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.

The purpose of the following study is to examine how reading is influenced by the use of easy-to-read adaptations of literary classics compared to the original works in an educational context. The novels forming the basis of the analysis are Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) and the adaptation written by Malin Lindroth, as well as Hjalmar Söderberg's Doktor Glas (1905) and the adaptation written by Tomas Dömstedt. In our study, we focus on how complex motifs and themes transition from the original works to the adaptations. The motifs that emerge in Jane Eyre are class affiliation, violence, gender oppression and religious oppression, which together constitute the overarching theme of female emancipation. The motifs that emerge in Doktor Glas are superhuman ideal, desire and disgust and doubt which together constitute the theme of moral guilt. Using an adaptation theoretical perspective based on Linda Hutcheon's and Brian McFarlane's respective theory descriptions, and a comparative method, we analyze how the motifs and themes transfer. The results show that class affiliation, violence, and gender oppression in Jane Eyre and superhuman ideal and some aspects of desire and disgust in Doktor Glas are transferred while maintaining fidelity to the essence. Furthermore, the results of the study show that there are opportunities to use the easy-to-read fiction for a didactic purpose, but that the easy-to-read literature must be supplemented with parts from the original work in some cases.

《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.

Victorian inquisitiveness about sleep and dysfunctions of sleep is exemplified in novels published during the fifty-year period from Jane Eyre (1847) to Dracula (1897). This inquisitiveness foreshadows modern medical sleep science and immerses the reading public in a body of popular literature that subverts the concept of "normal" sleep. My dissertation explores the ways in which Victorian fiction brings physiological and psychological female concerns to the fore through the plot devices of sleep and sleeplessness. I examine the Victorians' diverse interpretations of illness, physical and sexual vulnerability, moral insanity, criminality, and anxiety to determine the thematic and narratological ways in which these issues are linked to sleeping and waking states. Drawing on feminist literary criticism, cultural historicism, and medical insight from the early nineteenth-century to the present, I argue that Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Bram Stoker use sleep and wakefulness as vehicles to navigate gendered fluctuations of power and loss. Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, and Dracula each present sleep as a gendered space in which power is contested. I argue that sleeplessness and restlessness are the methods women adopt, either on purpose or unintentionally, to realize self-sufficiency and protect themselves from patriarchal jurisdiction and other social restrictions on women. Women must reject their instinctual desires for a certain amount of sleep so that they can maintain agency and authority over their bodies and narratives. Implicit in the novels is the idea that deep sleep is a mechanism for achieving health and moral strength of character. However, explicitly and without apology, the novels use the trope of sleep for women as a violent instrument of loss, infection, powerlessness, and weakness. The cultural and medical artifacts of the time suggest that deep, indulgent sleep is the only way to achieve or maintain health. Yet Victorian authors write sleep as a sure road to incapacitation and subjugation. Brontë, Collins, and Stoker demonstrate that a woman's mind is only as healthy as her sleep, while her body is always safer awake.

This analysis examines Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea through the lens of lunar imagery and the irrational feminine, arguing that both texts are aspects of an extended, collective narrative in which both heroines rescue and reclaim their feminine essence from the construction of a masculine idealism.

Bibliography: leaves 230-246.

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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 bystanders 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 schools 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 Adele. 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 bystanders dilemma.

This study examines the theme of hybridity in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre and Jordan Peele’s film Get Out. Both the narrative text in the novel and the script with visual elements of the film use the concept of hybridity through Gothic motifs: a mad non-white woman in the attic in Jane Eyre and a psychological place in Get Out, where members of a white family hypnotise black people in order to exploit their physical capabilities. This is employed to disrupt dominant discourses of authoritative class, revealing the ways in which these discourses are constructed through the exclusion of certain identities. Bertha Mason, the Creole wife of Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre, and Chris Washington, the African American protagonist of Get Out, both embody a sense of hybridity that challenges established norms of individuality and representation. Through a comparative analysis of these characters, this essay argues that hybridity serves as a means of exposing and subverting the power structures that reinforce presiding stereotypes of othered characters. By deconstructing these sovereign discourses, hybridity creates space for alternative voices and perspectives that are often excluded from ascendant literatures. Ultimately, this essay accentuates the importance of inspecting the intersectional identities of characters in literature and film, as a means of challenging prepotent discourses and promoting social justice.