Episode 321: “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë, Ch. 13-19

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On The Literary Life Podcast this week, Angelina and Thomas cover chapters 13-19 of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Today’s episode includes more discussion of the important symbols and images in these chapters. Angelina highlights the stories of Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, and Cupid and Psyche and their connections to this book. She and Thomas also talk about the trope of the “reformed rake” and how it relates to Brontë is setting up that possibility here. In these chapters we see more fire images, as well as several things that point to this story as a journey of the soul for both Jane and Mr. Rochester.

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Commonplace Quotes:

Romanticism is described more easily by examples than by definition.

R. B. Mowat, from The Romantic Age

For the Brontës, genius was above all things deputed to assert the supreme unimportance of externals. Up to that point truth had always been conceived as existing more or less in the novel of manners. Charlotte Brontë electrifies the world by showing that an infinitely older and more elemental truth could be conveyed by a novel in which no person, good or bad, had any manners at all. Her work represents the first great assertion that the humdrum life of modern civilization is a disguise as tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a ‘bal masque.’…

…’Jane Eyre’ is perhaps the truest book that was ever written. Its essential truth to life sometimes makes one catch one’s breath. For it is not true to manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are almost always false; it is true to the only existing thing which is true, emotion, the irreducible minimum, the indestructible germ.

G. K. Chesterton, from Twelve Types

Books and Links:

Amazon Affiliate links follow….

The Romantic Age by R. B. Mowat

Twelve Types by G. K. Chesterton

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell

Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

Mary Webb

The Long War

by Laurie Lee

Less passionate the long war throws
its burning thorn about all men,
caught in one grief, we share one wound,
and cry one dialect of pain.

We have forgot who fired the house
Whose easy mischief spilled first blood
Under one raging roof we lie
The fault no longer understood
But as our twisted arms embrace the desert where our cities stood
Death's family likeness in each face must show at last our brotherhood.

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