Character Analysis
What Character Analysis Means in Jane Eyre
Strong OCR answers on Jane Eyre treat characters as Brontë’s tools rather than real people. Each character is a vehicle for an idea about gender, class or faith. Your job is to analyse what she does with them: what quality they carry, how that quality changes, and what Brontë argues by showing us that change.
A character paragraph needs three moves: (1) the writer’s choice (‘Brontë presents…’), (2) a short embedded quotation, (3) a link to Victorian context or theme. Miss any one and the paragraph drops a band.
Jane: an Arc in Five Settings
Jane’s development is mapped onto the five main settings. At Gateshead she is the angry child (“I am not deceitful”); at Lowood she is the disciplined pupil learning from Helen and Miss Temple; at Thornfield she finds voice (“I am no bird”); at Moor House she is the independent heiress who refuses St John (“I scorn your idea of love”); at Ferndean she is the chosen equal (“Reader, I married him”). Treating the novel as a Bildungsroman lets you link geography to growth.
A useful revision task is to match one short quotation to each stage. Keep the quotations short — embedded quotation works better than block quotes. Four words, accurately placed, beats a forty-word block quote.
Rochester begins as a Byronic hero — brooding, sardonic, secretive. Brontë uses him to interrogate Victorian ideas of male dominance. Track him in three phases: the mysterious master (Thornfield), the would-be bigamist (the interrupted wedding), and the humbled husband (Ferndean). He is never simply redeemed; rather he is rebalanced.
Useful quotations: “Bigamy is an ugly word”; “You have saved my life”; “it still renews hope”. Each corresponds to a different phase of his arc. Always attribute Rochester’s change to Brontë’s authorial purpose, not to his own decision.
Bertha: the Madwoman in the Attic
Bertha Mason is often treated as plot-furniture. She is actually Brontë’s most charged character. She is Jane’s doppelgänger: every time Jane represses rage, Bertha acts it out — the torn veil, the fires. She is also a figure of colonial violence: Brontë inherits and perpetuates Victorian language about Creole women that modern criticism (notably Jean Rhys and Gayatri Spivak) has interrogated.
A top-band candidate handles Bertha by holding two readings together: what Brontë intends (Bertha as Rochester’s past coming home) and what she accidentally reveals (the silencing of a Creole woman to secure a white heroine’s happiness). Both are legitimate; neither cancels the other.
St John Rivers: Cold Duty
St John is not villainous but wrong for Jane. Brontë uses him to show a second kind of temptation: a marriage of duty without desire. His “cold, cumbrous column” description is a physical metaphor for moral rigidity. Track his three roles: rescuer, cousin, suitor. Each role tests Jane’s autonomy.
Brontë builds a three-tier religious scheme: Brocklehurst (hypocritical), Helen (patient), St John (rigorous). None of them is a model for Jane, who creates a fourth model — faith with love — through her marriage.
Minor Characters as Moral Instruments
Helen Burns, Miss Temple, Mrs Reed, Grace Poole and Adèle all play small but weighted roles. The most useful technique is to ask: what does this character reveal when placed next to Jane? Helen’s patience exposes Jane’s fire; Mrs Reed’s cruelty sharpens Jane’s speech; Adèle’s vanity offers a child-version of Blanche’s adult shallowness. Brontë writes no minor character carelessly — each serves the novel’s argument.
Use a PEAL template. Open with Brontë’s intention; embed a quotation; zoom in on a single word; lift to Victorian context; link back to the question. The key difference from basic PEE or PEA is that L — the link — shows you are still answering the original prompt.
Avoid biographical paragraphs (‘Brontë’s father was a clergyman’) unless the biography directly illuminates the line you quoted. Otherwise it becomes a detour that costs you time and earns no marks.
Building a Quotation Bank by Character
For every main character, aim to memorise four short quotations — one for each major stage. For Jane: ‘I am not deceitful’ (Gateshead), ‘soulless and heartless’ (Thornfield), ‘I am no bird’ (proposal), ‘Reader, I married him’ (ending). For Rochester: ‘Bigamy is an ugly word’ (wedding), ‘it still renews hope’ (Ferndean). For St John: ‘a cold, cumbrous column’ and ‘formed for labour, not for love’. Building these tiny banks per character means that in the exam you can pull an accurate phrase from memory without panicking about long recitations.