Episode 320: “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë, Ch. 6-12

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On today’s episode of The Literary Life Podcast with Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks, we continue our series on Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Before jumping into chapters 6-12, Angelina and Thomas re-cap chapter 5 so that they can keep the entire Lowood School storyline together. They discuss the character of Helen and how she mirrors Jane, as well as the images of fire and ice throughout this book. In looking at the character of Miss Temple, they also highlight her as the picture of a well-ordered person. When Jane arrives at Thornfield, we find more fairy tale and Gothic novel elements, specifically the reference to the story of Bluebeard. Finally, when Mr. Rochester is introduced, Angelina shares some thoughts on the medieval understanding of the soul and the passions.

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Commonplace Quotes:

Weak men are worse for the good sense they read in books, because it furnished them only with more matter to mistake.

Lord Halifax, from Moral Thoughts and Reflections

Jane Eyre is not a novel in the Tolstoyan, the Flaubertian, even the Hardyesque sense. Jane Eyre is a tale.

The concern of the tale is not with social mores, though social mores may occur among the risks and challenges encountered by the protagonist. Neither is it an anatomy of the psyche, the fated chemistry of cosmic forces.

The world of the tale is above all a “vale of soul-making,” and when a novelist finds herself writing a tale, it is likely to be because she is move by that vibration of experience which underlies the social and political…

Adrienne Rich, from “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman!”

Books and Links:

Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson

Selection from The Lucy Poems

by William Wordsworth

Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A Lady of my own.

"Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The Girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.

"She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;
And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.

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