Introduction

Lord Byron’s Descendants 69
active and emotionally needy. However, with Jane he sees his chance for true love
and happiness.
Chase comments that Rochester obviously serves as “Charlotte’s symbolic
embodiment of the masculine élan” (107). Jane’s feelings for Rochester are situated
always in conflict with each other, he “draws her to him with a strange fascination”
but she is simultaneously “repelled by his animalism and demonism”
(107). Chase proceeds by noting that she is torn between her desire to submit
herself to him and the knowledge that she cannot do so. Jane is captivated by the
gentleness and passion in his every trait, ranging from his masculine appearance,
to the mysteriousness of his self-proclaimed guilt to his many female conquests.
However, I disagree with Chase when he states that Jane flees because she could
not “endure the intensity of his passions” and that she only sees two options of
behaviour in this situation: “meek submission” or a “flirtatious, gently sadistic
skirmishing designed to keep the love at bay” (107). Chase clearly seems to forget
the fact that Jane decides to return to Rochester even before she has heard of Bertha’s
death and Rochester’s freedom. Accordingly, she is not scared by his passion
for her, but of her passion for him, since she began to lose herself in the pure
semiotic. It is not her fear of Rochester’s sexuality, or the limited options of behaviour
she can choose from, as Chase argues, but her recognition that she is not
able to keep a balance between the symbolic and semiotic that induces her to leave
him eventually. In the midst of all this, as Gérin notes, Jane is still able to break
free from the Byronic enchantment, from “the voice that has lulled all her senses”
(18):
My future husband was becoming to me my whole world, and more than
the world – almost my hope of heaven. He stood between my every
thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and broad sun. I
could not, in those days, see God for his creature, of whom I had made an
idol. (241)
Rochester catalyzes Jane’s passions and desires to such an extent that she can no
longer think clearly, and is at risk to surrender her whole identity to him.
Mei argues that the failed marriage attempt can be seen as a turning point
where Jane leaves the realm of the fairy tale and is for the first time at Thornfield
fully driven by reason (168-170). When Rochester tries to convince her that she
should stay as his mistress, since she has no one else who could care for her, Jane
comes close to giving in, but in the end she finds the power to resist him. Nevertheless,
after a severe inward struggle, instead of finding a balance between the
symbolic and semiotic, she chooses the symbolic:
This was true; and while he spoke my very conscience and reason turned
traitors against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him. They spoke
almost as loud as feeling, and that clamored wildly. “Oh, comply!” it said.
“Think of his misery, think of his danger, look at his state when left alone;