<p>I agree NJTM.</p>
<p>The descriptiveness and the unusual character of both the bird pictures in chapter 1 and Jane’s later paintings beg the question “Is there a deeper meaning?”. I get the uneasy feeling that I’m supposed to delve into the “why” - just like in dream sequences. I guess I fall somewhere between NJTM/BUandBC82 and SJCM: in other words, call me dense as to the arcane, deep meaning (if there be one); but I also acknowledge a why-the-heck-else-did-Bronte-go into-such-detail-and-make-the-pictures-shout-“figure-me-out” feeling.</p>
<p>Jane’s dreams foreshadow trouble as does lightning striking the tree asunder. Jane and Rochester impossibly hear the other one’s voice across miles. So … maybe Jane’s subconscious mind can make that jump into the future. Still, leave me out of the analyzing. I remain purposely obtuse, leaving others to ponder the why.</p>
<p>It could be as simple as maybe, just maybe, Jane liked the esoteric quality of the paintings in the bird book and they influenced her later art work.</p>
<p>(I feel that English lit teacher … you know the one … hopefully you aren’t the one … pulling out her red pen.)</p>
<p>The dreams and the tree riven by lightning make sense to me, but not those paintings. </p>
<p>I guess they could have been influenced by something like the bird book. The first two anyway…the third one, of the colossal head with the despairing eye, resting against an iceberg, really makes you wonder.</p>
<p>The paintings seem to suggest a certain darkness inside Jane which had not been illustrated in other ways. I think this really piqued the interest of Rochester, who had plenty of darkness within him for other reasons.</p>
<p>It is much harder to do a good painting or drawing from one’s imagination than to use something as a model. One thing I thought when I was reading about the paintings was, “Gee, she was incredibly skilled even if she was rendering an image seen in a dream.”</p>
<p>Jane is really a bit of a dichotomy; she seems so practical, yet she shares so many mystical and spiritual images with us. Bronte does a good job of confounding me…even her “dear reader” stuff, as we mentioned earlier, seems to wink at us at times.</p>
<p>No Eng lit red pen from me–I was a science major who avoided English classes at all costs! If I could go back and do it over again…</p>
<p>BTW, I will be internet-free (well, as much as possible) for the next week (family vacation time). Looking forward to reading all the posts here when I get back.</p>
<p>another side note: my S is the literate one in the family and helps to push me along, just like you guys do. He will be taking a course in Literature of the Absurd and has asked me to read The Stranger by Albert Camus, which I plan to do while away.</p>
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<p>And I agree and agree.</p>
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I’ve actually had the experience of being in a sleep-like-but-not-sleep state and “hearing” someone yell something at me, although, presumably, they were not actually doing so and it was a sort of dream (there’s a name for it, I just don’t recall right now). </p>
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psychmom - let us know what else is on his reading list for the course! :)</p>
<p>Have a great vacation trip, psychmom! Tell us how you like “The Stranger.” I admit I’ve never read any Camus myself. (I read French <em>almost</em> well enough to read French literature in the original language, and I’ve kept thinking I should make the effort…then I end up never reading the book in question at all!)</p>
<p>I did recently read “Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson. It was so beautifully written…wow, just incredible.</p>
<p>The story is quite poignant and also involves a little bit of mild suspense. I don’t really think the book would be too great for a book club discussion because there is a certain spare simplicity to the story, but I recommend it very highly to those who relish ravishingly lovely prose.</p>
<p>I always thought the brooding nature of Jane’s paintings served as an outlet of her memories of being abused in her aunt’s home (the terrifying night locked in the room with the head injury, especially) and then the horrors at Lowood. I think her paintings signal to Mr. Rochester that she has lived a life that has been harrowing at times, that she is not superficial.</p>
