Key Moments and Scenes Flashcards
When is the gypsy scene?
Chapter 19
When is the fire scene?
Chapter 15
‘___ of flame darted round the bed… in the midst of blaze and vapour… Mr Rochester lay stretched motionless’ (Chapter 15)
tongues
what is the fire scene? conflagration following Jane’s admission she cannot sleep ‘for thinking of his look’ shows fire is an…
externalised representation of the incipient passion tamely contained within Jane’s conscious admissions that his face was ‘the object I best liked to see’ and ‘his presence in a room more cheering than the brightest fire’
Chapter 26
wedding + meeting Bertha
Chapter 25
tearing of the veil
when is the red room?
chapter 2
what is the importance of the Red Room
its supercharged with a significance which haunts the rest of the book
‘Alas!… no ____ was ever more secure’ (Chapter 2)
jail
Gilbert and Gubar on the Red Room
‘it is a kind of patriarchal death-chamber’
what does the Red Room anticipate?
forms of later female imprisonment egg, her ‘boarding’ at Lowood, the restricted field to which she is ‘condemned’ and Bertha’s incarceration in the attic
‘if you don’t sit still, you must be ____ down’ (Chapter 2)
tied
G&G regard the RR as a paradigm not just of inner female space but of…
Jane’s anomalous position in society as an orphan and governess, her enclosure in stultifying roles and houses, her attempts to escape through flight, starvation and madness.
The Red Room, like other ‘female’ spaces, is a compellingly _____ space, which shuts out the larger world but encloses and dramatises an internal one
interior
Maynard on the RR
the drama is Oedipal, ‘Jane’s experience of this room is essentially one of alienation. What should be a centre of warmth and affection is a place of cold and oppression’
Elaine Showalter: the Red Room, with its
‘Freudian wealth of secret compartments, wardrobes, drawers, and jewel chest’ gives it ‘strong associations with the female sexuality’
According to Showalter, Jane’s ‘mad cat’ behaviour stresses…
‘the fleshly aspect of adult female sexuality’ and creates a link to Bertha
Sally Shuttleworth: the room’s deadly and bloody connotations, and the flow of blood which marks Jane’s entrance, associates her confinement with…
‘the onset of puberty’ and the passage into womanhood.
‘my head still ached and ___ with the blow and fall I had received’ (Chapter 2)
bled
Sally Shuttleworth sees Jane catching sight of herself in the looking glass as…. (Red Room)
a curious episode of ‘alienated’ dissociation after she experiences the ‘bewildering, contradictory and polluting effects of suppression within the female frame’
‘all looked colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality; and the strange little figure there gazing at me; with a white face and arms specking the glow, and _____ eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit’ (Chapter 2)
glittering
Helene Moglen on the Red Room
she sees the bedchamber and its sense of consecrated gloom, the colour of food, fire and passion, as a kind of birth chamber.
Helene Moglen on the Red Room QUOTE
‘it is a terrifying womb-world in which Jane loses her sense of the boundaries of identity, feels an inhabitant of another universe, and is thence born into a new state of being’
For Helene Moglem the Red Room marks:
‘the end of the submission of childhood and the beginning of a new stage of growth’
Adrienne Rich on the Red Room
‘the moment that the germ of the person we are finally to know as Jane Eyre is born; a person determined to live and to choose her life with dignity, integrity and pride’
the startling glimpse of a spirit face in the mirror in the red room is repeated…
on the eve of their aborted wedding ceremony then Jane sees in the glass not herself but Bertha
The Red room is also implicitly recalled when Jane is…
summoned to another masculine bedchamber, Rochester’s, to find it alight with real flames
The Red Room incident initiates the network of association….
which holds Jane and Bertha both together and apart as twinned opposites of adult being
John Maynard QUOTE on the Red Room
‘it functions as a kind of symbolic preface to the entire work’
when does Jane recall the Red Room?
following Jane’s humiliating punishment by Brocklehurst at Lowood she remembers the ‘frightful episode… in the dark and haunted chamber’
Journey from Gateshead to Lowood
Chapter 5
lonely journey from Gateshead to Lowood of ‘______ length’
preternatural
begun in literal darkness and heading to an impenetrable and infernal destination, the journey from Gateshead to Lowood has the….
unstoppable momentum of another kind of nightmare birth, as she is wrenched away from Bessie, the one figure of maternity in Jane’s orphaned childhood.
