But, I have a quiz about Jane Eyre. But, I have a lot of notes, so I will
post that on the internet for you to code in if you want to. Do, I
encourage you to participate in Didac's game of collecting magic words,
because obviously if you give the definitions, there are, it's, you know,
it also means that you will have the word as it were. But anyway, that's
another question. Okay. What would you say is the genre of Jane Eyre?
Melodrama? Well, that's a good start. Okay. Right. There is a surprising
mixture of genres, which is why we found it so difficult to answer the
question, and that's what we're going to start by looking at. There are
clearly autobiographical elements. We can assume that the story roughly
coincides with Charlotte's life up to the point of writing it, obviously
not afterwards. She was born in 1816 and she published the book in 1847.
And that, given the time frame that we're given, the book starts when she
is about 10 and finishes when she is about 30, with most of the action
happening around when she is about 20, 1920, that coincides very much with
her age. In those different moments. I have read, I've seen people arguing
that the novel was meant to be set in the first decade of the 19th century.
But as far as I'm concerned there's no reference at all to war with France
and so that doesn't make very much sense to me. I think it's really
basically about her timescale of life. If you can think of any evidence to
contradict me, I would love to know it. But I can't think of anything.
Anyway, Charlotte's mother died, who was called Maria. Normally when we
want to say Maria, we mispronounce it as Mariah in English, who was called
Mariah Bronte, died of cancer in 1921. And of course we know that Jane,
aged 10, is an orphan, so there are possibly biographical elements there.
By 1825 Mariah Junior, Charlotte's sister, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily
were all at Cowbridge school, and as you know in that year the two elder
sisters died of tuberculosis. Are there other ways of saying tuberculosis?
If we don't want to say tuberculosis, how else can we say tuberculosis?
Synonyms for tuberculosis? No! Consumption, yes. Consumption occasionally,
very occasionally, can refer to tuberculosis. It's usually referred to
tuberculosis. The normal English way of referring to tuberculosis is TB,
because it's too long, basically. And as a result of those deaths, there
was an inspection and the conditions at the school were found to be
insalubrious. And so the two surviving daughters were taken away to be
home-schooled. Obviously, Helen Burns has elements of Mariah and Elizabeth,
a sort of composite figure taken from that. Cowan Bridge, like Lowood,
seems to have been a place designed to inculcate a sense of humility and
inferiority, not to educate. In 1831, Charlotte went to Miss Wooler's Row
Head School in Murfield, wherever Murfield is. I should know this area. I
went to university in Yorkshire, but I'm not sure where that village is.
Some of the more positive aspects of Lowood, especially Miss Temple,
probably come from Miss Wooler's school and that period in Jane's life. In
1835, Charlotte became an assistant teacher at Miss Wooler's school.
teacher at Miss Wooler's school. So, the process of going from student to
assistant teacher is the same in the real case and in the novel. In 1839,
Charlotte visited Norton Conyers which is meant to be the model for
Thornfield Hall, which was a big country house in the area. That's near
Ripon, which is just south of York. In the same year, she turned down two
proposals of marriage from different clergymen. probably elements of the St
John episode are taken from that. Notice we pronounce St John St John, I
think that's how you pronounce it. Sorry, it's just one of those silly
English names. In 1841 Charlotte worked as a governess in a home near
Bradford and of course she was working as a governess at Thornfield. So
there are parallels there. The most complicated, but perhaps in some sense
the most important part of the nexus between novel and life comes in 1843
when Charlotte was in Brussels to study French at the school owned by St
John. In 1843, she is known to have basically fallen in love with
Constantine Hegier, the father of the family. There is absolutely no
evidence that there was any sex or anything, but she had an infatuation
with him. Charlotte's biographer Claire Harmon sees echoes of the She is
the biographer, the biologic Constantine Hegier behind Jane's demanding,
volatile, cigar-smoking married employer Mr Rochester. The likeness between
Charlotte's fictional hero and Monseigneur Hegier is marked. ... Under his
moodiness, born of secret woes, Rochester is a man of fine sensibility and
affection. Heger was somebody who had actively participated in the
revolution of 1830 when Belgium became separate from whatever it was part
of, I don't know, and I think it was his brother-in-law who died in the
revolution, etc., etc. So there's a sort of dark past here where this is
happening. The next year, 1844, Charlotte returned home to care for her
father, who was almost blind. And so there may be elements of more or less
blind Rochester. Rochester, at the end of the novel, there. In the 1840s...
