7. impediment: Rochester’s casuistry is exposed when Mason declares the existence of an ‘impediment’ to the marriage in the church service in Ch. XXVI. What Rochester trivializes as a conventional impediment is a vow before God: the Book of Common Prayer ordains that ‘if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not lawfully be joined together in Matrimony, ye do now confess it … so many as are coupled together otherwise than God’s Word doth allow, are not joined together by God, nor is their Matrimony lawful’.
8. Ariel: The airy spirit in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, conflated with the zephyrs, spirits of the west wind.
9. the instrument: Theological term denoting the human agency through which God dispenses mercy and justifies the sinner. Rochester’s fourfold repetition of this word in his attempt to solicit spiritual regeneration without confessing his situation or renouncing his adulterous purpose indicates his state of moral contradiction.
10. the ladies of Carthage: St Augustine opens Book III of his Confessions: ‘I came to Carthage and all around me hissed a cauldron of illicit loves’ (Confessions, tr. and ed. Henry Chadwick, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 35).
CHAPTER XXI
1. Presentiments … signs: In the Puritan tradition of reading Providence, Jane invokes three unconscious modes of apprehension: intuitions (‘presentiments’); messages transmitted by affinity (‘sympathies’); and writings in the Book of Nature (‘signs’). The instance given (Bessie’s fulfilled dream of a child) is folkloric. In a letter of 18 April 1850, Charlotte Bront? writes: ‘That there are certain organizations liable to anticipatory impressions in the form of dream or presentiment – I half believe’ (Letters, Vol. II, p. 387).
2. dream of an infant: Comparable with Lockwood’s dream of the first Catherine in WH, pp. 24–6. In this chapter, Jane sees Bessie’s baby when she returns to her childhood home at Gateshead. Margaret Homans, in ‘Dreaming of Children: Literalisation in Jane Eyre’, in Bearing The Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 84ff., identifies the birth-metaphor as invoking a common Victorian fear of childbirth.
3. In course: Of course (archaic).
4. that bourne … unexplored: The wording crucially picks up Hamlet’s usage, for death is ‘The undiscover’d country from whose bourn/ No traveller returns’ (Hamlet, III. i. 79–80).
5. a wanderer on the face of the earth: In Genesis 4:12 God stigmatizes and punishes Cain with perpetual exile, for the murder of his brother Abel: Cain’s response is: ‘Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and vagabond in the earth’ (14).
6. tall as Miss Ingram: Eliza is paradoxically associated with Blanche: her pietistical, canting and High Church celibacy, which seems to contradict the latter’s voluptuousness, indicates the coincidence of extremes. Both are seen as materialists.
7. Cairngorm eye: The grey-black colour of smoky quartz, a semiprecious mineral found in the Cairngorms.
8. a ‘quiz’: A ridiculous, old-fashioned person.
9. switch: This is the first time we learn that Jane had been beaten by Mrs Reed. It recalls the corporal punishment of Helen Burns by beating the neck in Ch. VI.
10. a swollen and blackened face: This description of John Reed after his suicide, presumably by hanging, associates his physiognomy with the dehumanized Bertha, as described in Ch. XXV.
11. fancy vignettes: Small drawings of subjects suggested by the imagination. The subjects bear resemblance to Bewick’s vignettes, as perused by Jane in Ch. I, as well as those in her portfolio scrutinized by Rochester in Ch. XIII.
12. kaleidoscope: Invented in 1817 by Sir David Brewster.
13. I lied: Ironic, because Jane was denounced by Mrs Reed as a liar, to the child’s indignation: ‘“and this book about the liar, you may give to your girl, Georgiana, for it is she who tells lies, and not I”’ (Ch. IV). Jane has learnt the permissibility of a social front.
14. ‘the Rubric’: Direction, generally printed in red, for the conduct of divine service in the Book of Common Prayer. Eliza shows herself to be a formalist (a believer in church ritual and liturgy as a means of salvation) and Neo-Catholic High Church Anglican in religion.
15. if the whole … the new: This declaration is a striking reversal of Cathy’s words about Heathcliff in WH: ‘If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be … so, don’t talk of our separation any more –’ (pp. 82–3).
16. husky … deglutition: husky: Dry and indigestible, like wheat containing husks; deglutition: the act