How Does Charlotte Bronte Use The Weather In Jane Eyre

Sometimes the weather has feelings. In the Victorian Age novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte uses the weather as a pathetic fallacy to determine how the mood will present itself throughout the novel. Jane Eyre is the story of a woman who goes through many hardships from childhood to adulthood, all while trying to find where she belongs in society. Through the utilization of the weather contrasting the mood, rain symbolizing a negative event that is about to occur, and bright weather indicating a happy moment, Charlotte Bronte successfully uses the motif to foreshadow events that are about to occur in the story.

In the story, there is a clear theme that sunny, happy weather and rainy, dark weather will precede a happy or sad moment in the novel.

Bronte uses lightning during a rainstorm as an obvious sign that there is to be a big plot twist. We see in the novel, “Before I left my bed in the morning, little Adèle came running in to tell me that the great horse-chestnut tree at the bottom of the orchard had been struck by lightning in the night, and half of it split away” (Bronte 241). This event occurs while preparations for Jane’s wedding to Mr. Rochester begin, and it foreshadows the big secret revealed on her wedding day and what I view as the ultimate climax of the novel; that Mr. Rochester has already been married. The splitting of the tree by the lightning warns how Jane and Mr. Rochester are soon to be split up by a force out of their control, the force being that Mr. Rochester unknowingly married an insane woman who he could not divorce. The lightning symbolizes Bertha Mason who, similar to lightning, starts literal and metaphorical fires throughout the novel. Comparing Bertha Mason to lightning in this instance could be said to foreshadow the last fire that she sets toward the end of the novel that leads to the impairment of Mr. Rochester and leads to the death of Bertha, which allows Jane and Mr. Rochester to meet