Fire at Thornfield Hall

The Fire at Thornfield Hall is the novel's most violent and transformative event, a conflagration that simultaneously destroys the ancestral home, liberates its hidden madwoman, and punishes and purifies its master. It is the physical and moral crisis that resolves the central impediment to Jane and Rochester's union, reducing the gilded prison of the past to a blackened ruin and leaving Rochester stripped of his pride, his sight, and one hand—a broken but redeemable man.

Causes and Background

The fire was not an accident but the deliberate act of Bertha Antoinetta Mason, Rochester's mad wife, who had been secretly confined for ten years in a third-storey cell under the care of Grace Poole. Bertha had a history of violent, cunning escapes during her keeper's lapses: she had once attempted to burn Rochester in his bed and had later torn Jane's wedding veil. The immediate trigger was the collapse of Rochester's plan to marry Jane, exposed at the altar by the revelation of Bertha's existence. After Jane fled Thornfield, Rochester became savage with disappointment, dismissed most of the household, and shut himself up like a hermit. The fire broke out at dead of night, just about harvest-time, when the house was largely empty of guests and servants.

What Happens

Bertha, taking advantage of Grace Poole's drunken sleep, stole the keys, let herself out of her chamber, and began her work of destruction. She first set fire to the hangings of the room next her own, then descended to a lower storey and made her way to the chamber that had been the governess's—an act of deliberate spite, as if she knew how matters had gone. Fortunately, no one was sleeping in that bed. The flames spread rapidly; by the time the engines arrived from Millcote, the building was one mass of flame. Rochester, who was at home, ascended to the attics, roused the servants from their beds, and helped them down himself. He then went back to rescue his mad wife from her cell. She had escaped onto the roof, where she stood above the battlements, a big woman with long black hair streaming against the flames, shouting till she could be heard a mile off. Rochester climbed through a skylight onto the roof and called to her—"Bertha!"—but she yelled, gave a spring, and the next minute lay smashed on the pavement, dead as the stones on which her brains and blood were scattered. As Rochester descended the great staircase at last, after everyone else was out, a great crash brought the whole structure down. He was taken out from under the ruins, alive but terribly hurt: a beam had fallen in such a way as to protect him partly, but one eye was knocked out, one hand so crushed that the surgeon had to amputate it immediately, and the other eye inflamed until he lost the sight of that also.

Consequences and Aftermath

The fire left Thornfield Hall a blackened ruin—a well-like wall, very high and very fragile-looking, perforated with paneless windows, with no roof, no battlements, no chimneys. The front was exactly as Jane had once seen it in a dream. Winter snows drifted through the void arch, spring vegetation grew among the drenched piles of rubbish. The property was destroyed, but the legal and moral obstacle to Rochester's marriage was removed with Bertha's death. Rochester himself was left stone-blind and a cripple, his left arm amputated, his face scarred by fire. He retreated to Ferndean Manor, a desolate, insalubrious house buried deep in a wood, where he lived with only old John and his wife, refusing all other company, sunk in a dark, dreary, hopeless existence. It was to this broken, sightless, but now free man that Jane returned, drawn by his supernatural call, and it was at Ferndean that she found him—no longer the proud, imperious master of Thornfield, but a man humbled by suffering, ready at last to accept love on equal terms.