Context

Question 1

quasi-obsessive attachment?

Answer 1

Her unreturned passion for a married passion, her Brussels schoolmaster, M.Hegerm; the author’s quasi-obsessive attachment haunts the dynamic of separation and longing in the heroine’s relationship with Rochester

Question 2

Roy Pascal on Bronte’s altering circumstances e.g. substituting fantasy of love fulfilment for the rejection she had herself suffered

Answer 2

lies are in the service of authenticity; ‘her novel is Truer to her real character than life itself was, for it unfolds these resources which life seems determined to choke. Imagination has not distorted truth but shaped the shapeless’

Question 3

Wordsworth influence on her bildungsroman?

Answer 3

genre can be traced back to the influence of the Wordsworthian dictum that ‘the child is the father of the man’

Question 4

Sally Shuttleworth on JE as a bildungsroman

Answer 4

‘seems to follow the developmental pattern of the Bildungsroman, whilst actually offering the very reverse of a progressive, linear history’.

Question 5

Sally Shuttleworth on psychological formation of Jane

Answer 5

‘Jane, as child, presents the same psychological formation as Jane in adulthood. The history she offers is that of a series of moments of conflict… the endless reiteration of the same’

Question 6

When was Jane Eyre published?

Answer 6

16th October 1847

Question 7

what did the Romantics (Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth) establish?

Answer 7

the child as the archetype of the Romantic sensibility; powerfully expressive of nostalgia and Wordsworthian ‘natural piety’ as of Blakean indignant social protest

Question 8

Peter Coveney on why JE expresses the psychic condition of childhood deprivation and persecution more than Dickens

Answer 8

‘Jane Eyre is perhaps the first heroine in English fiction to be given, chronologically at least, as a psychic whole. Nothing, in fact, quite like Jane Eyre had ever been attempted before.’

Question 9

novel is immersed in the feel of childhood experience, its sensory primacy

Answer 9

as Jane says in Chapter 3, children ‘can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings’

Question 10

What are the novels Gothic set pieces?

Answer 10

the red room
the forbidden attic
the dangerously sexualised hero

Question 11

Robert B. Heilman on the Gothic

Answer 11

it ‘manages to make Gothic more than a stereotype’; ‘Jane Eyre’s ‘new gothic’ leads away from standardised characterisation towards new levels of human reality, and hence from stock responses towards a kind of passionate engagement’

Question 12

Rosemary Jackson on the Gothic

Answer 12

Gothic fantasy ‘characteristically attempts to compensate for lack resulting from cultural constraints: it is a literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss’

Question 13

How popular was the figure of the governess in novels. of this period?

Answer 13

140 novels featuring a governess were published between 1814 and 1865

Question 14

Mary Poovey and Kathryn Hughes on the governess indicating cultural anxieties which centre in

Answer 14

‘the tension which the governess embodies - concerning social respectability, sexual morality and financial self-reliance’

Question 15

Poovey on the governess cultural significance

Answer 15

‘the proximity she bears to two of the most important Victorian representations of women - the figure who epitomised the domestic ideal, and the figure who threatened to destroy it by being independent professionally as well as sexually’

Question 16

similarities Jane and Charlotte

Answer 16

governess analogous to the habits of a novelist - a woman of uncertain means like Bronte had an ambivalent standing in Victorian society. It is part of her power that the craft of character and author are closely identified.

Question 17

the very ______ of the book - with its mix of genres, voices, and, like Jane’s paintings, its explorations of new dimensions and realities, is testimony to Bronte’s creative effort to escape conventional social or literary models.

Answer 17

amorphousness

Question 18

Legends of Angria

Answer 18

created an exotic fantasy world as the setting for a romantic saga of love, war, passion and revenge. It’s inseparable from the influence of Gothic fiction and Romantic poetry, especially LORD BYRON, Charlotte’s avowed literary hero

Question 19

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Answer 19

JE inspired this story where the governess asks herself ‘was there a secret at Bly? An insane, an unemotional relative kept in unsuspected confinement?’

Question 20

within a year of its publication, Jane Eyre had been dramatised and…

Answer 20

10 adaptations followed

Question 21

Daphne du Mauirier’s Rebecca

Answer 21

JE inspired this story where an erstwhile lady’s companion marries into the gentry only to find Manderley haunted by Rebecca, her husbands first wife

Question 22

Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

Answer 22

offers a prequel where Bertha is given an extended monologue. Submissive and exploited, she submits to Rochester’s sexual demands and is later rejected for ‘intemperance’ and betrayed by her husband’s promiscuous infidelity.

Question 23

Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress

Answer 23

Gilbert & Gubar pointed out in the 1980s that Jane Eyre is a distinctively female ‘Pilgrims Progress’ - her difficultuies are ‘symptomatic of difficulties Everywoman in a patriarchal society must meet and overcome: oppression (at Gateshead), starvation (at Lowood), madness (at Thornfield), and coldness (at Marsh End)’