Go away! In the 1840s, Charlotte and her sisters... Thank you. Charlotte
and her sisters tried to start a village school, very much like Mary
Wollstonecraft and her sisters in Funny Blood, but they couldn't find
enough pupils. And, of course, the time when Jane is working in the village
school for syndrome is related to that. So, obviously, this is not just a
film disguised... autobiography, but Jane does say that Charlotte does draw
a lot on her own experience, which is probably a good thing. There are also
elements of spiritual autobiography in this novel. Jane is on a quest to
discover her own identity. The novel can be seen as a feminised reworking
of the traditional quest story in which the hero encounters a series of
dangers, obstacles and monsters in the search for his goal. So instead of
having a knight in shining armour charging around the countryside on a
horse, you have a hero who is in the search for his goal. So you have a
feminised version of this, with her having to get over a series of
problems. This is influenced by Pilgrim's Progress in the novel's
exploration of religiosity. Bunyan's book Christianised the quest where
Bronte's feminised it. So it's a similar idea of reworking earlier
fictional forms. of Charlotte and Emily Bronte treat the passions of women
as uncharted territory, and to express feeling is a right women had been
denied until that time. So, religion is important in this novel without the
novel being tendentious in trying to sell or promote or proselytise for a
particular religious slant as it were. Jane encounters three main religious
figures in the novel. St. John, the last. Mr Rocklehurst, good one. And the
last one? Helen Burns. Good. So Jane encounters three main religious
figures in figures in the novel, each represents a model of religion that
Jane ultimately rejects as she forms her own ideas about faith and
principle and their practical consequences. Syndrome is admirable in his
public face but too cold in his domestic self. Jane describes him as a
cold, cumbrous column of ice-cold white marble. So he's comparable in that
sense to Mr Brocklehurst who is a black pillar, a column of white marble,
black pillar, in terms of ideas of black and white. And the Dowager Lady
Ingram is also compared to a marble column. So these figures who are seen
as columns of stone are unflexible. They're not something that can be
adapted for Jane for her own life. Jane admires Helen Burns, but her
passivity and her death willingness are not for Jane. Jane just does not
see the world in that way. Rivers, to some extent, can be seen as a
grown-up, as an adult version of Helen. But also expresses Christian soul's
spiritism and is death willing. He's perfectly happy to go and die as
initially the sort of thing you could imagine Helen doing in her way. Where
Rochester is too passionate in Volume 2, Rivers is too rational and
passionless. Rivers rightly recognises that Miss Oliver wouldn't stand the
life of a missionary's wife, but fails to see that Jane wouldn't stand
being his wife. Jane is strong enough to be a missionary's wife, but not
his wife. Jane needs emotional as well as spiritual sustenance. Catholicism
is attacked and the fact that someone as cold and heartless errr as Eliza
Riesch, representing MT Ritual, can become a nun and rise to Mother
Superior. She is obviously somebody who has no charity, no passion. Jane,
of course, Charlotte, of course, have come across Catholicism above all in
Belgium, in Brussels. Not a lot of Catholics in the village of Haworth, but
that's where she had encountered Catholicism. In the end, Jane learns to
form her relationship with God on her own terms, not according to the
dictates of others. It's a sort of do-it-yourself religion. Another genre
which has an important impact on Jane Eyre is the genre of fairy tale. The
structure of the novel can be very much compared to Cinderella or topical
because there's a new version, Beauty and the Beast. There is also the
fairy tale of Bluebeard. Do you know the story of Bluebeard? Bluebeard was,
I believe, a pirate. Most people call Beard our pirate. He married Mrs.
Bluebeard, and they lived happily in a house, but she was told that she
could do what she liked in the house, and she was told that she could do
what she liked in the house, but there's every room except for one which
was kept locked. One day he went away on business and she found the key and
unlocked the door and found the bodies of all of the previous wives in the
spare room. Jane describes the passageway at Thornhill Hall as reminding
her of a corridor in some bluebeard's castle. So the reference seems to be
explicit in that sense. Also, in the description of Mr Brocklehurst's face,
the novel says, what a face he had, what a big nose, what a mouth, what
large prominent teeth. What does that remind you of? Yes, good. The big...
Little Red Hood, right, and the big wolf. But, one of the things about
English is that we often add extra words in order to create figures of
sound, which, as you know, is my obsession. Right, so, it's Little Red
Riding Hood. Now, there is no such thing as a riding hood anywhere in
English, any reference to a riding hood, apart from... Yes. ...a reference
to Little Red Riding Hood. In the novel, we are never told that she goes
riding, but we add the riding so that we have consonants with red. And the
same thing happens with the wolf. You say, the big wolf. Why not? But it's
the big bad wolves when we have to add the bad as opposed to a good, nice,
cuddly wolf. Have you ever encountered wolves? Yes. Some friends of mine
have a nature reserve near to the Escorial and I was allowed to go in with
the female wolves. Apparently the male wolves are too dangerous to have
people they don't know going in with them but the female wolves are kept in
one enclosure and I was allowed to go in and it was fascinating because the
head female wolf came up to me and I started stroking her and she turned
over onto her stomach so that I could stroke her stomach etc. But then one
of the other female wolves came close and the female who was here in an
instant got up and attacked the other wolf to go away and then came back to
restrain some more. It was a moment, I didn't really feel threatened with
myself but suddenly you went to say this is just a dog. Let's face it, this
is a wild animal. The level of instant aggression that the wolf was capable
of was incredible. A beautiful animal, really, really beautiful animal.
