Jane & Rochester Flashcards
first meeting ambiguities are mutually exploited
“it would please me to now draw you out - to learn more of you - therefore speak.” Instead of speaking, I smiled: and not a very complacent or submissive smile either… I sat and said nothing: “If he expects me to talk for the mere sake of talking and showing off, he will find he has addressed the wrong person,” I thought’
master-servant roles allow a kind of reversal wherein J knows R better than he knows himself
‘I don’t think, sir, you have a right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have - your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience’
Crossdressing allows role change, master now socially ostracised. Bronte’s dialogue relishes the potential for witty power play and sexual negotiation which temporary release from rules of social discourse allows:
“I have… a quick eye and a quick Brian.” “You need them all in your trade.” “I do; especially when I have customers like you to deal with. Why don’t you tremble?” “I’m not cold.” “Why don’t you turn pale?” “I am not sick.” “Why don’t you consult my art?” “I’m not silly.”
John Maynard on cross-dressing exchange
‘the repartee of the lovers is one of the joys of the novel and the cross-threats a form of sexual courting’
‘a trite commonplace sinner hackneyed in all the poor, petty
dissipation with which the rich and worthless try to put on life’
if R places Jane in the role of involuntary confidante, it is because in Jane he needs a confessor
‘it is not your forte to talk of yourself, but to listen’
‘You, with your gravity, considerateness
and caution were made to be the recipient of secrets’
authentic intimacy and discourse between them
‘I find it impossible to be conventional with you’ ‘the ease of his manner freed me from painful restraint… I felt at times, as if he were my relation, rather than my master’
Rochester conferring upon Jane the official sanctioned status of wife
‘Soon to be Jane Rochester’
Jane’s sense of loss of their privileged sense of equality after he seeks to befit her elevated station
she feels ‘an ape in a harlequin’s jacket, a jay in borrowed plumes’ declares ‘I will not be your English Céline Varens’ and refuses to give up the independence of her ‘governing slavery’ until the marriage’
Love has nothing to do with servitude in the narrow sense, but is inconceivable without some higher ideal of service
after saving his life “There is no doubt, benefit, burden, obligation in the case”
When we first meet Rochester he falls. The powerful masculine presence is rendered as conspicuously _____ on first appearance as the titular heroine is remarkable for her plainness and ____.
POWERLESS
INDOCILITY
in the Gypsy scene Rochester intimately _______ Jane’s habitual suppression of her stronger feelings, which he locates and draws out to find the Bertha inside Jane
ventriloquizes
‘Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild ____’
chasms
‘The ____ may rage furiously… and the desire may _____’
passions
imagine
‘strong wind, earthquake-shock and the ___ may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience’
fire
Embodied within Bertha as Jane’s alter ego are all the feared ____ possibilities of Jane’s measured demeanour
inverse
what are the inverse possibilities of Jane’s measured demeanour?
energies unleashed and uncontrolled in primal snarls, growls, demoniac laughter (embodied within Bertha as Jane’s alter ego’
there is a _________________ or proximity between the incidents of Bertha’s escape into inhabited areas of the house and moments of high emotional intensity for Jane
successive narrative overlap
the burning of Rochester’s bedchamber is the immediate sequel to Rochester’s recounting to Jane of…
the erotic backstory of his guardianship of Adèle
during the conversation prior to Bertha’s burning R’s bedchamber, Jane’s absence of shock and align request to know the whole (——–) is remarkable
‘I ventured to recall him to the point’ she says when R digresses
‘my thin crescent destiny seemed to enlarge, the ____ of my existence were filled up’
blanks
the fire & conflagration which follows Jane and Rochester’s conversation about his erotic backstory is, whilst she can’t sleep ‘for thinking of his look’….
is an externalised representation of an incipient passion tamely contained within Jane’s conscious admissions that his face was the ‘object. Best liked to see’ and ‘his presence in a room more cheering than the brightest fire’
‘I might have been as good as you - wiser - almost as _______’
stainless
‘I envy you your peace of mind, your clean conscience your ______ memory’
unpolluted
‘Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure - an inexhaustible source of pure _____’
refreshment
‘I have known you, Mr Rochester; and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I must be torn from you…
for ever. I see the necessity of departure; and it feels like looking on the necessity of death.
