When Rochester confesses his love for Jane he compares her to all his past lovers, declaring that he had given up finding a woman who could make him happy until he had met her. She’s moral and would never dream of becoming someone’s mistress like her pupil’s mother, Celine Varens.
She doesn’t spend time chasing men or thinking too much of herself like her first rival Miss Blanche Ingim or have dangerous fits of violence like poor Bertha in the attic. She’s satisfied with little and doesn’t expect much. Jane Eyre is a textbook Not-Like-Other-Girls. Instead of the flawless but unobtainable Estella of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations or Mina, the lovely damsel in distress from Bram Stoker’s Dracula we have the wild, pragmatic Catherine of Wuthering Heights and, of course, the small, plain, practical Jane Eyre. Because of this, their heroines were not the picture perfect paragons of beauty, warmth and goodness that the male gaze of the time expected them to be. The Bronte sisters were unique in their time because they wrote from an underrepresented woman’s perspective.
Manifestations of the Byronic hero are found in both Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff and Charlotte Bronte’s Rochester. The brooding bad boy who is able to see the Not-Like-Other-Girl’s worth bears a striking resemblance to the Byronic hero of the Romantic Era. The rise of Dark Romance as a genre in YA fantasy began largely with Twilight in the early 2000s but if you remove the supernatural element the genre bears a striking resemblance to the works of the Bronte sisters way back in the 1850s. YA fantasy is bursting with so many manifestations of this heroine that she is now a cliche but where did she originate and why did she become so prominent?
ROCHESTER AS A BYRONIC HERO SKIN
She’s a rare jewel in an ocean of flashy skin deep baubles. She’s kind and capable and more than a little lonely. She would never use her charms for her own gains because she doesn’t realize she has any. She’s into cool, practical things, not silly, frivolous ones.
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