Anyway, so yes, the big bad wolf. When Montrista first appears to Jane she
describes his dog and horse as gytrashers, don't put it on, gytrashers is
the pronunciation. A northern dialect word for goat. The word gytrashers is
a word that comes from the English word gytrashers, don't put it on,
gytrashers is the pronunciation. And this term is taken from the fairy
tales that Bessie told Jane, so there's a relationship there. He later
tells her that during this incident he thought that she was a fairy. So we
have this situation where both of them are seeing each other as
supernatural beings in this situation. And of course she has already
identified herself as a fairy in the Red Room. You see? Like a supernatural
being, Jane seems to have prophetic dreams. Rochester dresses as a gypsy in
a red cloak, possibly a little red riding hood again, and in this role he
gives Mason a magic potion. Sleeping Beauty, perhaps. Jane's arrival at
Ferndy is an inversion of the fairy tale trope of the prince cutting his
way through the forest, to find Sleeping Beauty. And Bessie's burial of a
poor orphan child wandering alone on the moors in Chapter 3 foreshadows
Jane's own experience in Chapter 28. So there's a lot of fairytale in
there. But the novel is also heavily influenced by the romantics. Berwick's
History of British Birds, the book which he hits John Reid with, is full of
sublime images of shipwrecks and storms and arctic wastes and high
mountains and death and disaster, typical images of romanticism. Rochester
is clearly a Byronic figure, grooving, apparently misanthropist, forceful,
charismatic and independent. By the way, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights,
which is pronounced Wuthering Heights, I can't remember the name of it in
English, Wuthering Heights, is another Byronic figure. However, Charlotte
undermines the Byronic archetype from the very beginning. He appears as
this dark, majestic figure on his black horse and immediately falls off and
is injured. That's not very Byronic in itself. In the end, Jane transforms
him into a mild-mannered husband dependent on his wife for moral and
intellectual guidance. In fact, Jane is ultimately the true Byronic hero of
the novel. Finally, it is Jane, not Rochester or St. John, who achieves the
philosophical ideal embodied in that figure. In her passage through
loneliness, isolation, intense suffering and temptation, Jane asserts her
own individuality, forges a sense of identity and proclaims her freedom and
independence of will. The central theme of Joan Eyre is essentially the
romantic conceit of the self as individual and unique. In Volume 2, Chapter
8, there is an allusion to Keats' poem Ode to a Nightingale, which you may
have heard of. And there are also references to A Midsummer Night's Dream,
which were loaded by Shakespeare, had quite a lot to do with it. In Volume
3, Chapter 2, Jane recognises God's omnipotence and omnipresence on the
moor at night. This is reminiscent of the romantic idea that nature can
teach morality, as in Wordsworth's prelude. But, Jane... ...also is
significantly influenced by the genre of Gothic literature. The first half
of the novel is dominated by gothic references to a nursemaid who teaches
her charge about folklore and the supernatural, witches, fairies, sprites,
incubi, imps, ghosts, vampires, eerie laughs, gypsy fortune tellers and mad
women, all of which are typical of gothic literature. Gothic fantasies
typically begin with an enjean arriving at an old gloomy mansion. So you
have an innocent young woman arriving at Dracula's castle or whatever type
of thing. In moments of anxiety, Jane's mind sees the face of Judas
morphing, changing into that of Satan in the panels of the novel. The
intense sexual magnetism that Rochester exerts over Jane is barely
understood by the young woman. She is in turmoil due to the struggle
between intense passion and the belief that such passion cannot go
unpunished. As I mentioned, in gothic literature there tends to be... quite
a lot of sexuality sublimized or hidden or metaphorically speaking, quite a
lot of sexuality within gothic literature. The Dracula is all about sex for
example, although do you have any other course to get to study dracula?
Well, I think it's a shame. It's very interesting as literature Where it
all comes from? That's another Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah right in the game of charades. How do you say she loves She loves I
think she loves Charades But it's not sure that is each other's well in In
general In the game of charades. Yeah, we sort of pronounce it in the sort
of French way more or less the words right Is followed by the word? well
now a bride well is a type of prison for Minor crimes for like moral crimes
and things like that. So that's all very word played One day it was clearly
influenced by Anne Radcliffe our old friend Anne Radcliffe for instance in
a Sicilian romance a The strange occurrences that terrify the sisters are
the result of their mother having been imprisoned by her father, who
declared her dead in order to marry again. So the mother's locked up in a
tower in the corner of the big mansion they live in, so they see lights and
movement at night in the corner of this town, and this originally looks
like it seems to be a ghost, etc., and they finally end up working out it
was their mother. Which, of course, is all very, very reminiscent of Bertha
Mason. Moreover, as with all of Radcliffe's romances, most, if not all, of
what seems supernatural in Jane Eyre has a logical or psychological
explanation. We're not left with magic really exists, necessarily.
Psychological distortions of things exist, madness exists, but magic and
superstition are in vain. Or magic in itself doesn't really. Robert Heelman
has suggested that Bronto revised the Gothic mode using its conventions and
motives to symbolize the enigmatic parts of the human personality and the
unconscious soul. If you like. So we have that. I need to have some tea. I
really should be settled. All right. I need to run classes. we have a long
conversation about names, about acronyms, don't worry, well that's coming
very soon Not really... to some extent, you could argue that that, the
nearest thing you come is something like Don Juan, or maybe, or probably a
better example would be Childe Harold's Programmage, which of course is
poetry. Because still at that stage, and remember we're talking maybe, or
at least a good generation earlier than this, the novel is still an
inferior form. It's almost that sort of situation. As I tried to express,
it's very much about perception rather than reality. For me, for most
people as they're trying to be objective, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner
is a masterpiece, I'm not criticising it at all, but it is fundamentally
gothic. The thing is that gothic, though, has an element of criticism. And
novel has an element of criticism until really after people have fully
realised how good Jane Austen was. Jane Austen is really the person who
turns novels into the major art form of the Victorian age, even though
Charlotte Bronte was very nasty about Jane Austen. Charlotte Bronte said
that she wasn't really a novelist, she just described social surroundings.
