Feeling and Reason in Tandem

Passage:
    "‘It was with me; and I did not like it. It was a grovelling fashion of existence: I should never like to return to it. Hiring a mistress is the next worse thing to buying a slave: both are often by nature, and always by position, inferior: and to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading. I now hate the recollection of the time I passed with Celine, Giacinta, and Clara.’
    I felt the truth of these words; and I drew from them the certain inference, that if I were so far to forget myself and all the teaching that had ever been instilled into me, as—under any pretext—with any justification—through any temptation—to become the successor of these poor girls, he would one day regard me with the same feeling which now in his mind desecrated their memory. I did not give utterance to this conviction: it was enough to feel it. I impressed it on my heart, that it might remain there to serve me as aid in the time of trial."

    From the start of the novel, the reader understands Jane as a passionate person. She feels strong emotions, and she has a difficult time resisting the urge to act upon them. As Jane goes through life and Lowood, this changes significantly, and reason governs her fiercely. Jane allows emotion to overcome reason for the first time in a while when she decides to marry Rochester, and subsequently when she becomes determined to leave him. In this passage, Brontë creates an image of Jane using her feelings as leverage, with reason as an aid, to leave Rochester.
    Despite the constant battle between feeling and judgement, this scenario seems to focus more on which feelings Jane will choose to follow, aided by reason. Jane is emotionally invested in Rochester and her life at Thornfield. She didn't know, however, that Rochester was already technically married. When she finds this out, things go south for her pretty quickly. As Rochester begins to describe his past love affairs, Jane draws an "inference" about them. While inferences tend to be based on reason, Jane doesn't describe the logic of her new discovery having a profound effect on her. Instead, she claims "it was enough to feel it." Jane as a character places value in reason and judgement, so this is an interesting move for her. Claiming that a feeling alone is enough to dictate one of the largest decisions of her life so far, leaving her life at Thornfield, is something that she would not usually do.
    Reason aids this process in that Jane analyzes various actions and their outcomes to verify her feelings. Her diction in using "under any pretext—with any justification—through any temptation" indicates that Jane had thought over any alternatives to leaving before the realization. Feeling and judgement almost work in tandem in this passage, a strange occurrence, as in the novel as a whole they are so frequently at war.
    This passage marks a transformation in the way Jane uses her feelings. Rarely in this novel do emotion and reason work together, and that makes this excerpt important. In this situation, she chooses one part of what she feels and uses reason to bolster her emotions, thereby enabling her to act clearly upon them.