It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satis fi ed with tranquillity: th, Apuntes de Idioma Inglés

¡Descarga It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satis fi ed with tranquillity: th y más Apuntes en PDF de Idioma Inglés solo en Docsity! CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S JANE EYRE This novel is about politics, nationalism and ideology. Women fiction in the C19. It became a best-seller. It’s not at all related to the love story, it goes beyond that. Represents a type of woman who still exists even today. The plot is useless in this novel, the main character tries to convince the reader. Jane Eyre becomes the first heroine in the protestant society. This novel is in a way a response to Pamela (C18). This novel creates some kind of school for women writers. This is a craft. In the C19 the main question for the woman is ‘’What is a woman?’’. Prostitutes and gypsy women were expelled from that category of women. White middle-class women (women who could read) are present; the rest are absent. This can’t be considered feminist as in the 21st century. The label feminism is conflicting. She is not a woman in the story, she is a beast. This is not an innocent novel. Jane Eyre does fit into the grand array of heroines of the Protestant will that commences with Richardson’s Pamela and goes through Austen’s Emma Woodhouse to triumph in George’s Eliot Dorothea Brooke and Henry James’ Isabel Archer. They are simply too wild and Byronic, too High Romantic, to keep such company. For a Victorian woman the question was peculiarly fraught since women were biologically defined as creatures of excess, throbbing with reproductive energy which had to be sluiced away each month, and yet could not be dammed up or controlled without real threat to the balance of the psyche. // Pamela is a novel which is subtitled. A woman has to have her virtue safe. That’s why prostitutes, gipsy women, black people were expelled. That’s why Jane Eyre marries for love in the end (rebelliousness throughout the novel, but decides to marry and she becomes free, she’s always in control when she’s married, she’s the only character who knows all the time). Feminism becomes the key term of this novel. Brontë’s novel as ‘’myth’’ that works toward balancing individualistic bourgeois values and conservative aristocratic values. He argues that her novels, including Jane Eyre, do this in part through conservative endings in which the protagonists ‘’negotiate passionate self-fulfillment on terms which preserve the social and moral conventions intact’’ by taking positions within the social system that has oppressed them earlier in the novel. Jane Eyre as radical conservative; and as such she belongs to a distinguished literary lineage, all the way from Joseph Conrad to T.S Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. Sets the path of a type of womanhood that still pervades in the 21st century. That is why this novel was so important. This novel follows another path, that’s what it makes it interesting. It also became a landmark for the United States. The C19 is the most important century for writing, expansion of the British Empire. The novel was rejected several times, that is why Brontë had to edit it. Women writing was fine at the time. For Victorian women: It was a matter of learning new disciplines and habits of feeling, new rhythms of time and organizations of space, new forms of repression, deference and self- fashioning. Jane: an extraordinarily contradictory amalgam of smouldering rebelliousness and prim conventionalism, gushing Romantic fantasy and canny hard-headedness, quivering sensitivity and blunt rationality (she knows she has to follow the rules). Women were of course allowed to be free as long as they followed the rules, if not, they were expelled. Prostitution novels became popular in the C19. The story is told by an old Jane Eyre. She holds her feelings back. All characters serve a role for her development, to help her arise and know what she wants to be. The purpose is to indoctrinate women how to behave: they need to leave, how to repress their feelings. Jane and Bewick’s History of British Birds; children’s fiction to reinforce human feelings. Tess Cosslett explains that these feelings are reinforced by two arguments that would later become traditional in fiction about animals; ‘’the religious appeal to the idea of ‘fellow creature’, and the rhetorical device of reversing the roles, translating animal pain into equivalent human pain’’. Hence, nonhuman creatures, together with black slaves and women, were, in a way, categorized under the same label and came to be the target of a rising rhetoric of sensibility throughout the first half of the 19th century to transform social understandings about the inferiority of these subjects. Promoting sympathy towards animals mirrored the politics of liberal enlightenment. Jane Eyre starts the story as a child, reading a book (History of British Birds; she reads it for a reason). The concept of ‘child’ was reconstructed after a revolution, after Britain faces a religious crisis. The concept of ‘child’ is an ideological vessel and becomes political afterwards. Every time a child appears in a novel it has nothing to do with childhood. These children have political weapons. Glorious Revolution. That’s why Jane Eyre started the story as a child, and the text is created to indoctrinate women readers. She reads a book about animals. The feelings and emotions of women and animals were similar. She mirrors herself in this story of animals. She feels herself in captivity. This marks the intention of the novel, which is to get these women out for escape of this label. This novel was deemed as a romantic, domestic novel. This novel pretends to attack, to try to get away from that label. FRAGMENT COMMENT It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow- creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. (chapter 12) Ostensibly the passage articulates support for the reformist position adopted by Combe, that women, as well as men, should be allowed to exercise their faculties to the full. The demand is