<p>In a way this reading of JE has me thinking that this novel might be highly autobiographical on a psychological development level. I don’t know much about Charlotte Bronte except I believe she never married, lived in remote areas, was raised in a heavily religious atmosphere, suffered early and repetitive losses of loved ones to illness – a tough and probably isolated interior life for her.</p>
<p>The novel Jane Eyre strikes me on this reading as a sort of journey by the author trying to come to terms with tragedy, cruelty, harshness, Christian doctrine, sexuality, love. It does not feel on this reading like a very “crafted” book wherein the writer knows where she is headed and what she is attempting to tell us. It feels like someone trying to make sense of their world and themselves.</p>
<p>I guess it feels more flawed this reading (for me) but also more magnificent.</p>
<p>(psychmom - my son introduced me to George Elliot. He did economics and premed in undergrad, I think maybe one or two lit classes along the way. One of his other fav writers is Vriginia Woolf, especially Mrs. Dalloway. I have really cherished being able to have discussion with my adult son on wonderful literary topics.)</p>
<p>Sewhappy, how cool to have a son who digs Virginia Woolf!</p>
<p>I agree with you about “Jane Eyre” seeming flawed but magnificent this time around.</p>
<p>Yeah, he’s cool, if he could just figure out how to get through the day without getting his iced coffee all over his shirt.</p>
<p>I ran across this:</p>
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<p>from [Image</a> and Text in Jane Eyre’s avian vignettes and Bewick’s History of British Birds. - Victorian Newsletter | HighBeam Research](<a href=“http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-87352735.html]Image”>http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-87352735.html)</p>
<p>sewhappy: Charlotte Bronte did marry: “In June 1854, Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate and possibly the model for Jane Eyre’s St. John Rivers.” (Wikipedia) She died while pregnant with her first child. I visited the Haworth parsonage where the Bronte sisters lived and the church and cemetery. It was a gray dreary day and easy to imagine life on the moors.</p>
<p>[Bronte</a> Parsonage Museum - Haworth](<a href=“http://www.haworth-village.org.uk/brontes/parsonage/parsonage.asp]Bronte”>Bronte Parsonage - Haworth - Haworth Village)</p>
<p>Another quote from the commentary Ignatius found:</p>
<p>“Typical subjects of Bewick’s vignettes include scenes of hunting and fishing or other activities of rural village life, of socially marginal persons such as beggars and itinerant peddlers, and of shipwrecks, graveyards, and ruined castles. Often these little illustrations seem to have no obvious connection to the textual material presented about a given bird. They serve to fill in space between bird entries in the history, and to intrigue the reader, for sometimes the tailpieces present a moral of sorts. In one example in a section describing the Gull in Volume II, Bewick inserts into the typescript a vignette of very small gallows with corpses hanging from them.”</p>
<p>This explains why a bird book would contain the image of “the fiend pinning down the thief’s pack behind him” that terrified young Jane.</p>
<p>Jane Eyre could also possibly have been exposed to the scary type of admonitory children’s literature that used to exist:</p>
<p>"While today’s scary stories are meant to entertain, horror themes were used in the Victorian Age and earlier to teach children etiquette, restraint and responsibility by showing terrifying examples of the price of misbehaving.</p>
<p>'One of the oldest cautionary books in our collection is from 1789, titled Vice in its Proper Shape, or the Melancholy Transformation of Several Naughty Masters and Misses into Contemptible Animals,’ Ingram said. ‘In this book, the children behave like animals and then slowly turn into animals representing these characteristics, almost like the werewolf or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.’ ”
[University</a> of Florida News – Today’s Scary Stories Are Tame Compared To Victorian Age Tales](<a href=“http://news.ufl.edu/1996/10/25/scary/]University”>http://news.ufl.edu/1996/10/25/scary/)</p>
<p>When my family lived in Germany when I was a small child (Dad in US Army), we had a copy of the famous children’s book, written in 1845, called “Der Struwwelpater” that scared the heck out of me! I’m not sure what ever happened to it. Probably got thrown away.
