Vanster counting lesson on how many are here on TW- please reply once

Vanster said:
If you want to know how bad TW fails, read the thread title.

then this

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This forum should just throat a bag of hair. You can't even complete instructions from one of your own. You have posted yourselves retarded.

lol 3

I'm dumb. Let's let this place die.
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lel he mad
 
vanster is attempting to troll and failing almost as bad as blackpeople. That award would be hard to beat. I mean a career bartender at probably Hampton Inn suites with the IQ of a turnip and probably as round as one stuck on repeat.
 
jfc hampton inn is getting too pricey

wtf are they adding bartenders for? every one is next to an applebee's or old chicago w/ a real bar and real lonely moms looking 2 get a hole plugged
 
blackpeople said:
omg jfcccc i m still supadupa fukn hard hopn n prayn 2 find strenth n kerrage 2 kill my pussy self yus lykka my dedcuckfuk pussyass bro wuz able 2 do n bring sum happy 2 muh chit famly n chitlyfe 4 yus 1 tyme FFFFFFUKME N FFFFFUKU 2 MOM FFFFFUK
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pussyass effemcuck spikktrash no d00 alway b soundn lykkit 2 wtf lma0 smdh lol :jester:
 
i got a- for this pos

Use of freudian psychology, hero and combat stereotype by bloom having to beat the infection of anxiety of writing in males, is different from females having to overcome the infection of the sentence

Jane Eyre’s description of psycho-social sociosexual roles vs Gilbert & Gubars, + examples

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Yet after all my task was not an easy one; often I would rather have pleased than teased him. My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol.

Jane Eyre has agency of her own in that she has born vitality, survivorhood, and awareness but this is different from thriving or conquesting the way Rochester has with multiple wives and locations, being able to change his path in life more easily than Jane. If his wife doesn’t please him he can afford to lock her away, if he doesn’t like his living arrangement he has the power to change them without relying strictly on the charity and opportunity of others. When Jane wants to run away she ends up sleeping on doorsteps.

Doesn’t doesn’t die of consumption like Helen Burns



Jane speaks to the reader as a woman not as a patriarch and because of that, to express herself, she has to write as a woman in a patriarchal system, against a patriarchal form of writing while showing her non-patriarchal style of living.

Rochester is able to pose himself as clever when explaining away his bigamy of and imprisonment of Bertha Mason.





I feel Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre in light of Gilbert & Gubar’s feminist literary criticism, “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship,” has more clarity as an example of writing against patriarchal norms of writing. I believe Gilbert & Gubar explain that the act of writing for women suffers in the confines of a historically patriarchal structure and support their critical opinion of women’s writing using a feminist analysis of Harold Bloom’s patriarchal Freudian psychoanalysis. They assert that writing against this structure breeds an, “Infection in the Sentence,” for women writers, which is different than Bloom’s male “Anxiety of Influence.” In my opinion, the influence of patriarchy is more evident after reading Jane Eyre coupled with reading Infection in the Sentence.



Gilbert & Gubar don’t debate assimilation into literary psychohistory, they detail J. Hillis Miller’s criticism of literary genealogy, or how it is, “inhabited by ghosts of previous texts,” and they accept much of Harold Bloom’s analysis of, “The Anxiety of Influence,” in male poetry. They recognize that Bloom’s model of literary history isn’t a recommendation for patriarchal society but an analysis of one, that the Freudian psychoanalysis that Bloom uses to define men’s writing isn’t symmetrical for women, that the Oedipal Complex mirrored by the Electra Complex doesn’t fit in the case of women’s literary history. They take it a step further though by recontextualizing Harold Bloom’s analysis in terms of women’s authorship, and the example they use is that of revision. Revision being all the different ways a woman has to rewrite herself and her story (which is a piece of permanence when written) to become self-defined in a psychosocial system that filters everything through a patriarchal lens. This is compounded because women’s writers don’t have the same precursor authors that males do and don’t share the same literary genealogy to gather influence from, challenge, and supersede.

Likewise, Jane Eyre isn’t a classical retelling of heroic feats and conquest, rags to riches, or standardized plot, instead Jane Eyre is a unique narrated biography of a woman’s life in the Victorian era, and in this way acts as an analysis of the society of that era for women, and patriarchy. Because Charlotte Bronte didn’t have many literary female influences before writing, there really isn’t a literary matriarch to defeat in my laymen's opinion, and Jane Eyre is more of a forerunner of feminist writing and rebellion because it is untrodden ground.

Detailing physical ailments from patriarchal socialization that have affected suffering on women historically and currently, and the projection of the binary roles of angel and monster on women in traditional literature, Gilbert & Gubar show that women don’t only suffer an, “anxiety of influence” in their writing as males do but an “anxiety of authorship” in total for their act of creation. The history of these debilitations, along with the lack of literary precursors that males have breeds an, “Infection in the Sentence” that must be overcome by women writers in a much more difficult way than the “Anxiety of Influence” of males.

In Jane Eyre, Jane doesn’t really fit into the types of angel or monster, though her experiences in society do show pressure on her to sway her into being one or the other. Jane could have developed more monstrously out of revenge or anger at society but doesn’t, she also could have been completely subservient and passive but isn’t. Instead Jane Eyre, lives and makes decisions in a thoughtful way. Though this could be seen as having partly to do with her being very self-aware from child hardship after her parent's death, her life choices to flee Rochester, or to deny St. John’s religious alternative, to be curious about her situation and not vengeful or complacent, show she has much higher-level thinking than what was traditionally defined as the state of normal for women in that era.

Jane Eyre also does much revision of herself through a patriarchal filter in the novel. Jane is confined to machinations of nineteen century patriarchal society. She doesn’t get to go to Jamaica on what is basically an adventure or keep her first spouse in an attic while engaging in bigamy, she escapes bullying in her home life by going to boarding prefecting school for girls, becoming a teacher and marrying her boss. Her life choices aren’t as free as Rochester’s and her decision-making process reflects this, despite her vivaciousness and survivorhood.

Conversely Helen Burns dies of consumption, similar to other child victims in other nineteenth century books by male authors, and Charlotte Bronte does not dispute that these Oliver Twist type living conditions are poverty stricken, just that the experience itself is much different for women.

Gilbert and Gubar back this up more by comparing women’s writing to male conquest tales, where heroes avenge, exploring is done, fame and fortune is sought, etc. In fact, from what I understand Gilbert & Gubar illustrate the sheer amount of disease women have to overcome just to write. They speak about roles in Victorian society, as female diseases that were goals, with women often being described as frail or sickly and suffering from various ailments including hysteria, and that this continues to this day with the body dysmorphic disorders of anorexia, or with phobias like agoraphobia. These illnesses infect women at a greater rate than men, because they are enabled by patriarchal structures.

Even being intelligent was against the norm for women and in the context of The Infection of the Sentence can be viewed as an act of rebellion. Jane is very intelligent and critical of her surroundings and she understands the power imbalance of her relationship with Rochester and the other men, her role as a governess, her society, and narrates her story accordingly, and Charlotte Bronte‘s by analogy, in my opinion. Not only was Charlotte Bronte a governess herself, but she suffered from the ailment of tuberculosis like Helen, and died young shortly after marriage. All of Charlotte Bronte’s siblings died before her, and she maintained that the poor conditions of the school they attended in youth contributed to their early deaths, all were women authors, writing against a patriarchal system and form of writing showing their non-conformity to patriarchy, and in this way, they were foremothers of what Gilbert & Gubar, “might call the secret sisterhood of their literary subculture.”

More so Jane even comments on the institutions of society and norms of it overtly, for example on the topic of expectation of marriage for women, when St. John wants to “unite” with Jane in a common purpose under the guise of moral duty to religion, she articulates that it would be loveless. Charlotte Bronte writes about religious Mr. Brocklehurt who punishes children and profits from it, which is another analogy of religion and patriarchy being internalized in society. But Jane and Charlotte Bronte don’t outright demonize marriage though the pitfalls of it are illustrated so are some of the benefits,

Yet after all my task was not an easy one; often I would rather have pleased than teased him. My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol.

The reader can see much like Gilbert & Gubar’s assimilation into literary culture Jane and Charlotte Bronte don’t dispute the benefits on some level of assimilation into marriage. To Jane marriage stands between her and religion as an intervention, perhaps writing is what also stood between Charlotte Bronte and religion, I don’t know, but Charlotte Bronte’s death while conceiving is definitely an example of the despair of The Infection of The Sentence continuing, she was only married shortly, and it seems to me conforming to a norm to have a stable home for children more than an emphatic holy union.

Jane is very aware of society and what is typified as “womanhood” in her time period. She isn’t out to conquer the hardship of other writers, including in my opinion members of the opposite sex, and instead speaks to the hardship of all humans in her era, but particularly sheds light on the female struggle in her respective class. Relating to Gilbert and Gubar’s description of traditional female ailments in Infection in the Sentence, Charlotte Bronte also must have these role model characteristics and, in this way, “prove by example that a revolt against patriarchal literary authority is possible.”

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

In my opinion, it is easier to see, that Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre also provides a psychosocial analysis of women’s writing under nineteenth century patriarchal structures in the context of Gilbert and Gubar, in that the novel is also a representation of her own life, all women’s lives, and women’s writing.





Jane is very intelligent and critical of her surroundings and she understands the power imbalance of her relationship with Rochester and the other men, her role as a governess, her society, and narrates her story accordingly, and Charlotte Bronte‘s by analogy, in my opinion. When St. John wants to “unite” with Jane in a common purpose under the guise of moral duty to religion, she articulates that it would be loveless. Charlotte Bronte writes about religious Mr. Brocklehurt who punishes children and profits from it, which is another analogy of religion and patriarchy being internalized in society.

