User:Emilykomornik/sandbox

Bertha Mason

 * Jane hears Bertha’s “demoniac laugh,” seemingly at her bedside ( JE, 167).


 * “The implication is that he did not— or could not—[deceive her] because he respects ‘the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of ’ Jane’s eyes as much as she herself does”


 * “Jane’s truest and darkest double,”
 * Characters in Jane Eyre also emerge out of imbalance (a rebellious extreme or an extreme of tranquility), but with the complex exception o{ Rochester, they reveal themselves as false solutions. Helen Burns's perfect obedience becomes death-affirming, and Bertha's fire and feeling erupt as lawless destructive passions.
 * Laurence Lerner, have argued that Bertha is a minor character, a sensational plot device undeserving of the symbolic weight of Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis, their reading nevertheless opened the door to radical questions regarding the figure of the female writer and the production and reception of her work.

Significance of red room and parental figures

 * However, the primary concern in the red-room is the ambiguous relation between parents and children, which becomes the prototype for all male and female interactions within the novel.
 * The significance of the initial absence of a father-figure--eerily present in this scene--is constantly reaffirmed throughout the novel. The structure of the novel suggests that we can never escape our childhoods in an adult experience of love.
 * The red-room is constructed as a symbolic encounter with paternity, where the ghostly presence of Jane's uncle is, in reality, an absence, contrasting with John Reed's excessive physical presence in chapter 1.
 * The Reeds are symbolically linked through their dark 'unwholesome' skin (chapter 1, p. 16) and thick lips: they represent both the violence and inhumanity of the slave driver and the degradation of the slave.

Madwoman in the attic: Red Room

 * The room is, moreover, connected with the vault in which Mr Reed lies dead, reinforcing the idea of a 'patriarchal death chamber' identified by Gilbert and Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic. The room is further marked by symbolic representations of authority:

Scarcely less prominent was an ample, cushioned easy-chair near the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne. (chapter 2, p. 21)