All italics will be mine unless otherwise noted.
             Symbols often, perhaps so that they may have meaning, contain within themselves their opposite. The child in Victorian culture is an example of this. Construed, and sentimentalized, on the one side (in line with Locke's tabla rosa) as alternately angelic or innocent –a word whose meaning comes from want or lack- the child is emptied and may be, by the construer, filled. On the other hand we find the child conceptualized as a being by nature a savage, a collection of unruly instincts and impulses which it is the adult's position to manage and civilize so that the child does not come to ruin and waste. We find the child then associated on the one hand with the angelic and on the other with the demonic. Jane at one point characterizes childhood as, "-so tranquil, so passionless, so innocent" (Ch.XXV)
             Jane Eyre's character as a child in the text is, while hardly sentimentalized in the conventional sense, wedged between these notions vis-â-vis Mrs Reed and company. Let us consider for a moment this character's actions. The child Jane Eyre is, in part by virtue of her categorical emptiness, the subject of a projection on the part of Mrs Reed; i.e. Mrs Reed transfers her guilt and feelings of deceitfulness from not truly fulfilling the death-vow to Mr Reed to care for Jane Eyre, an obligation she resents, onto Jane Eyre herself. The hostility of Jane's environment aids her in the d
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