Front’s Jane Rye is one of development and personal growth. When published, Charlotte Bronze took a male pseudonym in order to avoid prejudices based on gender (Guy). While speculation on the identity of the author was a factor in the popularity Of Jane Rye, the Story Of Cane’s character kept the audience reading. As a novel in the bloodcurdling genre, the narrative carries readers through the development of Jane and her “healthy self-interest and rebellious questioning of rules and conventions” (Watkins). Readers are introduced to Jane when she is a young girl living in the manor known as Gathered.
As an orphan, Jane is isolated and unloved by the Reeds, the family of the house. The lack of compassion for Jane is evident when she is locked in the “Red Room,” a haunting chamber where the last of Cane’s known blood relatives died. Mrs… Reed’s harsh punishment of Jane and the cruelty the orphan faces from the other children of the house leave Jane without a sense of belonging. Early in the story, Jeans questions of belonging connect the novel to the bloodcurdling genre. Cane’s desire for a better life is seemingly fulfilled when she learns she will be leaving Gathered for the Elwood School.
However, a rule and abusive headmaster leaves Jane wondering if her situation will ever truly change. Fortunately, a fellow student named Helen Burns befriends Jane. Her deep religious beliefs and ability to suppress anger show Jane a new way to view her situation. Through her friendship with Helen, Jane is exposed to an alternative point of view that helps her grow emotionally and mentally. Many critics are of the view that Helen who is an ethereal and oblivious soul brings forth the spiritual facet to Jane. Let is suitable to hail Helen as the “Little Rose” of Emily Dickinson as, Nobody knows this little Rose- It might a pilgrim be
Did not take it from the ways And lift it up to thee. Only a bee will miss it- Only a butterfly, Hastening from far journey- On its breast to lie- Only a bird will wonder- Only a breeze will sigh Ah Little Rose-how easy For such as thee to die! Hellene death comes as a result of poor living conditions at the school, a situation similar to the death of Charlotte Bronze’s sisters, Maria and Elizabeth (Humans). Experiencing the death of a friend at such a young age forces Jane into a very adult situation early in life.
Once again, the placement of a child or childlike character in an adult situation emphasizes Jane Rye as a coming of age story. Cane’s development continues throughout her time at Elwood as she transitions from a pupil to an instructor. However, Jane soon finds her position unfulfilled; her longing for something more drives her to a governess position at Threefold manor. During the Victorian era in which the novel was written, the position of governess was one of the only occupations available to women. In fact, Charlotte Bronze worked as a governess from 1839 to 1841.
Bronze hated being a governess because she felt like an “inferior who was not ‘considered as a living and rational being except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfill'” (Humans). Contrary to Front’s experience, Jane is described as excited and anxious at the new prospect of the occupation. At Threefold, Jane teaches a French girl named Adele. Abandoned by her mother and cared for by Mr… Rochester, the owner of Threefold, Adele is essentially an orphan like Jane. Luckily for Adele, she has been loved and cared for while at Threefold.
Mr… Rochester intrigues Jane, eventually becoming a love interest. This romantic interest is realized by Jane and by readers through the appearance Of Balance Ingram. As an attractive, upper class woman, Jane becomes convinced that Rochester will soon marry Balance. The comparison in the novel of Jane and Balance points out the class differences essential to social norms of the Victorian era. Cane’s jealousy of Balance and romantic interest in Mr… Rochester displays the evolution of Jane from a child to a woman who longs for more than familial love.
When Rochester proposes to Jane instead of Balance, she accepts. Following the theme of difficulty throughout Cane’s life, the wedding ceremony does not go according to plan. It is revealed that Rochester is already married to a woman, as he later explains, who is mentally insane and who has been locked in the attic at Threefold the entire time Jane has been oversees. As a result of this new information, Jane rejects Rochester’s proposal to move away and get married. Instead, she abandons the love she has always longed for to preserve her self-respect.
Leaving Threefold opens the next chapter of Cane’s life. After fleeing from Threefold, Jane once again finds herself penniless and alone. Jane nearly circles back to having nothing and knowing nobody. Again, the difficulty of life for characters in bloodcurdling genre novels applies to Jane. Luckily, the Rivers family takes her in and provides her with much more than the necessities. When SST. John, the head of the Rivers household, notifies Jane of an inheritance, it is revealed that the Rivers are cousins of Jane. By finally connecting with family, Jane finds a sense of belonging.
