← The Literary Life Podcast
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- [00:19]
Angelina Stanford
This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the science, skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and here with me me is the man who is not John Reed nor Mr. Brocklehurst.
- [01:39]
Thomas Banks
No, no, I think I. I think I avoid that particular skilla. And Charybdis.
- [01:43]
Angelina Stanford
You haven't tortured any animals recently? Not that I know of. Okay, okay. Phew. He's not Mr. Reed, our master read. He's Mr. Banks. And welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. Today we start a series that people have literally been asking us for, for years. A series on Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. And I'm very excited to start this. I think this is another fan favorite because it's going to be another opportunity for us to focus on our mission here, which is learning how to read in the literary tradition. And as we go, we're going to be able to highlight the different ways to read passages and we'll highlight some modern misreadings to what the passages look like if you're reading them within the older tradition. And I think you're going to see that that is very interesting and also just illuminates the book. And we'll talk about why those bad ways of reading are wrong and how we know they're wrong. You know, all the usual stuff you've come to expect expect from the Literary Life Podcast. If you're brand new. Buckle up, buckle up. I mean, we've been talking about these things on this podcast for since 2019. There's a huge back catalog which will hopefully fill in some of the gaps for you as we go. But this is a standalone series, but hopefully you'll be intrigued and want to binge seven years worth of episodes. But before we begin, a word from our sponsors us. This is a member supported podcast. This is a free podcast for you. It's not behind a paywall. You're not going to have the middle of this podcast interrupted with, you know, pillow ads or weight loss ads or cell phone ads. It's just us. And our day job is that we are teachers at House of Humane Letters. And this is a business that we started many years ago with the same mission as the podcast, to help people recover the lost intellectual tradition of the Humane Letter. And so we like to just start each podcast letting you know what we've got going on there for people who want to dig deeper. If you're enjoying the podcast and you just want to support us that way, of course you can join our Patreon. Big shout out to those guys who are, by the way, are killing it with this book. I, my heart is so huge right now. Every time I dip into the forum and see what they're talking about, I think they're doing it. They're doing it. They're reading so well. And I'm just, I'm like a proud mom to all of you guys. So well done to you. And if you want to check out some of our classes to dig deeper, I'll just tell you what's going on there. So this is our usual yearly registration for our year long classes. You can Visit our website, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to see all of the mini year long literature classes and history classes and language classes where you can go deeper. But we also have a number of shorter term options. If you're limited by budget or time or both, I'll tell you what we've got going on there. So in addition to our year long classes which are opening for registration right now, we've got two short term things that I would like to draw your attention to. One is a webinar. So that's a one night event for a couple of hours, two to three hours probably, and $18. So this is a low threshold starting point and we like to bring a number of different topics. And this, this month's topic for March is one I'm very excited about because part of our mission here in preserving and restoring the lost intellectual tradition is to show that stories are the tree of stories, capital S. And it's not the tree of English literature, it's not the tree of the Western tradition. It is the tree of all universal stories. And Western literature is one branch on that, but there are many other branches. And last month we had a webinar on the Persian tradition, looked at that branch. And this month we're going to be exploring the Asian tradition, another branch. And I'm quite excited as we fill out more of our Tree. So this is called the Righteous Outlaw from east to West Turning the Tables in the Upside Down World. So this is going to be a webinar. I won't read you the whole description here. I'm trying to make it snappy for you so we can get to Jane Eyre, but you can go to the website again. Houseofhumaneletters.com Click on the mini Classes tab and you can read the full description here. But basically we're going to look at the Robin Hood figure, the outlaw figure, and see him in the west and in the Eastern tradition. And through learning about the Eastern tradition, we will learn not only their tradition, but we will learn more about our own, because these are universal archetypes and images and they go in both directions. And I'm just really excited about that. If you've been curious about Robin Hood, if you've not understood what's going on in that story or even that character type, this is the webinar for you. It's going to be Fantastic. This is March 27th at 7:00pm Eastern, but like everything we do, it's recorded and you can either catch the live session or watch it later. The recording is yours to keep. And the instructor there is Addison Hornstra, who is getting an advanced degree in Asian Studies and is reading these things in Chinese. And this is just going to be a fantastic webinar. So if you've been curious about Asian stories, this is for you. And secondly, I want to talk to you about a new offering from Dr. Jason Baxter. So you guys have bought his book, published by our publishing wing, Cassiodorus Press, why Literature Still Matters. If you haven't, go over to cassiodoruspress.com right now and pick up that book. But that book has been a huge hit. Huge hit. Everybody loved it. And it really is just this amazing defense of the arts in the technological age and why we still need them. And when he finished that book and it got into the hands of readers, immediately you guys were asking the question, where do we go from here? Now what? What do we do? We. Okay, you've convinced us the arts are necessary. Literature is necessary. Now what do we do? And so he has designed a 12 week class to answer that question. It's called where do we Go from here? Reading for Life. And here's the description. Dr. Jason Baxter's book, why Literature Still Matters hit a nerve. So much so that readers not only agreed with the premise that we need literature in our technological age, but wanted to know, where do we go from here? In this course, Dr. Baxter will provide a six week long addendum to why literature still matters by giving a vision of a lifetime reading plan including an introduction to the different genres of literature, myth, epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry and the novel. That's right. You're ready to press buy now, right? This is going to be amazing. And he's actually going to do something kind of interesting here. So it's going to be six lectures over 12 weeks. So it'll be every other week. This is a fall class, by the way. I should say this is a class that will be starting in our fall schedule. So like you know, from August to December, 12 weeks over the, over that semester. But if you want, you can, you can register for an optional add on. And that's six weeks where he will give different literary essays on the different genres. So essays by C.S. lewis and Northrop Fry and all the people that you've come to learn about on the podcast. And then if you, if you choose that optional add on, he will have these like guided readings of those essays with you and you'll discuss them and go through them and try to understand more deeply what's going on there and how to apply it to the books that you've read. The final book list is yet to be determined, but will include the Odyssey by Homer, a Shakespeare play, Melville's Billy Bud, and select poems by Wordsworth and Keats. And you can find the schedule for that as well as the pricing options on our website. Again, that's HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and this is going to be a really fun class. I think Dr. Baxter is an amazing teacher. If you loved him in the book, you will love him even more in person. And we've also priced this class very low. So if you're looking for more from Dr. Baxter, this is for you. And speaking of Dr. Baxter and Cassiodorus Press, he's got yet another book out. I don't know how this man sleeps. Maybe he doesn't. Maybe the answer is he doesn't sleep. But we have a new book out. This is a reprint of his first book and with expanded and revised, it's called Falling Inward. We did a whole podcast episode on this back in January if you want to listen to that and get pumped up about the book. But this is on pre order. It should be coming out in the next month or so. You can find out about it at our website, cassiodoruspress.com and it's, it's a book where he tries to express the experience of depth in literature. And it's just a lovely book.
- [10:13]
Thomas Banks
That's a good description.
- [10:15]
Angelina Stanford
It's a lovely book. And so one last thing, you can also get on our mailing list so you can keep up with all the things that are going on. You can just check on the website every now and then, but you can also get on our mailing list. So HouseOfHumaneLetters.com click over there. It should pop up and ask you if you want to join the mailing list. If it doesn't, scroll to the bottom of the home page and there's a place there. Same thing for cassiodoruspress.com you can go over there and sign up for the newsletter there, find out about new publications. We've got a very exciting publication schedule coming up for that, so be on the lookout for that. All right, I did it. Ads are over. Let's get into it. If you're new to the podcast, we like to start off by sharing a quote from something we have read. So, Mr. Banks, I'm going to put it ball in your court.
- [10:57]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, mine is fairly short and to the point. It comes from some of one of Lord Byron's poems. And here he is reflecting on the fact that most great love poetry is not love poetry within marriage. It's usually poetry, you know, involving love before marriage or you know, something like. Or outside of marriage.
- [11:18]
Angelina Stanford
Maybe. But that fits with my thematic take on this book. But go ahead.
- [11:22]
Thomas Banks
Yes. But anyway, Lord Byron here. Thank you. If Laura had been Petrarch's wife, he would have written sonnets all his life.
- [11:33]
Angelina Stanford
I think Edmund Spencer has something to say about that, but.
- [11:35]
Thomas Banks
No, that's true. Edmund Spencer does have the epithelium and.
- [11:39]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, well, I'm going to save that thought. That'll be a few episodes from now when we get a little further into the book. I'm gonna, I'll bring up some Edmund Spencer. My quote is from Northrop Fry. Not surprising anybody. You can put that on your bingo card. He is my favorite literary critic and I was reading up on what he had to say about Charlotte Bronte and he you won't find this in any of his books, but he writes about this in his unpublished notebooks. And I found one particular paragraph that I thought really just summed up a lot of what I am going to say in this episode and over the next few weeks while we go through Jane Eyre. So he starts off talking about Charlotte Bronte's other novel, Shirley. Shirley is a well known and highly respected novel, but it is not and probably never will be as popular as Jane Eyre. Popularity may have an ideological link, like Uncle Tom's Cabin, but this is rarely primary. The usual reason for popularity is mythological, the unobscured revealing of archetypes. And then he goes on to say that Jane Eyre is a Cinderella story.
- [12:46]
Thomas Banks
That sounds like something you would say
- [12:47]
Angelina Stanford
it very much agree with. I'm glad. Well, I'm glad Fry agrees with me. It's always nice when he agrees with me.
- [12:51]
Thomas Banks
He stole your thoughts for the fact.
- [12:54]
Angelina Stanford
For the fact. This is the danger of being a ton.
- [12:55]
Thomas Banks
Just reading your thoughts before you were born.
