Rochester Flashcards
Rochester ____ into Jane’s life as if destined to fulfil his role as powerful masculine incumbent of secluded, brooding Thornfield
thunders
First meeting with Rochester quotes
he rides a ‘tall steed’
his ‘rude noise’ breaks the evening calm
accompanied by a ‘great dog’ - a ‘lion-like creature with long hair and a huge hair’
Duke Zarmona and its tale of scandal, betrayal and romantic domestic treachery provide a ____ for Rochester and his backstory of sexual intrigue in Madeira and India.
prototype
The exotic exploits and fiercely passionate individualism of Byron’s Don Juan is evoked in the successive association of Rochester with Persian King ____, with the ____, and with a ____ in possession of a harem, as well as in his history of sexual licence.
Ahaseureus,
Grand Turk
sultan
Rochester’s name connotes the _______ verse of the Restoration poet, the 2nd Earl of Rochester
sensationally erotic
In October 2009 a _______ poll found Mr Rochester to be ‘the most romantic character in literature’ - receiving more votes than both Mr Darcy and Gabriel Oak
Mills & Boon
Rochester is also Bronte’s version of Byron’s ___
Cain
what was the biblical story of Cain and Abel?
cain slays his brother Abel
What did Bronte describe Byron’s poem as
‘a magnificent poem’
How is Rochester like Byron’s Cain?
he compares himself to a ‘fallen angel’ and a ‘snake-like tempter’; like Cain who is condemned to roam the earth as an isolated and resentful outcast, burdened with a curse of his own sinful making
Rochester’s frequent association with a ‘volcanic’ secret nature suggests forbidden, subterranean demonic powers.
‘that opened../ now and then, in his eye, and closed again before one could fathom the strange depth’
How did Bronte correct Romantic literary forbears into ‘realist’ fiction?
‘the man, the human being, broke the spell at once’
What is the first thing Rochester does?
fall of his horse
Implications of Rochester falling off his horse
gives an implicit side glance to the fallenness of his past life and current spiritual state; Rochester ‘the human being’
‘He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder, and leaning on me with some stress, limped to his horse’
Rochester rendered absolutely ‘the human being’ a fallen fellow creature, vulnerably in need fo another’s succour, aid and care.
Rochester’s character doesn’t simply reverse the terms of its Romantic prototype; rather,
the novel complicates and interrogates this model
Where we expect highly charged feverish drama - at the ___________ - we get the grimly realistic black humour of ________
symbolic burning of his bedchamber
his cursing at the wetness of his bedclothes
Where Jane projects upon Rochester the ____________ he confronts her emotionally in the _______.
suavity of the successful suitor to Ingram
gear of an old fortune-telling crone.
Where we expect _______ after the exposure of his pre-contracted marriage to Bertha, Rochester’s strategies of ________ seem to emulate the worst excesses of Gothic male oppression
remorse and self-flagellation
seduction and narrowly aborted rape
Rochester is a _____ creature whom even as he ____ at his punishment, absolutely wants to be saved.
fallen
baulks
He represents a __________ experiment at the boundaries of generic fictional types
psycho-metaphysical
What do Heilman and John Maynard suggest about Rochester’s legacy?
his real legacy is found in the questions of sexuality and identity posed by Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which met the same outrage as Jane Eyre on first publication
Robert B. Heilman on seeing Rochester rightly
‘if in Rochester we see only an Angrian-Byronic hero… we miss what is most significant, the exploration [and] opening up of new areas of feeling in intersexual relationships…[moving] deeply into the lesser known realities of human life’
‘I have a past ______, a series of deeds, a colour of life to contemplate within my own breast’
existence
D.H Lawrence on Rochester’s ‘blackened ruin’
“Mr Rochester’s sex passion is not ‘respectable’ till Mr Rochester is burned, blinded, disfigured and reduced to helpless dependence”
Rochester’s mutilation and blindness is also a sort of ______?
symbolic castration
he first appears to Jane as a ‘_______ _______’ shorn of masculine strength
sightless Samson
Harold Bloom on JE’s destruction of Rochester
‘Much of Jane Eyre’s rather nasty power as a novel depends upon it’s authors attitude towards men, which is nobly sadistic as befits a disciple of Byron.’
“you think me… an irreligious dog; but…
I began to see and acknowledge the hand of God in my doom… to experience remorse, repentance.”
Rochester’s words ‘I did wrong have the…
force of blinded Glouceter in King Lear when he says ‘I stumbled when I saw’
‘hampered, _____, cursed’
burdened
Although he was duped by Bertha’s family into becoming ‘bound to a wise at once intemperate and unchaste’, his own sensual nature made him susceptible to this trickery… (quote)
‘I was dazzled, stimulated, my senses were excited’
‘ireful and _____’
thwarted
His demeanour is….
‘grimly grimacing’
‘the morose, almost malignant scowl [which] _______ his features’.
blackened
Neither ‘handsome’ nor ‘heroic-looking’ he embodies a kind of __________.
balked primitive energy
‘he _______ his teeth and was silent’
ground
‘some hated thought seemed to have him in his grip, and to____
hold him so tightly that he could not advance’
‘quivering conflict I the large pupil dilating under his ____ eyebrow’
ebon
‘another feeling rose and triumphed|: something hard and ______; self willed and resolute: it settled hi s passion and petrified his countenance’
cynical
The more Rochester hides his secret self, the more it seems to claim its own forms of alarming physiological and outward expression - as if the price of shutting Bertha out is the constant risk of being______
turned violently inside-out. by the sheer force of his own vital energies
‘A movement of repulsion,_____, fear, would have sealed my doom - and his’
flight
Rochester’s wild temperament, barely restrained and posing a real threat of sexual violence when Jane threatens to leave…
is a constant and frightening vision of madness confined
“Since happiness is irrevocably denied me,
I have a right to get pleasure out of life: and I will get it, cost what it may”
Rochester’s grave and irascible sexuality is filtered entirely through Jane’s perception of its power to move her:
“my master’s colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth, - all energy, decision, will - were not beautiful, according to rule; but they were more than beautiful to me: they were full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me, - that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his’
“my master’s colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, ____ _____ , strong features, firm, grim mouth”
deep eyes
What changes when Jane gets excited about R?
the tense, she constantly uses the ‘live’ present tense in place of the relative safety and distance of the simple past tense
‘I looked, and had acute pleasure in looking, - a precious yet poignant pleasure;
pure gold with a steely point of agony’
‘a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned,
yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless’
‘I was forced to pass through
the valley of the shadow of death’
