(bright upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and the citizens of Minnesota.

This program brought to you in part by SELCO.

(gentle upbeat music) - Good evening, my name is Julie Clinefelter, and I'm the director here at the Austin Public Library in Austin, Minnesota.

Welcome to the Reading for Life lecture.

Tonight, we are doing Charlotte Bronte's book, "Jane Eyre."

Reading for Life is a movement of the imagination, with the purpose of growing community around a shared love of literature.

The idea is that real community begins and ends with our imaginations.

And few resources if any, are as vital to the imaginations development as works of literature.

Our presenter tonight is Michael Verde.

Michael graduated with honors from the University of Texas's Plan II Honors program.

Earned an MA in literary studies from the university of Iowa and an MA in theology from the University of Durham, England, where he graduated at the top of his international class.

He taught for 15 years at the university and college prep school levels.

And most recently at Indiana University.

And is currently completing his PhD with the focus on literature and religion.

Michael founded Reading for Life in 2005.

As I said, our text tonight is "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte.

Michael, the stage is yours.

- Julie, thank you.

And thank you Austin Minnesota Public Library for making this experience possible.

I've spent a lot of my life reading and somehow thought that it would be a private pursuit.

And delighted to have an opportunity to share.

And I know this is a case for many of your patrons, that there are people who read religiously in the sense that it's as part of their life, the way someone golfs, or someone cooks, or someone gardens, but often for those readers, it's not easy to find a community.

In my experience book clubs, especially for people who love to read, sometimes book clubs can be more frustrating than satisfying.

It would of course depend on the group of people, but without some kind of facilitation it's very difficult to maintain a thread and intellectually developing discussion.

And then if you add of course, wine and other kind of beverages, it can become increasingly impossible.

So, I hope that what we're doing here is something like i may believe book club for people who wanna go deep into these works of literature in a way that may not be available to folks outside of the university or for that matter even inside the university.

So, anyway, thank you for this.

Why don't we start our discussion of "Jane Eyre", where Jane starts, which is in a window seat.

Behind to her right, red moreen curtain, as she describes it.

A Scarlet drapery, especially thick drapery, and this is to her right.

She's sitting cross-legged, as she said, like a Turk.

And in her lap is the book, Bewick's, "History of Birds."

To her left just beyond the window pane, is the inclement weather about which she said that it was too cold and rainy and not possible therefore, to take a walk today.

I'm trying to describe the novel beginning with Jane enclosed.

She's in a confined space in a material physical way, but more fundamentally her life with the Reed family, she is not a matro born member of the family.

The Mr. Reed who's passed away was related to her father.

And at his deathbed charged his wife with raising Jane Eyre.

And his wife was doing so a great deal of... Well, she hasn't accepted Jane into the family.

So Jane's condition in the family, I'm trying to suggest that it is enclosed in a claustrophobic world that she doesn't feel a part of.

She is described even by herself as something like an interloper among these people.

She feels herself like an alien.

In fact, Mrs. Reed chastises her because she can't be natural enough.

By which Mrs. Reeds means something like normal with her own children constituting the norm.

And her children aren't particularly bright, and they're certainly not imaginatively excited about anything.

And her one son John Reed, is described as gluttonous and a almost sadistic bully.

And these are the people around what she surrounded and her status in the Reed family is lower even than the servants.

When she has discovered reading in the window seat, John tells her that she is not to read their books.

And soon thereafter, he takes this same book and throws it across the room and bloodies her lip or nose.

I'm trying to create a picture of a 10 year old girl, in a family where she is emotionally, verbally, and physically abused for resisting this assault for standing up for herself, for being physically assaulted by John Reed, who's four years older.

She's thrown into the red-room and perhaps there's fewer scenes maybe that are more memorable.

This would have to be among the constellation of scenes in the great works of English literature that people would recall reflexively.

The red-room I wanna stress is a part of this notion of being enclosed in a place that's infernal in its isolation.

So it's a contrast, she's in a place where there is heat because of physical and verbal violence, but more fundamentally she's isolated.

In other words, though, there is a threat of physical force, there is not intimacy.

So it's heat without warmth.

It's a heat that could burn you really.

And the trauma that she experiences in this room that she thinks is haunted by a ghost.

Her mind now is racing.

Gateshead is the name of the setting.

So that suggests that something that is broken into.

Her mind is racing in a terror that leads to her actually passing out.

So this is where the novel begins.

If you can imagine someone in a least auspicious situation existentially, of a 10 year old, without any natural family, with no support emotionally or otherwise, no prospect for the future, and a home of people who find her odd the best a nuisance at worst, and who from time to time including the mother, gets some strange pleasure in degrading her in various ways.

