“For me,” Jane begins, following the incident in the red room, “the watches of that long night passed in ghastly wakefulness; ear, eye, and mind alike strained by dread: such dread as children only can feel” (Brontë 20). Saturated as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is with unnerving or unsettling sensations, what is fascinating is how these sensations and images work in conjunction to articulate trauma—particularly trauma as it is experienced by a child. There is a striking poignancy to Jane’s specification that the dread she feels in this moment is “dread as children only can feel” (emphasis mine). A closer reading of red room incident reveals that the text corresponds to two…