And of course really the literature for the Victorians means novels, it
doesn't mean poetry. Yes you have the great Victorian poets of Browning and
Tennyson, for me Gerald Manley Hopkins is a greater Victorian poet, but
nobody knew he existed until the 1920s, he was rediscovered in the 1920s.
So he doesn't really count in terms of the Victorians' perception of
things, whereas the Victorians had the idea that they were exporting
Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot and Meredith and all the
other people and Trollope to the world and these people were as highly
considered as the rest of the world. I think the Russian writers at the
same time, I think the Russian writers would probably be better writers.
But anyway, where Victorian literature really took off and had a huge
influence on the world was in the novel, so the Victorians start to value
it. But that's the problem really, you have people like Wordsworth who
don't want to be associated with the Gothic because they are great poets
and a great poet can't be associated with the Gothic. So not really, but
what I'm saying is there is a huge overlap obviously. Again, Frankenstein
is something which comes out of a romantic milieu that is a gothic novel to
some extent. It's probably better described as a piece of science fiction,
as the first piece of science fiction. But it has a huge influence of
gothic novels, so it's a problem. But it's a problem because of snobbery
about definitions rather than the fact of influence. And again, the sort of
painting that will... You have the same type of thing in the world of
visual art. You will have Fuseli, Honoré Fuseli and Gérard. John Martin
is probably more described as gothic painters. Whereas Turner and Constable
are romantic painters. Now, there are moments when the sort of subject
matter that's being painted... Like when Turner does a painting of Hannibal
crossing the Alps. It's incredibly similar to the same type of subject
matter by John Martin. It's infinitely better because it's Turner. But the
paintings look, on a very superficial level, incredibly similar. But one
would tend to be considered slightly more gothic just because that's a
slightly more insulting work. So, yeah, more or less. Blah, blah, blah. The
other, another genre which is enormously important in this case is
Bildungsroman. Jane Eyre has much in common with the coming of age novels
of the Victorian period, like David Cotterfield or Mill on the Floss. Jane
presents a society in which a young woman's secure place depends on looks,
wealth and family. And initially she had the idea that she was going to be
a woman. She has none of those, and to some extent, by the end of the
novel, she has all of them. Remember that Jane has been educated for the
benefit of others. She can be a governess or a school teacher. That's one
of the options here. It's a little bit like being British in Spain. You can
be a translator or an English teacher. She excels in her book learning and
conforms to the religion of her education, but neither has a huge impact on
her inner life, which is largely ruled by superstition. The religious
teachings she has received doesn't relate much to her life, so her own
psychological references are to a much more naturalistic God. Jane is on a
quest, and her quest is to find out who Jane Eyre is. She frequently does
not recognize herself, starting with her reflection in the mirror in the
red room. Ah, there it is. Right, I can now see the text. This is exciting.
I can't see you, but you can see the text. You win some, you lose some. She
has to remind herself of her identity, such as in the self-portrait of a
governess, disconnected, poor and plain. Jane's artistic self and her true
self are closely linked, as the title of this drawing suggests. Jane
frequently tells her story. To the apothecary, Mr. Lloyd, which is
pronounced Lloyd, not Lloyd, by the way. To Helen Burns, to Miss Temple, to
Rochester, and to St. John. Telling her story becomes synonymous with
knowing herself and establishing her identity. And of course, as she tells
her story, the thing develops and it changes according to her age. So
there's quite a lot of realism with a small R in the fact that early on in
the story, a lot of her references are more to things related to fairy
tales, etc., and this sort of thing will be picked up on by James Joyce.
When you read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the early parts of the
book are written as if they were written by a five-year-old and then they
develop out according to the age, etc. But that sort of fun you will see
next year. Right, so those are the main genres which come to play in the
novel. Another aspect which is interesting but is not related to a genre is
Jane's process is guided by a series of substitute mothers. Bessie, who
offers consolation and a sensitivity to the supernatural. Miss Temple, who
offers consolation and teaches self-control. Mrs Fairfax, who teaches a
sense of status as well as nurture. And Diana Reid, who teaches Jane to be
independent and self-assertive. Jane also has supernatural mothers. There
is the white vision mother. In human form in chapter 27 she sees on the
night of her parting from Rochester and calls mother. And the universal
mother nature mentioned in chapter 28 when she is lost on the moor. Jane is
on a quest to find love but she insists on being loved without
self-abnegation. She has spent too long finding herself to deny herself for
someone else. Jane also has a series of surrogate and supernatural children
before having her own children. There is the doll at Gateshead. Adele. The
tiny infant she carries in her dream, representing her orphaned self that
she must nurture and bring to maturity, and the young child in the dream
about the ruin of Thornfield that prevents her from leaving Rochester.
