Jane Eyre Flashcards
(20 cards)
Type of novel
Starting with a consideration of how Charlotte Brontë’s bildungsroman, Jane Eyre, uses the
autobiographical voice to convey the interior life of the protagonist as she makes her way in the world
It can also include biographical information about
the author, but here one must take particular care to avoid reading texts simply as autobiographical. In fact, Jane Eyre is often incorrectly read as Charlotte Brontë’s autobiography, and it is therefore important to consult reputable sources when
you investigate Brontë’s biography.
Victorians
The Victorian era came to an end at half past six on 22 January 1901 at Osborne House,
when, surrounded by her family, Queen Victoria finally passed away.
The term ‘Victorian’ gathered strength after 1901, as it was called upon to evoke an
historical period, a series of styles in fashion and architecture, a moment when the novel
flourished and a lavish empire continued to grow, but, perhaps most of all, a state of
mind.The use of the term ‘Victorian’ is usually a simplification as it stands for what
was a diverse and complex society. There is, for example, no consensus about when the Victorian period actually was
This leads us to the question: who were the Victorians? The obvious answer would be: anyone who lived in the British
Isles in the second two-thirds of the nineteenth century. The term ‘Victorian’, however, has always seemed to connect far
more with the world of the middle classes (and perhaps the aristocracy) than with that of the working classes. The word
conjures up in the first instance the comfortable, upper middle-class home ruled by a paterfamilias, waited on by his
loving wife and several servants, while his children are seen and not heard.
Ideology
an ideology is a set of beliefs – the ‘imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’, as
Althusser phrases it. Ideologies exist not only as ideas, however. Instead, they are given concrete form in the practices
and social institutions that govern people’s social relations and that, in so doing, constitute both the experience of social
relations and the nature of subjectivity.
To describe ideology as a ‘set’ of beliefs or a ‘system’ of institutions and practices conveys the impression of
something that is internally coherent, and complete … [but there is another] face of [Victorian] ideology – the extent to
which what may look coherent and complete in retrospect was actually fissured by competing emphases and interests …
the middle-class ideology we most often associate with the Victorian period was both contested and always under
construction; because it was always in the making, it was always open to revision, dispute, and the emergence of
oppositional formulations” (3)
Intersections of Class and Gender
different speheres
men go out and deal with danger
protect women from this
beauty and purity
women’s wealth belongs to husband
The characterisation of women as having most to hide, and as constructed by guilt, sexual misplacing and by illness and
hysteria belongs to that nineteenth-century discourse of sexuality Foucault describes as inducing ‘a hysterisation of
women’s bodies’, where the feminine body is seen to be ‘thoroughly saturated with sexuality’”
Notes
Industrial Revolution
- Feuded by economic growth from colonies
- Changes in class structure
- Aristocracy
- Gentry
- Middle classes
- Professional men
- Wife held domestic space
- Growing and becoming layered
- Working classes
- Servant classes sustaining domestic world inhabited by gentry
- Labourers
- Child labour considered important stage in lifespan in individual
- Jane, who inhabits the world of the gentry but works as a child, lives outside of these classic class
divisions
- UK is not big enough territorially to sustain its booming population
- Economy to sustain massive estates came from the colonies
- Gender viewed rigidly
- Middle class growing
- Public and private spheres become separated
- Domestic sphere becomes more protected
- Middle class childhood becomes protected
- Urbanisation
- Overpopulation in cities
- Poor sanitation
- Epidemics and diseases
- Prostitution grows drastically
- Darwin
- Challenging belief systems
- Where do I come from? And what happens to me when I die?
Allegory
“An allegory is a narrative, whether in prose or verse, in which the agents and actions, and sometimes the
setting as well, are contrived by the author to make coherent sense of the ‘literal’, or primary, level of
signification, and at the same time to communicate a second, correlated order of signification.”
“A literary mode that attempts to convert abstract concepts, values, beliefs, or historical events into
characters or other tangible elements in a narrative.”
