Andrew's Wiki
Jane Eyre

Interpretation

• A milestone on the course of crystallizing realism
  • Where the fantasy, the supernatural, the fairy tale, the vision, the improbable, and the fairy tale all come together, are cancelled out and preserved at a higher level
• The improbable is domesticated and put into Providential narrative
  • ESP moment is seen as God’s will b/c it’s when Rochester admits that God knew what was right all along
• The elven, the strange, the Gothic, is put into a material framework
  • Jane’s eccentricity is explained as an effect of having been to Lowood in addition to her own temperament (also a narrow need to keep the family together)
  • Rochester’s own Gothic past is made by the commonplace greed of his father and brother, trying to keep the family property together
• Hegelian pattern: Jane constantly wants her inner spirit and soul to be free, disclaiming the importance of her earthly frame or superficial independence (ie, she can be a paid servant but still retain her spiritual freedom; she can retain her feminist independence even while being “flesh of his flesh” b/c she has explained that his presence helps to draw out her whole entire being)
• The Strange
  • Her visions (the dreams, like of her mother saying “Go, child, out of temptation”)
  • Her drawings (the Evening Star, the floating corpse and wreckage surmounted by a bracelet-stealing bird)
  • Jane’s being compared to, associated with fairies, elves, sylphs, sprites, witches, Turks, genii, etc
• How Is Gothic “Cancelled?”
  • Turned into art
    • Jane’s drawings
  • Turned into a story
    • Innkeeper recites the story of the Thornfield fire as if to a stranger (the condition of the novel), rather than Jane witnessing it, having someone who was there say it, or having a vision of it happening
  • Jane’s conversation
    • When Jane gets back to Rochester, he keeps talking about her being an enchantment, the ESP scene, her being an elf, but she insists on talking about getting his hair tidy, acquiring eggs and ham, etc: all material and down-to-earth
  • Religion
    • ESP explained as God’s will
    • The socially approved supernatural is left in charge of the field
  • Jane’s Distance
    • 377: In first flush of their love, she keeps him at a distance, provoking him and teasing him in order to keep him from giving her those Gothic names: elf, sprite, etc
    • The “pungent” is used so that their relationship doesn’t sink into cloying sweetness
    • It keeps him “in reasonable check” so that he cannot overmaster her by being too loving (she knows she will cave and lose her independence if not)
• How Is Gothic “Preserved?”
  • These exact same ways! It receives plenty of page-time, but you are not to read them as the final arbiters of truth, but instead on the register of feeling and emotion: especially your own as the reader
  • It’s a foreign spice that doesn’t wholly conceal the plain mutton underneath
  • The supernatural and the material are so wrapped up in each other that you can hardly tell what was improbable and what probable
    • The painful material circumstances she suffers while escaping Thornfield seem to purchase for her the right to “stumble upon” her unknown cousins
    • Divine Justices renders Rochester so low that his personal situation seems lowly enough for Jane Eyre to wed with (his blindness and lameness seem to cancel out her obscurity and personal unattractiveness)
    • The transfer of the Totally Out There supernatural elements to the providence of God makes the former acceptable as their ultimate interpretant: the pagan is dissolved into the accepted supernatural mode, which is what makes it realistic
      • For example, the ESP, but also the mysterious elements surrounding the marriage: the electrical storms, the cloven chestnut tree, Bertha’s eerie visit to Jane’s chamber: all end up in the undramatic (as Jane argues) climax at the church and a scary but unterrifying (Jane does not faint) visit to the third story; and Jane interprets it as having to hapen b/c she had made “an idol” of Rochester and put him before God
      • There is the supernatural, but it is explained in such a way as to make it objective (“We all believe in God, right?”)
• Religion CONTAINS the supernatural elements, allows them to be roped into a realistic framework
• We hear the story of Bertha, which is a geographical division of labor that ousts the supernatural and irrational: where the irrational occurs on colonial soil, and the reason why he’s steeped in it occurs on British soil and is quite materialist, quite objective, about his being the second son

Contingency

• What the Gothic elements speak to is contingency: chance versus fate
  • Jane says it’s “absurd” to await “circumstance” (559) which would put her and Rochester back together, but that’s kind of what she does: her romance is duly put on hold until Rochester is ready for her
• How is it different?
  • Bildung: Jane is tested and grows in her generosity and charity by teaching at the charity school
  • Circumstance, chance, improbable is reinterpreted as Providence

Temperament

• The cult of personality begins here, with the “unique” Jane Eyre whose situation just happens to be perfect for storytelling
• Personality
  • Jane’s being different from Aunt Reed is the explanation for her bad treatment: people in general do not like each other b/c of their born natures “shunned them as one would fire, lighting or anything else is that is bright but antipathetic” (156)
  • 181: Yes, experience can change you: Rochester we meet after “fortune has knowed me about” making him “hard and touch” but not wholly so: he is still “pervious” (you can be changed but not forever)
  • 418 “the hitch in Jane’s character” makes her leave Thornfield
  • 419: St John the saint: he is a saint b/c he wants to change his character to make it more acceptable to God (he does this by sacrificing his chance at romantic happiness with the pretty heiress Miss Oliver)
  • Bronte’s real crime against Bertha is denying her access to temperament: Bertha is a monster of fate, a victim merely of her genes, becoming an alcoholic madwoman like her forebears
• The science of temperament: physiognomy
  • Maybe half a dozen times Jane uses it to make generalizations about people’s personalities, esp her own (“organ of Veneration” huge)
  • Bronte wants a scientific base for her conversations about personality
• Love here emerges in its modern form, as the merging of two completely compatible temperaments (their “natures”) 347