Focus, openness and reader addresses

A recent Brontë-related thesis:

Focus, openness and reader addresses in Jane Eyre and Villette : a study of narrative strategies

by Giulia Rotava Schabbach

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil

February 2024

The present thesis examines narrative strategies used in Charlotte Brontë’s novels Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853) to verify why, although the structures of the novels are similar, the effects they generate are so different. The two works have fictional autobiography formats, with female narrators who present their own stories over a period of several years. Both narrators address their readers directly. Jane Eyre’s narration provokes an emotional approximation with the reader, born from the confidential tone of her addresses, but Lucy Snowe’s narrative keeps the reader at a distance, as the narrator clearly chooses not to share the facts of her life as Jane Eyre does. To understand the reasons for this contrast, I use the critical support offered by Funtek (2018), Gibson (2017) and Monin (2010), who analyse the narrators of Charlotte Brontë’s novels, the way they deal with their readers, and the relevance of the “reader” addresses to the narration. Furthermore, to extract empirical data to contrast the use of these narrative devices in the two works, along with their thematic focus and degrees of openness with the reader, I rely on Bettina Fischer-Starcke’s (2010) study about the use of Corpus Linguistics as applied to Literary Studies. The thesis is devised in two sections. The first presents the context, discussing Charlotte Brontë’s trajectory and relevant aspects of her style, and the study corpora, which are presented individually and then contrasted. The second part presents the analysis of the novel’s literary devices, as well as a description of the methods and criteria used to collect the linguistic data with AntConc 4.0 Corpus Linguistics software — specifically its keyword list and keyword in context (KWIC features) — and the results that were obtained. Despite the similarities in character background and style, Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe function differently as narrators. The thesis examines this cleavage through three points of analysis: (a) the characters on which the narratives place their focus; (b) the strategies the two narrators use to address the “reader”; and (c) the way Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, as narrators, recount their conversations with Mr. Rochester and M. Paul, respectively. Finally, this work aims to contribute to the body of research on Charlotte Brontë’s narrators through a different methodological perspective, which has the capacity to provide new insights into how the textual devices used in her narratives work to produce specific literary effects.