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Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Gulliver's Travels:
In Chapter 3, Jane rereads Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. This allusion introduces the novel's colonial backdrop, and it also emphasizes that Jane might be an unreliable narrator when it comes to distinguishing facts from fantasy:
I considered [Gulliver's Travels] a narrative of facts, and discovered in it a vein of interest deeper than what I found in fairy tales: [...] Lilliput and Brobdingnag being, in my creed, solid parts of the earth’s surface, I doubted not that I might one day, by taking a long voyage, see with my own eyes the little fields, houses, and trees, the diminutive people, the tiny cows, sheep, and birds of the one realm; and the cornfields forest-high, the mighty mastiffs, the monster cats, the tower-like men and women of the other.
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Chapter 9
Explanation and Analysis—Hope's Steps:
The narrator personifies the concept of hope in Chapter 9, when she describes the Lowood gardens in spring:
Unlock with LitCharts A+[A] greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshing daily, suggested the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her steps.
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Chapter 11
Explanation and Analysis—Autobiography as Art:
Throughout the novel, which styles itself "an autobiography," the narrator crafts her image as an artist and styles the novel as an artistic creation. For example, Chapter 11 begins with a comparison between a novel and a play:
Unlock with LitCharts A+A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you see a room in the George Inn at Millcote [...]
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Chapter 13
Explanation and Analysis—Autobiography as Art:
Throughout the novel, which styles itself "an autobiography," the narrator crafts her image as an artist and styles the novel as an artistic creation. For example, Chapter 11 begins with a comparison between a novel and a play:
Unlock with LitCharts A+A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you see a room in the George Inn at Millcote [...]
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Explanation and Analysis—Sublime Visions:
The imagery with which Jane describes her watercolor paintings in Chapter 13 emphasizes the fact that the novel is told by an unreliable narrator. The watercolors represent landscapes Jane has tried to recreate through the filter of her imagination:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The first represented clouds low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea: all the distance was in eclipse; so, too, was the foreground; or, rather, the nearest billows, for there was no land. One gleam of light lifted into relief a half-submerged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with foam[.]
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