- [12:58]
Angelina Stanford
Once again, him and CS Lewis both. But that's one of the things we're going to talk about, reading things in the tradition, reading them in terms of all the books are talking to each other, that there's a world of literature that's being referenced within each book, and that each book really is a gateway into the larger world of literature. And so while modern reading tends to focus on things like the ideas in the book or the ideological concerns, that I'm going to argue gets in the way of being able to see the true meaning and power of the work, which is ultimately archetypal and mythical, logical. So buckle up. We'll be getting into that. That's a little tease for what you've got coming. And, you know, I have to say again to the Patreon, when we first started out, I think in this podcast, it was kind of a hard sell for a lot of people to see that these books are really just fairy tales. And you'll learn why that's important if you're new to that idea. But right now on the Patreon, they're so excited because they're saying, wait, no, I'm getting it now. I'm seeing on every page of this book, there's like 50 fairy tale references. It's fairy tale after fairy tale after fairy tale. Like Jane Eyre, whole understanding of her life is. Is expressed to us in terms of books and folk tales and ballads. And this is going to be so important. We have this tendency to skim over that or brush it aside and to focus on, like, passages where someone's, you know, having a speech. But I think you're going to see that it's the speeches that are the asides. And the fairy tales is really. Is really the heart of it all. Right, before we jump in, though, let's set some context here. Mr. Banks, tell us a little bit about Charlotte Bron, where she is in the 19th century and how she fits into the 19th century literary world. And from then we'll go talk about Gothic romance.
- [14:39]
Thomas Banks
So Charlotte Bronte comes of age just as the Regency period is giving way to the Victorian. She would have been, what, just over 20 years old, I guess. When Queen Victoria comes to the throne, Charlotte is born.
- [14:53]
Angelina Stanford
So they're basically contemporaries.
- [14:54]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, she would have been just a little bit older than Victoria. Charlotte was born in 1816. She is born to few advantages, she and her several siblings. We remember the three Bronte sisters, Anne, Emily and Charlotte. There were six altogether. She had two older sisters who died during childhood and also a rather hapless, a creative, though hapless brother. There was the one Bronte brother, Branwell, who died, I think, in a state of mental collapse, essentially. They're not privileged people, they're creative, a lot of strong minds and imaginations in the same family, but they're the daughters of an Anglican parson. And the name Bronte, by the way, is not English. You can probably guess it's Irish. So Bronte comes from a Irish background. He had been given a scholarship to study at university in England and had a country parsonage in Yorkshire. So these are not society people. These would have been, if they had been characters in a Jane Austen story, they would have been poor country cousins. And they did have, it seems that their father did encourage, within some limits, his children's creativity. So they had, you know, the run of the small library that the family possessed and the girls all read the Arabian Nights and Walter Scott. It seems they had knowledge of some of the new German literature. And the influence of German literature on the Brontes and on English Gothic fiction in general is quite important. That'll come up later in the whole. What's called the Sturm Undrang movement, which sort of begins in German with Goethe's the Sorrows of Young Werther. Sturmend drum means storm and stress. So novels, poems, dramas of a high. A high pitch of emotional intensity, often involving destructive passions at war with each other. As you know, Werther is the most famous example of that, which we will
- [17:09]
Angelina Stanford
also see in this novel. If you're listening and thinking Stroman Drang, that sounds like Durmstrang from Harry Potter. Correct. That is exactly what she's dealing with.
- [17:18]
Thomas Banks
Well noted. I had not remembered that. Anyway, so Bronte and her sisters. There's a lot of governesses in the Bronte story and they. It's. That's one example of writing what, you know, because all of the Bronte sisters, I believe, at one time or another were Governesses.
- [17:38]
Angelina Stanford
There weren't very many options.
- [17:40]
Thomas Banks
No, there were not many options.
- [17:42]
Angelina Stanford
There really weren't very many novels. I mean, options for a woman who needed to make her way in the world for one reason or another.
- [17:47]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. And she. She does eventually marry. She's the only Bronte sister who lives long enough to marry. And she. When she does, you might think a woman, you know, with the. Who tells the kind of story she tells would have run off with some kind of rake or count or a romantic soldier of fortune. Yeah. No, she married a. I mean, kind of respectable and rather dull Anglican parson. I mean, a man kind of like her father in some ways. Wasn't he even. Wasn't he even her father's protege?
- [18:16]
Angelina Stanford
I believe that's right.
- [18:17]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. I don't remember his name off the top of my head, but he goes down in history as having been Charlotte Bronte's husband. She did get a number of other offers, I found out, but turned them down for one reason or another.
- [18:29]
Angelina Stanford
Complicated woman.
- [18:30]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. So I think that she would probably surprise us in some ways if our impression of who she was as a person were based on the emotional flavor and subject matter of her books. We might find her more understated in some ways.
- [18:51]
Angelina Stanford
And I want to say, too, that we did a series on an Anne Bronte novel. Was it last year?
- [18:55]
Thomas Banks
Agnes Grey? Yeah, there was Agnes Gray about a year ago.
- [18:59]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. So you can. You can dip into those waters as well. And I've said before on the podcast that I did my thesis on. Well, I did it not. Jane Eyre was one of the books covered in the thesis. It was really more about the female buildings, Roman, and it covered several novels. But that was well over 30 years ago that I wrote that in grad school. And I was a little nervous to pick this book up. I've read it many times, but it's been a very, very long time.
- [19:29]
Thomas Banks
You feared you were going to have to recant your views?
- [19:32]
Angelina Stanford
It was. I did.
- [19:34]
Thomas Banks
Our ratings would skyrocket if that happened. Like, you know, headlines, Angelina forced to recant.
- [19:39]
Angelina Stanford
She Denounces Her Younger self. So I was nervous. I was nervous. And it's been. I read it a bunch of times. So I read it maybe like at 18 or 19 for the first time. And then I read it for several classes. Of course, I read it many times for my. My thesis. And then I recycled my research later and wrote several academic articles on Jane Eyre after. After the thesis was over and I think I reread it again. And then I taught it once in the 90s, but I have not read it since then. So it's probably 30 years since I've read Jane Eyre. And mostly when I talk about it, I'm just going by memory. So I was a little nervous when I read it and I did something I don't usually do on the podcast. I read the whole thing before the first episode because I just needed to know was I still right?
- [20:25]
Thomas Banks
And.
- [20:25]
Angelina Stanford
And we can all.
- [20:26]
Thomas Banks
Drum roll, drum roll.
- [20:27]
Angelina Stanford
We can all breathe easy. Yes, I was, I was, I was actually thrilled. I was thrilled to see how much I remembered how much was still so vivid in terms of the imagery. And every time I got to a new section of the book, I sort of cheered young Angeline. I was like, yes, yes, you were right. You were right. You saw this correctly. And I mean, I'm a much better reader now with 30 more years of practice. And I see a lot more, and I see a lot more. I'm like, oh, I wish I had said this in my thesis because. No, but it held up. It held up. So I'm not gonna.
- [20:54]
Thomas Banks
Disappointing, disappointing Ms. Stanford here. No, I think it's always like, I don't know, maybe, I mean, we mere mortals Ms. Stanford. Usually when I go back and find a poem or an essay I wrote 20 odd years ago, I throw it away. I want to make sure that no copies survive it. It's like. Well, to use a greater name obviously than my own, but a John Dryden, one of his epigrams, he wrote in middle age. So John Dryden was a Cambridge man and he wrote an epigram about Cambridge University and in it he expressed the wish that he had gone to Oxford instead. That was all that Cambridge meant to him, basically. Yeah,
- [21:38]
Angelina Stanford
Well, I mean, I'm not saying it's a super mature, but it holds up. It's definitely the work of somebody in their 20s, but. No, it holds up. I think my basic reading is still sound and I can do an even better job with it now. So I was, I was, I was
- [21:52]
Thomas Banks
quite relieved you would pass the doctorate examination with flying colors.
- [21:55]
Angelina Stanford
I did. Phew. Okay. Yeah, I don't have to denounce myself now. You mentioned a little bit about German romanticism, and that definitely is going to come back actually as a plot point because some people are going to be reading those books later on. So that's quite intentional that this is a big part of the book. But I want to step back a little bit and talk about the Romantic movement because while Charlotte Bronte, of course is writing in the Victorian era, she is much more a romantic writer than a Victorian. Like she's not George Eliot. If you, if you read both of those, even though they're somewhat contemporaries time wise, it's like you're reading two different worlds. And I love George Elliott and I actually had, I had a George Eliot novel in my thesis, the Mill and the Floss. Like I love George Eliot. That's not a criticism, it's just, it's the difference between, you know, Bach and Mozart, they're just. Or Bach and Beethoven. It's just going to sound different.
- [22:46]
Thomas Banks
Is they, they seem not to fit into their, they don't fit into the domesticity, say that we associate with the Victorian era, which is a large part of it. Certainly. I think Chesterton said somewhere that Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre give the impression of having been written by an eagle perhaps, but not a governess.
- [23:08]
Angelina Stanford
Right. Well, no, that's true. Of course. I was thinking more just like a difference in tone. I feel like George Eliot is a lot more tidy, whereas the Brontes are going to be much more intensely passionate. There's going to be like a wildness that goes through the books.
- [23:23]
Thomas Banks
Oh yeah, yeah.
- [23:24]
Angelina Stanford
Which you don't find in George Eliot.
- [23:26]
Thomas Banks
There's, there's less sort of that quiet, stoic, reflective agnosticism that you find in George Eliot. Right. I love her novels, but they do burn at a lower temperature.
- [23:38]
Angelina Stanford
Yes. And I love Jane Austen. I would say Jane Austen burns at a lower temperature. Right. So I'm just trying to say that the Brontes are romantics, not Victorian per se. I think of George Eliot as a much more of a Victorian writer trollop. Thackeray. Like those guys, they're very, they're very tidy. Now Dickens has a lot of romanticism in his as well, but the Brontes are, they're romantics.
- [23:57]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, I, it was funny you mentioned George Eliot. I found out that her husband actually gave a set, a set, a number of the Jane Austen novels to Charlotte Bronte because he admired her work and wanted to encourage her. That was not actually a very well received gift. I think she just kind of dismissed them and she didn't have, you might guess this from her own book. She was not a big Jane Austen gal.
