Red Room Symbolism

In the second place, Rochester tells Jane much like a nervous and shy bird. He said “I see intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage; a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high. You are still bent on going” (Bronte 119). But, one side Rochester give her authority only to be a listener rather than narrator that means he also want her to be cage bird, and obeyed him. Furthermore, physically, Jane is again compared with bird by Rochester when he took her into his arms to kiss her. “Jane, be still; don’t struggle so, like a wild, frantic bird that is rending its own plumage in its desperation” (Bronte 216). Rochester feel her is beginning to grow, asserting …show more content…
Red room is the bedroom where Jane’s uncle died. Red room described its haunted atmosphere of fear by the description of the physical aspects of the room because of the Gothic status of this novel. But some critics argue that red room was a symbol of womb for Jane in order to reborn as an obedient child, that is why she was locked in red room. First stage of Jane’s life with Reed family was very passionate and angry. “‘Wicked and cruel boy!’ I said. ‘You are like a murderer-like a slave-driver—you are like the Roman emperors!’” (Bronte 8). Fire is a symbolic of her emotions, which shows her internal anger when she called cruel and murderer to her cousin John Reed because she is an orphan and poor child. She is a picture of passion who always ready to attack on her cousin. In the Reed house, when Jane is reading Bewick’s History of British Birds while sitting in a window with "folds of scarlet drapery” enclosing her from the right and “clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating her from the drear November day" at Gateshead Hall (Bronte 1). The cold and wet window with red curtains depict the theme of fire and water. Solomon argues in his article Jane Eyre: Fire and Water that fire and water are two symbols which show the character of Jane, and her strengths and weaknesses which depend on the location and the characters around her. She is an absorbent personality, who is influenced by these dominant tropes that lie within certain characters of the novel, but she is never fully controlled by any of them. It is this duality within her that allows her to escape both extremes, the fiery Edward Rochester and the ice-cold St. John Rivers, and to finally land in a “golden mean” between “the flames of passion and the waters of pure reason” (Solomon 217). These images of fire and water are located in five different places in the novel. Fire