Yet despite SST. John’s proposal of marriage and life with him as a missionary in India, Jane decides to return to Threefold. Upon her return, Jane finds Threefold burned to the ground. It is later explained that Rochester’s wife set fire to the manor and jumped to her death. Finding Mr… Rochester blind and injured in his new home, Ferdinand, Jane rekindles the relationship. As a consequence, the infamous line “Reader, married him” draws the novel toward closure. Jane then joyfully describes err life with a partially blind Edward Rochester and a son.
Jane Rye is a coming-of-age story that was rebellious for the Victorian era. Throughout the novel, “the progress of Jane Rye can be charted through a sequential arrangement of the family/counter-family dyad” (Speak). Her development and growth throughout the novel is emphasized by her beginning as a lonely, penniless orphan to her solidified place in society as an heiress with her own family. Through self-reliance, questioning of her surroundings, and her healthy self-respect, Jane blossoms despite her orphan status. In the end, it is Jane who creates her own family and happiness.
Psychological maturation is a typical trait of Bloodcurdling genre. The German word”Bloodcurdling” means “novel Of education or novel of formation” is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (coming of age), and in which, therefore, character change is extremely important. The folklore tale of the dunce who goes out into the world seeking adventure and learns wisdom the hard way was raised to literary heights in Christopher Martin’s “History of Gaston”.
The term was coined in 1819 by philologist Karl Northeastern in his university lectures, and later famously reprised by Wilhelm Deathly, who legitimated it in 1870 and popularized it in 1905. The birth of the Bloodcurdling is normally dated to the publication Wilhelm Mister’s Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1795-96. Although the Valetudinarians rose in Germany, it has had extensive influence first in Europe and later throughout the world. In the 20th century, It has spread to Germany, Britain, France, and several other countries around the globe.
Philosopher Wilhelm Deathly stressed five main points about the bloodcurdling novels: “(1 ) the idea of Billing, or formation, cultivation, education, shaping of a single main character, normally of a young man; (2) individualism, especially the emphasis on the uniqueness of the protagonist and the primacy of his private life and thoughts, although these are at the same time representative of an age and culture; (3) the biographical element, usually supplied from the author’s own life in what Deathly calls the conscious and artistic presentation of what is typically human through the depiction of a particular individual life”; (4) the connection with psychology, especially the then-new psychology of development; and (5) the ideal of unanimity, of the full realization of all human potential as the goal of life”. On his essay on Holder, he comments: “[The Bloodcurdling] examines a regular course of development in the life of the individual; each of its stages has its own value and each is at the same time the basis of a higher stage. The dissonances and conflicts of life appear as the necessary transit points of the individual on his way to maturity and harmony. And the ‘highest happiness of humankind’ is the development Of the person as the unifying, substantial form of human existence” The bloodcurdling traditionally ends on a positive note though its action abbey tempered by resignation and nostalgia.
If the grandiose dreams of hero’s youth are over, so are many mistakes and painful disappointments, especially in the 19th century novels, a life of usefulness lies ahead. In the 20th century and beyond, however, the bloodcurdling genre ends in resignation or death. Essentially, the bloodcurdling genre demands internal movement in its protagonist- from innocence to maturity, from ignorance to knowledge. This internal movement is mirrored by external movement, these movements act as a sort of catalyst to introduce the protagonist to obstacles ND challenges the rules Of society. This genre actually demands its protagonist to be pushed out into the world by subverting any sort of dependency and thus pave the way for the hero to find his self-fulfilling quest in a solitary fashion.
In Jane Rye, which is a part autobiographical, there is rebellion of Charlotte Bronze, portrayed in the novel, against the suppression and defeat of female autonomy, creativity and maturity by patriarchal norms and her struggle to write as an independent female writer. When Gilbert and Suburb wrote that “women in patriarchal societies have historically been imprisoned in male sets” they were referring not only to the stereotypes which, following the binary pattern of angel/monster “kill” women into images of themselves, but also, in the wider sense, to the female writer’s problematic struggle for artistic self-definition. This, they argued, was complicated not only by the representation of the female as Other in male texts but also by the patriarchal notion that “the male quality’ as Gerald Manley Hopkins defined it, “is the creative gift”, and the assumption that, if this is so, the reverse must be true.
