Commentary-Jane Eyre(red-room)

Commentary on “Jane Eyre” This particular excerpt of Charlotte Brönte’s “Jane Eyre” is in prose, told in a first person narrative. It is about the last moments that Jane Eyre is locked in the “red room” after being wrongly accused of pouncing on Mrs. Reed’s son, in which her mind has drifted off to the topic of ghosts and spirits coming back from the dead to take revenge on the living and …

…goings-on. However, there is one particular sentence where I did feel that the language was foregrounded: “...she sincerely looked on me as a compound of virulent passions, mean spirit and dangerous duplicity.” There is even alliteration (which there doesn’t seem to be in the rest of the text): “dangerous duplicity”. The effect that the language has here is that it is so sly and ‘intelligent’ that it actually compliments the meaning of the sentence!