# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel helped introduce the idea of the "modern individual"-a surprisingly radical concept for readers at the time.

Consider the selfie. By now, it's a fairly mundane artistic tradition, even after a profusion of thinkpieces have wrestled with its rise thanks to the so-called Me Generation's "obsession" with social media. Anyone in possession of a cheap camera phone or laptop can take a picture of themselves, edit it ( or not), and share it with the world in a matter or seconds.

But before the selfie came "the self," or the fairly modern concept of the independent "individual." The now-ubiquitous selfie expresses in miniature the seismic conceptual shift that came about centuries ago, spurred in part by advances in printing technology and new ways of thinking in philosophy. It's not that the self didn't exist in pre-modern cultures: Rather, the emphasis the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century placed on personal will, conscience, and understanding-rather than tradition and authority-in matters of faith spilled over the bounds of religious experience into all of life. Perhaps the first novel to best express the modern idea of the self was Jane Eyre, written in 1847 by Charlotte Brontë, born 200 years ago this year.

Those who remember Jane Eyre solely as required reading in high-school English class likely recall most vividly its over-the-top Gothic tropes: a childhood banishment to a death-haunted room, a mysterious presence in the attic, a Byronic hero, and a cold mansion going up in flames. It's more seemingly the stuff of Lifetime television, not revolutions. But as unbelievable as many of the events of the novel are, even today, Brontë's biggest accomplishment wasn't in plot devices. It was the narrative voice of Jane-who so openly expressed her desire for identity, definition, meaning, and agency-that rang powerfully true to its 19th-century audience. In fact, many early readers mistakenly believed Jane Eyre was a true account (in a clever marketing scheme, the novel was subtitled, "An Autobiography"), perhaps a validation of her character's authenticity.

The way that novels paid attention to the particularities of human experience (rather than the universals of the older epics and romances) made them the ideal vehicle to shape how readers understood the modern individual. The rise of the literary form was made possible by the technology of the printing press, the print culture that followed, and the widening literacy that was cultivated for centuries until Jane Eyre's publication. The novel seemed perfectly designed to tell Brontë's first-person narrative of a destitute orphan girl searching for a secure identity-first among an unloving family, then an austere charity school, and finally with the wealthy but unattainable employer she loves. Unable to find her sense of self through others, Jane makes the surprising decision to turn inward.

The broader cultural implications of the story-its insistence on the value of conscience and will-were such that one critic fretted some years after its publication that the "most alarming revolution of modern times has followed the invasion of Jane Eyre." Before the Reformation and the Enlightenment that followed, before Rene Descartes's cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"), when the sources of authority were external and objective, the aspects of the self so central to today's understanding mattered little because they didn't really affect the course of an individual's life. The Reformation empowered believers to read and interpret the scriptures for themselves, rather than relying on the help of clergy; by extension, this seemed to give people permission to read and interpret their own interior world.

To be sure, early novelists before Brontë such as Frances Burney, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Mary Shelley contributed to the form's developing art of the first-person narrator. But these authors used the contrivances of edited letters or memoirs, devices that tended toward underdeveloped characters, episodic plots, and a general sense of artificiality-even when the stories were presented not as fiction but "histories." No earlier novelist had provided a voice so seemingly pure, so fully belonging to the character, as Brontë. She developed her art alongside her sisters, the novelists Anne and Emily (all of them publishing under gender-neutral pseudonyms), but it was Charlotte whose work best captured the sense of the modern individual. Anne Brontë's novels Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall contributed to the novel's ability to offer social commentary and criticism, while the Romantic sensibilities of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights explored how the "other," in the form of the dark, unpredictable Heathcliff, can threaten the integrity of the self.

One of the greatest testimonies to Brontë's accomplishment came from Virginia Woolf, a modernist pioneer who represents a world far removed from that of Bronte's Victorianism. "As we open Jane Eyre once more," a doubting Woolf wrote in The Common Reader, "we cannot stifle the suspicion that we shall find her world of imagination as antiquated, mid-Victorian, and out of date as the parsonage on the moor, a place only to be visited by the curious, only preserved by the pious." Woolf continues, "So we open Jane Eyre; and in two pages every doubt is swept clean from our minds." There is nothing of the book, Woolf declares, "except Jane Eyre." Jane's voice is the source of the power the book has to absorb the reader completely into her world. Woolf explains how Brontë depicts:

... an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently.

It is exactly this willingness-desire, even-to be "at war with the accepted order of things" that characterizes the modern self. While we now take such a sense for granted, it was, as Brontë's contemporaries rightly understood, radical in her day. More disturbing to Brontë's Victorian readers than the sheer sensuality of the story and Jane's deep passion was "the heroine's refusal to submit to her social destiny," as the literary critic Sandra M. Gilbert explains. Indeed, one contemporary review complained, "It is true Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength," but the critic continues that "it is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself." In presenting such a character, the reviewer worries, Brontë has "overthrown authority" and cultivated "rebellion." And in a way they were right: "I resisted all the way," Jane says as she is dragged by her cruel aunt toward banishment in the bedroom where her late uncle died. This sentence, Joyce Carol Oates argues, serves as the theme of Jane's whole story.

