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91 pages 3 hours read

Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1847

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Chapters 23-27 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 23 Summary

On a warm summer evening, Jane walks into the orchard. Mr. Rochester’s is already there. Jane tries to slink away, but he beckons her close. Mr. Rochester insinuatingly asks Jane if she feels at home at Thornfield. When Jane replies in the affirmative, he tells her that he’s found another governess position for her in Ireland. Jane cries, greatly distressed by the idea of being such as long way from England, Thornfield, and Mr. Rochester himself, and describes being parted from Mr. Rochester as a kind of death.

Mr. Rochester is battling some internal conflict he cannot reveal to Jane.

Suddenly, Mr. Rochester asks Jane to marry him. At first, Jane thinks he is mocking her and reminds Mr. Rochester about Blanche, but he declares, “My bride is here […] because my equal is here, and my likeness” (632). Overjoyed and suspicious at once, Jane asks Mr. Rochester to turn into the moonlight where she sees his face “very much agitated and very much flushed [with] strange gleams in the eyes” (634).

As the two of them declare their love, a storm descends over the orchard. They hurry inside out of the rain. Mr. Rochester helps Jane out of her wet coat and he kisses her repeatedly. Jane catches a glimpse of Miss Fairfax watching them, astonished, from the staircase.

The next morning, Adèle announces to Jane that lightning has struck a tree in the orchard and split it in two—the tree Jane and Mr. Rochester were sitting beneath when they confessed their love to one another. 

Chapter 24 Summary

As Jane goes about her morning routine the next day, she feels calm and happy. Looking in the mirror, she no longer feels plain because she knows her face pleases Mr. Rochester.

The wedding preparations, however, fill Jane with a more complex range of feelings. When Mr. Rochester pronounces her new name, Jane Rochester, she feels strange, remarking that their union feels impossible: “a fairy tale—a day-dream” (644). When Mr. Rochester attempts to shower her in jewels and gowns made of rich, expensive fabrics, she insists on wearing simple, modest clothing. When Jane resists his extravagances, he ominously jokes that he will put her on a chain like a prize gem.

Miss Fairfax disapproves of the wedding because young and inexperienced Jane is half Mr. Rochester’s age and because of a more hidden reason she doesn’t seem comfortable revealing.

Anxious about the impending wedding, Jane writes to her Uncle John Eyre in Madeira. She reasons that her inheritance from her uncle might make her Mr. Rochester’s social equal and make her feel more secure in their partnership.

As the wedding approaches, thoughts of her future husband alarmingly consume her. Mr. Rochester feels like the whole world, standing “between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun […] I had made an idol” (683). 

Chapter 25 Summary

Jane feels strange the night before the wedding. She wishes she could speak to Mr. Rochester, but he is away on business. She goes out into the orchard and looks at the split tree, imagining the two damaged halves as sentient creatures. She tells them, “You did right to hold fast to each other” (687), thinking of them as a metaphor for her bond with Mr. Rochester.

When Mr. Rochester returns, Jane tells him about a strange occurrence the evening before when her wedding gown and veil arrived. After hanging the wedding garments, Jane heard a strange rustling coming from her room. When she went to inspect the sound, she saw “a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back” (705). Jane watched the woman put on the veil, and then tear it in two. Mr. Rochester dismisses this as a dream.

When Jane continues to insist on the reality of her experience, Mr. Rochester tells her that the woman must have been Grace Poole, and that Jane’s anxiety must have distorted her image. He closes the discussion by promising to reveal, “why I keep such a woman in my house: when we have been married a year and a day, I will tell you; but not now” (711). 

Chapter 26 Summary

A sense of unease and foreboding fills the atmosphere as Jane heads to her wedding. Mr. Rochester is irritable and impatient, seemingly in a hurry to get to the church. On the way, Jane notices two strange figures in the graveyard.

Just as Jane and Mr. Rochester are about to recite their vows, a London solicitor named Mr. Briggs stop the wedding: He has evidence that Mr. Rochester is already married to a Creole woman named Bertha Mason, whom he married 15 years ago in Spanish Town, Jamaica. Mr. Briggs produces a signed letter from Mr. Mason as testimony, and Mr. Mason steps forward to affirm its validity. Furious and distraught, Mr. Rochester attempts to lash out at Mr. Mason, but eventually admits that this is true.

Mr. Rochester explains that his wife, Bertha, is a mentally ill and violent woman. When members of the congregation protest that they have never seen her, he explains that he keeps her locked in the attic of Thornfield. Bertha’s entire family was insane; her parents tricked him into marrying her.

To prove his wife’s psychosis, Mr. Rochester invites the congregation up to the attic to see her. In the attic, they find Grace Poole bent over the fire, cooking, while in the corner of the room, a figure runs back and forth:

What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it groveled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face. (729-730)

Upon seeing Mr. Rochester, Bertha becomes agitated and attacks him. After her violent outburst, Mr. Rochester compares the wild Bertha with the calm quiet of Jane: “That is my wife […] Such is the sole conjugal embrace I am ever to know […] And this is what I wished to have” (732).

