Jane Eyre Moon Quotes

The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 1. As Jane reads a book on birds, the author makes striking use of pathetic fallacy, with the images of the natural world accurately mirroring Jane’s own feelings and emotions. Jane is the rock standing alone in the swollen sea, the broken boat on a desolate coast, the ghastly moon peering at a sinking wreck. Each is a metaphorical symbol of her desolation at Gateshead, where she is isolated and unloved. The moon appears as a metaphor throughout the novel, presiding over the different situations Jane finds herself in. The rock here also symbolizes Jane’s strength and her resistance to the abuse she suffers at the hands of the Reeds.

Some heavy clouds, swept from the sky by a rising wind, had left the moon bare; and her light, streaming in through a window near, shone full both on us and on the approaching figure, which we at once recognised as Miss Temple.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 8. After Jane is falsely accused of being a liar by Mr. Brocklehurst, the appearance of the moon through the window and sweeping away of heavy clouds foreshadow an upcoming positive event. Miss Temple appears, comforts Jane and her friend Helen in her room with cake and tea and the three spend a happy evening together. Throughout the novel the weather and the moon are used by Bronte to herald positive or negative events and moods.

I lingered till the sun went down amongst the trees, and sank crimson and clear behind them. I then turned eastward. On the hill-top above me sat the rising moon; pale yet as a cloud, but brightening momently: she looked over Hay, which, half lost in trees, sent up a blue smoke from its few chimneys; it was yet a mile distant, but in the absolute hush I could hear plainly its thin murmurs of life.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 12. During a walk to Hay Jane sits and observes Thornfield and the surrounding countryside, taking in the rising moon. Bronte frequently uses the moon metaphor to symbolize change. In this case it is foreshadowing Jane meeting Mr. Rochester for the first time, although she doesn’t know it is him. This occurs a few minutes later when he falls off his horse on the causeway as “the moon was waxing bright.”

Something of daylight still lingered, and the moon was waxing bright: I could see him plainly. His figure was enveloped in a riding cloak, I traced the general points of middle height, and considerable breadth of chest. He had a dark face, with stern features, and a heavy brow; his eyes and gathered eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted just now; he was past youth, but had not reached middle age; perhaps he might be thirty-five. I felt no fear of him, and but a little shyness. Had he been a handsome, heroic-looking young gentleman, I should not have dared to stand thus questioning him against his will, and offering my services unasked…I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination; but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively that they neither had nor could have sympathy with anything in me and should have shunned them as one would fire, lightning, or anything else that is bright but antipathetic.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 12. Jane is out walking on her way to Hay to deliver a letter for posting. On the way she unknowingly meets Mr. Rochester for the first time, when a horse and rider slip and fall on a sheet of ice. There is an air of mystery about the stranger she goes to aid and will eventually marry. Here Bronte depicts the masculine in the person of Rochesteer as not having “beauty, elegance, gallantry.” Instead he is the anti-hero – stern, gruff, brooding, and not at all handsome and heroic looking. But despite Rochester’s dark, intense and stern appearance, Jane is immediately drawn to him. She later learns that he is Rochester. Their first meeting, set against the backdrop of the moon-lit hills, has a Gothic air about it. On first hearing the horse approach, Jane thinks of Bessie’s ghost stories about “Gytrash,” a spirit creature that is sometimes horse and sometimes large dog.

That sky expanded before me, – a blue sea absolved from taint of cloud; the moon ascending it in solemn march; her orb seeming to look up as she left the hill-tops, from behind which she had come, far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight dark in its fathomless depth and measureless distance; and for those trembling stars that followed her course; they made my heart tremble, my veins glow when I viewed them.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 12. On her way back from posting the letter in Hay, Jane lingers at the gates of Thornfield, gazes up at the sky and contemplates the ascending moon and the trembling stars that follow its course. She finds the experience liberating. This world to Jane appears “fathomless” and measureless” as she continues her search for freedom and identity and independence. There is also a sense that something momentous has happened – she soon discovers that the man she met and helped on the way back to Thornfield was her employer.