But Jane's resistance is not the empty rebellion of nihilism or self-absorption (consider how current practitioners of "selfie culture" frequently weather accusations of narcissism). Rather, her quest for her true self peels back the stiff layers of conventionality in order to discover genuine morality and faith. As Brontë explains in the preface to the novel's second edition (a preface necessitated by the moral outrage that followed the novel's publication),

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last ... These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world.

In a letter to a friend, Bronte responded to her critics' objections by declaring, "Unless I have the courage to use the language of Truth in preference to the jargon of Conventionality, I ought to be silent ..."

The refusal of such a woman, who lived in such a time, to be silent created a new mold for the self-one apparent not only in today's Instagram photos, but also more importantly in the collective modern sense that a person's inner life can allow her to effect change from the inside out.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How 'Jane Eyre' Helped Popularize the Concept of the Self

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel is based on the idea of the modern individual-a surprisingly radical concept for readers at the time.

# data[].attributes.body
with two excerpts from the novel (safe the ones studied in class). You can choose the BBC series of 1983 or the movie by F.Zeffirelli available on this Padlet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is well known for the shocking discovery of Mr Rochester's scandalous hidden wife, a deranged woman locked away in an attic. But astonishingly, this may not have all been fiction. Norton Conyers, the stately manor that Thornfield Hall is based on, was filled with rumours of a mad woman who lived in the attic - which is where Brontë found her inspiration.

Initial restoration

Norton Conyers has finally been unveiled to the public after its 30 year restoration to ensure the house was returned to its former glory. The manor, owned by Sir James and Lady Graham, is making its beautiful return just in time for the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë's birth in April 1816. It is described by Brontë in the novel as 'three storeys high, of proportions not vast, though considerable: a gentleman's manor-house, not a nobleman's seat.' Norton Conyers has been owned by the Grahams since 1624, years before Brontë was born, and has been proudly restored and taken care of by their current owners. The house was previously known as the coldest historic house in Yorkshire, but it has grown out of this title with the extension of the central heating pipes into previously unheated rooms. The renovation even saw the library of the manor restored with furnishings that imitate Mr Rochester's study, which was used by Jane Eyre as a classroom for his ward, Adele Varens.

Front view of Norton Conyers | Courtesy of Norton Conyers

How did it inspire Jane Eyre?

But how did Brontë craft Jane Eyre's Thornfield based on Norton Conyers? Well, in 1839 it is said that Brontë visited the medieval manor, marvelling at the 'stately and elegant, gloomy and haunting' house (the novel's description). Her visit left her feeling inspired when she was told of the tale of a mad woman who resided in the attic. Sound familiar? Brontë grabbed hold of this tale and spun her own story from the legend, crafting the deranged Bertha Mason. Described by the protagonist in the novel as 'a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair...It was a discoloured face - it was a savage face', Brontë used her vivid imagination to craft the supposed real-life mad woman who resided in the attic and created an animalistic, 'savage' being.

This woman was confined to the attic, whose entrance was behind a hidden door with a creaky staircase that led up to The Mad Woman's Room, as it had been named. The room itself and the stairway remains are now visible to guests at the house. Jane Eyre fans that visit are permitted to venture through the mysterious, hidden door and explore the stairway that leads up to the attic. The door was built into the 19th century panelling and so the age of the stairs themselves means that sadly they are no longer secure enough to be climbed by visitors.

How interior was used

Within the novel, however, the staircase and hidden doorway was used by Mr Rochester as a short cut to his attics, and as a quick escape from Bertha. Jane discovers the room after her failed engagement, where Mr Rochester shows her his deranged, secret wife. 'He lifted the hangings from the wall, uncovered the second door...In a room without a window, there burnt a fire guarded by a high and strong fender, and a lamp suspended from the ceiling by a chain.' Although the room at Norton Conyers has a window, the ghastly and solitary appearance of the attic is apparent. Readers of Jane Eyre can almost imagine Bertha prowling around in the room; 'a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, no one could tell.' Brontë's description of Bertha residing in the attics befits Norton Conyers grey and dismal room, kept sparse and spine-chilling to match not only the story in the novel, but the tale of the Mad Woman.

Norton Conyers Staircase | Courtesy of Norton Conyers

Brief history of the book

For those unfamiliar with Jane Eyre and the period it was set in, the 19th century saw people who were suffering with mental illnesses treated unfairly. Mrs Rochester, or indeed the supposed real-life Mad Woman, lived in an era where mental illnesses were not recognised as conditions, but simply saw those afflicted as 'idiots' to be locked away. Although family members often chose to take care of their ill loved ones, they were often hidden away, shut in a room to protect not only themselves, but the other family members residing in the house and their reputation. Some suffering with mild illnesses were included in society, but at the humour of others, seen as 'village idiots.'

Become a Culture Tripper!

Sign up to our newsletter to
save up to 40% on our unique trips.

