Rochester is a mimic of the occident despite being a member of the society. He is ‘almost the same’ but patriarchal structures meant that the younger son would not gain as much as the first born, and so he is victimized by his difference, just as Antoinette is. Sylvie Maurel believes that by ‘marrying Antoinette, Rochester is by no means creating his own story. As a penniless younger son, he is pressurized by his family into an arranged marriage with a presumably wealthy creole.’ Unlike Annette’s second husband, Mr. Mason, Rochester does not travel to Jamaica in order to ‘make money [off old estates] as they all do’ (p. 13), he does so to please his father. This is shown when he muses about writing a letter to his father,
Dear father, the thirty thousand pounds have been paid to me without
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[…] I will never be a disgrace to you or to my dear brother the son you love. No begging letters, no mean requests. None of the furtive shabby manoeuvres of a younger son. I have sold my soul or you have sold it’. (p. 42)
He only wants the money in order to not ‘disgrace’ his father or brother, and believes he has ‘sold [his] soul’ to please them. Here he is similar to Antoinette as despite being orphans by the end of the novel, both are affected by the everlasting influence of the older generation. They are forced to mimic the white colonial marriage. But Rochester is aware that he ‘played the part [he] was expected to play’, and questions how no one noticed that ‘every movement [he] made was an effort of will’ (p. 46). He is pleading for someone to discover his mimicry, but is trapped by it. Although Rochester visibly does not approve the treatment of the younger son in the patriarchal and imperialist regime, and is ‘almost the same, but not quite’, he also does not use his difference to undermine the authority. Bhabha was analysing the mimicry of colonised subjects, but Rochester’s mimicry provides questions as to whether the
Demos looks into the different family style of the Mohawk tribe. The Mohawk tradition holds the woman in charge while the Puritans maintain a patriarchal society like in Britain. He looks at Eunice trip to Canada on top of the shoulders of her eventual uncle, Hatironta. Eunice looks back to see her “falling back, gasping, calling out for rest.” The view on top of a strong man showed her the weakness of her father and upon hearing of his remarriage she described him as “faithless, forgetful father: protector who could not protect, comforter who would not comfort, caretaker who did not care.”2 Why such a change in heart from the seven year old girl? Was it the death of her mother? Demos did not go into it, but her father did not protect. Did her father's inability to take care of her on the march after the raid? John Williams's strength failed him and he could not “walk for the two of them”3 Eunice found comfort and care in the Indian who picked her up. Or did the change occur during the raid? Eunice awakes in the darkness to shouts in a different language and flames blazing outside her window, and she gets taken down the stairs by strangely dressed men. Her father failed to protect her or comfort her. Another possibility Demos does not investigate the possibility of any occurrence before the raid which created the rift between Eunice and the civilized world. Demos claims “the training, the discipline would surely have been firm-- and carefully channeled. Eunice did not enjoy, nor want to learn her catechism and she found peace when she arrived with the Mohawk
Within Rhys’s novel, he incorporates the normality of the West Indies during the nineteenth and mid- twentieth centuries. Antoinette, the main character, who happens to be a white Creole, is mistreated and discriminated because of her identity. Throughout the text, characters are victimized by prejudices. For example, Antoinette and Annette become victims of traumatic experience as they face numerous kinds of mistreatment. Antoinette had to deal with an arranged marriage, which results her becoming distressed. Throughout this marriage, she was treated irrationally by her husband, Rochester and servants. She was unable to relate to Rochester because their upbringings were incompatible. She had to stomach the trauma of being shunned because of her appearance and identity. She was called names, mainly “white cockroach”, and was treated as an
We learn that Jane is a young girl who is a victim of emotional and
her is inferior to Rochester and others of high class. She is forced into this social
Jane Eyre is a book about mind over heart. But this is not the case with Mr. Edward Rochester of Thornfield. He is a character with many flaws. One of them is that Mr. Rochester is something of a secretive person. Mr. Rochester’s motives for lying are in order to keep his secrets hidden from people he is close to. He lies to Jane twice in this story (that are important to the overall plot/storyline). Once is when he wants to make her jealous by saying he’ll marry Blanche Ingram, and then the second time is about having a wife, Bertha Mason, when he’s planning to marry Jane. Mr. Rochester’s lies are essential to the story line of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, but his motives for lying are purely for selfish, secretive reasons.
John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester was one of the most infamous rakes from the Restoration period. While Wilmot’s debauched lifestyle was well recorded, his deathbed conversion became even more popular. Through these early biographies and the poetry written by Wilmot, Charlotte Bronte became familiar with this historical figure. Bronte modeled her character of Edward Rochester on Wilmot. There are many instances in the novel Jane Eyre that link the two figures. In his essay "John Wilmot and Mr. Rochester" Murray Pittock establishes the link between Rochester and Wilmot. Pittock does such a thorough job of supporting the claim that Rochester and Wilmot are related. However Pittock fails to explain why Charlotte Bronte chose to compare her Rochester to the historical Rochester. The key to understanding Bronte’s motivation in selecting John Wilmot as the model for Rochester lies in Wilmot’s deathbed confessional. By the end of his short life Wilmot repented his immoral lifestyle. After his death, Wilmot became the focus of a number of religious tracts publishing his deathbed conversion. It is this aspect of Wilmot’s career as the rake that intrigued Bronte. In Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte not only establishes a connection between John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, but she also links Rochester’s reform to the reform of Wilmot. However, unlike Wilmot’s reform which occurs on his deathbed, Bronte allows her character to reform and continue his life.
The inability to have control and excessive control in the novel ultimately leads to the downfall of Antoinette and Rochester’s marriage which is seen as inevitable. The theme is presented in the novel culturally, socially and mentally. Rhys’s purpose in reacting to these topics is to identify the contextual issues within the novel, such as the struggle for control and power surrounding women’s role in society and traditional conventions within marriage.
Already full of self-criticism and self-loathing (Grigg 140), Antoinette begins feeling an “unconscious sense of guilt,” the result of an identification with someone to whom the person has been erotically attached; and it is “often the sole remaining trace of the abandoned love –relation” (Grigg 141). While Rochester is determined not to love her, he cannot help but feel responsible for her, after all part of the exile, and therefore her undoing is attributed to him. Unable to walk away from the marriage, he sets out to make the best of it the only way he knows how, by locking her away, exiling her
Bronte, we meet Jane Eyre, who finds her true love to be someone she is not
Despite Rochester’s stern manner and unhandsome appearance, Jane still finds herself falling in love with him. During her first encounter with Rochester Jane describes him
Blanche Ingram is a woman without scruples or morality - haughty and proud - very beautiful and priveleged - she is nevertheless shallow and intellectually inferior. She is a warning shadow to JE, who is soon to be faced with the temptation to give in to her passions and embrace the shallow life of a courtesan, when Rochester pleads with her to go to the continent with him after the "wedding". The more virtuous minor characters serve the same function, standing as moral or spiritual beacons to which Jane may aspire, but may not ever reach.
Edward “Fairfax” Rochester is set to be portrayed as an innocent individual. An innocent individual, who doesn’t initially feel contempt with his life or even free. Although he is a character who is wealthy, he has been described as having strong features that haven’t necessarily accredited him to being the most handsome soul. Furthermore, his own family, the Rochester, have been a prominent factor in his horrific life. Because of the late Mr. Rochester, the father of Edward wrote his will in favor of Edward’s brother, he wanted to make sure that both of his sons are protected. Nonetheless, Edward young and “blind” was allegedly forced to marry a Creole woman, who had a family background of mental illness. To his dismay, his wife, Bertha Mason,
Rhys divides the speaking voice between Rochester and Antoinette, thus avoiding the suppression of alternative voices which she recognises in Bronte's text. Rochester, who is never named in the novel, is not portrayed as an evil tyrant, but as a proud and bigoted younger brother betrayed by his family into a loveless marriage. His double standards with regards to the former slaves and Antoinette's family involvement with them are exposed when he chooses to sleep with the maid, Amelie, thus displaying the promiscuous behaviour and attraction to the ...
How does Bront portray Jane as an unconventional female character in the novel Jane Eyre? Jane Eyre was published in 1847, during the reign of Queen Victoria. The novel was written by Charlotte Bront, but published under the pseudonym Currer Bell. Pseudonyms were used frequently by women at this point in time, as they were believed to be inferior to men. The The work of female authors was not as well respected as those of male writers.
The Rochester figure notices how the life has started to go out of her. He even compares her to a corpse after their one night tryst, getting up and covering her “as if [he] covered a dead girl” (Rhys 83). At the very end, of the section he “watche[s] the hate go out of her eyes. […] And with the hate her beauty” (Rhys 102). He even says that he forces it out of her.