Love and marriage — Jane Eyre — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Love and marriage
Themes
What you need to know
How Brontë explores love and marriage, from Rochester's proposal and St John's loveless offer to the equal marriage at Ferndean across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I offer you my hand, my heart, and a share of all my possessions', 'it is my spirit that addresses your spirit', 'My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven', 'I scorn your idea of love', 'forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low', 'I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine', 'bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh', 'I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand'.
Context: marriage as a woman's expected future and a husband's power over his wife, against Jane's insistence on marrying as an equal and for love.
Edexcel's novel question has two parts, and neither marks context: part (a) on the printed extract marks language, form and structure (AO2); part (b) on the novel elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1), not language analysis. Use context only where it explains a reading, and say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
