Final Essay Plan

Question
Write an essay about the categorisation of women into archetypes in literature and the effect
this has upon them and their characters.

Core texts
● Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
○ The hysterical woman - wandering womb, etc
● Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
○ Contrasts between Mrs DeWinter (never named) and Rebecca- similar
relationship to Jane, Mr Rochester and Bertha (but both end happily? Due to the
time period written in?)

Ways of reading
● Feminist studies
● Side of disability studies
○ Also prevalent the idea of the incessant need to categorise into boxes- ‘good’
bodies, ‘bad’ bodies, ‘good’ body parts, ‘bad’ body parts

Argument
● Throughout history, men have consistently categorised women into archetypes in order
to understand what they perceive the ‘feminine mystique’ to be, which invariably leads
them to misunderstanding women as no woman fits into one fixed box.
○ This tradition has persisted throughout literature and is often used as a
mechanism to compare female characters against each other and show one as a
good character by contrasting her to a ‘bad’ woman
● As this is so intrinsic in literary culture, it has also become a part of the mindset of
female authors, however they attempt to break out of these constraints and write their
female characters with more depth and complexity
○ The contrast of ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ characters is also a key idea within disability
studies, as shown in Jane Eyre as the women who is clearly mentally ill and now
also physically deformed is shown by Mr Rochester to be the demonic
counterpart to Jane’s ‘angelic’, conventionally attractive, demure and subservient
character.
■ However, after a closer read, these two characters are more similar than
they originally seen, and Bertha could be argued to represent Jane’s
repressed anger and hidden desires that she cannot express due to
social restraints

Introduction
● Contextualise the masculine urge to categories women into archetypes/fixed boxes and
this restrains them/robs them of any agency, freedom, or personality
 ○ Shakespeare’s Madonna-Whore dichotomy
○ Homer’s categorisation of women (Penelope v Calypso v Circe, Hera v Aphrodite
v Athena)

Quotes from the Jane Eyre

1. "Jane: you please me, and you master me (because] you seem to submit" - Ch 24
2. ‘"Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?
You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, -and full as much heart! And if God had
gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to
leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the
medium of custom, conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh:-it is my spirit that
addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at
God's feet equal,-as we are!"’ - Ch 23
3. ‘Here, isolated from society but flourishing in a natural order of their own making, Jane
and Rochester will become physically "bone of [each other's] bone, flesh of [each
other's] flesh"
4. ‘In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards.
What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled,
seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was
covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head
and face.’ - Ch 26
5. ‘Mr. Rochester flung me behind him: the lunatic sprang and grappled his throat viciously,
and laid her teeth to his cheek: they struggled.’ - Ch 26
6. ‘And this is what I wished to have” (laying his hand on my shoulder): “this young girl, who
stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a
demon, I wanted her just as a change after that fierce ragout. Wood and Briggs, look at
the difference! Compare these clear eyes with the red balls yonder—this face with that
mask.’ - Ch 26
Quotes from Rebecca
1. “Men are simpler than you imagine my sweet child. But what goes on in the twisted,
tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone.”
2. “Either you go to America with Mrs. Van Hopper or you come home to Manderley with
me." "Do you mean you want a secretary or something?" "No, I'm asking you to marry
me, you little fool.”
3. “Boredom is a pleasing antidote for fear”
4. “I could fight with the living but I could not fight the dead… Rebecca would never grow
old. Rebecca would always be the same. And she and I could not fight. She was too
strong for me.”
5. “We were like two performers in a play, but we were divided, we were not acting with
one another. We had to endure it alone, we had to put up this show, this miserable,
sham performance for the sake of all these people I did not know and did not want to
see again.”
6. “I thought of all those heroines of fiction who looked pretty when they cried, and what a
contrast I must make with a blotched and swollen face, and red rims to my eyes.”
 7. “What degradation lay in being young.”
8. “I was following a phantom in my mind, whose shadowy form had taken shape at last.
Her features were blurred, her colouring indistinct, the setting of her eyes and the texture
of her hair was still uncertain, still to be revealed… She had beauty that endured, and a
smile that was not forgotten. Somewhere her voice still lingered, and the memory of her
words.”
9. ‘She belonged to another breed of women, a different race than I.’
10. ‘She called him Max, and I had to call him Maxim.’
11. “You are so very different from Rebecca.” - p105
12. ‘Tall and dark she was. She gave you the feeling of a snake. I seen her here with me
own eyes. By night she'd come.’ - p154
13. ‘Why don't you go? We none of us want you. He doesn't want you, he never did. He
can't forget her. He wants to be alone in the house again, with her. It's you that ought to
be lying there in the church crypt, not her. It's you who ought to be dead, not Mrs. de
Winter.’ - p246
14. I can't forget what it has done to you. I was looking at you, thinking of nothing else all
through lunch. It's gone forever, that funny, young, lost look that I loved. It won't come
back again. I killed that too, when I told you about Rebecca. It's gone, in twenty-four
hours. You are so much older…’ - p299

