Episode 324: “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë, Ch. 34-End

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On The Literary Life Podcast with Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks this week, we will wrap up our discussion of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. After sharing their commonplace quote for this week, Thomas and Angelina jump right into recapping the important plot points of this last section of the book. They start with some contrasts between St. John and Rochester, then they talk about the journey of the soul and the image of marriage. They also consider the parallels of her return to Thornfield and the reversals in these scenes, as well as how Brontë fulfills the various fairy tale endings she set up earlier in the book.

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Join us back here next week for an introduction to Alexander Pope and the Neo-classical Poets, followed by an episode on Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock”. In May, we will have a special guest interview of Malcolm Guite all about his new book, Galahad and the Grail.

Commonplace Quotes:

“Reader, I married him.” These words open the final chapter of Jane Eyre. The question is, how and why is this a happy ending? Jane returns to Thornfield to find it “a blackened ruin”; she discovers Rochester, his left hand amputated and his eyes blinded by the fire in which he vainly attempted to save the life of his mad wife. Rochester has paid his dues; a Freudian critic would say he has been symbolically castrated. Discarding this phallic-patriarchal notion of his ordeal, we can then ask, what kind of marriage is possible for a woman like Jane Eyre?

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

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it…and delete it before sending your manuscript to press.

Arthur Quiller-Couch, from The Art of Writing

Books and Links:

Amazon Affiliate links follow….

Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

The Arabian Nights trans. by Malcolm C. Lyons

The Faerie Queene, Book 3 by Edmund Spenser

Villette by Charlotte Brontë

The Professor by Charlotte Brontë

The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell

Galahad and the Grail by Malcolm Guite

Selection from “The Whitsun Weddings”

by Philip Larkin

Just long enough to settle hats and say
    I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,   
And someone running up to bowl—and none   
Thought of the others they would never meet   
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.   
I thought of London spread out in the sun,   
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across   
    Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss   
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail   
Travelling coincidence; and what it held   
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power   
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower   
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

Copyright © Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted here solely for educational purposes.

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