In light Of the pervasive view that, in Gilbert and Gasbags words, the “writer ethers his text just as God fathered the world” it is perhaps understandable that Charlotte Bronze, having as she said, “a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice”, refused to give up her androgynous alias Curer Bell throughout her literary career. In fact, in many ways, Charlotte Bronze typifies the woman writer’s struggle to escape from the male text, in both the negative and positive sense. Eke countless other female writers, it was probe fly the fear that she would be termed “a woman and not an artist’ as Graham Breton says of Vast in Violet, which drove her to disguise her gender.
However, although her metaphorical male impersonation in her first novel, The Professor may have allowed her to overcome what Gilbert and Suburb termed “anxiety of authorship”, in trying to deny her gender Bronze created an identity crisis as serious as the anxiety she was attempting to escape from, and inevitably cut herself off from what has often been described as the source of her originality and power – her own experience of life. In her two most successful novels, Jane Rye and Violet, Charlotte Bronze breaks away from Screwworms, the first person male narrator in the Professor, and speaks instead through Jane and Lully’s predecessor: Frances Henry, the woman who felt “the strong pulse of Ambition. ” Subverting elements of the Gothic tradition, she adapts the prose fiction form she had used in the Professor -” the Bloodcurdling – to represent the power women can take for themselves. In writing her first novel, Bronze said that she had “restrained imagination, eschewed romance, repressed excitement” and even avoided “over-bright coloring”.
She had, in other words, distanced herself as much as possible from the world of Anglia, with its rich, often extravagant imagination and intense emotion, in order to produce “something which should be soft, grave and true. ” This determination to abide by the subdued realism of the autobiographical novel of the time can be seen as another aspect of Bronze’s male mimicry, her “desire to appear male” as Gazelles called it. It could be said that in setting out to reproduce the Bloodcurdling as she found it, she implicitly accepted that in order to write publicly – to write seriously – she had to write in the style created for and by men, thereby also accepting the underlying patriarchal idea of creativity as a male quality.
However, Cut off from the Nigerian world, which, as Margaret Lane has noted, “lay very near the heart of her inspiration”, she was, not surprisingly, unable to truly express her self, and the result was that The Professor was not published until 1 857, two years after her death. During her lifetime, she had to, as she said, ‘put him by and lock[De] him up’. And with ‘him’, she seems to have locked up her futile efforts to duplicate the male autobiographical novel, at least in so far as imitating it’s style and structure were concerned, as Jane Rye demonstrates. In her second novel, instead of suppressing her secret world, Bronze utilized t, and even at times expressed herself through it.
Anglia, as Kathleen Titillation has argued, became a positive value for the first time, as the author framed her heroine’s story with material from her fantasy world, and in doing so, personalized the Bloodcurdling to fit her distinctly female narrative. Despite her recognition of the dangers on the dream, her conviction that ‘it would not do’, her claim that she had ‘had enough of morbidly vivid realizations’, Charlotte Bronze, as her biographer Juliet Barker notes, “had never lost her childhood addiction to mystery and the magical and supernatural. This ‘childhood addiction’ pervades her novels – the Nigerian fantasy world, the sometime oppressive golden dream, combining with elements of the Gothic tradition to produce something that often seems to be poised between the sensational, or at least, the unrealistically “improbable’ and what G.
H Lees described as “deep, significant reality. ” It is through this paradoxical position that Charlotte Bronze adapted the forms she makes use of in both Jane Rye and Violet. On the one hand, by allowing herself to make use of her Nigerian fantasy world, she breaks away from the tradition of realism in the Bloodcurdling, on the other hand, she ruefully disinfects her novel of ‘feverish emotion” by subverting and undermining the melodramatic Gothic conventions she uses. As Gilbert and Suburb put it, she committed herself to “an oscillation between overtly “angelic” dogma and covertly satanic fury’. The author’s choice of this form is, as Kathleen Titillation argues, of vital importance.
Not only because, as has often been noted, Bronze’s personal life was the substance of her novels and the Bloodcurdling allowed her to communicate her experience while fictionally it, but also because, in her use of a feminine first-person narrator she was able to achieve a degree of Ochs which imparted not only remarkable unity, but also total identification with her heroines. In contrast to the Professor, where the narrator is a somewhat effete male (until he becomes “Master to Frances Henry), and Shirley, where Bronze split her third person narrative between two female protagonists, in Jane Rye and Violet the heroine narrator is always there, at the center of the novel – in Jane Rye, we follow the heroine in a mythic mystery quest, in Violet we observe with the observer Lucy Snows.
In Jane Rye, the identification with the heroine is obvious – it is almost impossible not to be drawn into her life. Much of this may stem from the fact that we follow her life from childhood, as in a typical autobiography, although of course the narrative ends, famously with “Reader, married him” and not, as in a male autobiography, with the prospect of a successful career. The story of great expectations is an exclusively male text, tracing a man’s journey through life. Charlotte Bronze could not imitate it, for she was not only telling the story Of a woman, but as Gilbert and Suburb said Of Lucy, a “woman without’. It is this, perhaps, which most necessitated Bronze’s adaptations to the Bloodcurdling.
Lucy may be ‘Without” in the sense of outside, society, without family, wealth, beauty, or even the degree of ‘passion’ that attracts Rochester to Jane; however, she is certainly not without imagination. Bronze, while she could not mimic the male autobiographical novel in the Professor, (because she was like Lucy “without” – on the outside, looking in) could and did successfully tell the same story from the woman’s point of view, writing not in the accepted feminine style, but from and within her own Nigerian world of imagination and emotion. If this parallels the male/female, reason/ emotion binary, then, arguably, like Martinet’s criticism that Violet’s female characters think only Of love, this is precisely the point. What other way of escape is there?
It has been said that the paradoxical nature of women’s existence is that it is often only on the condition of being possessed by another that they are judged to have ‘become’ their mature selves. If, as in Lully’s case, this fails, there is only the escape of imagination left – imagination often bordering on hysteria. Jane, on the other hand, is eventually reunited with Rochester – although the seclusion of Ferdinand may suggest that it is only in this sort of physical and virtual isolation that it is possible to escape from the confines of hierarchal society. Some have argued that ultimately, in marriage, Jane abandons her rebellious feminism, retreating finally from her the red room and Bertha, her double, the figure she sees first in the red room looking glass.
Yet, on the other hand, it could be argued that Jane has undeniably emerged from her quest not only to a happy ending, but also to an independent, more empowered position. The slight ambiguity in the conventional ending here foreshadows the much greater and more deliberate ambiguity in Violet, here the reader is left to choose between the two possible fates – death or marriage. Gilbert and Suburb note that the indecisive endings of the authors novels suggest that she was finally “unable clearly to envision viable solutions to the problem of patriarchal oppression”, acting out “the passionate drive towards freedom” but never fully able to “define the full meaning of achieved freedom”.
In contrast to Jane, who “continually, quietly, triumphantly’ occupies the center, as Titillation says, Lucy is most often in the shadows, especially in the first few chapters. Yet she IS never distant, despite the fact that the reader knows so little about her early life, and may be tempted to ask, with Genera: “Who are you? ” The reader’s identification with Lucy despite the mystery that continually cloaks her can be seen as a result of the author’s unswerving focus, unswerving in the sense that, if Lucy is standing in the shadows, so is the reader, observing through her. Yet our impression of Lucy, as Titillation notes, is not of a character seen ironically, a character we are “invited to understand better than it does itself. This can be seen as another aspect of the authors juxtaposition of narrative modes for the representation of the self. In Violet, Bronze combines the biblical tradition of stories of moral trails, with the protestant spiritual autobiography of De auction, and examines one of the main beliefs the Bloodcurdling is based on – a belief in the knowable self. Bronze rejects this idea, remarking through Lucy: “We can never be rightly known. ” This conviction – that the knowable self isn’t, in fact, knowable -” underlies the oxymoron of Lucky name, which suggests both brightness for a figure always in the shadows, and light, which reveals, while Snows suggests something which conceals and buries, “a cold name for an overheated temperament” in Tim Dolphin’s phrase.
