How is Jane Eyre GOTHIC???

[cubertfilm]

I'm defending the declaration that JE is a Gothic tale. Why?

[sciencefan]

I entered this phrase in Google - what is gothic literature - no quotation marks,
and got a page full of online resources:

The period for Gothic Literature is generally dated from 1764 to 1840, and includes writers like Eliza Parsons,
Ann Letitia Akikin Barbauld, Horace Walpole, Thomas Peckett Prest, Ann Radcliffe, and Edgar Allan Poe.
http://classiclit.about.com/od/briti...Literature.htm

The Gothic: Materials for Study

THE GOTHIC CANON

Definitions of Gothic literature on the Web

Gothic Literature: An Overview | Introduction on eNotes.com

Gothic fiction on wiki

You may want to add Eyre to the search to see what else you might come up with.

From just a brief perousal of the definitions, in my opinion, JE definitely qualifies as Gothic,
and so does Wuthering Heights - written by her sister - in my opinion.

I wish you good success on your assignment.

[cubertfilm]

Hello, woman from Maine...

I am actually teaching a Gothic Film class to students aged 10-15. So far, in years past, we've done The Picture of Dorian Grey, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, Dracula and now J.E.

From my research it is easy to defend Frankenstein, Dracula, DG, J&H, and other books/stories... J.E. is just a pinch more challenging. I see the book easily as a social commentary, I've learned it's a "Bildungsroman" -- thank you spark notes! -- and also of course, a Gothic tale.... Bertha Mason, the red room, the disfiguring of Mr. R, the suspense, the setting, the place... all so in common with the stereotypical gothic tale...

Thank you for all of your suggestions, I shall sift through and seek further knowledge...

[sciencefan]

Hello, woman from Maine...

I am actually teaching a Gothic Film class to students aged 10-15. So far, in years past, we've done The Picture of Dorian Grey, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, Dracula and now J.E.

From my research it is easy to defend Frankenstein, Dracula, DG, J&H, and other books/stories... J.E. is just a pinch more challenging. I see the book easily as a social commentary, I've learned it's a "Bildungsroman" -- thank you spark notes! -- and also of course, a Gothic tale.... Bertha Mason, the red room, the disfiguring of Mr. R, the suspense, the setting, the place... all so in common with the stereotypical gothic tale...

Thank you for all of your suggestions, I shall sift through and seek further knowledge...

You are quite welcome.
I wish you good success.

[kiki1982]

Have a look on www.wikipedia.com . That will at least put you on the right track.

[sciencefan]

I listed wiki in my post also, but I always read there with a bit of caution as wiki is not authoritative, in that any Tom, Dick or Mary can write in it, and it can be wrong.
It's not like a real encyclopedia.

I do like wiki, but I quoted it once, and got burned for being wrong.

[kiki1982]

I agree about that although they usually take a lot of care that the info is right. It is a good place to start. There are usually interesting external links under the article.

[staticgirl]

You could almost say that Jane is imprisoned by her status as a woman and the various residences where she is forced to live. It is only at the end when she chooses to leave and be with an emasculated Rochester that she comes into her own as a woman. Imprisoned women are a common feature in Victorian and modern Gothic.

[cubertfilm]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc25pC6KwkE

[Sir Bartholomew]

i think that being Gothic means that the mystery takes place inside a haunted mansion or something.

[Literary_Cat]

Pardon me--in an academic paper, very few Internet sources are actually considered scholarly. I would use them freely to get a feel for your topic, but I would strenuously avoid citing them in any paper.

. . .

A Gothic novel usually contains elements of the supernatural, often taking place in a derelict setting, a "haunted house," or with sweeping and dark views of nature. An innocent young woman is often prey to an older, sinister man, and there are elements of what we might consider horror--blood, violence, fainting, screaming, scares, ghosts, dead bodies. Above all there are secrets, which Bronte offers in full supply.

Jane Eyre contains many of these elements--but also look out for the author's satire of the genre (!). An excellent subject, and worthy of study.