[Struwwelpeter</a>, Frightening Children Since 1845 – Resident on Earth](<a href=“http://www.residentonearth.com/2011/02/struwwelpeter-frightening-children-since-1845/]Struwwelpeter”>http://www.residentonearth.com/2011/02/struwwelpeter-frightening-children-since-1845/)</p>
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Charlotte married a minister, Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls, in 1854. She died the following year while she was pregnant, either from complications or from TB.</p>
<p>Hi, I’m back in town and enjoying all the wonderful posts. After my daughter’s orientation, we went to visit a friend in a small town where there was neither internet access nor cell phone service…and nobody living there seemed to miss it. Shocking. :)</p>
<p>No holding back required on Wide Sargasso Sea at this point. Feel free to post whatever is on your mind, spoilers and all!</p>
<p>Welcome back, Mary! I just finished reading WSS for the second time, and I was struck even more by how the actions and reactions of both Antoinette and Rochester were responsible for the disastrous trajectory of their relationship.</p>
<p>On my second reading, the regretful feelings that Rochester experienced when they were leaving Granbois, and his unsuccessful attempt to ask Antoinette for forgiveness at that time, actually made me cry.</p>
<p>Referring back to posts #115 and #116, I noticed that there was only one time Antoinette used bad language. It was at a certain highly emotional moment, and she was drunk. Christophene explained the cursing to Rochester by saying that Antoinette had been exposed to those words but hardly understood what they meant. I tended to believe her.</p>
<p>In WSS, Rochester never came right out and stated that Antoinette misbehaved with other men. When he was looking ahead to leaving Granbois, he thought to himself that he feared that she might misbehave in certain ways. The verb tenses in that passage are tricky. I read his statements as expressing his apprehension about the future.</p>
<p>Antoinette did see Sandi during the time they lived in Jamaica and Rochester was ignoring her, before Rochester discovered it and stopped it. Her wanting to be with him seemed understandable to me.</p>
<p>I wish I could read a version of the story where by some miracle Antoinette and Sandi ended up together.</p>
<p>I’m really enjoying all the great input and have lots of responses to earlier comments. Please bear with me as I try to keep them short—I’ll divide my thoughts into a couple of posts:</p>
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In a way, Bront</p>
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<p>How’s this for a different perspective?: A friend once told me that when she read Jane Eyre in college, the professor theorized that Jane was profoundly afraid of sex and that the virility of the “vigorous” Rochester both attracted and terrified her. That’s why (said the professor) Jane put off Rochester so often when he tried to embrace her and why she ultimately ran away. In the end, Rochester’s amputated hand is a symbolic castration, showing that he is no longer a sexual threat and that she is not afraid of the marriage bed.</p>
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<p>What did you find most appealing about the early section of the book? For me, part of it was Helen Burns and her touching and tragic story. But I also liked watching the feisty Jane, who would throws books at her nasty cousin’s head and give furious speeches to her aunt and pound the door and scream at the top of her lungs when subjected to the terrors of the red room. Compare her noisy response to that trauma to her very still response to the trauma later in her life when she discovers Bertha Mason:</p>
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<p>What happened to the fire of the young Jane and her quick temper? Is it simply a matter of maturing or did her years at Lowood trample her spirit more than we might initially have suspected?</p>
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<p>I disagree. Whether it’s Mr. Reed’s spirit in the red room or Mr. Rochester’s voice across the moors, I think that Charlotte Bronte had an attraction to the supernatural, and that there are other times where Jane’s unconscious mind predicts her future with Mr. Rochester. For example, as early as page 6, Jane looks in the mirror and sees herself as “half fairy, half imp, Bessie’s evening stories represented as coming out of lone, ferny dells in moors, and appearing before the eyes of belated travellers.” </p>
<p>And that is exactly how she first appears to Mr. Rochester!</p>
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<p>That darkness is hinted at, though, early in the book. She describes herself on p. 7 as having a “habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt” and “forlorn depression.” She seems serene and at peace later, but maybe there is still more “forlorn depression” within her than she is willing to admit (and thus it comes through in her paintings).</p>
<p>Okay Mary, I see what you mean now.</p>
<p>The bit about the fishermen and sailors did seem a bit far-fetched, but Christophine also said that Antoinette heard the words uttered by her own father. I think what Christophine meant was that that language was not part of Antoinette’s normal vocabulary.</p>
<p>I was kind of surprised by my reactions to the books. I simply adored Jane and really disliked Rochester in “Jane Eyre.”</p>
<p>In WSS, I thought both Rochester and Antoinette were pitiable, but I felt far sorrier for her than for him.</p>
<p>In a way, my favorite part of “Jane Eyre” was the Lowood part because of how Jane grew in self confidence there. </p>
<p>Lowood was a pretty dark place, and awful things happened there, but I think that by the end of the Lowood period Jane had left a lot of the darkness connected with the Reeds behind her.</p>
<p>One really interesting thing about Lowood (that none of the movies had time to touch on) was how the girls who were fortunate enough to remain healthy during the awful typhus epidemic experienced unusual freedom during that period, and benefited from improvements at the school when it was over.</p>
<p>My second favorite part was when Jane became a part of the Rivers household and forged such a close bond with Diana and Mary.</p>