- [24:23]
Angelina Stanford
No, that doesn't surprise me at all. I mean, it's one of the reasons why I personally, and this is not a comment on the mastery of the work, just it's a preference. I have to read Jane Austen over Emily Bronte, for example, because Wuthering Heights is just it's just too chaotic for me to feel super comfortable there. Now, I've read it five times, and I can see that it's a masterful book and has nothing to do with the movie. Just in case you're wondering, those are two completely different works. I disavow the movie, but I don't prefer that kind of intensity in a read for me. And so I like the orderly world
- [24:54]
Thomas Banks
of it is kind of apocalyptic.
- [24:57]
Angelina Stanford
But I do like Charlotte Bronte a lot. And I don't know if this will be true for all of our listeners, but one of my grad school professors who I had gotten really close to, she had actually assigned Wuthering Heights to me. And I think at that point, it was the third time I had read it. And I tried it again, and I. I said to her, I was in her office, we had gotten to be very close. And I said, you know, I'm. I'm struggling. I said, you know, I have read this at this point, three times, and I had written, you know, glowing papers. Right? I mean, the professors love the papers I wrote on Bronte. Like, it's not. It's not a matter that I didn't understand it. I definitely understand it. I can tell you, it's a masterpiece. It's masterfully crafted, all these things. And I. And I said to her, I was like, I just don't like it. And she said, let me guess. You like Jane Eyre. And I said, yes. And she said, in my experience, you either like Jane Eyre or you like Wuthering Heights. Okay, but see, now you're an exception because you like both.
- [25:49]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, I am. Though I did not fall in love with either book the first time I read it. I also read. I came to both of them in college. I read each of them once in my late teens, early 20s, and hadn't touched them for a long time. And I picked up Wuthering Heights again probably five years ago now, because I was going to start teaching it. Now I've taught it a number of times. I appreciate the craftsmanship of that book much more now, and I think I can read it a bit more discerningly than I did at whatever I was 18 or 19 or something like that.
- [26:20]
Angelina Stanford
You know, you have actually inspired me to do a reread. Especially the kids coming out of your classes will always tell me, the kids like it. Do like, you do a really good job. You do a good job teaching it. And. And they. They really like it. And so I. I know I. I might. I might give it Another try. Maybe that'll be a future podcast book. Because maybe I, I would like to give that another try to see if, if I can have a little more detachment from it again, you know? You know, I mean, you live with me, you're my host, Scandal, he's my husband. Just so everybody knows. But I don't do very well in a chaotic environment. I need an orderly environment. And I think that's why, like, if I'm gonna pick up a book book as a comfort read, it needs to be orderly and not chaotic. But I might be able to try it again. So. Yeah, so the Brontes are romantic. So what does that mean? Well, it means a number of things, but in terms of what we need to know as we read this book, one of the things that the Romantics are responding to is the neoclassical age, the Enlightenment age, and the very, very high value placed on reason. And, and, oh, this is, this is a rabbit hole. I could go on for days. So I'll try to make this quick. But the medieval understanding of reason was a much like fuller thing and of course had the rational mind, but that was just one part of reason and you had the imagination in there and you had other faculties involved with the reason that could, that could perceive truth. So that would include the imagination, it would include the book of nature, the book of divine revelation, tradition, the wisdom of elders. Like all of these things would be reasonable. Essentially anything that helps you participate in the mind of Christ would be under the name reason. And in the neoclassical age, they reduce that really to the rational mind. And their art rarely reflects that. You'll see everything's very orderly, very symmetrical, and clarity becomes a great value in their writing. You know, the heroic couplet is the poetry. You know, a little learning is a dangerous thing. Like that's a line of poetry. It doesn't even sound like poetry. Right. Everything's just clear here. We can understand it with our rational mind. One of the things that the Romantics are doing is responding to that, reacting to that, saying, you guys have over emphasized the reason. Now, because of this, the Romantics will be falsely accused of being irrational, but that those are Enlightenment categories. They're not being irrational, as Coleridge says, they're being supra rational. That is that they believe that the imagination and some of the other faculties of reasonableness are actually higher than the rational mind. And so they're going to push back for fancy and the imagination and, you know, intense feelings and things like that. But it's not, it's very incorrect to think that this is feelings versus reason. It's much more a trying to recapture a bigger understanding of reason. And we'll get into that more as we go. And so you're going to see one of the things you're going to see in Romantic novels, you see in this poetry as well, but a very intense return to symbolism. The Neoclassical age is not so fond of symbols because they want things to be very clear. And why would you have a symbol? The symbol is just clouding things. Just say what you mean and the Romantics correctly perceive that we've actually, in our attempt to make things simpler, we have actually made them more complicated because there are certain ideas that can only be expressed symbolically and that a symbol, rather than clouding things, is actually saying things much clearer. So, you know, if you look, for example, that the New Testament, you look at the way Christ answers the question, who are you? He answers it symbolically every time. I'm a lamb, I'm a door, I'm a vine, I'm a shepherd, you know, on and on and on. I'm a light, I'm the road. And he's not doing, he's not talking like that because he's trying to confuse you. He's talking like that because that is the best way to express it, right? That he's, he's bigger than just a statement. He's layers and layers and layers of meaning that can unfold because symbols can unfold into greater, greater meaning. And also the Romantics have a different view of symbol than we do as well. They, they see symbols as sacraments, right? Sort of visible signs of invisible realities. And so as, as Coleridge explains, words are kind of a portal in themselves that can take you into this other world where you can perceive this, you know, perceive the divine essentially. That's why Christ is the word, right? That, that's your very nutshell version because I have literally given a three hour talk on this and you can find it on the website to talk on Coleridge. And we have a webinar on Coleridge and you can webinar on Edgar Allan Poe where I really, really get into this because Edgar Allan Poe is the American Coleridge. So like, there's plenty of places you can deep dive on that in, in our, in our back catalog. But that means for us that rather than a Victorian novel, which is very realistic, this is a Romantic novel and it's highly symbolic. And I think one of the first mistakes that people make in reading Jane Eyre is that they are trying to read obvious symbolism realistically. And they will get very, very confused. What do I mean by that? I mean, if you think this is a realistic novel, you're going to be super confused when she has a conversation with the moon later and the moon tells her what to do and what to think. Right. No. Mr. Banks, you had some really good quotes you ran across about how she's using nature in this symbolic way.
- [31:35]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. Both George Lewis, an early critic of this book. George Lewis is the. The common law husband of George Eliot or Marianne Evans, to give her her birth name, who was a pretty notable book reviewer and biographer in his day. And he. He pointed out in an early review of Jane Eyre that the exterior scenery in descriptions of nature tends to serve as a reflection of an interior mood or state of mind or moral crisis.
- [32:07]
Angelina Stanford
That.
- [32:07]
Thomas Banks
That a character, usually the protagonist or some other character is going through. And Virginia Woolf, some years later, Virginia Woolf's writing at the beginning of the 20th century in one of her common reader essays made a similar observation.
- [32:24]
Angelina Stanford
Right. And so this is actually an attempt to recapture a very medieval way of telling a story. C.S. lewis describes that as your insides are on the outsides. So physical descriptions of people, of places, of nature, all of these things are really just outward signs of internal, invisible realities. And you have to read them that way. So we'll pay attention to the use of nature.
- [32:47]
Thomas Banks
I would say also another part of this book that will. Another feature of this book that will make it easier to approach a hospitality for unlikely situations which, you know, if you accept that going into the book, you won't find yourself arguing with it. I think as much that no guy like Rochester would actually fall in love with a girl like Jane. Like that kind of thing. Yeah. I don't want to give too much away, but yeah, like there are several that. Please don't.
- [33:15]
Angelina Stanford
You already have stretched it there a bit, I should say. We're going to do our best to keep this spoiler free and only talk about the chapters one through five yet. So we have not yet met Rochester, so we won't talk about him. But yes, you will be. You'll. If you're trying to read this as something that's quote unquote realistic, you'll be very annoyed. But once you accept the conventions, which I prefer the symbolic conventions, you realize that she's absolutely. She's telling a much better story. She's telling a story where she is actually showing us the internal states of things which will be very exciting. And one of the reasons why they're called the Romantics is because they're trying to get back to the medieval romance. And so this is going to have a lot in common with the medieval romance. Northrop Fry would say it's a displaced romance, it's a medieval questing story. But we've taken it out of its medieval setting and we've put it into a contemporary setting of the 1800s. So what does that mean? Well, this means that this is a story about a girl on a journey. This is a journey story. And a symbolic journey story is always a journey of the soul story. And there are going to be so many places in this book where Jane is going to draw attention to the fact that she's someone on a journey. Just in the chapters we read, she says she likes Gulliver's Travels because this is a story about a journey. I can journey to places. When she leaves the Reeds home and goes to Lowood School, she says, this is the next stage of my journey. Right. She's going to be really deliberate about that, the journeys, and we're going to want to pay attention to that because this is a journey of the soul. That's a. It's not just the journey of a little girl on her life to grow up like that. There's. There are symbolic things happening inside of her, which we'll look at today in these early chapters. Like, even just what we're talking about. Pay attention to nature. Like, one of the things I'm noticing is every significant physical journey, literal journey, that Jane takes is in the dark. That's hugely symbolic. Right? Because she doesn't know what's around the corner. She doesn't know. She doesn't have agency in her life. She's an orphan. People are making these decisions for her. She doesn't know what's next. And of course, that's a brilliant spiritual truth. None of us know what's around the corner. All of us are going through the journey of our life somewhat in the dark. And the older you get, the more that you realize that. Right. Like, I don't have a plan here. Things are gonna happen that I don't see coming. That's the symbolic kinds of stuff we're talking about.
