Методическое пособие по литературному чтению для 2го курса филологического факультета, отделение германской филологии
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DiscussionWhat is the story connected with Samson and Delilah? Who was Nebuchadnessar? Why did the biblical Saul invite David to keep him company? Why does Mr. Rochester compare Apollo and Vulcan? “The valley of the shadow of death” is a quotation from Pilgrim’s Progress, formerly a very popular religious book, written by John Bunyan (1628-1688). Try to find some more material about this writer whose impassioned preaching drew crowds of hundreds, but who was never very popular with the powers-that-be, being imprisoned several times during his lifetime. Ch. Bronte often uses the words thee, thine, thy, thou. What do you know about these words and what would you use today instead of them? When Jane learned Mr. Rochester’s story, she thought him a sinner. After the accident Mr. Rochester sees himself as a sinner. Do you see Mr. Rochester as a sinner? Do you consider the punishment brought upon Mr. Rochester as just repayment for the sins he had committed? Isn’t God a bit too cruel? Do you view the dialogue between Jane and Mr. Rochester (especially) as a bit too pompous, unnatural, high-flown and theatrical? Chapter 38 Answer the following questions to the chapter: What does Jane do right after she gets married to Mr. Rochester? Did Mary and John expect Mr. Rochester to marry Jane? To whom did Jane write to tell about her marriage to Mr. Rochester? How did Mary and Diana react? When did St. John answer Jane’s letter informing him of her marriage to Mr. Rochester? What happens to Adele? Does Jane like the school where Mr. Rochester has placed Adele? What is Jane’s married life like? Does Mr. Rochester stay blind? What is the fate of Mary and Diana? Did St. John marry anybody and what is his fate? Having become a missionary and having worked hard to spread the Christian faith, what reward was St. John expecting in the next world? Translate the following words and expressions into Russian: A shrill ejaculation, to stare at smb, a more indulgent system, he wrote to me without alluding to my marriage, a brief glance at, to be supremely blest, at length, his mind will be unclouded, to draw tears from one's eyes, to derive pleasure from. Give English equivalents to the following words and expressions: Ошеломить, экономка, жарить на открытом огне, одобрить шаг, пережить что-либо (трагедию), я побеспокоилась о том, чтобы, одно слово относительно…, без позора и унижения, потворствовать чьим-то желаниям, блестящее украшение. What do you think of the ending? What would you change in it? Discussion1. There are four male characters in the novel: John Reed, Mr. Brocklehurst, Mr. Rochester and St. John. Characterize each one of them: What are the main traits of each? What layer of society do they belong to? What function does each one of them play in the novel? What has the author tried to show with the help of each? Do you agree that each one of them is bad in his own way? Mr. Rochester and St. John are not really scoundrels, but is everything they do good? What makes it possible for us to say that Mr. Rochester is not really very good person? St. John is a holy man, isn’t he? What factors lead us to think that he is only an ordinary human being? Read the critical material given below and state your case. 2.The author mentions creed and caste in India. What do you know of castes in India? 3. Apollyon and Greatheart are characters from “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Did you like the book? State your case and say why you did or did not. SupplementaryA FEW WORDS ON CHARLOTTE BRONTE’S STYLE Charlotte Bronte’s style strikes one as extremely unequal: now simple and transparent, now violently pathetic. A shrewd observer, she had the power to present things in a clear, realistic manner, not infrequently satirical; but sometimes her taste fails her, and then, in her more abstract passages, she runs into long paragraphs rich in metaphor and complicated allegory, with the result that what should sound as poetry of the highest order falls into verbiage and melodrama. Her satire is chiefly directed against all forms of hypocrisy, and at hypocrisy she strikes with a sure hand. Take Mr. Brocklehurst when he upbraids Jane for not liking the Psalms: “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 ginger-bread nut to eat, or a verse from a Psalm to learn, he says: “Oh! The verse of a Psalm! Angels sing Psalms,” he says, “I wish to be a little angel here below.” Then he gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety.” Recall the same Mr. Brocklehurst preaching to the starved girls in Lowood on the impropriety of eating bread and cheese instead of burnt porridge, or of wearing curls even if their hair curled naturally, while his own wife and daughters, when they visited the charity school, “were splendidly attired in velvet, silk, and furs.” The satirical vein is present in Charlotte Bronte’s style when she deals with Blanche Ingram – that standard heroine of the early Victorian novel – and with St. John in whom, notwithstanding her professed respect for him, she perceives a cold, ambitious and calculating nature. Some of the best pages in Jane Eyre are the author’s vivid descriptions of scenery and people. The Lowood house and the country around it, the orchard at Thornfield, Whitcross on the day of Jane’s flight from Rochester, - the author not only brings these before our mind’s eye, but makes us feel the atmosphere of each place as keenly as she must have felt it herself. Again, when dealing with her characters she creates truly unforgettable portraits such as the hard-hearted and masterful Mrs. Reed enslaved by her good-for-nothing