The Merging of Spiritualities: Jane Eyre as Missionary of Love

1995 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 456-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Jeffrey Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
Rural Society ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Spiritual Needs ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Whole Person ◽  
Christian Discourse

This essay analyzes the discourses of spirituality represented in Jane Eyre within the context of the Evangelical upheaval in the Britain of Charlotte Brontë's childhood and the mixing of supernatural with Christian elements in the "popular religion" of early-nineteenth-century British rural society. In addition to a dominant Christian spiritualism and a supernatural spiritualism, however, a third discrete discourse is identified in the text-the discourse of spiritual love. The novel stages a contest between these three competing discourses. Christianity is itself conflictually represented, being torn between the repressive, masculine Evangelicalism of Mr. Brocklehurst and the healing communion (among women) represented by Helen Burns and the figure of "sympathy." The supernatural is equally conflicted: it is shown to empower Jane and to be a necessary vehicle for bringing Christian discourse in contact with the discourse of spiritual love, but then it is denied and left, like the madwoman in the attic, as the excluded term. Finally, spiritual love is offered by the text as that which solves these contradictions, revising and merging Christianity and the supernatural to produce a rejuvenated spirituality, one that fosters what is conceived of as the "whole" person, her need for mutual human relationship, her spiritual needs, and her desire.

Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending "Critical Attitudes" in the Face of Societal Ruination

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
Literary Techniques

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).

Jane Eyre: Now and Forever; or, the Strange Afterlife of Gothic

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Allen ◽  
Dino Franco Felluga
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
Opera Seria

Abstract This paper examines the recent fascination the Broadway musical has had with Victorian gothic, focusing both on the transition from opera seria to Disneyesque musical and on one specific cultural product, Paul Gordon and John Caird’s 2000 Broadway production, Jane Eyre: The Musical.  The paper claims that this particular hybrid of two notoriously hybrid nineteenth-century forms (the novel and opera) defangs both of its source genres, but nevertheless still allows its middle-class audience to participate in the spectacle of their own self-definition as consumers of “culture.”  The production also allows that audience to congratulate itself for having escaped the bourgeois repressions that arguably made the gothic such a viable genre in the Romantic and Victorian periods.  The fact is, though, that contemporary viewers of the Broadway gothic musical do still experience the frisson of a repressed terror: the return to a postmodern world that scripts our camp appreciation of such kitsch entertainments.

The Madwoman on the Third Story: Jane Eyre in Space

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deanna K. Kreisel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Depth Psychology ◽  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Third

A long-standing misreading of Jane Eyre is that Rochester's wife, Bertha Mason, is locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall. In fact, she resides on the third floor. This mistake has implications for readings of the novel and for recent critical methodologies such as “surface,” “denotative,” and “dialectical” reading strategies. Jane Eyre associates the spaces of Thornfield with psychological registers that are in turn associated with types of meaning making. This essay delineates these registers by mapping them onto the Lacanian schema of imaginary, symbolic, and real orders, thus drawing out the novel's engagement with a nascent nineteenth-century depth psychology while noting how the novel itself militates against so-called surface reading.

The reconstruction of feminine values in Mme Lesbazeille-Souvestre’s 1854 translation of Jane Eyre

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-33
Author(s):  
Rachel Williams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Stated Goal

Mme Lesbazeille-Souvestre’s translation of Jane Eyre, published in 1854, was the first to appear in French and has been re-edited numerous times, most recently in 2001. This analysis uses both the translator’s preface and the translation itself to explore how the translator constructed what was often seen as a problematically “feminine” text into a normatively “feminine” one and, in so doing, asserted herself as an author in her own right. In her translator’s preface, Lesbazeille-Souvestre aims to assure her readers that in translating she felt a duty of fidelity to the text and to the text’s author, and thus that they are reading a linguistically faithful translation. In the translation itself, however, and in contradiction to her stated goal, she actively attempted to construct Jane Eyre as a text that is proper both for a female writer to have produced and for female readers to consume by consistently negating the so-called “masculine” elements she found in the novel. The character of Jane Eyre is significantly altered in the translation in ways that bring her more in line with conventional feminine values. Lesbazeille-Souvestre’s protestations of complete fidelity in her preface must therefore be questioned and viewed through the lens not only of what it meant to translate in the nineteenth century but of what it meant to translate and to write as a woman.

scholarly journals Pet Lamb and Clothed Hyena: Law as an Oppressive Force in Jane Eyre

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-17
Author(s):  
Alexander Maine
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Status ◽  
Social Difficulties ◽  
Moral Behaviour ◽  
To Come ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Social Difficulty

Writing in 1864, the literary critic Justin M’Carthy stated that ‘the greatest social difficulty in England today is the relationship between men and women.’ This came at a time of unprecedented social and legal change of the status of women in the 19th Century. A prominent novel of the time concerning such social difficulty is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: An Autobiography which attempts to reflect these social difficulties as often resulting from law. As such, the novel may be used as a reflection of the condition of nineteenth century English law as an oppressive force against women. This force is one that enacts morality through legality, and has particular resonance in literature concerning social issues. Jane Eyre will be discussed as a novel that provides insights into women’s experiences in the mid-nineteenth century. Law is represented within the novel as an oppressive force that directly subjugates women, and as such the novel may be regarded as an early liberal feminist work that challenges the condition of law. This article will explore the link between good moral behaviour, and moral madness, the latter being perceived as a threat to the domestic and the law’s response to this threat. It will pick upon certain themes presented by Brontë, such as injustice towards women, wrongful confinement, insanity and adulterous immoral behaviour, to come to the conclusion that the novelist presented law as a method of constructing immorality and injustice, representing inequality and repression.

