Jane Eyre An Analysis

Gothic Elements of the Novel Gothic fiction  A type of literature developed in the 18th century and is still highly popular today. Horace Walpole’s 1746 novel The Castle of Otranto is widely credited as being the first Gothic novel, and introduced many of the elements that have become such a familiar part of this genre.

Gothic Elements in the Novel  The Haunted Castle  Madness, Secrets and Lies  The Hero  Aspects of the Supernatural  A Gothic Romance: certainly the course of true love does not run smooth in this novel.

Five Stages of Character Development  Jane's childhood at Gateshead, where she is emotionally abused by her aunt and cousins;  Her education at Lowood School, where she acquires friends and role models but also suffers privations;  Her time as the governess of Thornfield Manor, where she falls in love with her Byronic employer, Edward Rochester;  Her time with the Rivers family at Marsh's End (or Moor House) and Morton, where her cold clergyman-cousin St John Rivers proposes to her;  Her reunion with and marriage to her beloved Rochester.

Themes of the Novel  Social Class: Jane’s ambiguous social position—a penniless yet moderately educated orphan from a good family—leads her to criticize discrimination based on class. Although she is educated, well-mannered, and relatively sophisticated, she is still a governess, a paid servant of low social standing, and therefore powerless.  Gender relations( patriarchy and Jane’s efforts to assert her own identity within male-dominated society): Brocklehurst, Rochester and St. John, all try to keep Jane in a subordinate position and prevent her from expressing her own thoughts and feelings. Jane escapes Brocklehurst and rejects St. John, and she only marries Mr. Rochester once she is sure that their marriage is one between equals. Through Jane, Brontë opposes Victorian stereotypes about women, articulating her own feminist philosophy.

The Madwoman in the Attic  Central theory of a major 1979 book of feminist criticism, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.  The intensely powerful, passionate, and talented woman is seen as crazy and in need of confinement. (The 19th century woman writers’ abilities threatened the dominant good-old-boy literary network.  A lot of interesting implications for Bertha as a character, for Charlotte Brontë as an author.

Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason: Difference  Jane Eyre, though passionate, was guided by her beliefs and morals and what is right, while Bertha Mason was a passionate creature whose passions ruled her.  Jane Eyre is plain, whereas Bertha Mason had been a beauty.  In the setting of the book, Jane Eyre is entirely sane, whereas Bertha Mason was unquestionably insane.  Jane Eyre is the one who Mr. Rochester truly loved, whereas he was bewitched, at first, by Bertha Mason.  Jane Eyre actually loves Mr. Rochester for the man he is - they are soul mates - whereas, for Bertha, Mr. Rochester was a good match (he had money and consequence).

Charlotte and Bertha Mason: Relationship  Bertha: Charlotte Bronte’s alter ego:  Bertha is rejected by the man supposed to love her; Charlotte never married and fell in love with an unattainable man.  Bertha is kept prisoner in a lonely house; Charlotte traveled a little, but spent most of her life shut up in her father’s house in Yorkshire, away from any big-city culture.  Bertha is only able to show her powers in what seem insane, destructive ways; women novelists’ works were often considered ridiculous and their abilities inferior to those of men.

Charlotte and Bertha Mason: Relationship  The parallels: Bertha does double-duty, both representing the restrictions Charlotte felt and becoming Charlotte’s wish-fulfillment of breaking through those restrictions to inspire fear and awe.

Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason: Relationship  For Jane, the narrator of her own story:  Bertha is locked in a room for ten years and goes crazy "like some wild animal"; Jane is locked in the red-room for five minutes and completely freaks out so that she’s "like a mad cat."  Bertha sneaks around Thornfield at night to thwart Rochester’s plans of remarrying; Jane sneaks around Thornfield at night to thwart Rochester’s plans of using her to commit bigamy.  Bertha’s supposed to be insane; Jane hears voices.  Jane and Bertha are actually very similar, Bertha’s pyromaniac madness represents the incendiary potential of the woman writer telling her story, Jane could end up like Bertha.

Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason: Relationship  For Jane, the future wife of Rochester: Bertha Mason is both an external double and a projected double to Jane herself.  Jane is full of vengeful, raging ire, but her battle for acceptance within the patriarchal prison in which she lives, necessitates a suppression of this anger.  The stifling of her selfhood generates the projected double, which later emerges from Jane's psyche into a materialized separate entity - the stereotype of female madness. Bertha becomes the perpetrator of Jane's impulses, acting out the hidden rage which burns fiercely within her.

Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason: Relationship  Jane ’ s longing to transcend the prison of femininity and become part of the symbolic male world from which she is excluded makes her hear the mad laugh of Bertha.  Through her intimacy with Rochester, Jane suffers the trepidation of a dissolution of selfhood.  Although Jane doesn't openly rage at Rochester's behavior, her secret double revolts.  The patriarchal house with its imprisoned madwoman is symbolically the house of Jane's body, with the madwoman in the attic of her mind.

Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason: Relationship  Through her double-self in Bertha, Jane must burn the house in order to be free of her 'demon rage'. Both Bertha and the Bertha within her must be destroyed.  After Jane's acceptance of Rochester's marriage proposal her fears intensify and find release through her subconscious.  Jane, only after the destruction of her own dark double, is able to attain equality and peace

The Mad Woman in the Attic  The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination(1979), examines Victorian literature from a feminist perspective. Authors Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar draw their title from Charlotte Bront ë’ s Jane Eyre, in which Rochester ’ s mad wife Bertha stays locked in the attic.  The text specifically examines Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Bront ë, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson.

The Mad Woman in the Attic  In the work, Gilbert and Gubar examine the notion that women writers of the 19th Century were confined in their writing to make their female characters either embody the "angel" or the "monster." This struggle stemmed from male writers' tendencies to categorize female characters as either pure, angelic women, or rebellious, unkempt madwomen. In their argument, Gilbert and Gubar point to Virginia Woolf who says women writers must "kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been 'killed' into art".

The Mad Woman in the Attic  While it may be easy to construe that feminist writers embody the "madwoman" or "monster," Gilbert and Gubar stressed the importance of killing off both figures because neither the angel nor the monster are accurate representations of women or women writers. Instead, Gilbert and Gubar claimed that female writers should strive for definition beyond this dichotomy, whose options are limited by a patriarchal point of view.