When the moon, which was full and bright…came in her course to that space in the sky opposite my casement and looked in at me through the unveiled panes, her glorious gaze roused me. Awakening in the dead of night, I opened my eyes on her disk – silver-white and crystal clear. It was beautiful, but too solemn; I half rose and stretched my arm to draw the curtain.
Good God! What a cry!

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 20. Jane wakes up to the moon shining full and bright through her window. The moon appears as a warning. Its description of being “too solemn” is foreshadowing of danger ahead. Jane next hears a scream running from one end of Thornfield to the other. We will later learn that madwoman Bertha Mason has attacked her visiting half-brother Richard Mason and stabbed and bitten him.

It was a fairy, and come from Elf-land, it said; and its errand was to make me happy: I must go with it out of the common world to a lonely place – such as the moon, for instance – and it nodded its head towards her horn, rising over Hay-hill: it told me of the alabaster cave and silver vale where we might live. I said I should like to go; but reminded it, as you did me, that I had no wings to fly.
“Oh,” returned the fairy, “that does not signify! Here is a talisman will remove all difficulties;” and she held out a pretty gold ring. “Put it,” she said, “on the fourth finger of my left hand, and I am yours, and you are mine; and we shall leave earth, and make our own heaven yonder.” She nodded again at the moon. The ring, Adèle, is in my breeches-pocket, under the disguise of a sovereign: but I mean soon to change it to a ring again.
“But what has mademoiselle to do with it? I don’t care for the fairy: you said it was mademoiselle you would take to the moon?”
“Mademoiselle is a fairy,” he said, whispering mysteriously.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 24. Rochester is telling Adele a fairy tale while driving in the carriage. In the story Jane becomes a fairy with magical powers. She arrives from Elf-land with an errant to make Rochester happy. Rochester hopes that through Jane to magically wipe out all his past transgressions so that he can begin a new, fresh life. But even 10-year-old Adele is skeptical of Rochester’s fanciful tale, as she ridicules it and protests “I don’t care for the fairy.”

As I looked up at them, the moon appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled their fissure; her disk was blood-red and half overcast; she seemed to thrown on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly in the deep drift of cloud. The wind fell, for a second, round Thornfield; but far away over wood and water poured a wild, melancholy wail: it was sad to listen to, and I ran off again.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 25. There is an excellent example of the use of pathetic fallacy to reflect a change of mood. As Jane looks at the split halves of the chestnut tree, she notices that the weather is turning gloomy. The blood-red moon is half overcast in deep cloud and the wind gives off a melancholy wail. Jane finds it sad to listen to and runs off. This is foreshadowing of the disaster that is about to happen at Jane and Rochester’s wedding.

That night I never thought to sleep…I was transported in thought to the scenes of childhood; I dreamt that I lay in the red-room at Gateshead; that the night was dark, and my mind impressed with strange fears. The light that long ago had struck me into syncope, recalled in this vision, seemed glidingly to mount the wall…I lifted my head to look; the roof resolved to clouds…the gleam was such as the moon imparts to vapours she is about to sever. I watched her come…as though some word of doom were to be written on her disk…then, not a moon, but a white human form, shone in the azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 27. On the night after the day of Jane’s canceled marriage, she is troubled by dark supernatural dreams. She has a vision of being in the red room at Gateshead and she remembers all the fear of being imprisoned there. She looks up at the ceiling and it turns to clouds. Using a nature simile, she describes how there is a gleam like the moon gives to vapors she is about to divide. This foreshadows her parting with Mr. Rochester. The moon appears, it bursts through the cloud and is transformed into a white human form – that of her late mother with a message for Jane.

“My daughter, flee temptation.”
“Mother, I will.”

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 27. Jane dreams of her dead mother, transformed from the moon, whispering in her heart to flee temptation and do what is morally right. She promises that she will. The dream comes after the cancelation of her wedding, when Rochester is found to be already legally married to the madwoman in the attic. Gathering her modest belongings, Jane sneaks out of Thornfield and steals away. Jane’s mother died of typhus when she was a young girl.
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