Disease: the concealed protagonist in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

Through the stages of Jane’s life and her parable of personal growth inscribed in the Victorian, idiosyncratic model pervaded by opposing tensions, Charlotte Brontë accompanies us in a world located halfway between the inner self and the social self, along Christian, spiritual, and allegorical ancestry in which not everything that happens is really as it seems. Everything is within a hermeneutic-symbolic complexity that is both concealment and evidence of the extraordinary longevity of the text, in which disease is outlined as an instrument that is signifying in the Victorian context, as well as a meaningful empowering tool in the world of Jane. This paper aims to investigate the function of disease as a structural mark value, an iridescent value and not always uniquely identifiable. Disease is not intended only as a merely possible event but as an element that needs to be placed into a system with other factors, such as gender relationships and the link between physical and metaphysical dimensions, in order for it to fully carry out its great evocative charge.