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In Bed with Brontë podcast JANE EYRE (SHORT)

In Bed with Brontë podcast JANE EYRE (SHORT)

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 Hello!It’s lovely to see youI’m going to be talking about Jane Eyre todayIf you’ve been listening to my tracks, you will know we are in the last quarter of the book and we’ve been on quite a journey with Jane. We are coming to the point now where she has suffered her worst and she’s coming back from it (we hope). Obviously, it will end happily because that’s what Victorian novels tend to do.We’re going to talk about the Gothic theme to start with, and every week as you know we delve a little bit into the psyche of Jane. Stoicism is the school of thought whereby we say virtue is sufficient for happiness, so maintaining that level of virtue in your life where you’re not necessarily looking for external validation, and not looking to surround yourself with false idols. And the belief that the world is ordered by an external force, but one that can also come from within.If we practise Stoicism, we focus on the world as it is, and think about what we can control rather than what we can’t.And we can see this with Jane – a character who was very resilient and clear about who she was – I can’t change this, she says, but I am clear on what I am willing to accept, and therefore I’m going to leave if this is not what I want it to be. Many times, this was very difficult for her to do.We see this character go through massive transitions within this Gothic theme, this dark backdrop of misery, contempt: the lies the deceit that she faced, the isolation that she had right from the beginning when she was at Gateshead with John Reed bullying her and being sent to the Red Room where she had Supernatural experiences, which in the Victorian era there was a massive mistrust of and fear of.She was a frightened character and isolated character, yet she kept those stoic beliefs and she remained true to who she was. And the strongest message I take from Jane Eyre is that.And I appreciate that, because life is very difficult at times, it can be very dark at times, but it is enough for us to have that core foundation deep within us that is saying, you know what? You’ve still got me. And Jane had Jane throughout her experience, even when she’d left Thornfield Hall, when she was sleeping in a ditch, before she came to Moor House, because she could not make peace with being somebody’s mistress. I have to be true to myself, no matter the cost, she said, which is very virtuous.And because this was written in Victorian times, it went against every assumption people made about women and their place in society. Women are people and they have a core set of values and that should be enough, believed Bronte. Perhaps their path isn’t to be a wife and a mother, and perhaps we should talk about that.This was why the book was ground breaking.One feature of Stoicism is to keep your head when everything around you is going crazy, and of course at Thornfield Hall when everything around her is going crazy, we meet the character Grace Poole, and we see the love of Jane’s life: Mr Rochester, has deceived her with this mysterious, crazy woman who is living somewhere in the house – a juxtaposition between pious and virtuous Jane, and this supernatural energy (the Gothic coming through), which serves to highlight just who Jane is, because if you place the dark against the light, it’s just going to make the light even brighter.The book can be depressing at times, because when you read of isolation and deprivation and hardship, especially for a woman who is on her own in a Victorian Society in a period of time where if you wanted to escape and you had no financial means, you walked.But the saving grace for Jane, is nature. Every building she lived in actually was owned by a man, but when she was submerged in nature, that belonged to her. She could make peace with that she could be safe there. So even if at one point she was sleeping in ditches and when she first meets Mr Rochester walking in the dark to embrace Mother Nature, she has a sense of ownership of who she is. And that’s a valid lesson for us all.So let’s compare that Stoicism with the reward system we have in the Twenty First Century, which is frightening and damaging. The financial reward system is the ‘big play’ the thing everyone is talking about. But in fact you get little internal reward at all from that. And I think what we can do from reading Classic Literature, is understand that even though we may think differently, and feel isolated from that, there were people the way we think before – kindred spirits –souls we can connect with, and I am very comforted by that because if you feel detached from the norm (perhaps this is heightened sensitivity, perhaps you just cannot tap into this aggressive financial push, push, push), maybe open a book and have a look at somebody else’s thoughts on that, and make a new friend!So, to go back to Jane as a character with her own mind, she shows love when she wants to show love, she’s driven by her ...
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