Jane Eyre

244 Pages·2010·0.88 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Charlotte Brontë’s
JANE EYRE
Updated Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Modern Critical Interpretations: Jane Eyre,Updated Edition
©2007 Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2007 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre / Harold Bloom, editor. — Updated ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-9304-2
1. Brontë, Charlotte, 1816-1855. Jane Eyre. 2. Governesses in literature.
I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title: Jane Eyre. III. Series.
PR4167.J33C4 2006
823’.8—dc22 2006015135
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Contributing Editor: Pamela Loos
Cover designed by Keith Trego
Cover photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Jane Eyre: Lurid Hieroglyphics 7
Sally Shuttleworth
“Indian Ink”: Colonialism and
the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre 43
Susan Meyer
Thornfield and ‘The Dream to Repose on’: Jane Eyre 75
Susan Ostrov Weisser
Jane Eyreand the Secrets of Furious Lovemaking 97
Sandra M. Gilbert
The Enigma of St. John Rivers 123
Marianne Thormählen
St. John’s Way and the Wayward Reader 143
Jerome Beaty
Triumph and Jeopardy: The Shape of Jane Eyre 157
Heather Glen
Fairies and Feminism: Recurrent Patterns
in Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”
and Brontë’s Jane Eyre 175
Warren Edminster
vi Contents
The Wild English Girl: Jane Eyre 191
James Buzard
Chronology 217
Contributors 219
Bibliography 221
Acknowledgments 225
Index 227
Editor’s Note
My Introduction considers the vitalizing Byronism of Jane Eyre, which is
clearly sadistic, particularly evident in Jane’s dominance over the partly
maimed and partly blinded Rochester.
Sally Shuttleworth begins this volume with the argument that even the
“most private realms are constructed socially.”
Colonialism, another current mode of critical cant, is invoked by Susan
Meyer, while Susan Ostrov Weisser refreshingly acknowledges that Jane Eyre
attempts to achieve a private morality.
Sandra M. Gilbert, the major feminist literary critic, even more
refreshingly emphasizes Jane’s fierce sexuality, after which Marianne
Thormählen centers upon St. John Rivers, Jane’s more spiritual “double,”
whose character is allowed by Charlotte Brontë to remain rather ambiguous,
an enigma partly resolved by Jerome Beaty’s Bakhtinian reading.
In Heather Glen’s interpretation, the novel’s religious conclusion
points toward Charlotte Brontë’s own public era, while Warren Edminster
finds in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath a feminist precursor to the sexually vibrant
Jane Eyre.
James Buzard concludes this volume by describing Jane Eyre as a wild
being self-tamed, as Wordsworth and Coleridge had been, before her.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
The three Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily Jane, and Anne—are unique
literary artists whose works resemble one another’s far more than they do the
works of writers before or since. Charlotte’s compelling novel Jane Eyreand
her three lesser yet strong narratives—The Professor, Shirley, Villette—form
the most extensive achievement of the sisters, but critics and common
readers alike set even higher the one novel of Emily Jane’s, Wuthering
Heights, and a handful of her lyrical poems. Anne’s two novels—Agnes Grey
and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall—remain highly readable, although dwarfed
by Jane Eyreand the authentically sublime Wuthering Heights.
Between them, the Brontës can be said to have invented a relatively
new genre, a kind of northern romance, deeply influenced both by Byron’s
poetry and by his myth and personality, but going back also, more remotely
yet as definitely, to the Gothic novel and to the Elizabethan drama. In a
definite, if difficult to establish sense, the heirs of the Brontës include
Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence. There is a harsh vitalism in the Brontës
that finds its match in the Lawrence of The Rainbow and Women in Love,
though the comparison is rendered problematic by Lawrence’s moral zeal,
enchantingly absent from the Brontës’ literary cosmos.
The aesthetic puzzle of the Brontës has less to do with the mature
transformations of their vision of Byron into Rochester and Heathcliff, than
with their earlier fantasy-life and its literature, and the relation of that life
1