Jane Flashcards
subordination by John Reed
‘You are a dependant… you have no money, your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentleman’s children like us’
Jane’s demeanour of ‘habitual obedience’ (heroine)
‘accustomed to john Reed’s abuse, I never had an idea of replying to it’
Radical new departure for Jane, beginning chapter 2
‘I resisted all the way; a new thing for me’
Jane’s retaliatory counter-assertion of her own worth after Reed says she’s ‘not worthy of notice’
‘I cried out suddenly and without at all deliberating on my words, “They are not fit to associate with me”’
“Speak I must:
I had been trodden on severely and must turn”
Jane’s isolation, as a ‘discord’
‘Me, she had dispensed from joining the group… saying she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy little children’
Interesting features to note about ‘Me, she had dispensed from joining the group…’
- proposed ideal of female childhood mediated entirely through Jane’s ironic consciousness of Mrs Reed’s reported words, not through direct dialogue
- the syntax is itself ostentatiously unorthodox - ‘Me’ is positioned in silently vengeful opposition to the family’s will to dispense with and ignore her
Jane’s instinctively raw, innate sense of justice
“unjust! Unjust!” - Jane’s inward cry at Reed’s “violent tyrannies”
‘winner of the field’ in ‘the hardest
battle I had ever fought, and the first victory I had gained’
How does Jane’s marginalisation as Governess echo marginalisation at Gateshead?
we first see her in the ‘double retirement’ of a window-seer the ‘red moron curtain drawn nearly close’ ; at Thornfield ‘the crimson curtain hung before the arch… “there she still is behind the window-curtain. You pay her of course’ - literalists her social position in household
what did anxieties about governess’s sexual neutrality link her to in the Victorian mind?
too figures of sexual depravity - the fallen woman and the lunatic (Bertha)
Inga-Stina Ewbank
In Jane ‘the love story, the woman question and the governess (social) problem coalesce’
Terry Eagleton on Jane’s ambiguous point in the social structure
‘She lives at that ambiguous point in the social structure at which two world - an internal one of emotional hungering, and an external one of harsh mechanical necessity - meet and collide’
Terry Eagleton, Jane’s governess and orphan status
‘leaves the self a free, blank, “pre-social” atom ;free to be injured and exploited but a also free to progress, move through the class structure.’
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’
‘I longed for a power fo vision… which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen…
I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach’
Kathryn Hughes
Jane the governess is a daring alter ego and surrogate and spokeswoman for all middle-class women
Jane’s very subordination confers a privileged vision, which she consciously exercises…
she is a watcher, who sees Rochester’s faults, Adelè’s spilt inanity, and Ingram’s deadness and poverty of life
possibility of being an insider-outsider is itself…
a kind of protean release from the stereotyped role of spinster governesses
Jane’s superior insight exposes the poverty of the showy guests minds with all the authority of an omniscient narrator’s definitive word:
‘She [Blanche] was very showy, but she was not genuine: she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature: nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted its freshness’
what do her pictures depict?
successively, a cormorant, an iceberg and the evening star
the _____ landscapes - wild, dramatic, uncertain of meaning - are continuous with the dream life Jane experiences throughout the novel
visionary
what Rochester sympathetically examines in these paintings is an ______?
expression of Jane’s inner life
Jane ‘feasted… on the spectacle of ideal drawings,
which I saw in the dark; all the work of my own hands’
Jane’s art is a Romantic form of ______
expressionism
Her art brings with it Romantic creative anxieties about the gap between conception and execution, and the difficulty of giving form to the elusively inexpressible’
‘I was tormented by the contrast between my idea and my handiwork… I had imagined something which I was quite powerless to realise’ R: ‘Not quite: you have secured the shadow of your thought’
‘my inward ear to a tale that was never ended - a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, ___, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence’
fire
Jane’s imagination compensates for the _____ of female experience
privation
Terry Eagleton on Jane Eyre’s bourgeois ethic
she ‘negotiates passionate self-fulfilment on terms which preserve the social and moral conventions intact, and so preserve intact the submissive, enduring, everyday self which adheres to them’
Terry Eagleton on Passionate imagination in Jane Eyre
‘To allow passionate imagination premature rein is to be exposed, vulnerable and ultimately self-defeating: it is to be locked in the red room, enticed into bigamous marriage, ensnared… in a hopeless consuming love’
‘How dare I, Mrs Reed?
