Speaker – John Farrell<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is sometimes overlooked that Jane Eyre is a classic Bildungsroman that narrates Jane’s formative years and spiritual education. Even more deliberately, it is a journey narrative. But Jane\u2019s travels follow two incompatible paths. Both paths are narratively constructed as pilgrimages. Charlotte Bront\u00eb\u2019s task in the novel\u2014and Jane\u2019s as well\u2014is to make these pilgrimages converge. Their convergence is achieved only as Jane learns to comprehend a poetic language that emerges mysteriously from the novel\u2019s narrative.
John P. (\u2018Jack\u2019) Farrell joined the English Department at UT in 1974 as an Associate Professor and retired in 2006 as Professor Emeritus. Among his publications are Revolution as Tragedy: The Dilemma of the Moderate from Scott to Arnold and more than fifty essays on Romantic and Victorian literature\u2014the latest of which is \u2018Romance Narrative in Hardy\u2019s A Pair of Blue Eyes\u2019. He is a founding member of the British Studies seminar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaker – John Farrell It is sometimes overlooked that Jane Eyre is a classic Bildungsroman that narrates Jane’s formative years and spiritual education. Even more deliberately, it is a journey narrative. But Jane\u2019s travels follow two incompatible paths. Both paths are narratively constructed as pilgrimages. Charlotte Bront\u00eb\u2019s task in the novel\u2014and Jane\u2019s as well\u2014is to make these pilgrimages converge. Their convergence […]","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/02\/19-02-27-BSLS.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"43.97M","filesize_raw":"46108928","date_recorded":"22-02-2019","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[119,40,118,116,117,120],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-107","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-austin","6":"tag-british-studies-lecture-series","7":"tag-english-department","8":"tag-jane-eyre","9":"tag-john-farrell","10":"tag-university-of-texas","11":"series-bsls","12":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":949,"post_author":"10","post_date":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content":"\n
Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":910,"post_author":"40","post_date":"2020-06-24 17:34:25","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-24 17:34:25","post_content":"\n John Farrell is a Professor Emeritus in the English Department. He received his Ph.D., from Indiana University in 1967 and went on to teach at the University of Kansas until 1974, when he joined the English Department faculty of UT Austin.\u00a0 His many honors and awards include several Faculty Research Assignment grants, the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, and the Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of Humanities.<\/p>\n","post_title":"John P. Farrell","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"john-p-farrell","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-24 17:34:25","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-24 17:34:25","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=910","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":" Very BRESNEHAN followed with<\/p>\n Sam Baker has arrived, and so we can begin. I’d<\/p>\n like to begin actually by saying that this is the Jet Thorold podium.<\/p>\n This is handcrafted. And this comes from the from Jack. And it’s<\/p>\n kind of a reminder that he was one of the founding members of the British Studies<\/p>\n Group. This goes back all the way to 1975. And so he has seen<\/p>\n a lot of changes.<\/p>\n So I won’t say anything more, actually, except I hope that Jack will explain how<\/p>\n the best pronunciation of Jane Eyre is. Go ahead, Jack.<\/p>\n Well, as as I was saying, I actually have heard Jane Eyre<\/p>\n presuming to get a, you know, a play on words. So you don’t hear that anymore. And I think the Jane<\/p>\n Eyre will suffice.<\/p>\n I by the way, I may have built this left<\/p>\n turn, but it’s nothing to what Roger has built in this<\/p>\n world class institution. And I’m always honored to take<\/p>\n part in it. I can’t. I can’t believe it’s been going since 1975.