Jane Eyre 5: Crossing the Threshold with Jane—The Novel’s Liminal Elements

At first, when I realized we would be reading Jane Eyre during the end of December and beginning of January, I thought that was a little strange. After all, this seems more the time of year to read Dickens, or maybe Charlotte Bronte’s sister Emily’s great novel Wuthering Heights ( I still hold to the old traditions of ghost stories at Christmas). Then  I realized there is probably no better time of year to read this novel which, in many ways, is a story that focuses on the meeting place between one state and another, making it a threshold or liminal (from the same root word that gives us “limbo”) story of the first order.

January, of course, is named for Janus, the Roman doorway good, whose two faces looked in opposite directions. The Romans took their thresholds seriously, giving us the tradition of the groom carrying the bride over the threshold of their new home (though a Roman groom had a group of his buddies heft the little woman in rather than trying to take on the task alone!). Romans recognized that the threshold was a tricky place, an in-between spot that was neither one place or the other. Threshold places are those that, like Lewis’s Wood Between the Worlds in The Magician’s Nephew, connect two places.

Less exotic threshold places are found all around us, as Polly and Digory realize the Wood is very much like the attic space where they play. Liminal events are those that are experienced in the transition from one state to another: birth, death, marriage, dreaming, etc. ( I always do the “liminal” talk when I teach Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” a story that centers on several such events). Jane spends an usual amount of time in places that can be seen as ways between worlds, and she undergoes a number of threshold experiences in her story, emphasizing her role as a person who is neither one thing nor another but who can travel between different worlds.

A Shadowy Childhood

Jane’s threshold experiences color, or rather, shadow, her childhood. When we first meet Jane, she is sitting in a windowseat reading as she hides from her brutish cousin John Reed (if Dudley Dursley had read Jane Eyre, maybe he would have learned that meatheads who bully their orphaned cousins seldom come to good ends). A windowseat is a truly liminal place, neither outside nor inside the house. Shortly after her unpleasant encounter with her cousins, her tyrannical Aunt Reed has her locked up in the red room. Here Jane has her first supernatural encounter of the book (more on those when we get to religion and the supernatural) when she thinks the ghost of her late uncle, who would have cared for her had he lived, visits her. A ghost is the very epitome of a liminal creature: neither alive nor dead, neither in one world or the other, terrifying to some but comforting to others.

This transforming experience leads indirectly to another crucial threshold moment in young Jane’s life. After being sent to Lowood school, she befriends Helen Burns, the sickly but spiritually focused child. In an unequivocally liminal scene, Jane cuddles up with her sick friend, and drifts off to sleep, only to awaken to the realization that Helen has died in her arms in the night. Jane has accompanied her friend in the ultimate threshold moment, death, made even more liminal by the fact that it happens during sleep. The living child holding the dead one is a perfect picture of a threshold moment.

A Liminal Love Affair

During her time at Thornfield, Jane also functions within the liminal sphere. The governess was a threshold figure in the gentry of Britain: an employee, but more educated and involved in family life than a maid or cook, she often knew the family’s children better than their parents did, but was not really part of the family. Jane’s meeting with Rochester is also marked by threshold elements. Jane is sitting on fence stile, a crossing place, a threshold for fences, basically. She meets him just after the sun has gone down and the moon is rising. Not only is twilight a critical liminal time, but the time of day when the moon and sun are opposite each other in the sky, as one rises and the other sets , is a very important event in Celtic belief: the time between times, the time of day when the walls between the worlds are thinned and mortals may travel to fairy lands, or the fey themselves may enter our world.

Rochester and Jane thus meet in an atmosphere of both fading sunlight and rising moonlight, and Jane knows that this is an important moment. Its role as a liminal experience is emphasized by Jane’s words when she returns to the house and, thinking she is returning to her usual dull routine, does not want to enter Thornfield :” to pass its threshold”; for she is crossing a threshold, beginning her life-changing relationship with Rochester.

Even though it does not take place at the liminal moments of dawn or dusk, and is apparently even after the transitional hour of midnight, Jane’s rescue of Rochester, a moment that is pivotal in their changing relationship, still has the threshold element. When Jane is awakened, thinking she had heard someone touching her bedroom door, she reassures herself by the reminder that it must be Pilot the dog, who often “found his way up to the threshold of Mr. Rochester’s chamber,” and, of course, it is at her own threshold where Jane finds the candle and then rushes to Mr. Rochester’s aid, altering their relationship and deepening the Grace Poole mystery.

