Susan Sniader Lanser – Jane Eyre’s Legacy: The Powers and Dangers of Singularity

 

Reading Journal - Session 6 - 29/11/2016

Susan Sniader Lanser – Jane Eyre’s Legacy: The Powers and Dangers of Singularity
 

·         novel only not a failure because it was promoted as autobiography with a strong narrative voice, impersonal narrator wouldn’t have had the same effect

·         female personal voice took form in the early 19^th cent. by merging two different genres: courtship novel and spiritual autobiography

·         governess novels preceding Jane Eyre: retrospectively told by a woman who has been a wife for some time, with the goal being instruction

o   silence a condition for the position of the governess, as well as an expectation of womanhood

o   restlessness with their own submissive and pious femininity

·         Jane Eyre exposing earlier governess narrators as only fictively female and singular, occupying the ideological positions of men

·         most crucial to the development of Jane’s character is the preservation of her right to speak

·         proceeds as though she must not only have a voice, but be the voice

o   vanquishing the verbal authority of men

o   becomes her own spiritual authority, instead of accepting the assumed connection btw. God’s authority and man’s

·         addressing the reader directly as form of public epistolarity

·         to tell is to exist

·         Jane Eyre as a starting point for a tradition of fictional autobiography by women

·         but in order to be so effective, Jane must silence all other voices (especially Bertha Mason Rochester, Jane’s silenced double), subjugation the Victorian Empire demands

o   racialized other, defeminized, dehumanized, assures Jane’s own femininity

o   compared to Bertha’s uncontrollable voice, Jane’s outspokenness is ultimately safe and unthreatening to social order

·         just as Romantic narrative constructed authority as essentially masculine, Jane Eyre legitimates female authority as essentially white

This essay raises interesting points concerning the narrative voice in Jane Eyre that made the novel so different and successful in the history of English literature. It explains how it becomes the starting point of fictional autobiography of female voices and the importance of Jane’s outspokenness throughout the whole piece. But it also takes into account that for Jane to be as outspoken as she is, everyone else has to be silenced, the men she interacts with as well as other women who threaten her position. While Jane Eyre is an important work of fiction in the context of feminism by making her voice equal to men in the narrative, it is also important to consider the unequal notions by silencing all the other women. In a racial context, this becomes even more severe in the person of Bertha Mason Rochester who is silenced, dehumanized and killed to further Jane’s own narrative. It is no wonder that she received so much attention later on through the “Mad Woman in the Attic” as well as the prequel of the book Wide Sargasso Sea for “The Empire Writes B(l)ack” that deals with Bertha’s story. It is an instance that very well shows that feminism for white women and feminism for black women mean very different things and need to be considered differently to reach some kind of equality.

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Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre

Reading Journal - Session 6 - 29/11/2016

Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre

As I already stated, I haven’t read the text before, but I already knew quite a bit due to different sources, so I was prepared for Mr. Rochester and the mad woman in the attic who sets everything on fire, as well as the proposal from a missionary who wants Jane to go to the West Indies with her.

Therefore, I expected the story to start with Mr. Rochester, not with her early childhood and the systematic abuse she had to suffer because of her inferior standing. I did not expect to like the part of Jane being in school to like the most and find more interesting than anything that followed. While it was also not a completely happy part of her life, it was nice to see people treat Jane kindly, giving her the benefit of the doubt. While servant Bessie was also nice to Jane most of the time, she also helped restrain her and took an active part in her abuse. But Miss Temple was really the first completely positive role model she had. Helen Burns was another character that was really interesting to get to know, with her unyielding trust in any of the adults, admitting to “terrible character traits” that she deserved to be punished for. While it was not easy to read about the treatment of the teachers, it was at least a good contrast to see a character so at peace with her situation and her suffering, even though Jane is much more relatable in her desire for fairness and a right to fight against mistreatment, no matter her social standing.