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

Jane is very aware of society and what is typified as “womanhood” in her time period. She isn’t out to conquer the hardship of other writers, including in my opinion members of the opposite sex, and instead speaks to the hardship of all humans in her era, but particularly sheds light on the female struggle in her respective class. Relating to Gilbert and Gubar’s description of traditional female ailments in Infection in the Sentence, Charlotte Bronte also must have these role model characteristics and, in this way, “prove by example that a revolt against patriarchal literary authority is possible.”



More so Jane even comments on the institutions of society and norms of it overtly, for example on the topic of expectation of marriage for women,

Yet after all my task was not an easy one; often I would rather have pleased than teased him. My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol.

Jane is very intelligent and critical of her surroundings and she understands the power imbalance of her relationship with Rochester and the other men, her role as a governess, her society, and narrates her story accordingly, and Charlotte Bronte‘s by analogy, in my opinion. When St. John wants to “unite” with Jane in a common purpose under the guise of moral duty to religion, she articulates that it would be loveless. Charlotte Bronte writes about religious Mr. Brocklehurt who punishes children and profits from it, which is another analogy of religion and patriarchy being internalized in society.

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

Jane is very aware of society and what is typified as “womanhood” in her time period. She isn’t out to conquer the hardship of other writers, including in my opinion members of the opposite sex, and instead speaks to the hardship of all humans in her era, but particularly sheds light on the female struggle in her respective class. Relating to Gilbert and Gubar’s description of traditional female ailments in Infection in the Sentence, Charlotte Bronte also must have these role model characteristics and, in this way, “prove by example that a revolt against patriarchal literary authority is possible.”

In my opinion, it is easier to see, that Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre also provides a psychosocial analysis of women’s writing under nineteenth century patriarchal structures in the context of Gilbert and Gubar, in that the novel is also a representation of her own life, all women’s lives, and women’s writing.

















Gilbert & Gubar don’t debate assimilation into literary psychohistory, they detail J. Hillis Miller’s criticism of literary genealogy, or how it is, “inhabited by ghosts of previous texts,” and they accept much of Harold Bloom’s analysis of, “The Anxiety of Influence,” in male poetry. They take it a step further though by recontextualizing Harold Bloom’s analysis in terms of women’s authorship, and the example they use is that of revision. Revision being all the different ways a woman has to rewrite herself and her story (which is a piece of permanence) to become self-defined in a psychosocial system that filters everything through a patriarchal lense.



Jane Eyre also does much revision of herself through a patriarchal filter in the novel. Jane is confined to machinations of nineteen century patriarchal society. She doesn’t get to go to Jamaica or keep her first spouse in an attic while engaging in bigamy, she escapes bullying in her home life by going to boarding prefecting school for girls, becoming a teacher and marrying her boss. Her life choices aren’t as free as Rochester’s and her decision-making process reflects this, despite her vivaciousness and survivorhood.

Conversely Helen Burns dies of consumption, similar to other child victims in other nineteenth century books by male authors, and Charlotte Bronte does not dispute that these Oliver Twist type living conditions aren’t poverty stricken, just that the experience itself is much different for women.

Gilbert and Gubar back this up more by comparing women’s writing to male conquest tales, where heroes avenge, exploring is done, fame and fortune is sought, etc. In fact, from what I understand Gilbert & Gubar illustrate the sheer amount of disease women have to overcome just to write. They speak about roles in Victorian society, as female diseases that were goals, with women often being described as frail or sickly and suffering from various ailments including hysteria, or and that this continues to this day with the body dysmorphic disorders of anorexia, or with phobias like agoraphobia, that infect women at a greater rate than men, because they are enabled by patriarchal structures.

Yet after all my task was not an easy one; often I would rather have pleased than teased him. My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol.

Jane is very intelligent and critical of her surroundings like Gilbert & Gubar she understands the power imbalance of her relationship with Rochester and the other men, her role as a governess, her society, and narrates her story accordingly, and Charlotte Bronte‘s by analogy, in my opinion. When St. John wants to “unite” with Jane in a common purpose under the guise of moral duty to religion, she articulates that it would be loveless. Charlotte Bronte writes about religious Mr. Brocklehurt who punishes children and profits from it, which is another analogy of religion and patriarchy being internalized in society.

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

I also think it’s important to note that Gilbert & Gubart don’t attack the “Anxiety of Influence” as shameful or outright evil, only that they recontextualize it in terms of how it relates to women historically. Sure, men may have been the first authors competing against anti-literature society, or Bloom’s poets may have had despair that their poems wouldn’t compare to their precursors, but women were never even given that option. In this way the gravity of women’s authorship is much more filled with despair and the infection of the sentence than men’s, and it breeds because it's so easily dismissed or compartmentalized as symmetrical to male history, which is a mistake in my opinion, and I think Gilbert & Gubar’s because it minimizes women’s history and identity, and reinforces patriarchal norms all over again. In this way women and women authors are yet again having to do constant revision of themselves against history and society.



Charlotte Bronte, in Jane Eyre, doesn’t overtly belittle other writers of her time, she illuminates the life of Jane Eyre and discusses it with the reader in a very literal way.































Double revision





Gilbert & Gubar ask, “What does it mean to be a woman writer in a culture whose fundamental definitions of literary authority are, as we have seen, both overtly and covertly patriarchal?” and explain that writing in literary tradition, women are often put into the binary roles of angel and monster, which are defined by men, and that women’s writing is then filtered through this male perspective, giving it an inherit patriarchal bias.

Gilbert & Gubar don’t debate assimilation into literary psychohistory, they detail J. Hillis Miller’s criticism of literary genealogy, or how it is, “inhabited by ghosts of previous texts.” G&G also talk about how Harold Bloom uses a patriarchal Freudian psychological model of understanding these literary genealogies and that it isn’t specifically a recommendation of patriarchal society but more of an analysis of one.

They talk about the Oedipus complex and Electra complex where a male seeks to overcome his father or a female seeks to usurp their mother, and conclude that it doesn’t really exist in women’s writing because women don’t have many literary mothers the way males do, and when they do have literary mothers they aren’t out in conquest to dominate their predecessor or precursor, but to seek them out for relation.

psychological act of writing under patriarchal structures much like Charlotte Bronte provides a psychosocial representational analysis of her own living, and all women’s living, under nineteenth century patriarchal society, through writing Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre’s narration, and telling of her story.





Gilbert & Gubar help to differentiate women’s writing from the patriarchal structure of male writing by differentiating between the Freudian psychosocial aspects of male writing and women’s writing.



Gilbert & Gubart ask, ““where does a woman writer ‘fit in’ to the overwhelmingly and essentially male literary history Bloom describes?” we find we have to answer that a woman writer does not ‘fit in.’”. While maintaining that Freud and Bloom’s psychoanalysis models can be used as an analysis of patriarchal thinking systems and not a recommendation of them, Gilbert and Gubar assert that unlike males who inherit an “anxiety of influence” in competing with historical writing and peers, women inherit an “anxiety of authorship” in that authorship isn’t a norm at all for women and is a unique anxiety different from men who experience the anxiety more as an anxiety of creativity vs one of actual creation.





I think this type of statement gives greater meaning to the words in Jane Eyre, which is so detailed and lengthy, it covers an entire life, and has many relations to the author’s real life, it’s hard to selectively quote the novel without bulk quoting or summarizing because it is such a substantial piece of information. Not only is Charlotte Bronte writing almost a biography of someone’s life, that has similarity to her own experiences and her sisters’, but she’s doing so in a real-world system that opposes the creation of that writing in favor of patriarchal gender roles, much in the same ways that the protagonist Jane Eyre has conflicts with her world.

The anxiety of authorship

“Her battle, however, is not against her (male) precursor’s reading of the world but against his reading of her.”

"Just as in Freud’s theories of male and female psychosexual development there is no symmetry between a boy’s growth and a girl’s (with, say, the male “Oedipus complex” balanced by a female “Electra complex”) so Bloom’s male-oriented theory of the “anxiety of influence” cannot be simply reversed or inverted in order to account for the situation of the woman writer.”



“for the simple reason that she must confront precursors who are almost exclusively male, and therefore significantly different from her. Not only do these precursors incarnate patriarchal authority (as our discussion of the metaphor of literary paternity argued), they attempt to enclose her in definitions of her person and her potential which, by reducing her to extreme stereotypes (angel, monster) drastically conflict with her own sense of her self - that is, of her subjectivity, her autonomy, her creativity.”



The fictional story and the real life of the author blend, and that gives the book more permanence as a historical piece in my opinion. Gilbert and Gubar influence this more by pointing out that to accomplish the feat of writing a book as great as Jane Eyre, Bronte had to do so against a patriarchal authority not only in greater society but specifically in writing itself.

The novel is constructed against the male authority persona of other novels, and novel writers, and Jane Eyre as a fictional creation to me,



In this way, to me, Jane Eyre, is meant as an example of born innocence that gets castigated into a jail-like, railway tracks, framing of life, the patriarchy, but luckily is vivacious enough to resist the death throes, which the reader experiences over the course of her life. Likewise, Charlotte Bronte’s writing doesn’t “apply Freudian structures to literary genealogies”, and follow the same Freudian typification that Bloom asserts is necessary to become a strong writer. There isn’t an a-typicial heroic warfare aspect or invalidation of a “poetic father”. Instead Jane Eyre is a detailing of a life within context of womanhood in Jane and Charlotte’s respective psychosocial strata and sphere of understanding.

Gilbert and Gubar point out that Emily Dickinson’s observations about “infection in the sentence,” quoted in their epigraph, that “For any reader, but especially for a reader who is also a writer, every text can become a “sentence” or weapon in a kind of metaphorical germ warfare.” For women this means they, “may inhale Despair” from all the patriarchal texts which seek to deny female autonomy and authority,” as well as from their “foremothers” who conveyed the norm of anxiety of authorship on their descendants. So, in my opinion the creation of woman’s writing is coming from a much different norm and place than male writing.