<\/p>\n There we are. And we have the books to prove it.<\/p>\n Well, I want to talk about one of the Brontes today. And<\/p>\n there was a time when they tended to be seeing Emily and Charlie<\/p>\n as a kind of pair of Yorkshire goonies. Nobody quite<\/p>\n knew what to make of them. And I still think that Emily Bronte does not<\/p>\n get her just recognition as a truly great novelist.<\/p>\n Certainly somebody who can sit at the table with George Eliot and<\/p>\n it in my mind, she is the Victorian Virginia Woolf, because of<\/p>\n the subtlety of her feelings, the depth of her perception, the complexity<\/p>\n of her emotional judgments. So Emily still,<\/p>\n I think, needs to be relieved of some condescension. Charlotte,<\/p>\n on the other hand, was enormously popular right from the beginning. Jane Eyre was an immediate<\/p>\n bestseller and all Charlotte was was always successful as a<\/p>\n novelist, but also some of<\/p>\n the same condescension. You know, carried on<\/p>\n even with her. And I thought I’d give you a<\/p>\n little example of that. Things have improved greatly. You put this is the kind<\/p>\n of thing when I started teaching the novel, this is the kind of thing that you might come across<\/p>\n with respect to Charlotte. This is a parody by of all people,<\/p>\n Bret Hart called Miss Mix. And I’m just<\/p>\n gonna read you a paragraph. Blunder Bore Hall The Seed of<\/p>\n James roared Jester. Esquire was encompassed by dark pines<\/p>\n and funereal hemlocks on all sides. The wind sang weirdly<\/p>\n in the turrets and moaned through the long, drawn avenues of the park as I<\/p>\n approached the house. I saw several mysterious figures flip before the windows,<\/p>\n and a yell of demonic laughter answered my summons at the bell,<\/p>\n which was answered by a scared looking old woman who showed me into the library.<\/p>\n I entered overcome with conflicting emotions. I was dressed<\/p>\n in a narrow gown of dark serge, trimmed with black bugles,<\/p>\n a thick green shawl was pinned across my breast. My hands were encased in black.<\/p>\n Half mittens work with steel beads. On my feet were<\/p>\n large patterns, originally the property of my deceased grandmother<\/p>\n as I passed before a mirror, I could not help glancing at it, nor could I disguise myself<\/p>\n that I was not handsome. Drawing.<\/p>\n Excuse me, she she. The elderly woman bites her into the library<\/p>\n and she enters and draws a chair into the recess. I<\/p>\n sat down with folded hands, calmly awaiting the arrival of my master. Once<\/p>\n or twice, a fearful yell rang through the house, or the rattling of chairs and<\/p>\n curses uttered in a deep, manly voice broke upon the oppressive stillness.<\/p>\n I began to feel my soul rising with the emergency of the moment.<\/p>\n You look alarmed, miss. You don’t hear anything, my dear, do you? Ask<\/p>\n the housekeeper nervously. Nothing. Whatever. I mark calmly as a terrific scream,<\/p>\n followed by the dragging of chains and tables in the rooms above ground. For a<\/p>\n moment, my reply. It is the silence, on the contrary, which has made me foolishly nervous.<\/p>\n The housekeeper looked at me approvingly and instantly made tea. I drank nine cups.<\/p>\n So that’s the kind of thing that that used to sort of<\/p>\n foreign frequently in discussions of the Brontes. But but that has much improved. Thank<\/p>\n heavens. In any case, I’m going to be talking about Jane<\/p>\n Eyre. And the first thing to look at in Jane Eyre is its plot.<\/p>\n And the first thing to notice about the plot is the scheme of Jane’s journeys.<\/p>\n She begins at Gateshead. Wonderful place to begin. She then goes<\/p>\n on to Lowood and things get very low at Lowood.<\/p>\n Then they get worse at her next stop. Thornfield Which is very thorny.<\/p>\n Then comes Marsh End, where Jane has to struggle through the marshes.<\/p>\n Finally, she partially retraces her journey until she comes to a semi Edenic garden.<\/p>\n Co-funding. Just from the names we can tell. This is an allegorical<\/p>\n journey and that the novel is fashioned in the first instance after John<\/p>\n bunyan’s late 17th century classic Pilgrim’s Progress,<\/p>\n bunyan’s immensely popular book tells the story of a protagonist<\/p>\n named Christian who was weighed down by the great burdens of his sin.