St John Rivers — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
St John Rivers
Characters
What you need to know
How Brontë presents St John Rivers, and how the character develops across the text: Jane's cousin, a cold and dutiful clergyman whose proposal tests her as Rochester's did.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'like a Greek face, very pure in outline', 'I love Rosamond Oliver so wildly', 'I am cold: no fervour infects me', 'a cold, hard, ambitious man', 'Reason, and not feeling, is my guide', 'you are formed for labour, not for love', 'God and nature intended you for a missionary's wife', 'My iron shroud contracted round me', 'the disappointment of an austere and despotic nature, which has met resistance where it expected submission', 'If I were to marry you, you would kill me. You are killing me now', 'the ambition of the high master-spirit', 'he never will marry now'.
St John as a foil to Rochester, ice against fire, and why the novel gives his missionary life its last words.
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.