[Newcomer]

How is Jane Eyre GOTHIC?
In my opinion it is not!
It is a love story but not necessarily a romance, rather a study of the psychology of love of early Victorian sensibility. A journey in discovery of the multifaceted characteristics of love , starting from that of a young girl and ending with that of a woman. And love is a more interesting subject than fright. For Charlotte Bronte it was a more compelling a subject than writing an entertainment of the Gothic type, of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto.

Gothic is usually defined by example: by Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), or Ann Radcliffe, The Italian (1797). “In The Italian, Radcliffe uses a technique of scene painting to invest particular landscapes with complexes of emotional meaning for her characters. This practice is of interest to a study of sensibility in that it emphasizes personal, affective relationships with scenes of nature. In particular, the view of the bay of Naples comes to represent, for Ellena and Vivaldi, a complex of ideas that links their personal love to a familial and domestic ideal.”1 In the example of The Italian, the simple definition of Gothic as connected with supernatural has to be expanded by Ann Radcliffe's emphasis of “complexes of emotional meanings”, or passion of the characters, leading directly to the emphasis on passion as emphasized by Charlotte Bronte. This type of analysis of Gothic has the flaw of necessity of familiarity with the original sources. What is needed is a abstract generic definition, in spite of all shortcomings.

“Gothic is variously defined. In a recent book review Leslie Fiedler implies that Gothic is shoddy mystery-mongering, whereas F. Cudworth Flint defines the Gothic tradition, which he considers “nearly central in American literature”, as “a literary exploration of death”.2

Cuberfilm writes - I'm defending the declaration that JE is a Gothic tale. Why? - Cuberfilm is asking a question and I found Robert B. Heilman's essay Charlotte Bronte's “New Gothic”, more interesting, as he lays out an answer. Not only does he introduce a new genre, the “New Gothic” but he builds an argument based on numerous examples from Jane Eyre. “Aside from the partial sterilization of banal Gothic by dry factuality and humor, Charlotte goes on to make much more important – indeed, a radical – revision of the mode: in Jane Eyre and in other novels, as we shall see, that discovery of passion, that rehabilitation of the extra-rational, which is the historic office of Gothic, is no longer oriented in marvelous circumstances but moves deeply into lesser known realities of human life. This change I describe as the change from the “old Gothic” to “new Gothic”. The kind of appeal is the same; the fictional method is utterly different.”3

The supernatural of old Gothic” is surpassed as in, “My heart beat fast and thick: I heard its throb. Suddenly it stood still to an inexpressible feeling and trilled it through, and passed at once to my head and extremities. The feeling was not like an electric shock; but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling: it acted on my senses as if their utmost activity hitherto had been but torpor; from which they were now summoned, and forced to wake. They rose expectant: eye and ear waited, while flesh quivered on my bones.
“ What have you heard? What do you see?” asked St. John. I saw nothing: but I heard a voice somewhere cry -
“Jane! Jane! Jane!“ Nothing more.”4

The language is not of fear but of rapture, of a psychological insight. It is confirmed by the following passage: “”Down superstition!” I commented, as that specter rose up black by the black yew at the gate. “This is not thy deception, not thy witchcraft: it is the work of nature. She was roused, and did – no miracle – but her best.”5 The cadence is of poetry not prose.
Compare the magnificent nocturne in Jane Eyre with the following from Villette:
Jane Eyre - ”I lifted up my head to look: the roof resolved to clouds, high and dim; the gleam was such as the moon imparts to vapours with strange anticipation; as though some word of doom were written on her disk. She broke forth as newer moon yet burst from cloud: a hand first penetrated the sable folds and waved them away; then not a moon, but a white human form shone in the azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward. It gazed and gazed on me. It spoke to my spirit: immeasurably distant was the tone, yet so near, it whispered in my heart -
“My daughter, flee temptation!”
“Mother, I will.”6

