red room Flashcards
what is significant about the red room?
the red room symbolizes the terrifying sense of Jane’s internal being. It also symbolizes her feeling of being trapped by society because of her status as an orphan and a female.The red room also functions as a motif of enclosure and escape. Not only Jane, but also the other women in the novel search for the key to release them from their attics and red rooms.
why is Jane so terrified by the red room?
she believes her uncles ghost is in there coming to avenges his wife’s volition of his last wish as that is where he died. she tries to break out and injures herself.In addition to its connection with death and garish red decor, the room is cold and silent, heightening Jane’s terror.
how does Jane break free?
Jane eventually breaks free of both the literal red room as well as the metaphorical trappings of her childhood, when she gets herself sent to boarding school and then moves on to become financially independent.In the end, Jane’s strength and determination help her overcome the red room’s oppressive atmosphere and the oppressive forces in her life.
what does the red room show about her childhood?
symbolizes her unhappy childhood in general, in which she often feels like a prisoner. Being a female orphan who is mistreated by the aunt and cousins charged with caring for her, Jane feels hopelessly trapped in a painful existence.The red room also symbolizes Jane’s powerlessness, as she is continuously subjected to the whims of those in authority.
what do the red and white symbolise?
The recurring imagery and symbolism of these colors throughout are made concrete in the red room episode. In the novel, red represents anger, passion, lack of control and restlessness, and white represents restraint, patience and commitment.The interplay of colors here exemplifies the tug-of-war between passion and restraint.
what does it foreshadow?
Berthas imprisonment
how does it show womanhood?
physicality and architecture of the red room are like the female anatomy. the incident could be seen as the onset of Jane’s womanhood. Jane’s adolescence is marked by her first act of rebellion and its resultant punishment. John Reed’s assault on Jane and her passionate counterattack, associates the moment of rebellion and autonomy with bloodletting and incarceration in the densely symbolic red-room.Hence the crime that the Reeds punish Jane for is not just for hitting John Reed but also the crime of growing up.
how does it show female body?
Jane’s punishment in the red room is a lesson about the feminine behaviour that she must adopt now that she is a ‘woman’: perfect submission and stillness. The red room is a critical symbol that constructs the kind of woman Jane grows up to be and the suppression of her ‘animalistic’ traits
how does it show she’s an outcast?
Jane’s time in the red room emphasises her isolation which is not just social but also financial and economic. The incident opens her position as an outcast orphan, her enclosure in stultifying roles and houses, and her escape from poverty and starvation.The next day Jane’s solitary confinement is over, but her punishment continues as she is treated like a social pariah in the house—the repercussions of the red room last throughout the novel. Brontë successfully depicts the female identity that makes a psychological, supernatural and sexual impact on Jane that is hard to miss.
what does her not recognising herself in the mirror show?
the fact she doesn’t recognise herself is psychologically relevant to the reader. As Jane looks at her alien self in the mirror, it points towards a common literary idea of looking at the fractured self through a mirror. The mirror highlights the inverted, repressed self that Jane fails to identify.Later in the novel, the night before the wedding, Jane looks at Bertha Mason’s reflection in her bedroom mirror, a subtle indication that the reflected image is not only Bertha’s but also Jane’s: her broken, repressed, animalistic self’s reflection.
