Preface of Jane Eyre

PB : The text will therefore examine in which ways the oscillation between freedom and
prison is made manifest in this extract

Information about this extract :

Preface of Jane Eyre
Bertha childhood
Marriage to rochester
Under the supervision of grace poole
the novel give a voice to the ‘madwoman in the attic’.

Very cold room

Grace poole lights a re
The re crackle and spit
Admiration of the re and the ames
Go to bed but want to discover and watch the ames
Lexical elds of ames
Tension with re
The days les but she stay in thorn eld
Comparution with a serpent and doves (colombes)
Contrast between hell metaphor and paradise

She want to go out = to escape but he doesn’t want

Window = escape = liberty free but she cannot see (like a tentation but a frustration)
Window + door = espace place liberty

A little room no distraction like a punition a prison

Description of a simple room
Mother = but don’t recognition like she was a gosht

Grace = grâce, Bertha considers that the name grace is not adapted to her because she is not a
good person
In thorn eld they don’t want to call Bertha by his real name : Antoinette, like if they dehumanize
her.
She is not important and his name doesn’t matter
The name Antoinette represents the healthy, free, beautiful side and her normal, happy life before
she went mad

No looking glass as if her identity doesn’t matter = she is a ghost she disappears

His past life is dead

Admiring herself, she embraces herself, the beauty of before and of her person.

identity instability, she doesn't even know who she is anymore because of where she is, her
identity disappears

Door locked = impossibility to escape, prison

Who I am ?
A break with the work, with humanity she is alone

Whispering = his life is like a nightmare or a dream, all strange and not real
In the night = she escapes strategy

« Walk into their world » like a stranger, an another person, a thief

She doesn’t know where she is, with how, for when = she is like a child, like an animal abandoned
She is lost

Help me = she is in danger

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she's like drugged to make her obey and behave

I) An urge to escape

II) the contrast between a prosperous dream life and a hellish life without freedom

III) The restriction of liberty for the woman in the nineteenth century

About the condition of bertha, the condition in thorn eld house

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