Jane Eyre critical quotes

Shuttleworth - the mirror

'captures the bewildering, contradictory and polluting effects of suppression within the female frame'

Shuttleworth - childhood

'part of a new, emerging, more sympathetic attitude to childhood'

Rigby

'the same tone that fostered Chartism and rebellion is the same which has also written Jane Eyre'

Gilbert and Gubar - challenges of womanhood

'everywoman in a patriarchal society must meet and overcome: oppression (Gateshead), starvation (Lowood), madness (Thornfield), and coldness (Marsh End)

Gilbert and Gubar - the red room

'a kind of patriarchal death chamber'

Gilbert and Gubar - Jane’s oppression

'Jane's anomalous, orphaned position in society, her enclosure in stultifying roles'

Gilbert and Gubar - Lowood

'orphan girls are starved and frozen into proper Christian submission'

Gilbert and Gubar - Bertha

'Jane's truest and darkest double'

Gilbert & Gubar - Jane’s opportunities

'a path of thorns' or a 'path of roses'

Gilbert and Gubar - SJ

'St John represents the patriarchal imposition of duty and sacrifice'

Gilbert and Gubar - Bertha’s symbolism

'Bertha embodies the repressed and oppressed women who cannot fit into the narrow confines of Victorian femininity'

Gilbert and Gubar - impact of Lowood

'her way of confronting the world is still fiery rebellion…she learns to compromise' at Lowood'

Moglen

'a womb world'

Simpson

'Mix of the realist mode of autobiography with the supernatural world of folk and fairy tale…a response to the constraints imposed on women in the early Victorian period'

Billington - Jane’s archetype

'brings together in one heroine the two roles which arguably embodied most tension for 19th century English society - the orphan and the governess'

Billington - Bronte’s tone

'anti-Gothic, anti-Romantic, rationalism'

Eagleton - Jane’s place

'lives at the ambiguous point in the social structure at which two world - an internal one of emotional hungering and an external one of harsh mechanical necessity meet and collide'

Eagleton - impact of money

'Inheritance allows Jane independence and power over Rochester - comes to him on her own terms'

Polley

'Jane is rendered totally impotent and ineffectual by being fantasises and imprisoned in the fairy discourse'

Rigney

'In Jane Eyre the price of sexual commitment is the loss of self in madness or death'

Showalter

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

Acton 1865

'women who have sexual desires…form of insanity'

Anderson

'for rigid self-control is the only way woman can survive in the Victorian sexual hierarchy'

Clarke

'The dilemma many women con-front regarding marriage or spinsterhood'

Wells

'She intends to nullify the difference between various social scales'

Webster

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

Zare

'the fairy tale closure falsifies women's experience by suggesting that a married woman's life is not worthy of testimony'

Heilbrun

'after youth and childbearing [women] have no plot'

Mullan

'the orphan above all is out of place'

D.H. Lawrence

'Jane Eyre verges on pornography'

Mozely

'burning with revolutionary, French, anti-monarchists'

Rosenfield

'one representing the socially acceptable…the other externalising the free'