symposium proposal
Feb. 24th, 2008 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseGirls, if any of you would be willing to read over my proposal for my final paper on Jane Eyre, I'd love you forever. I have to present it to all faculty and majors on Thursday, and the prop is due tomorrow morning. It's just a short bit - let me know if you see any glaring flaws or logic holes?
“I am no bird, and no net ensnares me”: Monstrousness, Sight, and Liberty in Jane Eyre
In many ways, the Gothic serves as a check to Enlightenment hypocrisies. It points out that while the progressive imagery of the times call for the bringing of torches and candles into the dark places of human cruelty, post-Enlightenment cultures often prefer to shove anything dark or shadowy into a closet and forget about it, to repress that which they should rather reform. The ideals of the Enlightenment paid lip service to gender equality: Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill argued the case for women’s inclusion in the category of rational beings, Olympe De Gouges declared for the independence of women. However, both the philosophers of the Enlightenment and the Victorians who came after them found it difficult to practice as they preached with regard to women, and to other groups such as the poor or those of different ethnic backgrounds. Prejudice, to a certain degree, defeated idealism, and the powerful continued to oppress and dehumanize the weak. Victorian projects of social reform often neglected certain causes of liberty, even though the philosophies of the Enlightenment would have supported them. Often, the Gothic is seen as a straight-out rejection of the Enlightenment. However, as James P. Carson argues, works of Gothic fiction are often rather in dialogue with the Victorian world around them, correcting or problematizing rather than outright condemning. Jane Eyre takes this stance.
While Jane herself values Enlightenment systems—she is a Christian, and when she breaks loose it is for liberty that she yearns—she also brings a feminist critique to her culture that indicts it for forgetting the plight of women, and a humanist critique that speaks towards the value of greater freedom for all human beings. Jane moves from enclosure to enclosure, constantly seeking a way out. Bertha Mason, the most repressed of all women in the novel, serves within the context of Jane’s argument to strengthen the need for gender and social justice. In Gilbert and Gubar’s famous reading, Bertha serves as an outlet for all of Jane’s own subversive and rage-filled impulses, acting as her dark double. But even if we take these two women as fully separate characters, their circumstances inform one another: Jane longs for liberty, while Bertha is literally imprisoned. Throughout the novel, these issues are presented through images of visibility and monstrousness, and the culmination of Jane’s cultural critique occurs symbolically through Rochester’s blinding.
Bertha completely embodies the Gothic terror of the hidden: she’s frightening precisely because she’s unseen. She’s locked up in the third-story attic of an old, seldom-used mansion, and when young governesses are brought there massive conspiracies have to be erected in order to keep them from finding her out. She’s physically, literally concealed, breaking out only under the cover of night. The novel speaks of her in terms of the monstrous and the uncanny, calling her a vampire or a fiend. In a way she’s doubly concealed, first through the physical veil of Thornfield, but also through Rochester’s inability to speak of her as a human being. Bertha is persistently othered by the text, denied full humanity or rationality. She’s not mentally ill so much as mentally sub-human, and as Chih-Ping Chen discusses in his article “’Am I a monster?’: Jane Eyre among the Shadows of freaks,” she’s locked away like a monster at a freakshow, titillating but also utterly excluded.
To a lesser degree, Jane herself is also denied humanity. She is the goblin to Bertha’s vampire—not as damning, but just as inhuman. Throughout the novel, Jane is persistently described in terms of the uncanny, the invisible, what in folklore used to be called the “unseelie.” Gilbert and Gubar quote Sherry Ortner as saying that femininity is constructed as “both under and over (but really simply outside of) the sphere of culture’s hegemony” (Gilbert and Gubar 28). That is, women are figured as either angels or demons, both of which figurations place them outside of plain humanity. Jane is figured as both: she’s a bad animal and a fairy thing and, to Rochester at least, sometimes and angel. But always she’s classed as inhuman, unnatural—and essentially unseen. John G. Peters argues that the figuration of Jane’s inhumanity serves to exclude her from the stream of society, forming the walls of the prison in which she’s kept, and from which she yearns for liberty.
