The following passages in Chapter 27 help us to understand Jane's motives for leaving Rochester in the first place:
(Rochester:) "...Hiring a mistress is the next worse thing to buying a slave: both are often by nature, and always by position, inferior: and to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading. I now hate the recollection of the time I passed with Celine, Giacinta, and Clara."
I felt the truth of these words; and I drew from them the certain inference, that if I were so far to forget myself and all the teaching that had ever been instilled into me, as--under any pretext--with any justification--through any temptation--to become the successor of these poor girls, he would one day regard me with the same feeling which now in his mind desecrated their memory. I did not give utterance to this conviction: it was enough to feel it. I impressed it on my heart, that it might remain there to serve me as aid in the time of trial.
.......(Rochester:)"Is it better to drive a fellow-creature to despair than to transgress a mere human law, no man being injured by the breach? for you have neither relatives nor acquaintances whom you need fear to offend by living with me?"
This was true: and while he spoke my very conscience and reason turned traitors against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him. They spoke almost as loud as Feeling: and that clamoured wildly. "Oh, comply!" it said. "Think of his misery; think of his danger--look at his state when left alone; remember his headlong nature; consider the recklessness following on despair--soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his. Who in the world cares for YOU? or who will be injured by what you do?"
Still indomitable was the reply--"I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad--as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth--so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane--quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot."
Jane has principles and a sense of self-worth which guide her in her decision to leave Edward. Nonetheless, as she stumbles her way to the coach-stop, she hates herself for hurting her master:
...In the midst of my pain of heart and frantic effort of principle, I abhorred myself. I had no solace from self- approbation: none even from self-respect. I had injured--wounded-- left my master. I was hateful in my own eyes.
A year later, having heard Rochester's outcry from afar, she returns to Thornfield in order that she may "know something of him whose voice seemed last night to summon [her]". But, of course, she experiences the conflict between conscience (the monitor) and heart that I describe in a previous post.
Who knows where the time goes?
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joyceday
12 years ago
No I would have left because I would know that this could not be what God had for me since His Word tells us that we are not to commit adultery. I would feel great compassion for Rochester based on how he was tricked into the marriage and I would not be angry with him for trying to have some happiness. It would be extremely difficult but I would have to leave or else become one of the women he despised from his past.
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