Berta Mason, of course, is a sort of doppelganger for Jane Eyre, and she is
the catalyst for the growth of Jane's self-understanding. Jane goes through
a process of learning when to speak, when to express herself, and when to
be silent. This is self-control, but it is also controlling how she
interacts with others. Control. By controlling the image of herself, she
projects to others. Jane must also learn a path of moderation between moral
duty and earthly pleasure, her spiritual and her physical needs. By the end
of the novel, Jane has become a mature woman who knows her own mind and can
resist convention. There is also a level of satire in the novel. Above all,
the depiction of the townspeople. The townspeople are the people of the
town, of charitable institutions like Lowood, which has very little charity
at all about it, and of upper-class society that is rigid and lacking in
human feeling, especially as represented by the Ingrams. So the novel can
be seen as a satire on institutionalised religion and high society.
Charlotte Bronte dedicated Jane Eyre to William Thackeray, the satirist who
had written, at that time, a few months before, Vanity Fair, and she
considered him the first social regenerator of the day, the first in the
sense of the most important social regenerator of the day, believing that
his satire could help to correct the warped system of things, the corrupted
nature of British society, that there was a moral purpose behind the novel
in that sense. The serious purpose of Jane Eyre is to expose the hypocrisy,
self-interest and moral bankruptcy of her society and to help to change.
There are also elements of realism in this novel. The realism of the
dialogues in Jane Eyre surpasses almost anything that had been written up
to that point. Moreover, the psychological realism, as Bronte explores the
workings of Jane's mind, was also unsurpassed up to that time. It builds on
the introspective religious novels, 1830s and 1840s, which are now
completely forgotten but were of some importance in the two decades before
Jane Eyre was written. However, realism in literature means more than being
realistic. Realism implies a straightforward causal sequence, an
unproblematic representation of the world. Realist literature does not
question itself or refer to its own construction as problematic. Jane Eyre
on the other hand does give a detailed and concrete picture of Jane's world
but many of the details have a secondary symbolic meaning. Moreover, Jane
Eyre is a self-reflexive text. We see Jane struggling to compose her own
autobiography and we are made aware that what we are being offered is a
written text that is not and cannot be a full direct representation of the
world. It is subjective. Behind Bronte's departure from realism is her
conviction that human experience is too complex and profound to be fully
understood. So, what symbolism do we have? The red room. Good, yes, that's
one symbolic space. The mirror, reflections. Reflection is always
important. And the chest mask. The two key concepts are fire and ice. Where
does Charlotte Bronte get the idea of fire and ice from? The two big
concepts are fire versus ice. Where does Charlotte Bronte get this contrast
from, by the way, Frankenstein? I mean, it goes back to Petrarch and
whatever, but in a direct sense in a novel it comes from Frankenstein. So
fire represents passions, anger and spirit. Rochester's eyes, for example,
are described as having fire in them. Jane realises that as St. John's wife
she would be forced to keep the fire in my nature continually low. So her
passions would have to be constantly turned down, as it were. Bertha sets
fire to Rochester's bed, foreshadowing the fire that will kill her and
emasculate her husband. So the fire is important. Red is associated with
fire, passion and sexuality in Bronte's work. White with coldness and the
absence of sexuality. Another way of saying white in Enfonce? I want
Blanche, right. Blanche Ingram has this idea of being passionless and a
lack of sexuality. Ice represents the oppressive forces trying to
extinguish Jane's vitality. Frozen breakfast at Lowood. I tell you what,
the frozen breakfast is of course a pretty harsh concept as such in
realistic terms but it's also part of that continual, that constant
coldness that was part of the environment at that school. And St John is
compared to ice and cold rock. He casts a freezing spell, an incantamento
helado over Jane. Jane and Rochester meet over ice. Later the fires are lit
in Thornfield when previously the grates had been empty the fires had not
been lit because Rochester was not home. After forgiving Rochester for his
attempt at bigamy Jane resolves that she must be ice and rock to him.
Again, a guide of controlling passions. Jane will gradually melt and
unlearn the icy reserve she acquired at Lowood. Rochester will gradually
tame his lascivious passions and learn that relationships should be based
on companionship. Not just sex. And marriage is about love, not profit.
Rochester's disguises in the game of charades as bridegroom, emir and
criminal foreshadow his real life roles as bridegroom, despotic fiancé and
attempted trigonist. Bertha, Jane's doppelganger, wears and then rips into
her wedding veil, a symbol of lost virginity. During the episode, Jane sees
Bertha's face reflected in her own mirror. For you last year, Antonio
Andrés Ballesteros was the head of department for Grand Luna, yes? He has
written a whole book about the importance of mirrors and reflections. In
Victorian literature. So you can imagine how important these things are.
Produced by Castile Leon, I think it's Castile Leon or Toledo University
Press, whatever. It's interesting, it's an interesting subject. And of
course we see mirrors in The Lady of Shalott and Frankenstein and here and
all sorts of places. Mirrors are... are important. Rochester proposes under
the great horse chestnut tree and that night the tree is split in two by
lightning, suggesting supernatural disapproval of the wedding. Now, the
concept of nature here is much more complex and much more interesting than
the Romantics' idea about nature. In the Lowood chapters, Bronte dismisses
the idea that nature feels for humanity in any straightforward way.
However, nature can be a symbol of what is true, innocent and renewable in
contrast to the rottenness, artificiality and corruption of some fields.