This is where the novel begins.

In clause and what I'm trying to capture with the image of redness.

The red-room and the red moreen curtains, of something that is like hell, you could imagine existentially.

The novel ends in a very different set of circumstances for Jane.

She's in a place called Ferndean, where she has been reunited with the love of her life in a most unlikely set of circumstances.

She now is not only wedded to the one that she loves most, in contrast to being divorced or isolated from the Reed family.

She's now wedded to the love of her life in a place where there is no sense of power differential.

She's wedded to Rochester in such a way that both feel of each other, that they complete each other.

This is stressed in the concluding chapter of how each part of their own being, both physically, because Rochester has lost an eye in his house burning down trying to save Bertha Mason, who started the fire.

His eye and lost a hint.

So even physically, Jane who is now leading him and in some ways being his eyes, even at that anatomical level, their bodies have fused in a way.

But more fundamentally, they are wedded at the level of spirit.

But not in opposition to or intention with the body.

They are wedded in body, and in mind, and in spirit.

Jane has also been bequeathed much to her surprise, just...

In fact, at this point when Ferndean takes place less than a year earlier, she's learned that she's inherited rather enormous fortune of 20,000 pounds.

I'm not exactly sure what that would mean in terms of wealth in our terms, but the way that Jane receives the knowledge, she suggested that she would've been blown away with 5,000 pounds and not to mention 20,000 pounds.

And not only has she come into this inheritance, but she's discovered that this family who essentially has brought her in at the brink of her own extinction when she has fled from Thornfield and really randomly picking a place to find some kinda of shelter and without any resources whatsoever finds her way to a small house and this family brings her in.

It turns out through the twist of fiction or fate, that the family that is brought her in for shelter are related to her as second cousins.

So I wanna create a picture of just how different Jane's condition is at the beginning of the novel from the end.

And in I guess, pithy terms we can say in the beginning, she is isolated and cut off and dismembered for any sort of communion or affection.

She doesn't belong, she's an outsider.

At the end of the novel, she is entirely reunited in every way with Ken Folk and with the love of her life, and she is no longer in a place where she needs to fear anything.

And she expresses her life in a like the most...

If you could imagine a happy ending.

I don't know if it could have been articulated any more forcefully and convincingly as this novel ends.

So I guess a question that I'll raise for myself and would throw out for whomever is participating, is how is it that Jane Eyre, at 10 an orphan with no resources finds her way roughly 10 years later in a very opposite set of circumstances that one might think of as beatific or as a fairytale ending, except in very material in corporal and real world terms.

If we think about the movement from Gateshead to Ferndean, in geographical terms, then we're talking about a movement of time and space.

And the way that happens, you could just recount the plot 'cause that's it.

But if we imagine that Ferndean symbolizes something more than just a geographical location, let's say that Ferndean is emblematic, not only of Jane's external world, but of her internal world.

In other words, the world as she is experiencing it from the inside out, and not simply the world in which she's an object.

If we imagine how she moves to that understanding of Ferndean, then I think things get pretty interesting.

And I wanna propose three ways that Jane finds herself going through the Gateshead, through Lowood, the school where she attends.

Through Thornfield, through Marsh's End or Moor House, and then to Ferndean.

The first thing I would say that explains Jane's arrival at this happy ending, is her insistence as she says, "with respect to being thrown into the red-room, I resisted all the way."

And I would say, this is true for Jane's life for the next 10 years.

That each one of those locations, she was confronted with one or more people who like Mrs. Reed or John Reed the bully, would put her in her place.

And her place being a place was suitable for their image of her.

In each of these locations, she comes across someone who would define her.

And not only just who she is, but where she belongs in the world.

And in each one of those, let's say collisions of will, Jane resist an interpretation of her that doesn't feel congruent with who she experiences herself to be.

And if we think that her resistance is taking place in a context in which she has no resources, she has no backup.

I think I'm around 55.

And even to this day, I know that if things implode around me, I can pick up the phone and call my mother.

I'm embarrassed to admit that, but that's the fact of the matter.

And that's at 55.

So I'm imagining at 10, when you have no one that you could call on and yet you're resisting often at the cost of the potential of being cast out.

In other words, as in fact happens at Gateshead because Jane resists the depodations of the Reed family, Mrs. Reed has her sent to a school for orphans.

She's kicked there out for what?

For resisting being abused.

So Jane's resistance is taking place in a context where there is something to lose if she resists.

And I think that adds a great measure to the intensity of the novel, because again and again, really Jane is coming into a situation where she could lose her life by accepting a place that is offered her.

That is the irony.

If she accepts a kind of opening, but that opening isn't consistent with her sense of herself, then she would come in out of the inclement weather physically and emotionally, but she would do so at the cost of some let's say constriction.

