The Madwoman and Her Languages: Why I Don't Do Feminist Literary Theory

"The Madwoman and Her Languages: Why I Don't Do Feminist Literary Theory"

 

thesis:Woman's death is not good things.

 

 

 

 

Background: Nine cannot ignore the work Bronte has put into definding Bertha out of humanity.

The creature(Bertha) is wholly hateful, and  no wonder :she has stolen Jane's man. Jane's rage against Rochester , one might say, is deflected to what a feminist might well see as innocent victim.

The woman ,rather than man, becomes her adversary;that woman's death is necessary as Rochester's blinding for Jane's liberation.

 

Nina Baym.The Madwomwn and Her Languages:Why I Don't Do Feminist Literary Theory. University of Tulsa.(1984):45-59

 

"Jane Eyre, from Governess to Girl Bride"

thesis

"the novel continues to prove unsettling in its use of gender identities and its associations of gender with class and age"

Godfrey Esther, "Jane Eyre, from Governess to Girl Bride", SEL Studies in English Literature,45:4( 1500-1900): 853-871

necessary background

"Since its publication in 1847, readers of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre have debated the subversive implications of this text. The plot conventions of Jane’s rise to fortune and the marriage union that concludes the novel suggest conservative affirmations of class and gender identities that seemingly contradict the novel’s more disruptive aspects."

supporting argument

Victorians("Jane Eyre" was written in 1947 and it is related Victorian period.) were expected to marry within same class, but in"Jane Eyre" we can see less strong class conflicts. Jane is not rich and Mr. Rochester is wealth, but they marry.

What Did Jane Eyre Do?

 

thesis

The topic of this academic paper is " Does Jane Eyre achieve a class consciousness??".

The theme is "literary criticism has tended to treat ideology in economistic terms as a fixed, normative field of discourse that represses social reality, a conception that underlies the now commonplace characterization of Victorian texts as both subverting and supporting ideology."

 

back ground
*What Jane Eyre does is that it assumes that the novel embodies a fixed ideology represented in the subjectivity of its heroine and inexorably produced in the reading subject, a view that obscures the involvement of the text in producing—not just reproducing—ideologies and identities as well as the variety of uses to which reading subjects can put this textual material.

 

*Because ideology is always being produced in time, we should see the novel as producing, not merely reproducing, ideology.

 

About a title

the title of this academic paper gives the book title and the topic.

 

 

Work Cited

Vanden Bossche, Chris R. "What Did Jane Eyre Do? Ideology, Agency, Class and the Novel" , The Ohio State University: (2005) 46-66

 

 

Unaccommodated Woman and the Poetics of Property in Jane Eyre

Thesis:
This paper examines the equivocal and often erratic nature of Bronte's radicalism, which makes her
response to the manorial ethos resistant to any consistent formulation. The religious rhetoric, especially, is the source of a covert endorsement of patriarchalism that subverts more liberal impulses
evident elsewhere. What emerges ultimately is not a dialectic between different orders of value, but a radical text which is qualified in significant ways by a conservative subtext.



Background:
In our own time, it has been sacralized as a handbook for feminists and revolutionaries, articulating
all the rage of the unaccommodated and dispossessed. But contemporary adulation of Bronte the radical feminist often overlooks the tenacity of her Tory convictions, which inform even Jane Eyre, arguably one of the most unorthodox of her novels. It is true that Bronte endeavors to inaugurate in Jane Eyre a new and different discourse about the structures of power in nineteenthcentury England.



Work Cited:
Parama Roy,"Unaccommodated Woman and the Poetics of Property in Jane Eyre" , Studies in English Literature, 29:4 (1989): 713-727

Girl Talk: "Jane Eyre" and the Romance of Women's Narration

Thesis;

The novel is read as a "revolutionary manifesto of the subject". Jane's value as a feminist heroine is "figured in the ability to tell (if not direct) her own story".

Kaplan, Carla. "Girl Talk: "Jane Eyre" and the Romance of Women's Narration", NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 30:1 (1996): 5-31

 

JANE'S CROWN OF THORNS: FEMINISM AND CHRISTIANITY IN "JANE EYRE"

Thesis:

Given, then, the vexed discourses of gender, domesticity, and faith surrounding Jane Eyre’s production, an easy reading of the book's ending is neither possible nor desirable.

 

Background:

These ambiguities reflect the tensions real Victorian women of faith experienced in trying to meet multiple, often conflicting demands in their lives. Such challenges were complicated further by the fact that nineteenth-century Evangelical Christianity-attentive to the realities of sin, sorrow, sacrifice, and loss-was no easy creed for women or men. Despite the attractive "healthy-mindedness" of so much of Jane's theology in her narrative, the book's tormented ending reminds readers that Bronte, freethinker as she was, nonetheless subscribed to Christianity that cherished Christ's "Crown of Thorns" as its standard.

