Got here via sophia_sol's pinboard. Hope you don't mind me chiming in!
Oooh, fascinating. I absolutely agree with you on this. Rochester has no idea how to react to Jane, and it's nice to meet another person who thinks that he honestly didn't mean to propose to her then and afterwards has no idea how to handle it. Particularly since so many of their conflicts during their engagement come from Jane's expectations of what it means to be a poor governess engaged to a rich man.
(As an aside, have you ever read Mary Stewart's Nine Coaches Waiting? There are a lot of fun, tongue-in-cheek references to Jane Eyre, particularly about the main character—a governess, of course—building her employers up to be much more class-conscious than they are.)
There's all this talk about the relationship being so very dubcon: Rochester has all the power, Rochester is trying to trick her into marrying him when he's already married, etc. And there is a lot of truth in that, but I've never seen it as quite that simple. Jane managed to escape him—not without terrifying personal sacrifice, it's true, and much dramatic Wandering on the Moors—, but there's no escape from Bertha for Rochester.
I am considerably less coherent than I'd like to be, but I wanted to let you know that I thought your post was thought-provoking and really, really interesting.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-06-28 12:38 am (UTC)Oooh, fascinating. I absolutely agree with you on this. Rochester has no idea how to react to Jane, and it's nice to meet another person who thinks that he honestly didn't mean to propose to her then and afterwards has no idea how to handle it. Particularly since so many of their conflicts during their engagement come from Jane's expectations of what it means to be a poor governess engaged to a rich man.
(As an aside, have you ever read Mary Stewart's Nine Coaches Waiting? There are a lot of fun, tongue-in-cheek references to Jane Eyre, particularly about the main character—a governess, of course—building her employers up to be much more class-conscious than they are.)
There's all this talk about the relationship being so very dubcon: Rochester has all the power, Rochester is trying to trick her into marrying him when he's already married, etc. And there is a lot of truth in that, but I've never seen it as quite that simple. Jane managed to escape him—not without terrifying personal sacrifice, it's true, and much dramatic Wandering on the Moors—, but there's no escape from Bertha for Rochester.
I am considerably less coherent than I'd like to be, but I wanted to let you know that I thought your post was thought-provoking and really, really interesting.