love … loved am I’: Rochester’s lyric rewrites Charlotte Bront?’s personal narrative poem, ‘At first I did attention give’ in which a schoolgirl named Jane recalls her frustrated love for a ‘master’ who expresses his passion in outbursts of temper, and loses her with regret: ‘Why will they part us, Jane?’
23. suttee: Hindu custom according to which a widow threw herself on to her husband’s funeral pyre and the subject of Charlotte Bront?’s essay, ‘Sacrifice of an Indian Widow’, in Belgian Essays, pp. 4–5. She probably learned about this practice from the article in Blackwood’s entitled ‘Burning of Indian Widows’, 23 (February 1828), pp. 161–2. Her essay makes it clear that the widow to be burnt has internalized the misogynist customs of her religion; that, in fact, it takes two to subordinate a woman.
24. I had made an idol: In her poem, ‘He saw my heart’s woe’, Charlotte Bront? recognizes that Heger’s heart is implacably stony in relation to her: ‘Idolater I kneeled to an idol cut in rock!… In dark remorse I rose: I rose with darker shame’ (Poems of CB, ll. 13, 17).
CHAPTER XXV
1. its very last hours: Charlotte Bront?’s narrative technique in this chapter is impressively intricate and subtle, moving between dream and reality; raising and maintaining suspense by delaying events and withholding information; enclosing tales within the tale, with an effect not unlike the ‘Chinese box’ structure of Emily Bront?’s Wuthering Heights.
2. D.V.: Deo Volente (God willing).
3. Mrs Rochester … exist: The paragraph, with the contrast between Jane’s use of the first person ‘I’ for her unmarried state and the third person ‘she’ for her married identity, is eloquent with irony. Mrs Rochester does exist and is not Jane.
4. The cloven halves: The symbolic cleaving of the chestnut tree into twin halves not only carries powerful emotional reverberations but also plays upon the double (and opposite) meanings of ‘cleave’, as ‘unite’ and ‘break apart’, alluding to the Prayer Book injunction to husband and wife to be ‘as one flesh’.
5. dividing the ripe from the unripe: Allusion to the classical tale of Cupid (Eros) and Psyche (the human soul) who, seeking her lost mate, must sort a huge pile of seeds, which she accomplishes with the help of the forces of nature. The tale is found in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (second century BC) but Charlotte Bront? knew it from a variety of sources, including Keats’s ‘Ode to Psyche’.
6. hypochondria: Pathological depression. The Bront? household’s medical self-help book, John Graham’s Modern Domestic Medicine (London: Simpkin & Marshall et al., 1826), describes this as a state in which ‘the greatest evils are apprehended upon the slightest grounds’. Charlotte Bront? had endured severe depression. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote that in 1837–8 ‘she would turn sick and trembling at any sudden noise, and could hardly repress her screams when startled’ (Life, Vol. I, p. 184). Charlotte Bront? described her condition as that of ‘a stalking ghost’ (Letters, Vol. I, p. 178, n. 1).
7. It struck twelve: This narrative of premonitory events, culminating in the description of Bertha’s attack on the bridal veil, takes the form of an interpolated tale, told as dialogue, with the teller compelling it to unfold, while the listener attempts to abbreviate it.
8. dreary … rose: Echoes Isaiah’s prophecy that ‘the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose’ (Isaiah 35:1).
9. blond: Lace made of white or black silk.
10. ‘with a sullen, moaning sound’: In Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (Bk I, stanza xiii, l. 1), this sound is explained as the voice of the coming storm, for ‘It was the Spirit of the Flood that spoke / And he called on the Spirit of the Fell’ (Bk I, stanza xiv, ll. 7–8) (The Poetical Works, ed. J. Logie Robertson, London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
11. I continued in dreams: Compare Lockwood’s dream in WH, p. 24, which carries on the sound of the rattling of the ‘fir-tree that touched my lattice’ into the next dream.
12. I dreamt … bats and owls: The vision of Thornfield in ruins derives from Isaiah’s vision of the separation of the wicked from the just and God’s vengeance on his enemies. ‘And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls … the screech owl also shall rest there … there shall the vultures also be gathered, every one with her mate’ (Isaiah 34:13–15).
13. discoloured face: Bertha’s description evokes the complexion