Jane Eyre - AO3

Bronte Biography

• Born April 21 1816 in Yorkshire

• Her mother died when she was five years old

• Her father sent her and Emily to join Maria and Elizabeth at a boarding school

• Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell entertained each other with stories about an imaginary land

• She taught at a school and briefly served two families as a governess, but the work did not appeal to her

• Charlotte and her sisters decided to open their own school

  • To prepare for this, in 1842, she set out to improve her language at a school in Brussels.

  • Here she encountered a remarkable teacher, Constantin Heger, and fell in love.

  • Heger was, however, married, and after two years of increasing anguish she forced herself to go home, desperate for his letters, which, since he was a model of propriety, did not arrive.

  • This, the most vivid experience of her life, furnished material for all her novels, and although at thirty-eight she married her father’s curate, she died, in 1855, before she could take hold of this experience.

• In 1847, Charlotte published Jane Eyre, which was very successful

  • Wrote under the pseudonym 'Currer Bell' to conceal her identity

  • Didn't want prejudice from being a female writer

• She continued caring for her elderly father

• After rejecting several marriage proposals, in 1854 she married the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls, who had replaced her father as the curate

Autobiography

• Southey (Poet Laureate in 1836) told Bronte “‘literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: & it ought not to be’” (It would seem that a woman’s life cannot be the business of literature either. 

• As Valerie Sanders explains, Victorians had clear ideas as to who was an appropriate subject for an autobiography or biography, and women, perceived “as being in no sense representative of the age,” fell outside that category: They took no part in politics or business, they invented nothing, they failed to exhibit anything important at the Royal Academy, they contributed little to public debate. 

• Those who did write justified their entry into a male arena on the grounds that they were passing their experiences on to their children, or teaching the public something useful about childcare and household management.

• However, despite what was said publicly about autobiography and biography being inappropriate for women, women themselves were busy writing in these forms, as demonstrated by both Gaskell’s work and Sanders’ book-length collection of nineteenth-century women’s autobiographical fragments, called Records of Girlhood. 

• Women’s lives were detailed in letters such as those of Elizabeth Carter, in diaries such as those of Fanny Burney, and in journals such as those of Dorothy Wordsworth.

• These works are often embraced by postmodern critics under the heading of “life narrative,” a democratic term that acknowledges a wider range of autobiographical practices and writers than the previously privileged res gestae “autobiography,” a term which implies a “definitive achievement” or “universalizing life story”

The New Gothic

• Distinction made by Robert Heilman in 1958

• 'old Gothic' - took an easy route, using 'the excitements of mysterious scene and happening'

  • Atmosphere of fear and suspense: Stories often evoke terror through dark, claustrophobic settings and the threat of supernatural force 

  • Settings: Castles, monasteries, crypts, and ruins symbolize the passage of time and human fragility.

  • Plot elements: Common motifs include imprisonment, persecution, murder, live burials, doubles, and mysterious family secrets.

  • Narrative style: Gothic stories frequently use convoluted structures, including tales within tales, changing narrators, and discovered manuscripts. 

  • Themes: Death, decay, the supernatural, psychological conflict, and the intrusion of the past into the present are central.

• Complex heroes: Protagonists are often anti-heroes, morally ambiguous, or socially outcast, reflecting inner conflict and duality.

• Bronte's approach is more subtle - the 'new Gothic'

  • She tends towards humorous modifications, a kind of anti-Gothic that gently critiques the genre

  • She indirectly incorporates and naturalises elements of the Gothic in a way that liberates her work from the limitations of the conventional, the rational and the socially acceptable

• Earlier critics often disparaged the Gothic influence but Heilman regards it as key to the novel's strength

  • Transformed Gothic elements not there simply to provide thrills and chills but offer a direct means of connection with subconscious life, in its potentially violent, sexual, aggressive and self-annihilating aspects

• e.g. Rochester nearly burned in his bed, only to find himself comically baptised in a pool of water when Jane puts out the flames

• e.g. Bertha not literally a vampire, but when she tears Jane's wedding veil in two, she embodies the dead hand that will reach out to destroy Rochester's planned bigamous marriage

• Heilman

  • Bronte "finds new ways to achieve the ends served by the old Gothic - the discovery and release of new patterns of feeling, the intensification of feeling"

  • "radical revision" of earlier modes of writing

Romanticism

• The generation of poets which preceded the Victorian period - in particular Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile or A Treatise on Education, which seeks to show how natural human goodness can survive corrupt society – had established the child as the archetype of Romantic sensibility.

