Charlotte

Brontë
ENGLISH LITERATURE SINCE
ROMANTICISM
SPRING 2024
 • Jane Eyre is an autobiography from childhood to ten years
after her marriage to Mr. Rochester (Jane is now about 30
yrd).
• In chapters 24, 26, 34, 35, Jane is 19 years old; St. John is
almost 30 (359); Rochester is 39 (232).
• Jane’s experience at Lowood Institution was based on
Charlotte Brontë’s own experience at the Clergy Daughters’
School, where typhus also broke out (Oxford edition xiii).
• Charlotte Brontë worked as a governess.

INTRODUCTION
 • This novel is a first-person narration that addresses the reader
directly (e.g. 227) to talk about a child’s sense of the wrongs
of childhood and a young woman’s sense of the privations of
a governess’ life (x).
• As a child, or lowly governess, presuming to speak out and
judge her social superiors, Jane has violated the fragile
boundaries which kept social hierarchies in place (Oxford
edition ix).
• Jane’s history has often been read as a spiritual journey, with
the acquisition of new insights and self-control (xv).

INTRODUCTION
• This novel caused a literary sensation when it was
published in 1847 (Oxford edition vii-viii).
• Presses (including religious ones) praised its freshness,
(moral) vigor, and (psychological) reality.
• Charlotte Brontë (Currer Bell was her pen name)
introduced the concept and language of selfhood to
the novel.
• Selfhood is defined as a hidden interior “recess” rather
than a process of social interaction.
• This inner space is to be carefully guarded against
intruders, while the play of the mind’s powers is to be
rigorously guided and controlled.
• This picture of selfhood is a battleground of
conflicting energies, where passion must have vent.

Mr. Rochester
• Give Jane jewels (227) and dresses (235)
• Jane as an angel and comforter (228)
• “To women who please me only by their
faces, I am the very devil when I find
out they have neither souls nor hearts”
(228)
• “I never met your likeness. Jane: you
please me, and you master me” (229)
• Curiosity kills the cat (230)
• Has a designing mind; pursues Miss
Ingram to make Jane loves him (231)
• Will claim Jane’s thoughts and company
for life (234)
JANE AND ROCHESTER
Jane Eyre
• Jewels for Jane sounds unnatural
(227)
• Men are capricious (228)
• Wants to know all about Rochester,
including why he pretends to want
to marry Miss Ingram (230)
• Jane claims her rank as his equal
(230)
• Rochester is not like a father (232)
• Prefers plain dress (236)
Jane:
• Rejects Rochester’s Eastern fantasy
of suttee/slavery (236-237)
• Refuses to be Rochester’s English
Céline Varens (237)
• Wants to continue to act as Adele’s
governess and earn board and
lodging (237-238)
• Wants to use her salary to buy
clothes (237)
• Be herself in a relationship: “I was
naturally hard” (240)
• Keeps the distance from Rochester
before marrying him (241)
JANE AND ROCHESTER
Mrs. Fairfax the housekeeper
• Rochester is 20 years older than Jane
(232)
• Doubts whether Rochester marries
Jane for love (232)
• Thinks Jane is too young and little
acquainted with men (232)
• Wants to put Jane and her guard (232)
• Jane is like Rochester’s pet (233)
• Gentlemen in his station are not
accustomed to marry their governesses
(233)
 CLASS
Jane: “Don’t address me as if
I were a beauty; I’m your
plain, Quakerish governess”
(227)
Mrs. Fairfax thought Jane had
forgotten her position
(“station”) as a governess and
Rochester had forgotten his
position as a gentleman and
an employer (231)
Quakers:
• use thee as an ordinary
pronoun
• refuse to participate in war
• wear plain dress
• refuse to swear oaths
• oppose slavery
• practice teetotalism
CLASS

Rochester: “for every privilege, every

attention shall be yours, that I would
accord a peer’s daughter, if about to
marry her” (227).

“I wish that instead of a mere inquiry

into, perhaps, a secret, it was a wish for
half my estate” (230)

Rochester is proud; his father liked

money (232)
 Bertha Mason

• Daughter of a merchant father and a mad, drunkard creole mother (255,

257). Creole means either a white naturalized by birth in the West Indies
or a mixed-race person living in the West Indies (Oxford edition xxv).
• Came from a family with three generations of idiots and maniacs (257)
• Rochester married Bertha 15 years ago in Jamaica (255)
• People gossip about the mysterious lunatic kept at Thornfield Hall under
watch (256)
• Rochester does not know about Bertha’s madness before the marriage
and is cheated into marrying her (257)
 Bertha Mason

• Bertha bit and stabbed her brother (257)

