Charlotte Bronte 3 Objectives Introduction
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IDOL Institute of Distance and Online Learning ENHANCE YOUR QUALIFICATION, ADVANCE YOUR CAREER. 2 M.A.English Early British Fiction Course Code: MAE 604 Semester: First e-Lesson: 7 SLM Unit: 8 https://www.google.com/search?q=Greek+theatre www.cuidol.in Unit-8(MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL CHARLOTTE BRONTE 3 OBJECTIVES INTRODUCTION In this unit we shall be able to understand the Student will be introduced to Charlotte Bronte as about Charlotte Bronte a novelist Student will be introduced to his social and literary background of Charlotte Bronte Student will be able to understand Charlotte Bronte’s as a novelist Student will be able to understand Jane Eyre Student will be able to understand Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Jane Eyre www.cuidol.in Unit-8(MAE604) INSTITUTE OF DISTANCEAll right areAND reserved ONLINE LEARNINGwith CU-IDOL TOPICS TO BE COVERED 4 Charlotte Bronte: The Birth of the author His Social & Literary Background of Charlotte Bronte Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre www.cuidol.in Unit-8(MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL CHARLOTTE BRONTE 5 Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels became classics of English literature. She enlisted in school at Roe Head in January 1831, aged 14 years. Born: 21 April 1816, Thornton, United Kingdom Died: 31 March 1855, Haworth, United Kingdom Nickname: Currer Bell Movies: Jane Eyre, Woman and Wife, Wide Sargasso Sea, Orphan of Lowood, Sangdil, Shirley, Shanti Nilayam Charlotte Bronte | Biography, Books ... britannica.com www.cuidol.in Unit-8(MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL CHARLOTTE BRONTE 6 Charlotte Bronte | Biography, Books...britannica.com www.cuidol.in Unit-8(MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL CHARLOTTE BRONTE Charlotte Bronte:- 7 English novelist noted for Jane Eyre (1847), a strong narrative of a woman in conflict with her natural desires and social condition. The novel gave new truthfulness to Victorian fiction. She later wrote Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853). Her father was Patrick Brontë (1777–1861), an Anglican clergyman. Irish-born, he had changed his name from the more commonplace Brunty. After serving in several parishes, he moved with his wife, Maria Branwell Brontë, and their six small children to Haworth amid the Yorkshire moors in 1820, having been awarded a rectorship there. Soon after, Mrs. Brontë and the two eldest children (Maria and Elizabeth) died, leaving the father to care for the remaining three Charlotte Bronte | Biography, Books ... girls—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—and a boy, Branwell. britannica.com www.cuidol.in Unit-8(MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL CHARLOTTE BRONTE 8 In 1824 Charlotte and Emily, together with their elder sisters before their deaths, attended Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, near Kirkby Lonsdale, Lancashire. The fees were low, the food unattractive, and the discipline harsh. Charlotte condemned the school (perhaps exaggeratedly) long years afterward in Jane Eyre, under the thin disguise of Lowood Institution, and its principal, the Reverend William Carus Wilson, has been accepted as the counterpart of Mister Brocklehurst in the novel. www.cuidol.in Unit-8(MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL CHARLOTTE BRONTE 9 Charlotte and Emily returned home in June 1825, and for more than five years the Brontë children learned and played there, writing and telling romantic tales for one another and inventing imaginative games played out at home or on the desolate moors. In the autumn of 1845 Charlotte came across some poems by Emily, and that discovery led to the publication of a joint volume of Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846), or Charlotte, Emily, and Anne; the pseudonyms were assumed to preserve secrecy and avoid the special treatment that they believed reviewers accorded to women www.cuidol.in Unit-8(MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL CHARLOTTE BRONTE 10 The book was issued at their own expense. It received few reviews and only two copies were sold. Nevertheless, a way had opened to them, and they were already trying to place the three novels they had written. Charlotte failed to place The Professor: A Tale but had, however, nearly finished Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, begun in August 1846 in Manchester, where she was staying with her father, who had gone there for an eye operation. www.cuidol.in Unit-8(MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL CHARLOTTE BRONTE 11 When Smith, Elder and Company, declining The Professor, declared themselves willing to consider a three-volume novel with more action and excitement in it, she completed and submitted it at once. Jane Eyre was accepted, published less than