Key Quote
“"Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?"”
Jane Eyre · Chapter 23
Focus: “soulless”
Jane challenges Rochester's assumptions — and Victorian society's — that external qualities (wealth, beauty, status) determine internal worth.
Technique 1 — RHETORICAL QUESTION / ENUMERATIO
The rhetorical question forces Rochester — and the reader — to confront their own prejudices. The enumeratio (listing) of 'poor, obscure, plain, and little' catalogues every social disadvantage Jane possesses: economic ('poor'), social ('obscure'), physical ('plain'), and bodily ('little'). Each adjective is a reason Victorian society would dismiss her. The cumulative effect is to expose the cruelty of a value system that equates worth with appearance and status.
The juxtaposition of external qualities ('poor, obscure, plain, little') with internal qualities ('soulless and heartless') creates an implicit argument (an argument suggested rather than stated): if the external does not determine the internal, then society's treatment of the disadvantaged is unjust. Jane's question is not just personal but systemic — she challenges the entire Victorian assumption that social position reflects moral worth.
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RAD — PROGRESS
Jane progresses from passive acceptance of her social position to active challenge. Her question is not a plea but a confrontation — she demands that Rochester justify the assumptions embedded in his behaviour. This progression from submission to assertion is the novel's central arc.
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Technique 2 — SOUL & HEART — SPIRITUAL EQUALITY
The words 'soulless' and 'heartless' invoke the two centres of human identity in Victorian thought: the soul (spiritual, immortal, divine) and the heart (emotional, loving, moral). By asking whether poverty makes her soulless and heartless, Jane argues for spiritual equality — before God, all souls are equal regardless of social position. This is simultaneously a religious and a revolutionary argument.
The implicit answer to Jane's question is 'no' — Rochester does not think her soulless. But the power of the passage lies in the fact that the question needs to be asked at all. Jane's society DOES treat the poor as if they lack souls and hearts. The rhetorical question exposes a truth that society prefers to leave unexamined: class prejudice functions by denying the full humanity of the disadvantaged.
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Context (AO3)
PHYSIOGNOMY
Victorian culture believed in physiognomy — judging character from physical appearance. 'Plain' women were assumed to be morally or spiritually inferior. Jane's challenge to this assumption was genuinely subversive: she insists that plainness conceals depth rather than indicating emptiness.
CLASS & THE SOUL
Christianity theoretically taught equality of souls — rich and poor alike before God. But Victorian practice contradicted this: separate pews, different charities, and social segregation at every level. Jane invokes the theology her society professes but does not practise.
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WOW — INTERSECTIONALITY (Crenshaw)
Kimberlé Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality — the idea that different forms of disadvantage (gender, class, race) overlap and compound each other — illuminates Jane's catalogue. Jane is not just poor OR plain OR female — she is all of these simultaneously, and each disadvantage amplifies the others. A wealthy plain woman has more power than a poor one; a beautiful poor woman more than a plain poor one. Jane's specific combination of disadvantages — poor AND female AND plain AND small — creates a unique, compounded form of marginality that no single category fully captures. Brontë, writing before the concept existed, intuitively dramatises intersectional oppression: Jane does not suffer one disadvantage but the multiplication of several, each reinforcing the others.
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