Wuthering Heights and the New Apartment

I read Wuthering Heights for the first time about a year ago, when we were first moving in to our current place. I tried to reread it again in like 2 hours. This is what I discovered: 

• In the introduction to my edition (a 1961 Holt edition) Mark Schorer suggests that Bronte set out to persuade us of “the moral magnificence of such unmoral passion” (x) but that as she wrote the novel, she was compelled to see that this moral magnificence is only “a devastating spectacle of human waste: ashes.” Charlotte Bronte, in her 1850 preface, apologizes for the horror of her sister’s characters: “Having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done . . . if it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful scenes banished sleep by night, and disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis Bell would wonder what was meant, and suspect the complainant of affectation” (xxxiii). She also points out the moral characters of Nelly Dean and Edgar Linton (“some people will think these qualities do not shine so well incarnate in a man as they would do in a woman, but Ellis Bell could never be brought to comprehend this notion,” Charlotte says, which might be helpful for thinking about some of the gender differences in her own novels).
• But does Emily Bronte want us to come away from Wuthering Heights with a clear moral judgment of Heathcliff and Cathy’s passion? I find Heathcliff and Cathy pretty horrifying; I had nightmares when I first read Wuthering Heights that Heathcliff had trapped me in my house and was torturing me with loud noises from the street; but surely we’re supposed to sympathize with their passionate identification with each other! That’s what people like about this novel, right? I’ve been reading both Brontes this year with Twilight in mind, so maybe I’m biased—but I grew up with the understanding that it was a great love story, and was actually pretty horrified when I realized what really happened.
• The framing story: What are we supposed to think about Lockwood? He listens to the story of Heathcliff and Cathy mostly for his own amusement—which is what we’re doing, I guess, and what any listener does in any framing story, so why should we judge him? But he’s so callous in so many other ways that I think we are supposed to judge him, even as we identify with him as a reader/auditor of the story, but also as a more cosmopolitan, educated reader than the other characters in the novel. How much of a transformation does he really undergo, when he returns to the house to tell Heathcliff he’s leaving and kind of tries to help bring Cathy and Hareton together? When he comes back and learns about Heathcliff’s death? What are we supposed to make of his final comment: “I . . . wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth” (358)? It seems sentimental and patently untrue, given what we know about the sleepers.
• Disciplining the reader: Lockwood is one character who stands in for the reader in the novel, and who represents our inability to read Wuthering Heights accurately; Isabella Linton is another. When Isabella starts falling in love with the brooding Heathcliff, her sister-in-law Cathy tries to warn her that what you see is painfully what you get: “Pray, don’t imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior . . . I never say to him let this or that enemy alone, because it would be ungenerous or cruel to harm them, I say—‘Let them alone, because I should hate them to be wronged’: and he’d crush you, like a sparrow’s egg, Isabella, if he found you a troublesome charge” (108). This seems like a message to the reader who might be making the same assumptions—who might, like other characters in the novel, think Heathcliff’s cruelty might be redeemed or softened by his love for Cathy, or his natural instincts, or his ability to make small talk. Characters are constantly underestimating how evil Heathcliff is: “you’re a cruel man, but not a fiend,” Cathy II says to him. And Nelly thinks to herself “Poor wretch! . . . you have a heart and nerves the same as your brother men! Why should you be anxious to conceal them?” (177). The reader is continually tempted to sympathize with Heathcliff and is continually jolted from that sympathy by his violence and cruelty. In the end, does Cathy II turn out to be right that Heathcliff’s not a fiend? She lives to see some evidence of him softening, but only after a lot of suffering and forced marriage and ear-boxing.
• Cathy’s ghost: One of the most upsetting and famous scenes in the novel is one where Lockwood is very much engaged—passionately, violently engaged—in the story of Heathcliff and Cathy: after reading Cathy’s diary-like notes in her old books, and seeing different versions of her name carved into the bed, he has a terrifying nightmare/vision of her return to Wuthering Heights. Catherine begs to be let in:
        As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes; still it wailed “Let me in!”