<\/p>\n Christian must travel from the grievers city of destruction and discover the celestial<\/p>\n city, the city on a hill where he and his wife Christiana<\/p>\n will find salvation along the way, they must pass through awful places<\/p>\n like Vanity Fair, the slew of Despond and the wicked gate.<\/p>\n Excuse me. bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress plots Christian search for his spiritual<\/p>\n identity across a symbolically demarcated landscape where temporal and spatial boundaries<\/p>\n create a guide to for the protagonist and no less for the reader.<\/p>\n Moreover, our recognition of bunyan’s allegory as a model for Jane Eyre<\/p>\n is read fast, reinforced by numerous allusive passages and Bronte’s text,<\/p>\n even the final chapter is awash with explicit references to bunyan’s book.<\/p>\n But however much the narrative is formed by bunyan’s allegorical journey,<\/p>\n it simultaneously mirrors in its motions and altogether antithetical<\/p>\n journey founded on quite a different pilgrimage. The second journey<\/p>\n is brewed from the heady potion that Byron had created in Child<\/p>\n Harrell’s pilgrimage. The sensational and boisterously erotic poem<\/p>\n that appeared in the four cantos during 1812 to 1818, and<\/p>\n that made Biron by far the most popular poet of his time.<\/p>\n One of his devoted admirers was Charlotte Bronte, who in her young years memorized<\/p>\n hundreds of lines of fire. The most provocative aspect of his fiery<\/p>\n poetic was the dark, brooding, guilty figure of the Byron ahero.<\/p>\n There is no question that Rochester Jane Eyre descends from this dangerously attractive wanderer<\/p>\n as the following lonesome chariot, Charles Harold will suggest the poem’s narrator<\/p>\n is considering the figure he has created in Harold Long<\/p>\n absent. Harold reappears at last. He of the breast which fain<\/p>\n know more, would feel wrong with the wounds which kill not but never<\/p>\n heal. Get time. Who changes all had altered<\/p>\n him in soul and aspect as an age.<\/p>\n Years steal fire from the mind as vigor from the limb and life’s<\/p>\n enchanted cup. But sprach sparkles near the brim.<\/p>\n His springs of life were poisoned. And again,<\/p>\n Montas text is littered with allusions to Byron’s poetry and<\/p>\n the bionic hero. Jane’s position thus becomes<\/p>\n what Yates would later call in one of his majestic late poems, the subject of a<\/p>\n dialog of self and soul. Jane is journeying in a double direction<\/p>\n where her effort to discover her spiritual identity, which somehow must somehow comprehend<\/p>\n the self divisions and the multiple moral dimensions of her being.<\/p>\n Even if we as readers do not recognize the bunion esq and by running frames of<\/p>\n identity the Bronte’s using, we soon get caught up in Jane’s probing and often<\/p>\n unsettling accounts of her fantasies, anxieties and childhood speculations<\/p>\n on who she is and where she is. There is, for example, the<\/p>\n trauma of her experience in the red room at Gateshead, where her habitual feelings<\/p>\n of fear, betrayal and anger deepen into, quote, a dark deposit<\/p>\n in a disturbed mind. Bronte’s highly imagistic presentation<\/p>\n of her heroine in many such passages portrayed Jane strenuous efforts<\/p>\n to penetrate what amounts to her Proteau by Roenick identity.<\/p>\n Yet at other times, the four Lauren child ripens into the position of a steady,<\/p>\n mature narrator who is stabilized by her penetrating judgment and<\/p>\n convincing perception. Here’s a passage from Jane at Lowood, where she<\/p>\n is one morning eating her scantly breakfast. My vacant<\/p>\n detention soon found lively attraction in the spectacle of a little hungry,<\/p>\n hungry rabbit, which came and chirped on the twigs of a leafless<\/p>\n cherry tree nailed against the wall of the case.<\/p>\n I crumbled a morsel of my roll and tugged at the sash to put out crumbs<\/p>\n on the windowsill. A passage like this, of course, implies an equivalence<\/p>\n between the deprived Jane and the hungry Robin. Both are trapped in a<\/p>\n threatening environment. But the parallel between them is managed by the Jane who<\/p>\n is seeing. And seeking a moral center.