How dare I? Because it is the truth.’
‘Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to ___ with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt’
exult
‘It seemed as if an __________________, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty’
invisible bond had burst
[vengeance’s] ‘after-flavour _______ and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been ______’
metallic, poisoned.
In Jane’s confrontation with Reed, her angry words are converted through the shocking visual perception of the result of the outburst (‘Mrs Reed looked frightened’) into a…
virtual swallowing both of her own cruelty and of Mrs Reed’s fear
the double consciousness of early narrative discourse, with the adult perspective inflecting and interrogating a child’s eye view, is not rigidly reproving or moral….
the gap between child and adult awareness is not didactically exploited like in Great Expectations, rather the second layer of adult solicitude is protective, amending the vulnerable and bewildered shortfall in the child’s vision.
‘How all my brain. was in _____, and all my heart in insurrection!’
tumult
‘thus was I severed from Bessie and Gateshead:
thus whirled away to unknown, and, as I then deemed, remote and mysterious regions’
Josie Billington
when she asks ‘What is Lowood Institution’ she is asking an infantile version of King Lear’s impassioned questionL ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am’
‘I could not comprehend this doctrine of endurance, and still less could I understand or sympathise with the _____ she expressed for her chastiser’
forbearance
‘an impulse of fury against Reed, Brocklehurst and Co., bounded in my pulses… I was no ________’
Helen Burns
Helen offers Jane…
the NT model of forgiveness in place of the OT
HELEN: “I live in calm, looking to the end.” Helen’s head, always ____, sank a little lower as she finished this sentence
drooping
‘In the tranquility she imparted there was an alloy of ____ ________. I felt the impression of woe as she spoke.’
inexpressible sadness
‘in passing, she _____ her eyes. What a strange light inspired them! What an extraordinary sensation the ray sent through me!’
lifted
‘I desired ______, for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer’
liberty
‘I see the necessity of departure’ and it feels like looking on the necessity of _____.’
death
‘Jane Eyre…. a cold, solitary girl again, her life… pale; her prospects…. desolate…. Where was her _____?
life
‘The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will ____ myself’
respect
Terry Eagleton on Jane’s self
‘for someone as isolated as Jane, the self is all one has. Self-possession comes to assume a meaning deeper than the coolly impenetrable… it suggests also a nurturing and hoarding of the self’
Karl Kroeber on Jane’s direct address
represents special pleading for the reader’s sympathy in an attempt to ‘assert a community’
Jane’s _____ of direct address are part of the novel’s structure of growth, reminding us that the Jane who narrates her story is not identical with the Jane who experiences it
interpolations
Karen Chase on Jane’s direct address
‘by reminding us of frequently of the narrative act, by calling us away from the recorded events to the reader/writer relationship, [they] inevitably place us at one remove from these events’
‘no many knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions
fermenting the masses of life which people earth’
‘women feel just as men feel….
they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation’
‘I longed for a power of ____ which might overpass that limit’
vision
‘it is vain to say human beings out to be satisfied with ______; they must have action; and they will still make it if they cannot find it’
tranquility
‘I care for myself… I will keep the law given by god;________’
sanctioned by man
‘nature seemed to me benign and good; I thought she loved me, _____ as I was’
outcast
‘I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, not even of mortal flesh;
- it is my spirit that addresses your spirit’
'’show me, show me the path!’ I ______ of heaven…. I heard a voice somewhere cry, ‘Jane, Jane, Jane!’’
entreated
‘my heart swells with gratitude to the beneficent God of the ____’
earth
Jane feels Rochester is ‘bone of my bone and
flesh of my flesh’
‘I am a free human being
with an independent will’
‘I am an _____ woman now’
independent
Gilbert and Gubar on her flight across the moors
‘her terrible journey across the moors suggests the essential homelessness- the nameless, placeless, contingent status - of women in a patriarchal society’
‘you think I have
no feelings, that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so’