Both Jane and Rochester are acutely aware of nature and the changing
seasons. Both are steeped in the pathetic fallacy. So, one of the things
that does not happen here, if you remember one of our criticisms about
Pride and Prejudice is that there was no seasonal grounding. You have a
seasonal grounding here. There is a suggestion that at some deep, complex
and unknowable level, there is a connection between nature and humanity.
But it's complex and problematic, rather like the relationship between
nature and humanity in The Run of the Ancient Man. Rather like Gerard Manny
Hopkins' A Generation Later. To be in tune with nature is to be closer to
God. It is to know oneself and to resist the ill effect of modern
mechanical society. Brockelhurst sees nature as sinful and seeks to destroy
it. We are not to conform to nature, he says. He symbolically has the
girl's natural curls cut. That was motivated by the hair curls naturally.
And of course this goes back to the arguments about nature in things like
The Tempest. You know, whether nature is a good force or a bad force.
Bronte believes in the possibility of some profound affinity between
humanity and nature. Sorry, Bronte believes in the possibility of some
profound affinity between humanity and nature. This sentence doesn't make
sense, does it? It means that Jane Eyre... Sorry, Bronte's belief, not
beliefs. Bronte's belief. ...in the possibility of some profound affinity
between humanity and nature means that Jane Eyre is ultimately a romantic
novel. Coincidence. Most Dickens is ruined for me by the level of
coincidence. There's too much confidence in me to believe him. What
coincidences do you have here? Uncertain coincidences. They are all really
connected. So this is a typical small word. Well syndrome, a little bit
like Jane Austen. I mean the big problem here I think is you have Jane
stumbling around lost on the moor and the house that she goes to just
happens to be the house where her long lost cousins, the Rivers, live.
And... So, she seems to have not to know or to have forgotten that she has
cousins named St. John, Diana and Mary. You probably remember these names
of your cousins or your family name at some point. And also the fact that
when Jane is rich and is able to marry Rochester on her own terms, Mrs.
Rochester has conveniently burnt herself, which obviously we wouldn't have
the solution if that wasn't the case. I was going to ask about the wind,
winded by John. Yes. That's what you're saying. Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure,
sure. No, I mean it's... The... I mean, the fact, again, well, to some
extent the way in which the uncle can make contact with, doesn't make
contact with, and the rivers hiding the fact that he'd written all that is
slightly difficult to believe. But it's, I mean, it's not as bad as
Dickens' currency business. Dickens has far too many currency businesses.
Currency businesses do happen in life. Well, I think they're allowed one
per novel. Okay, so the name game, the part you're interested in. The names
in Jane Eyre are often both significant and ironic. Jane is proverbially
plain. Plain Jane is a typical expression. Jane's plainness makes her an
unusual heroine in English fiction. Of course, the vast majority of English
novels have a pretty young woman as the female protagonist and that is not
the case here. And it's what probably is what most goes wrong in film
versions of this novel, that Jane in film versions tends to be far too
pretty for the thing to actually make sense. Eyre, as the surname, comes
from a real local family in Yorkshire at the time who, who had a married
woman locked up in their home. So there is an oral basis to this. But, of
course, the fact that Eyre is a homophone of Eyre gives the idea of birds
and freedom and that sort of thing that comes up regularly in the novel.
And also, ironically, Eyre is the masculine form. Ayres is the feminine
form. But Eyre, the idea that Jane Eyre is an Edith Eyre, is ironic to most
of the novel, because she is completely on her own and is an orphan rather
than being somebody who inherits. As it is written, it probably reminds us
more than anything of an eerie. What's an eerie? Any idea? No. Eerie,
pronounced the same but written differently, means phantasmagoria. So
you're on the right track, but not in this case. An eerie is the nest, the
high, high nest of an eagle or a condor or something like that. I don't
know if you have a special name for that, but you don't know. The spelling
there would suggest that. The novel mentions a condor's eerie when
describing the yell Richard Manson uttered. It says, when attacked by his
sister. So there is a direct reference to that. This is not how he does
many battles on my part. There is a direct mention there. The eerie could
also represent Jane's high ideas, but it also represents the highest part
of the house from which Bertha swoops down like a bird of prey and attacks
her victim. Ah. E-I-R-E, of course, is a name for the Republic of Ireland
and there are some references to Ireland there. And, of course,
biographically, Jane's father came from Ireland. Now, Mrs. Reid, a reed can
be an instrument of punishment. However, interestingly, Mrs. Reid prefers
the psychological torture of the Red Room to corporal punishment. So it
would be perfectly normal at this time for somebody in that situation to
use a reed on a child. But this is actually not the case. And the name is
also ironic. It's ironic because the symbolic quality of a reed, of course,
is flexibility. And the one thing that Mrs. Reid seems to be very not is
flexible. Helen Burns. There's the idea that Helen is warm, is
compassionate and burns with religious passion. But Helen has to survive in
the hostile, frigid world of Lowood by going into herself. By daydreaming
and by seeking religious solace. But this is not enough and she burns up
with fever. However, she is passive in the face of injustice and is cold in
death. So have to hold you hot-cold going on again. Miss Temple, Temple
suggests sanctuary, Miss Temple marries a clergyman, foreshadowing Jane's
syndrome option. Blanched is blanched. When do we refer to blanched in
English? About the only time we ever use the adjective blanched is blanched
albums. I don't know what they actually do to them, but that's when we use
blanched to mean whitened. And she of course is bland and passionless.
