Jane Eyre Task 3

Becoming a Governess

1.      The woman Question is the voice of the women in the nineteenth century, asking to be heard and answered. Like all that women, this novel ‘Jane Eyre’ asks us to think about a woman in the middle of Victiorian England, trying to make sense of her own destiny. It asks that we understand the voice of a feminist and that we listen to ‘What women want’.

Higher education became available to women in 1848 when the Queen’s college opened. This made it able for women to get a higher qualification and to get a decent job and earn their own money.

2.      “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;”

Jane worked at Mr Rochester’s house as a governess. When she first met him he recognised her as the governess because of the way she dressed.

-          “He stopped, ran his eye over my dress, which, as usual, was quite simple – a black merino cloak, a black beaver bonnet; neither of them half fine enough for a lady’s-maid. “ “Ah, the governess!” (Bronte, 135)

Governesses were seen as dumb and Mr Rochester could not believe that it was Jane who drew that beautiful pictures.

-          “Out of my head. That head I see on your shoulders?” (Bronte. 146)

A governess was expected to look after the children

-          “what are you about Miss Eyre, to let Adele sit up so long? Take her to bed” (Bronte, 149)

3.      A governess in the nineteenth century was known as a low class woman. She had to do domestic work in the house, nurture the children and do everything the man wants her to do; she was like a middle class mother. The governess was expected to preside over the contradictions written into the domestic ideal. For gentlemen a governess was a tabooed woman. They couldn’t marry her, because she was a governess and in their eyes a governess was a lunatic and fallen woman. The governess also never performed as a mother. She was only helping out in the family when the mother couldn’t do it or when a family’s mother died. Being a governess in the nineteenth century must have been very humiliating to the women. No one cared about their humanity and they didn’t have respect for them.

Jane Eyre Task 4

Dreams and Paintings

Jane describes the drawings as visions of her spiritual eye and these pictures reveal her great awareness for dreams.

The first picture Jane painted (Bronte, 147):

It represents someone sinking in the swollen sea, clouds rolling over the sea and there is no land in the picture. This picture can illustrate how Jane sees her own life. She feels useless and as if she has no meaning in this dark life, therefore she can be the person sinking in life - as rough and strong as the dark swollen sea.

The second picture (Bronte, 147):

This painting is not religious; it belongs to a Greek legend. It portrays the Evening Star, a hill with a woman’s shape rising into the sky. It represents Jane’s emotional commitment with Mr Rochester just like the goddess Selene fell in love with Endymion at Mt Latmos. Mr Rochester identifies this setting in the painting.

The third picture (Bronte, 147):

It is “a head, - a colossal head... Above the temples, amidst wreathed turban folds... gleamed a ring of white flame... This pale crescent was ‘The likeness of a kingly crown’ what it diademed was ‘the shape which shape had none’ (Bronte, 147-148).

This picture depicts the ice-bound landscape of Jane’s despair. Her dream art may thus reveal how she was suppressed, passionate and unconscious.

A dream in Jane Eyre can serve as a general symbol. Her dreams can also serve as complex representations for events in Jane’s life. Jane begins having dreams about children. Gilbert and Gubar argue that these dreams correspond to the increasing apprehension Jane feels towards a romance with Rochester. After Jane and Mr Rochester walked around Thornfield, she has a series of child dreams:

“...during the past week scarcely a night had gone over my couch that had not brought with it a dream of an infant: which I sometimes hushed in my arms, sometimes dandled on my knee, sometimes watched playing with daisies on a lawn; or again, dabbling its hands in running water. It was a wailing child this night, and a laughing one the next: now it nestled close to me, and now it ran from me.”

Jane had another series of child dreams after she and Mr Rochester became engaged. These dreams may reflect a fear that Jane muffles from herself and others. Homans suggest that the child of the dreams may represent Jane’s love for Mr Rochester. The dreams can also represent Jane’s orphan childhood, something she cannot free herself from. Al the memories and experiences come forward through her dreams.

Jane had another dream the night that she decided to leave Thornfield. In the dream she has returned to the red room of Gateshead. As she looks up at the ceiling, it turns into clouds. A human from reminiscent of the cosmic woman in Jane’s imaginative watercolour paintings appears. In this dream Jane’s emotions again reflected in her dream.

Dreams in Jane Eyre thus serve several complex functions. They forewarn Jane of trouble or good fortune, and reveal Jane’s inner self to the reader. They can serve as general symbols, interpretive representations, or direct reflections of Jane’s emotions.

Jane Eyre - Task 2

1.      Bessie:

Jane is sent to the Red Room for behaving badly, but she is resisting the whole time. I told her that if she doesn’t listen to us and don’t sit still, we will have to tie her down. I told Jane that she must listen to Mrs Reed otherwise she will be sent to the poorhouse. We went out of the room and left Jane in there so that she can think about what she did wrong.

The next thing we hear is someone knocking, screaming and crying from inside the Red Room. We ran to the room, unlocked it and went in. Jane was crying and I asked her, “Are you hurt? Have you seen something?” (Bronte, 21). Jane grabbed my hand and she didn’t want to let go. Mrs Reed came along and asked what we are doing inside. I told her, “Miss Jane screamed so loud, ma’am” (Bronte, 21), but she just told us to leave her and go. That was the last time we have seen her till she came out the next day.

Poor Jane couldn’t stand up for herself and leave Gateshead by her own, but luckily she told Mrs Reed what she thinks of her and she told it directly into her face.

