t. John-has he a human nature, or is he so close to God that his nature is God-like? The answer is a bit of both. St. John is filled with the same dispassionate caring that God's nature provided Jane in the heath: he will provide, a little, but he doesn't really care for her. We get the feeling on the heath, as Jane stares into the vastness of space, that she is just one small part of nature, and that God will not pay attention to that level of detail. Similarly, she says of St. John: "he forgets, pitilessly, the feelings and claims of little people, in pursuing his own large views." On the other hand, St. John exhibits definitely human characteristics, most obvious being the way he treats Jane after she refuses to marry him. He claims not to be treating her badly, but he's lying to himself: "That night, after he had kissed his sisters, he thought proper to forget even to shake hands with me, but left the room in silence." What is important here is that St. John is more human than God, and thus he and his sisters are able to help Jane.From the womb, Jane is reborn. She sees the future as an "awful blank: something like the world when the deluge was gone by." She takes a new name, Jane Elliott. With a new family, new friends, and a new job, she is a new person. And the changes go deeper than that. The time she spent in the heath and the moors purged her, both physically and mentally. Jane needed to purge, to destroy the old foundations before she could build anew.It is necessary to examine these scenes of nature in the context of the early to mid nineteenth-century. This was of course the time of the Industrial Revolution, when as Robert Ferneaux Jordan put it, there was "a shift from the oolite, the lias and the sand to the coal measures. What had been the wooded hills of Yorkshire or Wales became, almost overnight, a land of squalid villages and black, roaring, crowded cities. Villages and small country markets became the Birminghams a...