- [35:35]
Thomas Banks
And while we're on that note, since you're bringing up the romantic affinity for the Middle Ages and things like this, the Gothic novel. Should we. So the history of the Gothic novel begins. Actually, it's kind of interesting that the Gothic novel actually starts to make its appearance even before the Romantic revolution in the arts is in full swing. What's usually cited as the first Major piece of Gothic fiction is a story called the Castle of Otranto by a man named Horace Walpole. And Horace Walpole is not Lord Byron or Shelley or Coleridge. He's not a romantic artist in the accepted sense. He's an English gentleman whose father had been Prime Minister of England. His father was Robert Walpole. He comes from one of the old, you know, Whig landed families. He moves in high circles. He knows King George ii. He, you know, associates with Samuel Johnson and other members of the club. So he's very much a neoclassical guy. And he wrote a. He wrote a sensationalistic tale of, you know, murder and haunted castles in Italy. And that's where the Roman. The Gothic novel begins. So this is in the 1760s. He writes this book and it is kind of a sensation. And within a few decades of this, you have Matthew Lewis, who writes the Monk, which. Not a safe book to give your children, by the way, but it's another kind of sensationalistic page turner involving a corrupt Spanish priest who sells his soul to the devil. Romance of the Force, Mysteries of Udolpho and Ann Radcliffe. And often these stories will have either a medieval or a Renaissance setting. Often they're set in the past and will involve some kind of a common literary device. You see this in the Castle of Otranto and also in Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg will involve a found manuscript which tells some. Some tale of horrific happenings and supernatural,
- [37:39]
Angelina Stanford
which is also a medieval device.
- [37:40]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, so it's. It's a weird thing. I. Someone pointed this out in an essay I found, I think on the Victorian web or something. But the found manuscript is almost kind of the early version of the found footage horror movie.
- [37:54]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah.
- [37:54]
Thomas Banks
Like the. What was the witch.
- [37:57]
Angelina Stanford
Blair Witch Project.
- [37:58]
Thomas Banks
Blair Witch Project, that kind of thing. Yeah, very much so.
- [38:00]
Angelina Stanford
Part of what's going on here is in the epic tradition, the poet starts off saying, this is the story that has been told me by the muse. Right. Single goddess. And when you get to the medieval tradition, it's not, this is the story that was told to me. It's. This is the story that I read. Yeah, I found this. I read this. And so the found manuscript is a medieval thing. And so you can see that in the Gothic novel we have a return of an interest in the Middle Ages. Again, this is a reaction to the neoclassical people.
- [38:26]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. Which is simultaneously kind of fascinated, horrified by it.
- [38:30]
Angelina Stanford
But I think what's going on again is this reaction to clarity, this reaction to the idea. I mean, you can see why? At first, it's very exciting and almost intoxicating, this idea that, hey, we've got a microscope and a telescope, and we are going to be able to solve every mystery in the world. Now we got this, right? But then the pendulum goes too far, and now you've taken all the wonder out of the world, and you've. The way that you have gotten to the point where you think you can understand everything is because you've reduced it and flattened it, right? And so you've got. Got. Oh, you've got Blake writing Macon. Macon. Voltaire, Rousseau, right. Trying to push back against the idea that you actually don't know anything. And you've got Wordsworth writing poems like that. You know, we murder to dissect. You've got Edgar Allan Poe, his sonnet to Science. He's pushing back on that. You've got Keats in La Mea saying, we measure everything by rule and line. We clip an angel's wings. We're going to unweave a rainbow, right? And you can see that all of these guys are like, we've gone too far. Okay. And they're trying to put the wonder back in the world. And so part of what's going on with the Gothic novel is things are more than meets the eye. We actually live in a mysterious universe, and we might have haunted castles and secret passages and, you know, we live in a mysterious world that we don't really understand. And so, yeah, so you have that development, and this is going to have a lot of Gothic elements, but she's going to be doing something more than that. That. Because one of the things that happens with the Gothic romance is. Can go into the sentimental novel world, right?
- [39:57]
Thomas Banks
Oh, yeah. And so it's. Yeah, like the Gothic novel produces masterpieces and also total rubbish.
- [40:03]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, still does.
- [40:04]
Thomas Banks
Oh, yeah.
- [40:04]
Angelina Stanford
As still does.
- [40:05]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [40:07]
Angelina Stanford
And so what we're going to see. And we're not going to necessarily see it in these early chapters, but we'll talk about it as we get to it. You're going to see a lot of Gothic romance conventions. Crumbling castles, mysterious figures. You're even gonna see the typical sentimental novel setup of some kind of, like, plain heroine who meets this mysterious Byronic hero.
- [40:27]
Thomas Banks
Is he a monster or is he not?
- [40:29]
Angelina Stanford
Right. Exactly. And so she's gonna be playing with all those conventions. However, she's gonna be doing something different than that. She's gonna be doing something better than that. She's gonna elevate it. So we'll just have to hold on
- [40:38]
Thomas Banks
to that, and we can Say, this is not unique to gothic fiction at all. I mean almost every genre or sub genre of fiction you can point out, the novel of manners produces Jane Austen and it also produces more than its fair share of twaddle, I think we can say.
- [40:53]
Angelina Stanford
Absolutely. Drama can give you Shakespeare and it can give you other things.
- [40:56]
Thomas Banks
Other things, Yeah. I have a one act play in the works that I wanted to see later, Ms. Stanford.
- [41:02]
Angelina Stanford
Right, very funny.
- [41:03]
Thomas Banks
And this is how Mr. Banks died.
- [41:05]
Angelina Stanford
1-800-Marriage counselor call immediately. So, so in your medieval romances you've got characters on literal quests, right? I've got to go, you know, find the White Heart or the Holy Grail or something like that. And as we get into more realistic settings, really, and realistic here just means ordinary. That's all it means. Because the truth is that realism is a convention. It's not real. No one actually talks as witty comeback as you see in a, in a novel of manners. No one really talks like that. That real life is awkward pauses and fumbling around and two days later you're like, oh, that's the witty comeback I should have said. Right. So realism is, is a convention. It's a convention just like any other. And it's not any more legitimate than a romance convention is, but it is marked by ordinary settings. And so the journey of the soul story, rather than having these kind of like medieval markers and there's a questing beast or the Holy Grail, which is obviously very symbolic. I mean it sells you. In the Holy Grail story it says I'm a symbol. And you even have a monk who comes out and explains what it's a symbol of. Right. It's, it's very on the nose. But once you get into an ordinary setting, once you do with north and Fry says you displace that romance. We see a lot of these journey stories being the story of someone who's a child and they grow up. So like David Copperfield, right. It's, it's going to be their whole life and this is that kind of story. So we've got 10 year old Jane and this is going to go all the way, you know, to the end. And name for that kind of novel, not surprisingly is a German word because everybody's interested in German romanticism at this point. But it's a bildensroman and that's the story of the development of a person,
- [42:46]
Thomas Banks
literally a building novel.
- [42:47]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so this will be the story of Jane Eyre growing up. But it's not just going to be this kind of surface level. You know, this is. This is the things that happen to Jane. You're going to see this projected to us deeply symbolically, with a lot of fairy tale references to show us what's going on when her spiritually. That this is a story of someone who's going through a spiritual journey. And the fact that she's an orphan is also very, very common. And. No, it's not, because a lot of kids. Parents died by then. No, no, no. This is a symbolic thing as well. And this goes way back to. This goes back to the hero of Mysterious Origin of Mythology. And again, this is a spiritual state. This is a symbolic state that symbolically. Symbolically, we're all orphans. Symbolically, all of us are exiles from home by nature of the Fall, right? And all of us are on a journey to find our people, our family, our home. And so, I mean, this was what the Aeneid's about, right? You lost your home, it's burnt down, Troy's burned. You can't go back. Right. Must move forward and find my new people in my new home. And that's projected in these stories in a spiritual sense. And I think you're going to see that here as well, that Jane's on this journey for home. Correct. Dr. Drought in his book, and we interviewed him back in January too, and you should check. Check that out. But in his book the Tower and the Ruin, he talks about how this. This sense of longing for this lost home pervades all of Tolkien's work and that the word for that is nostalgia. But he didn't want to use that word because we've ruined that word.
- [44:14]
Thomas Banks
We tend to use it mockingly and
- [44:16]
Angelina Stanford
just very sentimental, like, oh, you're just being nostalgic, you know, for when you were young and were strong or something like that. Now you're old. And so instead, he uses the literal meaning of nostalgia, Home pain. And I love that. That's what. That's what. That's the state we find ourselves in the world. Home, pain. We have lost our home. We can never go back. You have to go forward and find. Find it here. And so we all have that longing. And that's what's going on in these orphan stories. All right, I resist even though we just spent 30 minutes giving you the backstory here. The truth is, I resisted. I thought a long time about this and decided I would not info dump on you guys in the first episode. And I'm going to save a lot of what I want to. We get to different sections of the Book. But I think we have enough to jump in with these first five chapters, which covers the entirety of her life at Gateshead hall, which, you know, Rachel in the Patreon shout out to her, said, if you say it out loud, it sounds like it's Gates of Hell Hall. I think that's spot on. I think that's spot on.
- [45:18]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. Hellgate. Yeah.
- [45:20]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, I think that's spot on. She's. She's kind of born in this hellish situation. Her parents are dead. Dead. And we've got. It's very much a Cinderella setup. Okay. With a slight variation. I mean, Cinderella, her. Her father's dead and she's got this stepmother here. It's. She's been given a surrogate mother and father because her parents died. We know in this chapter. In these chapters that he was very nice to her and he died. And so now she's got this. This aunt in the function of the evil stepmother who's treating her like. Like this. Not even second class. Third class.
- [45:54]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. Not a relative. An inconvenience. Servant at the most.
