brings to Mrs Reed a comfort she cannot accept.
CHAPTER XXII
1. walled up alive: The theme of the immured woman is reiterated here in the minor key. Eliza the anchorite; Bertha the prisoner; Jane in the red-room all reprise this theme of the silenced woman. In her poem, ‘Frances’, Charlotte Bront?’s persona complains that her mind is a ‘narrow cell; / Dark – imageless – a living tomb’ (Poems of CB, ll. 65–6).
2. wherever … home: A restatement of Eve’s words to the fallen Adam at the end of PL: ‘with thee to go, / Is to stay here; without thee here to stay, / Is to go hence unwilling’ (Bk XII, ll. 615–17).
3. ‘prête … Anglaise’: Ready to crush her little English mother.
CHAPTER XXIII
1. ‘Day … wasted’: A slight misremembering of Thomas Campbell’s The Turkish Lady, ll. 5–6: ‘Day her sultry fires had wasted,/ Calm and sweet the moonlight rose.’
2. a very high wall: Milton’s Eden in PL, Bk IV, l. 143 is surrounded by a ‘verdurous wall’.
3. silence … moon: Miltonic references cluster, chiefly to Book IV of PL: ‘Now came still evening on … Silence accompanied; … the moon/Rising in clouded majesty … unveil’d her peerless light’ (Bk IV, ll. 598–609). These references are important: evoking the Miltonic Eden and predicting the inevitable Fall to come.
4. organ of Adhesiveness: George Combe (1788–1858), the most prolific British phrenologist, denotes this as the basis of friendship and attachment. ‘It is generally strong in women’ (quoted in Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, Embodied Selves, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, p. 34).
5. lady-clock … home: Rochester, taunting Jane into declaring herself, quotes from the nursery rhyme, ‘Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home. / Your house is on fire and your children are gone’, using a dialect form for ‘ladybird’.
6. left ribs … frame: In Genesis, God fashions Eve from one of Adam’s ribs in his sleep, ‘and closed up the flesh instead thereof’ (2:21), after which Adam affirms that ‘This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh … Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh’ (23–4). In biblical terms, Adam is ‘akin’ to Eve, as being her source.
7. petrified: Turned to stone, treated like an inanimate object.
8. face to face: 1 Corinthians 13:12: ‘For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face.’
9. the oath shall be kept: But by keeping this oath, Rochester must break his marriage vows.
10. morsel … living water: The staples of life: the phrase ‘a morsel of bread’ is a frequent biblical term, as is ‘living water’, which is found in The Song of Songs: ‘A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse … a well of living waters’ (Song of Solomon 4:12, 15). In a letter of 8 January 1845 to M. Heger, Charlotte Bront? had written: ‘Monsieur, the poor do not need a great deal to live on – they ask only the crumbs of bread which fall from the rich men’s table – but if they are refused these crumbs – they die of hunger’ (Letters, Vol. I, p. 379).
11. I