Again, she could have a place as long as she would agree to be less than who and what she is.

If she would agree not to allow herself to expand into its most fruitful form, then she can have a place.

For instance, at Lowood school.

Mr. Brocklehurst who's the headmaster of the school and a very wealthy man, he learns from Mrs. Reed.

Mrs. Reed explains to Mr. Brocklehurst that Jane is a bad child.

So it was almost like a spoiled fruit, an apple.

Like something's wrong with her.

It really at a congenital level, but a spiritual level.

It's not just that she's naughty, there's something fundamentally not good about Jane and Mr. Brocklehurst assures Mrs. Reed, that he would not let that definition of her escape his memory.

And at Lowood in front of all of the students, roughly 80 girls, Mr. Brocklehurst comes in and he gives this piration about this one particular girl in their midst, who is an example of what not to be.

This is an example of someone trying to define Jane in a way that reduces her and indeed indeed is abusive.

And she has to find something within herself, a strength of character that says, even if only to herself, that what is being said about me is a lie.

In fact, when Mrs. Reed is telling Mr. Brocklehurst that she is a liar, Jane, at a certain point in her fury, and I'm trying to play off the idea of fire, and cold, and ice.

Starting back with being in the window seat with the inclement weather to her left and the red curtain to the right.

Again and again, this notion of an intensity of passion, but also a coolness of intellect come into a collision.

So for instance, at a peak of her indignation of Mrs. Reed mischaracterizing her as a liar, she's had enough and the spirit in her, and it must be a a very intense spirit.

Because at 10, she is a very interesting young lady.

One, she has read some remarkable books, namely, she mentions, Goldsmith's "History of Rome," and she's formed an impression of Nero and Caligula.

She's also has some very particular books in the Bible that she's fond of.

Because Mr. Brocklehurst asked her if she has favorite books.

And she explains that, yes, she does.

She likes revelations, she likes parts of Kings and Samuels.

She likes Job and Jonah.

And Mr. Brocklehurst ask her, well, do you like the Psalms?

Now you see what's going on here in a way, is this 10 year old girl has identified with the prophetic text of the Bible.

And in many ways, the least likely text for a 10 year old to get their mind around.

And these are her favorites.

But Mr. Brocklehurst, wants to bring her back to these bromides, something I don't wanna reduce the Psalms to bromides.

But you can see that the Psalms could be read is a anthology of quota book quotes that you could pick and choose from these little moral niceties.

And when Mr. Brocklehurst asked her if she likes the Psalms, she says, the Psalm are not interesting.

This is 10 year old.

I'm trying to explain the intensity of this child that is bringing her into a conflict with surroundings that really aren't escapecious.

And their depth of awareness and spiritual oppressions as her own interior world is.

She's really in some ways too large for the enclosures that she finds herself in.

And she stood up to me, Mrs. Reeds, stand up to Mr. Brocklehurst in his way of mischaracterizing her.

Also at Lowood very quickly, Helen Burns, who is depicted as something of a martyr and a Saint.

She's a young girl who has a Quaker like disposition.

And in contrast to Jane's fiery disposition, Helen Burns, no matter what happens to her, in other words, when the teachers punish her or whatever, she accepts it with a stoic sort of... Not just that she accepts it, she explains to Jane that she finds nothing really about it that is insulting.

This is Jane who's arrived there having taken umbrage at Mrs. Reed to want to standing up for herself.

She bumps into a girl that she finds very interesting and very powerful person, Helen Burns, who begins to explain to her, Jane your insistence on standing up for yourself is really spiritually immature.

And she gives her a conception of a spiritual life that would involve Jane retreating inward.

The whole Lowood section is about light.

In the plaque in the front of the school, is the verse for Matthew 5:16 that says, let your light so shine before men that your father in heaven will be glorified.

And Jane looks at this verse and she's trying to get her mind around what light would mean in an institutional context.

And she soon learns from Mr. Brocklehurst what it means.

For Mr. Brocklehurst it means give the appearance of being goodly, although, in fact, you're starving these young ladies and you're treating them as if they were less than your own children.

In other words, he gives the appearance of being a Christian.

This is what he means by letting his light shine.

Whereas Helen Burns light shines inwardly.

Mr. Brocklehurst it's all outwardly and nothing inwardly.

For Helen Burns, it's all outward and not inwardly.

Consider the name, Helen Burns.

Helen means light, and of course Burns being burns.

So this section is about how do you get your light to burn?

And this is what the fiery passionate Jane is having to learn.

How is it that I bring forth this intensity that is within me?

