Biographical and Literary Context for Reading, Understanding, Discussing, and Writing about
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Here are some questions you should consider as you read Jane Eyre and some information to help you consider the questions. Be prepared to discuss some of this on Monday in relation to chapters one through sixteen.
I. The Author’s Biography & the Fiction of the Novel
Question: How are (the biography of) Charlotte Bronte and (the fictional autobiography of) Jane Eyre related?
Contextual Information:
Click here (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/bronte/cbronte/brontbio.html) and here (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/bronte/cbronte/brontetl.html) for skeletal biographies of Charlotte Bronte.
Click here (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/bronte/cbronte/61brnt6.html) for a consideration of biographical elements in Jane Eyre. Other relevant biographical elements are alluded to in the aforementioned brief biographies and (if you have some familiarity with Bronte’s life) can be inferred as you read Jane Eyre.
II. Other literature and ideas of the time period in relation to the novel
Question: How is Jane Eyre related to other works literature written in English during the nineteenth century? In what ways does Bronte’s Jane Eyre share characteristics with Romantic, Gothic, and Victorian literature and in what ways does the novel deviate from other literature of the time?How is Jane Eyre related to social and political concerns in England during the mid-nineteenth century?
Contextual Information:
Here is some background on nineteenth century English-language literature that we can apply to Jane Eyre.
Romantic Era in English-Language Literature
(around 1770 to around 1870)
Historical Context
“…the Romantic period, beginning in 1798, the year of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge and of the composition of Hymns to the Night by Novalis, and ending in 1832, the year which marked the deaths of both Sir Walter Scott and Goethe. However, as an international movement affecting all the arts, Romanticism begins at least in the 1770's and continues into the second half of the nineteenth century, later for American literature than for European, and later in some of the arts, like music and painting, than in literature. This extended chronological spectrum (1770-1870) also permits recognition as Romantic the poetry of Robert Burns and William Blake in England, the early writings of Goethe and Schiller in Germany, and the great period of influence for Rousseau's writings throughout Europe.
The early Romantic period thus coincides with what is often called the "age of revolutions"--including, of course, the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions--an age of upheavals in political, economic, and social traditions, the age which witnessed the initial transformations of the Industrial Revolution. A revolutionary energy was also at the core of Romanticism, which quite consciously set out to transform not only the theory and practice of poetry (and all art), but the very way we perceive the world. Some of its major precepts have survived into the twentieth century and still affect our contemporary period.”
Imagination
“The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. This contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason. The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate "shaping" or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity….Imagination is the primary faculty for creating all art. On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps humans to constitute reality, for (as Wordsworth suggested), we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create it. Uniting both reason and feeling (Coleridge described it with the paradoxical phrase, "intellectual intuition"), imagination is extolled as the ultimate synthesizing faculty…Finally, imagination is inextricably bound up with the other two major concepts, for it is presumed to be the faculty which enables us to "read" nature as a system of symbols.”
Nature
“While particular perspectives with regard to nature varied considerably--nature as a healing power, nature as a source of subject and image, nature as a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization, including artificial language--the prevailing views accorded nature the status of an organically unified whole. It was viewed as "organic," rather than, as in the scientific or rationalist view, as a system of "mechanical" laws, for Romanticism displaced the rationalist view of the universe as a machine (e.g., the deistic image of a clock) with the analogue of an "organic" image, a living tree or mankind itself…Romantic nature poetry is essentially a poetry of meditation.”
Emotion & the Self
“Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with the above three concepts. Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and Romantics generally called for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely logical reason. When this emphasis was applied to the creation of poetry, a very important shift of focus occurred. Wordsworth's definition of all good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" marks a turning point in literary history. By locating the ultimate source of poetry in the individual artist, the tradition, stretching back to the ancients, of valuing art primarily for its ability to imitate human life (that is, for its mimetic qualities) was reversed. In Romantic theory, art was valuable not so much as a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the world within. Among other things, this led to a prominence for first-person lyric poetry never accorded it in any previous period. The "poetic speaker" became less a persona and more the direct person of the poet. Wordsworth's Prelude and Whitman's "Song of Myself" are both paradigms of successful experiments to take the growth of the poet's mind (the development of self) as subject for an "epic" enterprise made up of lyric components. Confessional prose narratives such as Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Chateaubriand's Rene (1801), as well as disguised autobiographical verse narratives such as Byron's Childe Harold (1818), are related phenomena. The interior journey and the development of the self recurred everywhere as subject material for the Romantic artist. The artist-as-hero is a specifically Romantic type.”
The Romantic Hero {"Byronic Hero"}
The Romantics asserted the importance of the individual, the unique, even the eccentric….The hero-artist has already been mentioned; there were also heaven-storming types from Prometheus to Captain Ahab, outcasts from Cain to the Ancient Mariner and even Hester Prynne, and there was Faust, who wins salvation in Goethe's great drama for the very reasons--his characteristic striving for the unattainable beyond the morally permitted and his insatiable thirst for activity--that earlier had been viewed as the components of his tragic sin. (It was in fact Shelley's opinion that Satan, in his noble defiance, was the real hero of Milton's Paradise Lost.)