Jane Eyre specifically doesn’t have Jane physically fighting dragons, sailing the 7 seas, or doing any prototypical time-period stuff that is in other novels of the era, she isn’t a damsel in distress in a typical way. I find that Jane does more observing of life and speaking to the reader, and in this way teaching awareness. Jane has agency but she doesn’t have the same agency that Rochester has. She didn’t get married in Jamaica and then sail home, she doesn’t lock her wife in an attic, she doesn’t appeal to a second woman to run away to France, she doesn’t manipulate situations to make the woman she’s interested in jealous. Jane is more confined to her social role physically than Rochester is, even though she is able bodied, the patriarchal system doesn’t give her many options.

Gilbert and Gubar go on to explain that the infection of the sentence that women have and breed in their text, “is caused by patriarchal socialization in several ways”, one important note I think they make in relation to Jane Eyre, is that, “In the nineteenth century... this desire to be beautiful and “frail” led to tight-lacing and vinegar drinking” as well as bringing up that anorexia and agoraphobia are modern afflictions of of patriarchal femininity carried to extremes.









Gilbert and Gubar both point out there is a doubling of resistance to these patriarchal systems, in that as an author Bronte is constantly doing revisions of herself and her writing from the patriarchal social norm of writing and how to write, and that Jane Eyre the literary figure is also expressing her own experiences of living through that patriarchy in a way that represents hindsight and resistance.

Gilbert and Gubar call the phenomena of, traditional handed down male writing structures, to the first group of women writers inheriting it from a patriarchy of male writers, as “inferiorized female descendants”, whose inheritance is similar to a germ or disease, that’s the infection of the sentence in my opinion. It’s writing that comes with strings attached to the form of writing, psychological structures attached that go against the concept of female writing to begin with. Gilbert and Gubar also further point out that Emily Dickinson also pointed out the infection of the sentence, and said that it was almost a hereditary type of virus that continued to breed, in that writing is grounded in patriarchy to the point that even trying to attack it is then viewed as an attack on motherliness (something often defined by patriarchy lies) and therefore an attack on women, as defined by history of writing, which is written by men.

One aspect of Jane Eyre that I feel really reflects this notion of fighting back not being “womanly” is that Jane Eyre is very challenged in escaping her situation. When she’s a child she gets sent away after acting out, she doesn’t hit the road like the characters of Huckleberry Finn, when she does flee, she ends up on people’s doorsteps, not only is the environment and time period she lives in physically against women escaping it, but psychologically it is too.

I think the psychological trap of patriarchy is really evidenced by the narration of Jane Eyre, and it isn’t something that’s easy to pick up and quote from directly, but something that is brought to light over reading how the narrator describes the story and makes choices in the story over time. For example, what Jane considers and what she knows is built on as the story progresses, but one line or even a couple isn’t going to fully capture the psychology of the character, and finding evidence in a few lines in a short essay isn’t something I want to commit to. I found that Jane Eyre had to relate to the poverty of the time period just like other male writers of the same time period did, the food and environment is harsh, but it isn’t the same experience as Pip’s in great expectations, because the experience is a woman’s written by a woman, I think this quote from the book hints at the similarities and differences of Jane Eyre to other literature in the same time.

“But at that moment the summons sounded for dinner; all re-entered the house. The odour which now filled the refectory was scarcely more appetising than that which had regaled our nostrils at breakfast: the dinner was served in two huge tin-plated vessels, whence rose a strong steam redolent of rancid fat. I found the mess to consist of indifferent potatoes and strange shreds of rusty meat, mixed and cooked together. Of this preparation a tolerably abundant plateful was apportioned to each pupil. I ate what I could, and wondered within myself whether every day’s fare would be like this.”


Gilbert & Gubart, talk about the nineteenth century of women being sickly, and male culture wanting them to be frail, how society still pressures women into that stereotype as evidenced by anorexia. In Jane Eyre, Jane’s vitality, resilience, rebellion, and survival intuition are all stifled and snuffed out by the system. The easiest and biggest example of this is her being sent to boarding school for standing up for herself. There’s plenty of examples that back up this toxicity of the social system and humanity’s reinforced behaviors in modern times, like our political system, police and judicial abuse, corporate governance, etc.





Throughout the novel, her decision making is inhibited by limited choices from that type of society. She takes to survival, and in that sense has a very intelligent and detailed perspective on the entire psychological model of her environment. This isn’t subservient, or submissive, it isn’t strong in the, “I don’t want to die” sense, because, it should be given to not want to be trapped, enslaved, and destroyed by the world from birth, mentally and physically. What she does is natural and feminine in a world against it. She illuminates that world. She is a feminist character.

The marriage is her on the tracks of life making the best of what she can through the perspective of someone hopeful. Rochester isn’t her penultimate fulfillment, he’s her imperative from what she knows, even with evidence of his past failures as a person and man. St. John, to me is a representation of the church as a redundancy where after surviving one tainted love romantically, when Jane moves on, religion is there to attempt to scoop up her “soul” into a different hegemony, “appealing to a higher power.” The patriarchy doom train machine has no breaks.

She isn’t submissive to either of these characters and interacts with them as “sociable” as possible with her available information, though she encounters lots of grief.

There is a real commentary in this novel on how social systems shape people’s choices and lives. It isn’t as simple as doing something grandiose like, “taking personal responsibility.”

People aren’t perfect and women shouldn’t be targeted to be immaculate or binary.

Using Gilbert and Gubar’s terminology there is anomie and the permanent authority of text in both Charlotte Bronte as a person, and Jane and Bertha the literary creations. In my opinion, the novel is a published and detailed feminism that is accessible hundreds of years later, and social critique during a time period that totally was against it.

Revolt is hinted at in the entire novel, and the placement of the characters, as well as, “what could have been if...” and the conflict of that, and I think Charlotte Bronte’s life did too. Revision of a failed system of oppression is hard, especially when, “she is victimized by what Mitchell calls the “inferiorized and ‘alternative’ (second sex) psychology of women under patriarchy.” (Gilbert and Gubar).

Jane and Bertha interact with Charlotte Bronte’s own ideas of how patriarchal structures have not only affected her but all women. They are feminist creations.

The madwoman in the attic and the chaste marriageable woman show the angel/demon, false-dichotomy, through the juxtaposition of the psychosocial worlds they live in.

There is a system of thinking and writing being put on display that shows how male-dominated it is, right down to the “sociosexual” relations of the characters.

Hi Christine, thank you for your very thorough answers, they are really excellent to read as Jane Eyre is an important topic.

The closeness of the relationship with Bertha and Rochester is questionable for sure. It makes me think of almost a purely arranged marriage, though Rochester does say that he loved Bertha.

Bertha's suicide and her crawling on her hands and legs doesn't speak to me of genuine physical or genetic mental illness. I think of it as more cries for help from someone who has been supplanted and abducted to a foreign land. I don't think it's learned helplessness I think it's vitality and revolt while imprisoned. When she can not escape from her prison and is left behind in a trapped life she decides to break free from the mortal coil.

Jane Eyre definitely develops as you say over the course of the relationship with Rochester but not only that the entire novel. She is a woman for all seasons as much as that other guy is a man for all of them. Jane can not possibly be only submissive or subservient, she has many learned behaviors, but she also has many survival traits as well. Bertha and Jane both represent some form of confining nature into madness, the taming of nature using patriarchy.

The relegation of people to book characters has to be a theme here, as the novel is so detailed it is almost like the humans in it are living creations. Observing the similarities of people in the physical world to them makes them that much more alive.

Emily, I agree with you that Rochester is controlling and abusive, and I think the relationships in Jane Eyre really show a detail of the various ways patriarchy psychologically controls people, womyn.

Especially how Rochester locks Bertha away in the attic as if to sweep her under the carpet, or treat her like a disposable possession. By being dismissive of Bertha's entire existence and imprisoning her Rochester also manipulates Jane against Bertha with his bigamy. To me, that's an obvious crazy-making tactic that will most likely gaslight a reaction, which is why I can't label Jane as strictly confused, maybe it is more that she is having confusion inflicted on her?

Jane is very naturally lucid, she flees her various abusive environments many times, she witnesses life horrors while the book poses important experiences and questions on not only the control and abuse of women but patriarchal society as a whole.

I don't think Bertha is mad at all because almost the entirety of psychiatry is a historically based male construct of oppression. Rochester's diagnosis of Bertha having some inherited mental illness because of genetic "science" in the 18th century and his power to simply lock her away is good evidence of that history of authoritarian abuse.

Some people actively go looking for, "I did not participate in this horror show" trophies, perhaps Charlotte Bronte did the same a bit after completing a monumental contribution to humanity like Jane Eyre.



I feel Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre in light of Gilbert & Gubar’s feminist literary criticism, “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship,” has more clarity as an example of writing against patriarchal norms of writing. I believe Gilbert & Gubar explain that the act of writing for women suffers in the confines of a historically patriarchal structure and support their critical opinion of women’s writing using a feminist analysis of Harold Bloom’s patriarchal Freudian psychoanalysis. They assert that writing against this structure breeds an “Infection in the Sentence,” for women writers, which is different than Bloom’s male “Anxiety of Influence.” In my opinion, the influence of patriarchy is more evident after reading Jane Eyre coupled with reading Infection in the Sentence.



Gilbert & Gubar From my understanding this is compounded because women’s writers don’t have the same precursor authors that males do and don’t share the same literary genealogy to gather influence from, challenge, and supersede.



