Introduction

Lord Byron’s Descendants 67
burdened, cursed as I am? Besides, since happiness is irrevocably denied to
me, I have a right to get pleasure out of life; and I will get it, cost what it
may.” (120)
Rochester sees himself as the victim of unfortunate circumstances. He embraces
the role of a rebel, by refusing to follow symbolic orders and flouts society’s
laws. 36 He willingly ignores divine laws, such as monogamy, and tries to create his
own moral commandment; he wants to make Jane his wife even though he is still
married to Bertha.
Furthermore, his appearance also meets all the requirements of a true Byronic
hero. Jane mentions his ‘dark face’, ‘heavy features’ and ‘dark brows’, which are all
physical Byronic characteristics. Moreover, there is Bertha, his dark secret, his
mad wife whom he has locked up on the third floor and tries to hide from society.
As Millgate notes:
Rochester behaves quite deliberately and self-consciously like a Byronic
hero, taking up dramatic poses, singing Corsair songs, acting arbitrarily and
inscrutably; he talks of his past in Childe Harold’s terms; he delights in dressing
up and playing exotic roles. When such a figure is presented through
the still more naively Romantic imagination of the eighteen-year-old Jane
Eyre the coloration becomes positively violent. (318)
Accordingly, Jane fully succumbs to the Byronic hypnotic fascination.
Repeatedly, Rochester is connected to fire. He often sits in front of the hearth
and smokes, and Jane tells the reader that “Mr Rochester would like to see a
cheerful hearth when he came in” (243). Lodge points out that this element “is
generally associated with the inner life of passion and sensibility” (131). In addition,
Jane regularly compares him with fire itself, she mentions that “a strange fire
was in his look,” (133) that he “receive[d] the light of the fire on his granite-hewn
features, an in his great, dark eyes,” (115) and she hopes that she will not be “exiled
from the sunshine of his presence” (216). Accordingly, fire is connected to
both domestic idyll as well as to Byronic passion. Throughout her stay at Thornfield,
Jane is confronted with the dangers of fire, literally and metaphorically. She
soon sees the essential necessity to keep it under control; otherwise, she will be at
risk to be burned by it, as the Byronic hero’s capacity of passion makes it impossible
for her to resist him.
3.4 The Escape from the Byronic Power
In a moment of despair, when she fears losing Rochester to another woman, Jane
strips away all disguises and lets her passion free:
36 The flouting of authoritative laws is a Byronic characteristic that can be found particularly in
Byron’s protagonists Lara, Conrad and Cain.