This volcanic willpower in a way that doesn't lead to me doing what I did to Mrs. Reed, which was simply almost really to... She chastise her so fiercefully that Mrs. Reed was broken by this child, and afterwards, Jane did not feel good about it.

And so she arrives at Lowood knowing that she has this intensity, but that there's something about it that needs to be expressed in a way that's generative and not destructive.

And she meets Helen Burns, who suggests, well, you should just keep it all inside.

This isn't Jane's way.

In other words, at one level she rejects Mr. Brocklehurst being all about the light shining outwardly, and at some level she resist Helen Burns solution.

Helen Burns dies interestingly up consumption, which is to say she had a fever that burned her up inside.

So for all of her commitment to Christianity, her particular understanding of Christianity almost led to something that was masochistic.

If Mr Brocklehurst sadistic, there was something masochistic about Helen Burns and Jane resists both of those.

I don't wanna reduce this to saying it's something like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, that the porch being too hot or too cold, which you can see again and again through the novel, there is these opposites that Jane has to resist both of those for some other kind of way that doesn't seem available to her.

And so real quickly, she resists Mr. Rochester who would make her one, an angel, and then make her a wife, but not legally.

She resists that.

Even though she loves Mr. Rochester more than life itself, she will not agree to wed him under circumstances that because there principles, that she believes that are divine principles, she will not compromise her fidelity to those principles even to have the love of her life experienced in this what must have been a unimaginably desirable way.

Sinjin Rivers or spelled St. John, but I was told by someone who wasn't from east Texas and probably knew how to pronounce these words, that it was pronounced Sinjin, Sinjin Rivers.

And Sinjin Rivers wants to define her as a missionary wife.

He wants to wed her, but without any kind of passion or any kind of physical desire.

And he wants her to be his helper as he conquers India.

Proselytizing, he calls him the Hindu standing or the Indian people.

And he wants Jane to accompany him in this role of something like an assistant but not have any passion.

Jane says, I could go as an assistant and more like a sister, but I can't go with your wife 'cause I don't feel that way about you.

And Sinjin Rivers won't have it.

This was yet again, a situation where someone is trying to define Jane in a way that's not congruent with who she is.

So, you can see Jane's movement from Gateshead to Ferndean, as a succession of resisting definitions of herself that would if she accepted them, and there could be many things about those proposals that are inviting.

That if she accepts them, something in her would have to be either constricted, or amputated, denied or repressed.

We could think, for instance, speaking of fire, Bertha Mason, she might be thought of as the opposite of Helen Burns when it comes to fire.

And there was some indication, it's way Rochester has described her anyway, that after she went mad that she was closer to an animal.

Which would be to say, there wasn't anything particularly reasonable, or that would give her any kind of guidance as to her feelings.

And those feelings are so strong that she ends up burning down all of Thornfield.

They're a famous book, "The Mad Woman in the Attic," by Susan Uber and Susan, excuse me, Susan Uber.

I can't remember the other lady's name.

The book is called "Mad Woman in the Attic," and it suggests that Bertha Mason in some ways is symbolic of Jane herself or Charlotte herself rather.

Of having that fury of being in a man's world, enclosed and not having the ability to express yourself, would lead to a madness that this particularly symbolizes and that I think is profound insight.

But I'd also suggest that Jane resists that madness and moves out of Thornfield.

Any case, number one from Gateshead to Ferndean, resisting all the way and resisting the place that people proffer you that is not consistent with your interior world both intellectually and with regards to your feelings.

To desires and your let's say reason, and intellect, and consciousness.

In any situation in which all of those aspects of Jane would not have a place of expression, she'll resist the place offered her.

So you couldn't get to Ferndean if you accepted some other lesser state of condition.

Is what I'm trying to propose.

Secondly, in addition to resisting definitions that don't fit, Jane seems to be deeply intuitively involved with spirits of various sorts.

Perhaps above all else, there seems to be a very deep connection between Jane and the moon.

At crucial moments in her life, the moon appears.

In fact, in one of her drawings, she draws the moon as the queen of the evening star, and she consistently indeed always refers to the moon as a she.

And this moon is something like I guess she could say like Athena to Telemachus.

Something like a mentoring spirit that gives her inclinations, proclivities, when she's in doubt as to what directions she should take.

Jane also experiences guidance from the spiritual world in the form of dreams.

She has auditory visitations, she calls them visitations.

So in addition to resisting things that don't fit, she seems to be attending very deeply to another dimension of existence, that seems to be allied with her fruition.

I wanna suggest in other words, that the spirits that are in companioned to Jane, again, for most of her life, she had no human companions or source of guidance.

And so the spiritual world in the foreign of nature spirits, I'm suggesting symbolized by the moon, but also with spirits that seem to be coming from her own interior world.