Gilbert & Gubar don’t debate assimilation into literary psychohistory, they detail J. Hillis Miller’s criticism of literary genealogy, or how it is, “inhabited by ghosts of previous texts,” and they accept much of Harold Bloom’s analysis of, “The Anxiety of Influence,” in male poetry. They recognize that Bloom’s model of literary history isn’t a recommendation for patriarchal society but an analysis of one, that the Freudian psychoanalysis that Bloom uses to define men’s writing isn’t symmetrical for women, and that the Oedipal Complex mirrored by the Electra Complex doesn’t fit in the case of women’s literary history. They take it a step further though by recontextualizing Harold Bloom’s analysis in terms of women’s authorship, and the example they use is that of revision. Revision being all the different ways a woman has to rewrite herself and her story (which is a piece of permanence) to become self-defined in a psychosocial system that filters everything through a patriarchal lens.
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An Analysis of the Anxiety of Authorship in Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre - Alexander Knapik-Levert.docx | Comma | Linguistic Typology
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Womens Writing Alex Knapik-Levert Class Discussion | The Yellow Wallpaper | Jane Eyre


Alexander,

you have a good thesis and excellent ideas, but you need to work on being more concise and to the point.



Your understanding of Gilbert and Gubar's article is very thorough. You don't have to say everything about it though. Try to stay a bit more focused on your argument, and to avoid repeating words or ideas.



Hi
Alexander Knapik-Levert posted Sep 9, 2018 11:12 AMSubscribed
I'm Alex and I'm taking this distance education course to learn more about feminism and women's writing.

My former roommate was targeted and killed in a pre-meditated vehicular homicide a few years ago and I never felt justice was done, Courtney Vanessa Arthur

Emily Township man sentenced to five years in prison in crash that killed cyclist | MyKawartha.com

She was a very bright feminist writer, and I feel she was targeted because of her feminism.

Attempting to complete this course is a form of therapy for me.


Module 1
Alexander Knapik-Levert posted Sep 12, 2018 8:49 PM Last edited: Thursday, September 13, 2018 10:26 AM EDT Subscribed
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2 - Provide your own definition of “feminist.” Is there an undeniable connection between literature written by women and feminism? Why? Why not?

A feminist is someone that looks for equality between biases sources of power and control. Particularly in issues like Patriarchy, or gender roles, minority rights of the disabled, poverty, and secularism, etc.,

Someone would attempt to confuse that with humanism, but I factually know more often than not it is women that end up taking up the brunt amount of humanist behaviors and giving with little reward or even acknowledgment.

Sometimes even getting targetted for their ideals of peace and forgive and forget as if those concepts are somehow radicalized and intolerable in a Southern Ontarian society.

Feminism to me is seeing that it isn't an easy path forward to beat the old boys club, the jingoism, and chauvinists, but to try anyway because its the right thing to do ethically for the future of humanity and the world.

Feminism means that I might not get it right every time, but if I learn from my mistakes, I'll be able to educate myself and improve and do some good. That I won't have to end up in a Rudyard Kipling Novel with a swastika emblem in the inner page, where Evo-psych pseudo-truths become the law and that I'll still have free will to say no way in hell to that stuff and still live a good life.

I would like intersectional feminism one day to help get accountability for the total corrupt inside job system sentencing that happened to my friend Courtney Vannessa Arthur when she was murdered in a small town, Straight out of Mississipi Burning.

I find women writers are more observant of tragedies, sorrow, the underdogs fragile, unwanted, and that this sensitivity makes them strong.

Truth shouldn't be a conquest and honestly should be something people live.

I really get that experience from reading Jane Eyre who reminds me of Courtney Vanessa Arthur - a woman just trying to live her life safely and help as many people as she could along the way.

Do you think men and women write differently? If so, what is it that is different about the two modes of writing: subject matter; style; narrative voice?
Yes, I think men and women write differently but only really to the extent when they are writing in the character of men or women or writing subjective experiences. This is because men and women's subjective experiences are factually quite different emotionally psychologically physically so in writing as a woman who is physically a woman and has lived a woman's life more of these nuances and character trains and observances of the setting are in the readers face.

More so society and media have definitely locked in women and men into gender roles and lifestyles that contribute to subject matter; style; narrative voice; etc. A male is more likely to be interested in watching or reading or writing a heroic story of a warlord than a story of a woman slowly and delicately taking care of her family and friends and improving their lives through thick and thin and even chronic illness.

There is an attention deficit issue with males wanting quick gratification into what is programmed as exciting and immediate that women typically don't have. I find women care more about the holistic good of a large group and making things amicable between everyone more than they do a having a champion or a winner take all do or die scenario.

Though I have to say in the case of Jane Eyre the reading reminds me more of detailed psychological attack and deconstruction of the patriarchy scheme and world it's operated in. In a much more healthy way than a wartime book like The Painted Bird which had to illustrate these concepts with blunt war descriptions, Bronte is more able to keep things less grotesque than war but still definitively cold and distressing with her first-hand account of Jane Eyer's life.

Tiny Tim from Charles Dickson's a Christmas Carol does not worry me half as much as Jane Eyre.




Feedback
Alexander,

I am sorry about your friend--she sounds like a wonderful person.

Your posts are very compelling. You really unravel a lot of interesting issues. Try to be more concise though, and edit your writing more. Re-read each post before posting it, paying particular attention to sentence fragments.

Alexander Knapik-Levert
September 12 at 9:23 PM
Hi Emily,

I agree that women do tend to put more emotion into their words than men and that lets the reader empathize with the meaning of the text to a much greater degree than say the latest specific mechanical term for computer or weapon or criminal grifting jargonized score antic.

When it comes to literature I feel the best way to interact with the text is to be able to empathize with what is being written and that simply is much harder if the book has plenty of technical jargon but not enough emotional language.


<<< Replied to post below >>>
Authored by: Emily Petrini-Woolley
Authored on: Sep 12, 2018 9:41 AM
Subject: Module 1

Question one:



When comparing men and women’s writing styles, I would have to say that through my own personal experiences with novels and different reading materials, that there is a clear difference between the way a woman writes, compared to a man. I find that women tend to write with a lot of emotion, are very cautious with how they describe things, and they really write so that we can understand how they are feeling. However, from what I have experienced, men don’t write with much emotion. They get down to the point very fast and forget that a reader needs as much information as possible, to be able to fully understand and establish emotion within a story. For example, a woman may describe the death of a friend as being heart wrenching, life changing, and tear wrenching; while a man may describe the same event as being bad, poor timing, and/or unbelievable. In this example, I would connect way more with how the women feels, than how the man described his pain.



Question two:



To me, being a feminist means to be open minded toward everything in life. To accept everyone, no matter their race, sexuality, social class, gender. It also means that as a woman myself, that I stand up for what I believe in, I stand up for women’s rights, and will not allow myself to be degraded, because I am a woman. Often, I hear that “women can’t do tough/strong jobs, or “men” jobs”, and I get highly offended at this because we can do anything that a man can do. Why do us women choose not to degrade men because they are unable to carry a fetus in their body for nine long months? But it is ok for us women to be put down because we don’t have “big muscles” or are considered “weak”? Both of these things are completely out of our control, and we all need to love each other for who we are. Men can’t help that they were born males. Just like women don’t get to choose to be born females. Gender equality is still a huge problem in today’s society, and we really need both men and women to stand up to women’s rights, so that we can live in a kinder and more loving world.

I do believe that there is a connection between feminism and literature written by women because when women write, they don’t typically talk down to the male gender, and are quite accepting, which I think is part of my definition of feminism.

Alexander Knapik-Levert
September 12 at 9:16 PM
Hi Vyomi Vyas

I agree with your definition of feminism and was interested how you juxtaposed such a solid and easy to empathize with a definition of feminism with one of men's writing.

I had forgotten how many extra technical words a writer like James Joyce would have added into one of his books, or how much extra bloated terms we come up with today to appease our social groups or for whatever myriad of reasons.

Your comment made me think of the website urban dictionary which I think its pretty useless and so loaded with jargonized words of the day and how much those words are taken as serious pending the peer group someone is in at the time of their usage.

It made me think of how much more accessible writing is when everyone can understand it without the ego flaunting of the biggest vocabulary.

Alexander Knapik-Levert
September 20 at 2:35 PM

Hi Christine, thank you for your very thorough answers, they are really excellent to read as Jane Eyre is an important topic.

The closeness of the relationship with Bertha and Rochester is questionable for sure. It makes me think of almost a purely arranged marriage, though Rochester does say that he loved Bertha.

Bertha's suicide and her crawling on her hands and legs doesn't speak to me of genuine physical or genetic mental illness. I think of it as more cries for help from someone who has been supplanted and abducted to a foreign land. I don't think it's learned helplessness I think it's vitality and revolt while imprisoned. When she can not escape from her prison and is left behind in a trapped life she decides to break free from the mortal coil.

Jane Eyre definitely develops as you say over the course of the relationship with Rochester but not only that the entire novel. She is a woman for all seasons as much as that other guy is a man for all of them. Jane can not possibly be only submissive or subservient, she has many learned behaviors, but she also has many survival traits as well. Bertha and Jane both represent some form of confining nature into madness, the taming of nature using patriarchy.

The relegation of people to book characters has to be a theme here, as the novel is so detailed it is almost like the humans in it are living creations. Observing the similarities of people in the physical world to them makes them that much more alive.


<<< Replied to post below >>>
Authored by: Christine La
Authored on: Sep 18, 2018 8:44 PM
Subject: Module 2- Jane Eyre

What do you make of the courtship and relationship of Rochester and Bertha Mason? Is her madness a result of genetic predisposition (‘nature’) or of outside forces (culture shock, imprisonment, incompatible spouse, etc.—in other words, ‘nurture’)?