QUOTE Jane forgiving Rochester
‘at that moment, and on the spot’:’I forgave him all… at my heart’s core’
‘Every ____ of your flesh is as dear to me as may own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broke it would be my treasure still’
atom
In leaving Rochester, Jane risks abandoning him to the ______ life from which she has assiduously dissuaded him from.
dissolute
‘I must leave him decidedly, instantly, entirely, is intolerable. I cannot do it. But, then, a voice within me averred that I could do it; and foretold that I should do it. I wrestled with my own resolution: I wanted to be so weak that I might avoid the awful passage of further suffering I saw laid out for me.’
‘I’ is not strictly singular; sometimes ‘I’ is not synonymous with other first-person entities (my mind, my own resolution, a voice within me), sometimes it is (I should do it, I could do it). Challenge to locate the right “I” - the right ‘voice’ or ‘inward power’
Jane’s resolution has to ‘____’ not only with her own ‘weak’ inner voices, but with the passionate strength of Rochester’s own.
wrestle
‘“Jane! Jane! He said - in such an accent of bitter sadness, it thrilled along every nerve I had;
“you don’t love me, then?… Now… you recoil from my touch as if I were some toad or ape.” These words cut me…. I was so tortured by a sense of remorse at thus hurting his feelings, I could not control the wish to drop balm where I had wounded.’
Jane has to resist when he tries to render her very strength a source of weakness…
Rochester asks ‘will you hear reason’!
‘He crossed the floor and seized my arm, and grasped my waist. He seemed to devoir me with his flaming glance: physically, I felt, at the moment, powerless as stubble exposed to the draught and glow of a furnace’
Biblical evocation (Isaiah 5:25) - ‘as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumers the chaff, so their rot shall be rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust’
R: “I have found you. You are my sympathy - my better self -
my good angel…”
‘a hand of fiery iron grasped my vitals. Terrible moment: full of struggle, _______, burning!’
blackness
‘Not a human being that ever lived could wish to be loved better than I was: and him who thus loved me I absolutely _______: and I must renounce love and idol’
renounce
‘When he spoke my very _____ and Reason turned traitors against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him.’
Conscience
“Who in the world cares for you? Or who will be injured by what you do?”
‘I care for myself’.
she says ‘I care for myself’ ‘with [her] veins running fire, and [her] heart beating faster than [she] can count its throbs’…
when Conscience itself accuses her of selfishness
‘I can never bear being dressed like a ___ by Mr Rochester… I will be myself’
doll
‘with agony I thought of what I had left….
I longed to be his’
‘I had no solace from self-_______: none even from self-respect. I had injured - wounded - left my master. I was _____ in my own eyes.’
approbation, hateful
for all Jane’s rebellious energy, she is at last reduced to the role of desexualised submissive servant and to the duties of the stereotypical wife which she had once regarded as ______.
anathema
Helen Moglen on Jane’s role at the end
‘it is not a lover [Rochester] requires, but a mother who can offer him again the gift of life’ Jane transforms ‘into the noble figure of the nurturing mother’
‘I was then his _____ as I am now his right hand’
vision
‘I am no better than the old, lightning-struck chestnut tree in Thornfield orchard’
‘you are no ruin, sir - no lightning-struck tree: you are green and vigorous. Plants will grow about your roots, whether you ask them or not’
the very grammar of their relationship signals perfection towards the end
first and third person singular become mutually interchangeable: ‘I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine” and resolves into a marital syntax - “we are ever together”
At Ferndean they achieve a marriage of souls and an _____, non-exploitative partnership
egalitarian
‘while I cannot blight you,
you may refresh me’
‘I had not forgotten his faults…
in my secret soul I knew that his great kindness to me was balanced by unjust severity to many others’
‘I could not _____ him’
unlove
‘I feel akin to him… I have something in my brain and heart,
my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him’
‘Every good, true, vigorous feeling I have, gathers _______ round him’
impulsively
‘when you are near me, as now, it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left rib, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame’
implicit reference to Adam’s rib reminds us that sexual love is both a symptom of the Fall and a means to overcome and redeem that same flesh and blood limitation - extending self in another through loving union
‘you - you strange -___________ ! I love as my own flesh!’
you almost unearthly thing
“I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh:
-it is my spirit that addresses your spirit: just as if both had passed through the grave and we stood at God’s feet, equal, - as we are!”
Aparna Srivastava
‘though Jane cannot but love Rochester, she has to acquire economics independence… he too has to change’
‘my bride is here…
because my equal is here, and my likeness’
‘I love you better now
when I can really be useful to you, than I did in your state of proud independence’
‘it brought to life and light
my whole nature: in his presence I thoroughly lived; and he lived in mine’
‘all my heart is ____’
yours
‘to be your wife is,
for me, to be as happy as I can on earth’
‘a solemn passion is conceived
in my heart… kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one’