This is by far the most violent image we’ve encountered so far in Wuthering Heights, and it’s Lockwood who’s doing the violence, not Heathcliff. In a way this violence—and torture—might make Heathcliff’s violence and cruelty less surprising; Lockwood’s motive of “terror” isn’t the same as Heathcliff’s motive of revenge, but the violence he does is more arbitrary and strangely casual—terror maybe makes us desperate, but does it make us “cruel”? The intensity of this vision helps to explain Lockwood’s intense interest in the family story, but again, that interest feels strangely casual to me.

• other upsetting images:
• Heathcliff banging his head against a tree until it’s bloody on the night of Cathy’s death
• Heathcliff hanging Isabella’s dog in front of her
• Heathcliff beating Hindley almost to death after the knife folds back on Hindley’s wrist
• Heathcliff contemplating opening Cathy’s coffin
• Linton coughing up blood in agitation
• The nest Cathy and Heathcliff found as children “full of little skeletons” (130)
• Cathy’s writing: The scene before the nightmare, when Lockwood reads Cathy’s diary entries, and the different versions of her name, is also really interesting, of course. Cathy’s compulsive writing/carving of her name on the bed makes me think of Jane Eyre idly writing on her piece of scratch-paper; the different configurations, all of which become the name of some character in the novel, hint at the strange iterability of names and people in the novel. Too many Cathys, too many Heathcliffs, too many Lintons, too many Earnshaws; reflected also by Lockwood’s inability to understand the relationships between the characters at Wuthering Heights (is Cathy Heathcliff’s wife? Is Hareton his son?) Also Cathy’s own indecisiveness/identity crisis. And the compulsion to repeat behavior.
• Is Cathy a real ghost? There were a lot of clues in the bedroom before Lockwood went to sleep. But the “I’ve been a waif for twenty years” and the ghost calling herself Catherine Linton (“why did I think of Linton? I’d read Earnshaw twenty times for Linton”) suggest that she’s really there, and that Lockwood’s rational explanations for the event—and his suggestion that the graves must be quiet—are suspect.
• Heathcliff’s anguish. “Come in! come in!” sobs Heathcliff after Lockwood tells him the story of his dream. “Cathy, do come. Oh do—once more! Oh! my heart’s darling! Hear me this time—Catherine, at last!” Heart-rending moments like this make the reader want to think good of Heathcliff, just as they make Isabella and other characters sympathetic with them. But we and they get punished for it. But they’re still moving.
• Heathcliff’s sympathy with Hareton in particular. Heathcliff saves Hareton as a baby “by a natural impulse,” and then regrets it; later he likes him even though his goal is to make Hareton one instrument of his father’s destruction; at the end Hareton carries all this symbolic weight for Heathcliff: “Five minutes ago, Hareton seemed a personification of my youth, not a human being . . . [his] aspect was the ghost of my immortal love, of my wild endeavours to hold my right, my degradation, my pride, my happiness, my anguish—” (343). So there’s this sense both that Heathcliff has natural instincts that get betrayed by a more artificial, intellectualized desire for revenge; it’s also interesting that the characters Heathcliff ultimately feels some kind of sympathy and kindness towards are those we sympathize with as well—Hareton, young Cathy, and Nelly Dean. Well, I don’t sympathize with Cathy I much, and Charlotte Bronte apparently sympathized with Edgar Linton; but it’s interesting that Hareton, Cathy II, and Nelly are the characters whose underlying good nature Heathcliff can’t destroy or pervert—it’s as if he’s some kind of horrible, violent test of character.
• Cathy and Heathcliff as a unit. Both Cathy and Heathcliff explain over and over that their relationship isn’t merely (or even?) love, but total union and identification: as children they’re inseparable, and in Cathy’s diary entry she’s constantly using the pronoun “we”; she says “Nelly, I am Heathcliff” (86). Since I’ve been rereading Jane Eyre alongside Wuthering Heights I’m wondering to what degree Cathy and Heathcliff’s intense closeness mirrors Jane’s and Rochester’s, which by the end is symbiotic (and Jane’s love of Rochester, like Cathy’s description of Heathcliff as “an existence of [hers] beyond [her]”, verges on idolatry.) But of course Cathy and Heathcliff start out more closely united and are separated, while Jane and Rochester . . . well, that happens a little bit, too, but her total union with Rochester isn’t until the end. One scene in Wuthering Heights that echoes one in Jane Eyre, and that really gets at the difference between Jane’s solo hero’s journey and Cathy and Heathcliff’s doubled self, occurs when Cathy and Heathcliff spy on the Linton family through their lighted window. In Jane Eyre Jane has a similar experience looking in on the Rivers family; but while Jane is alone, friendless, and starving, Cathy and Heathcliff are smug and pleased with themselves—although the act of spying results in their separation. What does it mean to write a novel in which the hero and heroine almost don’t have single separate existences? It certainly does something strange to character; this novel can’t be a Bildungsroman, it can’t show us the life and development of a single consciousness. It is much stranger!
• Heathcliff overhearing Cathy: He hears “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff” but not “so he shall never know how I love him” (85). The fact that this last phrase would have genuinely ameliorated the first seems to get at something crucial in the Heathcliff/Cathy bond, which is certainly not about marriage; compare to Jane Eyre’s problematizing of marriage.
• More about Hareton and Cathy II: Heathcliff sympathizes with them, and they’re also the characters who remind him the most of Cathy—particularly Hareton, who is a more distant relation from Cathy than her daughter, and also a man. It could be just that Heathcliff hates Lintons, and also hates himself; but he also hated Hindley Earnshaw, Hareton’s father. What is it about Hareton? Is being native to Wuthering Heights Cathy’s main attribute? Is Hareton’s relationship to that sacred place more significant because his name is over the door, even if he can’t read it (at first)?
• Wuthering Heights itself is obviously very important.
• Heathcliff’s death. It’s hard not to read this as redemptive, even as it’s ghoulish. The wasting away, the rapturous smiles, transform Heathcliff, even as they’re unsettling. The sense that he fears Cathy—“By God! she’s relentless. Oh, damn it! It’s unutterably too much for flesh and blood to bear, even mine” (355)—makes it more unsettling still—do we read this as a kind of punishment for Heathcliff? Even for Heathcliff, haunting would be unsettling? 