I think the relationship between Rochester and Bertha Mason is that they did not have a close relationship regardless of their marital status to each other. I think that because they did not have a relationship prior to their marriage, they were not able to form a relationship as a couple. In relation, it was mentioned that Rochester did not love his wife, Bertha. It is evident that he married her because of her beauty and her family's wealth. As a result, Bertha's madness was a result of outside forces (culture shock, imprisonment, incompatible spouse), but due to Bertha's imprisonment for 10 years, it is likely for one to develop "crazy-like" or "madness" behaviours. In addition, in the novel, it was mentioned that Bertha's family history included mental health illnesses such as violent insanity and intellectual disability. It was evident that Bertha did suffer from violent behaviours and would crawl with her hands and legs. So, I think that her imprisonment and her husband's actions of mistreating her (and wanting to marry Jane), resulted her to behave violently and show her true self. I believe that Bertha does suffer from mental illness such as behaving violently, which she inherited from her family genes.

Brontë’s heroine Jane Eyre is often seen as a model of strong, independent womanhood by readers of the novel. At the same time, others maintain that Jane is a subservient, submissive woman who finds fulfillment in the marriage to a domineering man. In your opinion, what is the more accurate reading of Jane’s character and why?

I think that Jane Eyre is a subservient, submissive woman who finds fulfillment in the marriage to Rochester. I think that Jane's relationship and love to Rochester is undeniable. Her character and personality develops from when she first met Rochester on the morning walk to when she returns to find Rochester after running away and hiding from him. Although Jane had refused to be married to Rochester because of his marital status with Bertha, she did not forget about Rochester when she ran away and hid from him. She was obedient to Rochester, for instance, when he asked her to aid Mason's wounds she did. It is evident that Jane's personality is supportive, and will help when she sees it. To exemplify, she discovers that Rochester is injured from saving the servants and Bertha from the fire, and she immediately offers to take care of him. In conclusion, I believe that Jane is a woman who loves and listens to Rochester.

Christine La
September 21 at 12:28 PM
Hi Alexander, I didn't think of interpreting Bertha's suicide and her crawling behaviours as a cry for help, as you have mentioned. However, now that you mentioned it, I can interpret it in that sense as well. I think that Bertha didn't even realize she was crawling or acting violently. Perhaps she was exhausted from her relationship with Rochester and acted out without realization.

Thank you for your response.

Unread post
Emily Petrini-Woolley
September 21 at 3:02 PM
Hi Christine,

I also agree with you when you highlighted that the relationship between Rochester and Bertha contributed to her madness. He was extremely controlling and didn't take her feelings into consideration. To me that would make me extremely frustrated. I also felt that he messed with her head, and being that her head was already not in the right place, I can definitely see why she would have fallen off the deep end. He didn't help her in any way.

Great post!

Unread post
Pooyah Kathirgamanathan
September 21 at 3:32 PM
Hey Christine,

I agree with you that Rochester and Bertha didn’t have a close relationship. Keeping Bertha in the attic only made her more violent and mad and did not help in any way. I think that’s what also led up to Bertha’s suicide. I feel that if Bertha had received proper care from her family or Mr. Rochester that she needed for her mental illness she would have not ended up dead or being locked up in the attic that led to her death. Their relationship was not healthy and there was no love or care in their relationship.

Great Post!

<<< Replied to post below >>>
Authored by: Christine La
Authored on: Sep 18, 2018 8:44 PM
Subject: Module 2- Jane Eyre

What do you make of the courtship and relationship of Rochester and Bertha Mason? Is her madness a result of genetic predisposition (‘nature’) or of outside forces (culture shock, imprisonment, incompatible spouse, etc.—in other words, ‘nurture’)?

I think the relationship between Rochester and Bertha Mason is that they did not have a close relationship regardless of their marital status to each other. I think that because they did not have a relationship prior to their marriage, they were not able to form a relationship as a couple. In relation, it was mentioned that Rochester did not love his wife, Bertha. It is evident that he married her because of her beauty and her family's wealth. As a result, Bertha's madness was a result of outside forces (culture shock, imprisonment, incompatible spouse), but due to Bertha's imprisonment for 10 years, it is likely for one to develop "crazy-like" or "madness" behaviours. In addition, in the novel, it was mentioned that Bertha's family history included mental health illnesses such as violent insanity and intellectual disability. It was evident that Bertha did suffer from violent behaviours and would crawl with her hands and legs. So, I think that her imprisonment and her husband's actions of mistreating her (and wanting to marry Jane), resulted her to behave violently and show her true self. I believe that Bertha does suffer from mental illness such as behaving violently, which she inherited from her family genes.

Brontë’s heroine Jane Eyre is often seen as a model of strong, independent womanhood by readers of the novel. At the same time, others maintain that Jane is a subservient, submissive woman who finds fulfillment in the marriage to a domineering man. In your opinion, what is the more accurate reading of Jane’s character and why?

I think that Jane Eyre is a subservient, submissive woman who finds fulfillment in the marriage to Rochester. I think that Jane's relationship and love to Rochester is undeniable. Her character and personality develops from when she first met Rochester on the morning walk to when she returns to find Rochester after running away and hiding from him. Although Jane had refused to be married to Rochester because of his marital status with Bertha, she did not forget about Rochester when she ran away and hid from him. She was obedient to Rochester, for instance, when he asked her to aid Mason's wounds she did. It is evident that Jane's personality is supportive, and will help when she sees it. To exemplify, she discovers that Rochester is injured from saving the servants and Bertha from the fire, and she immediately offers to take care of him. In conclusion, I believe that Jane is a woman who loves and listens to Rochester.

Alexander Knapik-Levert
September 20 at 1:57 PM
Emily, I agree with you that Rochester is controlling and abusive, and I think the relationships in Jane Eyre really show a detail of the various ways patriarchy psychologically controls people, womyn.

Especially how Rochester locks Bertha away in the attic as if to sweep her under the carpet, or treat her like a disposable possession. By being dismissive of Bertha's entire existence and imprisoning her Rochester also manipulates Jane against Bertha with his bigamy. To me, that's an obvious crazy-making tactic that will most likely gaslight a reaction, which is why I can't label Jane as strictly confused, maybe it is more that she is having confusion inflicted on her?

Jane is very naturally lucid, she flees her various abusive environments many times, she witnesses life horrors while the book poses important experiences and questions on not only the control and abuse of women but patriarchal society as a whole.

I don't think Bertha is mad at all because almost the entirety of psychiatry is a historically based male construct of oppression. Rochester's diagnosis of Bertha having some inherited mental illness because of genetic "science" in the 18th century and his power to simply lock her away is good evidence of that history of authoritarian abuse.

Some people actively go looking for, "I did not participate in this horror show" trophies, perhaps Charlotte Bronte did the same a bit after completing a monumental contribution to humanity like Jane Eyre.





<<< Replied to post below >>>
Authored by: Emily Petrini-Woolley
Authored on: Sep 17, 2018 3:24 PM
Subject: Week 2

Brontë’s heroine Jane Eyre is often seen as a model of strong, independent womanhood by readers of the novel. At the same time, others maintain that Jane is a subservient, submissive woman who finds fulfillment in the marriage to a domineering man. In your opinion, what is the more accurate reading of Jane’s character and why?
In my opinion, I feel that Jane is a confused woman, who isn’t really sure of what she wants in life. At times, she demonstrates that she is an independent woman. But then just like that, she changes her character and makes the reader feel that the she needs a man to survive in this world, and that she lets people walk right over her. An example of this, is when Jane is in a relationship with Rochester. She allows herself to be controlled by Rochester, even though she claims that she loves the man. Why would you allow yourself to love someone who constantly controls your life? What is so satisfying about that? In contrast, she begins to realize that all she is, is an object to Rochester, and starts to despise him, and the gifts he brings to her. So although she begins to show her independency by realizing that the relationship she is in, isn’t real, she still allows her submissive partner to control her life. Further, Jane was strong enough to stand up for herself when John Reed was treating her wrongfully, but yet, allowed Rochester to play mind games with her, before she ran away from the relationship. Jane is a very confusing character.

What do you make of the courtship and relationship of Rochester and Bertha Mason? Is her madness a result of genetic predisposition (‘nature’) or of outside forces (culture shock, imprisonment, incompatible spouse, etc.—in other words, ‘nurture’)?
The courtship and relationship between Rochester and Bertha is not normal, is extremely unhealthy, and has clearly damaged both of them emotionally. I do believe that part of the reason that Betha is unable to control herself, is because she is in fact, “mad”. From what I have interpreted from the story, Bertha is not the only one in her family who is insane, and therefore, some of her behaviour and actions have very likely become out of her control, and she is unable to manage herself in the way that a typical, “normal” adult would. Some could argue that because she didn’t get help for her issues, she has set herself up for failure in life. In addition, Rochester has a history of being controlling, and from my personal experiences, controlling someone who is not well in the head, is a recipe for disaster, and will just end badly for both parties involved. Further, the fact that Rochester felt the only way to stay safe, was by locking Bertha in the attic, supports my opinion that both Bertha and Rochester were in an unsafe, and abusive relationship/courtship.

Cassandra Carchesio
September 20 at 10:06 PM
Hi Emily,

I too agree that a combination of a predisposed history of mental illness, along with a lack of nurture from her husband is what ultimately led Bertha to become "mad". It was unfortunate that she was unable to receive the proper help she so desperately needed in this relationship. It was evident that Rochester's abusive and controlling tendencies that Jane had too noticed in their own relationship had led to a toxic, unsafe environment . Ultimately, Bertha's mental and physical is what took a toll.

Thanks for your post!

Unread post
Haya Khalid
September 21 at 4:47 PM
I agree with you I don't believe that their marriage was a healthy one or an even a good one and not getting the proper care would result in the state of the person worsening I used to think that it was because of nurture and the way that everything was handled and peoples expectations of women but you really made me think about other factors as well

Module 2 - Questions 1, and 4.
Alexander Knapik-Levert posted Sep 20, 2018 12:21 PM Subscribed
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Brontë’s heroine Jane Eyre is often seen as a model of strong, independent womanhood by readers of the novel. At the same time, others maintain that Jane is a subservient, submissive woman who finds fulfillment in the marriage to a domineering man. In your opinion, what is the more accurate reading of Jane’s character and why?

