Hello everybody and welcome to this video. It's the continuation in the series on Jane Eyre. Everything taken from Mr Brough's Guide to Jane Eyre, available for £3.99 at mrbrough.com or amazon.co.uk, written by Kerry Lewis, one of the mrbrough.com team.
So what are we going to talk about today? We're going to talk about form and genre. Now form is the shape of a piece of writing.
For example, prose, drama, poetry, poetry Jane Eyre is a prose novel which takes the sub form of a fictional autobiography. We've talked about that already in this series. The decisions that Bronte made when writing her fictional autobiography have a considerable impact on the ways that we read and interpret the novel.
So we're going to go through those in this video. Do give the video a thumbs up if you want more videos on Jane Eyre. OK, so decision one was to have the first person narration with an older Jane intruding.
So the story is narrated in the first person with the pronoun I from the point of view of Jane at each stage of her life. Now the use of the first person establishes her character which is introduced to us through themes and it guides our response. Sometimes an older Jane interrupts.
For example, we see the older Jane says, No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this incident of the Red Room. It only gave my nerves a shock of which I feel the reverberation to this day. Now, etc., etc., you can see the quotation here on the screen.
When the older Jane says that her nerves are still affected to this day, the reader feels sympathy for the younger Jane, as we now appreciate the devastating long-term psychological impact of being locked in the Red Room. It's interesting to see the verb ought as well which is used when she says I ought to forgive you. This implies that she's still not managed to forgive her aunt and this is despite Jane apparently forgiving Mrs Reed on her deathbed.
Jane attempted to behave like a good Christian at the time of Mrs Reed's death but she reveals in her comment that she continues to carry deep psychological scars. The second decision is the shift from past to present tense. At the beginning of chapter 11, Jane shifts from the past to the present tense when she describes her surroundings at the Georgian mill coat.
The large figure papering on the walls as in rooms have such a carpet, such furniture, such ornaments on the mantelpiece, such prints. Now the present tense and long list slows time down. It encourages the reader to share Jane's observations.
The repetition of such adds a sort of rhythm where we can imagine Jane. being lulled into drowsiness by a warm fire after her cold, long and tiring journey. The third decision is the use of direct address.
There are many examples of direct address in the novel. After describing the room at the Georgian in chapter 11, for example, Jane directly addresses the reader. The reader, though I look comfortably accommodated, I am not very tranquil in my mind. And this signifies a change of mood.
The focus switches to Jane's own state of mind, shifting from the external world to her feelings, as we realise that appearances can be deceptive and that she's nervous and worried. The use of direct address and present tense together therefore creates tension as the reader identifies with Jane and shares her doubts and fears about whether she will be collected or not. Now structurally, chapter 11 starts with loneliness and fear.
but ends with happiness and companionship. So the use of direct address and the present tense at the start of the chapter heightens these contrasts and tensions. The third decision was the shift from present tense to past tense. Now, once again, Janus expressed her fears about not being collected from the Georgian, and she continues the narration of her story in the past tense.
She says, Fear with me became predominant when half an hour elapsed and still I was alone. I bethought myself to ring the bell. The final sentence here signals a change in mood as she makes an active decision and takes control and switching from the present to the past tense therefore speeds up the narrative. The fourth decision is deliberately withholding information from the reader. We know that the story is narrated by an older Jane who sometimes intrudes herself into the story.
She could have revealed much earlier that Mr Rochester was married, but she chooses to withhold this and other information from the reader. And of course this is a very common literary device. It adds tension. It captures the reader's imagination.
For example, when we share the younger Jane's distress, we discover at the same time as... that Mr Rochester is married and we empathise with how she's feeling. There are many further examples of withholding information to create suspense for the reader. In chapter 36, the reader wants to see Jane quickly reunited with Mr Rochester when she leaves Moor House and arrives at Thornfield Hall, but Bronte deliberately delays a reunion, creates lots and lots of suspense through all of these things, through a description of Jane's goodbyes and her journey to Thornfield Hall. telling a story about a mistress asleep on a mossy bank when all we want to hear about is Thornfield Hall, the use of direct speech when she reports every word of her conversation with the innkeeper, making us wait until the end of the chapter to learn that Mr Rochester is living at Fern Dean.
And even at the end of the chapter, Jane has still not been reunited with Mr Rochester, which creates more suspense for the reader. Very, very clever drawing out of suspense from the author. The fifth decision that I want to talk about in this video is mixing genres. Now, by simply just glancing at a text, we can immediately see that it's prose, poetry or drama.
