Female Novelists

Question 1

Charlotte Brontë

Answer 1

• Sister of Emily (Wuthering Heights) and Anne Brontë (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall)
• Wrote under the male pen name Currer Bell
• Worked as a governess

Major works
• Jane Eyre
• Shirley
• Villette
• The Professor

Question 2

Jane Eyre: Naturalism/ Gothic

Answer 2

Naturalism
• Education —> Bildungsroman
• Social class
• Gender

Gothic
• Settings
• “Otherness“

Narrative
• First person, homodiegetic
• “Autobiography“
• Female voice

Question 3

Jane Eyre: Setting

Answer 3

• Structure of novel
- Gateshead House
- Lowood School
- Thornfield Hall
- Moor House
- Ferndean Manor
• Indicators of Jane’s development and social position
• Indicators of Jane’s emotions —> subjective perspective, narration

Question 4

Jane Eyre: Femininity

Answer 4

• Jane:
- Plain
- Virtuous
-Strong principles
- Not conforming to gender roles

• Blanche Ingram
- Beautiful
- Vain
- Flirtatious

• Bertha Mason (First Mrs Rochester)
- Mad
- Sexual
- Exotic

Question 5

Bertha Manson’s Afterlife

Answer 5

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
• prequel to Jean Eyre
• postcolonial classic

Sandra Gilbert/Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979)
• Categorization of female characters as either ‘angel’ or ‘monster’
• Madwoman in the attic as symbol for repressed female agency/creativity/sexuality