 

 

 

Lamonaca, Maria. JANE'S CROWN OF THORNS: FEMINISM AND CHRISTIANITY IN "JANE EYRE". University of North Texas. 34:3 (Fall, 2002): 245-263

"Haunted by Passion: Supernaturalism and Feminism in Jane Eyre and Villete"

Theses: “The treatment of supernaturalism in Jane Eyre and Villette reveals a great deal about expectations for women in Bronte's time.”

Necessary Background: “This repression manifests itself in the form of mysterious figures that haunt both novels. The aggressive and animalistic Bertha Mason represents Jane's buried passion.”
“Jane and Lucy conceal their passion in order to get by in male dominated society. In Bronte's time, outspoken and aggressive women were generally considered to be unacceptable and unladylike. The ideal woman was calm, quiet, and submissive. Powerful women were often viewed as threatening. The supernatural figures associated with the female protagonists in both novels are robbed of their mysterious allure. Like Jane and Lucy, they are stripped of their power.”

Works Cited: Lorber, Laurel P., "Haunted by Passion: Supernaturalism and Feminism in Jane Eyre and Villete", Dissertations and Theses. (2013): 4-39

・"Rich Woman, Poor Woman: Toward an Anthropology of the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot"(2009)  by Elsie B. Michie,

---

 associate professor of English at Lousiana State University.

Thesis: "the implicatations of one of the most common marmar -riage plots in the nineteenth-century English novel "

・"THE (SLAVE) NARRATIVE OF JANE EYRE" (2008)  by Julia Sun-Joo Lee

 Thesis: metaphorical use of raceand empire in Jane Eyre

The Profession of the Author: Abstraction, Advertising, and Jane Eyre

Thesis

Bronte's career as Currer Bell, like Jane Eyre's as Jane Elliott, transformed pseudonymity into a form of veiled self-advertisement, into a strategy for disowning the difficulties of female embodiment by exploiting the powers of abstraction.


Background

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, and Currer Bell all publish under cover of a veiled visibility that exploits print's erasure of the author's body to authorize women's professional participation in a market.

Sharon, Marcus. " The Profession of the Author: Abstraction, Advertising, and Jane Eyre", PMLA, 110:2(Mar., 1995): 206-219

The world of man-woman relationship in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre

Thesis

The only option for women in the Victorian society is marriage, but marriage is not freedom for them.

  

Back ground

From the times immemorial, men and women have been living together. During primitive world, both man and woman were gatherers. Woman somehow shared equal footing with men during those days. The society changed with the time, and men began to suppress their companions as men got involved in more outdoor gears. The sons and brothers turned to be oppressor and repressor of sisters and their own mothers. Thus, the woman’s world was narrowed to the four walls. Their freedom and their world is owned by what is referred by Mary Wollstonecraft as a ‘supreme being’ (2000, p. 171). 

Hazari, Shyam. Lethro L. Phuntsho, Sherub. "The world of man-woman relationship in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre", School of Arts and Humanities ,Sherubtse College,Kanglung, Bhutan B.A. Programme, 12:2 (2012)

The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre

 

The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism

and the Structure of Jame Eyre

 

 

Thesis  

Part of a large system of what I term feminist orientalist discourse that permeates Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte's sul- tan/slave simile displaces the source of patriarchal oppression onto an "Oriental," "Mahometan" society, enabling British readers to contem- plate local problems without questioning their own self-definition as Westerners and Christians.

          Background

Yet by calling Rochester a "sultan" and herself a "slave," Jane provides herself and the reader with a culturally acceptable simile by which to understand and combat the patriarchal "despotism" central to Rochester's character.

 Zonana, Joyce. The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre. The University of Chicago Press. 18:3 (Spring, 1993): 592-617.



Shameful Signification: Narrative and Feeling in Jane Eyre

<thesis>

I want to explore the implications of this formative call “for shame” as it weaves into the presentation of Jane Eyre’s interiority and personal relations, and into the novel’s structure and narrative techniques, in a form not easily accounted for as either pronounced repression or covert Foucauldian discipline.(Bennett300)

 

＜background＞

Yet what are we to make of that emotion which inspires　the first diegetic mention of Jane Eyre’s surname and punctuates her physical　imprisonment in the metaphorically rich red-room as a young girl—“For　shame! for shame! . . . What shocking conduct, Miss Eyre” (9)? This cry “for　shame” suggests that shame constitutes both an introduction of “Miss Eyre” to the　reader and an interpellation of Jane into the contours of gendered interiority and　social relations.

