ABSTRACT
The ideal of beauty in Jane Eyre is Grecian. In Jane Eyre one can reach Bertha only by passing along a 'dark, low corridor' into a 'tapestried room'; behind one of the tapestries stands a second door leading to an 'inner apartment', a room 'without a window', where Bertha moans and shrieks and laughs. The young Jane's weakness and the mature Jane's garrulousness make impossible the frictionless cycle of wishes and fulfillments that dominated in Angria. Jane invokes traditional faculties in order to explain some oddity in her behavior, but her explanations, one is obliged to say, become more inscrutable than the actions that they mean to illuminate. Some of Brontë's most elaborate conceits occur when she employs this apparently neutral vocabulary of philosophical psychology. The relations of self and other, love and restraint, wish and fear appear in terms of spatial configuration, and in this regard, Brontë's use of the word 'region' is illuminating.
