I reread then chapters 26-27 and was amused at Mr Rochester’s claim that, when he set out to find a wife in Europe, his original plan was to find such a woman that he could love and that would hear his story and understand that he was not indeed married, accepting his proposal. He does not explain to Jane why he took a different approach with her - self-explanatory, he could see from the start that Jane would not accept it. And then I started noticing how, despite his behaviour, speeches, and self-affirmations negating his married state, deep down he is a great prude. Like Jane notices, his “you’re different from other women” talk just pointed how, in the future, she’d be paired with the rest of them should she do what they did - be with him without the sacrament of marriage. I used to think that he was disregarding the seriousness with which Jane took religion because it did not matter to him, and so, he was justified in lying to her because her concerns were of an irrelevant nature anyway. I used to think that this minimisation of what was grave to Jane was his biggest fault. What the dream opened the door for me to see was the depth in which religion mattered to Mr Rochester too, in a subconscious level. Then it began seeming to me that he did not tell Jane from the first not for fear of losing her person, but for fear of losing her soul. Perceiving her “purity”, and admiring it, rather than dismissing it, to tell her everything would be to make her complicit and, thus, a heretic - for going against the church knowingly. Her soul would be lost even before his own. Not telling her, however, he made sure she’d not be guilty of heresy, since the misinformed are not at fault. Like this, I started seeing Mr Rochester’s omissions and lies less like the cruelty of one who doesn’t really care about the other, and more like a result of his own internal conflicts and self-illusions about what religion meant to him. The impulse not to tell Jane from the beginning, then, when previously he had made up his mind to be completely open with whatever woman he chose, says less about his impression of Jane, and more about his internal, subconscious judgement of himself. Faced with love for her, he couldn’t kill her soul. That is, until despair made him attempt to kill it anyway. This reading also paves a clearer path for his reform at the end, and I would think that having been forced to do what his subconscious had told him would be the greatest crime, ended up being the main catalyst for his change and sacrifice at the end.

Everyone congratulate my friend @anonymoustypewriter, they just found out one of literature's biggest 100+ year old shock twists authentically without anyone spoiling it for them.

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