Jane Eyre

[ipanemagirl]

I've got a horrendous cold and have spent 3 days mostly in bed. So I started to read this again, starting at Thornfield. It's just so so so so so good. I love this book. It's a few years since I've read it, I can't believe I'm OLDER THAN MR ROCHESTER. When I first read it he was like an Ancient Old Man. It's so weird! He's 35! And there are loads of stout women in their 40s! I so don't want to be one of those stout women like Grace Poole!
I read books so differently now, I used to just skim landscape and interior descriptions, now I really read them. It's a different book.
Also, why does Jane accept his Parisien stories and the description of his general dissipation? Wouldn't a girl at that time be genuinely horrified? She's as unbothered as if it was 2009! Strange Brontes.

I've just followed that up MrsW! - love the evolution from the Men's Movement ... Am tempted to follow up further, indeed.

I love the passive-aggressive interpretation of Jane Eyre.

May I suggest that you could extend it from Jane Eyre, the character, to Jane Eyre, the book?

Governesses were like nannies/au pairs x 100 in Victorian England and were in a similarly sexually worrying situation within the family home. Jane Eyre is a story about a governess coming into a home and marrying the, married, head of the household.

Jane Eyre, the book sneaks into the home, offering a story of romance and in actual fact wreaking anxiety and havoc upon the middle-class readers.

Jane Eyre is one of those books that people have felt compelled to re-write again and again. I just watched "Rebecca" on T. V. and the parallels are striking. Daphne du Maurier turns the hints of women-women relationships up to 11 and her Rochester is a murderer, not just a bigamist and a control-freak with dodgy sexual tastes.

I've always thought that this is why Rochester is maimed at the end. In all seriousness, you could not have her marrying someone like that. Yes, she can get turned on by his weird and abusive power, but marrying? A bit of a no-no. So he has to be reined in. then she gets to be in control. In a spooky, Misery-like way.

By the way, I love The Genealogy of Morality. I always think Nietzsche was saying "OK, I see your modern interpretation of Jesus, with its Hegelian-Darwinian evolutionist theory of Christian morality as the highest expression of human civilisation, and I show you ... my arse!!" Then he moons at Strauss and all the Bibilical critics.

Though that's obviously a simplification.

I suspect he's also running up behind Kant, kiccking him on the bum, knicking his shoes and running away. But I don't know enough about Kant to say for sure if this is true ... .

That's a direct lure for anyone to enlighten me. I'd love to know.

Ive always found it interesting that Jane rejects the idea of freedom. (poss would have been too 'out there' for the time?) she instead opts for 'a new servitude' Yet it really seems that she is crying for freedom from the restrictions of her place in society. She develops the strength to cope with the restrictions rather than the strength to throw them off.
Re: gothic resonance, well that's a very Bronte thing isn't it? Although not as marked in JE as in Wuthering Heights.

zenandtheartofbaking and Bink and all the fabulous posters on this thread who remind me I used to have an organ of thought in my head region!
Muchos respectos!

and lol at "and I show you ... my arse!!"

I loved Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and P&Prej and the Woman in White all in my 14ish years.

Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet definitely for early teens and young love
Hamlet for proper adolescence of the bookish/loney/angsty kind.

I did Julius Caesar for O level (that will give you some idea of how much older I am than Mr Rochester who probably also did Olevels) and loved the speeches some of which we were forced to learn, a good thing in my book. Remember March the ides of March remember etc.

My mother adores the sonnets in a really passionate way and has adored them her whole life. I don't love them like that.

I saw Mark Rylance's Tempest at the Globe and loved it. That seems a play for maturity surely?

Lear for the 70s plus!

I like Genealogy too, Zen. I seem to remember thinking really very highly of it at one point, as offering an account of morality which secured its objective truth even while it acknowledged pyschological underpinnings and the reality of moral evolution. But I can't remember anything properly now.