And also from time to time, Jane is overcome by a voice that is her, but is not entirely under the dominion of her ego.

She will all of a sudden hear a voice that will speak and say something that she perhaps had not been aware of.

That too is an indication of the spirit moving Jane towards consummation of her identity that the social, and material, and physical world doesn't seem committed to bestowing on her.

So that I would say is point two with regards to the... Let's say the transformation of her.

If we were just talking about Jane's body, we could just say the transportation of her body.

But really we're talking about the transformation of her entire universe from the end side out.

And these are elements.

So resisting definitions that don't fit, being attentive to spirit that seem to have your own development, and indeed your blooming as finding the most fertile form of your expression seem to be committed to that even when nothing else in the material world seems to be.

And then thirdly, and I think this is most interestingly.

And we can move towards a stopping point for questions.

Jane marries opposites.

If we go back to her initial situation in that window seat, when she's enclosed in these drapes.

These red drapes with the inclement weather to her left, and we consider that she is reading a book, Bewick's "History of Birds."

What she says about that book is that she was deeply drawn to the pictures.

So here she is a 10 year old girl and she's looking at these birds in different kinds of terrain.

And she's especially drawn to those birds that are in the coldest, the most desolate climbs.

She picks out the Arctic zone for instance.

Now at one level what's going on, she's identifying her interior world in these images.

And Jane is being moved by these pictures.

Through this book, she's having another word stimulation that is not available to her through the Reed family or through that environment.

She has another source really of nourishment is what I'm getting at.

And that source of nourishment is working its way through her imagination.

She becomes a gifted drawer, painter.

And this becomes a practice for her as a kind of medium.

And I would wanna propose the idea that as an artist, what she's learning how to do, is to take things in natural or historical world.

Remember, it's Bewick's "History of Birds."

And turn those natural material things into images.

Art, for instance, may represent the material world, but the form of the work of art.

In other words, the composition of those contents.

The composition is not derived from the natural world, the composition is derived from the world of the imagination.

So works of art you might say, take what's out there in terms of nature, and transforms that nature into a nature that includes the human imagination.

And what the artist does in many ways is integrate opposites into a generative composition.

And I wanna say that this is what Jane does with the opposites let's say, of reason and passion.

Or eyes and fire.

In fact, you could think of all the characters in the novel as being symbolized by either ice or fire.

Think about it, just run through your mind.

If you name a character let's say Sinjin Rivers, he's described again and again, as associated with things that are cold.

In fact, at some point Jane says to Rochester that he was an iceberg to her.

Bertha Mason, well, there is fire and (indistinct).

Helen Burns internal fire, Mr. Brocklehurst, as cold as could be.

The girls for whom he was a steward are freezing to death.

Each particular character, Rochester is full of fire and so is Jane.

But what Jane has to do is to take that fire and meld it with her intellect.

And the power that combines intelligence and passion, is a sense above both in a way.

And I'm suggesting that sense is the imagination, that the imagination has an intelligence, but it's an intelligence that includes the body.

You can think of people, you could say that they're loved from the neck up.

Or people who are able to abstract and cut themselves off from concrete things.

Well, the imagination is it precisely the opposite of that.

The imagination includes the body's desires in its way of making sense to the world.

So, when Jane is put in these positions where she has to choose one element of herself or the other and she resists, she can draw upon the imagination to imagine a synthesis of those opposite things.

Let me give you a real concrete example.

So, both Mr. Rochester and Sinjin Rivers want to marry Jane.

They both propose to her.

And initially she rejects both of them.

In fact, she rejects Sinjin Rivers completely.

The cost of marriage for Mr. Rochester would be to accommodate passion at the cost of principle.

You could say that she could take the fire if she would let go of what the eyes, or intelligence, or something that is not of the body of the mind, she could get her body's fulfillment at the cost of her mind.

Sinjin River's proposal is absolutely the opposite.

He's not interested in her body, he doesn't want a passionate marriage, he wants her as a helpmate in which the ideology of Christianity is the main source of intercourse between them.

That is to say, they would live a life from the neck up, but the neck would keep going up, would go all the way to heaven.

And Jane would be to give up her life here on earth as a carnal being in order to participate in Sinjin River's picture of her.

So if Jane resists these different proposals, it's because there's an element of her that can imagine how they can be combined.

And I want again, use the word generative because the novel emphasizes the combination of white and red.

White for ice and red for fire.

The combination of those is green.

If you get the temperature just right, you can melt the ice and have water.

If you get the temperature just right, it can be an illuminating light and not a all consuming light.

If you mix even the colors of yellow for the sun and blue for the sky, then you get something like green.

