<p>You know, the gypsy scene in Jane Eyre always seemed out of key to me. No novel is perfect and I would question what that scene provides to the novel.</p>
<p>I read Middlemarch recently enough that seeing the name Rosamond in Jane Eyre was a bit unnerving, because the Middlemarch Rosamond is such a vivid character.</p>
<p>Sewhappy, I agree that the scene you described in Middlemarch is unbelieveably powerful and moving. </p>
<p>Blanche Ingram is not multidimensional at all, I’m afraid!</p>
<p>You know, Garland, the name “Rochester” does not occur one single time in Wide Sargasso Sea! I’m not quite sure how Rhys managed to pull that off.</p>
<p>Last post on Middlemarch but I just have to offer up the observation that the way Tertius sees Rosamond very clearly yet loves her anyway with great tenderness is very moving and believable. Mr. Rochester is no Tertius!</p>
<p>NJTM-- really! I did not realize that. As I said, it’s been many years since I read WWS. I think that Rochester and Bertha became a lit-feminist meme, and I think that it was kind of unfair, though I guess they could be read that way, if someone were to overlook what Bronte meant overall. The book “Madwoman in the Attic” damned poor R forever (another book I have not read since grad student days, so I remember almost nothing about.)</p>
<p>Garland, could you elaborate a bit on the lit-feminist meme, and how it overlooks what Bront</p>
<p>Okay, I guess I’m wrong about Mr. Rochester’s intentions with Blanche. I’m sure I read that passage you quoted ignatius, but it must have been close to bedtime… </p>
<p>
^^ I like that!
I don’t have the passage, but do recall Mr. Rochester telling Jane that he would tell her the story of his past, and the secret upstairs, after they had been married a year.</p>
<p>I have never read Middlemarch, but have it on my kindle now after a friend recently told me it was the best book she ever read. I guess I should get to it!</p>
<p>NJTM-- this goes way back, so my memory is fairly unreliable, but there was a lit/feminsist book that used the meme of The Madwoman in the attic to signify how men, in lit and elsewhere, used and abused women, locking them away when they caused any kind of trouble to man-world. You’d probably be better off googling it than going on my old memories. I was in grad school in the early 80s and this was around, but I wasn’t plugged into feminist crit so I only knew it peripherally. It is, IIRC, similar to how the movie Gaslighting became a meme for how men controlled wives. I think it’s kind of unfair, in reading JE, to lump R with those readings, but I think it was common to do so.</p>
<p>Again, I’m working off old memories; I havaen’t read into this stuff in a long time.</p>
<p>
Perhaps a reference to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper? Worth a read (very short) in this context and it’s available online:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/yellowwallpaper.pdf[/url]”>http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/yellowwallpaper.pdf</a></p>
<p>Yes! Definitely of that vein–I don’t see JE as being similar, but others have. The book I mentioned definitely was referencing JE in its title, but I think YW is more accurately making that point.</p>
<p>Thanks, Garland. I put in a request for “The Madwoman in the Attic” at the library so that I can take a look at it.</p>
<p>Wow, that Yellow Wallpaper story is really something. The character reminds me a little bit of the Agnes Rackham character in “The Crimson Petal and the White.”</p>
<p>SewHappy- “You know, the gypsy scene in Jane Eyre always seemed out of key to me”</p>
<p>I thought that clever, humorous scene was Rochester’s way of revealing Blanche’s shallowness and to bond with Jane.<br>
I never thought Rochester intended to marry mean Blanche. </p>
<p>Middlemarch will be on my reading list. Jane Eyre has become my favorite CC book club selection!</p>
<p>Garland very interesting link- From Charlotte Perkin’s personal notes at the end of the article, about her personal experiences with mental breakdown, and her goal to help others. </p>
<p>This was her drs advice- she didn’t take it, and proceeded to “write, write, write”…
1897</p>
<p>"For many years I suffered from a severe
and continuous nervous breakdown tending to
melancholia – and beyond. During about the
third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith
and some faint stir of hope, to a noted
specialist in nervous diseases, the best known
in the country. This wise man put me to bed
and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good
physique responded so promptly that he
concluded there was nothing much the matter
with me, and sent me home with solemn
advice to “live as domestic a life as far as
possible,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual
life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or
pencil again” as long as I lived. This was in
1887.</p>