not for radical change, but rather that women should be allowed to participate in the given social order in more decisive fashion. But against this reformist reading we must place the explosive energy of the passage, and the explicit linking of the position of women and workers. The vision is that of a silent but seething revolt, merely waiting to erupt. Writing in the era of Chartism, and at a time when political revolution was about to explode throughout Europe, Brontë was not employing her terms loosely. Her letters of 1847 and 1848 show a recurrent preoccupation with the phenomenon of political rebellion, through her shifting responses reveal a significant ambivalence. In April 1848 she speaks of Chartism as an ‘ill-advised movement… judiciously repressed’: collective political action should be replaced by ‘mutual kindliness’ and the ‘just estimate of individual character’. The novel gives the opinion of the author about politics. Brontë was against Chartism, which was the most ideological ghost in the C19. She wanted political equality for women. She was a yoking between the two terms of the metaphor turns not on shared inferiority but on difference and oppression. Comparison between the slave narratives written by black women with the oppression of white women. Nationalism, Britishness (ideological context). The bonding in the novel only takes place between white middle-class women. An interpretation of the significance of the British empire in Jane Eyre must begin by making sense of Bertha Mason Rochester, the mad, drunken West Indian wife whom Rochester keeps locked up on the third floor of his ancestral mansion. Bertha functions in the novel as the central locus of Brontë’s anxieties about the presence of feminine oppression in England, anxieties that motivate the plot and drive it to its conclusion.The novel’s anti-imperialist politics, such examples suggest, are more self-interested than benevolent. The opposition to imperialism arises not primarily out of concern for the well-being of the people directly damaged by British imperialism – the African slaves in the West Indian colonies, the Indians whose economy was being destroyed under British rule – but out of concern for the British who were being contaminated by their contact with the unjust social systems indigenous to the people with dark skin. Colonialism is part of the British culture in the 19th century. In opposition to the danger of the contagious inequality characteristic of other races – Brontë poses an alternative directly out of middle-class ideology: keeping a clean house at home in England. Part of what the novel solves in its conclusion is the problem of contamination from abroad. Clean and unclean, healthy and unhealthy environments form a central symbolic structure in the novel, and what is clean is represented as intrinsically English.Bertha institutes the great act of cleaning in the novel, which burns away Rochester’s oppressive colonial wealth and diminishes the power of his gender, but then she herself is cleaned away, burned and as it were purified from the novel. Brontë creates a character of the nonwhite races to use as the vividly embodied signifier of oppression in the novel, and then has this signifier, by the explosive instability of the situation it embodies, destroyed itself. Since the house is contaminated by the presence of Bertha, it has to be cleaned by eliminating her from the novel. She is not allowed to be in another room of the house, the attic is dirty and stingy. In the English culture (19th century) a house has to be clean and pure, a sinner or a beast (nonwhite) cannot live in that type of house. // Since the power of Rochester’s gender is diminished, Jane Eyre goes back to him, he is in an inferior position. In the very end, Jane Eyre is in control but they are still together, which makes the novel perfect. This is needed so Jane can shine as a perfect wife. Hero and heroine gets together in the end. WIDE SARGASSO SEA ‘’Is there another side? I said. ‘’There is always another side, always’’ The novel aims to present the real events of the marriage in Jamaica. Explains why Bertha (or Antoinette) is in such a distressful situation. Double? Bertha seems to act out for Jane where she cannot act out for herself. There are several examples of this throughout the novel: in chapter 20 Mr. Mason is stabbed by his lunatic sister. Jane had in the previous chapter voiced to the audience of her distaste for the man. She disliked him, though she did not wish him harm. Bertha attacks him the night of his arrival, nearly killing him in the process. While she literally does not do this because Jane does not like him, it is easy to look at it in a metaphorical manner.Similarly, she destroyed the wedding veil Jane was to wear after Jane begins to have second thoughts about marrying Rochester. Again, while it is not literal, it is easy to see how it is interpreted that it is Bertha acting on behalf of Jane by destroying the veil, symbolizing her sudden ill feelings towards the marriage. It also serves as foreshadowing for the pending nuptials that cannot occur because of Bertha. Bertha puts into motion, in a way, the repressive thoughts that Jane could never voice, as she is bound by the rules of proper society. This relationship is crucial to the novel as it dictates a great part of Jane’s future. Bertha has to be useless in terms of activity, she can’t act on her own because then she would not be a beast. Ending… punishment? (for Rochester’s sin, which is lying) Superiority of the blind: command of language. When someone is blind, they can only talk.Jane and Rochester’s love will be founded on the words that they exchange. In turn, Rochester is able to greater appreciate the language he shares with Jane, as his blindness enables him to concentrate more fully on words without being distracted by his vision. Jane Eyre is in power, in control. Consequently, Rochester’s blindness served a dual purpose: to sharpen his language capabilities and to allow him to become closer to Jane than any two people, independent of one another, could become. Therefore, their bonding is perfect in the end.