Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

1. Jane EyrebyCharlotte Brontë Part I of II

2. Jane Eyre: WTF? Romantic Novel Autobiography Sentimental Novel Gothic Novel Novel of Manners Bildungsroman Realist Novel Jane Eyre

3. Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855)and the Autobiographical Component Jane Eyre 1) Charlotte Brontë was born in 1816, the third daughter of the Rev. Patrick Brontë and his wife Maria. 2) In 1824 the four eldest Brontë daughters were enrolled as pupils at the Clergy Daughter's School at Cowan Bridge. The following year Maria and Elizabeth, the two eldest daughters, became ill, left the school and died: Charlotte and Emily, understandably, were brought home. 3) In 1831 Charlotte became a pupil at the school at Roe Head, but she left school the following year to teach her sisters at home. 4) She returned returns to Roe Head School in 1835 as a governess: for a time her sister Emily attended the same school as a pupil, but became homesick and returned to Haworth. 5) In 1838, Charlotte left Roe Head School. In 1839 she accepted a position as governess in the Sidgewick family, but left after three months and returned to Haworth. I 4) in 1841 she became governess in the White family, but left, once again, after nine months. Upon her return to Haworth the three sisters, led by Charlotte, decided to open their own school after the necessary preparations had been completed. In 1842 Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels to complete their studies. After a trip home to Haworth, Charlotte returned alone to Brussels, where she remained until 1844. 5) The Rev. A. B. Nicholls, curate of Haworth since 1845, proposed marriage to Charlotte in 1852 6) . She publishes Jane Eyre in 1857 underev he pseudonym Currer Bell

4. The Romance Novel, Horizontal Characterization, and Vertical Characterization 1) The romance novel is a literary genre developed in Western Culture, mainly in English-speaking countries. Novels in this genre place their primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and must have an "emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.“ Separate from their type, a romance novel can exist within one of many subgenres, including contemporary, historical, science fiction and paranormal. One of the earliest romance novels was Samuel Richardson’s popular 1740 novel Pamela. Or Virtue Rewarded which was revolutionary on two counts: it focused almost entirely on courtship and did so entirely from the perspective of a female protagonist. • Horizontal Characterization is a method of writing characters based on a kind of E-Harmony-esque mindset. The relative merits of suitors and heroines are judged against an array of criteria that correspond to desired qualities in a given society. The character is, in the end, the composite of all these qualities. • Vertical Characterization goes without notice after Freud but precedes his work. In vertical characterization (which attractive to Romantic writers of the romantic novel, it is not the sum total of surface qualities that constitutes character, but rather the sum total of surface display and inner feeling, conscious and subconscious, etc.

5. The Sentimental Novel 1)The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18thh century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility. 2) Sentimental novels relied heavily on emotional resposeboth from their readers and characters. 3) They feature scenes of distress and tenderness, and the plot is arranged to advance emotions rather than action. 4) The result is a valorization of "fine feeling," displaying the characters as a model for refined, sensitive emotional effect. The ability to display feelings was thought to show character and experience, and to shape social life and relations. 5) These novels commonly featured individuals who were prone to sensibility, often weeping, fainting, feeling weak, or having fits in reaction to an emotionally moving experience. 5) Sentimental novels gave rise to the subgenre of domestic fictionthe early eighteenth century, commonly called conduct novels. The story's hero in domestic fiction is generally set in a domestic world and centers on a woman going through various types of hardship, and who is juxtaposed with either a foolish and passive or a woefully undereducated woman. The contrast between the heroic woman's actions and her foil's is meant to draw sympathy to the character's plight and to instruct them about expected conduct of women. The domestic novel uses sentimentalism as a tool to convince readers of the importance of its message. 6) Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility s most often seen as a satire of the sentimental novel“ that works by y juxtaposing Enlightenment values (sense, reason) with and those of the later Romantic eighteenth century (sensibility, feeling).

6. Sentimentality and Sensibility 1) Sentimentalityis both a literary device used to induce a tender emotional response disproportionate to the situation,[and thus to substitute heightened and generally uncritical feeling for normal ethical and intellectual judgments, and a heightened reader response willing to invest previously prepared emotions to respond disproportionately to a literary situation. 2) Sensibility refers to an acute perception of or responsiveness toward something, such as the emotions of another. This concept emerged in eighteenth-century Britain, and was closely associated with studies of sense perception as the means through which knowledge is gathered. 2) It also became associated with sentimental moral philosophy. One of the first of such texts would be John Lockes’sEssay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), where he says, "I conceive that Ideas in the Understanding, are coeval with Sensation; which is such an Impression or Motion, made in some part of the Body, as makes it be taken notice of in the Understanding” 2A) Although it originated in philosophical and scientific writings, sensibility became an English-language literary movement, particularly in the then-new genre of the novel 2B)If one were especially sensible, one might react this way to scenes or objects that appear insignificant to others. This reactivity was considered an indication of a sensible person's ability to perceive something intellectually or emotionally stirring in the world around them. 2C)In the last decades of the eighteenth century, anti-sensibility thinkers often associated the emotional volatility of sensibility with the exuberant violence of the French Revolution, and in response to fears of revolution coming to Britain, sensible figures were coded as anti-patriotic or even politically subversive.