 

 

Bennett, Ashly. " Shameful Signification: Narrative and Feeling in Jane Eyre", The Ohio State University Press, 18:3 (Oct, 2010):300-323

lntertextual Identities: The Crisis of Voice and Location in Jane Eyre andWide Sargasso Sea

Thesis: There is only one heroine in a story, and we typically become quite possessive of her. We champion　her causes, mourn her losses, and cheer triumphantly her successesesis: The ideal woman was calm, quiet, and submissive. (Lorber4) There’s only room for one heroine in a story. The heroine consumes the narrative and its focus; moreover, this is pleasing to the reader, for it instills in one the sense of knowing intimately the thoughts, emotions and true nature of the focal female.

Background: From the first pages of the novel, Jane elicits sympathy. She is poor, plain and parentless. Left in the ‘care,’ if one can call it that, of her Aunt, Mrs. Reed, Jane is an outsider to her own family. At this stage, the reader wants nothing more than to see Jane obtain a sense of family, of belonging, of love.

 

 

 

 

Butler, Kristy. "lntertextual Identities: The Crisis of Voice and Location in Jane Eyre andWide Sargasso Sea",  Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, (2013)1-22

Reflection on Feminism in Jane Eyre

*Thesis
 We can analyze what Jane has done as a feminist through four aspects, her pursuit of esteem, independence, equality and true love. In the guidance of feminist beliefs, through her persistent and brave rebel and pursuit, Jane Eyre finally gets esteem, independence, equality and true love she aspires after for a long time.(Gao 926)


 *Back grounds
 The whole time spending in Thornfield is the most splendid part of the whole book. Meeting with Rochester and fell in love with him reflected the feminism in Jane and her new thoughts. Jane loves Rochester with all her heart and Rochester’s status and wealth make him so high above for Jane to approach, yet she never feels herself inferior to Rochester though she is a humble family teacher. She believes they are fair and should respect each other. In fact, it is her uprightness, loftiness and sincerity that touch Rochester. Rochester feels from the bottom of his heart that Jane is the spiritual partner he always longs for. When the heroine is moved by his whole-heartedness, they fall in love deeply. Although she had a deep affection for Rochester, she could not stand any compromise in her marriage. She is the whole one and cannot be laughed or argued by others in this aspect. She wouldn’t give up her independence and self-respect. So she chose to leave her beloved one and wanted to make a new life. As the end is known to all, Jane returns to Ferndean Manor and marries Rochester. Mr. Rochester then loses sight of both eyes and disabled. But in this circumstance, Jane Eyre comes back to Mr. Rochester caring for nothing but this man. She says: “I find you lonely, I will be your companion, to read to you, to walk with you, to sit with you, to wait on you, to be eyes and hands to you. Cease to look so melancholy, my dear master; you shall not be left desolate, so long as I live” (Bronte, 2002, p.310).



 *Reference
Gao Haiyan. "Reflection on Feminism in Jane Eyre" ,Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 3: 6 (2013),926-931

Reflection on Feminism in Jane Eyre

 

 

Thesis sentence: "This paper unfolds here from a different perspective concerning women’s self-realization, esteem and choices to society or marriage. It helps readers to realize the importance of independence and to be enough to fight for their basic rights as human beings. Furthermore, the paper makes it clear that women are equal as men no matter in personality, economy, or social status."

 

Background: "It is impossible for a low-status woman to have a decent life or a good marriage. The social structure determines the social position of a person. Women are discriminated in the patriarch society. Also, in this period, the female writers take the pens to speak for the oppressed women and Jane Eyre comes to be the most influential novel."

 

This background explanation is necessary. That's because it is easy to understand the reason why this author wrote about feminism and why this author thought relationship between Jane Eyre and feminism.

 

Supporting:

①"Jane’s rebellion against Mrs. Reed and John represent her feminist consciousness in getting esteem from other people as a decent and respectable person."

 

This supporting sentence is necessary, because Jane wanted to be treated as other children, so we can say Jane pursue equality. However, I did not think when Jane rebel against Mrs. Reed and John, she is conscious of her feminism. That's because the reason why Mrs. Reed and John bullied Jane was not Jane was a woman but she is not Mrs. Reed's child.

 

②"Jane Eyre does not think that she is making a sacrifice. She says: “I love the people I love is that to make a sacrifice? If so, then certainly I delight in sacrifice” (Bronte, 2002, p.451). In most people’s eyes, nobody would like to marry a man who loses his sight and most of his wealth. But as to Jane, she is different. In her mind, pure love is the meeting of hearts and minds of two people.

Jane Eyre is unique in Victorian period. As a feminist woman, she represents the insurgent women eager for esteem. Without esteem from other people, women like Jane cannot get the real emancipation."

 

This supporting part is important. That's because this part show Jane was unique in Victorian period because of feminism.

 

 

Work Cited

Gao Haiyan, Reflection on Feminism in Jane Eyre (Finland: ACADEMY PUBLISHER, 2013)