The word “seen” operates at many different levels in the English language. There’s the literal function of the ocular, but also a metaphoric connotation of understanding. To see someone can signify that you truly know them, that you comprehend their real self. The novel plays with both of these levels, substituting them for one another in order to create the novel’s meaning. Jane is often literally unseen: in her first appearance in the novel she’s hiding in the window-seat, as she later hides from Rochester’s upperclass guests in the curtains and the shadows. Like Bertha, Jane’s place is often one that is distinctly out of sight, and like Bertha her hiddenness functions to oppress her. While she hides under her own volition, she constantly strains against the conditions that make her action necessary. The awkwardness of her social position means that she’s neither fish nor fowl, that she’s constantly excluded from all social fears—and that causes her to hide herself.
Jane and Bertha, the monstrous women, stand outside of the virgin/whore dichotomies that encase the other women in the novel. Jane Eyre shakes up the usual constructs of women: the good girls that Jane is compared unfavorably to are more like whores than virgins, in that they’re the ones who know how to pander to the male gaze. Blanche Ingram and Georgiana Reed are ultimate visual objects. Opposed to them as they are, Jane and Bertha are neither virgins nor whores but merely monstrous, absolutely outside of the social sphere of understanding, terrifying and hidden. It’s not merely their womanhood that brings down social punishment, but their rebellion. Both Jane and Bertha refuse to operate within the rules. They constantly desire to break free, and express their passion and the rage. They threaten the system with their inability to be restrained.
The novel’s use of images of light and darkness, the revealed and the shadowy, culminates in Rochester’s blindness. The ultimate irony embodied in his blindness, he who tried to hide the women around him from other sight, fits the punishment for the crime. Rochester concealed Bertha, failed to properly see Jane, and now he cannot see at all. The ultimate outcomes of his desperate attempt to not see the realities around him is total blindness—which he finds he does not want. Once blinded, his only desire is to see. His loss of sight takes from his the ability to impose constructions on others; to a certain degree, he loses his own subjectivity along with his eyesight. Only then, when his unjust power is lost to him, can Jane marry Rochester. He’s disempowered, but more importantly his blindness functions as a metaphoric signifier of his sins of oppression.
Ironically, Rochester sees Jane clearly only when he’s blind. I would argue that more violently disempowering readings of the end of Jane Eyre fail to give weight to the fact that Rochester regains his sight eventually. He and Jane can and do live in marriage as full equals, with his visual powers restored to him. But in being blinded and in finally regaining that which he lost, Rochester regains full unfettered access to the Enlightenment ideals and imagery of full illumination. Bertha dies a monster, too feared and hated to survive, but Jane gets to live in the end a human woman, married to a man of equal power.
I'll possibly make icons on request for anyone who gives me good crit /wheedle
“I am no bird, and no net ensnares me”: Monstrousness, Sight, and Liberty in Jane Eyre
In many ways, the Gothic serves as a check to Enlightenment hypocrisies. It points out that while the progressive imagery of the times call for the bringing of torches and candles into the dark places of human cruelty, post-Enlightenment cultures often prefer to shove anything dark or shadowy into a closet and forget about it, to repress that which they should rather reform. The ideals of the Enlightenment paid lip service to gender equality: Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill argued the case for women’s inclusion in the category of rational beings, Olympe De Gouges declared for the independence of women. However, both the philosophers of the Enlightenment and the Victorians who came after them found it difficult to practice as they preached with regard to women, and to other groups such as the poor or those of different ethnic backgrounds. Prejudice, to a certain degree, defeated idealism, and the powerful continued to oppress and dehumanize the weak. Victorian projects of social reform often neglected certain causes of liberty, even though the philosophies of the Enlightenment would have supported them. Often, the Gothic is seen as a straight-out rejection of the Enlightenment. However, as James P. Carson argues, works of Gothic fiction are often rather in dialogue with the Victorian world around them, correcting or problematizing rather than outright condemning. Jane Eyre takes this stance.
While Jane herself values Enlightenment systems—she is a Christian, and when she breaks loose it is for liberty that she yearns—she also brings a feminist critique to her culture that indicts it for forgetting the plight of women, and a humanist critique that speaks towards the value of greater freedom for all human beings. Jane moves from enclosure to enclosure, constantly seeking a way out. Bertha Mason, the most repressed of all women in the novel, serves within the context of Jane’s argument to strengthen the need for gender and social justice. In Gilbert and Gubar’s famous reading, Bertha serves as an outlet for all of Jane’s own subversive and rage-filled impulses, acting as her dark double. But even if we take these two women as fully separate characters, their circumstances inform one another: Jane longs for liberty, while Bertha is literally imprisoned. Throughout the novel, these issues are presented through images of visibility and monstrousness, and the culmination of Jane’s cultural critique occurs symbolically through Rochester’s blinding.