- Eg. Gulliver’s Travels, The Faerie Queene etc.
Romance genre
Predictability and certainty it gives to the reader
- Realist text
- Falling in love is apart of life, a stage in adulthood
- Autobiographical structure
- Cause and effect
- Trend of writing a novel of compiled letters
- Epistolary novel 1800s
- Scandalousness is veiled by didactic form
- Brontë draws from this in her addressing of the reader
- Story becomes that of Jane Eyre, not Brontë — fictional autobiographical novel
- Charlotte Brontë took the pseudonym of Carabel and is presented as the editor of the autobiography
of Jane Eyre
Eroticism
- Present, courageously for its time
- Complex portrayal of attraction between 2 people who have different lives
- Meeting with Rochester falling off his horse
- Foreshadowing
- Relationship founded on talking
- Jane’s search for love, family, company, someone to converse with
- Invite her to be herself
- Jane’s friendship’s foreshadow this
- Scene after the fire in the bedroom
Servitude
- Is this a new type of servitude or equality?
- Rochester does not dominate her
Jane’s family dynamics
Born into family which inhabits a classless state
- Mother was of gentry but against the wishes of her father marries a good man who works among the
poor
- Mother is disowned
- Parents die
- Loses class as a baby
- Jane’s mother’s brother inherits her grandfather’s estate
- Uncle feels pity for his sister and niece and critical of his punitive father’s actions
- Uncle Reed takes Jane in, and raises her with his 3 children
- Uncle’s wife becomes envious of Jane because Uncle is spending more time with Jane than children
- Jane’s protector dies and she is left at the mercy of a woman who despises her
physically an dpsychologically abused
Places
Locations in Brontë’s story becomes richly allegorical
- A gate opens when Jane rebels
- 9 years old Jane rebels to get out of her abusive situation
- She is feisty and fierce
- Yet she questions why no one can love her
- ‘Why can’t I please anyone’
- Jane must hold onto her own self
- To resist, move out, initiate her own escape for her survival
- Lowood
- Sound of the name is deep and ominous
- Charity school
- Jane is cast off and her aunt maligns her
- Tells Brocklewood that Jane is a lier and must not be believed
- Aunt wants to protect herself
- Mentor in one of the teachers
- Becomes a teacher herself
- When her mentor leaves she feels a restlessness to leave
- Has repressed herself and her desire for life and movement
- Always standing looking out a window into the distance
- Places an ad in the newspaper to be a governess
- Initiates her own escape and movement
- Thornfield Hall
- Allegorical name
- Place of thorns
- Christian genre — everyman on a pilgrimage who must face obstacles before she can reach the
celestial city
- Place of temptation
- Meets Mr Rochester
- Romantic Byronic man
- Get along incredibly well
- Secret of the house
- Looks after Adele
- Daughter of a French dancer
- No sign of a mother
- Massive Manor House
- Inhabits alone with Mr Rochester and other servants
- Someone in the attic
- Victorian strictness about sexuality
- Constant awareness
- Covering of piano legs with skirting
- “Unmentionables” = trousers
- Jane departs
- Destitute
- In nature
- Refuses the Obstacles of Thornfield
- Her family finds her
- Rivers family
- Jane will become an heir despite Mrs Reeds best efforts to prevent this by telling them Jane is
dead
- Rochester is seen as kin (‘kind’)
- Presence of the supernatural
- Names become more natural and calm
The Red Room
- birthing moment
- Where Uncle Reed has died
- Uncle has been diminished, no longer has power to protect her
- Secret drawer, small portrait of what was once the patriarch
Story of a journey
- Trajectory is traced from place to place
- Mirrors growth,, development
- Childhood, adulthood, wifehood and motherhood
Motivation behind story
Jane uses the autobiographical opportunity to justify her actions and the actions and choices of the man she
loves and the father of her child. In doing so, the novel becomes societally critical. Society received it in
uproar and associated it with the French Revolution. Especially when it was found out that the author was a
woman. Jane eyre speaking out was unchristian and an abomination.