children; the kind and intelligent superintendent of Lowood school, helpless under the crushing Brocklehurst system, in short, a whole gallery of people, the most interesting among whom is undoubtedly the heroine herself, a young girl without riches or beauty (never before had such a heroine been introduced into English literature), but endowed with a strength of character and a wealth of feeling that make her final victory natural and logical. To emphasize her meaning Charlotte Bronte often has to resort to metaphor, but is immoderate in her use of it. Thus, not content with saying of her heroine, “Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent expectant woman – almost a bride – was a cold solitary girl again,” she goes on to express the same idea in seven more ways: “A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over Jane, ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and corn-field lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, today were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods which twelve hours since waved leafy and fragrant as groves between the tropics, now spread waste, wild and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway. Rochester uses long, complex metaphors, such as no person would use in actual speech. This is the way he addresses Jane in Chapter XV: “You think all existence lapses in as quiet a flow as that in which your youth has hitherto slid away. Floating on with closed eyes and muffled ears, you see neither the rocks bristling not far off in the bed of the flood, nor breakers boil at their base. But I tell you… you will come some day to a craggy pass of the channel, where the whole of life’s stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult, foam and noise: either you will be dashed to atoms on crag points, or lifted up and borne on by some master wave into a calmer current.” Charlotte Bronte likes to personify abstract notions, a literary device that goes back to old allegorical tales and poems. Thus, she writes: “Arraigned at my own Bar, Memory having given her evidence of the hopes, wishes, sentiments I had been cherishing since last night… Reason having come forward and told, in her own quiet way, a plain, unvarnished tale… I pronounced judgment to this effect.” Emphatic inversion is not infrequently introduced by the author to make her story sound more emotional (“To England, then, I conveyed her; a fearful voyage I had with such a monster… Glad was I when at last I got her to Thornfield”), or to make it move more quickly (“Up the blood rushed to his face; forth flashed the fire from his eyes; erect he sprang.”) Charlotte Bronte often uses parallel constructions that give a regular rhythm to her prose (e.g. “to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength”, “to be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company”). She is also fond of the elliptical form of the subordinate clause: “When a child (= when I was a child); “this achieved” (= after this had been achieved); “tea over and the tray removed” (= when tea was over and the tray had been removed), etc. Turning to Charlotte Bronte’s vocabulary we observe that she uses a number of words and phrases which are not used now, and were even almost obsolete in her days, such as the old negative form “answered not”, “know not” instead of the modern “did not answer”, “do not know”; the words “hither, thither and whither” where we now use “here, there and where”; “ere long”, standing for the modern “before long.” Many of the words she uses belong to poetical language. Thus, she says “to plain” when she means “to complain”; “bourne” and “ire” where “place” and “anger” might be used. Still more often she chooses out of several possible synonyms the most bookish, neglecting the simpler, everyday words, for instance: “repast” is used for “meal”; “lineaments” for “features”; “extremities” for “hands and feet”; “to peruse” for “to read”; “chastisement” for “punishment”: “moiety” for “half”; “to habituate oneself” for “to get used to”, etc. And yet, while admitting that Charlotte Bronte’s vocabulary occasionally errs on the side of bookishness, one nevertheless has the feeling that this quaintness of expression lends to her writings a charm all of its own. In conclusion, it should be noted that Jane Eyre abounds in quotations and literary allusions, the choice of which is clearly influenced by the author’s wide reading. Besides a number of lines from minor and long-forgotten poets, Charlotte Bronte quotes Shakespeare, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Milton’s Paradise Lost, a lyric by Robert Burns. We can see that she was well versed in Roman and Greek mythology. But the greatest number of her quotations and allusions may be traced to the Bible, which is not to be wondered at if we remember that most of Charlotte Bronte’s life was spent in a parsonage, that at Cowan Bridge school Bible-reading held first place in the course of education, and church was attended twice every Sunday. She was thus, from her girlhood, familiar with the stories and characters of the Bible, and in her books there is hardly a person who does not quote whole passages from it, or at least allude to it more or less often. These things, however, should not prevent us from appreciating the strength and color of Bronte’s style, her realistic grasp of life, the truth of her feeling, and the social value of the best pages of Jane Eyre. CHARLOTTE BRONTE With the exception only of Dickens, the Brontes have proved to be the most widely popular of English novelists. One reason for this is doubtless the story of their lives with its circumstances of loneliness and tragedy. It haunts the memory of all who encounter it like a powerful romantic novel, but a novel which, if written, would certainly appear too romantic, charged with too great an intensity to be convincing; four geniuses and four tragic deaths in one novel are three too many of each. The Brontes, then, have become the objects of a cult; it is natural enough that it should be so, though it makes more difficult the estimation of Charlotte’s worth as a novelist. We know a great deal about the self-contained, self-absorbed early family life of the Brontes in the isolation of the rectory at Haworth; we know how they grew up in the private worlds of daydream, the ideal universes of the Great Glass Town of Angria, which was originally the common property of the four of them, but later shared by Charlotte and Branwell only, and the Gondal of Emily and Anne. The booklets, which contain them, of which a hundred survive, amounting in length to the total published output of the three sisters, have enormous value for the light they throw on the psychology of literary creation; yet the novels themselves are as revelatory. They are the products of immense solitude, of the imagination turned inwards upon itself, and of ignorance of the world outside Haworth and literature. Jane Eyre is absurd in its own way. Yet to describe it simply as a wish-fulfillment dream is to fail to take into account the caliber of the dreamer. Dream it may be, but the dream of a tremendously real person. Of Jane Eyre’s reality there is never the slightest question; she is there from beginning to end, a young woman not of passion alone, but of genuine intellectual quality too. She is not a particularly attractive heroine; she is much too conscious of her moral and mental superiority; she has wit but neither humor nor self-criticism, and her creator is as unaware of her deficiencies as she is herself. This is merely to say that Jane Eyre is a highly subjective novel. Indeed, Charlotte Bronte’s resemblance to Byron is quite striking; one might even say that she is the female answer to Byron; and it is in this sense that Jane Eyre is the first romantic novel in English. Everything in the novel is staked upon the validity of the author’s sensibility; Charlotte Bronte is concerned with truth to her own feelings; the value of the feelings she never questions, it is taken for granted because they are her own. It is in this intense, intransigent subjectivity that the tremendous power of Jane Eyre, together with its unity, resides. As a novel it derives at least as much from literature as from life, and perhaps Charlotte Bronte drew no very clear distinction between the two. In the whole conception and rendering of the incarceration of the mad Mrs. Rochester in the attic at Thornfield are recapitulated, more vividly than they had ever been before, the horrors of the Gothic novel of Mrs. Radcliffe. If it were not for the unity of tone, Jane Eyre would be incoherent, for as a construction it is artless. Yet because of the unity of tone, the melodramatic incredibilities scarcely matter; they are false to observed reality but not false to Charlotte Bronte’s shaping dream; they represent, indeed, the triumph of the dream over reality. And the unity of tone is established on the first page of the novel, when we meet Jane Eyre as a small girl at the Reeds’, the terrifyingly lonely child in the alien atmosphere, already a rebel, defying the world about her on the strength of her own feelings of right and wrong and of her innate consciousness of superiority. This first part of Jane Eyre is one of the finest and most moving renderings of lonely and proud childhood we have – a high peak in English fiction; however improbable of the situations in which Jane finds herself later, it is the same Jane who is among them, dominating them; and since we are inside her mind we accept the improbabilities as subjective distortions of reality. Mr. Rochester is a monster; the dialogues between him and Jane are absurd, but they are absurd only on his side, because he is a figment of Charlotte Bronte’s imagination, a dream-figure, whereas the author herself, or her projection of herself in Jane, is wholly real. Rochester is not so much a man as a most powerful symbol of virility. If, as has been said, he is a schoolgirl’s dream of a man, then one can only retort that the schoolgirl who dreamed him may not have been very pleasant but was certainly very remarkable. The distinctive atmosphere that pervades the lives of Charlotte Bronte’s heroines is loneliness, a loneliness almost intolerable; they are marooned in themselves by circumstances and also by their very sensibility and intelligence, and they are forced to eat their souls out in waiting and inaction. They are in revolt against their circumstances, and they are in revolt as women. This is the most obvious difference between Charlotte Bronte and the women novelists who preceded her; the latter had accepted without question their place as women in a man-made world; they had fitted in. Charlotte Bronte’s characters do not. In Jane Eyre the self-regard is perhaps fundamentally a sexual self-regard, though the revolt is one of the whole woman. Charlotte Bronte is to be judged as romantic writers, whether poets or novelists, always must be, by the intensity with which she expresses her response to life and experience. Her response is total and uninhibited. Her appearance represents something new in English fiction; with her, passion enters the novel. Before her, the treatment of sexual love had been of two kinds: as a scarcely tempestuous affection between man and wife on the one hand and as a healthy animal sensuality, such as we find in Tom Jones, a Foundling, on the other. But passion, as the romantic poets have expressed it, is something transcending sensuality because a blending of the spiritual with the physical, was unknown. |