7. Sentimentalism The European sentimentalist literary landscape largely mirrors the philosophical debate by realizing it into actual practice through the fictional narrative and characters. Philosophically, sensibility is a seeming antonym of its rival rationalism. While rationalism pervades the analytic mind, sentimentalism hinges truth upon an intrinsic human capacity to feel. For the sentimentalist this capacity is perhaps most important in morality. Sentimentalists contended that where the rationalists believed they could create a morality based upon logical principles (i.e. Immanuel Kant's "Categorical Imperative") these principles all differ. Thus we are left without a sound morality. However, by developing the intrinsic moral sensibility and fine tuning this capacity to feel, we may access a universal morality underscoring our very nature as humans. Sentimentalism arose with the end of French rationalism with the death of Louis XIVand turned against the strictly reason-orientated way of life which had been used to discipline and civilize society under absolutism. Sentimentalism asserted that over-shown feeling was not a weakness but rather showed one to be a moral person, and privileged the private life (as opposed to Absolutism's privileging the public life). Arising from religiously-motivated empathy, it expanded to the other perceptions - for example, sensual love was no longer understood as a destructive passion, but rather as a basis of social institutions Religious sentimentalism was one of the inspirations for Chateaubriand and his creation of Romanticism.

8. The Gothic Novel and The Female Gothic The Gothic novel's story occurs in a distant time and place, often Medieval or Renaissance Europe (especially Italy and Spain), and involved the fantastic exploits of a virtuous heroine imperiled by dark, tyrannical forces beyond her control. The first Gothic novel is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Orlanto(1764), but its most famous and popular practitioner was Anne Radcliffe The notion of the sublime is central to the Gothic Novel. Eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, following Edmund Burke, held that the sublime and the beautiful were juxtaposed. The sublime was awful (awe-inspiring) and terrifying while the beautiful was calm and reassuring. The characters and landscapes of the Gothic rest almost entirely within the sublime, with the heroine serving as the great exception. The “beautiful” heroine’s susceptibility to supernatural elements, integral to these novels, both celebrates and problematizes what came to be seen as hyper-sensibility. Gothic and sentimental novels are considered a form of popular fiction, reaching their height of popularity in the late 18th Century. They reflected a popular shift from Neoclassical ideals of order and reason to Romantic ideals emotion and imagination. The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel. Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses, darkness, death, decay madness, hereditary secrets. The stock characters of Gothic fiction include tyrants, villains, maniacs, bandits, Byronic heroes, persecuted maidens, madwomen, demons, angels, ghosts, monks, nuns, and the devil. perception of the genre as inferior, formulaic, and stereotypical. Among other elements, Ann Radcliffe introduced the brooding figure of the gothic villain, which developed into the Byronic hero.

9. Novel of Manners 1)The novel of manners is a sub-genre of the realist which deals with aspects of behavior, language, customs and values of a particular class of people in a specific historical context. 2)The novel of manners often shows a conflict between individual aspirations or desires and the accepted social codes of behavior. There's a vital relationship between manners, social behavior and character. 3) The novel of manners describes in detail the customs, behaviors, habits, and expectations of a certain social group at a specific time and place. Usually these conventions shape the behavior of the main characters, and sometimes even stifle or repress them. 4) Often the novel of manners is satiric, and it always realistic in depiction. 5) The success or failure of romantic couplings in the Novel of Manners is symbolic of an endorsement or critique of the particular manners, customs, and society at hand. For example, if two characters conduct themselves according to custom and are married by the novel’s end, one can read the novel’s polemic as an endorsement of the social morays it chooses to portray.

10. Bildungsroman 1) To be categorized in the genre bildungsroman, the plot must follow a certain course. The protagonist grows from child to adult in the novel. At an early stage, a loss or some discontent pushes him or her away from the home or family setting, giving them a reason to embark on his or her journey. The process of maturation is long, strenuous and gradual, involving repeated clashes between the protagonist's needs and desires and the views and judgments enforced by an unbending social order. 2) The German Enlightenment started the Bildungsroman “theme.” Books that are considered to be this genre are usually written from a protagonist's point of view and in first person. One of the first books written in the Bildungsroman theme is HayyibnYaqdhan by IbnTufail (1100s). 3) The bildungsroman’s genre has all literary elements. Main characters are often helped through “self actualization.” (Having all other needs met and then being able to reach across to help someone else). As in My Name is Asher Lev, Asher is molded by the help of Jacob Kahn.

11. Realism Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of general “realism," Realist authors opted for depictions of everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch stands as a great milestone in the realist tradition. It is a primary example of nineteenth-century realism's role in the naturalization of the burgeoning capitalist marketplace. Balzac is often credited with pioneering a systematic realism in French literature, through the inclusion of specific detail and recurring characters.[ Flaubertis regarded by many critics as representing the zenith of the realist style with his unadorned prose and attention to the details of everyday life. It is a reaction against Romanticism, and displays interest inscientific method, the systematizing of the study of documentary history, and the influence of rational philosophy In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period of time from the Civil War to the turn of the century during which William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction devoted to accurate representation and an exploration of American lives in various contexts. 7) Kenneth Warren suggests that a basic difference between realism and sentimentalismis that in realism, "the redemption of the individual lay within the social world," but in sentimental fiction, "the redemption of the social world lay with the individual"

12. Charting Jane’s Growth via Locale:Gothic Architecture

13. Charting Jane’s Growth via Locale: Manor House