<\/p>\n The novel repeatedly prompts in us a pervasive shifting of focus between<\/p>\n Jane’s fearful experiences like those in the red room. And<\/p>\n Jane’s account of her morally intact and mature being. The kind<\/p>\n of shifting we must do in order to read the novel duplicates, the<\/p>\n kind of shifting Jane mustn’t do in order to read herself.<\/p>\n In effect, the framing of the bunion esq and by Raonic journeys that locate Jane’s pilgrimages<\/p>\n actually signal not the contradictions of self and soul that divide her, but a<\/p>\n language of symbolic action. As Kenneth Burke would call it, that creates at the level<\/p>\n of plot what Jane experiences at the level of character. To illustrate<\/p>\n this point, I want to turn to another episode at Lowood. Jane is<\/p>\n befriended at Lowood by a student even more disadvantaged than she. The appropriately<\/p>\n named Helen Burns. Helen is steeped in the Bunyan account of identity,<\/p>\n though unfairly and miserably treated at Lowood, Helen practices a fervent evangelical<\/p>\n faith. Jane is mightily impressed by Helen’s ardor and<\/p>\n conviction. She draws closer and closer to Helen as Helen declines<\/p>\n into a deadly illness. Jane’s own spiritual fervor is manifested<\/p>\n as Helen warns Jane against, quote, her too impulsive to vehement<\/p>\n love of human beings. She tells Jane as though reading a chapter<\/p>\n Bundanoon to her. That there are greater spiritual resources,<\/p>\n quote, than your feeble self can attain. Quote,<\/p>\n Besides Earth and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom<\/p>\n of spirit, that world is round us, for it is everywhere. And those spirits watch<\/p>\n for us as they are commissioned to guard us. Helen’s greatest<\/p>\n impact on Jane comes one evening when she shares an hour of close connection with Helen<\/p>\n and Miss Temple, Lowood, one caring teacher.<\/p>\n Jane is so enthralled by feeling accepted rather than a stranger that she listens in rapture<\/p>\n to Helen’s explanation of her religious convictions as Helen sermonettes<\/p>\n reaches its climax. The text gives us this wonderful description,<\/p>\n quote. Then her soul sat on her lips<\/p>\n and language flowed from one source. I cannot tell.<\/p>\n Has a girl of 14, a heart large enough, vigorous enough to<\/p>\n express such a swelling spring of pure full fervor<\/p>\n eloquence. The image of Helen Souled sitting on her lips<\/p>\n magnificently captures the near coalescence of meaning and being<\/p>\n that the whole novel takes as its project. And Jane, enthralled<\/p>\n rather than baffled by her realization that the language of Helen’s discourse is<\/p>\n grounded in some inspired but unknown source.<\/p>\n Janus, again, confronted by a miracle of utterance that the novel itself is<\/p>\n trying to register for us. We can take yet another instance of the novels, Buried Language,<\/p>\n to see how deeply Bronte is learing Jane’s complex identity. The<\/p>\n specific case I’m going to quote returns us for a moment to Gateshead,<\/p>\n but its relevance permeates the narrative. Jane, as usual,<\/p>\n is suspected of disobedience and has been hauled before the Rev. Mr. Brocklehurst<\/p>\n to be chastised. Brocklehurst wisdom about young children<\/p>\n extends no further than his belligerent Calvinism allows.<\/p>\n Well, Jane Eyre, he says to her. And are you a good child?<\/p>\n Impossible to reply to this in affirmative. My little world held a contrary<\/p>\n opinion, so I was silent. Mrs. Reid answered for me by an expressive<\/p>\n shake of the head, adding soon, perhaps the less said on that subject, the better.<\/p>\n Mr. Brocklehurst. Sorry, indeed, to hear it.<\/p>\n She and I must have some talk. And bending from the perpendicular,<\/p>\n he installed his person in the arm chair opposite. Come here, he<\/p>\n said. I stepped across the rug. He placed me square<\/p>\n and straight before him. What a face he had.<\/p>\n Now that it was almost on a level with mine. What a great nose<\/p>\n and what a mouth and what large permanent teeth.<\/p>\n Do you know where the wicked go after death? He asks her. They go to hell. Was my<\/p>\n ready reply. And should you like to fall into that pit?