...The hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid forms, where he must survive a succession of trials (97)." "Or it may be here he discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage." (97).
             When Jane goes away to school, she endures terrible conditions: "Our clothing was insufficient to protect us from the severe cold: we had no boots, the snow got into our shoes and melted there: our ungloved hands became numbed and covered with chilblains, as were our feet: I remember well the distracting irritation I endured from this cause every evening, when my feet inflamed; and the torture of thrusting the swelled, raw, and stiff toes into my shoes in the morning. Then the scanty supply of food was distressing: with the keen appetites of growing children, we had scarcely sufficient to keep alive a delicate invalid." But Miss Temple provides benign goodness: "Miss Temple walking lightly and rapidly along our drooping line, her plaid cloak, which the frosty wind fluttered, gathered close about her, and encouraging us, by precept and example, to keep up our spirits, and march forward, as she said, "like stalwart soldiers." (Chapter 7,
             The bliss of infancy regained; "The ultimate adventure, when all the barriers and ogres have been overcome, is commonly represented as a mystical marriage of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World (109)." "For she is the incarnation of the promise of perfection; the soul's assurance that, at the conclusion of its exile, in a world of organized inadequacies, the bliss that once was known will be known again; the comforting, nourishing, the good mother - young and beautiful - who was known to us, and even tasted, in the remotest past (111)." "The meeting with the goddess...is the final test of the tal
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