The class system was also a prevailing theme in the novel. One scene that stuck with me after reading was during a chapter in which Mr. Rochester entertained some higher class guests who talked dismissively about Jane, her occupation, her looks and her being present in general and went on to fondly reminiscent about how much they mistreated their own governesses, how they enjoyed it and how much their employees deserved it, wither their biggest crimes being that they actually obey the parent’s wishes to teach their children. And the parents join in at the party and even praise their children for the thoughtless actions. It really drives home the careless regard from the upper classes to the lower classes who deserve being looked down upon even though they are actually the ones who work hard so the lives of the upper classes are easier. While it becomes very obvious in this novel, especially because it is presented from Jane’s point of view, it is still a common issue that people still naturally take part in without being aware of it.

Generally, it was an interesting and enjoyable book and I wonder how much more of an impact it had when people still perceived it to be an autobiography. Did it change the view of the upper classes on the lower classes? Did it validate their existence because Jane joined their ranks after her inheritance? I haven’t read many other Victorian novels, but I remember Oliver Twist turning out to be upper class as well, after the character suffered throughout the novel from being poor. Was it perceived in a similar manner?

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Petra Rau - Bildungsroman

Reading Journal – Session  6 – 29/11/2016

Petra Rau – Bildungsroman

·         the novel of personal development or of education

·         protagonist’s actual or metaphorical journey from youth to maturity

·         aim of journey reconciliation between the desire for individuation (self-fulfilment) and the demands of socialisation (adaptation to a given social reality)

·         subjectivity, conflict btw. self and society

·         novels concerned with psychological characterization and questions of identity use Bildungsrom-elements

·         originated in Germany in the 18^th cent., heyday in the 19^th cent.

o   due to class conflicts, social change, educational reforms in Europe, Britain

·         Within Anglo-American literary criticism, the elastic definition of “novel of development” is still quite common and regarded as useful, because the notion of development accommodates a range of discursive fields; but it also loses the entire historic and cultural specificity of the original idea.

·         most examples in the 19^th cent. can be found in French and English, while Germans focused on the novella

·         female Bildungsroman emerges at the same time as the male counterpart and survives the 20^th cent. crises much better

·         Edgeworth and Austen are the first to depart from the ideals of sentiment and feeling in favor of a clear sense of reality, emotional and sexual self-control, economic awareness and independence of mind, while retaining a witty and ironic style

o   subgenre: novel of adultery

·         often also criticized as a genre and written against

o   its central aim is to show how characters are determined by their genetic heritage or their environment with little room for ideals of individuation or social integration

o   the subjects of the naturalist novels are mostly working-class outsiders whose lives are a steady descent into greater crime, deprivation and degeneration

·         subgenre: novel of awakening

o   replacing novel of adultery, focusing on women as wives and mothers

o   refuting the entire bourgeois idea of love-and-marriage as claptrap

·         modernist writing rejected linear plot and development of protagonist, but rather focused on memory, consciousness and epiphanies

·         resurrected in the 1950s/60s in the wake of feminist movements and left political agendas

·         increasingly popular with those ideologies and theories that claimed subject status for hitherto invisible or marginalized groups: women, socialists and the working-class, gay men and lesbians, and non-whites

·         postmodernism:  Often the label Bildungsroman (or anti-Bildungsroman) is employed on the basis of intertextual references. Conventional developmental trajectories are now also used to trace the development of psycho-pathological personalities, dysfunctional characters or societies

This text traces the emergence of the genre Bildungsroman in the 18^th century and the historical developments it underwent onwards, counter-movements as well as other genres it brought into existence, especially focusing on the female point of view there with the novel of adultery and awakening respectively. It discusses the crisis it suffered in the 20^th century as well as the reasons for its newfound popularity in the middle of the century due to marginalized groups reclaiming it for their own purposes. The is a comprehensive and easy read, providing good background information for the genre of the Bildungsroman.


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Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre - before reading

Reading Journal - Session 5 - 22/11/2016

Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre

“Until Jane Eyre was kidnapped I don’t think anyone—least of all Hades—realised quite how popular she was. It was as if a living national embodiment of England’s literary heritage had been torn from the masses. It was the best piece of news we could have hoped for.” - Bowden Cable. Journal of a LiteraTec

