Jane Eyre Critic Quotes

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Jane & Rochester:

“To twenty-first-century eyes, it shows a woman who fights for, yet abdicates to, love. To nineteenth-century eyes, it showed a woman who should abdicate to, yet fights for, love.” — Erin Blakemore

“Jane’s refusal of Rochester is part of a deep-rooted critique of social and economic institutions that echoes throughout the novel.” — Erin Blakemore

Jane Eyre is a “patriarchal love fantasy” — Jean Wyatt

”For after being taken advantage of by Rochester’s abusive tricks, Jane is supposed to attain ultimate fulfilment in a subservient relationship with a husband whose devotion seems to spring mostly from his new state of physical vulnerability.” — sociologist Bonnie Zare

”Rochester’s mutilation is the symbol of Jane’s triumph in the battle of the sexes.” — Walter Allen, ‘The English Novel’ (1954)

”the narrator never yields her “J-E”, her proper name, and her autobiography appropriately retains ‘Jane Eyre’. One could argue that this retention of the name … takes control of the conventional marriage plot.” — Susan Sniader Lanser

”what Jane calls the ‘pleasure in my services’ both she and Rochester experience in their utopian woodland is a pleasure in physical as well as spiritual intimacy, erotic as well as intellectual communion” — Sandra M Gilbert

Jane Eyre’s popularity is “a proof of how deeply the love for illegitimate romance is implanted in our nature.” — Elizabeth Rigby, ‘Quarterly Review’ (1848)

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Bertha Mason:

“Bertha is Jane’s truest and darkest double: she is the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to repress ever since her days at Gateshead.” — Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’

“Rochester … had married Bertha for status, for sex, for money, for everything but love and equality.” — Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’