During the moment I was silent, Miss Eyre, I was arranging a point with my destiny. She stood there, by that beech-trunk – a hag like one of those who appeared to Macbeth on the heath of Forres. “You like Thornfield?” she said, lifting her finger; and then she wrote in the air a memento, which ran in lurid hieroglyphics all along the house-front, between the upper and lower row of windows. “Like it if you can! Like it if you dare!”
“I will like it,” said I. “I dare like it.”
– Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre, Chapter 15. Rochester makes this speech to Jane after they ascend the avenue at Thornfield and he stops and lifts his eyes up to the battlements. His eyes are said to reflect pain and shame as he refers to the as yet unknown hag he describes as “my destiny.” The hag is Bertha, the secret wife he keeps locked in his attic. Using a simile Rochester compares the hag to the witches of Macbeth, giving an other-worldly and Gothic atmosphere to the passage. Like Macbeth, Rochester too has a wife who went mad.