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

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

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

“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 epitmosied 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

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