Bertha means bright in Germanic languages, which could associate her with
burning passion, but is also ironic. Since she is associated with the night
and is imprisoned indoors. Bertha also echoes bird, bird, Bertha, similar
to a sound, and she is a caged bird. She eventually destroys the cage with
fire. So the river's names. St John could refer to St John the Apostle who
wrote Revelation or just St John the Baptist who baptized in the river.
Jordan, John, rivers, blah, blah, blah. Rivers could refer to the pull of
the current. The Rivers are the mirror image of the Reeds – two sisters,
one brother. The male cousins are contrasted by name – John, Reed, St.
John, Rivers. Diana Rivers is the Virgin Huntress, Mary Rivers is the
Virgin Mother, both unmarried and latterly independent. Do Reeds, Eyre,
Burns and Rivers represent earth, air, fire and water? Perhaps. Does Eyre
hint at Eyre Island where Charlotte's father was born and where Rochester
suggests Jane should go when she leaves Thornfield? What about the place
names? Gateshead? What does Gateshead imply? What does it imply? Gateshead
is a place in Yorkshire, northern England, and it means the promontory of
the Last Cabinets, but that has nothing to do with this. There was the idea
of both Gates and Head as the idea of it being the entrance – the
beginning of the novel – it's an appropriate name for the beginning of
the novel. Lowood implies a dell, a low wood, a dark low point in Jane's
life. Thornfield implies a field of thorns, terrain that is difficult and
or painful to cross. Moorhouse is self-explanatory, and Fern Dean also
implies a dell, a dean and a dell are more or less the same thing, a wooded
valley, but while ferns are associated with woodland and moorland, they
also suggest softness, and this is clearly the most euphonic place name in
the novel. So there are games going on there as well. So what is the
Marxist interpretation of Jane Eyre? Well, the contemporaries, when this
novel was published, very much saw this as a revolutionary novel, to some
extent a dangerous novel, and it was associated with the revolutionary
climate of 1848. That year, conservative Elizabeth Rigby wrote in the
Quarterly Review, which was the Quarterly Review, the same tone of thought
which fostered Chartism and Rebellion is the same which has also written
Jane Eyre. In 1855, Mrs. Oldfront wrote, Jane Eyre had provoked a
revolution, the most alarming revolution of modern times, if you can
imagine. We already have the idea of somebody who is intelligent and
well-educated who cannot advanced themselves socially is considered a
threat to the status quo. It's very much the situation of William Langland
or Horatio in The Spanish Tragedy, or of Ursula in The Duchess of Malfi.
The clergy and above all the clergy's children are very much in this type
of position in rural society in Britain. While there was an increasing
urban middle class outside the cities, what you tended to have was an upper
class and a lower class and nothing in between, aristocracy and servants,
and so governesses were an anomaly. And the children of the clergy would
tend to be in the middle class, but they were not in the middle class. They
were more educated with the children of the aristocracy but of course then
had fewer financial possibilities. Jane has been an outsider from the
beginning. At Gateshead she is considered neither truly family nor servant.
Fanny Price, in Austen's Transfield Park, suffers under a similar set of
expectations as a dependent. Jen is a figure of ambiguous class standard
and consequently a source of extreme tension for the characters around her.
Jen's manners, sophistication and education are those of an because
Victorian governesses who tutored children in etiquette as well as
academics were expected to possess the culture of the aristocracy. In the
aristocratic folklore, governesses were liable to both madness and
seduction. Jane presumably is aware of this. Blanche describes governesses
as incubi. The new industrialists, the bourgeoisie, could buy their way
into the aristocracy. Jane can buy into the plutocracy at Berthaville,
incidentally. Miss Ingram's loveless pursuit of Rochester for his money can
be seen to parallel Bertha's and Céline Barron's. Jane constantly asks,
what is class? Is it money? Is it education? Is it family name? Is it some
sort of weird combination of these things? This century earlier wouldn't
really have been a problem. The same as it is for us today. What is the
class? What is upper class? We really... People use the terms and they're
talking about a completely different thing. For example, the Americans,
middle class is anybody who works who's not part of the lumpen. They don't
really even perceive of the working class, certainly the politicians. As a
child, Jane is the same class as the reeds in terms of blood but not in
terms of money John calls her a dependent she calls him a murderer a slave
trader and a Roman emperor clear signs of incipient class consciousness She
resists her captor like a rebel slave and she is taken to the Red Room She
refuses to accept that young master John is her master Jane confuses Mrs
Fairfax as the owner of Thornfield Mrs Fairfax is in fact a distant
relative of Rochester Again, her class is ambiguous Diana and Mary Rees are
also the poor daughters of upper-class hereditists However, Jane's eventual
gentrification can be seen as part of the Renaissance trope of
blue-bloodedness In the end, she returns to the class that she rightfully
belongs to She only seems to be lower class The inheritance demonstrates
otherwise She doesn't want to be taken for a slave who is able to afford
She is the only one Yeah, I mean there's there's that sort of weird
childish class consciousness in some sense is similar to Mohawk language in
the sense that we think children not thinking in terms of class but clearly
in these cases they're very much doo-doo. There's a bit about the
psychoanalytical analysis which you can read for yourself from part
post-colonial criticism. The post-colonial argument goes Jane Eyre and
Charlotte Bronte so Jane Eyre and through her Charlotte Bronte are colonial
fascist xenophobes who participate in and benefit from the empire. The
evidence for this is that all foreigners in the novel are portrayed
negatively. They are suspect and, well, foreign. Foreigners in general,
unlike Britishers cannot control their passions or lasciviousness. Jane
prefers English culture and education to French education and insists on a
girl being educated in an appropriately British way. Bertha Mason is
treated like a caged animal because of her dark skin and passionate nature
and because she speaks Spanish. Bertha is described as discoloured and
savage, purple, with swollen dark lips and bloodshot eyes. These terms can
be associated with 19th century descriptions of vampires, which reflect
stereotypes both of Jews, cannibals or simply aliens, simply foreigners. So
that is the post-colonial argument. To which I would answer. Most of the
English characters, Sarah Reid, John Reid, Eliza Reid, Georgina Reid, Mr
Bucklehurst and all of his family, Miss Scratchard, Blanche Ingram, her
sister, Lady Ingram and Grace Poole are all portrayed negatively in the
novel. So while there may be quite a lot of foreigners who are portrayed
negatively. Most of the English characters are also portrayed negatively.
