A Dialogue of Self and Soul - 11424 Words

TBC02 8/7/2002 04:01 PM Page 46 CHAPTER TWO A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane’s Progress a SANDRA M. GILBERT AND SUSAN GUBAR The authors of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination (1979) are both distinguished feminist critics: Sandra Gilbert is a Professor at the University of California, Davis; and Susan D. Gubar a Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Indiana University. They have also collaborated on No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Sex Changes and Letters from the Front with the aim of using feminist criticism to understand the achievements of British and American women in modern times. More recently†¦show more content†¦. . to go all lengths’ (ch. 1). But if Jane was ‘out of’ herself in her struggle against John Reed, her experience in the red-room, probably the most metaphorically vibrant of all her early experiences, forces her deeply into herself. For the red-room, stately, chilly, swathed in rich crimson, with a great white bed and an easy chair ‘like a pale throne’ looming out of the scarlet darkness, perfectly represents her vision of the society in which she is trapped, an uneasy and elï ¬ n dependent. ‘No jail was ever more secure,’ she tells us. And no jail, we soon learn, was ever more terrifying either, because this is the room where Mr Reed, the only ‘father’ Jane has ever had, ‘breathed his last.’ It is, in other words, a kind of patriarchal death chamber, and here 47 TBC02 8/7/2002 04:01 PM Page 48 THE BRONTËS Mrs Reed still keeps ‘divers parchments, her jewel-casket, and a miniature of her dead husband’ in a secret drawer in the wardrobe (ch. 2). Is the room haunted, the child wonders. At least, the narrator implies, it is realistically if not gothically haunting, more so than any chamber in, say, The Mysteries of Udolpho, which established a standard for such apartments. For the spirit of society in which Jane has no clear place sharpens the angles of the furniture, enlarges the shadows, strengthens the locks on the door. And the deathbed of a father who was not really her father emphasizes her isolation and vulnerability. Panicky, she staresShow MoreRelatedThe Ilusory Dialogue In Platos Gorgias1123 Words   |  5 Pagesillusory dialogue that is inaugurated upon Socrates’ analysis of nature and the power Gorgias states are presented in his art, oratory. 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