“I felt desolate to a degree. I felt–yes, idiot that I am–I felt degraded. I doubted I had taken a step which sank instead of raising me in the scale of social existence. I was weakly dismayed at the ignorance, the poverty, the coarseness of all I heard and saw round me. But let me not hate and despise myself too much for these feelings: I know them to be wrong–that is a great step gained; I shall strive to overcome them…In a few months, it is possible, the happiness of seeing process, and a change for the better in my scholars, may substitute gratification for disgust.”
Jane Eyre, Chapter 31
For the longest time in Jane’s life, she’s been put down – even physically bullied in her younger years – and didn’t acknowledge how that made her feel. She’s taken it and dealt with it, turning her other cheek all the while. She’s also been in a state of emotional numbness where she didn’t really feel anything. This quote shows a huge change from that. She’s finally in a place where she can allow herself to feel, and this is evidence of that. She acknowledges she feels degraded and dismayed, which we haven’t seen her acknowledge before.
