Allusion To Blue Bear In Jane Eyre Essay

Essay 4 (Option A)

Charlotte Bronte, the author of Jane Eyre, alludes to the corridor in the story of Blue Beard by Charles Perrault. This allusion plays an important function in chapter eleven of Jane Eyre and is connected with the rest of the novel.

The story of Blue Beard consists of a man with a blue beard who is deemed ugly and frightful to all the ladies of the village, therefore is unable to obtain a wife. After allowing many residents of this village, including the ladies, to take full advantage of his wealth and possessions by permitting them to use all his apartments and houses, many of the women realize that this ugly, wealthy man was not so frightful. As a direct result of his generosity, he obtained a wife, one of the village girls. He lavished his new wife with admittance of entry into all his apartments, although forbidding access to his secret closet. Predictably, the wife disobeys her husband and is discovered guilty of entering this prohibited room.1

Bronte chose to allude to this mysterious corridor while describing Janes tour of her new residence and workplace, Thornfield Hall. Mrs. Fairfax, the housekeeper, introduces Jane to the third story of the mansion. This particular floor consisted of a long hall with two rows of small black doors, all shut, adding to their mystery, similar to the secret closet in Blue Beards castle. Bronte included this description of the third story hallway because it reveals Janes curiosity of discovering what these rooms contained.

Another similarity between this novel and Blue Beard is what the mysterious room symbolizes. Both enclose the secret of each masters, Blue Beards and Mr. Rochesters, past. In Blue Beard, Blue Beard is hiding the degrading and disgusting fact that he murdered all his previous wives and has kept their bodies in this secret closet, while Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre keeps his insane, but fully alive, Jamaican wife in a hidden third-story room. The opening of these secret and forbidden rooms introduces and reveals the masters dark pasts. Both men locked their incriminating lives behind closed doors, hoping that their discovery and revelation would not come to be.

Although these two stories contain many similarities, a master with no wife and a secret room enclosing a dark past, there are a multitude of differences between Jane and the wife of Blue Beard. Jane, when introduced to this mysterious hallway of small black doors, respects the privacy of her new master and does not open the secret doors, although she was never prohibited from doing so. Jane resists any temptation that she contains, showing highly regarded character. This is the opposite action of Blue Beards wife. She burned with curiosity immediately after she was prohibited entry to this secret closet. The story describes the wife as not having the ability to think of anything other than this temptation. Eventually, she loses control of her resistance and enters her husbands secret room only to reveal the worse possible discovery, the previous wives dead bodies lying in rotting piles on the closet floor. Each deals with the discovery of their masters incriminating pasts in a differing way. Jane, upon encountering Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochesters insane wife, acts in a calm and respectful manner, although terrified beyond what she has previously experienced, while Blue Beards wife becomes burdened with the knowledge of her husbands murders and develops a greater fear of her husbands reaction to her disobedience than of the discovered secret.

The corridor in Blue Beards castle in the story of Blue Beard is an excellent analogy to the third story hall of mysterious doors in Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre. This allusion functions as prophecy of the secret that Mr. Rochester kept behind one of these closed black doors, his wife, similar to the mystery that Blue Beard kept behind his closet door, all his murdered ex-wives.