This week, we are reading chapters 2 and 3 of Jane Eyre.

The setting of chapter 2 is the red room.

To the uninitiated, the red room looms large in the imagination of air heads.

The red room is literally a room decorated in red.

It is also the room in which Jane's uncle died, and so, as it says in the text, a kind

of dreary consecration had guarded it from frequent intrusion.

No one goes in there.

Jane, as punishment for her rebellion in the last chapter, gets sent into this room.

This exile to the red room does not seem to be a frequently used punishment, so the spontaneity

of its creativity and cruelty is at minimum remarkable.

So Abbott, one of the servants, says that Jane might die in the room, and then, quote,

where will she be?

Hell is the answer so obvious that nobody has to say it.

Once in the red room, the true horror starts for this 10-year-old.

She realizes that she is locked in, and so starts to worry that her uncle will rise from

the dead, outraged at Jane's abuse, and she will be locked in a room with an angry ghost.

Jane, understandably, works herself up into a panic attack.

She sees what she notes from her narrator's vantage point, was most likely someone

with a light walking by the window from the outside.

But 10-year-old Jane is sure that the light is supernatural, and so she faints in horror.

Here's Elsie Michi, who you might remember from our first episode, explaining the role

that the red room has played in feminist readings of Jane Eyre.

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