Secondary reading
● Simone DeBeauvoir, Myths (from Norton)
● Lennard J Davis, Visualising the Disabled Body (from Norton)
● Madwoman in the Attic, Susan Gilbert
● Look at the lecture notes for both lectures also

Critical quotations
● Culture tends to split bodies into good and bad parts
○ Bad: too short or too tall, too fit or too thin, not masculine or feminine enough, not
enough or too much hair, penis or breasts too small or (excepting the penis) too
big
○ Each individual assigns good and bad labels to body parts- good: hair, face, lips,
eyes, hands; bad: sexual organs, excretory organs, underarms
■ These divisions of whole/incomplete, able/disabled, good/bad cover up
the frightening truth that reminds the hallucinated whole being that its
wholeness is in fact a hallucination, a developmental fiction - all from
Visualising the Disabled Body
● We tend to group impairments into categories either of ‘disabling’ (bad) or just ‘limiting’
(good)
○ E.g. wearing a hearing aid is much more disabling than wearing glasses
■ Loss of hearing is associated with ageing in a way that nearsightedness
is not
 ○ E.g. breast removal is seen as an impairment of femininity and sexuality,
whereas the removal of a foreskin is not seen as a diminution of masculinity
○ The coding of body parts and the importance attached to their selective function
or dysfunction is part of a much larger system of signs and meanings in society,
and is constructed as such
● Disability is seen as part of a system in which value is attributed to body parts
○ The disabling of the body part or function is then part of a removal of value
○ The concept of disabled is an absolute not a gradient- one is either disabled or
not - all from Visualising the Disabled Body
● Medusa is a poignant double
○ She is both beautiful and ugly, desired and repulsed, whole and fragmented
■ She is the disabled woman to Venus’ perfect body
○ The disabled body is always a reminder of the whole body about to come apart at
the seams
■ It provides a vision of and caution about the body as a construct held
together wilfully, always threatening to become its individual parts - all
from Visualising the Disabled Body
● Films enforce the normal body, but through a strange process
● The normal body, invented in the 19th century as a departure from the ideal body, has
shifted over to a new concept: the normal ideal
○ This is the one we see on screen: the eroticised body of the film star that is not
the norm, but the fantasised, hypostatised body of commodified desire
○ In order to generate this body and proliferate its images, films have to constantly
police and regulate the variety of bodily differences
○ To keep these nude Venus bodies viable and obsessed over, the Medusa body
also has to be constantly shown, categorised, and anatomised
○ In art, photography, film and other media in which the body is represented, the
‘normal’ body always exists in a dialectical play with the disabled body
○ We cannot have the fantasy of the erotic femme fatale’s body without having the
sickened, disabled, deformed person’s story testifying to the universal power of
the human spirit to overcome adversity - all from Visualising the Disabled
Body
● If the definition of the ‘Eternal Feminine’ is contradicted by real-life women, it is the
women who are wrong and not feminine, rather than rethinking the definition
● It is true that women are ‘other’ than man, and the relationship is one of difference, but
also of reciprocity- whether felt through eroticism, love, friendship, disappointment,
hatred or rivalry
○ To think of the woman as the ‘other’ is to refuse the idea (despite experiencing
these relationships) that she could be a subject or a peer
● In reality, women manifest themselves in many different ways, but each of the myths
built around women try to summarise her as a whole
○ These myths are incompatible as each woman is unique, and so men are
perplexed before the strange inconsistencies of the idea of Femininity
 ○ Every woman fits into more than one of the archetypes which claim to