Mr. Briggs will clear Jane from all blame and attest to this to her Uncle John Eyre, who is acquainted with Mr. Mason through business. Mr. Mason stopped in Madeira on his way back to Jamaica when John Eyre received a letter from Jane about her future marriage. Worried for his niece, John Eyre sent Mr. Mason to England to disrupt the wedding.

Jane sits overwhelmed in her room. As she contemplates the events that have led up to this moment, a sudden calm washes over her. She prays that God will be with her and guide her to the right choice. 

Chapter 27 Summary

Emotionally exhausted, Jane falls asleep. When she wakes in the afternoon, she realizes she must leave Thornfield. She feels deeply conflicted, however.

Mr. Rochester tells Jane he never meant to hurt her and asks her forgiveness. Though Jane finds herself unable to put her forgiveness into words, she internally forgives him at that instant, noting, “There was such deep remorse in his eye, such true pity in his tone […] and besides, there was such unchanged love in his whole look and mien” (743). When he tries to kiss her, however, she refuses.

Desperate to escape Bertha, Mr. Rochester asks Jane to run away and live with him in the South of France. He tells Jane he will imprison Bertha even more tightly and pay Grace Poole a tremendous salary to keep watch over her. Jane accuses him of cruelty, but Mr. Rochester counters that his antipathy for Bertha goes much deeper than her mental illness, and that he would love Jane even if she lost her reason.

When Jane refuses his invitation to run away, Mr. Rochester tells the story of his marriage to Bertha. After college, his father sent him to Jamaica to pursue a marriage he had already arranged, eager to absorb a large fortune—30,000 pounds—that Bertha was supposed to inherit. Bertha’s beauty charmed the young Mr. Rochester, and her family strategically prevented him from spending any length of time with her. Thus, they were able to conceal her mental illness and convince him to follow through with the marriage.

Shortly after the wedding, Mr. Rochester learned that Bertha’s mother was not dead as the family had told him, but in an asylum; Bertha’s brother was mute and intellectually disabled. Bertha herself revealed “a nature […] gross, impure, depraved” (763).

Mr. Rochester attempted to live with Bertha for four years, during which time his father and brother died, leaving him with a great deal of money. He considered suicide, but ultimately decided to return to England and shelter Bertha in the safety of Thornfield Hall. To escape the pain of his marriage, he traveled around the world in search of women who could provide a sexual outlet, though he notes that he was always disappointed in his mistresses. Mr. Rochester feels very differently about Jane because her strange personality fascinates him, and he sees her as his intellectual equal.

Mr. Rochester begs Jane to “accept my pledge of fidelity and to give me yours” (785). Though greatly moved and internally conflicted, Jane refuses him. She tells him she must leave, but that she will pray for his soul.

That night, Jane gathers her belongings and leaves Thornfield. She pours out her inner agony in a direct address:

Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonised as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love. (801)

Chapters 23-27 Analysis

Chapters 23-27 feature a number of symbolic representations of the troubled, complex connection between Jane and Mr. Rochester. Just before declaring their love in the orchard, Mr. Rochester describes a mysterious physical tether between them:

a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if […] that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. (627)

Likewise, the lightning-split tree in the orchard is a mixed omen of their relationship. On the one hand, the weather-ravaged tree foreshadows the troubles Jane and Mr. Rochester will face: the revelation of his marriage to Bertha and Bertha’s later attempt to burn down Thornfield. On the other hand, Jane notices that in spite of the fire, the two halves of the tree have managed to cling together, as though bound by something powerful.

Bindings take on a more complex significance, however, as Jane reflects upon the dark control Mr. Rochester exercises over her in the weeks before their wedding. He behaves strangely and possessively, attempting to purchase silk gowns and jewels for Jane that she does not want. He ominously threatens to “figuratively speaking—attach you to a chain” (674). Fearing that Mr. Rochester holds too much control over her, Jane writes to her Uncle John in Madeira, which inadvertently alerts him to send his lawyer and Mr. Mason to Jane’s wedding.

The arrival of Mr. Briggs and Mr. Mason and the subsequent revelation of Mr. Rochester’s “mad woman in the attic”—a phrase made famous by the novel—introduces another image of bondage. Mr. Rochester has quite literally kept his first wife imprisoned—locked in the attic—with the justification that he was doing so for her own good and for the safety of others. His justification, and the fact that his descriptions of Bertha are tinged with racial bias, echoes the language used by British imperial colonists to rationalize their subjugation of natives.

Thus, when Jane withstands the temptation of running away with Mr. Rochester, she frees herself from his emotional hold over her, remaining true to her own independent values. By the end of the novel, however, their love will have transformed into a healthier and less fraught one.

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