Lisa Napell Dicksteen

April 14, 2005

EGL 599

Contemplating teaching Jane Eyre…

I can see why some students find this book hard to get through. To the modern, MTV-influenced mind it must seem a thicket of distracting discursions, old-fashioned mores, and servile domesticity. Yet it is also a gothic romance in which the girl and boy find each other, lose each other, and are reunited to live happily ever after in the end. There is even some blood and gore and a madwoman locked in the attic to engage those who crave more excitement than romance from their reading.

It lends itself to Marxist and feminist readings, and much might be done with those critical lenses, once one has convinced students to actually engage with the text. This I think must be done in some other way than just assigning the pages for homework and proved in a more inventive and less onerous fashion than regular quizzes on the names of Jane’s tormentors or the places in which she lives. And showing the movie is not the answer either – at least not by itself, and not prior to reading the text.

My thought is to enter the plot through the setting. Charlotte Bronte is a master painter of scenery – when one wades through the ocean of her descriptions, one finds an almost phtographically clear picture of wherever young Jane is located. I think I might begin by breaking the class into groups of around four and giving each group a descriptive passage – no book or other information, just the description typed on a page.

The intention is to encourage close attention to the descriptive elements of a text in order to discern possible authorial intent behind its creation and placement, and the value it brings to the readers’ comprehension. I intend for students to become more aware of the ways in which the author uses descriptive language to create mood and to influence the readers’ perceptions. This aspect of writing is often overlooked by young readers (and writers), yet it is an essential element, enabling the reader to better understand the characters and their interactions. Careful readers can gather enough information to develop their own maps or other visualizations of the places in which the stories occur.

Once I have handed out the texts, I will ask the groups to work together to create sets and backdrops – they can draw, paint, cut-and-paste, computer-generate, whatever they like, as long as the finished product represents their collective vision of the text they are working with and includes an explanation and defense of the selection and placement of each element and notation of where those decisions are based in the text. By focusing on how Bronte creates a sense of place, I am encouraging a closer engagement with both the text and the culture it depicts, many aspects of which might be unusual or foreign to 21st century students.

Once each group has completed and presented their setting, we will use them as the backdrops for the story itself, which will be ingested in part through reading at home, in part through clips from the movie, and in part through acting scenes out in the classroom. This combination of approaches should result in a clearer understanding of the story and a deeper engagement with what might seem at first glance to be a dense and intimidating text.