Brontë “conventionality is not normalcy”
“Speak I must” — when she can no longer endure her cousin John’s abuse
Trauma of Jane’s childhood echoes into her adulthood.
- Becomes a governess
- Sexual precariousness
- At the mercy of her employers
Narrator 2
Autobiographical narrative
- Highly constructed
- Unreliable?
- There is no other perspective to confirm what is the truth
- But what does Jane’s framing tell us about her
- What is important to her
Creates an intimate relationship with the reader and the speaker
- Regularly calls out to “dear reader”
- Drawing from Richardson who wrote in letter form — conveying intimacy and private affairs
- Reader becomes a voyeur
1st chapter
- Where the story begins
- “Autobiography edited by Carabel”
- Narrative veiling
- The author hides behind an assumed name
- Pretends to be an editor and this document came to ‘him’ and he publishes this document that he
edited and was written by Jane Eyre
- Verisimilitude = the attempt to convince the reader that what they are reading is a true story and
resembles life as it is
- Contains detailed description of the place
- The self in the larger society
6
- Reaction to the massive changes in the society
- Society becomes more rigid and has more rules (gender in middle class)
Brontë’s preface to the 2nd Edition: - Brontë shows her stance to be that morality does not equate to normality
- Jane’s own self in society is revealed
- Everyone had to present as ‘good’ all the time
- Novel opens the door into the home and lived reality (exposing the interior world)
- Lays claim to her own interpretation of religion
- Saintjohn rivers
- Clergy
- Story ends with his story and takes over Jane’s voice
18th century Romantics - Byron and Shelley
- Rochester is romantic
- Jane is like a Byronic heroine in her conduct
- Breaks her mould
- Similar to Pride and Prejudice — meet, hate, get to know (see estate), end up married
- Not controlled, contained middle class woman
- Passionate, full of momentum
- Complexity of characterisation
story and words
starts story with traumatic childhood
she is taking power and telling her story
very descriptive
bessie is her love but just some kindness cant help her-lose her job
food is symbol of love
acquintances at Lowood
Mrs Temple
- Surrogate mother
- Helen Burns
- Jane feels she learns a lot from Helen
- Allegorical structure
- Helen’ voice is associated with a self-denying Christianity
- If i am punished it is because I deserve it and must tolerate it
- Pg 47-48 “I could not comprehend this doctrine of endurance”
- Pg 58-59 “if all the word hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscious praised
you”… “I cannot bear to be solitary and hated”
- To be loved : “I would willingly have the bone of my arm broken” — Helen
- Masochism
- Is this friendship?
- Helen gives Jane sermons
- Tries to correct her behaviour an encourage her to control herself
- Frames Jane as hysterical
- Precursor to Sinjin Rivers
- Maryanne Wilson
- While Helen Burns is ill she discovers her friendship with Maryanne
- Guilt of enjoyment over duty
- Finds escape from the institution with Maryanne by going out into nature
- Profound communication between Jane and nature
- Soul-scape of nature
- Finds her childhood
- “She had a manner which set me at my ease”
- “She liked to inform, I to question”
- To and fro communication
- A real and fulfilling childhood friendship
- No issuing of instruction — juxtapose with Helen
- Pleasure in storytelling
- Similar to Bessie
- Similarly to pleasure in talk, as found with Rochester later
- Precursor to Rochester
- Only truly found friendship later with Rochester
speak i must
“If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it
all their own way; they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and
worse. When we are struck at without reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should –
so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again” – Jane speaking to Helen Burns (Ch 6, 48).
- Piece speaking
“Jane is punished by Mr Brocklehurst in front of the class, demonised to stand over a stool for hours. I saw
Jane as a stylite: the stool is turned almost into a column, where she learns the prayers and penance. The
concept has been taken from Fra Angelico’s fresco The Mocking of Christ: I used his technique to represent
the punishments that Lowood Institute gave to the girls they sheltered. The bad food, the scourges with the
bundle of twigs, the censorship represented by the scissors over the head of Jane.”