<\/p>\n And be burning there forever? No, sir. What must you<\/p>\n do to avoid it? I must keep in good health and not die.<\/p>\n So here you have a kind of stereotypical<\/p>\n bunny in this scene and Jane’s by Romick<\/p>\n Rebellion as a counter statement to it. And what I’m trying to<\/p>\n suggest is that this is what happens throughout the novel. There are these two discourses<\/p>\n that confront each other and speak to each other. And Jane is gradually<\/p>\n becoming the product in the sense of<\/p>\n those discourses, as in the case of Jane and the Hungry Robin.<\/p>\n The novel here assimilates a story to yet another reservoir of expressive language<\/p>\n in a fairy tale. It draws heavily on this reservoir. How<\/p>\n can it be that, Jane, at every stage of her pilgrimages, encounters two false sisters,<\/p>\n together with a distant male figure, a snobbish surrogate mother and an INDISCERNABLE<\/p>\n fairy godmother? Obviously, the novel is providing<\/p>\n us with a version of Cinderella, much less Red Riding Hood. One<\/p>\n that seems tainted by Picasso since the principal figures appear in distorted and displaced<\/p>\n but still readable form. At Thornfield, this version of the fable<\/p>\n appears in the narrative. When the lofty Dowager Lady Ingram visits for an extended<\/p>\n stay with her two daughters, Blanche and Mary, the former is marked by,<\/p>\n quote, her arched and haughty lip and the latter by her expressionless<\/p>\n face. From her obscure spot in the room think<\/p>\n fireplace. Jane generously allows that,<\/p>\n quote, most observers would call them attractive. Meanwhile,<\/p>\n quote, I saw Mr. Rochester smile, his stern features<\/p>\n soften and his eyes grew, both brilliant and gentle. Rochester<\/p>\n is becoming a proper Prince Charming. But the undercurrent fairy<\/p>\n tale is revealing Jane’s smoldering rage and jealousy.<\/p>\n Never a good sign for Cinderella. However, Jane has been privileged by a psychic<\/p>\n fairy godmother who has a special gift for intuitive knowledge.<\/p>\n Quote, He is not to them what he is to me. He is not of<\/p>\n their kind. I believe he is mine.<\/p>\n I am sure he is. I feel akin to him. I<\/p>\n understand the language of his countenance and movements through rank and wealth, though.<\/p>\n Excuse me, though, rank and wealth several rows widely. I have something<\/p>\n in my brain and in my heart and nerves that assimilates<\/p>\n me mentally to him, not the jinkx cannot quite identify<\/p>\n the something in her heart and blood that forms her connection with Rochester.<\/p>\n But since we know the story of Cinderella and Prince Charming, we readily recognize the dynamics<\/p>\n of desire that motivate Jane at Thornfield. Rochester has awakened<\/p>\n Jane’s own by Romick being. Yet Rochester’s soul<\/p>\n does not sit on his lips. Quite the contrary.<\/p>\n Even in the earliest extended conversations she has with him, she rejects<\/p>\n his conviction such as that the difference between a guide and a seducer<\/p>\n is easily recognized. Jane is bewildered by what he says. To speak<\/p>\n truth, sir, I don’t understand you at all. I cannot keep up the conversation<\/p>\n because it got out of my depth. What Jane feels she is losing is<\/p>\n her trusty sense of authenticity, her frequently renewed sense of what road<\/p>\n to take. Things get so bad in the toilet. Thornfield<\/p>\n that she finally realizes she has been snared, quote, in a web of mystification.<\/p>\n She wonders, quote, What unseen spirit has been sitting for weeks by my heart,<\/p>\n watching its workings. While leaving her without answers and without direction,<\/p>\n the red room of her distraught childhood is gradually reappearing as the mad<\/p>\n woman’s attic, a place where speech is being replaced by screams.<\/p>\n The degeneration of speech and the screams marks the development of impending crisis<\/p>\n at Thornfield, which has become a remarkably unsavory place as the<\/p>\n narrative unfolds. Its account of Thornfield. We were given<\/p>\n scenes where the entertainment is, tellingly, games of<\/p>\n charades. The Schrader’s raids are followed by the arrival.<\/p>\n Excuse me, by the arrival of a gypsy fortune teller who surprisingly requests Jane<\/p>\n as a client. And whose strange thorn wrapped me in<\/p>\n a kind of deceit. This episode no sooner concludes than a foreign travel and<\/p>\n named Mason shows up, arriving apparently by Jet from the West Indies.