Jane resolves to control her feelings for Rochester

After the arrival of the fashionable house party at Thornfield Hall, Jane Eyre found herself in an agonizing position. She had fallen deeply in love with Mr. Rochester, yet every sign—his constant attendance on the beautiful Blanche Ingram, the gossip of the household, and the vast social gulf between a governess and a landed gentleman—pointed toward his imminent marriage to another woman. Rather than indulge in hopeless fantasy, Jane resolved to take control of her own emotions through a deliberate and almost surgical act of self-discipline.

The Verdict of Reason

The turning point came on the night after Mrs. Fairfax described Blanche Ingram in detail—tall, dark, majestic, accomplished—and confirmed that Mr. Rochester had gone to a party at the Leas where Blanche was present. Alone in her room, Jane conducted an internal trial. Memory gave evidence of the hopes and wishes she had cherished since the night she saved Rochester from the fire; Reason then delivered a harsh verdict: she had been a fool, a "fantastic idiot" who had "surfeited herself on sweet lies, and swallowed poison as if it were nectar." She accused herself of stupidity for reading meaning into the occasional tokens of preference shown by a gentleman of family to a dependent, and declared it "madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it."

The Discipline of the Two Portraits

To make this self-rebuke concrete and permanent, Jane devised a practical exercise. She resolved to draw two portraits: first, a faithful chalk self-portrait, "without softening one defect," to be labeled "Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain." Second, on a piece of smooth ivory, she would paint the loveliest face she could imagine—Blanche Ingram, with raven ringlets, an oriental eye, a Grecian neck, diamond rings, and a golden rose. The instruction she gave herself was brutal: whenever she was tempted to fancy that Mr. Rochester thought well of her, she was to take out the two pictures and compare them, asking whether a man who could win a noble lady's love would waste a serious thought on an "indigent and insignificant plebeian." She carried out the task within a fortnight, and the contrast between the two images was as great as self-control could desire. The work gave force and fixedness to the new impressions she wished to stamp indelibly on her heart.

Maintaining the Resolve

The discipline proved immediately useful. When Mr. Rochester remained absent for over a fortnight, Jane felt a "sickening sense of disappointment" but rallied her wits and reminded herself that she had nothing to do with the master of Thornfield beyond receiving her salary and being grateful for kind treatment. She forced herself to keep to her caste, warning herself not to lavish the love of her whole heart where it would be despised. When the house party finally arrived and she saw Rochester ride at Blanche Ingram's side, she pointed out the circumstance to Mrs. Fairfax, outwardly calm. In the drawing-room that evening, she sat in the shade behind a window-curtain, watching him with an "acute pleasure" that was "pure gold, with a steely point of agony," but she did not betray herself. She noted that he never once turned his eyes in her direction, and she bore it.

The Cost and the Continuation

Jane's resolution did not extinguish her love; it only forced it underground. She admitted to herself that she could not unlove him merely because he ceased to notice her, and that she read daily in Blanche's proud security the likelihood of their marriage. Yet she refused to indulge in jealousy, judging Blanche too inferior in genuine worth to excite the feeling. The pain she suffered was not jealousy but a deeper anguish: she saw that Rochester did not truly love Blanche, that he was going to marry her for family or political reasons, and that Blanche could never charm him. This knowledge made the situation more torturing, not less. Still, Jane held to her course, and when she later returned from Gateshead after Mrs. Reed's death, she found that the discipline had served her well: she could meet subsequent occurrences with a "decent calm" that would have been impossible had she not prepared herself.