• For the first time, during the Romantic period, childhood was regarded not only as intrinsically significant as the foundation of subjectivity but as uniquely valuable for modelling natural innocence and goodness in a world of fallen experience.

• Individuality, innocence, imagination, heightened sensitivity and fragility, and could be as powerfully expressive of nostalgia and Wordsworthian “natural piety”, Blakean indignant social protest.

• Wordsworth sees childhood as a moment where purity and honesty can be released into the world. 

  • This period of life is one where one is fully immersed within their world and the barriers of in-authenticity and duplicitous conditions are not present. 

  • In Wordsworth's poetry, the idea of childhood is firmly linked with the expression of emotions, reverence for the natural world, as well as the idea that social conformity is secondary to individual authenticity. 

  • The connection between both nature and childhood converge in Wordsworth's poetry.

• Jane’s rebellious outbursts against the tyrannies of John Reed and his mother may be identified within the tradition of radical autobiography inherited from writers such as the philosopher and novelist William Godwin (1757-1836).

• Godwin was the husband of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)) and father to Mary Shelley.

• His novels, which included such works as Caleb Williams (1794)…were associated with Revolutionary Romanticism and were appreciated for their intense depiction of individual Psychology. One of Jane Eyre’s early reviewers, the editor of the radical Examiner, asserted that ‘as an analysis of a single mind’ the novel should be read alongside the autobiographies of Godwin.

• Godwin’s narratives sympathised with the rebellious individual protesting against personal and social injustice

Childhood

• Jane Eyre was one of the first novels that set out to explore what it feels like to be a child.  it is recounted by the heroine herself, supposedly in adulthood, but with all the intensity of immediate experience

• Moral Instruction books:

  • The Naughty Girl Reclaimed (1811) - A picture book with a cut-out dunce’s cap. Here a naughty child, who throws away her schoolbook, learns to control herself and to become a quiet, obedient daughter, who is ‘anxious her dear mamma to please’.

  • Flowers of Instruction (1820), shows an angry child who is jealously attacking her little sister or brother, but learns from her mother to control ‘passion’s angry storm’.

  • Children who did not control themselves could descend, it was warned, into a life of crime, or even worse, medical books suggested, into complete mania in adulthood.

• Unlike these naughty children from the morally improving literature, Jane is a defiant child, who is fully convinced of the rightness of her rebellion.

• Sally Shuttleworth - "In her anger and passion, Jane is far removed from the conventional model of the Victorian child who should be ‘seen and not heard’. Instead, she is part of new, emerging, more sympathetic attitudes to childhood, which stressed that adults should pay attention to the feelings and sufferings of children"

• Household Education (1849)

  • The writer Harriet Martineau noted that it had not been fully understood how much a child can suffer from fear, and few parents ‘know anything of the agonies of its little heart, the spasms of its nerves, the soul-sickness of its days, the horrors of its nights’.

  • Her description of her own terror of a magic lantern, and the shadows it cast, offers remarkable parallels with Jane’s terror of the flickering light when she is locked in the red room.

• Lowood Institution is partly based on the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, which Charlotte Brontë attended with her older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, and younger sister Emily, in 1824-25.

  • Maria and Elizabeth died of consumption, contracted at the school, and there was also an outbreak of typhus while Charlotte was there, which clearly helped to colour her memories of Cowan Bridge.

  • When the Reverend Brontë sent his daughters there, however, he had every reason to believe it would be a good school, and indeed it was not that different from other similar institutions.

  • Lowood Institution, as depicted by Brontë, was harsh, but far removed from the dreadful Yorkshire school, Dotheboys Hall, in Dickens’s novel Nicholas Nickleby (1839). The dominating Mr Brocklehurst was partly based on the evangelical clergyman, the Reverend Carus Wilson, who ran Cowan Bridge.

• The ‘Child’s Guide’ Brocklehurst gives to Jane, which contained ‘an account of the awfully sudden death of Martha G---, a naughty child addicted to falsehood and deceit’ (ch. 4) is no doubt based on some of Carus Wilson’s own publications, either Child’s First Tales (1836), or his magazine, The Children’s Friend, which both carried many tales of children who were struck down dead if they flew into a passion, or told lies.

• Brocklehurst makes Jane stand on a stool in front of the class and orders her classmates to shun her because she is a liar.

