A ruin, an entire ruin

Why I can't stop thinking about a fictional chestnut tree

Before we begin, a quick note. I’ve been a little absent recently - I’ve just been really busy! Last week, I was in London as part of the London Library Emerging Writers cohort programme where, amongst other things, I spent a lot time reading about trees - and this idea was born. I have a few pieces cooking, but they need a lot more time before they’re ready. So until then, here’s something short and sweet.

If you took two seconds to look at me, you wouldn’t be surprised to learn one of my favourite books is Jane Eyre. The first time I read it I was fifteen. I would wake up around 5am most days to read as much as I could. I’d sneak it under the desk at school. I’d read it on the bus, whilst I ate and until I passed out every night. I volunteered to write an essay on it - on top of my school work - partly because I thought it’d look good on my university application, but also mainly because I loved it so much and just wanted to write more about it.

For those of you who haven’t read or watched Jane Eyre, then read it right now. Or close this tab, open a new one and type in “Jane Eyre 2006” and let Ruth Wilson ruin your life. (I could write a lot about how the 2011 film with Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender completely misses the mark, but I’m trying not to rant here).

One of my favourite moments in Jane Eyre is at the end of chapter 23:

‘Before I left my bed in the morning, little Adèle came running in to tell me that the great horse-chestnut at the bottom of the orchard had been struck by lightning in the night, and half of it split away.’

Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens as Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester in the BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre, 2006 (via Penny For Your Dreams)

This moment comes at the end of the chapter where Jane and Mr. Rochester have confessed their love to one another and kissed for the first time. The novel has built to this for ages! They are a doomed match: she is his employee, of a lower class than him. Now, something old - like the societal traditions that hold them back from being together - has been quickly destroyed by something overwhelming like a romantic spark. What a romantic image! Nature torn apart by the power of their love!

I love this image, and it reminds me of the last stanza of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “In Mrs. Tilscher’s Class”:

‘That feverish July, the air tasted of electricity. / A tangible alarm made you always untidy, hot, / fractious under the heavy, sexy, sky. […] You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown, / as the sky split open into a thunderstorm.’

We can see that the tree foreshadows Jane and Rochester’s relationship. Whilst they are together now, something calamitous will happen and they will be split apart. However, the roots of the tree are still held together, meaning Jane and Rochester’s lives will always be intertwined and they are destined to find each other again.

However, I think nothing in this entire book is that simple. This symbol of passion and overwhelming emotion also feels deeply eerie. The lightning destroys the site where Rochester and Jane often meet, where Rochester proposes. Even as he tries to tell Jane he loves her, Jane tells us she can hear how the tree ‘writhed and groaned’ in the wind.

Throughout the entire story, Charlotte Brontë keeps the reader on a knife’s edge asking us again and again, what is love? What is romantic? One scene that shows this clearly is when Rochester is determined to lavish Jane with beautiful clothes and jewellery. Jane rejects him firmly:

‘I told him in a new series of whispers, that he might as well buy me a gold gown and a silver bonnet at once: I should certainly never venture to wear his choice.’

In any other story, this scene could be flipped: Rochester wanting to spend and spoil would be romantic. Here, it is not. Time and time again, moments of gothic rear their head in their relationship. Jane and Rochester reunite, in part, because Jane swears she can hear Rochester calling for her across miles of land. Is this the connection of two souls or is this a haunting?

An illustration from Jane Eyre via Modern Monastery

Similarly, whilst reading the story, there is always some tension - will they get together? Should they? Then, once they separate - will they reunite? Should they? Jane is not able to enter the marriage until she is on equal economic terms (yay, 1800s feminism!) but also not until his first wife has died, brutally. Jane is a good wife because, despite her supposed class differences, she is pious, pragmatic, white and English. Bertha is a bad wife for Mr. Rochester because she is the opposite: wild, mentally ill, mixed race, foreign.

When I think of where else I see the threads of Jane Eyre, obviously there’s Bluebeard’s Castle, but also Rebecca, Crimson Peak, The Piano - narratives which subvert marriage into a horror story.

At another moment where Jane looks at the tree, she says:

‘I faced the wreck of the chestnut-tree; it stood up, black and riven, the trunk, split down the centre, gasped ghastly. The cloven halves were not broken from each other […] the sap could flow no more: their great boughs on each side were dead, and next winter’s tempests would be sure to fell one or both to earth: as yet, however, they might be said to form one tree - a ruin, but an entire ruin.’

The tree is uncanny, broken, twisted. We can see the ‘entire’ part of it - despite all that’s faced it, it’s still together (as Rochester and Jane will be). Yet, it’s a ‘ruin’.

The interlocking roots aren’t the only metaphor in the book that suggests Jane and Rochester are fated to be together. Mr. Rochester tells Jane:

‘I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you.’

This idea of a string connecting two people is a common idea: the red thread of fate in South Asian folklore, the thread of fates in Greek mythology, or to quote Taylor Swift:

‘Isn’t it just so pretty to think / All along there was some / Invisible string / Tying you to me.’

I think that is what Jane Eyre offers in a way: pretty thoughts, beautiful thoughts. A sense of true love, fate, soulmates, everything working out despite the biggest of odds. But Charlotte Brontë is also hinting at something much darker than that.

I know that this is where I should conclude with my thoughts on what the tree means, or even, whether the book is romantic or terrifying. But my relationship with Jane Eyre won’t let me. Part of me will always be fifteen, reading that book before the sun came up, desperate for the climatic romantic scene. Now, I can condemn the book’s perspective on race, on colonialism, on disability. I can see that marriage, for Jane, is still a cage even if she has more money, more connections, more choice.

Jane’s decision to marry Rochester is not just about two people: it is about the history of marriage, the power between men and women, faith between someone and their God. The fact that all of this pours through the page in a metaphor of one tree is, for lack of a better word, electrifying.

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For a beautiful essay on the role trees play in our lives, I wholeheartedly recommend Lindsay Johnstone’s “Legacy” on her What Now? Substack.

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