<\/p>\n His presence turns Rochester whiter than ashes, despite his shock. Rochester treats<\/p>\n Mason as though he was an old college chum. Once Rochester gets Jane alone, he<\/p>\n attempts to explain himself to her by offering a disguised autobiography that takes the<\/p>\n form of his own by running pilgrimage, but ends by confessing, but ends<\/p>\n by confessing to a lot of hanky panky, both in Jamaica, where he met Mason<\/p>\n and in Paris, where he diplomatically revealed he knew quite<\/p>\n well what Paris was for. After all of this, you half<\/p>\n expect to see her alive striding into this room saying there’s nothing but lying<\/p>\n and mendacity in this place. Nothing but byan and mendacity.<\/p>\n The central issue crisis of the novel occurs, of course, after Jane has finally agreed to marry the deceived<\/p>\n in Rochester. When a lawyer from London, Mr. Briggs, who represents both Richard<\/p>\n Mason, the elusive friend of Rochester, as well as Mason’s sister Bertha,<\/p>\n breaks up the wedding in progress because Bertha is Rochester’s erstwhile wife.<\/p>\n The following morning, Jane wakes with all the anxiety of crisis still upon her and asks<\/p>\n herself what she used to do. The answer, quote, The answer my<\/p>\n mind gave leave Thornfield at once was so<\/p>\n prompt. And so dread that I stopped my ears.<\/p>\n The moment epitomizes the Thornfield portion of Jane’s pilgrimage. She has received<\/p>\n so many warnings about the obscure roads she has taken that she has been stopping<\/p>\n her years and not learned. Bertha’s shrill screams<\/p>\n and pyrotechnics should have been enough to send Jane packing. But Rochester<\/p>\n has a fetish for hiding mistresses. He tries a new approach<\/p>\n with Jane, quote, You should go to a place I have in the south of France. France is always<\/p>\n getting. Coming up here. Dangerous moments. You should go to a place I have in south of France.<\/p>\n A white washed villa on the Mediterranean shores.<\/p>\n There you shall live a happy and guarded life. Attempting often, no doubt,<\/p>\n but Jane finally eludes the by ironic law with the help of another Red Broom dream.<\/p>\n This time the dream discloses, quote, a white human form that speaks to her<\/p>\n spirit. Jane describes the spirit’s tone as immeasurably distant,<\/p>\n but its whisper is immediately present. She has retrieved the power<\/p>\n of pre linguistic communication that enables her moral consciousness<\/p>\n and her sense of reality. The form says, my daughter<\/p>\n flee temptation. And she answered simply, I will.<\/p>\n There are many ways to read this exchange has the critical literature on the novel shows. But however,<\/p>\n reread it. The episode reinforces the main point I had been making here, namely<\/p>\n that Jane as a character reflects the plot of the novel itself through a complex<\/p>\n interweaving of voices, discourses and symbolic actions that describe<\/p>\n its drama of self-discovery. Jane makes several different attempts to<\/p>\n elucidate the access she seems to have to a sort of the language of the inner self<\/p>\n akin to Helen Burns’s inspired utterance. And missing entirely from<\/p>\n the shrouded world of Thornfield as she resists Rochester, for example,<\/p>\n she listens for a quote, a gentle Ariel to compose her responses.<\/p>\n But all the voices of nature around her, she says, remain inarticulate.<\/p>\n She is accustomed, as she puts it, to opening, quote, her inward ear to a tale that was<\/p>\n never ending a tale. My imagination created a narrative continuously<\/p>\n while her mind’s eye dwell, quote, on whatever bright<\/p>\n vision rolls before it. For the reader, this experience is palpable<\/p>\n since the interweaving I have been outlining is altogether present as multiple allusions,<\/p>\n echoes, parallels and subtext cross one another on the page.<\/p>\n Quite unexpectedly, Jane, Plum’s the heart of her metter language in a quiet,<\/p>\n contemplative moment at Thornfield, where, unprompted, she gives us a complicated<\/p>\n account of how her inward ear in her mind’s eye function<\/p>\n in the workings of her imagination. Oddly, this passage is<\/p>\n nearly entirely overlooked in the critical to her. But for me, it seems to me absolutely<\/p>\n crucial to the novel, quote, presentiment<\/p>\n of strange things. And so our sympathies and so are signs.