Jane Eyre on New Jersey Transit

I thought Jane Eyre was one of the novels on my orals lists that I'd already read, but a quick attempt to skim it revealed that 1) I didn't remember reading ANY of it because 2) the last time I read it was ten years ago, and also I'd read the kid's abridged version so many times since I was seven that all I remembered was that and 3) it is a delightful novel! So I had the pleasure of reading it all over again, which may or may not have been a waste of time, but generated 85 pages of notes. The slightly-condensed-and-at-the-same-time-seriously-fleshed-out version:

• Brontë’s 1850 preface: defending the morality of Jane Eyre against critics (who must have thought it was immoral, or at least "coarse"), Bronte claims that the novel’s perceived immorality comes of its truthfulness; in saying the world “may hate him who dares to scrutinise and expose—to rase the gilding, and show base metal under it—to penetrate the sepulchre, and reveal charnel relics: but hate as it will, it is indebted to him” she’s making social/moral/documentary claims for Jane Eyre as if it were Oliver Twist or, more precisely, Vanity Fair:
   
  There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears . . . who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital—a mien as dauntless and as daring.  Is the satirist of “Vanity Fair” admired in high places? . . . I have alluded to him, Reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognised; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day—as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things.”
  
  
• I’m surprised to see Jane Eyre, which is a Bildungsroman focusing on one character’s experience, not on a riotous cast of colorful types, and told in the first person, compared to Vanity Fair, and associated with the ambition of “social regenerat[ion]” and “restor[ing] rectitude to the warped system of things.” If Jane Eyre is a tool for social regeneration, how is it working? What does it want to effect? School reform? The Lowood section is the most like Oliver Twist, but on the other hand the problems of the school seem to be more obviously specific: as soon as someone from the outside finds out the school is bad they fix it (but Helen Burns has to die first.) Divorce reform? The reform of rakes, or of the double standard? Bronte explains that the people who object to Jane Eyre are those “in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry—that parent of crime—an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth.” So she’s talking about bigotry—against married men? Against strange women? Certainly the novel has a feminist message, and there are these moments of what Geoffrey Bennington calls sententiousness, where Jane makes a clearly reformist gesture:

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. 