I mentioned these colors because Jane Eyre does.

She has green eyes.

Sinjin Rivers, who would have blue eyes.

Indeed does have blue eyes.

Why?

'Cause he's associated with things that are not of the body so much, things that are higher.

But higher at the cost of what is here down below.

Jane in other words reaches Ferndean, by taking what might be sources of herself that are in conflict, or that could be accepted at the cost of the other.

And she imagined that there is a way that those desperate aspects of her, can be integrated into a sum that is greater than the parts.

So I would say then that these would be the three principle ways that Jane is able from that place in the window seat at Ferndean, excuse me, at Gateshead, to that garden like end of the novel by resisting people that would define her in ways that were less than who and what she was and could be, and could become.

An ability to tune in to a source of guidance that was not readily available in the empirical world, through the whatever it's the calling spirits.

And finally the ability to trust her imagination as what brought together the various aspects of her life, interior and (indistinct) to create something that she participates in the creation.

This is what I want to stress that Jane is participating in the creation of the final expression of herself.

Now she is not solely the person that is dictating, that too would be a break in opposite.

She's either opposite, in other words of dependency and independence, those two have to be combined.

At the end of her life she is not independent and she is not dependent.

I'm speaking on Rochester.

She has reached a level of intimacy and union that transcends the very difference between independence and dependence.

You see those opposites are the world that she in fact has grown out of into another world altogether, symbolized by Ferndean.

So we're just scratching the surface here, but how bad if we just hit pause and see what folks have going on in their imaginations, and then we'll take it from there.

- [Julie] Great.

Yes, so I think let's see if I go back through, there was one...

So Steve did mention we were talking about the red-room.

He said, does the red-room also in some sense indicate being trapped in her heart.

That she's an emotional prisoner as well as a physical prisoner.

- Thanks for stimulating Steve, you wanna add to that a little bit more?

- [Steve] Yeah, I would say, I feel like what you're describing as far as Jane's situation throughout the book is a very well developed description of the dilemma of women in Victorian society.

She might have something going on upstairs, but she's not allowed to use it.

She's trapped in a room because she doesn't have agency.

Emotionally, she's a prisoner.

The men are all condescending or brutal, all the kinds of things.

And it's like, oh, this is what she's describing as life was like for women in Victorian society.

To me the red represents blood, also as fire.

And that she was an emotional prisoner that when she talks about the red-room, I think of immediately that her heart.

That her heart is trapped when she's younger.

- I think.

- That I think is very insightful and I appreciate you suggesting very happily, that there is obviously a context here.

A political and social context that explains her enclosure.

And very much fair to say because the novel itself makes it very clear.

That men define the places especially of women.

And those places are very limited.

You can be a governess, you could be a teacher in a school, but you would certainly be answering to a man ultimately who was funding the school.

You would be like a maintenance except for the mind of young people.

You could be a maid, I suppose, there was very limited... And this is of course true for Charlotte Bronte as well.

And so you can imagine if you do, just as you're saying, if you have this interior world that is so vital in many ways, including with regards to desire , an intellectual desire and imaginative desire.

And you're faced with a social world in which there is no place, there's no infrastructure.

There's no supporting ladders or farm in which you can come to fruition.

Then what are you gonna do with that intensity of your being?

Well, I think you're- - [Steve] Exactly.

And there's a part of me that thinks like, the only tool she has really is passive aggressive behavior.

And a lot of what she writes about is exactly that.

Well, I'd have to think more about that.

Tell me what passive aggressive means to you.

- [Steve] Well, the business about keeping it all inside, my grandmother was a perfect Victorian lady.

She kept everything inside because you didn't have agency to express what you really felt or to exercise your will because that was for the men to do.

And that kind of stuff to me is... And so the ways they dealt with as well, I'll just keep it to myself, but then quietly behind the scenes, they'd do what they want to do kind of a thing.

And so in a passive aggressive way, they could make things happen.

But that was part of the Victorian mix of how things worked.

- Right, so part of the survival strategy would be the... And I think that's certainly true in certain instances.

The more confidence she gets, and her confidence really in a way comes with this love with Rochester.

And Rochester's willingness to recognize.

When she are paintings to Rochester, at one point he says to her, who taught you to paint the wind?

- [Steve] Yes.

When she was younger was more the passive aggressive stuff.

- Well, except the fact that there were certain times when she was aggressive, aggressive.

(laughing) This is what got her kicked out of Gateshead, is when she refused to be passive aggressive.

So I would say that certainly Jane learned some survival strategies that one had to learn, including probably being submissive for people that were beneath you.

Inferiors, in fact you can see with the people around Rochester, the wealthy people that he brings into Thornfield they treat her dismissively, and she feels herself superior to them, but she doesn't act it out.

