Jane Eyre Critic Quotes

“mix of the realist mode of autobiography with the supernatural world…a response to the constraints imposed on women in the early Victorian period…feminist doubleness”

Vicky Simpson

“Victorian women novelists like the Bronte’s are not so much unconsciously ‘written by’ gender codes as they are actively engaged in rewriting them”

Robyn Warhol

“a wild declaration of the ‘rights of woman’”

Margaret Oliphant

“fantasied female power is continually tethered by…patriarchal imbrication”

Penny Boumelha

[Rochester] “plays the role of master…toward all men and women”

Nancy Pell

[Jane Eyre expresses a] “voice from the dangerous class of oppressed or ‘outlawed’ women”

Katherine Tillotson

“St John…has an almost blatantly patriarchal name” (the gospel)

Gilbert and Gubar

[St John] “wants to force Jane into an inegalitarian marriage”

Susan Meyer

[Bertha] “symbolic of female expression, shackled by patriarchal expectation”

Emma Kirby

“Jane is rendered totally impotent…and imprisoned in the fairy discourse”

Jina Politi

[doubles] “one representing the socially acceptable or conventional personality, the other externalising the free, uninhibited, often criminal self”

Claire Rosenfeld

“the rebel girl, confronted in the social mirror with the aberrant representation of revolt, realises the practical necessity of disconnecting herself from her bodily image”

Jina Politi

“Bertha…is Jane’s truest and darkest double”

Gilbert and Gubar

[Bertha] “exaggerated symbolic face of what Jane herself could become”

Peter Grudin

“governess is also significant…because of the proximity she bears to two of the most important Victorian representations of women: the figure who epitomised the domestic ideal, and the figure who threatened to destroy it”

Mary Poovey

[the governess] “lives at that ambiguous point in the social structure”

Terry Eagleton

[the red room] “a terrifying womb-world”

Helen Moglen

“the recieved idea that women always write about ‘experience’”

Winterson

“vast preserves of masculine life - schools, unis, clubs, sports, businnesses, government and the army - were closed to women”

Elaine Showalter

“literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life and it ought not to be” (1800s)

Robert Southey

[Bertha] “a laughter that subverts all authority”

Lina Williams

“Charlotte Bronte is Jane Eyre” (1800s)

Mary Augusta Ward

“threatened by a morally dry, pragmatic marriage without passion”

Lucy Webster

[the ‘best’ mothers/wives] “love of home, children and domestic duties are the only passions they feel”

William Acton