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Unitatea de nvare V.
Romanacieri:
3. The Brontes
Obiective:
3. The Brontes
Their Lives
Their Works
and fairy-tale have often been noted and on a very simple plot level the
influence is obvious. We should thus not be too worried by the magical
coincidences which allow the heroine to gain her ends so spectacularly. An
element of wish-fulfilment in the story appealed to Victorian readers and still
appeals, helping this to become one of the most universally popular novels in
English. The fairy tales elements do not end with the plot however, and are
exploited throughout the novel. Jane, whose surname is Eyre, is compared by
critics (Rochester) to an elf. It is clear that in Charlotte Brontes terms the
feminine spiritual element is civilizing the unprepossessing masculine one,
guiding and taming him until he is fit for union with her.
may take some traits from Mr. Constantin Heger, the Belgian schoolmaster
she met in 1832. His descent from the Byronic hero imaginations is clear.
Though the Rivers sisters mirror to some extent in an idealized fashion the
home personas of the Bronte sisters, they are not to be confused with the
real Emily and Ann.
There are many elements of visual description in Jane Eyre, some showing acute
observation, like the landscape of the road to Hay on the January day when Jane first meets
Rochester. Bewicks woodcuts are not far from this scene. Bewick is also present in the very first
scene when Jane is hiding from her cruel cousins. The authors short-sightedness meant that she
studied landscape partly through Bewick and other engravers. The coldness of the winter scenes
in Bewick emphasises the loneliness of some humans, and this chimes with the Brontes interest
in orphans and the tyranny of the adult world over the world of childhood. The scenes involving
Mr. Brocklehurst, including those at Lowood, explore the nature of childhood resentment.
Ch. Bronte was able to use Jane Eyre as a critique of evangelical
religion, which exerted some attraction for her own personality but which she
rejected here as heartless and mechanical, though the sense of duty
exhibited by St. John Rivers is not disparaged. He is approved as a
conscientious person, but his inconclusive relationship with Rosamund is
presented critically. The empty ritual of Bible reading at Lowood while Miss
Scatcherd torment her victim provides a black image.
Jane Eyre was on the whole well-received by the early critics, who
noted its passion and warmth. The first person narrative enabled them to
come close to the life experience of the underprivileged heroine and
sympathy was quickly established. It is possible to see the book as a feminist
text, both in the sense that the female first person is the emotional centre of
the story, and also since Rochester and the other made characters are shown
as inadequate. He learns through suffering, but it is not clear whether St.
John Rivers is capable of learning, and Broklehurst is a stereotype. Subsidiary
female characters, good or bad are generally more credible than male,
though
Bertha
Mason
is
seemed
externally:
deviant,
outraged
and
menacing . Jane Eyre successfully raises the woman question high on the
agenda, but it was perhaps more important still to the author to portray Jane
as a champion of the human race, irrespective of gender. She clearly stands
for the individual against a deforming society, a child rather than a girl only
against harsh education, a servant than rather merely a governess against
the bland superiority of the gentry, represented by Blanche Ingram, and
sincerity against the blandishments of wealth which considers it can buy
anything.
However, the traditional plot, in which an oppressed orphan magically
but deservedly overcomes loneliness and finds a strong partner who is finally
fit to be her equal is clearly a major reason for the success of the book. It
stands, among other things, as the archetypal romance, by which many
subsequent novels have been influenced. The character of Jane is imbued
with so much life that generations of readers have believed in her as the real
author of the book.
The genuinely popular nature of the novel at one time led critics to
underestimate its artistry, but in recent years its importance has been
readily acknowledged.
Though she wrote less than Charlotte, she is some ways the greatest of
the three sisters. Her one novel Wuthering Heights (1847) is unique in
English literature. It breathes the very spirit of the wild, desolate moors. Its
chief characters are conceived in gigantic proportions, and their passions
have an elemental force, which carries them to the realm of poetry. In a
series of climaxes, the sustained intensity of the novel is carried to almost
unbelievable peaks of passion, described with a stark, unflinching realism.
the cruelties of the climate, the raging passions that burn within them and
destroy them, or the fierce cruelty of the satanic Heathcliff.
Nelly is, in short, an important character in the story. She was created
by the author to guide the reader to the point from which he/she is forced,
because of the need to challenge Nellys views, to share more deeply the
pain of dwellers of Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights, and by
sharing their pain to understand them better, to be moved by their plights,
and not to be shocked by their excesses. The catharsis of the reader is
impelled by Nelly.
Lockwood performs a different function, and yet an important one. He
provides the reader with the view of an outsider, the city dweller, unfamiliar
with the mores of the people of the moors. He seeks solitude, he says, but it
is a pose. Solitude is not what he wants. Even though he is poorly treated on
his first visit to Wuthering Heights, he must return for a second visit; and he
is
not
deterred
by
threatening
weather.
He
is
sentimental
about
relationships, though afraid to make a gesture that will involve his life with
anothers. He is sufficiently sensitive to suggestion to dream that the ghost
of Catherine knocks on the window of his bedroom, when he spends the
night at Wuthering Heights, and tries to enter. Later he thinks that he may be
able to charm and to win as bride the winsome young Cathy.
He is, of course, fascinated by the story which Nelly tells him and
which he records for the reader in Nellys words. He is inclined to accept
Nellys judgements because he, too, represents a normal view, a little
different from Nellys, and because his is the view of an outsider, a male, and
a romantic. He is perhaps more sympathetic to the supra-normal passions of
the dwellers at Wuthering Heights, but his sympathies are those of a
sentimental spectator rather than, as in Nellys case, those of an active
participant.
The story, therefore, filters through two different normal minds, one
healthy, one troubled, and takes on added appeal as the reader responds
part in agreement, part in protest, to their views.
There is in the novel a myriad of views. There are the views of the
characters themselves, for example, Heathcliffs account of how Catherine,
bitten by the Linton dogs, came to stay at Thrushcross Grange; Catherines
passionate avowal to Nelly of what Heathcliff means to her. In addition, there
are Nellys views and Lockwoods views. Finally, there are the readers views,
complex and varied, fashioned by the author through this intricate approach.
and
not
troubled
by
Heathcliffs
aggressions
and
Nellys
violent nature, subdue the unrest and submit to the beauty of mutual respect
and mutual help. They are on the way, the story suggests, to a good life on
the wild and rough moor, ready to match their strengths as free spirits and
as partners against anything the moor can offer. This is the ideal and
romantic ending of Wuthering Heights and forms a companion fadeout to
the phantom appearances on the moor of the ghosts of Catherine and
Heathcliff.
Anne Bronte
She is, by far, the least important figure of the three. Her two novels,
Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) are much
inferior to those of her sisters, for she lacks nearly all their power and
intensity.
With the Brontes the forces which have transformed English poetry at
the beginning of the century were first felt in the novel. They were the
pioneers in fiction of that aspect of the romantic movement which concerned
itself with the haring of the human soul. In place of the detached observation
of a society or a group of people, such as we find in Jane Austen and the
earlier novelists, the Brontes painted the sufferings of an individual
personality, and presented a new conception of the heroine as a woman of
vital strength and passionate feelings. Their works are as much the products
of the imagination and emotions of the intellect, and in their more powerful
passages they border on poetry.
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