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Your reply is interesting, although since I started the thread a lot has changed. Love is not any more the main focus I see in Jane Eyre, now I tend to concentrate more on Jane as the woman, the fighter. Also, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea changed the way I read Jane Eyre. It's not just a nice story of a governess falling in love with the master of the 'maison', now there are years of colonialism behind it, Rochester is a mere manipulated 'daddy's boy' and Jane an ignorant (or by that matter, Charlotte Bronte herself.)
As I said, the theme of love in the two novels appealed for the 16 year old me, but now my thoughts have changed completely concerning the two books in discussion.
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Both novels are entirely different in the way they tackle the idea of
emtions being expressed by the main characters in the novels.In Wuthering Heights we can see that both Cathrine and heathcliff are both anti-heros.They are quite different from the other two main characters in Jane Eyre.In Wuthering Heights ,Heathcliff leaves the grange at the very idea of hearing cathrine feeling degradation just at the cocept of marrying him, which is a contrast Jane Eyre novel doesnt really contain.
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I am not sure Wuthering Heights is about love. I read it recently and it struck me more as a kind of evil fairytale than a love story.
But yes, if you consider it a love story, then it is very different, mostly because the characters are very different. Not only that he thinks she despises him and then gives her up. Or does he? Returned three years later he intimates that he wanted to gain his money for her. But why then would he not ask her to wait for him?
But even if somewhat predatory, love is never life’s enemy in Jane Eyre. And the love couple seems so much sounder. Even though Rochester raves for Jane, he still does not revenge himself on Adele or Richard Mason or anyone else. There is no intimation in the novel that he even lets Bertha pay for Jane’s escape.
And even playing with the idea that Edward Rochester had found Jane out in Morton I cannot really imagine him harassing a sickening Jane to death and then put the blame on her cousins. Quite the opposite – he knows after her escape he is culpable whatever has happened to her.
And I cannot imagine a fighter like Jane to be such a reed in the storm of her own life. I could imagine her married and then either in an early state asking Rochester to leave her alone or in a later state to elope with him but I can hardly imagine her refusing the need to choose.
But of course, if Catherine had told the story instead of Nelly, and if Mrs. Fairfax had told the story instead of Jane, what would it have looked like then?