And certainly the horrors that Jane describes, to which critics of Jane Eyre presumably objected, are metaphors for or extreme cases of problems with education, marriage law, the double standard. I guess I’m so used to reading Bronte’s feminism through Gilbert and Gubar, or even through Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, as submerged and suffocated and only partially articulated, that I’m surprised to see she had political or social intentions. But on the other hand, maybe a feminism can be both intentional and imperfectly articulated; maybe that’s why I’m stalling at the suggestion that this is a social novel, and maybe that’s where Woolf’s claims of suffocation are coming from.

• I’m also struck by Bronte’s address of the Reader in her introduction: it’s identical to Jane’s (famous) address of the Reader in the novel, and breaks down the boundaries (masculine, or at least gender-neutral pseudonym; insistence on the novel as a tool of social regeneration)  Bronte seems to want to set up against reading Jane Eyre autobiographically. If Jane and Charlotte are one and the same, what does that do to the idea of reading Jane Eyre as a social novel? David Copperfield kind of invites a biographical reading, especially because David is an author at the end, but Dickens’s preface doesn’t encourage you to keep thinking in this way: he makes it clear that David & co are beloved friends that Dickens totally made up. There’s certainly a tendency to read women writers’ works as autobiographical/confessional or at least _personal_--one example I’m thinking of is Romney’s accusation in _Aurora Leigh_ that women are only interested in specifics—and I’m curious to what degree Bronte might have been participating in this kind of reading of Jane Eyre, or even using that kind of reading to suggest a different, more personal, less crusading kind of social novel? David Copperfield doesn’t feel as reformatory as Oliver Twist, but is it intended to be, just in a different way? Is Jane Eyre intended to be?  

• Jane’s sudden fits of rage as a child—compare to Oliver Twist. Are the causes different?
• “‘Unjust!—unjust!” said my reason, forced by the agonising stimulus into precocious though transitory power”—and her fantasies of resistance: “to achieve escape from insupportable oppression—as running away, or, if that could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die.”
• Her exultation when she resists Mrs Reed, followed by an accompanying dejection: Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt.  It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty . . . A child cannot quarrel with its elders, as I had done; cannot give its furious feelings uncontrolled play, as I had given mine, without experiencing afterwards the pang of remorse and the chill of reaction. 
•  
• The strange treatment of race/skin color in the novel: not only are Bertha and Mason dark (their mother was a Creole) but also Mr Rochester (I guess also a character with a colonial connection) and Mrs Reed. And Blanche Ingram! With her ironic name! Mr Rochester’s darkness makes it harder to read these other dark characters as necessarily bad, or bad because of race (although they are all bad.) Mr Rochester’s contempt for Blanche is definitely connected to his disgust with Bertha (he desires Jane as a “change.”) But is it also a disgust with himself? I can’t read it that way, but I also can’t read the way color is working in this novel clearly.
• Retrospect: it doesn’t seem to be as strongly marked here as it does in David Copperfield or Bleak House or even Villette. Maybe because Jane makes relatively few references to her current position: she tells us “I could not answer the ceaseless inward question—why I thus suffered; now, at the distance of—I will not say how many years, I see it clearly,” but for the most part we experience things as she experienced them—her breaks into the present tense make this feeling of immediacy, of a real-time narrative despite our knowledge that this is retrospect—stronger. The only really noticeable moment was when she refused to tell us what she had seen that had upset her; she says “Stay till he comes, reader; and, when I disclose my secret to him, you shall share the confidence.” This, too, seems less forced to me than, say, Esther Summerson refusing to tell me the contents of the letter, perhaps because Jane has been framing this story so theatrically (“A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader . . .”) that we accept her desire to make things more dramatically satisfying.
• When Mr Brocklehurst asks her how she will avoid going to hell, Jane says “I must keep in good health, and not die.” This always struck me as a really important line. In the end this becomes a moral choice that Jane has to make—between thinking about Heaven and going to India with St John or keeping in good health and not dying. And she chooses not dying. It’s a statement that’s both comically (and disastrously) blasphemous and intensely life-affirming, and despite Jane’s later religious thoughts (and the weird St John ending) the novel seems to be on the side of being a little bit blasphemous and life-affirming—or rather, it may suggest that God helps those who help themselves, and that we should focus on keeping in good health and not dying (physically, emotionally, psychologically) and the rest of this stuff will take care of itself?
• Jane’s negotiation of the terms of her freedom: “Grant me at least a new servitude!” She knows the “freedom” she longs for is unrealistic, but a new servitude isn’t. I’m reading Louisa May Alcott’s Work for another list, and I think the ways in which Jane is thinking about and negotiating freedom/a new servitude/a space for herself are similar to the way Christie is looking for ways in which to be useful and happy in Work (she becomes a servant, a governess, an actress, a companion, a florist . . . ) This restlessness of Jane’s forces her/allows her to exercise choice; even when the choices aren’t entirely voluntary, she seems to have some limited agency. All the images of Jane’s corded-up trunks support this sense.
• Also related to the “new servitude” passage: Jane’s conversations with herself, in which two sides of her nature debate some moral or practical question. The most literal and kind of hilarious moment is when Jane “order[s] [her] brain” to solve the practical problem of finding a job for her:

A kind fairy, in my absence, had surely dropped the required suggestion on my pillow; for as I lay down, it came quietly and naturally to my mind.—“Those who want situations advertise; you must advertise in the ---shire Herald.” “How?  I know nothing about advertising.” Replies rose smooth and prompt now:— “You must enclose the advertisement and the money to pay for it under a cover directed to the editor of the Herald; you must put it, the first opportunity you have, into the post at Lowton; answers must be addressed to J.E., at the post-office there; you can go and inquire in about a week after you send your letter, if any are come, and act accordingly.”

 Moments like this remind me a lot of Villette, where the brain, and parts of consciousness or conscience, are personified and anthropomorphized to the point that the drama becomes almost entirely interior. In Jane Eyre the drama is much more external; and at times these interior voices are exported to other characters (notably when Mr Rochester dresses up like a gypsy, but also in other moments of interrogation with Hannah the servant and St John.)

• Which brings us to Mr Rochester’s tricks: I never noticed before this reading how much he resembles not only a terrifying Gothic villain but also a Richardsonian rake: the gypsy move in particular made me think of Mr B dressing up like a woman servant to get in Pamela’s bed.
• Rochester as a Bad Boy: The cartoonist Kate Beaton makes fun of the Bronte sisters’ love for Byronic heroes, and I was struck by the contrast between a passage in Wuthering Heights, where Cathy I warns Isabella Linton against the very kind of allure Rochester seems to have for Jane in this passage:

that something, I, at intervals, beheld still; and with throbbing heart, but not with palsied nerves.  Instead of wishing to shun, I longed only to dare—to divine it; and I thought Miss Ingram happy, because one day she might look into the abyss at her leisure, explore its secrets and analyse their nature.

      “Watch out for the abyss!” you want to tell her. “There is a madwoman in it!” But!

• Jane and Rochester really get along. At the end of the novel Jane tells us what a perfect union they have:

To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company.  We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking.

She also says “no woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.”