<\/p>\n And the three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not yet<\/p>\n found the key. I never laughed at sentiments in my life<\/p>\n because I have had strange ones of my own sympathies. I believe<\/p>\n exist, for instance, between a far distant, long absent holding<\/p>\n a strange relative asserting notwithstanding their alienation,<\/p>\n the unity of the source to which each traces his art.<\/p>\n Whose workings baffle mortal comprehension. And signs<\/p>\n for all we know, maybe. But the sympathies of nature with man.<\/p>\n The passage is extraordinarily pertinent to the theme we have been exploring presentiment<\/p>\n of for tellings of the future. A plot projection, so to speak,<\/p>\n such as the red room dreams that recur at pivotal moments in Jane’s narrative<\/p>\n or prefatory tales that give us guideposts to the narrative we are following.<\/p>\n Sympathies, as Jane is using the term, constitute telepathic communications<\/p>\n that arise from the mystic bonds of a common life that is stronger than<\/p>\n the barriers of time and space. And signs form<\/p>\n an alternative language awards worthy in discourse recollected<\/p>\n by the self in special moments. That is, WORDSWORTH said to<\/p>\n his Bront\u00eb and readers, for example, open consciousness to poetic<\/p>\n faith. Or they could be spoiler alerts like explosive<\/p>\n lightning strikes that will split a horse chestnut down the middle to warn a naive young woman that<\/p>\n she should get out of Dodge in a hurry. James,<\/p>\n exposition of presentiment, sympathies and signs refers to phenomenon<\/p>\n that permeate Bronte’s novel and that illuminate both the dilemmas and the decisions<\/p>\n James faces as she says she feels ensnared in a web<\/p>\n of mystification. And in her journeys, she calls on what she sometimes<\/p>\n addresses as, quote, some good spirit, unquote,<\/p>\n that can provide her with the self-knowledge she needs to deal with the questions that<\/p>\n would set her. For Jane, that self-knowledge can only be grasped within<\/p>\n the framework of a transcendent language that inherently dissolves mystification<\/p>\n at the zeenat of the illusions and mendacity that twists her whole world.<\/p>\n Jane explicitly tells Rochester what a transcendent language is.<\/p>\n Quote, I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom<\/p>\n invention analogies, nor even of mortal flesh. It is<\/p>\n my spirit that addresses your spirit. She wants<\/p>\n no more of seeing through a glass darkly. It is difficult to define<\/p>\n the latent language that characterizes Jane’s idea of speaking spirit to spirit,<\/p>\n though, as I have been saying, the text is imbued with an approximation of what she speaks.<\/p>\n I think we can borrow Freud’s term, the uncanny or when, with<\/p>\n which he introduced in a long essay of 1919 and identified as a puzzling perception<\/p>\n of the familiar in something of the unfamiliar. Excuse me. In something familiar.<\/p>\n As Freud puts it, the uncanny quote is in reality nothing new or alien<\/p>\n but something which is familiar, an old established in the mind and which has become<\/p>\n alienated from it to a process of repression. A decisive<\/p>\n example of the uncanny for Freud is a manifestation of the ID in the presentation<\/p>\n of the ego. What I want to do is credit Charlotte Bronte<\/p>\n with introducing into the narrative structure of Jane Eyre. A layer of uncanny<\/p>\n language. Especially in the sense that Jane is guided and enlightened<\/p>\n by discourses that she can understand, even though they always remain<\/p>\n mysterious to her. There are two other stages of Jane’s<\/p>\n journey that involve marvelous use of Bronte’s uncanny, novelistic twists.<\/p>\n Jane, having gotten the message to flee Thornfield at last Braves the open ronit<\/p>\n in order to escape the fate of being converted by Rochester into<\/p>\n being converted by branches into another berthon Mason. Of course, our journey<\/p>\n goes badly so that she soon finds herself friendless, penniless, utterly alone<\/p>\n and no g._p._s in spite of these problems and without a clue<\/p>\n as to where she is going. She manages to arrive at a shining light on a hill<\/p>\n top, which is easily identifiable as bunyan’s Celestial City.