(DOWNLOAD) "From the Red Room to Rochester's Haircut: Mind Control in Jane Eyre (Critical Essay)" by English Studies in Canada # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: From the Red Room to Rochester's Haircut: Mind Control in Jane Eyre (Critical Essay)
- Author : English Studies in Canada
- Release Date : January 01, 2006
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 227 KB
Description
THE CONTROL OF THE IMAGINATION is at stake in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Throughout the novel, Jane comes under the power of people and institutions that want to break her spirit. While tyrants such as Aunt Reed, Brocklehurst, Rochester, and St John Rivers want to turn Jane into a personal servant, Lowood Institution wants to turn her into a servant of the wage labour economy. In response to these attempts to control her, Jane's romantic visions of an open untamed landscape, such as the moors, allow her to escape the feeling of being enclosed and commodified. The central dilemma of Jane's struggle is whether or not she can enter into society on terms that will allow her some measure of freedom within the social order. Her final settlement at Ferndean is the result of her struggle for such a balance. Here, she appears to be doubly free; she has the freedom that comes with having an employable skill and money in the bank and the freedom that comes with being a romantic figure living on the outskirts of civilization. But how free is she really? Many feminist critics have recognized a lack of freedom in Jane's marriage to Rochester, the way it threatens to remove her from the working world and turn her into a stereotypical Victorian angel in the house. For example, in Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England, Nary Poovey argues that Jane's retirement form the working world reflects the almost universal Victorian assumption "that women would work only out of necessity" and "the belief voiced by conservatives that women's proper work was moral superintendence and (unpaid) domestic labor" (158-59). Jane's marriage to Rochester would appear to trap her in the same oppressive patriarchal system the novel critiques. While it is appropriate to read the ending as one built upon compromise and constraint, this essay shifts the focus away from Jane as angel in the house to Jane as agent of the modern nation-state. As that agent, she is able to live at Ferndean only because she has negotiated a complex deal with the state, one that insists she become an active participant in darker forms of control, such as those in use at Lowood school. Nancy Armstrong argues that the female domestic space of nineteenth-century novels is an apolitical space: "As it became the woman's sphere, then, the household appeared to detach itself from the political world and to provide the complement and antidote to it. And in this way, novels helped to transform the household into what might be called 'counterimage' of the modern marketplace, an apolitical realm of culture within the culture as a whole" (48).