• We can read this as the symbiotic (codependent?) relationship created when Rochester’s blindness and lameness makes Jane’s body a necessary supplement to his; this goes along with Elaine Showalter’s observation that the heroes in novels by Victorian women have to be blinded or maimed and therefore feminized
• We can also read it as a version of the closeness of Heathcliff/Cathy in Wuthering Heights: “I am Heathcliff!” In that case, Jane and Rochester’s romance is precisely this romance-novel fantasy of the passionate union with the reformed rake that Cathy warns Isabella against, and that readers of both novels (including Stephenie Meyer) have always found so appealing
• But I think there’s also something realistic and down-to-earth and everyday about Jane’s account of their constant conversation, something that suggests this is in fact a real marriage of two people who get along, and which is not fed by teeth-grinding and obstacles and trauma. Rochester is exciting because he’s mysterious, but he’s also someone Jane is immediately comfortable with—she says over and over how she isn’t put off by his gruff manner, his ugliness, but rather encouraged by them. She likes talking to him. When she doesn’t get along with St John Rivers, it’s not because he’s boring or uncomplicated, but because he’s just kind of uncomfortable to talk to. Well, he’s cold, and he doesn’t have an emotional life. But I still think there’s something to the fact that Jane can recognize people she can get along with—that includes Mrs Fairfax and the Rivers sisters—and that that’s important to her.
• Lying and teasing: When Rochester is wooing Jane, he plays a similar kind of bait-and-switch game with her that Jarndyce plays with Esther—“I didn’t mean Blanche Ingram, I meant YOU”—but sometimes he’s clearly just lying to her rather than coyly suggesting something. I wonder if this is a clue that he’s lying about other stuff (incidentally, I can’t imagine reading this novel without knowing about Bertha beforehand! At one point I must have had that experience, but it’s entirely lost); when Jane pulls the same trick with him at the end, suggesting she might marry St John, she does a much better and more playful job (and she’s doing it For His Own Good, however weird that is—trying to make him jealous so he won’t focus on his own melancholy and insecurity about his disabilities.)
• Jane the artist: I’m interested in her ability to render these interior states/solipsistic conversations material through drawing: the creepy dreamscapes, but also her use of portraiture as a kind of argument (trying to cure herself of her pretentions to Mr R’s love by drawing her own face and Blanche Ingram’s; tryig to draw out St John’s love for Miss Oliver with her portrait) and as a kind of invocation/companionship (drawing Mr Rochester’s portrait at the Reeds’.)
• Then there are the ways in which the drawings reveal Jane’s real identity to people: that she’s a lady with accomplishments (mostly to people associated with the Reed household); that she’s an interesting person and/or an elfin spirit (to Mr Rochester); and literally what her name is (to St John when he sees her name written on her piece of scratch paper, which is also blotted with all the colors she’s been using.) Throughout the novel people have difficulty recognizing or placing Jane (Mrs Reed on her deathbed; Rochester when he first meets her, and in his blindness; various characters who can’t reconcile her ladylike behavior with her poverty or her situation; the Rivers family because of her alias) and the pictures seem to be one of the truer indexes to her identity
• The hero narrative. In Writing Beyond the Ending Rachel Blau DuPlessis identifies two conflicting plots in nineteeth-century novels by and about women: the quest plot, in which the female protagonist is the hero, and the marriage plot, in which she is reduced to a mere heroine. The quest plot might sometimes be the same as the marriage plot, but in the end the quest plot—and the female hero—disappear, and the story dead-ends in the marriage and the establishment of the female hero as passive, married, loving heroine. Jane Eyre is a classic example, where all Jane’s restlessness and resistance and rebellion culminates in her as a contented wife and mother and helpmeet to her injured husband. This does happen, but for some reason I keep wanting to question classic feminist readings of Jane Eyre; in this case, I’m interested in thinking about how ambition is portrayed in the novel, as well as work and vocation and restlessness. Jane is depicted as restless, and St John claims she’s ambitious, while she claims she’s not; I wonder whether the negative light in which St John’s ambition appears means that Jane’s final lack of restlessness is less gendered than we might think? Again, there’s the argument that Rochester is feminized by his injuries; but Rochester has actually always been kind of a domestic figure for Jane, and if he’s been restless, he certainly hasn’t been ambitious. He’s sown his wild oats; maybe Jane’s restlessness is merely an argument (one she voices explicitly) that both sexes should be allowed to do this, in some way?
• The ending: Why does St John get the last word? I don’t know! To protect the novel from seeming blasphemous? To contrast his religious fervor with Jane and Rochester’s domestic contentment? To circle back to Helen Burns’s devotion? “even so come, Lord Jesus!”