  • The novelist Elizabeth Sewell recalls how, at her school in the 1820s, girls who told a lie were made to stand in a black gown with a picture of a liar’s tongue round their neck.

  • The main idea behind these harsh measures was that if the body was punished, the soul could be saved.

• In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë challenges these notions, and instead offers a deeply sympathetic portrayal of a rebellious child, which helped to transform Victorian attitudes to the child.

Women in legislation

Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act

• 1857

• Made adultery of the wife sufficient grounds for divorce, but not of the husband

• Double standard of chastity for women & licence for men

• No sympathy for women who were victims of domestic violence - they were even blamed for ‘making’ their husbands to act in such a way

Married Women’s Property Act

• 1870

• gave women more rights to their own earnings

• previously husbands gained all their wife’s property upon marriage

Coverture

• abolished late 1800s

• wives didn’t have a legal existence outside of their husband

• considered the legal property of their husband

• children owned by husband

• institutionalised rape within marriage

Matrimonial Causes Act

• 1923

• divorce granted on same grounds for both sexes

Women in society

The Angel in the House

• 1854

• Coventry Patmore

• popular in 19th and 20th centuries

• woman who embodied Victorian feminine ideal - wife and mother, selflessly devoted to children, submissive to husband

Dowries

• money/property given to husband upon marriage to wife

• incentivise marriage

• shows commodification of women & transactional process of marriage

Education

• for working class girls - mostly Sunday schools - rudimentary reading skills, religious instruction

• no sex education

• middle & upper class - focussed on obtaining ‘accomplishments’ - speaking French, playing piano, drawing, sewing etc

Governesses

• Unmarried middle class woman

• A preparatory governess would teach the girls of the household such subjects as English, geography, history, singing, piano, drawing, and needlework until they reached the age of twelve, when a finishing governess or a boarding school instructor would take over their education.

• Social limbo - often ate in isolation, not really part of the family, often resided in remote part of house, not equal to employer yet not considered servant

• Often the target of malicious or insolent behaviour by the children, she was powerless to stop it lest she displease the parents and find herself out of work.

• Any flirtation or attraction between a gentleman and a governess was strictly forbidden, and a governess was obliged to downplay her own sexuality in order to avoid any misperceptions; as a result, the stereotype of the stern, strict, and severe governess was quick to emerge. 

• “the figure who epitomized the domestic ideal, and the figure who threatened to destroy it”? (Mary Poovey)

• General dismissive attitude towards governesses - contemporary letters, journals, and fiction describing public humiliation and degradation by employers of the very person they'd charged with the upbringing of their children. 

• Concerns over the “plight” of women in this state led to the establishment of such charitable organizations as the short-lived and generally unsuccessful Governesses' Mutual Assurance Society in 1829. 

• Harriet Martineau and Charlotte and Anne Brontë - belief that governesses suffered miserably as a result of repeated humiliations, sexual repression, and intense loneliness

• Alison Dungey - "Jane Eyre typifies a woman of great personal strength and fortitude, the type of woman most governesses in England at the time aspired to be."

• Governesses’ Benevolent Institution 1841

• According to author of 'Hints on the Modern Governess System' and Lady Eastlake's 1847 review of Governesses' Benevolent Institution's annual report, governesses accounted for the single largest category of women in lunatic asylums

• Mary Poovey - "mid-Victorian fear that the governess could not protect middle-class values because she could not be trusted to regulate her own sexuality"

• "the governess was so affecting...because she epitomised the helplessness unfortunate individuals experienced...from the volatile fluctuations of the modern, industrialising economy"

• "the plight of the governess could be any middle-class woman's fate"

• "the governess revealed the price of all middle-class women's dependence on men"

• "workmen may rebel and tradesmen may combine...but the governess has no refuge" - Lady Eastlake

Sexuality

AO1

• "Certainly, my best. And I was quite right: depend on that: there are a thousand reasons why liaisons between governesses and tutors should never be tolerated a moment in any well-regulated house; firstly--"

• "Oh, gracious, mama! Spare us the enumeration! Au reste, we all know them: danger of bad example to innocence of childhood; distractions and consequent neglect of duty on the part of the attached--mutual alliance and reliance; confidence thence resulting--insolence accompanying--mutiny and general blow-up. Am I right, Baroness Ingram, of Ingram Park?"