- [45:58]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. The whole. All the conversations of, you're lower than a servant. You're lower than a servant. I mean, this is Cinderella, right? You don't get to eat and play or even be around them. I love my precious children. And I mean, even to the point where she. She doesn't have a bedroom. She sleeps in a closet. This is like Cinderella in the fireplace. Right? So this is tons of Cinderella imagery. And. And no, no, Cinderella is not a story about that. I'm out there trying to find my Prince Charming. Cinderella is also a journey of the soul story, and maybe we can talk about that more as we go through. But. But this is being framed very deliberately as Cinderella. And then I. I picked up on this and was very pleased to see the guys in the Patreon pick up on it, too. There's a. There's a. You can obviously see the influence of this book on Harry Potter. I mean, John Reed is Dudley. And when they. When they put Jane in the closet, I was like, this is Harry in the cupboard. I mean, like, this is the same book. And again, you know, J.K. rowling read all of these kinds of novels and is a big fan of Gothic literature as well. I mean, it's kind of writing a Gothic novel herself, again, with all the. All the spiritual symbolism involved in that. All right, so let's take a look at the first few chapters, because there are some scenes we want to pay very careful attention to because. Okay, I'm not going to spoil anything. I'll just tell you that there are images in the first few chapters which will be repeated multiple times through this book. And they are to be understood symbolically. And you're going to want to watch and catch. Every time they're repeated, there's going to be repeated, sometimes with obvious parallels and sometimes with a twist. And those repeating scenes will be how we're able to gauge her symbolic, spiritual development, how is she responding as these things repeat in her life? So we'll try to pay attention to that. And I also, I think that this is a good novel in the sense that it's going to help us to be aware of the biographical fallacy. This book is called Jane Eyre An Autobiography. That does not mean this is Charlotte Bronte's autobiography. This is a convention. It's kind of like Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, which is called Tom Jones A History, which just means this is a story of a life. And so Jane Eyre is a story of a life told through the, through the voice of that person. Right. This is a first person narrative. So it's an autobiography, but that's not Charlotte Bronte's autobiography. In other words, you don't look to figure out the meaning of Jane Eyre by looking to Charlotte Bronte's life. This isn't her life story, but it's also true. And this is, I think, where people get very confused. Okay. They hear me say, this is not the story of Charlotte Bronte, and then they lose their minds when they find out. But she was a governess. You just said it had nothing to do with it.
- [48:33]
Thomas Banks
She was physically small. She was
- [48:36]
Angelina Stanford
like. Hold on a second. Like, saying this isn't the story of her life doesn't mean it's not written by her. And she's not pulling from her own life experience. Right. Like you write about what you know. I mean, when, when Mark Twain writes Tom Sawyer, he says, Tom Sawyer is me and every boy I knew. Right? Like he's, he's pulling from all these different things. But that doesn't mean. Is Mark Twain.
- [48:59]
Thomas Banks
There's the famous line from, from I just read it. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary. When he was, when he was describing the characters of the book in a letter to a friend, he felt, he said he felt he knew Emma Bovary so far, that Je suis Emma Bovary, I am Emma. And no, he did not identify as a woman or anything like that. But. But yeah, I mean, you know, this book is one in which she, you could say she arranged the Narrative drawing from some of the furniture and, you know, material properties of her own life and rearrange them in.
- [49:35]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, right, exactly. And. And we. Again, no spoilers. But when we get to the end, we can point out that Charlotte Bronte's choices in her own life are very different than the choices of Jane. Very different.
- [49:47]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [49:47]
Angelina Stanford
So she's going to be pulling from her own life and her experiences as a governess. And this is how I know how orphan schools are run, because I've been in them. Like, you know, she. Yes, we all do that. If you've been to Notre Dame, you're going to write a description in the book about Notre Dame based on what you saw. But that doesn't mean, you know, the character is you on vacation and, you know. Yeah. Jane Eyre and Charlotte Bronte do not make the same choices. They're not the same person. All right, so we start off and we meet the kids and all these images of Exile. I mean, literally, she's been fussed at and told, go be somewhere else. You can't be around the kids. Right. So, I mean, instant images of exile while. And she withdraws with a book. And you're going to notice that repeatedly, like it, books is how Jane Eyre makes sense of her life. And so she sits in a window seat with a red curtain pulled around her. And the color red is going to be very, very important. And guess what? It will not be hard to figure out what is red? Fire. What is fire? Passion. What is Jane in these first four chapters? She says she has ungovernable excitement. She says, let's see. Let's look at some. I wrote this. These down. Let's see some of the way she's described. Because Jane A is red. Right? She's red. Let's see, in chapter one, she is called the picture of passion. And she's going to get locked in the red room where she had been behind the red curtain. Right. Okay. So the red room has red curtains on the bed. There's red curtains here. Okay. This is going to be a repeating image. In chapter two, she's described as having a compound of virulent passions. Jane is going to say she has ungovernable excitement. Are you starting to pick up what's going. Jane has a lot of passions.
- [51:32]
Thomas Banks
It seems that the only time she catches someone's attention, usually to her, to her, you know, detriment in the early chapters is when she expresses strong feeling of some kind other than that she's the member of the household that they ignore. Try not to take any notice.
- [51:50]
Angelina Stanford
That's right. And again, she's on a journey. Right. But at the beginning of the story, she feels unloved, unprotected. And if I don't stand up for myself, no one else will. Okay. And so we'll see. We'll see where it goes from there. If she learns.
- [52:05]
Thomas Banks
It takes us a couple chapters to learn exactly why she. I mean, she's obviously an orphan, why she is living with this family, and how she came to be there. Yeah, so she's a little bit enigmatic, actually. Well into the book.
- [52:18]
Angelina Stanford
I think that's true.
- [52:19]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. We feel that there's a lot about her that we don't know, even though to everyone around her, she seems kind of ordinary.
- [52:26]
Angelina Stanford
Well, since you brought up the fact that she's ordinary, CS Lewis has got a great quote about that, because this is actually part of Charlotte Bronte's genius. Because if you write a book about a character who's overlooked and unloved and everybody thinks is worthless, it's gonna be really hard to make your reader have any interest in that character. So what does CS Lewis say about that?
- [52:47]
Thomas Banks
All right, so here he is comparing her to Fanny Price of Mansfield park,
- [52:52]
Angelina Stanford
which is another Cinderella story. It's very, very similar. We did a podcast series on that. You should go check that.
- [52:56]
Thomas Banks
Very similar and very different in a thousand ways. Yeah. So. So here is CS Lewis. How then, does Fanny Price fail? I suggest by insipidity. One of the most dangerous of literary ventures is the little shy, unimportant heroine whom none of the other characters value. The danger is that your readers may agree with the other characters. Something may be put into the heroine to make us feel that the other characters are wrong. Excuse me? Something must be put into the heroine to make us feel that the other characters are wrong, that she contains depths they never dreamt of. That is why Charlotte Bronte would have succeeded better with Fanny Price, to be sure. She would have ruined everything else in the book. Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris would have been distorted from credible types of pompous dullness, lazy vapidity, and vulgar egoism into fiends, complete with horns, tales, and rhetoric. But through. But through Fanny, there would have blown a storm of passion which made sure that we least would never think her significant.
- [53:59]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, I think that is. That is so fair.
- [54:02]
Thomas Banks
I think it's a little bit unfair to Fanny, but. But no, it is.
- [54:05]
Angelina Stanford
It is true.
- [54:06]
Thomas Banks
It is true that.
- [54:07]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, it's fair about Charlotte Bronte is what I mean.
- [54:09]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. Um.
- [54:10]
Angelina Stanford
So she does succeed in making us care about Jane Eyre. It's part of the reason why it's written in a first person narrative that we can see what's going on and she's got all these depths inside and got all this passion and will stand up for herself. It is also true, and this fits the genre of the gothic novel, that characters will be very larger than life. Okay. They will seem like either monsters or angels as we go through. And again, these are symbolic projections.
- [54:34]
Thomas Banks
It's interesting also that in the early chapters of. Though, I mean, horrible things are being done to Jane, her significance does not exist solely in the fact that she has suffered at the hands of others. There's an interest that transcends that, I think.
- [54:48]
Angelina Stanford
Agreed. Yeah, I think that's true. And I think if you. If you think about this being, you know, the gates of Hell hall and everybody here is being described as monstrous in some way. That's how she feels about her life at the beginning of this. Everything's monster.
- [55:04]
Thomas Banks
And it's. I find it kind of fascinating that. So her escape, of course, is through books. That by itself doesn't surprise us. But the book she reads, I mean, she reads about the evil Roman emperors. She, you know, she's interested in the mysterious east, you know, the Orient. She describes herself sitting like a Turk to read. Well, you know, the book, the. The Book of Birds, Buick's British Birds or whatever.
- [55:27]
Angelina Stanford
That could be important later on that she's reading a Book of Birds. So just save that. Later on she's gonna be reading the Arabian Nights.
- [55:33]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, so she's drawn to. She's. I won't say attracted to. That's too early to say that. But she is drawn to and. And fascinated by things and people that are potentially dangerous.
- [55:45]
Angelina Stanford
That's 100% right. I read a book once that said, well, this was a scholar on the Arabian Nights, and he said that romanticism was born when the moment when the Arabian Nights was translated into French. French. And so the Arabian Nights influence on romanticism, again, this. These exotic, dark, a little bit violent tales. And I think that that's definitely in here. I mean, John hits her on the head with a book and she falls down and bets her. Like there's violence.
- [56:13]
Thomas Banks
It's a sociopath.
- [56:14]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, there's violence. And of course, he's very reminiscent of the sadistic kid in Agnes Grey. Same kind of thing. She's, you know, the governess of this family. And this. This kid is horrible. But it also makes me laugh that she literally gets hit over the head with a book. Okay. Like, we are literally getting hit. Hit over the head with a book. One of the things that really I have to chuckle at, you know, it's one of these things where I can laugh or cry for the sake of the walls in our home and me not punching walls in them, I will just choose to laugh. But people will insist on reading this super realistically. And there are going to be so many speeches in this book where a character will stop and give a long monologue about how something's a symbol. Okay. And people will just skip that. Like, pay attention to that huge things and. And so many references to books and so many pointing out, this is like a book, this is like a symbol. This is like a fairy tale. I feel like I might be in a book, like, pay attention to all of that.
- [57:04]
Thomas Banks
And you said speeches. I think that that is a distinction that exists between Charlotte Bronte, say, and, well, the novel of manners, whether in the hands of Jane. Jane Austen or something. There's not really much conversation in Charlotte Bronte. There's a lot of people talking, but it's more like one speech that is answered by another speech, often at a kind of a high pitch as opposed to polite and kind of, you know, ironically insinuating dialogue.
