A Pittsburghism in Jane Eyre

I have never in my life seen or heard this usage anywhere but Pittsburgh.

I am New England born and bred.

Jane to Rochester, after combing his hair.

"There, sir, you are redd up and made decent."

Chapter 37, Jane Eyre.

She has a happy ending and marries Rochester.

St. John has a happy ending and dies for his Lord.

It goes wrong right away

St. John wants all the more urgently to go to India, and does his level best to exploit his ascendency over Jane to get her to go with him as his wife, using both their 5,000 pound shares to finance a mission and both a boys' and a girls' school.

His sisters are fine with the marriage, though they, he, and Jane are completely aware he does not love her for one second.

But they fear she would die in India in less than a year, a belief she and he seem also to share.

Still, so great is his power over her that, though it defies everything she actually wants, she agrees to run off with him to die soon as a missionary schoolmistress but refuses the loveless marriage.

He is all the more firm and refuses to let her come along at all without binding herself once and for all to him, his life, and his control of her by marrying.

Of course he guilt-trips the hell out of her about it, forcing upon her the idea she has a religious duty to go with him to an early death in divine service, an idea which he seems to be quite successful in imposing on her, though no such thing ever in life for a moment entered her head, neither before nor after she first encountered her cousins.

He goes away for two weeks during which he wants her to think about it.

Before leaving he hectors her one last time.

She nearly surrenders, cries out to God, "What shall I do?"

She hears the voice of Rochester calling, "Jane! Jane! Jane!"

St. John leaves the next morning to begin his two weeks preparation for India.

Jane leaves to find Rochester.

Jane Eyre.

This won’t end well

A lately deceased uncle has left Jane 20,000 pounds, while leaving nothing to his nephew and nothing to his two other nieces.

Jane says this is unjust and an arbitrator agrees with her.

She wants to split the inheritance with her three cousins, 5,000 pounds each.

But her reason is that she is committed to never marrying, having abandoned Rochester, and she desperately wants to live happy ever after and quite at leisure with all three of her newfound cousins.

But St. John has known plans to leave the country to be a missionary in India and the two girls, his two sisters, beautiful, better educated, and more accomplished than Jane, are hardly likely to never marry, themselves.

All the less so if she makes them each rich.

But that is what she is doing, anyway.

Trying to buy herself a cozy little family with which to be happy ever after, all four living together in harmony and joy.

Jane Eyre.

Really so young?

We are 400 pages into a story of 527 pages and she says she is 19 years old.

Jane Eyre.

When Christian clergy write the marriage laws.

And the law of divorce, and the law of annulment.

You get the tragedy of Rochester and Jane Eyre.

And yet, how far would the conditions of her imprisonment have contributed to her madness?

Mrs. Rochester, of the West Indies, I mean.

But in the end it's really Jane's own fault.

"Mr. Rochester, I will not be yours," she says.

I think of The Mill on the Floss, and of George Eliot's heroine who rejected the rejection of convention Ms. Eliot did not reject.

Jane rejects Rochester and happiness because she is a Christian, advising prayer and hope for a good afterlife.

No kidding.

Reading Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece.