Prof.

Eliana Ionoaia Arabo Avin, II B

Seminar of Victorian Literature Arabic – English, group 8

Gothic and Fairy Tale Elements in Jane Eyre

“Gothic literature often refers to the fairy tale and shares its interest in exploring
humanity’s terrors and desires.”1 It appeared in Britain in the late eighteenth century with
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is considered to be a true work of gothic fiction because it
encompasses the most specific elements of this genre: frightening scenery, mystery plots, dark
secrets, supernatural frames which are meant to offer a particular atmosphere – that of fear and
suspense.

From the very beginning of the novel we encounter a Gothic setting: „There was no
possibility of taking a walk that day. (…) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so
sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.
(…) Eliza, John and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room: she
lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside and with her darlings about her looked perfectly happy.
Me, she had dispensed from joining the group;”2 This is a Gothic setting in terms of the cold,
austere atmosphere which is presented in the eyes of little Jane Eyre who stays separated from
the rest of the family. This paragraph is very important because it shows the inspiration of the
author from fairy tales.

At Gateshead Hall, we see similarity between the protagonist and Cinderella. Jane Eyre is
an underprivileged orphan who stays in the house of her aunt Sarah Reed. Before his death, her
uncle tells his wife to treat the girl as if she was one of her own. The aunt is the figure of the
ugly stepmother who promises to take care of the child and fails at it. At the end of her staying
at Gateshead Hall, confining Cinderella stereotypes, Jane Eyre escapes and makes her own way

1 Brennan, Zoe. Bronte’s Jane Eyre. London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2010, p. 26
2 Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Service & Paton, 1897, p. 5

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 in the world.3 Her true worth and natural goodness is recognized by her prince and rewarded
once she has escaped the clutches of Mrs. Reed.4

With respect to the inspiration from fairy tales we also find that the novel has similarities
with the Bluebeard myth. Bluebeard was a diabolic husband who murdered all his wives and
locked them in closets. The myth appears in chapter 11 of the novel, in which the heroine walks
through the hall of Thornfield and the closed doors reminds her of the terrors of Bluebeard’s
castle.5 This episode anticipates a little the future happenings because the master of Thornfield,
Edward Rochester, keeps his wife locked in the attic.

A further Gothic element is the redroom in which Mrs. Reed locks Jane Eyre. That
environment is frightening for her because she knows that her uncle died in there. Her nanny,
Bessie, never walks into that room and she always tells her ghost stories. Sitting in there she
starts to think of a superstition about ghosts coming from the dead to haut those who didn’t
respect their last wishes. She imagines Mr. Reed angry with his wife for not honoring his last
desire: “I began to recall what I had heard of dead men, troubled in their graves by the violation
of their last wishes, revisiting the earth to punish the perjured and avenge the oppressed”6. When
the night comes, she finds herself alone in the dark room and begins to conceive fearsome
images which are only phantasms of her imagination: “I thought the swift darting beam was a
herald of some coming vision from another world. My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a
sound filled in my years, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I
was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down;”7 Alternatively, the critic Eugenia
DeLamotte regards the redroom as “an external image of Jane’s own passionate interior” and
she implies that the creature Jane sees in the redroom is “her own fearful self, a self in great
part created by Mrs. Reed’s tyranny”.8

Common to the Gothic narrative is the way in which nature predicts human fate and also
the reflection of human emotions in weather and inanimate settings. In Jane Eyre this can be

3
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature. New York: Facts On File, 2005, p. 108
4 Brennan, Zoe. Bronte’s Jane Eyre. London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2010, p. 26
5 Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature. New York: Facts On File, 2005, p. 33

6 Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Service & Paton, 1897, p. 13

7 Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Service & Paton, 1897, p. 14
8 DeLamotte, Eugenia. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Oxford University Press, USA, 1990,

p. 195

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 noticed in the episode with the storm at Thornfield Hall. The lightning bolt strikes the chestnut
tree, which is a symbol of family solidarity. A night before this event, Mr. Rochester proposed
to Jane under that tree and the falling of the tree foreshadows the separation of the two, danger
and disaster.9

According to Mary Ellen Snodgrass nighttime phantasms are realistic landscapes on which
the psyche combats terrifying threats and dream-states. In Jane Eyre, the author turns the
protagonist’s dreams into visions about the secrecy at Thornfield. During the four weeks before
Jane Eyre’s wedding she experiences prophetic visions of the hall in ruins and inhabited by bats
and owls. This vision turns into a real confrontation with a true evil, the insane woman who
lives at the 3rd floor of Thornfield Hall.10 This episode reveals true Gothic elements: phantasms,
visions, the evil, the monster and prophetic images.