• Bertha groveled on all fours; growled like a wild animal; with dark,
grizzled hair wild as a mane; a cunning “clothed hyena” (257-258)
• Bertha is a tall woman with force; tries to strangle Rochester (258)
• Jane’s uncle urges Mr. Mason to prevent the false marriage (259)
• Jane as modest purity vs. Bertha as violence and animality
 • Preoccupation with potential madness ran through all levels of
Victorian circle (Oxford edition xxi).
• The Victorian culture stresses that women, far more than men,
were prey to the disorders of insanity because of their physiology
e.g. hysteria provoked by menstruation. Bertha’s outburst tends to
coincide with the appearance of a blood-red moon, symbol of
lunacy and menstruation (xxi).
• The early part of the 19 century saw the emergence of new
attitudes to insanity based on the principles of “moral
management.” Insanity was now regarded not as an absolute state,
but rather one that could be partial, as in moral insanity and
monomania, and could also be cured. Rochester, with his disgust at
his wife, belongs to the old school, whereas Jane, with her
sympathy and pity, belongs to the new. The boundaries between
sanity and insanity became more ill-defined. Sanity came to be seen
INSANITY merely as the ability to maintain self-control (xx).
 • Jane […] almost a bride—was a cold, solitary girl again:
her life was pale; her prospects were desolate (260)
• I look at my love: that feeling which was my master’s—
which he had created; it shivered in my heart, like a
suffering child in a cold cradle; sickness and anguish had
seized it (260)
• I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a
great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains,
and felt the torrent come: to rise I had no will, to flee I
had no strength (261)
• Jane’s uncle wants to adopt her and makes her his legatee;
the inheritance will support her for the rest of her life
(236)
• Jane still loves Rochester: “a name graven on a tablet,
Chapter 26 fated to last as long as the marble it inscribed” (351)
 ST. JOHN RIVERS
/ˈsɪndʒɪn/ or
/ˈsɪndʒən/

• St. John is a clergyman and Jane’s cousin

• A foil to Rochester; St. John is ambitious (346), hard, and cold and does not
enjoy life (345); religious (353)
• Does not appreciate Jane’s work at tidying up the Moor House (345); does
not approve of people resting round him (346); would not make a good
husband (346)
• Tells Jane not to cling to the ties of the flesh; save ardor for an adequate
cause (344)
• St. John is not a man to be lightly refused (350)
 ST. JOHN RIVERS

• St. John is a controlling person; Jane doesn’t like her servitude (350) but wishes
to please him by disowning half her nature (351)
• St. John says that Jane’s present life is too purposeless (351) and prolongs
Jane’s lesson of in the Hindustani language (352)
• Asks Jane to come to India with him and be his “help-meet”: “You shall be
mine: I claim you—not for my pleasure, but for my Sovereign’s service” (354)
• St. John to Jane: “your assistance will be to me invaluable” (355; my emphasis)
• Jane says she can go as St. John’s sister, not his wife, because there’s no love
(357)
 ST. JOHN RIVERS

• “I do not want a sister; a sister might any day be taken from me. I want a wife:
the sole helpmeet I can influence efficiently in life and retain absolutely till
death” (357).
• “It’s under His standard I enlist you. I cannot accept on his behalf a divided
allegiance” (357-358)
• “Do not forget that if you reject it, it’s not me you deny, but God” (360)
• “It’s what I want. […] Undoubtedly enough love would follow upon marriage”
(359). -> Jane scorns his idea of love and counterfeit sentiment (359)
• “Refuse to be my wife, and you limit yourself forever to a track of selfish ease
and barren obscurity” (360)
 JANE

• “If I join St. John I abandon half myself ” (356); “to do as you wish me would,
I begin to think, be almost to committing suicide” (364)
• As St. John’s comrade (and not his wife), “there would be recesses in my mind
which would be only mine, to which he never came” (359)
• Doesn’t think she can stand Indian weather (364). Diana (St. John’s real sister)
agrees (365)
• Tells Diana: “He has told me I am formed for labor—not for love: which is
true, no doubt. But, in my opinion, if I am not formed for love, it follows that
I’m not formed for marriage. Would it not be strange to be chained for life to
a man who regarded one but as a useful tool?” (366). Diana agrees.
• Says that St. John is a good man but he forgets the feelings of little people in
pursuing his own large views (366)
 JANE

• Jane is moved by St. John’s his reading of the Bible and his prayer (367-368)
• The Book of Revelation refers to Lamb’s book of life (367), which contains
names of the faithful people ready to receive the gift of eternal life
• Jane says to St. John: “I could decide […] were but convinced that it is God’s
will I should marry you” (369).
• Jane suddenly hears the voice of Rochester (an element of the Gothic) when
she’s about to say yes to St. John. She therefore rejects St. John.
• Jane denies the Victorian notion of femininity e.g. self-sacrificing love and
disinterested devotion (Oxford edition xvii).
 Oscar Wilde

Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Importance of Being Earnest

HOMEWORK