<\/p>\n Not only that, but of all the locales in England, the cottage she<\/p>\n comes to is home to her only living family. Three cousins<\/p>\n whom she does not know she has. Only her two<\/p>\n female cousins are at home and a kindly motherly figure who watches over<\/p>\n all of them. She might as well have called herself Cinderella instead of Jane Elliot,<\/p>\n especially since an Adonis, her male cousin by the name of sin, Joan Rivers, soon<\/p>\n shows up as a highly eligible Prince Charming. However, though, Jane<\/p>\n is quite happy to have found female cousins and a surrogate mother, Cintron proves a dud.<\/p>\n As opposed to Rochester, who was the prince of darkness, tempting Jane into the precincts<\/p>\n of desire, Singerman out bunyan’s Bunyan. He excites<\/p>\n and Jane not passion, but piety. Jane has Recher voices in<\/p>\n her head. The fulcrum of Sinjin regard for Jane is this increasingly<\/p>\n important plea to her that she come out to India with him and be his<\/p>\n missionary’s wife. Granted, he does not want to tuck<\/p>\n her away in an attic, but yet he is just as committed to making Jane<\/p>\n a prisoner of his power. But again, Jane is rescued by<\/p>\n the scripts that reflect her real identity. Amazingly,<\/p>\n through Saint John, Saint John Jane comes to learn of her own connections<\/p>\n with Mason family and that despite the many deceits that her wicked<\/p>\n stepmother perpetrated on her, she is heiress to the Mason fortune.<\/p>\n And as a result, she becomes not only and perhaps super abundantly<\/p>\n the pilgrim who has reached the shining city, the Cinderella who has gained a two sister<\/p>\n loving family and an actual fairy godmother who can and does<\/p>\n distribute her surprise inheritance to her newfound cousin.<\/p>\n All of Jane’s fantastic fulfillments of her evolving identity at Morehouse actually<\/p>\n derived from another triumph of her expressive self as she grows into the roles<\/p>\n that her discoveries at the cottage on the hill established for her. She remains, as usual,<\/p>\n partly anonymous and masked. But one day, Sinjin, who has been<\/p>\n in touch with Brigs and who has heard much of the story of a woman known as Jane Eyre,<\/p>\n receives some documents that have been retrieved from Gateshead. Among these papers<\/p>\n are discarded sketch papers that the real Jane has made.<\/p>\n He shows the supposed Jane Elliot some shabby slips of paper,<\/p>\n quote, with stains of ultramarine and familiar.<\/p>\n In the ravish margin of the drawing paper, the actual Jane sees<\/p>\n quote, in my own handwriting, the words Jane Eyre.<\/p>\n From the smudges of her art, Jane appears.<\/p>\n Jane. Jane. It just this inchoate and uncanny discourses blend into<\/p>\n Jane’s autobiography, the preliminary art of the sketches instantly<\/p>\n disclose who she is and where she has come from. It is not Sinjin<\/p>\n who is discovering Jane. It is Jane discovering Jane.<\/p>\n Even more dramatically, Jane, who is at the brink of accepting a programmatic marriage to Sinjin<\/p>\n for the sake of the moral duties he has nearly persuaded her to accept.<\/p>\n She hears a voice, quote, a known love, well-remembered voice, calling<\/p>\n her over and an immense distance. It must be said telepathically<\/p>\n from the heart of nature itself, filling her as we discover in the final<\/p>\n two chapters with presentiment, sympathies and signs.<\/p>\n The uncanny language that flourishes so powerfully and so indelibly in<\/p>\n the interstices of the written text finally unites. Jane with herself<\/p>\n and the narrator with the reader. Bront\u00eb has positioned Jane between<\/p>\n the symbolic utterances that frame her story and the an unbearable story<\/p>\n that constitutes her identity. Thanks very much.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/107\/she-moves-in-mysterious-ways-jane-eyres-journeys.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/107\/she-moves-in-mysterious-ways-jane-eyres-journeys.mp3","audio_player":"