Introduction

64
Vanessa Mangione
He had a dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow; his eyes and
gathered eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted just now … I felt no fear of
him, and but little shyness. Had he been a handsome, heroic-looking gentleman,
I should not have dared to stand thus questioning him against his
will, and offering my services unasked …
If even this stranger had smiled and been good-humoured to me when
I addressed him; if he had put off my offer of assistance gaily and with
thanks, I would have gone on my way and not felt any vocation to renew
inquiries: but the frown, the roughness of the traveller, set me at my ease.
(99-100)
As Cho notes, Rochester has an “unconventional look” that contains a “kind of
proud detachment and passionate energy with which she feels instinctively comfortable
and familiar” (105). Cho comments that Jane’s description of Rochester’s
physicality is an anesthetization of his masculinity:
I had hardly ever seen a handsome youth; never in my life spoke to one. I
had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination;
but had I met those qualities incarnated in masculine shape, I
should have known instinctively that they neither had nor could have sympathy
with anything in me, and should have shunned them as one would
fire, lightning, or anything else that is bright but antipathetic. (99)
By pointing out his physical irregularities of an “un-heroic looking, middle-aged
dark man” and depicting his appearance as contrary to ‘handsome youth[s]’, it is
obvious that Jane is fascinated mostly with his “lack of beauty” (105). By constituting
him as a “charismatic” and not “beautiful” man, Brontë gives an entirely
new definition of masculinity. Rochester, the embodiment of this new type of
masculinity, strikes Jane “with such an impressive anomalous charisma as to leave
an audible mark on her “gallery of memory” in an unprecedented way” (Cho 105):
The new face, too, was like a new picture introduced to the gallery of
memory; and it was dissimilar to all the others hanging there; firstly, because
it was masculine; and secondly, because it was dark, strong and stern.
(101)
Brontë portrays Rochester as man who is aware of his shortcomings and who is
torn between admitting it and trying to uphold a masquerade of masculinity. Neither
Jane, nor Rochester are described as attractive in a conventional way, this
“lack” of attractiveness prepares the ground for their shared appeal. Jane apparently
falls under the Byronic spell, although she tries to renounce the romantic
encounter as something unimportant – “[t]he incident had occurred and was gone
for me; it was an incident of no moment, no romance, no interest in a sense”
(101) – she cannot stop thinking about him and their meeting, and she even imagines,
or hopes, to hear his horse again.