chapter 38

"Reader, I married him." O estilo Vitoriano tem final feliz, mas a frase tem um significado maior. Foi um choque para a época. "Reader, he married me", teria sido mais convencional. Jane Eyre se recusa à passividade que era esperada de uma mulher da sua condição de classe. Ela diz "não" às condições de vida absolutamente restritivas as que estiveram submetidas as mulheres até a metade do século XVIII. Charlotte Brontë usou um pseudônimo masculino para as primeiras edições de Jane Eyre, ela era Currer Bell. O romance foi meio de expressão e recusa dessa situação.

Reader, I married him.  A quiet wedding we had:  he and I, the
parson and clerk, were alone present.  When we got back from church,
I went into the kitchen of the manor-house, where Mary was cooking
the dinner and John cleaning the knives, and I said -

"Mary, I have been married to Mr. Rochester this morning."  The
housekeeper and her husband were both of that decent phlegmatic
order of people, to whom one may at any time safely communicate a
remarkable piece of news without incurring the danger of having
one's ears pierced by some shrill ejaculation, and subsequently
stunned by a torrent of wordy wonderment.  Mary did look up, and she
did stare at me:  the ladle with which she was basting a pair of
chickens roasting at the fire, did for some three minutes hang
suspended in air; and for the same space of time John's knives also
had rest from the polishing process:  but Mary, bending again over
the roast, said only -

"Have you, Miss?  Well, for sure!"

[Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847)