How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Volume.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
"No wonder you have rather the look of another world. I marvelled where you had got that sort of face. When you came upon me in Hay Lane last night, I thought unaccountably of fairy tales, and had half a mind to demand whether you had bewitched my horse: I am not sure yet. Who are your parents?"
"I have none."
"Nor ever had, I suppose: do you remember them?"
"No."
"I thought not. And so you were waiting for your people when you sat on that stile?
"For whom, sir?"
"For the men in green: it was a proper moonlight evening for them. Did I break through one of your rings, that you spread that damned ice on the causeway?"
I shook my head. "The men in green all forsook England a hundred years ago," said I, speaking as seriously as he had done. "And not even in Hay Lane or the fields about it could you find a trace of them. I don’t think either summer or harvest, or winter moon, will ever shine on their revels more." (1.13.40-47)
At Jane’s second meeting with Rochester, he accuses her, playfully, of being a fairy or a sprite who enchanted his horse and caused the accident in which he sprained his ankle. Jane isn’t about to be outdone and banters with him readily and quick-wittedly, seeming to take fairy tales as seriously as he himself is pretending to do.
Although Jane’s unearthly fairy qualities are mostly a joke here, there is definitely something strange and uncanny about her quiet demeanor, plain dress, and strong personality. Rochester has met his match—and she is a little bit eerie.
Quote #5
Then my own thoughts worried me. What crime was this that lived incarnate in this sequestered mansion, and could neither be expelled nor subdued by the owner?—what mystery, that broke out now in fire and now in blood, at the deadest hours of night? What creature was it, that, masked in an ordinary woman’s face and shape, uttered the voice, now of a mocking demon, and anon of a carrion-seeking bird of prey? (2.5.54)
Whoa, suddenly we’re reading a Gothic novel! There’s a secret and unnamable crime at Thornfield that can’t be solved for mysterious reasons! Of course, we’ll find out that it is a human woman—we won’t call her ordinary—behind the arson and the bite wounds at Thornfield, not a demon or a vampire.
The most disturbing part of the story is that this terrible crime isn’t supernatural—just unnatural.
Quote #6
Presentiments are strange things! and so are sympathies; and so are signs; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not yet found the key. I never laughed at presentiments in my life, because I have had strange ones of my own. Sympathies, I believe, exist (for instance, between far-distant, long-absent, wholly estranged relatives asserting, notwithstanding their alienation, the unity of the source to which each traces his origin) whose workings baffle mortal comprehension. And signs, for aught we know, may be but the sympathies of Nature with man. (2.6.1)
Foreshadowing’s a strange thing too, and so is symbolism, and so are little hints from the author about supernatural tricks she’ll use later to bring the main characters back together when they’re dozens of miles apart. Erm, what’s that called? Yeah, a deus ex machina.
This passage is important because it’s one of the only moments that Jane actually claims to the reader that she does believe in some kind of supernatural foreknowledge and also a psychic connection between people. Still, Jane suggests that these seemingly supernatural connections may have natural explanations that we just don’t know about.