• "My lily-flower, you are right now, as always." (p.206)

 

AO3

• "There were strong middleclass fears about inappropriate governesses, who instead of functioning as a bulwark against immorality, were the conduit through which it infected the home" Mary Poovey

• The governess is culturally significant, says Poovey, “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” – by being independent professionally (earning her own income) as well as sexually (by definition single and marriageable, degradedly vulnerable, and living at close quarters with husbands and sons)

• "There is that pervading tone of ungodly discontent which is at once the most prominent and the most subtle evil.... the tone of the mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre. (Elizabeth Rigby 1848)

• "Sexual appetite was considered one of the chief symptoms of moral insanity in women; it was subject to severe sanctions and was regarded as abnormal or pathological." (Elaine Showalter)

 

AO5

• "Jane Eyre verged towards pornography" (D.H. Lawrence)

Revolution

French Revolution - 1789

• "Liberte, egalite, fraternite"

 

Chartism

• The Chartist movement was the first mass movement driven by the working classes.

• It grew following the failure of the 1832 Reform Act to extend the vote beyond those owning property and advocated for universal male suffrage

• Petitions presented to the House of Commons in 1839 and 1842 were rejected, resulting in unrest

1834 Poor Law

• Ensured that the poor were housed in workhouses, clothed and fed.

• Children who entered the workhouse would receive some schooling.

• In return for this care, all workhouse paupers would have to work for several hours each day.

• Except in special circumstances, poor people could now only get help if they were prepared to leave their homes and go into a workhouse.

• Conditions inside the workhouse were deliberately harsh, so that only those who desperately needed help would ask for it.

  • Families were split up and housed in different parts of the workhouse.

  • The poor were made to wear a uniform and the diet was monotonous.

  • There were also strict rules and regulations to follow.

  • Inmates, male and female, young and old were made to work hard, often doing unpleasant jobs such as picking oakum or breaking stones.

  • Children could also find themselves hired out to work in factories or mines.

• Shortly after the new Poor Law was introduced, a number of scandals hit the headlines.

  • The most famous was Andover Workhouse, where it was reported that half-starved inmates were found eating the rotting flesh from bones.

  • In response to these scandals the government introduced stricter rules for those who ran the workhouses and they also set up a system of regular inspections.

  • However, inmates were still at the mercy of unscrupulous masters and matrons who treated the poor with contempt and abused the rules.

• Some people, such as Richard Oastler, spoke out against the new Poor Law, calling the workhouses ‘Prisons for the Poor’.

• The poor themselves hated and feared the threat of the workhouse so much that there were riots in northern towns.

Madness

• When Dickens visited St Luke's Hospital in 1851 he noted "insanity is more prevalent among women than among men"

• Madhouse Act 1828 - stipulated that a resident superintendent had to be employed when an asylum held more than a hundred patients

• Lunatics Act 1845 - required asylums keep records of medical visits and treatments

• "the prevailing view among Victorian psychiatrists was that…women were more vulnerable to insanity than men because the instability of their reproductive system interfered with their sexual, emotional and rational control"

• Dr Edward Tilt described female adolescence as a state of "miniature insanity"

• Showalter - "Deprived of significant spheres of action and forced to define themselves only in personal relationships, women become more and more dependent on their inner lives, more prone to depression and breakdown"

• Florence Nightingale in Cassandra - "Give us back our suffering…better have pain than paralysis!"

• Showalter - "Bertha suffers from the 'moral insanity' associated with women's sexual desires"

• Before moral management, it was common for crazy women to be kept hidden in homes

• The image of Bertha haunts Conolly's books Treatment of the Insane Without Mechanical Restraints (1856) and supports his argument that insane women should be treated in asylums rather than at home

• "Before Jane Eyre can reach her happy ending, the madwoman must be purged from the plot, and passion must be purged from Jane herself"

• Bronte described Bertha's disease as "a phase of insanity…in which all that is good or even human seems to disappear from the mind, and a fiend-nature replaces it"

• In Villete (1853) when Lucy finds the assurance that she is loved and rewarding work, she is no longer sick -> "sophisticated understanding of women's complex emotional needs that the more sensational Jane Eyre lacks"

• "uncontrolled sexuality seemed the major, almost defining symptom of insanity in women"

• "'Moral insanity' redefined madness, not as a loss of reason, bus as a deviance from socially acceptable behaviour"

  • Concept introduced by James Cowles Prichard in 1835

  • Led to abolition of mechanical restraint in public asylums