Representations of Female Defiance: Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
LIT13-10-Thu1
Iana Seerung
This course will take place virtually on Zoom. Participation requires a device (ideally a computer or tablet, rather than a cell phone) with a camera and microphone in good working order and basic familiarity with using Zoom and accessing email.
10 week course - March 13 - May 22
(No Class April 17)
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) remains one of the most iconic novels of the Victorian period. Readers have long admired Jane’s tenacity and grit against cruel authority figures, with feminist critics reclaiming both Jane and the “madwoman in the attic” as emblematic figures of patriarchal resistance. While Jane Eyre is set in the early nineteenth century, its publication in 1847, a decade after the abolition of slavery, puts questions of slavery, freedom, and empire at the forefront of any discussion of the text. Over a century later, the Caribbean writer Jean Rhys would take inspiration from Jane Eyre and seek to tell the story of Bertha Mason, the creole woman whose imprisonment by Mr. Rochester marks the central conflict of the novel. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is at once a prequel to Jane Eyre and a masterpiece of fiction in its own right as it explores in lyrical prose themes of consent, “female hysteria,” post-emancipation social roles, and resistance against patriarchal and colonial control.
This course proposes an in-depth reading of both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. In pairing two texts which have overlapping content, yet markedly different writing styles, this course aims to bring together readers of both the Victorian novel and experimental fiction into a lively discussion based course that will expose everyone to different ways of approaching and thinking about literature.
More facilitated discussion than lecture
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Penguin Classics: 9780141441146
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, W. W. Norton & Company 9780393352560
Students will read approximately 60-80 pages per week.
Iana Seerung (they/them) is a PhD student in the Department of English at Brandeis University. Their research is in Victorian literature, new formalism, and philosophy and literature. Iana’s dissertation explores the relationship between novel form and the changing shape of British national and imperial identity over the course of the nineteenth century. Their work is particularly interested in the production of the free-market and the conflicting relationship between novels and liberal economic ideals over the course of the Victorian era. Iana has previously taught a course on Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure with BOLLI.