The cut bled, the pain was sharp: my terror had passed its climax; other feelings succeeded. "Wicked and cruel boy!" I said. "You are like a murderer--you are like a slave-driver--you are like the Roman emperors!" (C. Bronte, Jane Eyre, Hertforshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1992, p5-6). .
Jane erupts and the two cousins fight, "He ran headlong at me: I felt him grasp my hair and my shoulder: he had closed with a desperate thing. I really saw in him a tyrant, a murderer. I felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle down my neck, and was sensible of somewhat pungent suffering: these sensations for the time predominated over fear, and I received him in frantic sort. I don't very well know what I did with my hands, but he called me "Rat! Rat!" and bellowed out aloud- (Bronte, p5). Mrs. Reed holds Jane responsible for the scuffle and sends her to the "red-room" - the frightening chamber in which her Uncle Reed died, as punishment.
From chapter one, the reader can see how Bronte establishes Jane's character through her confrontations with John and Mrs. Reed, in which Jane's good-hearted but strong-willed determination and integrity become apparent. This chapter along with chapter two also establishes the novel's mood. Beginning with Jane's experience in the red-room in chapter two, the reader senses a palpable atmosphere of mystery and the supernatural. Like Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre draws a great deal of its stylistic inspiration from the Gothic novels that were in vogue during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These books depicted remote, desolate landscapes, crumbling ruins, and supernatural events, all of which were designed to create a sense of psychological suspense and horror. While Jane Eyre is certainly not a horror novel, its intellectually ambitious criticisms of society make it far more than a typical Gothic romance, it is Bronte's employment of Gothic conventions that gives her novel popular as well as intellectual appeal.
