Gazing out the Window: Jane Eyre’s Inner Desires Forced into a childhood of mistreatment and misfortune with the Reeds after her parents die, Jane Eyre spends much of her young life physically and emotionally abused. Even after she leaves Gateshead and comes to Lowood Institution, her misfortune continues in the form of poor treatment by the schoolmaster, Mr. Brocklehurst; sub-standard living conditions; and the death of her best friend, Helen Burns. As paragraph nine opens in chapter ten, Jane is staring out her window, longing for the “liberty” she has never experienced, and is “tired of the routine” she has become imprisoned within (86). In this passage, Jane is looking towards the “hilly horizon” and “white road,” which symbolize her inner desire to move towards what lies ahead in the distance, away from Lowood and her troubled past, and to be freed from the life she has led (86). At the heart of this paragraph is, most ostensibly, Jane’s lamentation for what she desires most in life: a “change” from the structured, confined existence she has been living at Gateshead and Lowood (87). For Jane, the tragedy of losing her parents and being subsequently treated as a burden by the Reeds, whose care she comes under, paired with the misery she feels while attending Lowood, all culminate in her inner desire to experience an emancipated freedom from the “boundary” of her world (86). More specifically, as Jan gazes out her window and toward the distance, she comments on her confinement within the “blue peaks” that “seemed [like a] prison-ground,” which points to her feelings of entrapment, as if she is an inmate being held unjustly captive against her will (86-87). Despite Jane’s prisoner-like status at Lowood, however, she is willing to live in “servitude” as long as it is somewhere else—which, ultimately, leads to her relations with Mr. Rochester later in the novel (87). As a wealthy, established man, Mr. Rochester—the master figure in a nineteenth-century master-servant relationship dynamic—is very demanding of Jane, often trying to manipulate her feelings and pressure her into decisions. This is, nonetheless, the only “white road” available for most women in Jane’s nineteenth-century society: one that provides her with the “stimulus” she dreams of, while robbing her of her “liberty”—a cruel paradox, one which Jane has no choice but to adhere to as she ultimately returns to Thornfield to marry Mr. Rochester (87). Although Jane believes in the importance of women’s independence and has strong principles, her “white road . . . [vanishes] in a gorge,” just as she commits herself to loving Mr. Rochester and assures him that she will not leave him (87). With this in mind, then, it is clear that while Jane, at times, champions a feminist ideal for herself—one that could free her from the “habits and notions, and voices, and faces” society forces upon her—at the same time, she must “[frame] a humbler supplication” for what is possible within the realm of her society. This theme of confliction, of balancing one’s morals with the restraints that govern society, then, is a microcosm for Jane’s life. While Jane is capable of self-soothing introspection when she gapes into the “window” of her own soul, she struggles to completely “surmount” the “blue peaks”—society’s established conventions—as she surrenders her feminist ideals to marry Mr. Rochester, the domineering figure who becomes the final master of her “servitude” in life (87).