Bertha completely embodies the Gothic terror of the hidden: she’s frightening precisely because she’s unseen. She’s locked up in the third-story attic of an old, seldom-used mansion, and when young governesses are brought there massive conspiracies have to be erected in order to keep them from finding her out. She’s physically, literally concealed, breaking out only under the cover of night. The novel speaks of her in terms of the monstrous and the uncanny, calling her a vampire or a fiend. In a way she’s doubly concealed, first through the physical veil of Thornfield, but also through Rochester’s inability to speak of her as a human being. Bertha is persistently othered by the text, denied full humanity or rationality. She’s not mentally ill so much as mentally sub-human, and as Chih-Ping Chen discusses in his article “’Am I a monster?’: Jane Eyre among the Shadows of freaks,” she’s locked away like a monster at a freakshow, titillating but also utterly excluded.
To a lesser degree, Jane herself is also denied humanity. She is the goblin to Bertha’s vampire—not as damning, but just as inhuman. Throughout the novel, Jane is persistently described in terms of the uncanny, the invisible, what in folklore used to be called the “unseelie.” Gilbert and Gubar quote Sherry Ortner as saying that femininity is constructed as “both under and over (but really simply outside of) the sphere of culture’s hegemony” (Gilbert and Gubar 28). That is, women are figured as either angels or demons, both of which figurations place them outside of plain humanity. Jane is figured as both: she’s a bad animal and a fairy thing and, to Rochester at least, sometimes and angel. But always she’s classed as inhuman, unnatural—and essentially unseen. John G. Peters argues that the figuration of Jane’s inhumanity serves to exclude her from the stream of society, forming the walls of the prison in which she’s kept, and from which she yearns for liberty.
The word “seen” operates at many different levels in the English language. There’s the literal function of the ocular, but also a metaphoric connotation of understanding. To see someone can signify that you truly know them, that you comprehend their real self. The novel plays with both of these levels, substituting them for one another in order to create the novel’s meaning. Jane is often literally unseen: in her first appearance in the novel she’s hiding in the window-seat, as she later hides from Rochester’s upperclass guests in the curtains and the shadows. Like Bertha, Jane’s place is often one that is distinctly out of sight, and like Bertha her hiddenness functions to oppress her. While she hides under her own volition, she constantly strains against the conditions that make her action necessary. The awkwardness of her social position means that she’s neither fish nor fowl, that she’s constantly excluded from all social fears—and that causes her to hide herself.
Jane and Bertha, the monstrous women, stand outside of the virgin/whore dichotomies that encase the other women in the novel. Jane Eyre shakes up the usual constructs of women: the good girls that Jane is compared unfavorably to are more like whores than virgins, in that they’re the ones who know how to pander to the male gaze. Blanche Ingram and Georgiana Reed are ultimate visual objects. Opposed to them as they are, Jane and Bertha are neither virgins nor whores but merely monstrous, absolutely outside of the social sphere of understanding, terrifying and hidden. It’s not merely their womanhood that brings down social punishment, but their rebellion. Both Jane and Bertha refuse to operate within the rules. They constantly desire to break free, and express their passion and the rage. They threaten the system with their inability to be restrained.
The novel’s use of images of light and darkness, the revealed and the shadowy, culminates in Rochester’s blindness. The ultimate irony embodied in his blindness, he who tried to hide the women around him from other sight, fits the punishment for the crime. Rochester concealed Bertha, failed to properly see Jane, and now he cannot see at all. The ultimate outcomes of his desperate attempt to not see the realities around him is total blindness—which he finds he does not want. Once blinded, his only desire is to see. His loss of sight takes from his the ability to impose constructions on others; to a certain degree, he loses his own subjectivity along with his eyesight. Only then, when his unjust power is lost to him, can Jane marry Rochester. He’s disempowered, but more importantly his blindness functions as a metaphoric signifier of his sins of oppression.
Ironically, Rochester sees Jane clearly only when he’s blind. I would argue that more violently disempowering readings of the end of Jane Eyre fail to give weight to the fact that Rochester regains his sight eventually. He and Jane can and do live in marriage as full equals, with his visual powers restored to him. But in being blinded and in finally regaining that which he lost, Rochester regains full unfettered access to the Enlightenment ideals and imagery of full illumination. Bertha dies a monster, too feared and hated to survive, but Jane gets to live in the end a human woman, married to a man of equal power.
I'll possibly make icons on request for anyone who gives me good crit /wheedle