Jane Eyre - Criticism - Mindmap in A Level and IB English Literature

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Created by: Lauren Sadler
Created on: 13-05-15 16:52

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Criticism
- Marxist
  - Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton
    - Allude to the ambiguity of Jane's employment as a governess, with her role evidently contradicting her social mobility with Rochester
    - During the time Jane Eyre was written, was a time of social rebuttal and tensions, these are reflected both in the representation of Jane's passion and desire, and fear of isolation
- Postcolonial
- Psychoanalytical
  - Focus on myth that suggest new and interesting ways to read the novel. Such as that Rochester's first wife: Bertha Mason is Jane's double.
    - Elizabeth Imlay
      - Noted both women are represented at different times in very similar ways. (Both locked up)
- Early Critical Reviews
- Feminist
  - Read Jane Eyre as a radical text in which a woman writer wrote successfully about the treatment of women in her society
    - Gilbert and Gubar
      - Jane describing her mind as a lightened health is prophetic of the flames consuming Thornfield
      - All the female characters have overtones of male suppression for example, Miss Temple forced to keep her anger quiet in front of Mr Brocklehurst
      - In Thornfield's attic and battlements 'Jane's own rationality' and 'her irrationality intersect'. In close proximity to Bertha Mason at these moments, and hearing her laugh, Jane seeks her 'own secret self'.
      - Jane's 'terrible journey across the moors suggests the essential homelessness.. of woman in a patriarchal society'.
- Walter Allen
  - Asserts it is the desire of women 'to be mastered, but to be mastered by a man so lofty in his scorn for women as to make the very fact of being mastered a powerful adjunct to the woman's self-esteem'.
  - Suggests Rochester's mutilation at the end of the novel is a symbol of Jane's triumph in the battle of sexes.
- Robert B. Martin
  - Asserts each location in novel (Bildungsro.) adopts characteristic tone
    - The Gateshead section dominated by a sense of '‘passion, sensuality, emotion, superstition, and other manifestations of the non-rational’