Jane Eyre Irony Quotes

This precious vessel was now placed on my knee, and I was cordially invited to eat the circlet of delicate pastry upon it. Vain favour! coming, like most other favours long deferred and often wished for, too late! I could not eat the tart; and the plumage of the bird, the tints of the flowers, seemed strangely faded: I put both plate and tart away.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 3. Bessie hands Jane some delicate pastry on a bright china plate with a picture of a bird of paradise painted on it. Having always admired the plate Jane had often asked to be allowed hold it, but was refused. Now when Bessie offers her the plate with some tart, it is ironic that Jane no longer wants it. The bird’s plumage are said to be “strangely faded,” representing Jane’s feelings after her traumatic experience of being locked in the red room.

Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the world only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 3. Jane is telling local apothecary Mr. Lloyd why she would refuse to live with caring relatives who are poor. Mrs. Reed has told Jane – falsely – that her Eyre relatives are poor and lower class. She has taught Jane that poverty is associated with unpleasantness and wickedness. It is ironic that Jane rejects the idea of going to live with relatives that she would have discovered are kind, educated and middle-class. She would have saved herself a lot of pain and misery at Lowood institution had she seen past Mrs. Reed’s lie. There is also irony in the fact that Jane is herself poor, even though she is allowed to live with her wealthy aunt.

Mr. Brocklehurst, I believe I intimated in the letter which I wrote to you three weeks ago, that this little girl has not quite the character and disposition I could wish: should you admit her into Lowood school, I should be glad if the superintendent and teachers were requested to keep a strict eye on her, and above all, to guard against her worst fault, a tendency toward deceit. I mention this in your hearing, Jane, that you may no attempt to impose on Mr. Brocklehurst.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 4. When Mr. Brocklehurst, supervisor of Lowood charity school for poor girls, arrives at Gateshead to decide if Jane will be accepted at his school, Mrs. Reed warns him that her niece is a liar. Her accusation about Jane is ironic, as Mrs. Reed is actually the deceitful one.

Consistency, madam, is the first of Christian duties; and it has been observed in every arrangement connected with the establishment of Lowood: plain fare, simple attire, unsophisticated accommodations, hardy and active habits; such is the order of the day in the house and its inhabitants.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 4. Mr. Brocklehurst says this to Mrs. Reed, but his words are later revealed to be very ironic and dripping with hypocrisy. The man who views himself as a good Christian claims that young women in his care need the deprivation that his school offers. And he preaches it in the name of “Christian duties.” But later in the novel the inhuman conditions at Lowood are revealed, as Jane tells us about “faminished” girls and how the scanty food supply is barely enough to keep a “delidate invalid” alive. Mr. Brocklehurst is the ultimate religious hypocrite who starves the girls at his school while his family lives a life of luxury.

“I have a Master to serve whose kingdom is not of this world; my mission is to mortify in these girls the lusts of the flesh; to teach them to clothe themselves with shame-facedness and sobriety – not with braided hair and costly apparel and each of the young persons before us has a string of hair twisted in plaits which vanity itself might have woven; these, I repeat, must be cut off; think of the time wasted, of – ”
Mr. Brocklehurst was here interrupted: three other visitors, ladies, now entered the room. They ought to have come a little sooner, to have heard his lecture on dress, for they were splendidly attired in velvet, silk, and furs. The two younger of the trio (fine girls of sixteen and seventeen) had grey beaver hats, then in fashion, shaded with ostrich plumes, and from under the brim of this graceful head-dress fell a profusion of light tresses, elaborately curled; the elder lady was enveloped in a costly velvet shawl, trimmed with ermine, and she wore a false front of French curls.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 7. Mr. Brockehurst lectures the Lowood pupils and their teacher Miss Temple on the importance of wearing plain clothes and straight hair with no curls. He believes that he is on a mission from God to save them from the “lusts of the flesh.” But the barefaced religious hypocrisy and irony of what he preaches are exposed when his wife and two daughters enter the room. They are adorned in luxurious clothing, covered in expensive silk and velvet and animal furs, and are displaying elaborate curls! While he and his family permit themselves to live extravagantly, the poor orphaned girls of Lowood must live plain lives.