Adele is portrayed in a not unsympathetic way and Madame Carole, the French
teacher, is one of the nicest characters in film 1. Rochester seeks out
actresses and prostitutes for his sexual liaison. Bronte never implies that
similar women do not exist in British cities. There is never any sense that
Richard Mason and Madame Pierrot are not in control of their passions.
British culture is more adequate for Adele, who is after all growing up in
Britain. It's not the idea that if she was growing up in France, that
French education would be more appropriate, but it depends where the child
is growing up. The future, for example, is just to be a servant. I don't.
You think? It goes back and it stays there and the future will come. Well,
she's not treated like a servant, but it is, yeah? You think? She's a
servant. Yeah. Oh, no, no. Well, who knows? Bertha is treated like a caged
animal because she is violent and dangerous. Her brother is not described
according to his color. Bertha is discolored because she is permanently
indoors and is usually seen at night by candlelight. As defined in the
1760, in the Dictionary of 1760, Creole, referred to someone born and
naturalized in the West Indies, but of European or African descent. The
name having no connotation of color. It seems pretty clear from the novel
that Bertha is a white colonial, which is not a mulatta or whatever the
term would be. Most importantly, the Masons belong to the colonial plan,
not a class who oppressed the colonial population, not to be oppressed and
colonized. They were the people whose wealth was ruined by the British
abolition of slavery. So it is wrong to identify the Masons as the
colonised class, they are in fact the colonial class. So basically as far
as I can see, the post-colonial analysis of this novel. Right, there's an
interesting colonist critique of the novel. Bertha can be seen as a symbol
of the trapped Victorian wife imprisoned in domestic uselessness, driven
mad because she has no outlet for her anxieties and frustrations. There is
a central male... Sorry, three sections. A central male figure threatening
Jane's desire for equality and dignity. Mr Brocklehurst, Edward Rochester
and St John Rivers. All three at some level are misogynistic. Jane wishes
to be useful and needed without being dependent, to serve on her own terms.
Having a family, the Rivers, and money allows Jane to marry Rochester as
someone who is emotionally and financially independent. Yet there is also a
certain irony at the end of the novel. Jane needs the deus ex machina
element of an uncle leaving her a fortune which guarantees her financial
independence and her Byronic, lascivious husband is named, incapacitated
and partially impoverished so he has to be dependent on her for her to be
happy. If this is wish fulfilment, then is Bronte saying that the male must
be gelded, must be emasculated for there to be domestic bliss. Rochester is
more responsible and conventional than he might at first appear. He houses
his mad wife at home when it would be reasonable to have her
institutionalised. After all, she is dangerous, and that would have been
perfectly acceptable at the time. He takes in Adèle when he has no
responsibility for her. Adèle is not his daughter, and yet he takes charge
of her. And we could see the novel as a description of patriarchy. Bronte
analyses the workings of patriarchy in that she presents us with a series
of households administered and apparently controlled by women, but actually
ruled by men. Gateshead is administered by Mrs. Reid for despotic drum
rule. Lowood is administered by Mrs. Temple for tyrannical Brocklehurst.
Thornfield is administered by Mrs. Fairfax for Rochester. More houses are
administered by Diana and Mary for singeing. Equality only comes when
Rochester abdicates power of Thornfield and ends up sharing it with Jane.
Rather pessimistically, this occurs outside or on the very margins of
society, more or less. Okay, any questions? I'm going to finish on time to
make Adriana happy. So, I will post those notes tonight. Next week, you
have a sort of holiday in that we will be talking about Victorian women in
general. But, of course, it would be a good idea if you could read The
Strange Cases of Dr Deborah and Mr Hyde for the following week. I can't
remember if that's optional, but it's quite interesting. It's up to you.
It's not very long either, depending on how much work you have. You can
either read that or not, but we will talk about that the following week.
There is, of course, a huge