So in a way, I would agree with you that there is a passivity in her judgment of their mediocrity.

This is some way she's a Sage in the insults to her being is she's saying, well, yeah, but you're so limited.

You have no idea that Mr. Rochester and I have this separate way of reading each other, that goes so beyond what you can do with Mr. Rochester.

So I would've certainly agree with that.

But would also say that at some point she had to resist those strategies, if she was ever going to achieve the union she achieved in Ferndean.

In other words, if she would've reconciled herself to this passive aggressive subterranean self-medicating mindset, then we wouldn't have seen the Ferndean that we see in which none of that needs to be in play at all.

So, I would say that she did have to learn survival strategies, but then she also had to resist the temptation to let those strategies be sufficient.

This would be part of resisting all the way.

- And it was her art that gave her the avenue to do that.

- Absolutely, because the art was enabling her to bring out those different parts of her character in a unified form that was itself more that it was her plus her imagination.

It was all of her manifest.

If you we're gonna say that her mind bloomed, it blew through her art.

And what we saw there then was not just her interior self, but her interior self that is it was combining elements including things that were not herself.

At the end, she combines Rochester into herself and Rochester combines her into his self.

So in a way they're achieving a kind of... Well, you can call it a consummation.

Speaking of fire, but also of intercourse and also of intellectual intercourse.

They consummate what is within them by finding a farm that is generative.

But in order to arrive at that, it requires dialogue and communication.

So the communion that you see at the end of the novel between Jane and Rochester, is most symbolized by their capacity to communicate with each other.

And for it, we talked all day, she says, and it was always delightful for us to be in each other's company.

In other the words their communication was achieving something larger than each of their individual entities.

And that involved the ability to combine.

I wanna say that in this novel the highest virtue, spiritually and otherwise, is a person's ability to wed.

In this novel, if you can marry, not just marry another person, but marry things that are in you that may not be obviously asynthesizable.

If you can marry the different parts of your world into a fertile union.

So Ms. Temple at Lowood, who is the one real you could say, Christian, who is getting her light just right because she's used in her virtues without calling attention to herself like Mr Brocklehurst.

And without burning up in inside, she's responsible for those girls and needs to keep them alive.

And she's figuring out clever ways of subverting the system to keep these girls alive.

And at a certain point, what do we learn about Ms. Temple?

Is that she marries.

And then the fact that Sinjin Rivers, at the end of his life, doesn't marry, is a profound critique of his Christianity.

And it is done in such a subtle way.

The last two paragraphs seem like they could not be any higher praise for Sinjin Rivers.

Having decided to leave England to achieve the higher crown of glory.

But what did she say about him?

He never married.

And deep down she suggests very clearly that the path that he pursued was one that his own will carved out.

He wasn't in communion with spirits.

He wasn't having to wed. His own desires was something.

His desire was to dominate through his ideology.

And other people they were gonna have to be saved by him just as...

In fact, he suggested to Jane that if she didn't agree to what he was proposing, that she was offending God and would burn hell.

Jane Eyre was seeing that use of this ideology as a way that would lead to her being sacrificed in the name of something higher.

When what she was looking for was something that involved here and now in a kind of fruition.

- [Julie] So that's really interesting because that was gonna be my question for you Michael.

Was at the end of the book, the first thing I wrote was why did we end with Sinjin Rivers?

But that makes sense if the idea was the wedded piece.

- Yes.

- [Julie] That really makes sense.

- Consider for just a second, Charlotte Bronte was deeply influenced by the romantic poets.

So words were a barren.

She felt that sir Walter Scott, she associated him with romantic.

She was deeply in love, she loved.

But she was also a...

Her father was a pastor from Cambridge.

She ended up marrying a curate or a pastor.

She marries a pastor, but she herself loved the Bible.

When she went to Brussels to study under Constantine Hagar, he said about her, that she was nourished on the Bible.

He had never met anyone that knew the Bible the way Charlotte Bronte knew the Bible.

And so what she has been faced with is a very interesting dilemma because she loves the romantic movement.

And in the romantic movement, one's own imagination is almost supplanted the place of an external creator.

You see in the romantic movement, the imagination becomes something like a divinity.

But in Orthodox Christianity, that of course would be a kind of promythia it would be diabolical to put yourself as the source of your own creation.

So here was this Titanic mind.

An imagination in love with traditions that seem to here we go, the marriage of opposites, who seemed to love two traditions that were incompatible ultimately, and yet she wedded them.

I'm gonna suggest that Jane Eyre, look at this.

It is the Byronic Rochester and the miltonic Sinjin Rivers.

Here is the romantic Byronic hero and here is the hero Milton.

