Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)

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Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre. Pub. 1847. Ed. Richard Dunn. New York: Norton, 2001. Print.

  • Pub 3 vol by Smith, Elder

Reading Notes

  • Good for: old canon books, her radical-self assertion through advertising in a newspaper
  • The bibliographical universe of Jane's childhood is notably religious and old canon (in St Clair 2004's terminology) - the way the socioeconomic structures of reading play out in (fictional) experience (see too JE's lit crit on 316)
    • 6 Bewick, History of British Birds (6) - diegetic
    • 7 Richardson, Pamela (1740) - allusion
    • John Wesley, Henry Earl of Moreland (1781) - allusion
    • 8 Goldsmith, History of Rome - allusion
    • 10, 16, 47 Bible allusions; 49 - diegetic
      • 27 reading Bible with Brocklehurst - diegetic
      • 38 reading Bible (collect) aloud at Lowood, again on 44 - diegetic
    • 16 Gulliver's Travels - diegetic
    • 17 Ballad by Rainsford (1840s) and one by Bronte herself - diegetic
      • the ballad is from the 1840s but the novel is set in 1800 - not strict representational realism
    • 29 religious children's magazine - diegetic
    • 41 Johnson, Rasselas (with Helen Burns) - diegetic
  • 22 "...for it seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their utterance: something spoke out of me over which I had no control."
  • 30 Mrs Reed sizing JE up as an "opponent of adult age": it's JE's self-possession that most troubles the category "child"
  • 31 JE's mind-as-heath, wonderful
    • again on 72
  • 40 description of the lessons at Lowood - repetition
  • 41 "my reflections were too undefined and fragmentary to merit record": a different idea of realism than, say, To the Lighthouse
  • 46-7 the wind rouses something inside JE
  • her convo with Helen B
  • 57 her courage and vision after Brocklehurst's abominable judgment
  • 59 the "science" of physiognomy on the moral vision of these characters
  • 63 spring coming on after her name is cleared: will this patterning of the relationship btwn external and internal world continue?
  • 79 "A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play": why the theatrical analogy?
  • 83 "externals have a great effect on the young"
  • 92-3 JE's meditations: serious, restless, resentful of cant and stifling convention. Wonderful.
  • 202 JE's sententious lines about feeling and judgment
    • perhaps like Eliot, or designed with anthologizing in mind (Price 2000)
  • 211 again JE shifts to present tense: it seems to happen when she enters an almost visionary mode of engagement with her surroundings
  • 218 again the pattern of weather in seeming sympathy with Jane - the storm in the garden when R proposes
    • Wordsworthian?
  • 234 description of J & R's playful intimacy
  • 245 "flushing eyes" echoes Coleridge, later on 249 she uses the phrase "mad, bad" - could it be an echo of Lamb's description of Byron?
  • 252 weather patterning again
  • 253 powerful paragraph beginning with "But, then, a voice within me averred that I could do it..."
  • 262 R's description of Bertha's fit during "a fiery West Indian night" - this time the weather patterning xferred to R
  • 272 how was the ellipsis depicted in early eds?
  • 273 a print metaphor when she leaves to go toward Millcote: "Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet - so deadly sad - that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank: something like the world when the deluge was gone by."
  • 274 weather as emotional metaphor: "may your eyes..."
  • 305 again the shifting to present tense beginning of Ch 31
  • 312 the passage with "romantic chance" - to what extent is this novel an extended negotiation with the cultural/moral politics of Romanticism
  • 316 JE dabbles in literary criticism (Scott's Marmion is the only other named piece of English lit with Rasselas, which Helen read at Lowood)
  • 361 "A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank..." (thanks, K)
  • 379 sacrifice or not: kind of the summation of J's moral vision
  • 384 Dunn's second note: the image of JE as Eve "completes the cycle that began with her realization at the end of Ch 24 that she had made an idol of R"

Class Notes

CLP Seminar 10-15

  • what do we learn about the c19 from JE?
    • religiosity
    • material culture: houses, furniture, dress
    • cultural indebtedness to Romanticism
    • a woman's sense of self-worth is dangerous and unconventional
    • time works differently: how long it takes to get places
    • intimacy with death
  • "I have as much soul as you" - p. 216
    • conflicted: she participates in class discrimination and yet she says she transcends
    • teaching how it feels to be engaged in this kind of conflict
  • the power of what JE feels
  • intimacy with death
    • Helen teaches restraint, plain faith, flintiness, self-control
      • religious self-effacement building to JE's self control but she ends up growing away by going back to Rochester
      • pragmatism: you can be free internally but properly comport yourself in the world
  • parallels between Bertha and Helen: Bertha burns, Helen is consumed
  • JE is weird: very few characters (vs Dickens or Tolstoy)
    • left Mrs Reed -> going back
    • weird, tightly linked world
  • stakes of p.72 (when she advertises as a governess)
    • limitedness, self-imposed and externally
    • dramatization of thinking
    • wants to leave -> I need to solve this problem -> so much effort to come to a simple conclusion
    • ladies don't advertise: this is radical self assertion
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