Jane Eyre to me is an example of born innocence that gets castigated into a jail-like frame of life, the patriarchy, but is luckily vivacious enough to resist the death throes.

Throughout the novel, her decision making is inhibited by limited choices from that type of society. She takes to survival, and in that sense has a very intelligent and detailed perspective on the entire psychological model of her environment. This isn’t subservient, or submissive, it isn’t strong in the, “I don’t want to die” sense, because, it should be given to not want to be trapped, enslaved, and destroyed by the world from birth, mentally and physically. What she does is natural and feminine in a world against it. She illuminates that world. She is a feminist character.

The marriage is her on the tracks of life making the best of what she can through the perspective of someone hopeful. Rochester isn’t her penultimate fulfillment, he’s her imperative from what she knows, even with evidence of his past failures as a person and man. St. John, to me is a representation of the church as a redundancy where after surviving one tainted love romantically, when Jane moves on, religion is there to attempt to scoop up her “soul” into a different hegemony, “appealing to a higher power.” The patriarchy doom train machine has no breaks.

She isn’t submissive to either of these characters and interacts with them as “sociable” as possible with her available information, though she encounters lots of grief.

There is a real commentary in this novel on how social systems shape people’s choices and lives. It isn’t as simple as doing something grandiose like, “taking personal responsibility.”

People aren’t perfect and women shouldn’t be targeted to be immaculate or binary.

What do you think is the relationship between Charlotte Brontë the author and Jane and Bertha the literary creations respectively? What is the function, using Gilbert and Gubar’s terminology, of Jane the chaste and modest woman and of Bertha the wanton madwoman in Brontë’s text?

Using Gilbert and Gubar’s terminology there is anomie and the permanent authority of text in both Charlotte Bronte as a person, and Jane and Bertha the literary creations. In my opinion, the novel is a published and detailed feminism that is accessible hundreds of years later, and social critique during a time period that totally was against it.

Revolt is hinted at in the entire novel, and the placement of the characters, as well as, “what could have been if...” and the conflict of that, and I think Charlotte Bronte’s life did too. Revision of a failed system of oppression is hard, especially when, “she is victimized by what Mitchell calls the “inferiorized and ‘alternative’ (second sex) psychology of women under patriarchy.” (Gilbert and Gubar).

Jane and Bertha interact with Charlotte Bronte’s own ideas of how patriarchal structures have not only affected her but all women. They are feminist creations.

The madwoman in the attic and the chaste marriageable woman show the angel/demon, false-dichotomy, through the juxtaposition of the psychosocial worlds they live in.

There is a system of thinking and writing being put on display that shows how male-dominated it is, right down to the “sociosexual” relations of the characters.









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Ruchika Gothoskar
September 21 at 6:37 PM
Hi Alexander,

Thank you for your thoughtful reflection. Something that really struck me was you saying, "people aren’t perfect and women shouldn’t be targeted to be immaculate or binary." It's such a powerful statement steeped in truth - women, more often than not, are held to such an immeasurable and unattainable regard, expected to be everything, for everyone. To expect that out of anyone, let alone exclusively women, is silly and ridiculous. It was just quite nice to see that statement written out for once, is what I think I'm trying to get at here!

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Your posts are very perceptive, Alexander.

Try to incorporate quotations into your sentences though (rather than letting them stand on their own). See: https://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/Integrating_Quotes.pdf

I don't think there is any textual evidence to suggest the narrator of the YW dies at the end. The last we know of her is that she has lost touch with reality entirely and she is "creeping" around and around the room, and over John's unconscious body.

Alexander Knapik-Levert
September 28 at 11:57 PM
Jennifer, I agree that the perception of John diminishes as the story goes on, almost as if he is inhibited by his role as a doctor and not completely able to emotionally relate with his wife. In this way, the story is tragic to me because as the narrator gets more sick, so does the relationship. Parts of their relationship are displayed more transparently as the story goes on, and the reader can really feel the dysfunction and control of the relationship and John. I feel like this is all exacerbated by John being very normalized to his patriarchal role and believing he's the one that's right and the authority, while conversely his wife who has coupled with as she gets sicker can no longer rationalize herself out of her feelings of inequality or being treated like a prisoner.

I think the relationship dynamic makes the Yellow Wallpaper more tragic but also more pointed in its social commentary about the injustice in traditional relationship dynamics.

Because the narrator is treated like an object she almost becomes one in her "stimulating distraction" as you say of the wallpaper.

Truly a mind-bogglingly tragic story, and your comment made me think about it in a lot of ways I wasn't able to, thank you!

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Authored by: Jennifer Weeks
Authored on: Sep 24, 2018 1:27 PM
Subject: questions 1 & 3

I have mixed feelings about John and the ‘medical treatment’ of his wife. At first, I thought John is a kind man who wants what is best for his wife, and genuinely loves and cares for her: The narrator says “He is very careful and loving” and “He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have the perfect rest...” His intentions seem good, as he tends to her needs and wishes for her recovery. However, as the story progresses, I feel John shows he is in fact controlling, patronizing and insensitive in his reactions to her wishes, concerns, and behaviour. The narrator says John “laughs at me about the wallpaper”, dismissing her discomfort with it. She asks to go downstairs, and he doesn’t agree. She wishes John would let her visit family, and he says she’s not well enough. She can’t write, which she loves to do, because ‘nothing’ is best- and he knows best. And he is "practical in the extreme", with control. All of these instances make me see John as someone who lacks emotion, concern and patience in her recovery. And he is treating her more of a stubborn ‘patient’ than his wife.

The symbolism of the yellow wallpaper is certainly strong! The woman trapped behind the ‘bars’ in the pattern is, I think, symbolic of the narrator, ‘trapped’ in the room, the house, and in her oppressed gender role (no education, supposed to marry/raise a family, abiding by your husband) in the Victorian 19th century. She is trapped in the ‘pattern’ of day to day life. Her husband claims to plan to remove it from the wall, but he does not, to her disappointment, because he thinks it of course has nothing to do with her recovery. So, the lingering of it on the wall, despite her despise of it, symbolises to me that ‘men know better than women’. The paper drives her ‘mad’ eventually as it is the only stimulating distraction for her, since she is forbidden to write, socialize, exercise, etc... Thus the ‘crazy’ design and pattern is, well, her fate. Also, she says of the description how the “curves commit suicide”, which struck me as a sort of foreshadowing.

Alexander Knapik-Levert
September 28 at 11:49 PM
"I think because her husband loves her, he is strict with the treatment, and this makes the treatment weigh that much more on the narrator. Additionally, I believe that the narrator's husband has more control over her compared to the control a husband exerts on his wife in a typical husband-wife relationship. This is because her husband is also her physician, so he has just that much more power and control over her, and that much more power to make orders upon her. "

Hey Alexandra, I think you expressed some really good points that I missed in my own analysis.

It is challenging that the husband both loves his wife and is her physician. I agree with you that it must weigh more on the narrator, almost like a contributing factor to her outlook on her condition. It's scary to me to read about the influence that males can have through sheer accumulated power and normalization in patriarchy.

I feel that it creates a very large blindness for males in not being able to know what exactly they are doing wrong in their treatment of women, which is a reason I enjoy learning about feminism.

It's particularly tragic to me that the husband's wife gets progressively more ill and perhaps dies when he has so much control over her. There must be a communication divide when she seems outright against him and more enjoying the Yellow Wallpaper.

It also could just be such a great piece of writing on the perils of marriage in patriarchal society that shows how male power corrupts and alienates some from the people they care about.

I enjoyed what your comment reminded me of, thank you.
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Authored by: Alexandra Nemeth
Authored on: Sep 28, 2018 1:33 AM
Subject: Module 3

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator’s husband is a renowned physician. Do you see his treatment of his ill wife as a means to control and patronize her, or do you believe he is doing what he sees as the best way to treat her nervous condition? Support your claims with specific references to the text. I believe that his treatment of his ill wife is a means to control her, but I also believe that he thinks that the “treatment” and this control over her that he is prescribing to her is out of love for her. I believe that what her husband thinks is best for her may not actually be what’s best for her, but her husband sees his treatment as the best treatment possible for the illness that his wife has. The narrator obviously does not feel that the treatment is working for her, as she believes that, “John is a physician, and perhaps-(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)-perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.” I think because her husband loves her, he is strict with the treatment, and this makes the treatment weigh that much more on the narrator. Additionally, I believe that the narrator's husband has more control over her compared to the control a husband exerts on his wife in a typical husband-wife relationship. This is because her husband is also her physician, so he has just that much more power and control over her, and that much more power to make orders upon her. He can control her and influence her by being her husband, but he can also exert control on her by being her physician, by ordering various treatments, etc. The narrator described how she even felt nervous being around her husband, which to me, means that their relationship was not healthy: “And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous”.
The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” spends her days and nights tracing the pattern of the wallpaper of the room in which she is essentially held captive. She provides the readers with a considerable amount of description of the wallpaper’s physical features. These physical features may be interpreted to stand as symbols for the narrator’s mental state and/or her situation. What do you think is the symbolic meaning of the yellow wallpaper?
I believe that the yellow wallpaper is a symbol of the narrator's thoughts and mind, and specifically, represents the narrator's mental disorder. I believe that she uses the wallpaper and the whole house, to describe her mental state. This is evident in the following passage: “…but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad. So I will let it alone and talk about the house”. For this reason, whenever she describes the house and the room, and the details of the wallpaper, I believe she is actually describing her mind. At the beginning of the story, when she is talking about the house (or really, herself and her mental state), she sees some goodness and positivity in it: “The most beautiful place!” and “There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a garden—large and shady.” I think that this represents that she is not completely insane, and there are some things that she sees are right about herself…and maybe just a small part of her mind is suffering (aka just the yellow wallpaper).

