Finding a Place to Live in Brontë's Jane Eyre The best novels, like the best people, are in conflict. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Erye is certainly no exception. At times, the novel seems almost at war with itself, an impression that can only be explored in depth here. Jane Eyre navigates complex and treacherous territory between various extremes, mapping these spaces in rich detail for her “dear reader.” The novel takes place on the border between the old hierarchical social order of the ancient regime and the emerging autonomy of a more modern sense of self. She undertakes various pilgrimages through places where women struggle (with varying degrees of success) to reclaim meaningful freedom while living under the decisions of now-absent men. Perhaps most urgently, it seeks fertile ground between the desperate extremes of human possibility – between passion (the “dark” madness of Bertha Mason) and reason (the logocentric rationalism of St. John Rivers). I finally found such a place to stay. One might wonder why Brontë, at the very end of the novel, returns to the story of St. John Rivers. For Brontë (and presumably for her contemporaries), the trajectory of immediate passion is obvious enough – Bertha's life consumed in her own fiery unreason, a fate that requires no further explanation to the Victorian mind – but the internal logic of Bertha's choices St. John remains less noticeable. clear. Brontë needs to elaborate the destiny of a man like Saint John, who based his life on the passage from heart to mind, from human pathos to divine logos. Jane Eyre is finally an investigation into the possibilities of human integrity. At the end of the novel, Brontë turns to her cold and lonely grandmother... in the center of the paper......ochester is not a simple “happy ending”. Brontë's Victorian critics were acutely sensitive to the anger that had accompanied Jane's life, and could not understand her rejection of what must have seemed to them a noble example of Christian morality in St. John Rivers. The attentive contemporary reader might note the curious violence surrounding Jane's final trajectory to closure: “My Edward and I, then, are happy” (385). Perhaps this resolution represents an incomplete (and somewhat forced) fusion of conflicting elements, rather than a reconciling synthesis. But in the end Jane arrives at the place she wanted; finds a way to create a life for himself and those he loves, under the grace of a God of ordinary things. Works Cited Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 2001.