St John Flashcards
an _____ _____ of those very ‘laws and principles’ on the strength of which Jane has rejected Rochester
external embodiment
Offers an alternative to Rochester, both ______ as an opposing character type, and ______ as a potential mate for Jane
structurally, personally
‘restless’ ‘eager’ ‘troubled by…
insatiate yearnings’
by whose sermons ‘the heart was ____, the mind astonished’
thrilled
even before St John’s literal kinship to Jane is disclosed, there is a strong sense of likeness:
‘I was sure St John Rivers… had not yet found that peace of God which passeth all understanding: he had no more found it, I thought, than had I’
St John directly mirrors her own history when he says:
‘it is hard to control the workings of inclination, and turn the bent of nature: but that it may be done, I know from experience. God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate’
Diana: ‘St John looks quiet… but he hides a ____ in his vitals… in some things he is as _____ as death’
fever,
inexorable
‘with all his firmness and self-control… [he] locks
every feeling and pang within - expresses, confesses, imparts nothing’
What Jane finds in Rivers is…
a version of her own self
Where Bertha embodies Jane’s displaced sexuality,
in Rivers the austerity Jane has cherished as her inward guardian now confronts her externally
Jane detects ‘elements within either ____, or hard, or eager’
restless
Structurally, St John is more a foil to Bertha than to Rochester, pitting against her animal instincts his __________.
inverse model of pure rationalism
‘a cold, ____ , ambitious man…. Reason, and not Feeling is my guide’
hard
‘a ____ instead of a man’
statue
But for all his fierce zeal, stern stoicism and loveless rigidity, St John ‘could not bind all that he had in his nature, the rover, the aspirant, the poet, the priest….
in the limits of a single passion’
St John does note simply represent a corrective to Jane, but an ________.
enticement
when he asks her to leave for India with him as helpmeet in the fulfilment of his missionary purpose…
it is never inconceivable that he is offering salvation
When she says ‘I can but die… Let me try to with His will in silence’ …
she hears St John’s voice ‘close at hand’ - literally her saviour
he is ‘___ her nature’
half
‘Is not the _______ he offers me truly the most ____ man can adopt or God can assign?
occupation, glorious
‘Alas! If I join St John… If I go to India, I go to ________’
premature death
‘my mind… is like a ________ ________, with one shrinking fear fettered in its depths - the fear of being persuaded by you to attempt what I cannot accomplish’
rayless dungeon
‘If I were his wife - this good man, pure as the deep sunless source, could soon ____ __’
kill me
‘If I were to marry you, you would kill me, you are killing me now….
to do as you wish me, would I begin to think, be almost equivalent to committing suicide’