In style, the Romantics preferred boldness over the preceding age's desire for restraint, maximum suggestiveness over the neoclassical ideal of clarity, free experimentation over the "rules" of composition, genre, and decorum, and they promoted the conception of the artist as "inspired" creator over that of the artist as "maker" or technical master….Although interest in religion and in the powers of faith were prominent during the Romantic period, the Romantics generally rejected absolute systems, whether of philosophy or religion, in favor of the idea that each person (and humankind collectively) must create the system by which to live.
The Commonplace & the Alien
The attitude of many of the Romantics to the everyday, social world around them was complex. It is true that they advanced certain realistic techniques, such as the use of "local color" (through down-to-earth characters, like Wordsworth's rustics, or through everyday language, as in Emily Bronte's northern dialects or Whitman's colloquialisms, or through popular literary forms, such as folk narratives). Yet social realism was usually subordinate to imaginative suggestion, and what was most important were the ideals suggested by the above examples, simplicity perhaps, or innocence. Earlier, the 18th-century cult of the noble savage had promoted similar ideals, but now artists often turned for their symbols to domestic rather than exotic sources--to folk legends and older, "unsophisticated" art forms, such as the ballad, to contemporary country folk who used "the language of commen men," not an artificial "poetic diction," and to children (for the first time presented as individuals, and often idealized as sources of greater wisdom than adults).
Simultaneously, as opposed to everyday subjects, various forms of the exotic in time and/or place also gained favor, for the Romantics were also fascinated with realms of existence that were, by definition, prior to or opposed to the ordered conceptions of "objective" reason….
In the Lyrical Ballads… Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed to divide their labors according to two subject areas, the natural and the supernatural: Wordsworth would try to exhibit the novelty in what was all too familiar, while Coleridge would try to show in the supernatural what was psychologically real, both aiming to dislodge vision from the "lethargy of custom."
The Romantic (Hero) & Society
In another way too, the Romantics were ambivalent toward the "real" social world around them. They were often politically and socially involved, but at the same time they began to distance themselves from the public. As noted earlier, high Romantic artists interpreted things through their own emotions, and these emotions included social and political consciousness--as one would expect in a period of revolution, one that reacted so strongly to oppression and injustice in the world. So artists sometimes took public stands, or wrote works with socially or politically oriented subject matter. Yet at the same time, another trend began to emerge, as they withdrew more and more from what they saw as the confining boundaries of bourgeois life. In their private lives, they often asserted their individuality and differences in ways that were to the middle class a subject of intense interest, but also sometimes of horror….Unfortunately, in many ways, this distance between artist and public remains with us today.
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/rom.html
Adapted from an adaptation of A Guide to the Study of Literature: A Companion Text for Core Studies 6, Landmarks of Literature, ©English Department, Brooklyn College.
Gothicism
1764 to 1820+
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole was published in 1764; the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was first published in 1818 (though a revised edition was published years later) and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer was published in 1820.
But its influence can be seen throughout “Romanticism” in England and the United Stated and into the literature of the present day.
History and Defining Characteristics
The Gothic begins with later-eighteenth-century writers' turn to the past; in the context of the Romantic period, the Gothic is, then, a type of imitation medievalism. When it was launched in the later eighteenth century, The Gothic featured accounts of terrifying experiences in ancient castles — experiences connected with subterranean dungeons, secret passageways, flickering lamps, screams, moans, bloody hands, ghosts, graveyards, and the rest….By extension, it came to designate the macabre, mysterious, fantastic, supernatural, and, again, the terrifying, especially the pleasurably terrifying, in literature more generally.
Closer to the present, one sees the Gothic pervading Victorian literature (for example, in the novels of Dickens and the Brontës), American fiction (from Poe and Hawthorne through Faulkner), and of course the films, television, and videos of our own (in this respect, not-so-modern) culture.
…
Influence on later literature
More pervasive signs of Gothic influence show up in some of the most frequently read Romantic poems — for example, the account of the skeleton ship and the crew's reaction ("A flash of joy . . . And horror follows") in Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (NAEL 8, 2.430)
The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Norton Topics Online
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_2/welcome.htm
More
More information about relevant gender issues, literary connections, political context, social context, religious context, scientific context, biographical context can be found here (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/bronte/cbronte/eyreov.html).
Victorianism
“For much of the last century the term Victorian, which literally describes things and events in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), conveyed connotations of "prudish," "repressed," and "old fashioned." Although such associations have some basis in fact, they do not adequately indicate the nature of this complex, paradoxical age that was a second English Renaissance. Like Elizabethan England, Victorian England saw great expansion of wealth, power, and culture. (What Victorian literary form do you think parallels Elizabethan drama in terms of both popularity and literary achievement?)”
…
“More than anything else what makes Victorians Victorian is their sense of social responsibility, a basic attitude that obviously differentiates them from their immediate predecessors, the Romantics. Tennyson might go to Spain to help the insurgents, as Byron had gone to Greece and Wordsworth to France; but Tennyson also urged the necessity of educating "the poor man before making him our master." Matthew Arnold might say at mid-century that
the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.
but he refused to reprint his poem "Empedocles on Etna," in which the Greek philosopher throws himself into the volcano, because it set a bad example; and he criticized an Anglican bishop who pointed out mathematical inconsistencies in the Bible not on the grounds that he was wrong, but that for a bishop to point these things out to the general public was irresponsible.”
George P. Landow, Professor of English and the History of Art, Brown University
http://www.victorianweb.org/vn/victor4.html