Miss Ingram was a mark beneath jealousy; she was too inferior to excite the feeling…She was very showy, but she was not genuine. She had a fine person, many brilliant attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature…She was not good, she was not original…Tenderness and truth were not in her…Other eyes besides mine watched these manifestations of character…Yes, the future bride-groom, Mr. Rochester himself, exercised over his intended a ceaseless surveillance; and it was from this sagacity…this obvious absence of passion in his sentiments toward her, that my ever-torturing pain arose.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 18. Jane has watched Rochester and Blanche Ingram move closer to marriage, with both taking part in a mock-marriage charades game during Blanche’s stay Thornfield. But Jane doesn’t feel any jealousy. She ironically calls Blanche “inferior,” even though Blanche belongs to an aristocratic family and is a social class above Jane. But the real Blanche, as Jane sees her, is poor in mind and character, lacking in heart and full of show. Jane believes that Rochester doesn’t love Blanche, so it hurts her that he is going to marry her.

“Come to my side, Jane, and let us explain and understand one another.”
“I will never again come to your side: I am torn away now, and cannot return.”
“But, Jane, I summon you as my wife: it is you only I intend to marry.”
I was silent: I thought he mocked me.
“Come, Jane – come hither.”
“Your bride stands between us.”
He rose, and with a stride reached me.
“My bride is here,” he said, again drawing me to him, “because my equal is here, and my likeness. Jane, will you marry me?”

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 23. When Mr. Rochester proposes to Jane, she is full of doubt that a man of his social stature and wealth would want to marry a poor governess like her. She also thinks that Rochester is engaged to Miss Ingram. Rochester assures Jane of his feelings for her, saying that she is his equal and the one he wants for a bride. While Rochester loves Jane, his love is imperfect. For he doesn’t have the courage to tell Jane that he already has a wife – the mad Bertha Mason. So there is unintentional irony when Jane declares that “your bride stands between us,” mistakingly believing this to be Miss Ingram.

“This morning I wrote to my banker in London to send me certain jewels he has in his keeping, – heirlooms for the ladies of Thornfield. In a day or two I hope to pour them into your lap: for every privilege, every attention shall be yours that I would accord a peer’s daughter, if about to marry her.”
“Oh, sir! – never rain jewels! I don’t like to hear them spoken of. Jewels for Jane Eyre sounds unnatural and strange: I would rather not have them.”
“I will myself put the diamond chain round your neck, and the circlet on your forehead, – which it will become: for nature, at least, has stamped her patent of nobility on this brow, Jane; and I will clasp the bracelets on these fine wrists, and load these fairy-like fingers with rings.”
“No, no, sir! think of other subjects, and speak of other things, and in another strain. Don’t address me as if I were a beauty; I am your plain, Quakerish governess.”
“You are a beauty in my eyes, and a beauty just after the desire of my heart, – delicate and aërial.”
“Puny and insignificant, you mean. You are dreaming, sir, – or you are sneering. For God’s sake don’t be ironical!”

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 24. After proposing to Jane, Rochester wants to drape her in the family jewels and finery for their wedding, as befits her new social position. He wants the world to pay attention to Jane, as she is a beauty in his eyes. But the modest Jane doesn’t want any of this, it doesn’t feel natural or comfortable to her. She protests that she doesn’t see herself as a beauty, but is “your plain, Quakerish governess.” And she admonishes Rochester not to be ironical by calling her a beauty.

“The marriage cannot go on: I declare the existence of an impediment…It simply consists in the existence of a previous marriage; Mr. Rochester has a wife now living.” My nerves vibrated to these low-spoken words as they had never vibrated to thunder – my blood felt their subtle violence as it had never felt frost or fire…I looked at Mr. Rochester; I made him look at me…He disavowed nothing…Without speaking, without smiling, without seeming to recognize in me a human being, he only twined my waste with his arm, and riveted me to his side.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 26. Rochester’s secret that he aleady has a wife is ironically revealed at the altar of his wedding ceremony with Jane. It happens moments before they are to take their vows together and Jane is about to marry a bigamist. The heartbreaking news is delivered by London solicitor Mr. Briggs who interrupts the ceremony just as the clergyman asks Rochester will he take Jane for his wedded wife. It seems that Rochester married Creole woman Bertha Mason fifteen years earlier in Jamaica.

“Well, what did he want?”
“Merely to tell you that your uncle, Mr. Eyre of Madeira, is dead; that he has left you all his property, and that you are now rich – merely that – nothing more.”
“I! – rich?”
“Yes, you, rich – quite an heiress.”

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 33. Jane is astonished to learn from St. John that she has inherited a fortune of twenty thousand pounds from her late uncle John Eyre. There is a certain irony here, as the despised impoverished orphan child Jane becomes an heiress and more successful than her spoiled Reed cousins.
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