Sunday, September 28, 2008
Beauty
It seems that beauty as a feature added to scenery or characters inevitably leads to death and destruction in this book. Where the plain featured Jane is involved, it is like Beauty itself spits in her face constantly. First, beauty thrives in the presence of Georgiana and Jane’s lack thereof a true family; next, with the beautiful spring months in Lowood, when typhus fever breaks out. There is a particularly beautiful scene depicted on page 94 in which Jane watches the moon rise, enjoying its majesty in the presence of the fragrance of flowers and the calmness of dew on the ground. That same night, Helen Burns is announced to be dead by morning. Where ever beauty goes, death and despair follow. Through these subtle features added to characters or scenery, I believe Bronte is trying to put across the irrelevance of beauty in the matter of life and death. Helen Burns dies, but believes in the equality of souls in the afterlife, regardless of good or bad deeds, and Jane believes Helen beautiful from the inside. Even with the introduction to Mr. Rochester, Jane does not believe him a handsome man in the slightest, but he is attractive through his other qualities. In the scheme of life, and especially in this book, beauty is relative.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Is she trying to argue for the irrelevancy of beauty, or to make us reconsider how we define the term. Certainly, Jane seems to have an inner beauty that Bronte wants us to acknowledge as superior to, say, Blanche's good looks (though, it's interesting how, as the book progresses, we hear from Diana and later from John's wife that maybe Jane isn't quite as ugly (even on the outside) as we'd been lead to believe).
Post a Comment