I think the wallpaper could have remained just an ugly wallpaper, and her depression could have just remained an episode of depression, but because of the treatment she was prescribed, the wallpaper became more than just a wallpaper, it becomes a tormenting, all-encompassing aspect of the narrators life, like an untreated or worsening mental disorder.



Additionally, just like how John believes that his wife is not sick, and that he “assures friends and family that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression,” he also is the one who “laughs at me so about this wallpaper!” To me, this shows that the wallpaper is the women’s mental disorder, and John does not believe her mental disorder actually exists, or he belittles her mental disorder.

Module 3 - Questions 2 and 3
Alexander Knapik-Levert posted Sep 24, 2018 6:51 PM Last edited: Monday, September 24, 2018 7:01 PM EDT Subscribed
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Cixous, much like Gilbert and Gubar, is trying to understand the social and historical circumstances that lead to the absence of women's voices in Western literature over the last two and a half thousand years. Is it simply a matter of women’s lack of access to education that would allow them to participate in the artistic and literary community? Or, is Cixous actually suggesting that women have a way of thinking, speaking, and interacting—a women's grammar--that is different from men’s and that has made it more difficult for women to participate in such discourse?

"Cixous does not want to provide rigid definitions for the terminology she uses, because to do so would make her essays exercises in dogma and phallocentricity—something she fights against." (Module 3 - Helene Cixous' "The Laugh of the Medusa' The Author Biography"). "For Cixous, the logical structure of male language not only sets up and maintains hierarchical positions, but makes them seem natural: the phallocentric model of language is thus the dominant mode of seeing and organizing the world. By writing the body, Cixous insists, women writers will free their bodies as well as their speech." (Module 3 - Helene Cixous' Analysis of "The Laugh of The Medusa").

I think Cixous is suggesting that there is a woman's grammar, that it is different from men's, and that it is important to participate with it because it is beneficial to all women and differentiates womyn's writing from male writing. I think Cixous is saying that writing in any kind of typified historically established literary mode is going to be influenced by a patriarchal social norm, so when she engages in woman's writing she is going to write as a woman and not as a man, and that means expressing herself as one too.

The Laugh of the Medusa, in my opinion, illustrates how Cixous has given information in such a way so as to avoid patriarchal hierarchies in writing, an explanation of how she did so, and why as well.

I don't think it is only a lack of access to education that is preventing women from being active in the artistic and literary community though I do think Helene Cixous is a lover of education and she isn't strictly against historical form, as she describes in her "bisexuality of literacy" ideas. She isn't arguing to castrate men or men's writing of maleness and isn't arguing that all literary form up to her is evil, instead she speaks about de-paternalizing writing and the world, and that there are ways to do this in expressive writing, and in my opinion, that writing is a way for all women to help find themselves.

I think she is arguing for more acceptance in different types of writing instead of demonizing one.

The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” spends her days and nights tracing the pattern of the wallpaper of the room in which she is essentially held captive. She provides the readers with a considerable amount of description of the wallpaper’s physical features. These physical features may be interpreted to stand as symbols for the narrator’s mental state and/or her situation. What do you think is the symbolic meaning of the yellow wallpaper?

In my opinion, the symbolism of the yellow wallpaper is situational in the context of each of the narrator's experiences documented in the text, as well as of an overall symbolism of the patriarchal male-dominated system of the world.

The wallpaper is stripped off in large chunks at the start of the story. This could have a dual meaning in that not only is the narrator physically ill but the wallpaper and her life is damaged by patriarchy to begin with.

The narrator is very educated (she may want to inflict that she is indoctrinated) in the introductory lines, she's clearly been formally educated, she knows about ancestral knowledge, but her thinking about her life is all in relation to this guy John, her husband, who is dismissive of her and even laughs at her questioning. She's been socially conditioned to relate to herself through him so she's taught herself to brush off his abusive behavior. She's also been normalized to her patriarchal society to an extreme degree, she's fine being called patronizing condescending infantilizing terms like little girl, listening to her husband's orders, being denied social contact, and generally being submissive because that is her society's idea of "normal", though it's destructive, and she internalizes this destructive aspect of society. That is the analogy of the wallpaper in my opinion, and while this all happens the wallpaper changes, "On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind." (The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman).

"The color is hideous enough and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing." (The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman). Perhaps this is a reflection on her dealings with her husband, their moving to a country mansion, the expectations he has towards her being a mother, her treatment in her growing sickness, and how society reinforces all of this as healthy or "good". Because the world is a patriarchy and because she is locked out of changing that society because she is a woman, having the knowledge of what is happening to her is torturous.

I'm not sure if the narrator dies in the end, but she says she pulls down most of the wallpaper and this symbolizes to me that once she has exposed the reader and her husband to the ideas that the patriarchy is so toxic, that that can't be changed, that though she may be dead she is free of the patriarchy, she has become part of the fabric of life itself by interacting with it and writing about it, and now she is able to creep over "him" every time. It is gruesome that she may have had to die to pull down the wallpaper and expose her husband to what she experienced, which is another commentary on the sickness of it. Though she may have been physically ill, she was not intentionally ill and the patriarchy is if she must seek freedom from it in death.

Alexander Knapik-Levert
October 2 at 10:48 PM
Hi Helen, I agree with you that there were some indicators that the relationship could have been "loving" but not loving in the love-filled and happy sense.

I think Rochester does give basic courtesy sometimes to Antoinette but it is never anything more than basic, and mostly to save himself from his perceived inconvenience of her emotions, I wouldn't consider it empathetic. His comfort for her when she leaves her home is to tell her to, "forget about it" which isn't really comforting, and then he goes on to be dismissive of all her other emotions that she shares with him defeating the entire discussion and emotional relation. He also belittles her shortly after and starts calling her Bertha, almost reimagining her as something he wants to both try to change her and also dismiss her existence and humanity further.

I'm not sure if Rochester telling Antoinette he doesn't love her is what fully pushes her over the edge as a final catalyst so much as it may make her more desperate out of self-preservation. Much like witnessing all the other horrors of her life Antoinette may have learned that in order to survive or at least not be cast out and destitute she would have to do certain uncomfortable things to survive. I think this is also why she doesn't leave to go to Martinique when Christophine suggests it, she has definitely been conditioned to believe that to maintain her life she must stick to some patriarch for better or worse, with the worse being potential independence but ultimately being alone and even dying in a very cruel and violent way.

In this way, it's very very evident how patriarchy infects women into dependence and robs them of their agency. It's particularly graphic in a novel like Wide Saragossa Sea because the historical context is so brutal, though these social problems continue today.

Thank you for your interesting comment.

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Authored by: Helen Huynh
Authored on: Oct 2, 2018 9:54 AM
Subject: Module 4

1. I think that there were some indicators that pointed to the possibility of a loving relationship between the two characters. I think that the Englishman loved Antoinette in a small way and, if outside forces did not break them apart, or if he allowed himself to develop these feelings, there could have been real love between them. For example, when they were beginning their journey to Jamaica, he said that he would comfort her if she she showed any signs of sadness over leaving her childhood home. This showed that he still cared enough for her that he would want to hold her if she were sad. I also believe that the gossip and Daniel Cosway’s letter had some truth in them but were over exaggerated by their hatred for Antoinette’s family. For example, her mother did go mad but what drove her to madness was omitted from gossip which made her seem crazier than she actually was. Her reason for attacking her husband could stem from the grief of losing her son and her blaming him for the death since he refused to leave the home when she asked him to. There were things that pushed her mother to madness, just as there were things that pushed Antoinette to madness and omitting these things in the gossip and letter made their points less valid.

2. I think that Antoinette fully goes mad after the Englishman tells her he doesn't love her. Though I believe that she was already mentally ill before their marriage since she discussed how she felt depressed at night, I do not think that her madness reached a full climax until she heard that her husband didn’t love her. During the fight, when he tells her he doesn’t love her, she began to curse at him with words she didn’t consciously realize she was using and then even bites him. It was at this moment that I think she really lost control of her sanity. I think she snapped at this moment because it seemed like her husband was the only person left that she could fully have as a companion but with this admission from him, she realized she had truly lost everyone. Her mother rejected her and she knew that her servants were planning on leaving, so the Englishman was all she felt she really had left. Losing him too was too much and this caused her to go mad. We can see this after their fight, on their journey to Jamaica, where Antoinette did not seem to have feelings anymore and seemed “doll-like”, signalling that she gave into her madness and no longer cared about trying to fight it.

Christine La
October 4 at 6:39 PM
Hi Helen, I agree with you that the letter that Daniel Cosway wrote was over-exaggerated and an addition to the gossips. He wanted to show that Antoinette and her family had issues, which was basically seen throughout the book with the servants' gossips. So, I do agree with you that the gossips was also a factor that caused Antoinette's madness behavior.

I too believe that Antoinette's cause of madness occurred when she found out that her husband doesn't love her. She had a love connection with him, but she was rejected from it. Also like her servants, gossiping about her and her former nanny planning on leaving her, she had no one to rely on and did not feel loved.

Thank you for your insight.

Unread post
Emily Petrini-Woolley
October 5 at 9:43 AM
Hi Helen,

I really didn’t believe that there was any love between Antoinette and the Englishman, but you did a good job on convincing me. Perhaps, there was a time, where he actually had true feelings towards her, and showed compassion, but unfortunately it didn’t last long.

I also feel that the turning point and the reason that she went mad, was because of all the traumatic events that had just happened to her family. Her brother died, and her mom was very unwell. She had no one to express her emotions too, and was left with her and her unwell thoughts.

Great post!

Unread post
Simrah Ali
October 5 at 11:59 PM
Hi Helen - do you think that that Rochestor telling Antoinette that he doesn't love her is the long factor that caused her to go mad?