encapsulate a whole, isolated truth about women which confuses men- similarly
to how Sophists were confused that a person could be light and dark at the same
time
■ E.g. women who have to use their bodies for money/gain are seen by
some men as sirens, allurers, who ruin lives by seizing fortunes are ‘bad
women’- yet to their families, they can be seen as guardian angels: the
courtesan who swindles rich financiers is a patroness of painters and
writers
■ If a woman is cast as the praying mantis or the demon, men cannot
understand how she can also be seen as the goddess mother and muse -
Beauty Myths
● Ambivalence is an intrinsic property of the divine feminine- every term has its opposite
○ E.g. the saintly mother/the cruel stepmother, the angelic young girl/the perverse
virgin- Mother equals life and sometimes death, and every virgin is a pure spirit
or flesh possessed by the devil - Beauty Myths
● The role assigned to women in patriarchy is a vocation, but no more free than slavery is
a slave’s vocation
○ To identify women with altruism is to guarantee a man’s absolute rights to her
devotion, imposing a category upon her - Beauty Myths
● To say that women is mystery is not to say that she is silent but that her language is not
heard
○ She is there, but hidden beneath veils- who is she? An angel, a demon, an
inspiration, or an actress?
○ A fundamental ambiguity affects the feminine being; in her heart she is
indefinable for herself: a sphinx - Beauty Myths
● Women in literature are never truly mysterious characters- they can only begin at the
beginning of a novel as such, but by the end have given up their secrets and become
consistent and translucent characters
○ Mystery is never more than a mirage- it vanishes as soon as you try to approach
it
● Myths are explained in large part by the use man makes of them
○ Eras and social classes that had the leisure to daydream are the ones who
created the black and white statues of femininity- the poorer classes have basic
relations with their women and do not embellish her with an auspicious or fatal
aura
○ Through myths, society could impose its laws and customs on individuals in an
imagistic and sensible way
■ Everyone can draw on myths to sublimate the most modest experiences-
a man betrayed by the one he loves can call her a slut, the man obsessed
with his own impotence can call her a praying mantis, and the one who
takes pleasure in his wife’s companionship has Harmony, Mother Earth
● The myth replaces lived experiences and the free judgements of experience by a static
idol
 ○ The myth of Woman substitutes an authentic relationship with an autonomous
existence
○ Man would have nothing to lose if he stopped disguising woman as a symbol-
dreams, cliches and worn-out fantasies are so poor and monotonous compared
to living reality
■ The times when women were the most sincerely cherished were the
times when men regarded women as their peers, when women looked
truly romantic- women without mystery are no less engaging for it
■ To recognise a human being in a woman is not to impoverish man’s
experience, or destroy all dramatic relations between the sexes, or
eliminate poetry, love, adventure, happiness and dreams: it is only to ask
that behaviour, feelings, and passion be grounded in truth
● ‘Defining poetry is a mirror held up to nature, the mimetic aesthetic that begins with
Aristotle and descends through Sidney, Shakespeare and Johnson implies that the poet,
like a lesser God, has made or engendered an alternative, mirror-universe in which he
actually seems to enclose or trap shadows of reality.’ - p5
○ ‘In all these aesthetics the poet, like God the Father, is a paternalistic ruler of the
fictive world he has created.’
■ ‘Having defined them in language and thus generated them, he owns
them, controls them, and encloses them on the printed page. ‘ - p12
● ‘Before the woman writer can journey through the looking glass toward literary
autonomy, however, she must come to terms with the images on the surface of the
glass, with, that is, those mythic masks male artists have fastened over her human face