The Christian great heart, both of whom tried to wed her and she resist both of them initially.

This is a great example of her finding a union of opposite that was not readily available to her, or at least was not being offered to her by the people around her.

So, one thing you could say that Charlotte Bronte accomplished, was she gave a depiction of well, Christianity would look like if it didn't look like Sinjin River's Christianity.

As he says about revelations, he's interested in a new heaven and earth.

And what he means by that is the heaven that you reach after he dies.

Jane also has a vision of a new heaven and earth.

But it's here and now in Ferndean, not there and then after my body is dead.

It involves the fulfillment of my body.

This is a powerful, and she does it in such a subtle way.

As you mentioned Julie, that the last two paragraphs seems like she's praising Sinjin Rivers, but if you read those very carefully, it is a lacerating criticism.

Without ever saying so, and interestingly enough, when this novel initially was published, there was from many sectors they've applauded as powerful.

Interestingly, one critic said, if a man wrote it, it's brilliant.

If a woman wrote it, it's a work of the devil.

So that was really interesting comment.

But the Christian remembrance that was a quarterly and another very popular quarterly on the conservative Christian side, condemn this book as being anti-Christian.

Because they could sense that there's a power in this that doesn't seem like it's subordinating itself to our ideology.

And that's precise if you read second preface that Charlotte... And she's responding to this rejection in some Christian quarters of her work as not being Christian.

When she accepts of course, is imagining that she's created something that is full of Christ, it's just not in the way that Sinjin Rivers was proposing.

It was a Christianity that included the natural world.

That included this earth.

If you read that second preface, I've never... You can't find too many people who in a public forum will speak up for themselves to the critics.

She wasn't apologizing.

She was essentially saying, that no wonder you think this is anti-Christian because prophets from time immemorial have been rejected by people who called themselves religious.

And this is just enough other example.

So anyway, I appreciate you bringing in the social and political context, 'cause there is something going on intellectual here that involves a new version of what Christianity might look like.

And I would propose one that's very viable right now.

- [Steve] I also really appreciate that perspective because what we did to kill a Mockingbird, we talked about how if you had experience living in the south in certain society, you had a different way of reading that book maybe than somebody who didn't.

And I think that the same thing is true with this book that we're far enough away in time and maybe distance from Victorian England.

That there might be ways that this language is used in this book, that it might have lit critics up at that time that we might just gloss right over because we don't connect with the power of those words in the same way that somebody who was Victorian England might.

- Absolutely, as the one critic said, if a man wrote it it's changes, if a woman is diabolical.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- [Julie] And, that's kind of an interesting way to wrap things up here in our last few minutes.

Why is this story still in the top hundred best books?

When there are lists, this one always makes it in.

Why do you think that is Michael?

- Well, people can love this book for lots of different reasons.

So I'll just throw out some that seem to resonate with me.

If you just read the prose is poetry.

It is poetic concentrated prose that the master of the English language.

The vocabulary that she has, the intensity with which she describes things that are very difficult to describe.

She likes people who can read another person's character and then articulate it, her ability to articulate things that typically are beyond language is remarkable.

So just the experience of the concentrated poetry of the prose.

But if you could imagine of the ultimate fantasy of experiencing a union in your life in which you are fulfilled in every possible way with another being without sacrificing one modicum of what makes you unique so that you could have the best of both worlds, your entire unique idiosyncratic self, and also complete intimacy.

Is there any greater dream of the human heart than that?

So the fact that she has been able to give an image of what that would look like, I would think would make it awfully impelling for time immemorial.

- [Steve] I also sort of see this as like a feminine version of a Horatio Alger thing.

- Well, wonderful.

I would just swap for Horatio Alger, Banyan's "Pilgrim's Progress."

- [Steve] Yeah, she's using the tools that are available to harass a woman to achieve success.

And it's very much that same kind of a thing which sort of fits with the Victorian.

- Absolutely, she has taken those different tropes in those genre from Victorian, to the the Christian quest, to the romance, the Gothic terror.

She's taken those genres and fantasy.

And she's wedding those into something that had adhered before never been seen.

I wanna stress that.

That she did just, as you said, and it's a wonderful way to put it.

She took these desperate different literary traditions, and she transmuted them into something that did not have precedence.

- [Steve] And it seems to me that almost every woman I've ever known loves this book.

And I feel like are there pieces of this story that resonate with women today, dealing with condescending men.

This kind of stuff.

Are there pieces of that that still resonate with women today in ways that maybe as a man I don't connect with as well.

- I'm sure that must be the case.

Excellent, Julie, thank you.

Steve, Kevin, Talya everybody.

Courtney, thank you so much.

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