Further evidence of Gothic is the appearance of the monster, which can be seen in the
description of the insane wife of Edward Rochester. After her meeting with Jane Eyre, the latter
says: “I never saw a face like it! It was a discolored face – it was a savage face. I wish I could
forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments. […] the lips
were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed; the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot
eyes.” 11
The woman is identified as a German spectre – the Vampyre. Her appearance is
grotesque, she is described through black and red, colors which signify the darkness, the evil,
blood. Mary Ellen Snodgrass points out that the insane woman expresses Jane Eyre’s repressed
anger and sexuality. And this is possible through the use of a Gothic motif – the double, which
illustrates the concept that the individual has a conscious and an unconscious. The author uses
a split of identity and Bertha represents that part of Jane that is not fully in control of her
feelings.12

In addition to what has been mentioned regarding the inspiration from fairy tales, we can
see similarities with Beauty and the Beast, only by looking at the relationship between Jane
Eyre and Edward Rochester. Jane isn’t necessarily the figure of physical beauty, but her

9 Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature. New York: Facts On File, 2005, p. 271
10 Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature. New York: Facts On File, 2005, pp. 92-93
11 Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Service & Paton, 1897, p. 242
12 Brennan, Zoe. Bronte’s Jane Eyre. London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2010, p. 27

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 morality and personality make her beautiful. Mr. Rochester is described by Jane Eyre as an ugly
man: “He had a dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow”13. We can also notice an
inspiration from Little Red Riding Hood in the passage: “What a face he had, now that it was
almost on a level with mine! What a great nose! and what a mouth! and what large prominent
teeth!”14 where Jane Eyre describes Mr. Brocklehurst similar to the way in which Little Red
Riding Hood describes the wolf. According to the critic Zoe Brennan this comparison reveals
the danger, risks, that he embodies and also the fact that he hides his true intentions, just like
the wolf pretending to be the grandmother. In Jane’s eyes, he has a threatening presence and
she finds him awful.15

Another Gothic element found in this novel is the naif. Mary Ellen Snodgrass identifies
this element in Jane Eyre because she notes that the innocent typically display spontaneous
goodness and by misjudging the power of evil, the candid female loses her innocence after
falling into unnatural settings. Jane Eyre allows herself to accept a marriage proposal from her
master, Edward Rochester, dragging herself into a complicated and dangerous setting.16

Mary Ellen Snodgrass identifies another Gothic motif in Jane Eyre – the Byronic hero,
who is a “charismatic, yet ambiguous male”. The critic suggests that Edward Rochester is the
figure of the Byronic hero, due to his personality: “the stereotype accommodates extremes of
behavior, often for unconscionable reasons”, she describes him as “the guilt-wracked charmer
in Jane Eyre who woos Jane while immuring his insane wife in an upper story of Thornfield.”17

Many critics claim that Jane Eyre is the imprisoned, trapped Gothic female. DeLamotte
argues that the protagonist is limited by education and she gives the following quotation:
“School rules, school duties, school habits and notion, and voices, and faces, and phrases, and
costumes, and preferences, and antipathies: such was what I knew of existence.”18 On the other
hand, the protagonist is imprisoned in every environment: at Gateshead she is subjugated by

13 Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Service & Paton, 1897, p. 96

14 Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Service & Paton, 1897, p. 26
15
Brennan, Zoe. Bronte’s Jane Eyre. London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2010, p. 39
16 Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature. New York: Facts On File, 2005, p. 247
17
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature. New York: Facts On File, 2005, p. 45
18
DeLamotte, Eugenia. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Oxford University Press, USA,
1990, p. 198

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 her aunt and cousins, at Lowood she finds herself trapped in a place she cannot escape from, a
place with strict rules and no comfort, and finally, at Thornfield Hall, she is caught in a marriage
with a man who has a dark secret.

With respect to toponyms, the name Thornfield may infer the idea of a “field with thorns”.
It shows a dangerous place, with risks and threats for the protagonist. On the other hand, she
describes it: “the eerie impression made by that wide hall, the dark and spacious staircase, and
that long, cold gallery (…) I remembered that after a day of bodily fatigue and mental anxiety
I was now at last in safe heaven”. The mansion is a place where she finally feels protected, and
she goes on by saying: “My couch had no thorns in it that night; my solitary room no fears.”19

To conclude, considering all the evidence found in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and
mentioned in this essay, we can ascertain that it contains many Gothic elements and it was
inspired from fairy tales. The plots include eerie landscapes, dark places, misty hills, made to
induce an atmosphere which is specific to this type of fiction: terror, suspense, fear. It contains
myths, elements, motifs which are specific to Gothic fiction. We found traces of very well-
known fairy tales, for example the Bluebeard myth, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and
Beauty and the Beast. Charlotte Bronte is regarded as “the nineteenth-century writer who gave
most audacious expression to the latent, subversive message of women’s Gothic, and to the
anger it implied” and Jane Eyre became a prototype for later women’s Gothic.20

19
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Service & Paton, 1897, p. 83
20
DeLamotte, Eugenia. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Oxford University Press, USA,
1990, p. 193

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 Bibliography

1. Brennan, Zoe. Bronte’s Jane Eyre. London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2010
2. Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Service & Paton, 1897
3. DeLamotte, Eugenia. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century
Gothic. Oxford University Press, USA, 1990
4. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature. New York: Facts On
File, 2005