Episode 322: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Ch. 20-26

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Welcome back to The Literary Life Podcast and our series on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This week Angelina and Thomas discuss chapters 20-26, especially looking at the character of Bertha and the symbolism of “the woman in the attic.” They talk more about the medieval idea of the well-ordered person in contrast to the person ruled by the passions, as well as how Bertha is a mirror for Jane’s inner turmoil. Angelina highlights more ways in which we see glimpses of the stories of Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella in this section, as well as a hint at Sleeping Beauty. Other ideas Thomas and Angelina bring out are the story of Griselda, Jane’s journey of the soul, images of the Garden of Eden, and so much more!

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Commonplace Quotes:

The reader learns with [Rousseau] to be discontented with everything, apart from himself. He was his own Pygmalion.

“On apprend avec lui à être mécontent de tout, hors de soi-même. Il était son Pygmalion.”

Joseph Joubert, from Pensées

Bertha is Jane’s truest and darkest double: she is the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret Jane has been trying to repress ever since her days at Gateshead. Specifically, every one of Bertha’s appearance–or, more accurately, her manifestations–has been associated with an experience (or repression) of anger on Jane’s part. Jane’s feeling of “hunger, rebellion, and rage” on the battlements, for instance, were accompanied by Bertha’s “low, slow ha! ha!” and “eccentric murmurs.” Jane’s apparently secure response to Rochester’s apparently egalitarian sexual confidences was followed by Bertha’s attempt to incinerate the master in his bed. Jane’s unexpressed resentment at Rochester’s manipulative gypsy-masquerade found expression in Bertha’s terrible shriek and her even more terrible attack on Richard Mason. Jane’s anxieties about her marriage, and in particular her fears of her own alien “robed and veiled” bridal image, were objectified but the image of Bertha in a “white and straight” dress, “whether gown, sheet, or shroud, I cannot tell.”

Sandra M. Gilbert, from The Madwoman in the Attic

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Selection from “The Palace of Art”

by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

As in strange lands a traveller walking slow,
In doubt and great perplexity,
A little before moon-rise hears the low
Moan of an unknown sea;

And knows not if it be thunder, or a sound
Of rocks thrown down, or one deep cry
Of great wild beasts; then thinketh, ‘I have found
A new land, but I die.’

She howl’d aloud, ‘I am on fire within.
There comes no murmur of reply.
What is it that will take away my sin,
And save me lest I die?’

So when four years were wholly finished,
She threw her royal robes away.
‘Make me a cottage in the vale,’ she said,
‘Where I may mourn and pray.

‘Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are
So lightly, beautifully built;
Perchance I may return with others there
When I have purged my guilt.’

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