both to lessen their dread of her "inconstancy" and-by identifying her with the "eternal
types" they have themselves invented-to possess her more thoroughly. Specifically, as
we will try to show here, a woman writer must examine, assimilate, and transcend the
extreme images of "angel" and "monster" which male authors have generated for her.’ -
p17
○ ‘Before we women can write, declared Virginia Woolf, we must "kill" the "angel in
the house." In other words, women must kill the aesthetic ideal through which
they themselves have been "killed" into art. And similarly, all women writers must
kill the angel's necessary opposite and double, the "monster" in the house,
whose Medusa-face also kills female creativity.’
○ ‘The images of"angel" and "monster" have been so ubiquitous throughout
literature by men that they have also pervaded women's writing to such an extent
that few women have definitively "killed" either figure. Rather, the female
imagination has perceived itself, as it were, through a glass darkly’
● ‘cause that growth has for so long been radically qualified by the angel- and monster-
imagery the literary woman sees in the looking glass of the male-authored text, some
understanding of such imagery is an essential preliminary to any study of literature by
women.’ - p20
● ‘Female bonding is extraordinarily difficult in patriarchy: women almost inevitably turn
against women because the voice of the looking glass sets them against each other.’ -
p38
● ‘In their attempts at the escape that the female pen offers from the prison of the male
text, women begin, as we shall see, by alternately defining themselves as angel-women
or as monster-women.’ - p44
● ‘Most important, her confrontation, not with Rochester but with Rochester's mad wife
Bertha, is the book's central confrontation, an encounter not with her own sexuality but
with her own imprisoned "hunger, rebellion, and rage," a secret dialogue of self and soul
on whose outcome, as we shall see, the novel's plot, Rochester's fate, and Jane's
coming-of-age all depend.’ - p4
● ‘"My bride is here," he admits, "because my equal is here, and my likeness." The energy
informing both speeches is, significantly, not so much sexual as spiritual… Charlotte
Bronte appears here to have imagined a world in which the prince and Cinderella are
democratically equal, and master and servant are profoundly alike.’ - p19
● ‘Rochester, having secured Jane's love, almost reflexively begins to treat her as an
inferior, a plaything, a virginal rossession-for she has now become his initiate, his
"mustard-seed," his "little sunny-faced ... girl-bride." "It is your time now, little tyrant," he
declares, "but it will be mine presently: and when once I have fairly seized you, to have
and to hold, I'll just-figuratively speaking-attach you to a chain like this"’ - p20
● ‘the spectre of Bertha is still another-indeed the most threatening-avatar of Jane. What
Bertha now does,for instance, is what Jane wants to do… Bertha, in other words, is
Jane's truest and darkest double: she is the angry aspect of the orphan child, the
ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to repress ever since her days at Gateshead.’
- p24
○ When Jane sees Bertha in her wedding dress in her reflection, she thinks it is her
features
● ‘two characters, the one representing the socially acceptable or conventional personality,
the other externalising the free, uninhibited, often criminal self.’ - p25
● ‘Many critics have suggested [Bertha is] a monitory image rather than a double for Jane’
- p26
● Comparisons between Bertha and Jane: the pacing, animalistic tendencies (Jane when
she was younger), their fiendish anger, how Rochester describes them: Bertha’s ‘goblin
appearance’, ‘half dream, half reality’; Jane as a ‘malicious elf’, ‘sprite’, ‘changeling’, as
well as his accusation that Jane bewitched his horse in their first meeting
● ‘we must finally recognize, with Jane herself, that on her arrival at Thornfield she only
"appeared a disciplined and subdued character"’ - p27