- [57:31]
Angelina Stanford
That is because we have all this intense passion in this book. This is fuck about passion. But she might do some things you're not expecting. Whereas with Jane Austen, there are depths under the surface. And that's. But of course, Pride and Prejudice was originally called first impressions. And that's a whole book about how we misunderstand each other. We make bad first impressions. Because everything under the surface, I mean, there's even that talk about how. How can anybody get married after being seeing each other at two balls? Like, how can you possibly know somebody like that? Right? This is a different book. This is a very different book. Speaking of books, right. She also mentioned. So she. She loves adventure stories. She loves old fairy tales, old ballads. And she also hears stories from Bessie that are taken from Pamela. And you and I were talking about how this. This book has so many echoes of Pamela. Give us a quick rundown of Pamela by. So Pamela, big first blockchain book was
- [58:24]
Thomas Banks
one of a very. Up to that time, it might have been the most popular English novel yet written. Pamela is an epistolary novel, so it's written as a series of fictional letters between characters. And it is the story of a young, inexperienced ingenue, an impressionable young woman who becomes a. She's a servant, a maid, of some kind, I think in the house of a disreputable man who I think is never fully named Mr. B. Yes, Mr. B. And Mr. B sets his eye, his not very innocent eye on Pamela right away and devises all these stratagems for seducing her and making her his mistress. But because Pamela is a virtuous young woman, she resists all of these advances and eventually succeeds in. She marries him eventually. And he then becomes virtuous and a good Christian gentleman and they settle down to have 12 babies.
- [59:15]
Angelina Stanford
There's more going to say about Pamela that won't say no.
- [59:18]
Thomas Banks
It's still a ridiculous kind of book.
- [59:20]
Angelina Stanford
But let me just finish this thought. There are going to be plot points about Pamela we're not going to share yet because they are going to be plot points in this novel. That. And so Charlotte Bronte is definitely riffing off of those. So more is to come. But you were saying.
- [59:32]
Thomas Banks
Okay, but if you actually want Pamela, it had its admirers. It also had its detractors. So Henry Fielding wrote a spoof. It's a very. It's a short spoof on Pamela called Shyamala, in which we're getting, you know, her actual intention. She's not a, you know, she's conniving it. She's just leading Mr. Baby be on because she wants to make a wealthy marriage and she's a social climber. It's quite funny.
- [59:56]
Angelina Stanford
But for this scene, what's important is that the book is called Virtue Rewarded. And that's what's happening in these chapters. They're telling her, you're a bad little girl, but if you were good, you would be rewarded. And she's arguing, I'm not a bad girl. Your standard for judging me is wrong. They even call her a bad animal. So having. Being ruled by your passions is very much associated with being an animal in the medieval imagination. And in literature, you see it all over the place because animals are ruled by their passions. They are not ruled by their reason. Some other important images from chapter one. They tell her she should be a beggar. This is going to be very important.
- [60:38]
Thomas Banks
You don't know how good you have it here.
- [60:39]
Angelina Stanford
Right? Yeah, exactly. And she has an outburst of passion and he hits her on the head. And so one of the things, or it doesn't hit her on the head, but hits her and she falls and hits her head. One of the things you'll just notice in these first four chapters is when she loses her self control and has these passionate outbursts. Okay. She feels satisfied but then there's immediately a negative consequence. And then she makes another outburst and then immediately has an even worse consequence.
- [61:05]
Thomas Banks
Oh, and one of her most important impressions of her own self is that she is unattractive. She tells us that almost right away that she doesn't feel like as beautiful as her. The Georgina and the other female cousins.
- [61:18]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, that's right. And that's going to be a plot point many, many times about whether or not she's, she's plain. And again, this is insides on the outside. She feels plain and rejected. She feels like if she was pretty, then people might be nice to her. So she's basically just feels like she has nothing of this world. No connections, no family, no money, no beauty, nothing. Nothing to rely on. So of course, in chapter one, she is put in the red room. So she is locked in the red room.
- [61:44]
Thomas Banks
Room. Sort of the hell within a hell.
- [61:47]
Angelina Stanford
Exactly. And because she lost her self control. Right. Did anybody see such a picture of passion? Take her away to the red room. But now, symbolically though, this is the state of her soul that she is locked into her passions. She's trapped by them. And she's, she's trying, she's acting out and she's having all this passion, but she keeps getting punished for it. Again, don't, don't draw conclusions yet. Let Charlotte Bronte tell this story. Just, just notice. Notice that this is what's happening. She keeps standing up for herself, but it just keeps making things worse for her. And so the pattern T.K.
- [62:18]
Thomas Banks
chesterton described the. Described the effect of some of these scenes as. I think he said that Jane Eyre is a book as cheerful and domestic as a house on fire.
- [62:30]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. So awesome.
- [62:31]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [62:32]
Angelina Stanford
So we want to notice too, when she's in the window seat, the red curtain. Curtain is protecting her from everybody else. And she's looking out of a window. There's a mirror on the other side of the curtain. Then when she goes into the bedroom, she sees a mirror. There is no window and she sees the mirror. So that's going to be important too. And more about that later. But if we look at the very beginning of chapter two, Jane is not so foregone in her passions that she's not able to reflect on what is happening as a result of giving in to them. I resisted all the way. A new thing for me. And then going down, down. I was conscious that a moment's mutiny had already rendered me liable to strange penalties. And like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved in my desperation to go all lengths. So she's aware this is hurting me, but I'm just gonna keep. I'm gonna go all in. Now she's scratching like a mad cat. Again, this scene, if you've already finished the book, this scene is going to be repeated later, okay? So you're going to want to pay attention to what's the same and what's different. She's scratching like an animal. They're fighting. They're saying, if you don't sit down, I'll tie you down. She says, okay, I'll stop, I'll stop. And then they say, if you don't behave, you're going to be torn out. You're going to be, you're going to be. Going to turn you out, send you to the poor house. You're going to be a beggar. Say your prayers. Jane Eyre. You got to be a good girl. And then we have a long description of the red room. She's locked in the red room. Y' all get it, right. She's locked inside her own passions. She's a bed that's red. The carpets are red, everything's red. But notice that the bed has the curtains on it. So they have the repetition already of she's inside, red curtains. Right. There are two windows, but the curtains are down on them. You can't, you can't see out. And then there's mirrors. And she looks in the mirror and does not recognize herself. These are big, important images. This is an instant indication that you're on an identity quest. She's on a journey of the soul to figure out who she is. Right.
- [64:28]
Thomas Banks
And I think it's. This is a preview, but it's not giving anything away. I think for much of this book it's kind of a mystery. If you ask, what does Jane Eyre want?
- [64:42]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, yeah.
- [64:43]
Thomas Banks
It's kind of hard to sum that up. Yeah.
- [64:46]
Angelina Stanford
She wants to feel free. Sure. And that's why she's pictured as being locked up. Yeah, but, but, but, but does a 10 year old even know what that means?
- [64:55]
Thomas Banks
But it's not. It's like she never. Here's a contrast, okay? Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. Becky Sharp wants a competence. She wants 10,000 a year so she can be virtuous, as she famously says. And I don't think she's lying when she says that Becky Sharp. And Becky Sharp is not a two dimensional character by any means. I mean, she wants things other than that, but she wants a place in society and she's willing to do what she has to do to get that place even Some bad things. Jane Eyre. I don't think we can say that Jane Eyre wants 10,000 a year and a comfortable situation. She's much more of a moving question mark through much of this book.
- [65:34]
Angelina Stanford
I think that's really astute. And it's almost like the first part of her quest is going to be to figure out what she is questing for.
- [65:41]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's nothing of the. If Jane Eyre had. Excuse me. If Jane Austen had written Jane Eyre, she might have told us at the beginning, kind of a general statement of this theme that a woman of few advantages wants to make a good marriage and will refine herself accordingly to be marriageable or something like that. She would have said it better because she's Jane Austen, but that's not the character that we have here.
- [66:10]
Angelina Stanford
Right. And Jane Austen would be ironic and funny and there's no humor in this book at all. None.
- [66:18]
Thomas Banks
Not even one joke? I don't think there are any.
- [66:20]
Angelina Stanford
Nothing. There will be no laughing. Anyway. Let's look at this. When she looks at the mirror. So she's in the red room. Alas, yes. No. Jail was ever more secure. Returning, I had to cross before the looking glass, my fascinated glance involuntarily explored the depth it revealed. All looked colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality. And the strange little figure there gazing at me with a white face and arms specking like the gloom and glittering eyes of fear, moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit. I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp. Bessie's evening stories represented as coming out of lone ferny dells and moors and appearing before the eyes of belated travelers. I returned to my stool. So again, she's interpreting her own life in terms of stories. I don't know who this is. Is it a fairy? Is it an imp? You know, but she's actually looking at herself. And you pointed out when we were reading this last week that, like, she's never. She's. You're gonna see. Guys, guys. Every time somebody describes her, it's going to be fairy, elf, imp, witch.
- [67:22]
Thomas Banks
I should have taken better note of this. When. When she is first called an imp. Is this. Or a fairy or an elf or whatever. Is it something she says herself or is it something somebody else tells her?
- [67:34]
Angelina Stanford
Well, right. She's saying it herself.
- [67:36]
Thomas Banks
A major character will say it more than once, I know. Later on. But no, I think she says it herself first.
- [67:42]
Angelina Stanford
Okay. Okay. I think it's right here. I think this is the first one. So she says it of the reflection. I think this is an, is an imp.
- [67:48]
Thomas Banks
All right.
- [67:49]
Angelina Stanford
Okay.
