Thornfield Quotes

All these relics gave to the third storey of Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the past: a shrine to memory. I liked the hush, the gloom, the quaintness of these retreats in the day; but I by no means coveted a night’s repose on one of those wide and heavy beds: shut in, some of them, with doors of oak; shaded, others, with wrought old-English hangings crusted with thick work, portraying effigies of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and strangest human beings, – all which would have looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam of moonlight.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 11. Mrs. Fairfax gives Jane a tour of Thornfield Hall. From Jane’s description the house is Gothic and foreboding, with its air of gloom and silence, “relics” of old furniture, and paintings of strange flowers, birds and human beings.

I lingered in the long passageway to which this led, separating the front and back rooms of the third story: narrow, low, and dim, with only one little window at the far end, and looking, with its two rows of small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 11. Jane gives us her first eerie impressions of the third story of her new home at Thornfield, with its secrets and locked rooms. There is a spooky creepiness about the place. Bluebeard was, according to the French folktale, a wealthy who was in the habit of murdering his wives and hiding their bodies in a locked room, which his latest wife was forbidden to enter. The reference to Bluebeard is foreshadowing of the secret that that will later be revealed about Thornfield’s locked attic.

I did not like re-entering Thornfield. To pass its threshold was to return to stagnation; to cross the silent hall, to ascend the darksome staircase, to seek my own lonely little room, and then to meet tranquil Mrs. Fairfax, and spend the long winter evening with her, and her only, was to quell wholly the faint excitement wakened by my walk, – to slip again over my faculties the viewless fetters of an uniform and too still existence; of an existence whose very privileges of security and ease I was becoming incapable of appreciating.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 12. Jane is restless and feels imprisoned in Thornfield, where she speaks of a life of “stagnation” and the “lonely little room” she lives in. The passage paints a picture of Jane feeling trapped in a life of uniformity and yearning to break free from her fetters to experience freedom and opportunity.

During the moment I was silent, Miss Eyre, I was arranging a point with my destiny. She stood there, by that beech-trunk – a hag like one of those who appeared to Macbeth on the heath of Forres. “You like Thornfield?” she said, lifting her finger; and then she wrote in the air a memento, which ran in lurid hieroglyphics all along the house-front, between the upper and lower row of windows. “Like it if you can! Like it if you dare!”
“I will like it,” said I. “I dare like it.”

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 15. Rochester makes this speech to Jane after they ascend the avenue at Thornfield and he stops and lifts his eyes up to the battlements. His eyes are said to reflect pain and shame as he refers to the as yet unknown hag he describes as “my destiny.” The hag is Bertha, the secret wife he keeps locked in his attic. Using a simile Rochester compares the hag to the witches of Macbeth, giving an other-worldly and Gothic atmosphere to the passage. Like Macbeth, Rochester too has a wife who went mad.

“The glamour of inexperience is over your eyes,” he answered; “and you see it through a charmed medium: you cannot discern that the gilding is slime and the silk draperies cobwebs; that the marble is sordid slate, and the polished woods mere refuse chips and scaly bark.”

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 20. Rochester says this to Jane, after he calls his home at Thornfield a “mere dungeon” and she remarks that it is a “splendid mansion.” Rochester uses a series of metaphors to compare the gilding, silk draperies, marble and polished woods to slime, cobwebs, slate and refuse chips.

I grieve to leave Thornfield: I love Thornfield – I love it, because I have lived in it a full and delightful life, – momentarily at least. I have not been trampled on. I have not been petrified. I have not been buried with inferior minds, and excluded from every glimpse of communion with what is bright and energetic, and high. I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence; with what I delight in, – with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind. I have known you, Mr. Rochester; and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see the necessity of departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 23. A sobbing Jane opens up to Rochester on her thoughts of losing her new home in Thornfield. There she led a happy and full life and felt a sense of belonging. She is particularly upset at being separated from Rochester, a man she clearly loves. Jane uses a stark simile to describe how having to quit Thornfield is like a death to her. But she makes clear that it is impossible for her to stay as she believes Rochester is to marry Miss Ingram. Rochester has been goading Jane with the news that he is soon to marry Miss Ingram. This is particularly cruel of him. His motive is be to make Jane jealous and discover how deeply she really feels about him.

On sleeping, I continued in dreams the idea of a dark and gusty night. I continued also the wish to be with you, and experienced a strange, regretful consciousness of some barrier dividing us. During all my first sleep, I was following the windings of an unknown road; total obscurity environed me; rain pelted me; I was burdened with the charge of a little child: a very small creature, too young and feeble to walk, and which shivered in my cold arms, and wailed piteously in my ear…I dreamt another dream, sir: that Thornfield Hall was a dreary ruin, the retreat of bats and owls. I thought that of all the stately front nothing remained but a shell-like wall, very high and very fragile-looking…I still carried the unknown little child: I might not lay it down anywhere, however tired were my arms…I must retain it. I heard the gallop of a horse at a distance on the road; I was sure it was you; and you were departing for many years for a distant country. I climbed the thin wall with frantic perilous haste, eager to catch one glimpse of you from the top: the stones rolled from under my feet, the ivy branches that I grasped gave way, the child clung round my neck in terror, and almost strangled me…I bent forward to take a last look; the wall crumbled; I was shaken; the child rolled from my knee, I lost my balance, fell, and woke.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 25. As they are about to be married, Jane tells Rochester about two dreams she had the previous night. In the first she is on a long and dark road trying to reach Rochester, while a small terrified and crying child clings to her neck and impedes her progress. The second dream takes her to Rochester’s Gothic ancestral manor, destroyed and in ruin, and she loses her balance and drops the child as Rochester rides away from her. Jane’s prophetic dreams are foreshadowing of the end of Thornfield Hall when Bertha sets fire to the place, and also of trouble ahead in her relationship with Rochester. Jane has the ability to foresee the future in her dreams.

Thornfield Hall is quite a ruin; it was burned down just about harvest time. A dreadful calamity! such an immense quantity of valuable property destroyed; hardly any other furniture could be saved. The fire broke out at dead of night, and before the engines arrived from Millcote, the building was one mass of flame. It was a terrible spectacle; I witnessed it myself.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 36. Jane learns from the proprietor of a local inn that Thornfield burned down late one night at harvest time. A lot of valuable property was lost in the blaze.

It was all his own courage, and a body may say, his kindness, in a way, ma’am; he wouldn’t leave the house till every one else was out before him. As he came down the great stair-case at last, after Mrs. Rochester had flung herself from the battlements, there was a great crash – all fell. He was taken out from under the ruins, alive, but sadly hurt…He is now helpless, indeed – blind and a cripple.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 36. Jane is told by the inn owner that after Bertha Mason set fire to Thornfield, Mr. Rochester bravely saved the servants from the burning house. He tried to save Bertha, but she jumped from the roof to her death. Rochester lost his sight and one of his hands in the fire, Jane hears.
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