If you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up and makes me feel Society as it is, wretchedly insipid you would pity and I dare say despise me. (C. Brontë, 10 May 1836) Before Charlotte Brontë wrote her first novel for publication, she admitted her mixed feelings about imagination. Brontë’s letter shows that she feared both pity and condemnation. She struggled to attend to the imaginative world that brought her pleasure and to fulfill her duties in the real world so as to avoid its contempt. Brontë’s early correspondence attests to her engrossment with the Angrian world she created in childhood. She referred to this world as the “infernal world” and to imagination as “fiery,” showing the intensity and potential destructiveness of creativity. Society did not draw Brontë the way that the imagined world did, and in each of Brontë’s four mature novels, she recreated the tricky navigation between the desirable imagined world and the necessary real world. Each protagonist resolves the struggle differently, with some protagonists achieving more success in society than others. The introduction of this dissertation provides critical and biographical background on Brontë’s juxtaposition of imagination/desire and reason/duty. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic supplies the basis for understanding the ways that the protagonists express imagination, and John Kucich’s Repression in Victorian Fiction defines the purposefulness of repression. The four middle chapters examine imagination’s manifestations and purposes for the protagonists. The final chapter discusses how the tension caused by the competing desires to express and repress imagination distinguishes Brontë’s style.

This essay investigates the narration in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre by applying narratologist Great Olson’s model of unreliable narration to Jane, the novel’s narrator. Further, the novel discusses how Jane’s reliability affects the portrayal of the character Bertha Mason. The essay argues that the narrator’s characterization of Bertha Mason is deliberately misleading.

This dissertation comprises an exploration of the concept of home and its link to propriety as it was imposed on women, focussing specifically on Jane Eyre and Villette by Charlotte Bronte. These novels share a preoccupation with notions of 'home' and what this means to the female protagonists. The process of writing on the part of the author, Charlotte Bronte, and the act of first-person narration on the part of the two female protagonists, Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, is significant in that the "muted culture" of women (Showalter 1999: xx) of the nineteenth century was given authorial and authoritative power in their stories. Questions of identity and location developed from Jane Eyre's and Lucy Snowe's being orphans, penniless and without homes. Subsequently issues of ownership and self-sufficiency emerged in their stories, all of which found particular focus in the home. This "muted culture", examined through the theories of marxism and new historicism, is also illuminated by a feminist analysis of Jane Eyre and Villette which reveals that the marginal female figures are entitled to, or deserving of, the privileges of home and selfhood only once they have made some sacrifice for this "unthinkable goal of mature freedom" (Gilbert & Gubar 2000:339). The exploration of 'home' finds resonance in a post-colonial context, as Bronte encompassed marginal figures in her society who remained homeless, bereft of their stories due to the effect of drastically "interrupted experiences" (Ndebele 1996: 28) in the process of identity formation. The situated analysis of the concept of home operates in two contexts in this thesis, that of nineteenth-century Britain and twentieth-century South Africa. Njabulo Ndebele states that South Africans have been marked by the experience of homelessness, "The loss of homes! It is one of the greatest of South African stories yet to be told" (1996: 28-9). By drawing on Bronte to illuminate the concept of home, a South African reader is able to further an understanding of the multi-faceted nature of this concept and to see that the new possibilities claimed for marginal figures at the periphery may have their origins in the representation of an earlier woman writer's "double-edged" (Eagleton 1988: 73) representation of 'home' . / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2005.

The thesis deals with the issue of narrative practices in television series, focusing on the adaptation of original novels of classic and canonized literary authors. In this context, the thesis focuses on the study of adaptation and narrative procedures used in movies and television series. Based on the comparison and analysis of the adaptation of a certain work, it focuses on specific issues concerning the serial narratives as compared to the original, and on features which are different in the adaptation of the television series from other serial or cinematographic works.

[Material:] Uppsatsen analyserar Gun-Britt Sundströms svensköversättning av Charlotte Brontës roman Jane Eyre (1999) och två filmatiseringar från år 1997 och 2011.[Syfte:] Att studera och jämföra vilka gotiska grepp som används i romanen Jane Eyre och filmatiseringarna från 1997 och 2011, och vilka gotiska effekter som dominerar samt om effekterna påverkas när texten blir film?[Teori/Metod:] Uppsatsen utgår ifrån valda gotiska begrepp som: det sublima, terror, horror och spänning (suspense).[Resultat:] Analysens resultat visade att samtliga valda gotiska begrepp och dess effekter finns i samtliga verk. Det sublima och terror är de effekter som visade sig dominera i romanen och filmatiseringarna. Avslutningsvis visade det sig att de gotiska effekterna minskade på grund av filmatiseringarnas komprimerade handling.

