So, Jane Eyre in lots of ways, borrows from fairytales and folktales, so in some ways,
Jane's story is like a Cinderella story - she's somebody who, she's low and she's despised
and her richer relatives think nothing of her, but by the end of the story, she's married
the handsome prince and he's not quite as handsome as he was at the beginning of the
book. But still, it's got all those elements in it, but at the same time, it's also got
another story which is the Bluebeard story, so Bluebeard is a man who keeps marrying a
procession of virgin brides and killing them and then the last one in the sequence opens
the cupboard door and finds the bodies of the previous wives. And, of course, Jane Eyre
finds a secret hidden away in the house too of the previous wife - while she's not dead,
but she's mad and deeply disturbing and distressing figure in the book. But you see the way that
she draws on those two stories, but then also brings them together with much more realistic
elements, you know the lack of food, the quite realistic descriptions of the school that
she went to - they're all there in the early scenes and it's that brilliant bringing together
of those two very different elements I think that so powers those novels and gives them
this kind of both a deeply realistic sense, but also this mythical kind of power that
enables them to speak to so many different places and times.
I think what Gothic enables them to bring
to the novel, is a way of extending the emotional range and the kind of questions that it raises.
So, theirs is a much more psychological Gothic in a way, so that it's a way of exploring
strange states of mind, of not being sure of who you are, of uncanny moments and this
is something called the New Gothic, which is this much more psychological kind, not
in which the scary things are necessarily outside yourself, but somehow they're deep
within yourself. So, one of the most interesting of those Gothic uses is the way that there's
a lot of insecurity about identity in Jane Eyre. So, if you think early on, you know,
when she's put in the red room, it becomes from being a quite naturalistic or realistic
kind of place, something much stranger and weirder than that - it's like death, it's
like the deepest kind of fears in your unconscious mind somehow come to haunt Jane at that moment
and it is a novel with a lot of haunting in it. There's that moment when Jane seems to
communicate telepathically with Rochester and when she calls out to him, she cries out
to him, but also you see it in the characters too, so that there's a way in which although
Bertha Mason is in some ways the opposite of Jane, she's also uncannily and strangely
linked to her as well and that, I think, is something that draws quite deeply on Gothic
tradition - the way that identity is never simple or stable or belongs uniquely to you
and that constantly you might find doubles, or projections, or hauntings, or ghosts of
yourself, popping up all over the place within the world. You remember the first time Jane
Eyre meets Rochester - it's on a lonely road at night and he seems like a supernatural
presence. It's like a Gytrash - well Charlotte Brontë learned about the Gytrash here in
this very house and so already at the first meeting of two realistic modern people, he's
already haunted by the possibility that there might be some supernatural force, something
beyond them, just at the edge of their consciousness.