Jane Eyre Self-awarness

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Eyre started from the first time Jane saw herself in the mirror which consequentially gave her a fresh awareness of her own identity. When John "throws the book" at Jane Charlotte Bronte's attempt was to both literally and metaphorically symbolize the deprivation he was instigating of any sense of herself and her rights.
According to Jacques Lacan, the first identity of oneself in a mirror is the most decisive stage in human development. It provides the "awareness of oneself as an object of knowledge".
I had to cross before the looking glass; my fascinated glance involuntarily explored the depth it revealed. All looked colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality: and the strange little figure there gazing at me with a white face and arms specking the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit: I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessies's evening stories represented as coming out ...

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me back-into the red-room, and locked me up there, to my dying day, though I was in agony, though I cried out, whole suffocating with distress, "Have mercy! Have mercy Aunt Reed!"…I will tell anybody who asks me questions this exact tale. (68-69)
The second account was to the apothecary who didn't yield too much sympathy, but the third, to Helen Burns was one of no tolerance or sympathy in the least bit. Helen firmly says, "Would you not be happier if you tried to forget her severity, together with the passionate emotions it excited? Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs" (90). This turns out to be a lesson about herself that Jane ...

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