Jane Eyre: The Impact of Tone The tone of Jane Eyre is direct, perhaps even blunt. There isn't the sensitivity of an affected little girl, but a surprisingly independent, even skeptical perspective. At age 10, orphan Jane already sees through the hypocrisy of her self-righteous Christian elders. She tells her domineering Aunt Reed, "People think you're a good woman, but you're bad; hard-hearted. You're deceitful!" and "I'm glad you're no relation to me; I'll never call you aunt again as long as I live. I'll never come to see you again when I grow up; and if anyone asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I'll say that the very thought of about you makes me feel bad." (In fact, when her aunt is old and dying, Jane visits her again and forgives her. But that's the distant future.) With the logic of a mature philosopher, indeed a bit like Friedrich Nietzsche to come, Jane protests the basic admonitions of Christianity as a schoolgirl: "I must resist those who... persist in disliking me; I must resist those who punish me unjustly. It is natural that I should love those who show me affection, or submit to punishment when I feel like it's deserved." And this bold declaration, which would have struck readers of 1847 (indeed, 1947) as radical and "unfeminine": "Restlessness was in my nature; it sometimes agitated me to the point of pain... Women should generally be very calm: but women feel as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and field for their efforts, just as their brothers suffer from too rigid a constraint, from too absolute a stagnation, just as men would suffer. men , the novel begins with the seemingly disappointed statement, “There was no chance of taking a walk that [rainy] day,” and almost immediately retorts with “I was glad of it; I've never liked long walks." When she is excluded from the Christmas revelry at the Reed house, the little girl Jane says: "To tell the truth, I didn't have the slightest desire to join in the company." Jane's challenge, which she does not exclude childhood fears, strikes us as frank in the same way as the adolescent temperaments of other famous literary voices: Jo March of Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women", Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield and their now countless younger brothers.