Jane Eyre - Critics

Gilbert and Gubar (Rochester in drag)

"By putting on a woman's clothes [Rochester] puts on a woman's weakness"

Vicky Simpson

The mix of the realist mode of autobiography with the supernatural world of folk and fairy tales may be understood as a response to the constraints imposed on women in the early Victorian period

Gilbert and Gubar (St John)

St John represents the patriarchal imposition of duty and sacrifice

Terry Eagleton

Jane represents “an extraordinarily contradictory amalgam of smouldering rebelliousness and prim conventionalism

Terry Eagleton

She lives where two worlds - an internal one of emotional hungering and an external one of harsh mechanical necessity - collide

Bonnie Zare

Jane’s sense of autonomy is heightened when she decides not to confide her half of the 'supernatural call' to Rochester, thereby she continues to maintain a private space separate from her husband

Emma Gruner

Jane’s education instils in her an unshakable sense of worth

Gilbert and Gubar (wilderness)

true minds must withdraw into a wilderness in order to circumvent the structures of a hierarchical society

Josie Billington (marriage)

marriage is not a sacrifice to convention, but, on the contrary…a first person assertion of individual identity

Susan Meyer

“Bronte uses the emotional force of the idea of slavery and explosive racial relations in the wake of British emancipation to represent the tensions of the gender hierarchy in Britain”

Susan Meyer (Rochester)

"the ending of the novel severely punishes Rochester both for his figurative enslavement of women and for his acquisition of colonial wealth"

Gilbert and Gubar (red room)

The red room is a “patriarchal death chamber”

Gilbert and Gubar (Jane’s journey)

Jane’s “terrible journey across the moors suggests the essential homelessness…of women in a patriarchal society”

Sally Shuttleworth

The red room conveys the “bewildering, contradictory and polluting effects of suppression within the female frame”

“The Naughty Girl Reclaimed”

Promoted the idea that girls ought to be quiet and obedient, thus severely punishing passion and defiance

D.H. Lawrence

Jane Eyre verged towards pornography”

Elaine Showalter (Bertha)

The incarnation of the flesh, of female sexuality in its most irredeemably bestial and terrifying form

Dr William Acton (modest women)

As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband, only to please him

Dr William Acton (insanity)

“women who have sexual desires so strong that they surpass those of men” have “a form of insanity”

Mary Poovey

The governess was the figure who epitomised the domestic ideal, and the figure that threatened to destroy it

Esther Godfrey

Governesses served as a hole in the invisible wall between working-class and middle class gender identities

Joan Z Anderson

Rigid self-control is the only way women can survive in the Victorian sexual hierarchy

Kirstie Blair

Gypsies represented "liberation, excitement, danger and the free expression of sexuality"

John Mullan

The orphan above all is out of place

Josie Billington (hybrid)

“Jane Eyre brings together in one heroine the two roles which arguably embodied most tension for nineteenth century English society – the orphan child and the governess”

Gilbert and Gubar (religion)

Religion is used as a weapon for male domination

Elizabeth Rigby (grace)

No Christian grace is perceptible upon Jane. She has inherited in fullest measure the worst sin of our nature – the sin of pride

Elizabeth Rigby (Jane)

The personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit

Gibson

Bertha is “the creole shadow of Jane’s own oppression”

Samantha Ellis

Bertha's suicide is a “radical leap of faith that sets her free”

Logan (Bertha)

Represents womanhood gone beserk

Gilbert and Gubar (Bertha)

Jane’s dark double

Gilbert and Gubar (Mrs Reed)

Surrounded by patriarchal limits

Joan Z Anderson (maxim)

Mrs. Reed enforces the patriarchal maxim of female silence on Jane

Joan Z Anderson (Mrs Reed)

Essentially functions in a male capacity

Nancy Armstrong

Rochester is a figure of "unrestrained sexuality"

Susan Meyer (Rochester)

The blinding of Mr Rochester is liberating: it takes from him any power of male evaluation of her

Gilbert and Gubar (St John)

Blatantly patriarchal name

Gilbert and Gubar (pilgrimage)

The novel is a “pilgrimage towards selfhood”

Lucy Webster

If Jane feels her identity threatened by passion without morality, she equally feels threatened by a morally dry, pragmatic marriage without passion

Carolyn Williams

Jane Eyre re-envisions marriage as a romantic institution of equal alter egos, a true alternative to marriage as an institution of male mediation

Gilbert and Gubar (marriage)

A passionate drive towards freedom

Stevie Davies (love)

Human rather than divine love is sacred in Jane Eyre

Gilbert and Gubar (Jane and Rochester)

Begin as spiritual equals

Gilbert and Gubar (love)

Even the equality of love between true minds leads to the inequalities and minor despotisms of marriage

Timothy Roberts

The physical spaces of the novel are concrete images of female social oppression

Logan (oppression)

Men could deliberately invoke the masculine powers of Victorian medicine and law to disarm, discredit, and confine women

Stevie Davies

The theology of Jane Eyre is heretical

Maria Lamonaca

Diana and Mary serve as models as divinely inspired womanhood for Jane

Gilbert and Gubar (women)

Women in Jane's world, acting as agents of men, may be the keepers of other women. But both keepers and prisoners are bound by the same chains

Gilbert and Gubar referencing Adrienne Rich

The names of Jane's 'true' sisters…suggest the ideal of feminine strength for which Jane has been searching

Politi

The narrative, together with the girl-child, grow from revolted marginality to quiescent socialisation

Weissman

The end of the book reveals the first half for what it is – not the rage of the Romantic radical who wants justice, but the rage of the outside who just wants to get in

Sara Lodge

Jane Eyre sells out - by the end, the heroine has become complicit with and inseparable from the society that, at first, she seemed to reject

Josie Billington (Jane)

For all her rebellious energy, Jane is at last reduced to the role of desexualised submissive servant and to the duties of the stereotypical wife which she had once regarded as anathema.

Josie Billington (ending)

The novel’s close constitutes a standard Victorian ending, where all non-conformist elements are restrained or tamed, and the female heroine reverts to patriarchal type

Joan Z Anderson (Ferndean)

Brontë's oasis in Ferndean suggests that even ideological worlds still require female servitude

Joan Z Anderson (freedom)

Jane's triumph resides in assuming the conventional role of wife. None of Brontë's females achieves true independence or freedom.

Joan Z Anderson (rage)

Brontë's narrative ultimately functions as a warning against female rage

Joan Z Anderson (conventions)

The novel “ultimately re-inscribes some of those very conventions that the author defies”

Virginia Woolf

Bronte “does not attempt to solve the problems of human life; she is unaware that such problems exist”

Bonnie Zare (ending)

The ending portrays Jane as subservient to a man whose gentleness stems mainly from his physical helplessness