<p>SJCM–yes, her comments are great. I recently taught that story to a college freshman required lit class (no English majors in the bunch) and once they got past the oddness and “old-fashioned” language, they really got into it. It was one of the most successful pieces of lit we did.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Actually, “ethnic and un-English” is exactly how I pictured Bertha! But I drew that from the text—or at least how I interpreted the text. We know from Jane’s description that Bertha is dark-haired with “black eyebrows” (p. 199). But more significantly, Rochester tells Jane that Bertha was “in the style of Blanche Ingram: tall, dark, and majestic” (p. 214)–and Blanche is “as dark as a Spaniard” (p. 118) with “an oriental eye” (p. 110).</p>
<p>Interesting that Rochester’s taste in women tends to run to “tall, dark and majestic”—until Jane, that is. When you throw Cecile Varens into the mix, I wonder…Could Charlotte Bronte have been making a statement about English values vs. foreign values? </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I just watched the BBC production, so I know exactly what scene you’re referring to. The “cavorting” (you put it politely :)) made sense to me because Rochester tells Jane that during his four years of marriage to Bertha, while they were still in the West Indies, his wife was “gross, impure, depraved” and “intemperate and unchaste” (btw, Rhys’ refers to this line in WSS). Rochester says, “her vices sprang up fast and rank: they were so strong, only cruelty could check them, and I would not use cruelty” (p. 215). He adds that “no professed harlot ever had a fouler vocabulary than she” (this also comes up in WSS) and that Bertha’s conduct made his father “blush to own her as his daughter-in-law.” </p>
<p>Comparing his own later behavior (with mistresses) to Bertha’s behavior, Rochester says, “I tried dissipation—never debauchery: that I hated, and hate. That was my Indian Messalina’s attribute: rooted disgust at it and her restrained me much, even in pleasure.” </p>
<p>This is all very sexual talk, isn’t it? It’s especially risqu</p>
<p>Mary, I guess I was so influenced by reading WSS first for this discussion that I actually discounted the part of “Jane Eyre” where Rochester told Jane that Bertha had been debauched and depraved during their time in the West Indies. </p>
<p>I don’t remember Antoinette being described in WSS as intemperate and unchaste, except perhaps by someone who seemed to be lying to Rochester about her. I’m rereading WSS right now and will keep an eye out for that. I do remember something about Rochester being shocked by some language she used which seemed very innocuous to me.</p>
<p>Re the ethnicity question, I’ve noticed in books written in the 19th century that brunettes tend to be described as “brown.” I’ve had the impression that pale blondness was the ideal, and much more was made of slight variations in skin tone and eye shape back then than would be today.</p>
<p>The comparisons you quote make Bertha sound no more exotic than Blanche, and I am sure that Blanche (whose name means “white,” of course!) was not that exotic at all.</p>
<p>Regarding Rochester and his ultimate “equality” with Jane, I was disturbed by the characterization that she loved him all the more once he was “disabled”. My late mother used to say she had a penchant for taking in strays - meaning men with flaws that she was of a mind to try to fix (father was a non-functioning alcoholic). As a 21st century woman, I find the sexism in JE particularly hard to accept. I was disturbed by the fact that JE did not find Rochester to be her equal until he was blind and with one hand. While I know that reflects the reality of the time, it’s still hard to swallow.</p>
<p>Sylvan, I know what you mean, but I think there may be another way to look at it. </p>
<p>Only after Rochester had suffered and became more humble was he “allowed” to possess the superior Jane.</p>
<p>He said to her when she found him at Ferndean, “Of late, Jane–only–only of late–I began to see and acknowledge the hand of God in my doom. I began to experience remorse, repentance, the wish for reconcilement to my Maker. I began sometimes to pray: very brief prayers they were, but very sincere.”</p>
<p>Rochester finally got to the point of asking God for death so that he could be reunited with Jane, whom he assumed to be dead. That is when he called out Jane’s name, and she heard him across the miles.</p>
<p>Although Rochester was maimed physically, he had been mended spiritually…</p>
<p>What is the difference between dissapation and debauchery?</p>
<p>I also saw in the novel Jane Eyre a marked preference for English over foriegn values. Her reaction to the far off climes that St. John was headed to–the reaction to the gypsy–.and Bertha’s characterization!
Of course, she was her own person and didnt’ want to marry St John-but still had a fear of the far off regions he was headed to.
Also, the way the tropical islands of Rochester’s early marriage were referred to as a unhealthy climate.</p>