Another critical moment with Jane and Rochester happens at the stile and at twilight. Here Jane, returning from attending her Aunt Reed’s funeral, thinks Rochester is a ghost, again ,the threshold creature. Just as the first meeting was the transitional moment when Rochester came into Jane’s life, so this one shifts their roles again. Rochester, at this meeting, actually jokes that Jane has come from the “the other world” since she’s been with a woman who is now dead, and teases her for being an elf or illusion, both liminal in nature. As if to make the point even more clearly, Bronte brings in the word itself again; in urging Jane to go back to Thornfield and rest, Rochester encourages her to rest “at a friend’s threshold.” Okay, Charlotte, we’ve got it now!

Always a Bridesmaid

Rochester actually proposes to Jane on one the big threshold dates of the year, Midsummer’s Eve, the shortest night of the year and one with very little darkness at all in northern countries. The role of the bride is a truly liminal one, even without the carrying over the threshold tradition we inherited from the Romans. She enters the church a single woman and leaves a wife, a role illuminated by her veil being lifted ( some traditions also include a bride removing her gloves and giving them to her father). Jane, who is, incidentally, veiled at the second stile meeting, too, has a little veil problem on the night before the wedding. The mad Bertha breaks into Jane’s room and shreds the fancy new veil (Jane goes with a backup), and, instead of believing her eyes, Jane thinks she’s had a vision or nightmare, both liminal, not-quite-reality moments, of a vampire, a threshold figure if there ever was one.

Of course, the wedding fiasco leaves Jane in limbo: she is not married to Rochester, but she is not free, either. She cannot commit to him in a life of sin, so she flees, consigning herself to a lengthy exile in limbo with the Rivers family, who live in a house called Marsh End. Anyone who’s ever gotten a shoe sucked into marshy earth knows it is a transitional element: not really water, but certainly not land. In addition, the Rivers family also serve as threshold reminders not because rivers themselves are particularly liminal, but they are crossed by a threshold—a bridge—and St. John Rivers’s namesake, Saint John (or the Revelator as some of the old folks still call him) is the most liminal of the New Testament writers, clearly illustrated by any comparison of him with the other Gospel writers: they seemed to be writing documentaries, while John was writing with one foot in the spiritual, and one in the physical, worlds.

Though Jane settles into her new life, she is still , in spirit, with Rochester, herself neither one place or the other.

How Low Can you Go?

When Jane and Rochester are finally reunited, it is at Ferndean, a house that is almost completely enveloped by the surrounding woods, making it a threshold between the natural and human worlds. And, no big surprise here, Jane arrives at dusk. The blinded Rochester, upon reunion with Jane, begins to slowly regain his sight under her care, placing him into a liminal state of vision as she restores him body, soul, and mind. When we last hear from Jane, of course, she is a wife and mother, having undergone the two most prevalent threshold experiences for women, but she is soundly in the human world, just as poor old St. John Rivers is surely bound for another one.

So, it seems pretty clear that all this threshold business is all over the novel; that begs the question of why? Does dusk just make a nice setting for a Gothic story, and are ghosts just something for atmosphere, or is there more? Jane’s very transitional nature is part of what makes her so very appealing, to Rochester, to generations of readers, to us here. She is both someone to whom we readers can connect (after all, we are her “dear readers), but also someone who is having amazing experiences we can share only through her. Jane is both fascinating and familiar so that we, like Rochester, find ourselves drawn into her spell. The liminal natural of the story also emphasizes the “not-one-thing-or-the-other” aspect of Jane’s position. As an orphan, she is part of a family but without a family, and, as this is the story of her growth and development, the threshold elements of the story add to the transitional, developmental aspect of this narrative. And perhaps, the liminal qualities of Jane and her story create the mystical, almost magical air of this novel, an aspect that we’ll explore further in a forthcoming post on the spiritual and supernatural elements of the story.

So, what purpose do you see the threshold theme serving? What other threshold moments and elements do you find worthy of discussion?