Mr. Rochester In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

In Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester tries in vain to convince Jane to stay with him even though he has a living wife; he gives a heartfelt plea that is almost pityingly vulnerable in its honesty, but Jane’s integrity keeps her passion in check and she remains unswayed by his revelations. Meanwhile, Mr. Rochester, in damning the women he’d kept as mistresses, damns himself to a life apart from Jane, devoid of love and joy, by steeling her resolve to leave him and not become the successor of “[those] poor girls” (Brontë 337), thereby intimating the self-destructive nature of exploiting fellow humans. Leading up to the lengthy monologue during which he explains how he came to love Jane, Mr. Rochester describes his previous engagements with the likes of Céline, Giancinta, and Clara, reviling the three of them and saying of the latter two, “What was their beauty to me in a few weeks” (336)? When Jane questions his judgment and moral backbone, Rochester accedes, “It was a grovelling …show more content…
Curiously, though he previously scorned the women themselves, here he instead homes in on “the time passed” with them, during which he was their master. It circles back to the self-reproach he first touched on and solidifies the demonstration of self-knowledge that he was gravely mistaken in his wanton, heedless ways. Knowing that he sought “the antipodes of the Creole” and that he saw debauchery as one of Bertha’s defining characteristics, something he “hated, and hate[s]” (336), it becomes clear Rochester recognizes something within himself that is less than. His repetition of “hate,” the be-all, end-all of torrid, forcefully negative language, ties together both sentiments—that of the time spent with his mistresses with the baseness borne in him by doing so, the inescapability of it embodied by the shackle of matrimony he bore with