And that's called the form of a text. Genre is a category of writing, for example, tragedy or comedy. And we need to read the text to learn its genre. Genre is closely linked to form as it tells us more about what to expect in the content of the writing. But Bronte employs a mixture.
of genres in this novel. The first is Bildungsroman, the coming of age story, a German word that translates as education and novel. So it's a novel about the growth of a character through several periods of life and if you're studying the history boys that is also a coming of age story as well. Now during Jane Eyre we learn of Jane's internal and external conflicts in each new geographical setting.
We can track her development by how she manages these conflicts. And the points in the next couple of paragraphs that I'm going to talk to you about are discussed in more detail in the e-book. So make sure you pick up a copy of the e-book because it contains lots more information that is never going to be in this video series. When we first meet Jane at Gateshead, she's an outsider because of her status as a penniless orphan and dependent on her aunt Reid. She's unable to control her passionate temper and she rebels against her cousin and aunt.
She has external conflicts with her family and internal ones when she thinks she can see her uncle's ghost in the red room. Under the influence of the positive female role models of Miss Temple and Helen Burns at Lowood School, Jane learns to control her passions. Eight years later, she's working as a governess at Thornfield Hall where she falls in love with Mr Rochester.
Jane's lower social status leads her to feel unworthy of Mr Rochester. With her plain appearance, she also feels inferior to the beautiful Blanche. And these internal self-doubts are paralleled by the external tensions surrounding the mysteries of the laughter. Grace Poole, Mr Mason after he's been attacked, Bertha Rochester tearing Jane's wedding veil in half.
Even when she agrees to marry Mr Rochester, she feels uncomfortable with him lavishing gifts on her. resulting in more and more internal conflict. Still further conflict is created when she learns that he is married and she refuses his offer to become his mistress. In the Morehouse chapters, Jane suffers internal and external conflict when she becomes a beggar.
As a schoolmistress, she has concerns about dropping in social rank. And at the end of the Morehouse chapters, a huge amount of emotional and spiritual conflict is created by St John with his marriage proposals and cold ways. Jane almost rejects her own passions and accepts his proposal, but her supernatural connection with Mr Rochester makes her realise that she must marry for love. We have emotional conflict when she learns that Rochester Hall is burnt down and she does not know if Mr Rochester is still alive. Finally, we have the famous lines, Reader, I married him, which shows that Jane actively makes choices and has become, for the time being at least, the dominant partner in the relationship.
So Bronte challenges the tradition of gender hierarchy by writing from the point of view of a woman, and this, combined with her beliefs about how women are restricted in Victorian society, emphasises that a woman's inner development is of equal importance to a man's. Of course, this novel is almost also a romance story, not almost. It's also a romance story. And, you know, this was a lot to do with why it was so popular when it was published. It was unusual for a novel to be written from a first person.
female perspective, especially one that describes the narrator's feelings with such intensity. At the time, the readership of novels was predominantly female, so Bronte's fans would better empathise with the thoughts and feelings of a female protagonist. Now, Jane's love interest, Mr Rochester, is not, like Jane, conventionally good-looking.
However, with his dark face, stern features and heavy brow, he resembles a Byronic hero, a type of character, name out. named after the English romantic poet Lord Byron. A Byronic hero is a flawed hero, dark, mysterious, moody, rebellious, arrogant, brooding, passionate.
And by depicting Mr Rochester as a Byronic hero, not only Jane but also many of her readers would be attracted to him. Typical characteristics of the romance genre are that two people fall in love with each other, there's an obstacle, they overcome the obstacle and they live happily ever after. Now, in Jane Eyre, the obstacle is Bertha Rochester. She dies in a fire, so Jane and Mr. Rochester can now marry and live happily ever after.
Obviously, that's a very simple summary, and it doesn't fully explore many important elements of the genre, but that's one of the ways we can see this novel as an example of a romance novel. And finally, of course, the Gothic novel. The Gothic genre combines romanticism with fiction and horror.
In Gothic literature, Characters usually include a virtuous orphaned heroine who faints a lot and a murderous villain with terrifying eyes. Tales are set in the past, often in remote foreign castles or monasteries with secret subterranean passages. You should expect to encounter a vampire, a ghost or a monster. The weather is often horrible and there's going to be lots of melodrama. Now this genre was very popular in the Romantic movement but by the 1840s It had begun to decline due to an increasing appetite for more socially realistic novels, and Bronte's success here was her ability to combine elements of realism with gothic melodrama.
Her orphaned heroine, for example, does not faint at the sight of blood, and these elements are described in more detail in the e-book. Well guys, I hope you found this video useful. Please do give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel.