Love and marriage — Jane Eyre — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
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.
OCR's question on this novel is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the novel elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the novel, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts when it is relevant to the question, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