An option, that Mr Rochester avoids, was to confine extremely mentally ill people such as Bertha to an insane asylum. This was, sadly, a cruel option as the institutes were more of a prison rather than a safe medical centre. Patients were made to sleep on straw mattresses, either on iron beds or on the floor, locked away in their cells at night. They were kept locked up with chains or straitjackets if they were deemed too dangerous, force-fed when they would not eat and washed with vigour if they were incapable. The inhumane conditions led to many families pulling their relatives out of the institutes, preferring they suffered in the safety of their home, rather than in a 'prison'.

Mad Woman's Room | Courtesy of Norton Conyers

Modern sympathies

We can therefore sympathise more-so with Mr Rochester's treatment of Bertha, permitting her a personal matron and place to live, rather than ill-treated in a prison-like hospital, surrounded by strangers. This may also have been the case for the supposed Mad Woman; perhaps the Grahams, or whoever resided, wanted her to stay in their attic rather than an asylum, protecting her from harm.

The eerie tale of the Mad Woman and the remaining hidden door and ' Jane Eyre Staircase', as Sir James refers to it, brings Brontë's novel to life. With visits to the manor spread out across 30 days throughout the year, the house is overflowing with Jane Eyre and Brontë fans greeted personally by Sir James and Lady Graham during these periods. Witnessing fiction come to life is a rarity, especially one that has been so well preserved; something we're sure Brontë would have felt extremely honoured by.

Did you know - Culture Trip now does bookable, small-group trips? Pick from authentic, immersive Epic Trips, compact and action-packed Mini Trips and sparkling, expansive Sailing Trips.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Mad Womans Room The Tale That Inspired...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre is well known for the shocking discovery of Mr Rochesters scandalous hidden wife a deranged woman locked away in an attic. But...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Warwick Blanchett: Mrs Rochester - the Surprising Sequel To Jane Eyre - NZ Herald

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Latest breaking news articles, photos, video, blogs, reviews, analysis, opinion and reader comment from New Zealand and around the World - NZ Herald

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Cathy Marston's technique is different than most choreography. In her adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's 19th century novel "Jane Eyre," the choreographer says she creates movement based on quotes taken directly from the novel.

"I really draw inspiration from words and translate them into movement so that every movement you will see on stage has a very specific meaning and intention," Marston said. "When I'm creating with dancers, the movement comes from inside and uses classical technique. You see that. But all of the movement is about the intention rather than about the technique. The technique is only there to underpin the emotion or the narrative the dancers are trying to express."

Marston's adaptation of "Jane Eyre" started at the Northern Ballet in England before heading to the American Ballet Theatre in New York. This week, it opens at Chicago's Joffrey Ballet.

The story of "Jane Eyre" explores an orphan's journey of self-discovery through several hardships. Constantly struggling between the desires of her heart and her head, lead dancer Amanda Assucena says conveying these emotions through movement has taken a lot of practice.

"Playing Jane has been about finding the person that she is," Assucena said. "She's such a complex character. Her mind expands to so many different thoughts. There's so much going on in her head, but on the outside, she's quite a composed person. So I've had to play with that a lot and I'm really enjoying the process of getting to know Jane."

With the Chicago Philharmonic playing a combination of Fanny Mendelsohn and Schubert, Marston says its timely but contemporary feel adds to the emotions she works to capture throughout the story.

It is Marston's ability to tell this story through movement based on literature that encouraged artistic director Ashley Wheater to invite her to work with the company.

"She's using the language of ballet, but it's also hybridized," Wheater said. "So I think you could say it's really like theater. And how she has told the story is so beautifully crafted. I was really compelled by the work."

While acting may be something the company is used to, it also comes with challenges that Marston says are for the better.

"It's challenging for the dancers but in a good way," she said. "Who doesn't want to live on stage so vividly? They've really connected with that process. It's an emotional ride for them. They will be changed at the end of the evening. I hope that will pass over the stage to the audience."

"Jane Eyre" opens at the Joffrey Ballet on Wednesday, Oct. 16 and runs through Oct. 27.
Follow Angel Idowu on Twitter: @angelidowu3 Angel Idowu is Related stories: It's Time to Declare a 'Year of Chicago Dance' Chicago Dance Crash's Wonderfully Fresh 'Lil Pine Nut' Deserves a Remount Joffrey Ballet Reaches 'Across the Pond' for Latest Program Joffrey Ballet's World Premiere 'Anna Karenina' Fit for the Silver Screen the JCS Fund of the DuPage Foundation Arts Correspondent.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cathy Marston's Adaptation of 'Jane Eyre' Heads to the Joffrey Ballet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In "Jane Eyre," Cathy Marston said she creates movement based on quotes taken directly from Charlotte Bronte's 19th century novel.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
11 Lessons That ‘Jane Eyre’ Can Teach Every 21st Century Woman About How To Live Well

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
11 Lessons That ‘Jane Eyre’ Can Teach Every 21st Century Woman About How To Live Well

# data[].attributes.body
Choose one cultural aspect to build your portfolio about topic 1
"Expression and self-construction".
Choose an axis, give an account of the document(s) and justify your choice.Write about 200 words.