Speech as a theme
- Speaking and telling one’s story
- Truth telling’ to shying away from confrontation and one’s perspective
- Used in a romantic and sexual manner when she is introduced to Rochester
- Feminist manifesto
Constraints of Victorian era
- Walks a fine path not to alienate readers
- Uses a child to make it possible for Brontë to reveal what goes on under the umbrella of charity
(abuse)
- What does it feel like when a child is utterly dependent on people and they insist gratitude
- Society expects gratitude
- Uses metaphor is of slavery (contentious issue at the time)
- “Something spoke out of me of which I had no control”
- Pushed down for so long
- Surge of verbalised emotion
- Expressive character and vital to her
- “You are not worthy of associating with me”
Thornfield
Curiosity and restlessness
- Jane feels a similar curiosity — warning of something being hidden
- Restlessness when in Thornfield
- Commentary on the position of women in society
- Making puddings and knitting stockings
- This is not fair, injustice
Mr Rochester
- Bessies stories anticipate events that happen later in Jane’s life
- Rochester is introduced by falling off a horse
- Not hero of story
- Byronic — “mad, bad and dangerous to know”
- He is irritated to meet her
- She spooked his horse
- Compares her to a faerie
- Has to rest on her shoulder
- Proposes relationship of equality
- Brontë wants a non-hierarchical love for her
- Jane will go on to help Rochester at the end of novel when he is wounded and blinded
- Conversations
- Breaking of invention convention
- Not supposed to sit alone in a room with him — Fairfax provides the commentary of this
- Reminder that conventionality is not morality
- He wants her to speak to him, invites her, encourages her
- Tells her about the love affairs he has had — do not yet know he is married
- Jane’s artistic eye
- Takes delicate observations of the world around her
- He wants to see her paintings
- He comments on her looking at him
- Do you find me handsome? — not particularly
- He doesn’t find her good looking either
- This introduces sexual passion and breaks conventional conversation
- “I knew the pleasure of vexing him and soothing him by turn”
- Already in love with him, confessed to reader
- Can make him cross and soothe him
- Control over emotions
- Teasing, taunting
- Power dynamic
- Fire Pg 129
- In Rochester’s bedroom
- Started by Mrs Rochester (Bertha Mason)
- The Id drive
- Disrupts everything
- Rochester sorts out his wife
- He returns and orders Jane to “stay”
- “You would do me good”
- “Strange energy was in his voice strange fire was in his look”
- Orders her to go again, while not letting go of her hand
- Real transgression is that Charlotte Brontë put this in a novel
- Caravel to be assumed as a male editor
- Authority to decide that this content would teach the reader something
- Tests her
- Blanche
- Dressing up as a gypsy
- Smoking positioned as sexy
Adele
- Rochester’s ward
- Rumoured to be his illegitimate child
- Revealed that the child is not his
- The child is that of the governess and he is looking after her
Blanche Ingrim
- Compares beauty through art
- Governess simple and small
- Reality check
- Existence of class expectations
- Society’s forced oppositional duality
- If Rochester marries her, Adele will be sent away to school
- Jane will no longer be needed
Mrs Rochester
- Revealed to be hid in the attic
- She has been laughing
- Mr Rochester is a bigamist
Offered the opportunity to run away with Rochester
- Able to disappear and live as if he was not married
- An idealistic and oblivious life
- Moral ultimatum
Moon
- Moment of mysticism and naturalism
- Speaks to her as a mother
An unbothered young girl
- Hears the warning of ‘leave my child’
- Not to engage with Rochester while he is married
- Goes into nature, loses everything
Proposal
Garden of Eden setting
- Chestnut tree — Knowledge
- Smell cigar
- Positioned as sexy
- Does not like walking alone at this hour
- Janet = endearment
- Talks of te possibility of separation
- Adele leaving
- Style of conversation
- Formal
- Employer-employee
- Knows he is going into a marriage proposal already married
- Jane reveals her feelings
- Rochester pushes her to express her feelings for him
- “From you, sir”
- Says this “involuntarily”
- Still refers to him as “Master”
- “What I naturally and inevitably loved”
- Rochester
- “Are you anything akin to me?”