Den här studien undersöker tre guvernanter ur den viktorianska guvernantgenren, som även kan förstås som den viktorianska guvernantromanen: Jane i Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 2014), Den okända kvinnan i När skruven dras åt (Henry James, 2013) och Martha Leigh i Guvernanten på Mellyn (Victoria Holt, 2018). Syftet med studien är att studera hur respektive guvernant förstår sitt psykiska och fysiska välmående. Detta görs från både ett tidigt och ett senare skede i verket, i syfte att studera guvernanternas utveckling från början till slutet. Dessa analyser jämförs sedan mellan de olika verken: Jane Eyre (Brontë, 2014), När skruven dras åt (James, 2013) och Guvernanten på Mellyn (Holt, 2018), för att studera verkans eventuella likheter och skillnader eftersom de tillhör samma genre – den viktorianska guvernantromanen. Dessutom berör denna studie även ett didaktiskt perspektiv på hur studien kan bli relevant för svenskundervisningen på gymnasieskolan. Studien utgår från teorin Epikanalys (Claes-Göran Holmberg & Anders Ohlsson, 1999) och nyttjar metoden komparation av karaktärer genom intertextualitet från kapitlet ”Intertextualitet, komparation och reception” (Anders Olsson, 2002). Studien visar att det finns såväl likheter som skillnader mellan hur guvernanterna: Jane (Brontë, 2014), Den okända kvinnan (James, 2013) och Martha (Holt, 2018) uppfattar sig själva både psykiskt och fysiskt. Studien kommer även fram till att den kan nyttjas i svenskundervisningen i gymnasieskolan för att skapa förutsättningar för elever att utveckla en mer vidgad syn på deras uppfattning om omvärlden.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the importance of class in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and its impact on how the characters perceive one another. Taking a closer look at the attitude the characters, John Reed, Jane Eyre and Mrs. Reed have towards each other and how the influence of the Victorian society came about. Through a Marxist perspective one can see the similarities between the society that Jane Eyre was written in and the society taking place within the novel. Where the accessibility of money determined what class one belonged to as well as how to behave accordingly by it. By analyzing the members of higher social standing, John and Mrs. Reed, one can see how they conform to the norms of the social class that they belong to which expresses itself in the way they both perceive and treat Jane in the novel. Jane however has an entirely different outlook. As she searches for a class to belong to, she realizes that her background is the main reason for her receiving the treatment that she does from John and Mrs. Reed.

This essay will discuss Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea from a postcolonial and historical perspective, to show how Rhys’s recreation of Bertha Rochester’s past (Charlotte Brontë’s madwoman in Jane Eyre) can make her end appear triumphant. The analysis will be based on a combination of aspects from the novel’s contemporary English and Caribbean societies and Edward Said’s thoughts about Orientalism, mainly the binary opposition between Europe and the Orient and the creation of Orientalist knowledge. Said’s theories and historical actualities will be used to identify how colonial and patriarchal values in the novel influence the development of the heroine Antoinette through her upbringing and later how they are used to reduce her into a madwoman. The analysis will conclude that Antoinette’s rebellion against patriarchal and colonial oppression in the last part of the novel provides an opportunity to interpret her predetermined end in Jane Eyre as triumphant.