This self-contradictory name captures one of the main themes of the novel – the oppositions of surface and depth, illusion and reality, emphasizing the deceptiveness of appearances, as the reader finds what seems to be full of meaning is simultaneously empty of meaning Similarly, Jane Eyre’s name summarizes her position, as Gilbert and Suburb note: she is invisible as air, heir to nothing, and “secretly choking with ire. ” Cane’s repressed rebelliousness obviously parallels her repressed emotions on some levels – moral feeling subjected to the consciousness of various new impulses is after all the only ‘story’ the novel tells – however, it is her anger, rather than the “asocial sexual vibrations” of the novel, which so disturbed the early reviewers. The focal point of the narrative is not in the tension of her confrontations with Rochester, but in the horror of seeing Bertha and confronting her own repressed rage.
The “little fierce incendiary’ as Margaret Lolloping called her, sets out from Gathered on a journey full of obstacles, which only ends with the symbolic and literal death of her double, allowing the conventional ending that Bertha ad forbidden. Hardly disguised in the novel’s fairy tale structure, these obstacles are “symptomatic of difficulties Everyman in a patriarchal society must meet and overcome”. Each step in Cane’s journey takes her to another kind of imprisonment in a succession of male-owned structures, which however, are significantly ‘kept’ by women. First, she is locked into the red room by Mrs.. Reed, her uncle’s widow, in Elwood, Miss Temple works for Mr.. Brochures, in Threefold, Jane at first believes Miss Fairfax to be her employer when she is in fact ‘only’ the housekeeper, while Grace Poole awards the madwoman for Rochester.
Finally in Marsh End, Diana and Mary, allegorically symbolizing the Great Mother in her dual aspects, care for Jane while Shoots analyses her character. All through the novel women are seen to be agents for men, pointing perhaps to Bronze’s recognition that women are often the first to inhibit other women from power, although they are simultaneously imprisoning themselves, as Grace Poole, in constantly guarding Bertha, is a prisoner of the attic herself. Ultimately, the women Jane encounters are all negative models, the antithesis of the values she stands or, from Adele, symbolizing society’s love of beauty, to Balance, and the marriage market charade. Even Grace Pool, who is Berth’s public face, is ‘unfathomable’: the darkness Of madness.
Like Bronze, Jane has no predecessors, no positive examples, to guide her on her quest. If Violet is “a series of deprivations”, Jane Rye could be described as ‘a series of enclosures and escapes’, escapes from oppression, confinement, starvation, madness and apathy. Both Jane Rye and Lucy Snow’s autobiographies are ultimately stories of entrapment – or burial – in the structure of patriarchal society. There may seem to be no place for the sort of unlikely coincidences, psychological doubles, melodramatic Gothic elements, and romantic obsessions which pervade both novels in such a subject and in such a form, however, this is precisely Bronze’s achievement: her own escape from the confinements of male conventions.
Charlotte Bronze invites the comparison of Jane Rye with other rebellious figures and times in history. Nancy Peel wrote: “Two allusions in the novel to actual rebellions… Suggest Charlotte Bronze’s awareness that Cane’s struggle for a wider life has significant historical implications” . Kathy Sutherland takes this further, and reveals how the novel abounds in references to revolutionary years. For instance, the year in which Jane Rye reached its audience Was 1848, when the Germans and Italians Were fighting a popular battle for independence. This is mere coincidence though, one which provided a useful context for anonymous reviewers to attack the novel.
Yet Bronze did write the novel less than a mile away from SST. Pewter’s Fields in Manchester, site of the Petrol massacre. 181 9 was a year when revolution, as Sutherland argues, was a real possibility, especially when protesters were hot at and killed, amongst whom were “the Female Unions, demanding, like Jane, their chartered rights as women workers” . It is significant, therefore, that Jane begins her narrative in this year. Miss Abbot describes Jane as *Guy Fakes’, the famous incendiary plotter. There are a lot of fires in the novel, but these are set off by Bertha Rochester, who some critics see as Cane’s alter ego. Richard Chase wrote that Jane asked herself, “May not Bertha…