- Shift to natural register
- “Because I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you”
- String tying them together from their ribs
- Gives Rochester words that are profoundly physical to describe their sense of connection to
each other
- He feels as profoundly as she does
- Jane’s distress
- “I loved Thornfield… because I had lived in it a full and lifefull life”
- “I have talked face to face with what. I have reverence”
Ironic exchange
- Jane refers to Ingrid as Rochester’s bride
- Rochester knows of Bertha
- “Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you”
- “I have as much soul as you”
Rochester
- “I entreat you to accept me as a husband”
Storm blows up
- Metaphorical natural world
- Lightening strikes and splits the big tree
- Pathetic fallacy
Fairfax comments
Wedding day
- Bertha’s brother arrives and shatters her fantasy
Moon
- Maternal advice
- Not to give in to temptation
Her school
Must make her way with no money or food.
Uses name of Jane Elliot
Sinjin
- Discovers her true identity through a painting
- Their familial connection
- Brocklehurst— “black pillar”
- Sinjin— “white pillar”
- Enforces particular world view on her
- Make her something they believe is right and moral
- Contain her
- “you were not made for love, you were made for labour
- Double of Helen Burns
- Self-denying Christian belief
- Opposite of Rochester
- Wife-sister
- No sex
- Offers to take her with him to India
- Learn Hindu? not German
Constant entreating of the “Dear Reader” to believe and understand Jane’s decisions
- To be on her and Rochester’s side
- To understand Rochester is doing this because he believes he has no other option
Further supernatural intervention
- “Jane, Jane, Jane”
- “Voice of a human ring, known, loved”
- Gothic dimensions
- Linked with romance
Ferndeen
Returns to Thornfield and finds it burnt to the ground
Finds Rochester injured
“Reader, I married him”
- Claim to power and authority
- Assertion of her own will
- Foregrounding of her voice
- Concluding chapter
- Usually draws all threads together
“To talk to each other…”
- A way of thinking
Novel goes on to Sinjin
- Dying and sends a letter
- Narrative ends on a prayer
- Makes Jane’s story palatable
- Create conceit of Christian allegorical narrative
- Self-sacrifice, and doctrine of self-denial
- Narrative trick to pass through celebratory end to Jane’s story
- Veil with Sinjin
- “Amen… Yours Sinjin”
- Final word on the narrative
- Protects autobiographical judgement
Displacement of Jane’s voice
Rochester
- Jane’s voice can disappear to make space for Rochester’s narrative
- Rochester’s stories about his previous affairs with woman
- Jane cannot be seen to tell these stories
- Warns Jane not to ‘go with him’ without caution — she could end up disgraced and on the streets
- Inclusion of her future husband
- Foreshadows a long relationship
- Explains why he is this way
- Allows Jane to justify her choice of husbands
- His story
- Youngest son
- Wants estate to go to oldest son
- Adamant he has nothing to give to his youngest son
- Father feminised him
- Arranging marriage with other influential man’s daughter
- Used slave labour on West Indian estates to maintain English money
- Stigma attached to people with this history
- Marries Bertha Mason
- Racialises her — metaphorics of slavery
- She is the daughter of a slave owner
- She herself is not a slave
- Rochester accuses her of many things
- Secret of the Rochesters
- “Disgusting”
- Read against the grain and view him critically
- Jane wants the reader to view him and her choice of him sympathetically
- Injury
- Fire from which he is reborn
- Cleansing
- Finds him in Ferndeen — delicate, smaller, plant of the home
- Rochester’s purgatory
Jane’s Money
- Not clean either
- Comes from a different avenue
Sinjin rivers
- This is repeated at the end of the novel to make way for Sinjin River’s voice
- His mission to India
- Muscular Christianity
Other Poignant points
