In class, we discussed the close relationship between some of Charlotte Bronte's life experiences and her work, JANE EYRE. Discuss the advantages and dangers relating an author's work to his or her life as a critical approach.
Virginia Woolf: "It is the custom to draw a distinction between a man and his works ...It is therefore a wise precution to limit one's study of a writer to the study of his works; but, like other precautions, it implies loss. A writer is a writer from the cradle; in his dealings with the world, in his affections, in his attitude to the thousand small things that happen between dawn and sunset"
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I have my issues with Barthes statement that the author is dead and that the death of the author is the birth of the reader. But I do agree with his reasoning. he says that, "linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing." It's that instance in its location within a cultural and social matrix that is the author. The author is constantly disappearing and popping up at new locations within the field imaginary. If we call that author C. Bronte, it is because at that instance of writing, Bronte is the nexus of an infinite number of influences leading up to that instance.
So the danger of relating to the author should be more a question of relating to the whole author rather than the instance of the author. And to avoid the author all together is to miss an opportunity to analyze a text from a specific point in history and society.
A member of my family is a published author of novels and it has, on occassion, troubled me to see the close proximity her "fictional" narratives have to actual events my family has undertaken. Furthermore, the portrayal of other family members and even myself has sometimes been the cause of some tension. In this regard it is interesting that Bronte initially wished to distance herself from the events that she details in her book, whilst still maintaining the autobiographical claim. Jane Eyre was originally entitled Jane Eyre: An Autobiography under the pseudonym Currer Bell, and this is significant to our subject. It is undoubtedly true that by taking a male moniker in nineteenth century England, Bronte was attempting to alleviate herself from the prejudices she may have faced as a female author, but there may also have been some attempt by Bronte to initially distance herself from the very personal nature of some of her issues.
The death of Helen Burns is one such example, as it is widely thought that this draws inspiration from her two sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who died of consumption as a result of the poor condition they experienced in their schooling. Similarly, her brother Branwell became an addict of alchohol and opium in the years proceeding his death, and this recalls the decline of John Reed depicted in Jane Eyre . Such issues may have influenced her decision to change the author's name of this admittedly autobiographical work, and her later decision to revert to her actual name may have been the latter stage in her process of revelation.
It is also important to note the modernity of this style of self-revelation. Speaking of another Victorian author, Charles Dickens, Joseph Gold writes in his article Charles Dickens and Today's Reader that,"David Copperfield, the most autobiographical of novels...experiments with the very modern technique of author or protagonist retrospection". And yet Dickens' work was published in 1850, three years after the first publication of Jane Eyre. Gold attributes much breaking of ground to Dickens in this approach, and the fact that this style was, seemingly, so revolutionary, that people would have been unused to reading of events so autobiographical in nature, may also have contributed to Bronte's reticence to claim authorship of her work.
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