- [67:49]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [67:50]
Angelina Stanford
Just pay attention to every time Jane looks in a mirror. That's all I'm going to say. Okay. It's going to be important. Now, looking into the looking glass, several people on the Patreon have said they're feeling a connection here between this book and Alice in Wonderland. And I want you to know I found a whole bunch of scholarly articles about Jane and Alice and through the Looking Glass. So. So you guys are reading this correctly, that's another highly symbolic story. Now her other thought in like, her thoughts go dark. Well, I'm just going to starve myself and die while I'm in here. Okay. Now if you understand this in terms of symbolism, then the picture here is she's locked into a state of hell and death because she's enslaved to her passions here. Okay. As much as we might be like, yes, speak up for yourself herself, this is a picture of a self destructive passion and she's locked into it and it's, and it's death. So one of the scholars I read made this interesting point about the way the reader responds to, to Jane. And I'm, I mean, I did too, every time. I'm the person who's always like, I gotta stand up for myself. And so, you know, it's impossible, I think, for us not to really relate to her. She's being mistreated and this is unjust. And you know, know, I think we're all kind of cheering in chapter four when she tells Mrs. Reed off. Just like really royally tells her off. Right? We're all just like cheering. But one of these scholars pointed out though that what's happening here is the surprised by sin situation. And what that's a reference to is Stanley Fish wrote a book called Surprised by Sin as his explanation of Paradise Lost. Okay. And I think, I think this is brilliant. I think this is exactly what's happening in this book. So. So he argues that the reason people misunderstand and think Satan is the hero is because Milton presents Satan to you in a way that you're kind of just like as he's making his arguments about and another reason why God is wrong, you're like, yeah, exactly right on. He's totally right. And then as you, as you identify with him and you keep going through the book and as his wickedness and self destructiveness is revealed to you, you realize you have been surprised by sin. You have, have you? It's the guilty Reader like you realize, oh gosh, no, I'm the bad guy. That sin in that character, Satan is in me and that's why I identified with him and that's why I thought he's in the right and he's, he's the hero because I think I'm in the right and right. And so, so the reader sort of goes on this journey in paradise. Loss of having his own sin revealed to him. I think something similar is going on. Again, she's not going to go where you think she's going to go. This isn't passion bad, you know, stoicism good. This is a way more sophisticated novel than that. And like Mr. Banks said, most of those German romantic novels are about two different kinds of passions warring inside a person. Okay, so just be patient and see where she's going to go. But the picture we have here at the beginning is self destructive passions that she is enslaved to and that is hurting her. And, and I think when we identify with that and we're just like, yes. And I do, I will admit that I want. It's like standing ovation every time I read that chapter where she tells Mrs. Reed off and I'm just like, you go girl, girl. Right. And then I think every time I have ever done that in my life, I have regretted it. I've been on a long journey of controlling my tongue and my passions. And so anyway, this is some destructive passions.
- [71:07]
Thomas Banks
This will all be revealed in your memoir. Angelina Stanford or Stoicism rewarded in three volumes.
- [71:15]
Angelina Stanford
Exactly, exactly. She also thinks when she's crying in there that she might wake a preternatural voice to comfort her. Her. That will also be repeated later. Oh, and she looks outside and sees the moon again. All will be repeated later. Go ahead.
- [71:32]
Thomas Banks
It's interesting. She says preternatural rather than supernatural.
- [71:36]
Angelina Stanford
What do you see as the difference there in those words?
- [71:39]
Thomas Banks
Couldn't a preternatural being be something that is part human and part not?
- [71:45]
Angelina Stanford
Ah, maybe so I think, I think
- [71:48]
Thomas Banks
in the old, in the old sense of that word, it can there. Anyway, okay, doesn't matter.
- [71:53]
Angelina Stanford
So she starts to freak out. They're like, what do you want? You gotta let me out of here. I saw a ghost. They're like, she's just faking it. And then she passes out and becomes dangerously ill. They actually think she's going to die. And so they call the, the servant doctor. She doesn't even get the real doctor. So that is quite a significant image of being trapped in your own passions and that being A type of death, but then in her again. So. So now we're going to get this beautiful image in chapter three, if she feels someone being tender with her, a tenderness she's never felt in her whole life, and she's being gently put back into her bed, but it's all done to us in the color red. So she just sees red, red, red, red, red, red, red, as she's being moved when she realizes she's in her own room. Y' all gonna love this. The red is actually the fire in the fireplace. Now, I bet you can figure out what's going on here. Let's think about it, right? If red and fire is passions and the red room is just. Everything's red, right? It's just red, red, red, red, red. It's unrestrained passion. What is a picture then, of a fire in a fireplace? It is properly restrained passion. Right. So the opposite of unrestrained passion is
- [73:02]
Thomas Banks
not passion brought back into its proper focus.
- [73:04]
Angelina Stanford
Exactly. Oh, look at your face. Yes.
- [73:06]
Thomas Banks
Focus actually literally means fireplace.
- [73:08]
Angelina Stanford
Oh.
- [73:09]
Thomas Banks
Believe it or not.
- [73:09]
Angelina Stanford
Punch it in. Well done. Um, right. So the opposite of passion here is not nothing. It's not cold. Right. It's the properly restrained fire in its proper function in the hearth, warming us rather than being uncontrolled and burning in that room. And she and her tenderness brought her to that place. Isn't this good already? You're already screaming. I understand this book better now. Yep, that's what a nice, strong symbolic response. Reed of the opening chapters are. Okay, so she talks to the doctor and she doesn't want to forgive Mrs. Reed. They try to give her things to eat, but, like, she's just too upset. She's too ill. It's too late. Too little too late. Right. She's been given the Birds of Paradise plates. Okay, so that's being contrasted with the hell she was just in, but she can't even taste it. Like, it's just too much. She picks up Gulliver's Travels, but doesn't want to read it. But she's drawn to it because it's a voyage story. I mentioned that already. And I love this little line here. This book I had again and again perused with delight. I considered it a narrative of facts and discovered in it a vein of interest deeper than what I found in fairy tales. For as to the elves, having sought them in vain among foxglove leaves and bells, under mushrooms and beneath the ground ivy, mantling old walnuts, I had at length made up my mind to the sad truth that they were all gone out of England to some savage country where the woods were wilder and thicker and the population more scant. I love that. That is such.
- [74:40]
Thomas Banks
I much admired that passage, too.
- [74:42]
Angelina Stanford
So good. Right. All the fairies have left Asia.
- [74:44]
Thomas Banks
She doesn't tell us in particular, but I would bet that she's reading the child's bowdlerized version of Gulliver's Palace. It was. Yeah. One of the odd gifts of the Victorians to children's publishing is to reinvent Gulliver's Travels without the offensive bits.
- [75:00]
Angelina Stanford
Well. And Andrew Lang put the Laput as a. As a. A kid's version.
- [75:04]
Thomas Banks
Oh, yeah. Very common practice.
- [75:06]
Angelina Stanford
But she's mentioning book two here with Brobnagar. She's. She's mentioning both of them. So the whole idea that I'm disenchanted because the fairies have left England, that's very much a comment on the Enlightenment. And then we have. This is actually an original poem by Charlotte Mason. And the. Charlotte Mason. Wow. No, it's not Charlotte Bronte. I'm so trained to follow. Charlotte was Mason. This is a poem, though, this ballad about orphanless or fatherless children. This is a poem.
- [75:34]
Thomas Banks
All three of the Bronte sisters wrote poetry, by the way, and we. It's worth mentioning that the first book that they published, they published together, it was poems by Kerr Acton, Acton, Ellis Bell. Yeah, they published under male pseudonyms.
- [75:48]
Angelina Stanford
But people knew right away that Jane Eyre was written by a woman. Yeah, they knew right away. Right away. So this ballad, of course, is about how hard life is for an orphan. And you might be a friendless orphan, but God is your friend. And this idea will also be echoed in some other characters later. Bessie says, come, Miss Jane, don't cry. She might as well have said to the fire, don't burn. I mean, look at this, right? All this imagery. Jane is being burnt up by her passions. Then we have a long passage where she talks about how children can feel, but they can't analyze their feelings. Right. So the doctor's like, what are you unhappy about? It just speaks to what you said. Right. She can't articulate what she's unhappy. She's like a lot of stuff.
- [76:28]
Thomas Banks
I wanted to understand that what education she has had up to this point is basically whatever she's been able to supply herself.
- [76:35]
Angelina Stanford
Somebody taught her to read.
- [76:37]
Thomas Banks
And also her religious upbringing seems to have been basically neglected also. I mean, it's. She's been maybe thumped over the head with a Bible a few times. But beyond that, it doesn't seem that. It doesn't seem that she's had much catechesis or anything.
- [76:51]
Angelina Stanford
She's quite neglected.
- [76:53]
Thomas Banks
She's been left without any kind of compass in life.
- [76:55]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, we could say she's very, very neglected. So she talks to him, and they have an important conversation. He says, do you know if you have relations? And she says, if I do, they're poor. Now, her understanding of what poor is, and she admits this. I didn't know what poor was. I thought poor meant I had to be a beggar. And so I said, no, I don't want to. I don't want to be poor, so I don't want to be a beggar with poor relations. We'll come back to that later. And then he says, would you like to go to school? And she says, yes, but she also doesn't know what school is. She's ignorant everything. But she thinks this might be nice to get out. So of course she's going to be brought to school. And Mr. Mr. Brocklehurst, what a great picture.
- [77:38]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [77:39]
Angelina Stanford
Come comes to take her. All right, so I'm going to show you the difference between reading something in the tradition and reading it in a newer way. Let me see if I can find the passage. This. It's the passage when Mr. Brocklehurst is described when he comes in. All right. So when Mr. Brocklehurst comes in here, he is described. The handle turned, the door unclosed, and passing through and cursing low. I looked up at a boy, black pillar such at least appeared to me at first sight. The straight, narrow, sable clad shape standing erect on the rug. The grim face at the top was like a carved mask placed above the shaft by way of capital. So I remember when I was doing my research for my thesis, I ran across a lot of explications of this passage. Don't worry if there's little ears around, I will speak euphemistically, but this is always read writing. Oh, you know. Yeah, because he's standing erect. And so they argue that this is a symbol then a Freudian symbol of male sexual power. And so they see that lens of. This is a story of Jane being abused by all these men and John reed and now Mr. Brocklehurst. Okay, here's. Here's just one of the most obvious problems with trying to interpret standing erect to mean sexual power. This book is also going to describe women as standing erect. I looked for it on this read and I found it. Okay, like, that's just a phrase for standing straight. It doesn't mean anything else. Right. This is. We can all just laugh at how ridiculous that is. Because are the women male sexual power too? It doesn't make sense. But if you're focusing on these Freudian images and if you're focusing on how this. All this is male sexual power, it's dominating a young girl, you will miss then the very, very obvious symbolism that comes in the next several paragraphs of which I was so proud of the Patreon. They all picked up on it. She looks at him and thinks, my, what big eyes you have. My, what a big nose you have. My, what a big mouth you have. He's the big bad wolf.