Jasper Fforde. The Eyre Affair

While I have read literature in connection to Jane Eyre – the postcolonial prequel Wide Sargasso Sea dealing with the backstory of Rochester’s insane wife Bertha (of which I sadly remember very little) and the postcolonial novel The Eyre Affair about which I wrote my last term paper (which I can recommend and in which Jane Eyre gets kidnapped, thus forcing the heroine of the book, Thursday Next, to rescue her, whereby she accidentally alters the story to reflect the actual story of Jane Eyre) – I have not read the book itself. Through writing my term paper about The Eyre Affair (as well as the following three novels in the series) I feel like I know the gist and importance of the story already, but I am curious about the actual book and how the Victorian novel will actually be, after already being influences by feminist, postcolonial and postmodern influences, that criticized some aspects of the books, but also treated the source material with consideration and worthy of basing their own stories on. It is certainly well known and considered a classic and I am curious how it is going to fit into the “Life Narratives” seminar, as I would not have thought of it belonging to this category (but I also don’t know the details of the story or the way in which it is written).

      “It is well known, even 150 years after publication. For The Eyre Affair to have any resonance the featured novel had to be familiar and respected. If potential readers of my book haven't read Jane Eyre they might have seen the film, and if they haven't done either, they might still know that Jane is a heroine of Victorian romantic fiction. I don't know of many other books that can do this.“

     Jasper Fforde

Helga Schwalm - Autobiography

Reading Journal - Session 5 - 22/11/2016

Helga Schwalm – Autobiography (The handbook of narratology)

·         as a literary genre signifies a retrospective narrative that undertakes to tell the author’s own life, or a substantial part of it

·         seeking (at least in its classic version) to reconstruct his/her personal development within a given historical, social and cultural framework

·         claims to be factual and non-fictional, but is inevitably constructive, imaginative

·         self-fashioning

·         governing structural and semantic principle: comprehensive and continuous retrospection (based on memory)

·         struggle for truthfulness and creativity, between oblivion, concealment, hypocrisy, self-deception and self-conscious fictionalizing

·         Bildungsgeschichte, personality formation

·         focus on psychological introspection, sense of historicity, link btw author’s life and literary work

·         generally first-person narration with some exceptions (3^rd person, verse)

o   narrating I: experiencing subject

o   narrated I: narrating subject

o   present both as the end and condition of its narration

o   as subject continues to live, no “real” end  until “quasi-death”

o   real, historical I not always in tune with the narrating and experiencing I’s, but considered the real author and external subject of reference

·         ideological I

o   covert operation: concept of a personhood culturally available to the narrator when he tells the story

o   reflects the social and intertextual embedding of the autobiographical narrative

o   only through engagement with socially/culturally prefigured models can individuals represent themselves as subjects

·         sociological angle: form of social action making sense of a personal experience in terms of general relevance

·         historically: emergence of autobiography as a genre at the same time as the modern subject (~1800)

·         temporalization of experience

·         represent a unique individual

·         fragmentation: modern writers subvert chronology and split the subject, foregrounding visual and scenic/topographical components, highlighting role of language, conflating auto- and heterobiography, transforming lives into fiction

·         linked to critical history of subjectivity

·         past endowed with meaning in the light of the present

·         constructs an individual life as a coherent, meaningful whole

·         memoir: representing the individual as social type, confirming autographer’s place in the world

·         autobiography: focus on identity and memory

·         inextricable connection btw narrative and identity with autobiography as the prme generic site of enactment

·         autobiographical pact:

o   autobiography as an institutionalized communicative act where author and reader enter into a particular ‘contract

o   The author’s proper name refers to a singular autobiographical identity, identifying author, narrator and protagonist as one, and thus ensures the reading as autobiography.

·         new considerations: gender, postcolonial, eco-autobiography (relationship btw natural setting and the self, topographical figurations)

·         shifted from literary genre to a broad range of cultural practices that draw on and incorporate a multitude of textual modes and genres

This text tries to define autobiography in a changing historical context, mapping the development, different theories concerning it and the way it has changed in newer times, not only taking identity and memory into account, but also different influences and purposes that shape this identity, like consciousness of topography, gender, etc.). It is definitely easier to follow than Lejeune’s text which goes very much into detail concerning the different positions a narrator can occupy and how the reader has to be conscious of that. I certainly never thought of the many distinctions and developments concerning autobiographies that one can be aware of, but this text is a useful reference for the purpose and different trends in this genre, as well as a good reference for further reading material.