Jane Flashcards
subordination by John Reed
‘You are a dependant… you have no money, your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentleman’s children like us’
Jane’s demeanour of ‘habitual obedience’ (heroine)
‘accustomed to john Reed’s abuse, I never had an idea of replying to it’
Radical new departure for Jane, beginning chapter 2
‘I resisted all the way; a new thing for me’
Jane’s retaliatory counter-assertion of her own worth after Reed says she’s ‘not worthy of notice’
‘I cried out suddenly and without at all deliberating on my words, “They are not fit to associate with me”’
“Speak I must:
I had been trodden on severely and must turn”
Jane’s isolation, as a ‘discord’
‘Me, she had dispensed from joining the group… saying she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy little children’
Interesting features to note about ‘Me, she had dispensed from joining the group…’
- proposed ideal of female childhood mediated entirely through Jane’s ironic consciousness of Mrs Reed’s reported words, not through direct dialogue
- the syntax is itself ostentatiously unorthodox - ‘Me’ is positioned in silently vengeful opposition to the family’s will to dispense with and ignore her
Jane’s instinctively raw, innate sense of justice
“unjust! Unjust!” - Jane’s inward cry at Reed’s “violent tyrannies”
‘winner of the field’ in ‘the hardest
battle I had ever fought, and the first victory I had gained’
How does Jane’s marginalisation as Governess echo marginalisation at Gateshead?
we first see her in the ‘double retirement’ of a window-seer the ‘red moron curtain drawn nearly close’ ; at Thornfield ‘the crimson curtain hung before the arch… “there she still is behind the window-curtain. You pay her of course’ - literalists her social position in household
what did anxieties about governess’s sexual neutrality link her to in the Victorian mind?
too figures of sexual depravity - the fallen woman and the lunatic (Bertha)
Inga-Stina Ewbank
In Jane ‘the love story, the woman question and the governess (social) problem coalesce’
Terry Eagleton on Jane’s ambiguous point in the social structure
‘She lives at that ambiguous point in the social structure at which two world - an internal one of emotional hungering, and an external one of harsh mechanical necessity - meet and collide’
Terry Eagleton, Jane’s governess and orphan status
‘leaves the self a free, blank, “pre-social” atom ;free to be injured and exploited but a also free to progress, move through the class structure.’
Mary Poovey and Katherine Hughes on the cultural anxieties in the governess’ distress
‘the tension which the governess embodies - concerning social respectability, sexual morality, and financial self-reliance’
‘I longed for a power fo vision… which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen…
I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach’
Kathryn Hughes
Jane the governess is a daring alter ego and surrogate and spokeswoman for all middle-class women
Jane’s very subordination confers a privileged vision, which she consciously exercises…
she is a watcher, who sees Rochester’s faults, Adelè’s spilt inanity, and Ingram’s deadness and poverty of life
possibility of being an insider-outsider is itself…
a kind of protean release from the stereotyped role of spinster governesses
Jane’s superior insight exposes the poverty of the showy guests minds with all the authority of an omniscient narrator’s definitive word:
‘She [Blanche] was very showy, but she was not genuine: she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature: nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted its freshness’
what do her pictures depict?
successively, a cormorant, an iceberg and the evening star
the _____ landscapes - wild, dramatic, uncertain of meaning - are continuous with the dream life Jane experiences throughout the novel
visionary
what Rochester sympathetically examines in these paintings is an ______?
expression of Jane’s inner life
Jane ‘feasted… on the spectacle of ideal drawings,
which I saw in the dark; all the work of my own hands’
Jane’s art is a Romantic form of ______
expressionism
Her art brings with it Romantic creative anxieties about the gap between conception and execution, and the difficulty of giving form to the elusively inexpressible’
‘I was tormented by the contrast between my idea and my handiwork… I had imagined something which I was quite powerless to realise’ R: ‘Not quite: you have secured the shadow of your thought’