- [79:37]
Thomas Banks
Oh, yes.
- [79:38]
Angelina Stanford
This is Little Red Riding Hood. He's the big bad wolf.
- [79:41]
Thomas Banks
This type of character also appears in Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, the. The legalistic Pharisee whose whole purpose in the book is to browse. Be another character or group of characters. There's the servant that I think he's supposed to be a Methodist. Joseph in Wuthering Heights, who's like one long litany of biblical texts flung like weapons at other people. He's actually kind of an amusing character. But Mr. Brocklehurst serves sort of the same function here.
- [80:18]
Angelina Stanford
Indeed. Now, we'll learn more about him in the next set of chapters. But he's obviously a very harsh kind of Christianity. His idea, you know, orphan.
- [80:27]
Thomas Banks
What does he say? Consistency, madam. I take to be the first of Christian virtues.
- [80:31]
Angelina Stanford
Exactly. Right. So the disc. Right. One of the fruits of the spirit. Right. The fruit of cons.
- [80:35]
Thomas Banks
We're also meant to understand that he runs this a charity. Charity. Charity. School At a profit. And makes actually a good on the
- [80:42]
Angelina Stanford
side because, I mean, even by his own mouth, his daughters are like, look how plain everybody is. I don't think they've ever seen a silk gate. Yeah. I'm like rear Rearing Papa.
- [80:49]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [80:49]
Angelina Stanford
Mrs. Reed says, Perfect. That's perfect for what I want for Jane. So he quizzes her and asks her, do you read the Bible? And she says, yes. And he says, do you like it? And she says, I like Revelations and the book of Daniel. Okay. That's your two big symbolic books.
- [81:03]
Thomas Banks
I mean, I was gonna say your apocalyptic books too.
- [81:05]
Angelina Stanford
Yes. Apocalypse.
- [81:06]
Thomas Banks
The last chapters of Daniel and the whole of Revelation are shot through with apocalyptic.
- [81:10]
Angelina Stanford
Apocalyptic language and highly symbolic. Apocalypse. Apocalyptic language. Charlotte Bronte could not be signaling to us harder that this is about symbol. Yeah.
- [81:19]
Thomas Banks
And she likes the darkly violent bits, it would seem.
- [81:23]
Angelina Stanford
Same thing in this whole section. I was wishing Cindy was on this.
- [81:26]
Thomas Banks
Daniel also has the fiery furnace which the boys are Thrown into.
- [81:30]
Angelina Stanford
So it's a fire that you can be protected from that won't consume you. I wish Cindy was on this episode for this little section about the Psalms, because this is everything Cindy keeps trying to say about how. How if you're taking comfort in the fact that your kid can spit out the right answer about how much he loves God or whatever, you might be putting your confidence in the wrong place. This is so great. So he says, do you like the Psalms? No, sir. No. Oh, shocking. I have a little boy younger than you who knows six psalms by heart. And when you ask him which he would rather have a gingerbread nut to eat or a verse of psalm to learn, he said, oh, the verse of a psalm. Angels sing Psalms, Psalms. I wish to be a little angel here before. Below. He then gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety. Okay, like you're getting played. Mr. Brocklehurst. This boy does not love the Psalms. He loves getting rewarded. That's. That's virtue rewarded is what that is. Right? And she says, psalms are not interesting. And he says, that proves you have a wicked heart. So he's right off the bat. And so he leaves. And he leaves her with a didactic track. Little girl. Here is a book entitled the Child's Guide. Read it with prayer, especially that part containing an account of the awfully sudden death of Martha G. A naughty child addicted to falsehood and deceit. So in the 1800s.
- [82:48]
Thomas Banks
That's not an exaggeration.
- [82:49]
Angelina Stanford
It is not.
- [82:49]
Thomas Banks
I think there are tracks exactly like that.
- [82:51]
Angelina Stanford
That's what I was going to say. This was. This was the didactic track they gave children. This is what Hilaire Belloc is satirizing in his, you know, cautionary tales. Yeah, Martha told lies and was burned to death kind of thing, because they really would give kids those kinds of tracks. And this is what people like George McDonald and Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens are fighting against, that children don't need didactic stories about bad things happen to bad kids. They need fairy tales and their imagination nurtured. And I think Charlotte Bronte is jumping right into that here. Like, that tract is not going to touch Jane Eyre's heart. And Jane Eyre is not made in a way that she can lie and be somebody she's not, not just so she can please Brocklehurst and get two pieces of candy. Some of you might be thinking, I would totally lie to get that candy, but I'm afraid I'm made more like Jane Eyre, as you know. Yes. You're not my Husband.
- [83:40]
Thomas Banks
That intense earnestness.
- [83:41]
Angelina Stanford
That intense earnestness, man, you couldn't have
- [83:42]
Thomas Banks
handled everything about the Victorian era but the intense earnestness. I think you would have, you know.
- [83:47]
Angelina Stanford
I would have excelled.
- [83:48]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, exactly. Full marks for that.
- [83:51]
Angelina Stanford
So when he leaves, she gives into her passions again. In. And tells off Mrs. Reed. I was left. Okay, so she tells her off. I mean, really, like I said, I clap. It's hard not to. I slow clap. I'm. I want her to tell off Mrs. Reed. Right. But this is what happens. I was left there alone. Winner of the field. It was the hardest battle I had fought and the first victory I had gained. I stood a while on the rug where Mr. Brocklehurst had stood and I enjoyed my conqueror's solitude. First I smiled to myself and felt elate. But this fierce pleasure subsided in me as fast as did the accelerated throb of my pulses. A child cannot quarrel with its elders as I had done, cannot give its furious feelings uncontrolled play as I had given mine without experiencing afterwards. The pang of remorse and the chill of reaction actually let me keep going. A ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring, would have been a meat emblem of my mind when I accused and menaced Mrs. Reed. The same ridge, black and blasted after the flames are dead, would have represented as meatly my subsequent condition when half an hour's silence and reflection had shown me the madness of my conduct and the dreariness of my hatred and hating position. Something of vengeance. I had tasted for the first time an aromatic wine. It seemed on swallowing, warm and racy it's after flavored, metallic and corroding, giving me a sensation as if I had been poisoned. Okay, that's everything we've been talking about, right? This. It feels good to give in to this passion because. But it's ultimately self destructive. So we're going to have to see what it's going to look like for her to move with tenderness toward that fire being in a fireplace. The next morning she's sent off in the dark. So she goes to Lowood School in the dark that is, you know, she can't see what's coming next. And she goes to the next stage of her journey and goodbye to Gateshead. And she gets there at night and maybe we'll pick up here next time. Yeah, meets. She meets some important.
- [85:56]
Thomas Banks
This charity school, by the way.
- [85:59]
Angelina Stanford
These.
- [86:01]
Thomas Banks
The history of this type of school in the 18th and 19th century, even into the 20th century to some degree is of course kind of controversial because I mean these schools, I don't Think she's really exaggerating too much. The type of instruction the girls would receive here.
- [86:17]
Angelina Stanford
Here.
- [86:18]
Thomas Banks
At the same time, though, like, what do you do with orphans otherwise? I mean, this is an age in which adopting. We might say, well, adopt them and put them in good homes, but this is an age which is kind of hostile to that. Yeah. So, I mean, this is as bad as it is. I mean, this state of affairs might be better than some other alternatives, tragically, but that. That remains a fact nonetheless.
- [86:40]
Angelina Stanford
We still struggle to know what to do with compromise children.
- [86:44]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [86:44]
Angelina Stanford
In this case, her family is putting her here on. On purpose. You wanted a school. Well, so she's going to get a beggar's education.
- [86:51]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [86:52]
Angelina Stanford
But we'll see what she makes of it. So hopefully this has given you a nice framework, the sorts of things to look for. We'll see as we go through that. As much as Charlotte Bronte is a romantic, she also has plenty of Victorianism in her, as does her sisters. And there will be moments that feel a little.
- [87:11]
Thomas Banks
There's some intense righteousness.
- [87:12]
Angelina Stanford
There's. There'll be some preachy moments. But I think people make a mistake of thinking, brush aside the fairy tale stuff and pay attention to the preachiness, because that's the real novel. And that's why I liked the Fry quote I chose. It's not the ideological stuff that makes this book what it is. It's the mythological stuff, it's the fairy tale stuff. So we'll. We'll hold on to that. All right. Right. So next time, meet us here for the second episode, and we will cover chapters six through 12 so we get through the next section of her journey here at Lowood School. And we'll just keep plugging along. And I look forward to your comments in the Patreon forum as well as in the Facebook group on how you're connecting with Jane Eyre. And don't forget, we are having a Q and A episode this summer. So keep posting your questions for us to answer, just about literature, reading or books in particular, or even questions about what it's like to be married to the mysterious Mr. Banks. I'll tell you right now, it's mysterious is what it is. It's very mysterious, like traveling in the dark. You can ask him what it's like to be married with an earnestly intense woman. Yeah, you're not going to answer that now? Good. Wise man. See, he's being mysterious again.
- [88:20]
Thomas Banks
Chesterton, you as charming and domestic as a house on fire. All those things.
- [88:26]
Angelina Stanford
Head to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to sign up for Jason Baxter's mini class this fall. Our Addison Hornstrom webinar on the Outlaw Tradition in the east and the west, which will be this month in March, and peruse our catalog of classes and take some classes with this as well. So we'll see you back here next time. Stick around to the end of this podcast. Mr. Banks has a special poem picked out for you. Until then, guys, keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with Cindy at Morning Time for Moms. Join the conversation at our member Only Patreon forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks,
- [89:52]
Thomas Banks
the Vision by William Sharp In a fair place of wind and grass, I heard feet pass where no one was. I saw a face bloom like a flower, nay, as the rainbow shower of a tempestuous hour. It was not man or woman, it was not human, but beautiful and wild, Terribly undefiled I knew an unborn child.