‘Thus was I severed from Bessie and Gateshead:
thus whirled away to unknown, and, as I then deemed, remote and mysterious regions.’ (Chapter 5)
the journey from Gateshead to Lowood resembles a…
terrifying descent into a new and strange existence - the fallen world.
‘as twilight deepened, we descended a valley, dark with wood,…
and long after night had overclouded the prospect, I head a wild wind rushing amongst trees.’
Josie Billington on Jane asking ‘What is Lowood Institution?’
It’s as though asking an infantile version of King Lear’s impassioned question: ‘who is it that can tell me who I am?’
at the raw stage of her inchoate identity, Jane enters a world, Lowood which seems somewhat upside down -
Lowood’s proclaimed NT mission is inverted; Helen Burns. who Jane is expecting to be praised is instead brutally admonished for circumstances she couldn’t have helped (cleaning her nails).
In Lowood’s abusively corrective environment, it as though the meanings and value of regard and punishment, praise and blame, have become ______.
transposed
Brocklehurst, like Dickens’ Gradgrind in Hard Times before him, is presented as the __________ - a straight ‘black pillar’ is how he first impresses Jane.
narrow embodiment of a principle
Kathleen Tillotson on Lowood
‘harsh physical discomfort [is] not merely piercingly actual (the taste of the burnt porridge, the starved arms wrapped in pinafores) but symbolic of a loveless order of things’
when Jane douses the fire in Rochester’s bedchamber, the meaning of the event is as ______ as Rochester’s meaning to Jane
equivocal
‘I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you: their expression and smile did not… strike delight to my inmost heart for nothing… My cherished preserver, goodnight!’ Strange energy was in his voice; strange ______ in his look.’ (chapter 15)
fire
“Is there a flood?” “No, sir, but, there has been a fire” (Chapter 15)
fire has connotations of baptism; does passion save or damn?
Rochester’s belief in Jane’s ‘good’ is no more separable after the fire incident from the ‘fire’ of his feeling for her than the ___ and ____ meanings of fire and water are distinguishable in the whole episode.
sexual and religious
‘She took my veil from its place; she held it up, ____ at it long, and then she threw it over her head…’ (Chapter 25)
gazed
‘I never saw a face like it…. it was as savage face… the fiery eye glared upon me… her ____ visage flamed over mine and I lost consciousness’ (Chapter 25)
lurid
‘I have known you, Mr Rochester, and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you forever. I see the necessity of departure, and it feels like looking on the necessity of _____’. (Chapter 23)
death
“Leave ____ at once”
Thornfield
John Maynard on Jane’s leaving Rochester
‘It is not that she couldn’t disagree with convention, only that she disqualifies herself to do so under her present passion. Like Bertha, she is insane when sexually aroused, ‘insane - quite insane’.”
Helene Moglen on Jane leaving Rochester
her departure is the first decisive and ‘crucial step’ in Jane’s feminist independence
when is St John’s proposal ?
chapter 34
‘my iron ____ contracted round me’ (Chapter 4)
shroud
‘the blackened ruin’ of Thornfield and the blind, scorched and charred Rochester represent the ______ of the novel’s sexual energies.
vanquishing
Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar on the end
it represents in classic Bildungsroman mode, the ‘essential epilogue to [Jane’s] pilgrimage towards selfhood’
by closing the novel with St John’s letter, an austere example of his single, missionary, religious life, a counter-narrative is shown…
although Jane’s is more ‘human’m the novel leaves us in no doubt that this is no less stringent or exacting
