"women feel just as much as men feel"

Question 1

finish this quote: “women feel just as men feel”

Answer 1

“they need excercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do: they suffer from too rigid a restraint, to absoloute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer.”

Question 2

what is happening in the quote?

Answer 2

• Jane opens up of how her atypical views of equality consumes her in this suppressive society
• how the “restlesness was in” her “nature; it agitated” her “to pain sometimes.”
• her sole relief is to pace through the corridors as a coping mechanism

Question 3

what does “restraint” and “stagnation” suggest?

Answer 3

• inactivity
• both mental and physical
• symbolism of imprisonment throughout book
• society is isolating women from liberty to benefit males

Question 4

what type of language does it have?

Answer 4

• employs challenging and political language
• extends feelings of entrapment to all women
• constituting to Bronte’s proto-feminist manifesto

Question 5

what would a modern audience think about Jane?

Answer 5

• Lowood’s teachings of repressing oneself
• taught Jane how to survive in this bounded society
• doesn’t change entirely
• creativity thru artwork exposes inner nature
• Lowood hasn’t made her inner world barren or lesser
• inspired it to thrive

Question 6

how does this quote show an alternative to Jane’s feelings of imprisonment?

Answer 6

• Brockhlehurst, Rochester, St. John
• may threaten her with fetters of patriarchy
• specific force which Jane actively resists in this passage
• aswell as when she doesn’t abide by Victorian expectations to follow her husband

Question 7

how is this linked to Bertha?

Answer 7

• describes “doom” to which “millions are in silent revolt against their lot”“are condemned”
• critices stifling Victorian conceptions of proper gender roles
• explicity states Victorian wives suffer from being metaphorically “locked up”
• Bertha eventually rendered nearly inhumane when her neglected suppressed feeling sturn to her madness and fury
• may be viewed as a symbol of the imprisoned female’s condition
• a warning

Question 8

why did Bronte write this?

Answer 8

• writing helped her cope with rage
• Jane describes retreat into her own mind to find freedom in her own imagination
• scornful about what custom had pronounced necessary for women
• listing activities either domestic/decorative preventing women carrying out more useful tasks

Question 9

why would Bronte be proud of this quote?

Answer 9

• Bronte’s greatest triumphs were the result of her own self-retreat
• wrote a novel where her heroine’s achievement is the balance she strikes between her need for autonomy
• and her desire to be an active member of society