Criticism Flashcards
Terry Eagleton on Jane as Governess and Orphan
‘leaves the self a free, blank, pre-social atom: free to be injured and exploited but free also to progress, move through the class structure’
Roy Pascal:
even lies are in the service of authenticity
Sally Shuttleworth:
‘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’
Peter Coveney:
‘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’
Rosemary Jackson:
the Gothic ‘characteristically attempts to compensate from lack resulting from cultural constraints: it is a literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss’
Inga-Stina Ewbank:
In Jane ‘the love story, the woman question and the governess (social) problem coalesce’
Terry Eagleton on Jane’s ambiguous social position
‘She lives at that ambiguous point in the social structure at which two worlds- an internal one of emotional hungering, and an external one of harsh, mechanical necessity - meet and collide
Katherine Hughes:
Jane the governess is a daring alter ego and a surrogate and spokeswoman for all middle-class women.
Gilbert and Gubar:
‘monsters’ in female novels are displaced symptoms of authorial anxiety as they were trespassing on a male domain
Adrienne Rich:
distinction between Bertha’s animism and Jane’s virginity is a crystallisation of the sexual double standards of Victorian masculinity. ‘The nineteenth century loose woman might have sexual feelings, but the nineteenth-century wife did not and must not’
Sally Shuttleworth:
the two figures in Victorian discourse ‘who demarcated the sphere of excess were the passionate child and the madwoman’
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’
early reviewers denounced the ‘coarseness’ of the language, the ‘unfeminine’ laxity of moral tone, and the _________ which made its hero cruel, brutal and yet attractive.
‘dereliction of decorum’
Margaret Elephant writing in 1855
‘[Jane Eyre] the impetuous little spirit that dashed into our well-ordered world, broke its boundaries and defied its principles = and the most alarming revolution has followed the invasion of Jane Eyre’
‘Every page burns with moral ______’ wrote an early critic
Jacobinism
Matthew Arnold
‘the writer’s mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion and rage’
George Henry Lewes, December 1847
‘It is an autobiography - not, perhaps, in the naked facts and circumstances, but in the actual suffering and experience… it is soul speaking to soul’
Algrnon Charles Swinburne regarded it as a work of ‘genius’ because it had the
‘power to make us feel in every nerve, at every step forward’
Virginia Woolf, 1916
‘all her force, and it is the more tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, “I love”, “I hate”, “I suffer”.’
Raymond Williams, 1970
‘in the tightening Victorian world of rigid self-control…. the Bronte sisters knew a whole structure of repression in their time; knew it and in their own ways broke it with a strength and a courage that puts us all in their debt’
D.H. Lawrence, 1929
‘I find Jane verging towards pornography’
Elizabeth Rigby 1948
deplored Jane Eyre as ‘pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition’
Helen Glen
‘the novel re-inflects the religious narrative, saying that the values of this world and the next can be reconciled’
Peter J. Bellis
Essay: ‘in the window-seat: vision and power in Jane Eyre’ talks about Lacan’s ‘sceptic drive’
GH LEWES
‘reality - deep, significant reality, is the great characteristic of the book’
Rigby on link to chartism
’ the tone of the mind and thought which has… fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre’.
Gilbert and Gubar on principles
“‘principle and law’ in the abstract do not always coincide with the deepest principles and laws of her own being’.