eight weeks later (on October 16, 1847), and had an immediate success, far greater than that of the books that her sisters published the same year. www.cuidol.in Unit-8(MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL JANE EYRE 12 Jane Eyre is a novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published on 16 October 1847, by Smith, Elder & Co. of London, England, under the pen name "Currer Bell". When Jane Eyre (1847) was published by Charlotte Brontë under the masculine pseudonym Currer Bell, it was received with great acclaim by some critics, and harsh criticism by others. The conservative Lady Eastlake suggested that if the book was by a woman ‘she had long forfeited the society of her own sex’. www.cuidol.in Unit-8(MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL JANE EYRE 13 In addition to this lack of femininity, she also diagnosed a spirit of rebellion which she likened to the working class uprisings of the Chartists, with their demands for votes for the working people, and also the political revolutions which were then sweeping across Europe. Jane Eyre unsettled views as to how women should act and behave, suggesting, in Lady Eastlake’s eyes, almost an overthrowing of social order. Unlike the long-suffering heroines in Charlotte Brontë’s early writings, who pine away for the dashing, promiscuous Duke of Zamorna, Jane demands equality and respect. ‘Do you think’, she demands of Rochester, ‘I am an automaton? – a machine without feelings?’. She speaks to him as one spirit to another, ‘equal – as we are’ (ch. 23). www.cuidol.in Unit-8(MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL JANE EYRE 14 One can find, however, elements of this rebelliousness in the early writings, which cover a period of Brontë’s life from early adolescence to her late 20s. In ‘Visits in Verreopolis’ (1830), the noble Zenobia, who is deeply learned in the classics, is subject to ridicule by various males. The Duke of Wellington suggests that women are like swans, graceful in the water, but when they presume to leave their natural element, the home, they have an ‘unseemly waddle’ which entitles everyone ‘to laugh till their sides split at the spectacle’ www.cuidol.in Unit-8(MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL JANE EYRE 15 A novel creates its own internal world through the language that it uses, and this fictional world may be quite independent from the real physical world in which we live. Writing in the style of an autobiography, Brontë distinguishes Jane Eyre, who quite clearly from the purely fictional worlds of Angria and Glasstown, locates her work within the world of Victorian England. www.cuidol.in Unit-8(MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL JANE EYRE 16 But although Brontë's world is undoubtedly based on nineteenth- century society, it should be remembered that the world conjured in Jane Eyre is not reality: it is but a world constructed by Brontë in which to tell a story. A novel based only on the mores and customs of Victorian society would surely hold limited appeal today, except as a historical document, yet Jane Eyre retains power and force even in a post-modern world, as shown by its continued popularity and the many TV and film versions it has inspired. Perhaps Jane Eyre retains such power and relevance because Charlotte fabricated the book from the cloth of her own psyche, her own passionate nature, and so, although our culture has changed drastically since the book was written, the insights into human nature which Brontë gave us remain. www.cuidol.in Unit-8(MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL JANE EYRE 17 Taking this view makes the characters in Jane Eyre seem denizens of Charlotte's own psyche. Some of them, such as the passionate Bertha and the cold St John, personify aspects of her character, her emotional and logical natures. Others, such as Brocklehurst and John Reed, which seem more two dimensional, could be viewed more as scenery, foils against which the main characters define themselves. Jane herself is Charlotte's most highly resolved character. Over the course of the book readers come to know every aspect of her intimately as she moves through Brontë's world. Readers also come to know her through her reflections, as she embodies aspects of the other characters. www.cuidol.in Unit-8(MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL JANE EYRE 18 Charlotte seems to know Jane intimately, so intimately that it seems likely that Jane is Charlotte's avatar within her fictional world. If Brontë is Jane, it follows that the other characters which came from Brontë might also be aspects of Jane Through these aspects we see a development of tension within Jane between emotional and logical natures, and this tension is played out in the events of the book.Taking this argument further, if the book is seen as a reflection of Brontë's own psyche, the source of the various supernatural events described within the book must be Brontë herself.