And re Kant, yes, I think Kant is for Neitzsche just a philosophical restatement of slave morality: moral duty as something other than and abnegatory of the will, etc.

And re Neitzsche being a pants writer compared to Bronte, I'm sure he was, and I would have preferred him if he had written 'straight' philosophy instead of all the tricksy aphoristic stuff.

oh god threadworm I only understand 20% of that..... I love this thread, it's pushing me real hard.

10% to be honest, or 7%

Don't say that. It makes me feel like a wanker. It's all pretty straightforward really: I never got to grips which the N dude much.

No threadworm don't feel that! I studied Kant at university! It's just so long ago and my brain is largely shot away through laziness and full time motherhood! Also I had a baby 4 months ago and that's made it really bad so I can't even remember the names of the people I live with at times!

What do people mean by calling Jane Eyre passive aggressive? In what way?

I feel just the same. It is sad really, but it is life.

and would you give him one? I think not

And I would certainly NOT give Nietzsche one! He's got a hedge attached to his face!

I suppose it is that she is powerless and wronged and, unable to avenge herself actively, she is dependant on an alliance with a powerful man to secure a sense of vengeance. She has strength vicariously and then the story revels in taming that strength to her control (R.'s blindmess)

I don't think pass agg is actually the right term for what I had in mind, though, because it is a character attribute, and her weakness is more of a structural thing: in herself she is strong. (This possibly also tells against the whole slave morality thing I suppose)

Oh, ipanema, you should read the whole philosophers'-hair/ladygarden thread in Other Subjects.

She's not looking for vengeance though.

NO, it is more that the story (rather than she herself) achieves a satisfactiory conclusion in her fluorishing despite abusers. That is a kind of vengeance. Admittedly it is located in the story and in the readers' satisfaction rather than in the woman JE.

Have to go to Tesco now.

oh god dh found this thread & is giving me such a hard time

Truly? Hard time how?

(a) Celia2, that is very far from irrelevant and indeed belongs, drily, in an Alan Bennett journal entry.

(b) Ipgirl, why? Is he squishing in the literary department? Not on, if so.

I checked the thread to see if ipanema had confessed to a jealousy-inducing lust for Mr Rochester. Not so, so DH is castigating us as w*nkerish? I will light a match in his attic.

Seriously, I hope you are ok?

Just found this thread... the Threadworm's analysis is lost on me because my introduction to Jane Eyre was via BBC ... the one many moons ago with Sorcha Cusack and the glorious if anachronistic strains of Elgar's Introduction and Allegro for strings swelling in the background... lost my heart to Rochester and had to read the book greedily ahead of the serialisation.

Ahh, those were the days. And that's what makes Bronte so good - it inspires feeling in the reader.

I loved Vilette when I got to it... couldn't understand why it wasn't more popular... till I got to the end. Arggghhh that is just such an incredible let-down whichever way you look at it... but won't say more as would spoil for anyone who hasn't read it (it def. is worth reading!)

Re. passive aggressive I've never really thought about that in relation to JE and have to give it some thought but I just wanted to contribute something on the revenging / avenging lord etc. It's something that's always bothered me, the inequality between Jane and Rochester and the idea of marrying the master as being the ultimate achievement for a female (of course I appreciate that society was male-dominated, but CB herself was living refutation of this).

The impression is that she, Jane, gains financial independence, and therefore autonomy, through work, but actually she just lurches from master to master - even as a child, her original punishment is for striking the young master, then of course the horrors of the school governor whose name escapes me, then Rochester, St John Rivers, Rochester again. Now my reading of philosophy is not exactly current, and I share others' baby brain at the moment, but I think I am right in saying that it was Hegel who put it that a master can only be dominant while a slave is always subservient (yes obviously the roles are like this, but the point being that the people cannot have any other role). I just don't like the idea that Jane is always subservient.

Oh I don't think I put that very well but you can't spend all that time typing a post and then discard it.