2.      Early in Jane’s life she had a bad experience in the Red Room and changed her life. She was afraid and couldn’t take it any longer to live with the Reed family.  “In the Red Room, Jane experiences the bitter isolation of the outsider, the powerlessness of the scapegoat to please, the abjectness of the victim. But above all, she experiences her situation as unnatural” (Rich, 471).

At the time when this happened to Jane in her life, she didn’t know what the outer world was like. She only knew the house she lived in which was full of abuse and violence. This is what inspired her to go out to the world, to see what other people are like, to live her life dignity and pride.

While Jane was in the Red Room, Bessie was one of the people to look after her. Bessie was also the first woman in Jane’s life that showed affection to her. This gave Jane some hope; it showed her that there are people out there who aren’t like the Mrs Reed and who will respect her life.

After the Red Room scene Jane motivated herself and with pride she went to Mrs Reed and told her that she will tell everyone, who asks, that Mrs Reed treated her with miserable cruelty.

The Red Room was definitely a turning point for Jane in her life. It made her stronger and inspired her to test out the alternatives and opportunities that live gives us.

3.      For the little drama enacted on ‘that day’ which opens Jane Eyre is in itself a paradigm of the larger drama that occupies the entire book: Jane’s anomalous, orphaned position in society, her enclosure in stultifying roles and houses, and her attempts to escape through flight, starvation, and…madness. And that Charlotte Bronte quite consciously intended the incident of the red-room to serve as a paradigm for the larger plot of her novel is clear not only from its position in the narrative but also from Jane’s own recollection of the experience at crucial moments throughout the book: when she is humiliated by Mr Brocklehurst at Lowood, for instance, and on the night when she decides to leave Thornfield. In between these moments, moreover, Jane’s pilgrimage consists of a series of experiences which are, in one way or another, variations on the central, red-room motif of enclosure and escape. (Gilbert &Gubar, Madwoman 341).

[The little drama enacted on ‘that day’] refers to the Red Room scene. This was the beginning of all Jane’s problems in her life and also the escape missions that she had. Later in Jane’s life she had bigger humiliating situations. One where Mr Brocklehurst humiliates her in front of all the children and teachers for something that wasn’t even true. Bronte used the Red Room scene to make us aware that there is going to be much more of this scene’s where Jane will be “locked in a situation” and can not escape.

Jane’s story is a story of enclosure and escape. She struggles from the imprisonment of her childhood toward an almost unthinkable goal of mature freedom and that is something that every woman in a patriarchal society must meet and overcome: oppression, where she was at Gateshead, starvation at Lowood where their food wasn’t what it must be, madness at Thornfield and coldness at Marsh End.

Bronte structured the novel excellent by putting the Red Room scene first and then that is the link and the beginning point of all Jane’ s bigger enclosure and escape situations.

Jane Eyre - Task 1

1.      Class- a number of persons or things regarded as forming a group by reason of common attributes, characteristics, qualities or sort.

Feminism- Feminism is a diverse collection of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies. Some versions are critical of past and present social relations. Feminist theory aims to understand the nature of gender inequality and focuses on gender politics, power relations and sexuality. Feminism is also based on experiences of gender roles and relations.

Gender- Gender refers to the social attributes and opportunities associated with being male and female and the relationships between women and men and girls and boys, as well as the relations between women and those between men.

Ideology- refers to the way in which people think about the world and their ideal concept of how to live in the world.

2.       

Ø  The author thanks everyone who had a hand in her book and who helped her, because she published it under a man’s name, Currer Bell.

Ø  She makes a correction to the people who thought her book means something that it is not.

Ø  She defends her book, because there are people who don’t like it.

Ø  She makes it clear “I repeat it” (Currer Bell, preface) that there is a difference. They must not get it wrong and judge her book, because she’s a woman.

Ø  I think that she is very thankful that she got it right to publish her book under the name of a man.

Ø  The author answers some of the questions about the novel that the reader asks and didn’t realise.

3.     

 Jane Eyre is written by a female and it can be seen in the way the book is written from a woman’s perspective, “the heroine is the image of a woman’s heart” (Rigby, 449). “Mr. Rochester’s character is tolerably consistent. He is made as coarse and as brutal as can in all conscience be required to keep our sympathies at a distance” (Rigby, 451). The author is a feminist so she writes about all her bad experiences of men and in that way she turns the reader also against them. Later Jane marries him and then the reader’s perspective change when he becomes the hero. Jane is not happy with the fact that only men can do what they want and get advantage in situations and women can’t. “No one would think that she owed anything either to God above or to man below” (Rigby, 452). She is a very strong feminist and she refuses to do what the usual women had to do in those years.

For the middle class people this book was unacceptable and Jane didn’t follow the moral rules. For them it is vulgar and it transgresses the rules of God. “She has inherited in fullest measure the worst sin of our fallen nature - the sin of pride” (Rigby, 452). Jane transgresses the rules that was in those years (Victorian class) seen as “right”. “Mr. Rochester is a man who deliberately and secretly seeks to violate the laws both of God and man, and yet we will be bound half our lady readers are enchanted with him for a model of generosity and honour” (Rigby, 451). It had upset the Victorian class people that although a man doesn’t appear moral, the girls still like it. It was seen as wrong for them. “We would have thought that such a hero had had no chance…but the popularity of Jane Eyre is a proof how deeply the love for illegitimate romance is implanted in our nature” (Rigby, 451). They believed that a woman shouldn’t fall for a man who has not moral values, but in this book the women like it. The readers and was disgusted about the book and Brontë illustrates this in the article.