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Authored by: Helen Huynh
Authored on: Oct 2, 2018 9:54 AM
Subject: Module 4

1. I think that there were some indicators that pointed to the possibility of a loving relationship between the two characters. I think that the Englishman loved Antoinette in a small way and, if outside forces did not break them apart, or if he allowed himself to develop these feelings, there could have been real love between them. For example, when they were beginning their journey to Jamaica, he said that he would comfort her if she she showed any signs of sadness over leaving her childhood home. This showed that he still cared enough for her that he would want to hold her if she were sad. I also believe that the gossip and Daniel Cosway’s letter had some truth in them but were over exaggerated by their hatred for Antoinette’s family. For example, her mother did go mad but what drove her to madness was omitted from gossip which made her seem crazier than she actually was. Her reason for attacking her husband could stem from the grief of losing her son and her blaming him for the death since he refused to leave the home when she asked him to. There were things that pushed her mother to madness, just as there were things that pushed Antoinette to madness and omitting these things in the gossip and letter made their points less valid.

2. I think that Antoinette fully goes mad after the Englishman tells her he doesn't love her. Though I believe that she was already mentally ill before their marriage since she discussed how she felt depressed at night, I do not think that her madness reached a full climax until she heard that her husband didn’t love her. During the fight, when he tells her he doesn’t love her, she began to curse at him with words she didn’t consciously realize she was using and then even bites him. It was at this moment that I think she really lost control of her sanity. I think she snapped at this moment because it seemed like her husband was the only person left that she could fully have as a companion but with this admission from him, she realized she had truly lost everyone. Her mother rejected her and she knew that her servants were planning on leaving, so the Englishman was all she felt she really had left. Losing him too was too much and this caused her to go mad. We can see this after their fight, on their journey to Jamaica, where Antoinette did not seem to have feelings anymore and seemed “doll-like”, signalling that she gave into her madness and no longer cared about trying to fight it.

Unread post
Alyssa Oddi
October 6 at 11:32 AM
Hey Helen, I think that you make an excellent point discussing "outside forces" when it comes to Antoinette and the Unnamed Englishman's love. I never considered their relationship a loving one, but regarding the Englishman's ability to comfort his wife is an endearing and caring point that I hadn't really thought of! You're right, his way of showing Antoinette that he cares about her feelings is extremely kind of him. Even if it isn't love, initially, at this part, readers can see that he does have it in his heart to look after Antoinette's wellbeing. I also didn't consider Daniel Conway's letter to have any precedence to the story, as I read it as a bitter and angry note, written for the sole purpose of over exaggerating the truth an tarnishing Antoinette's reputation.

Alyssa

Alexander Knapik-Levert
October 2 at 10:38 PM
Hey, I enjoyed your comment and it's very succinct in covering many of the aspects of how Antoinette is basically set up to be doomed from the start.

You're absolutely right that Daniel and the people in the book don't believe Antoinette is deserving of love. In this way, a large group of people, the tyranny of the masses, chooses to victimize her from the time she is young. This could be seen in one way as retribution for the family having owned slaves in the past but it is nothing but revenge in my opinion. It is taking one abusive patriarchy and replacing it with another.

I also agree that there wasn't anything loving about the relationship between Rochester and Antoinette, to begin with and it was also set up to be unhealthy. He's groomed to be a patriarch and people user and she's groomed to be innocent and accepting of it without agency to escape. That plus the time era of the setting is a recipe for disaster in my opinion.

I think your line that fate is against them in every way possible is very true, but what makes it more agitating and grief causing for me is that it is the system and society against them as well.

I don't think there was something not quite right with Antoinette, only that there was social condition and expectations for her to be a certain way which she can't possibly be because she has empathy skills and isn't a psychopath. Antoinette sees the humanity in people and that's why she relates to Obiah and Creole and her servants and family. Because she has empathy she is victimized by society over and over again, and you're right in my opinion for, "not blaming her for going mad because she had essentially lost everything...".

I agree that had Antoinette's situation been slightly different she wouldn't have been targetted by the masses and she wouldn't have been victimized or taught to internalize her victimization and would have had a much different life. Truly it is a scary piece of knowledge to learn.

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Authored by: Emily Petrini-Woolley
Authored on: Oct 1, 2018 7:29 PM
Subject: Week 4

Do you see indicators in the text that point to the possibility of a loving relationship between the unnamed Englishman and Antoinette? How much validity do you give to the gossip and especially Daniel Cosway’s letter? Support your answers with examples from the text.

I do not see any indicators in the text that suggest that there is a loving relationship between Antoinette and the unnamed Englishman. Right from the start, it was pretty evident that the decision to marry Antoinette was spiteful, and he did not truly love her. In fact, it was mentioned that he does not feel like himself when he is around her, and if he feels this way, then why in the world would he marry someone who he isn’t comfortable around? Antoinette can also sense the awkward tension between the two of them, and knows that what they have, isn’t real at all. Unfortunately, there is nothing loving about their relationship, and is actually very unhealthy. In regard to the gossip, I believe that people thought the arrangement between Antoinette and the Englishman was strange, but I do not believe that the letter from Daniel Cosway was truthful. I feel that everyone wanted to ruin Antoinette’s marriage because people may have felt that she was undeserving of love, so this man Daniel, decided to stir the pot and tried to blackmail them both. It was really hard to determine whether Daniel was truly a slave and had anything to do with the Englishman in the past, but either way, Antoinette and her husband are doomed for sadness. Fate is against them in every possible way.





At what point do your think Antoinette goes mad? What are the causes of her madness? Support your answer with examples from the text

I feel that there was something that was just not quite right with Antoinette, right from the start. From her character description, she seemed like someone who wasn’t’ comfortable with the gossip that she was surrounded with (I wouldn’t be either) and felt judged all of the time. However, I feel that the tipping point for Antoinette and the reason she became mad, was because her family home was set on fire, and in return, her brother had passed away, due to extreme exposure to spoke, and her mother became mentally unwell and couldn’t take care of her. Antoinette then was sent away to another family, who happened to be a family of color, and she had to attend a convent school. I interpret that Antoinette felt sad, defeated, and alone, and I don’t blame her for going mad because she had essentially lost everything she had ever cared about. I believe that although Antoinette’s family were very much disliked, it was the fact that they were not black, that put their whole situation over the top. Had they have been black, I find it doubtful that their house would have been set on fire, and therefore, Antoinette would still be with her brother and mother.

Module 4
Alexander Knapik-Levert posted Oct 2, 2018 9:20 PM Last edited: Tuesday, October 2, 2018 10:26 PM EDT Subscribed
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Do you see indicators in the text that point to the possibility of a loving relationship between the unnamed Englishman and Antoinette? How much validity do you give to the gossip and especially Daniel Cosway’s letter? Support your answers with examples from the text.

I think Rochester mostly exacerbates a bad situation, to begin with, this is mostly because he operates through a patriarchal system. He's even taught to seek dominance over other men as a patriarch which I think is exemplified in his letter to his father, listing an accomplishment, "he seemed to be attached to me and trust me completely."(69) He's a manipulator. When Antoinette is doing things like making her hair smell good or complimenting him on "looking like a king or emperor" he is dismissive having already crowned himself..(67).

To the extent of loving, I don't think he is more mitigating than loving. "I said, 'Antoinette, your nights are not spoiled, or your days, put the sad things away, don't think about them and nothing will be spoiled, I promise you." (121). In this way, Rochester is comforting but in what context is he comforting? Antoinette doesn't reply to him with some kind of binary emotional switch that she can just turn on and off but instead attempts to emotionally relate to him more about her brother's death, which he just turns off. He then guilts her about forgetting her mother when she brings up Mr. Mason having moved her mother in with other people away from them who abuse her.

Rochester then goes on to call her Bertha because he likes that name better. In this way, Rochester doesn't accept responsibility as a patriarch at all and there isn't any real love in their relationship.

As for the gossip and Daniel Cosway's letter, I think it shows the extent that people will go to gain an advantage over other people. Daniel Cosway's letter is destructive and not necessarily truthful in an attempt to gain money. The setting of the story is post-slavery and people are out for revenge. Using the formal Queen's English language, invoking knowledge of the Bible, all of these things could be attempts to gain confidence and manipulate for money. Deligitimizing a family that previously owned slaves or causing them chaos would be seen as a noble fight for people previously victimized by it and doing everything possible to cause conflict would also.

In the novel gossip is somewhat used as a voice for the native people to be juxtaposed against the storytellers so you know the social climate of the people, and it is one of revenge against the former slave owners in my opinion.

At what point do your think Antoinette goes mad? What are the causes of her madness? Support your answer with examples from the text.

"No one had ever spoken to me about obeah - but I knew what I would find if I dared to look." (28)

"...If the worst comes to the worst I can fight to the end though the best ones fall and that is another song." (34)

"I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it." (41)

Antoinette's house burns down, her brother dies, their parrot dies, she is predatorily stalked and bullying after, and her mother goes insane while living separately, their family is ruined. Then the convent, all through the book she is called white cockroach. Daniel Cosway's attempt at blackmail, and her husband arranging sexual liaisons that she must witness. There are too many contributing factors to list.

I think her entire life is on a railway track to PTSD but I wouldn't call it insanity. It isn't learned helplessness either because she is confined to a patriarchal structure that is basically inescapable. "Tell your husband you feeling sick you want to visit your cousin in Martinique... When you get away, stay away." (100) but she has no money and no protection, and after witnessing so mu
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I guess i must have missed the part where you guy pissed of vanster to the point that he's praying for tw's demise
 
ScooBySnaCk said:
vanster is attempting to troll and failing almost as bad as blackpeople. That award would be hard to beat. I mean a career bartender at probably Hampton Inn suites with the IQ of a turnip and probably as round as one stuck on repeat.
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Let's be fair here - Vanster is infinitely more interesting and entertaining than Blackpeople. I am hoping it's a persona.
 
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