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Sunday, December 27, 2020

Sunday, December 27, 2020 1:27 am by M. in , ,    No comments
The latest issue of the literary journal Semicolon includes a Jane Eyre-inspired story:
Semicolon
Issue 4 - October 2020 

by Eleanor Howell

And we have also a scholar paper around Bertha:
Minghua Yao
International Journal of Literature and Arts. Vol. 8, No. 5, 2020, pp. 292-297

Love and revenge are eternal motifs in literature, on which numerous renowned works are written in almost all times. In this paper, two characters, namely Medea in Euripides’ Medea and Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, are chosen to explore the female images in love and revenge stories. Seen from the perspective of feminism, their images are undeniably special and even subversive in comparison with common female characters. A prominent revelation of it lies in their independence from their male spouses named Jason and Rochester respectively. With the superiority in power, Medea and Mason are able to extricate themselves largely from the reliance of their husbands, thus gaining the courage to pursue their happiness in love as well as the determination to defend their dignity by taking revenge. However, limitations do exist due to the male dominance in the patriarchal society. For one thing, the depersonalization of women under male’s visual angle has made Medea and Mason turned into men’s tools, which has predestined the tragic ending of their love; for another, the dominant status of male discourse has victimized them. In the society where men firmly grasp the power of discourse, their voices are “muted” and their acts of revenge “magnified” to the extreme. Consequently, in reflection of their love and revenge tragedies, Medea and Bertha Mason are both subversive characters and unfortunate victims in a male dominating world.

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