Sending Flowers into the Mirror: Jinghua yuan as Metafiction

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 412-431
Author(s):  
Liangyan Ge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Examination System ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Civil Service Examinations

Abstract This study offers a reading of the early nineteenth-century Chinese novel Jinghua yuan 鏡花緣 (Flowers in the Mirror) by Li Ruzhen 李汝珍 (1763–1830?) as a fiction about fiction making. Contextualizing the novel in a society where the civil service examinations are among the most important cultural institutions, this article considers the protagonist Tang Ao's 唐敖 voyage to bizarre, fantastical islands, narrated in the early chapters of the novel, as an account of his conversion from examination scholarship to fiction creation. From these islands, his symbolic realm of fictionality, he sends flower spirits-turned-girls to China for the female examinations, here interpreted as an enterprise to fictionalize the examination system. Thus the narrative of the girls' participation in the exams and ensuing celebrations in later chapters becomes a fiction within the fiction. Discussing the dynamic between the examinations and fiction writing elevated in the metafictional structure of the novel, this study considers Tang Ao a fictional representative of many scholars in late imperial China, whose experience with the examinations was not merely a cause of intense frustration but also an inexhaustible source of literary inspiration.

Numbers

2019 ◽  
pp. 47-73
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Global Trade ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Regular Practice

This chapter focuses on American mathematical schoolbooks from the age of revolutions, as well as associated genres such as manuals on bookkeeping, navigation, and insurance. Knowledge of these fields was crucial for the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century voyages of commerce and discovery that connected the Atlantic and Pacific, and these books introduced a wide variety of readers, including women, to the world of global trade. In their attention to the interrelated practices of calculation and speculation, these genres—in dialogue with literature on the lottery—taught readers the narrative dynamics of suspense that also informed the emerging genre of the novel. Like transoceanic travel narratives, novels were the textual companions to capitalism, offering readers regular practice in accommodating the sensations of expectation central to a world increasingly penetrated by global trade and its mechanisms of risk-taking and risk assessment. Novels emerged, in other words, as numberless representations of an increasingly number-driven world.

scholarly journals Lucy Steele, the Mistress of Sense and Sensibility, in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility

MANUSYA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Choedphong Uttama
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Sense And Sensibility ◽  
Social Debate

This paper interprets Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) in the context of the literary and social debate about “sense” and “sensibility” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century when the concept of sense was viewed with a suspicious eye as it might lead sensible persons to machination and manipulation; and, sensibility with a disapproving one as such it had been throughout the tradition of the anti-sentimental novel. This paper thus aims to argue that the portrayal of a female antagonist Lucy Steele who unites assumed sensibility and prudent, selfserving sense to achieve her ambitious aims shows that the novel was responsive to the belief promoted by the antisentimental works that sensibility could be feigned and used to dupe others and at the time rejected the idea that (too much) sense is a desirable quality.

scholarly journals A “Defect of Justice”: Congregationalism, the Calvinist Problem, and the Unitarian Solution in Sylvester Judd's Margaret

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Woods
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Small Body ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Improvement ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Village Society ◽  
Over Time

This article contributes to a small body of criticism concerning Sylvester Judd’s 1845 novel Margaret. Largely described as a “Transcendentalist” novel that critiques the Calvinist theology prevalent in late-eighteenth-early-nineteenth century New England village society, I argue for an interpretation of the novel that is concerned the interaction between Calvinism and the Congregationalist model of social and religious organization over time. Rather than just exposing the negative social ramifications Calvinist doctrines like total depravity can have on New England society, I assert that the novel exposes the limitations in Puritan Congregationalist ideals espoused by early figures such as John Winthrop through the example of Livingston. The new Unitarian-congregationalist model Livingston adopts in discarding Calvinism suggests Judd’s resolute faith in Winthrop’s original Congregationalist mission. Judd does not imagine a radical Utopia, but instead offers a more pragmatic reform that is fundamentally Unitarian in its emphasis on humanity's essential goodness and limitless capacity for moral improvement.

RURAL SOCIETY AND CROWD ACTION IN BOLOGNA, c. 1796–c. 1831

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 977-997 ◽  
Author(s):  
DORA M. DUMONT
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Rural Population ◽  
Rural Society ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural Studies ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Police Reports

Although the field of peasant and rural studies has done much to redeem the reputation of peasants in general, historians generally continue to consider the Italian rural population in the early nineteenth century largely extraneous to the story of national unification. However, police reports, court records, and chroniclers from Bologna provide descriptions of collective action that suggest a complex pattern of interaction with both local authorities and the shifting political context. While it remains true that with few exceptions rural communities had little to do with the Risorgimento directly, already during the Revolutionary and Restoration eras they engaged in collective action that reflected independent initiative in engaging with various types of authority rather than political ignorance or blind adherence to religion.

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