Villette - “Imagination was roused from her rest, and she came forth impetuous and venturous. With scorn she looked on Matter, her mate -
“Rise!” she said; “Sluggard! This night I will have my will; nor shall thou prevail.”
“Look forth and view the night!” was her cry; and when i lifted the heavy blind from the casement at hand – with her own royal gesture, she showed me a moon supreme, in an element deep and splendid.
... She lured me to leave this den and follow forth into dew, coolness, and glory.”7

Heilman builds his case for Gothic on the use of hyperbolic language, the excess of emotion, as in the passage from The Professor: ““...I sprang from my bed with other slaves,” and rejoices,”liberty I clasped in my arms ... her smile and embrace revived my life.” The Puritan sentiment ( to be exploited partially in Jane Eyre and heavily in Lucy Snowe) becomes tense, rhetorical, fiercely censorious; the self-righteousness punitive and even faintly paranoid. Through the frenetically Protestant Crimsworth and his flair for rebuke Charlotte notes the little sensualities of the girl students (“parting her lips, as full as those of a hot-blooded Maroon”) and the coquettish yet urgent sexuality of Zorde Reuter perversely responding to Crimsworth's ostensible yet not total unresponsiveness to her: “When she stole about me with the soft step of a slave, I felt at once barbarous and sensual as a pasha.”8

He builds the case for the “new Gothic” when Charlotte revises the “old Gothic”, the mechanism of fear by the comic, which he calls anti-Gothic, as “When Mrs. Rochester first tried to destroy Rochester by fire, Jane “baptized” Rochester's bed and heard Rochester “fulminating strange anathemas at finding himself lying in a pool of water.”9

The anti-Gothic is not just the comic element but “The symbolic also modifies the Gothic, for it demands of the reader a more mature and complicated response sought by primitive Gothic. When mad Mrs. Rochester, seen only as “the foul German specter -the Vampire,” spreads terror at night, that is one thing; when, with malicious insight that is the paradox of her madness, she tears the wedding veil in two and thus symbolically destroys the planned marriage, that is another thing, far less elementary as art.”10

“In her flair for the surreal, in her plunging into feeling that is without status in the ordinary world of the novel, Charlotte discovers a new dimension of Gothic.” She does this most thoroughly in her portrayal of characters and of the relations between them. If in Rochester we see only an Angrian-Byronic hero and a Charlotte wish-fulfillment figure (the two identifications which to some readers seem entirely to place him), we miss what is more significant, the exploration of personality that opens up new areas of feeling in intersexual relationships. Beyond the “grim”, the “harsh”, the eccentric, the almost histrionically cynical that superficially distinguishes Rochester from conventional heroes, there is something almost Lawrentian..... Without using the vocabulary common to us, Charlotte is presenting maleness and physicality, to which Jane responds directly. She is “assimilated” to him by “something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves”; she must love and “could not unlove” him; the thought of parting from him is “agony”11 If this is the “new Gothic” it lies in the language of physiological exploration, not in the supernatural

Whatever your view of the argument, Robert Heilman presents an extension of the Gothic that is breathtaking. In so doing he confirms the depths in Jane Eyre and the genius of the writer. Whether this is an answer to Cuberfilm's question, that JE is a Gothic tale, I'm doubtful but perhaps Felis silvestris catus will appreciate the footnotes.

Footnotes -------------------------------------------------------------
1. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981...dcliffeC1.html
2. pg 179, The Victorian Novel, Modern Essays in Criticism; Robert B. Heilman, Charlotte Bronte's “New Gothic”.
3. pg. 171, Ibid.
4. pg. 632, Jane Eyre, Modern Library edition.
5. pg. 633, Jane Eyre, Modern Library edition.
6. pg. 478, Jane Eyre, Modern Library edition.
7. pg. 176, Ibid.
8. pg. 166, Ibid.
9. pg. 168, Ibid.
10. pg. 168, Ibid.
11. pg. 169, Ibid.

[Rigoletto]

The Gothic is like a sort of style; the characteristics are:

--elements of horror and suspense
--isolated mansions(Thornfield Hall)
--ghostly apparations(like Bertha Mason, and Mr. Reed's ghost)
--endangered heroine(Jane)

Hope this helped.
Rigoletto