For the last forty years, Jane Eyre criticism has understandably focused on Bertha Mason Rochester as a marginalized, abused, and silenced mixed-race woman. Although Jane's childhood friend Helen Burns is a very different and much less controversial character, she and Bertha suffer similar deaths from the culpable neglect of their guardians. Both women serve as the impetus of a bystander's dilemma: the perennial question of whether a person is obligated to protect another's life or dignity at the risk of his or her own. Because contemporary law imposed no duty to rescue upon bystanders, this paper uses the commentary of Victorian legal theorist John Austin to create a standard against which to judge the ethical merit of the choices made by bystanders throughout the novel. Maria Temple, superintendent of Lowood, is a bystander to the fatal abuse heaped upon her students; she has the power to expose the school's brutal conditions, but chooses to remain silent so that she can keep her job and her limited power. Her choice, while practical, makes her complicit in Helen's death. When Jane becomes bystander to Bertha's dangerously negligent captivity, she chooses to flee Thornfield rather than intervene. Though many critics have decried her selfishness, Jane makes a practical and ethical choice because she has so little chance of helping Bertha and so much to lose in the attempt. Just as Miss Temple is able to protect Jane because of her self-serving decisions, Jane in turn is able to protect Adèle. Yet all these successes are predicated upon earlier neglect of persons unable to protect themselves, as Helen and Bertha remind us. There is no comfortable solution to the bystander's dilemma.

《簡愛》如同吳爾芙所說的「強烈的自我中心性格」、借力於詩意的雄渾寫景、狹窄的力度，這些特質標誌著《簡愛》或夏綠蒂勃朗蒂獨樹一幟的文體風格。此外據吳爾芙的剖析，十九世紀英國女作家所寫小說必然受到狹窄的生活經驗所影響，作者性格總通過某種個人的因素而被清楚的意識。本文一方面通過現象學式的稠密閱╱寫對《簡愛》這部小說的上述特質加以印證、詮釋；同時也在性別政治脈絡的還原過程中將寫作活動的理論引曵回歷史情境，為文化情境中所謂「局部壓抑」的迷思做預先的鋪陳。在方法上，本文首先根據《簡愛》的「空間」與「物」的呈現╱陳列特質，演繹出該作品內建「狹窄的自我中心性」，這個中心是以童年的場景作為整部小說的詩意原型，同時整部小說也以摧毀童年夢靨原型為逆轉點。在詳細的分析後我們將發現，勃朗蒂竟是十分勉強地安排性別政治的標準價值，愛情與婚姻的價值、情感的脆弱、家庭事物的價值…這一切在《簡愛》這部小說裡，在通過帶著現象學傾向的分析後，我們將一一發現作者曾試圖想消除、重寫那些標準價值的痕跡，同時也發現那些不穩定的、不一致的事件串連事實上是通過「視覺物」被讀者的預設所任意完整化的。一當經過仔細的分析後我們發現這部故事並未以因果的方式開展出結果，反而我們發現一個又一個的空間為不存在的主體進行補充試圖刻畫出一個新的女性標準。綜觀《簡愛》整部作品可演繹出以下敘事模式與原則：fiction(構作)—simulation（擬仿）—supplement/ reverse (補充/逆轉)。本文認為這個敘事原則在過去採取精神分析假設與後殖民論述立場的分析裡被嚴重忽略，甚至扭曲女性書寫活動裡的情緒張力成為帝國慾望的再現；本文以顛倒順 序的閱讀方式重行分析出上述勃朗蒂的敘事模式，也提出非線共時平 面觀點的閱╱寫分析。 / Virginia Woolf points out that the circumstances which affected an author’s character may have left their traces on their work; therefore, the writings of nineteenth-century female writers are arguably affected by their limited life experience. In an effort to analyse the self-enclosure in Jane Eyre, this thesis first examines the theme of narrowness by employing a method of phenomenological thick reading/writing. I will argue that Jane Eyre constructs Jane’s childhood as a poetic prototype and centres on the end of Jane’s childhood nightmare as a turning point. Moreover, after close analysis of the text, it will be found that Brontë manages to arrange the standard of sexual politics, the value of family, love, and marriage with difficulty. By applying a phenomenological reading, we will find traces that the author tries to erase or rewrite these values. The reading of materiality, silence, space, and conflict within texts will open up extremely productive ways of studying the politics of language. The inconsistency, rupture, and disjunction of incidents are freely associated as a unity, a consistent novel by readers through the appearance of objects, and the plot of Jane Eyre is not based upon cause-and-effect. The narrative mode of Jane Eyre can be interpreted as fiction-simulation-supplement/reverse. The centrality of this narrative technique to Brontë’s work has received little attention in psychoanalytic or postcolonial criticism, both of which often interpret the intensity of feeling of the novel as the embodiment of imperial desire. By employing a non-linear reading of Jane Eyre, I will examine the narrative in reverse order, trying to establish a new platform for the infinite interplay between author, reader, and characters.