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• 1 2024-06-20T08:06:04-07:00 Gender & Marriage 7 plain 2024-07-12T06:53:49-07:00

       The final convergence of themes to be examined in this exhibit is the role of gender and marriage in the development of Antoinette and Jane, as well as their resulting attitudes toward marriage. The impact of marriage on a woman’s self-expression is of chief concern in both novels, with Jane refusing Rochester’s marriage until she feels secure as his equal. She discovered her irrepressibility in the moments of private contemplation discussed before, whereas Antoinette was much more preoccupied with the models of femininity she was raised with. While the examined selections of Jane Eyre contain few instances of the word “mother” or any maternal characters, Antoinette has two: Christophine and her mother.
  Antoinette’s mother is a haunted, distant woman. Her stories of Antoinette’s father paint a picture that contrasts with her economic marriage to Mr Mason. Mason appears with equal frequency to negatively connotated words “died” and “never,” with the later modifying “talk” and “told” and indicating another breakdown of communication. With Antoinette guessing at the feelings of her beleaguered mother, she is limited in her understanding and merely observes the effects of the emotionless marriage from the outside. On ngrams of Christophine, the appearance of “dress” in the top words evokes again the importance of dress in presentation of class. Antoinette frequently considers Christophine’s garb, admiring the black and Carribean elements missing from her own colonial costume. “Old” and “woman” by association underscore Christophine’s place outside of patriarchal marriage: not only is she black and an emancipated slave, but she is old and will never be married. This evokes the room Rhys gives her voice in her final appearance, but also reminds one that the closest relation Christophine has to marriage is that she was given as a wedding gift to Antoinette’s mother. Even in this close maternal relationship, the transactional and subjugating nature of marriage lingers. Notably, “mother” and “Christophine” are the most frequent words in each other’s ngrams. Antoinette’s two mother figures teach contrasting possibilities to her: her mother models a cold, detached life and aspires to live how the planter’s did prior to abolition, Christophine is communicative and open but this openness only makes clear that Antoinette will forever be separated from the black people she envies. Beyond that, Antoinette is raised seeing marriage as commodified and robbing the women she loves of freedom.
      Jane and Antoinette arrive at their suspicions of marriage in different methods, but it is demonstrable that neither thinks highly of prospect at face value. Again searching the novel selections for Ngrams, the words associated with “husband” or “groom” and “wife” or “bride” reveal a lack of positive association:
  

       At a glance the cloud does not paint a positive picture of marriage in the novels; looking closer does reveal a different shade of connotation along gender lines. Sargasso Sea still has some positive, romantic words like “kiss” and “love” appearing most frequently around the target words “wife” and “bride.” Comparatively, “husband” is joined by “dead” and “buried,” as well as more clinical words (e.g. “legally”). Recall that “widow” was one of the recurring familial words with “slave.” While Sargasso Sea is more sympathetic in its depiction of wives than husbands, the fate of many of these wives is to be widowed out of a loving marriage at best or, at worst, forced to remarry into an unhappy marriage. Conversely, in Eyre “husband” is connotated more even-handedly while “wife” is a more fraught concept. Ngrams of the masculine marriage words feature a hopeful word like “purpose” for every negatively connotated “nothing.” Skewed by the reveal of a confined Bertha, “wife” is paired with “desolate,” “existence,” and “keys,” reminding that for the majority of the novel the most prominent example of marriage is imprisonment.

       A final way these structures are uncovered in the themes of marriage in the novels is in the use of the word “love” and its relative frequency (or infrequency).
  Again graphing the Ngrams of “love”, or words with the base “love,” my research found a much greater occurrence in Sargasso Sea. This occupation with romance is not optimistic however, with “beg” and “money” further reinforcing the transactional nature of marriage in the text. Love occurs in Sargasso Sea to underscore the lack of real emotional connection between the married characters as opposed to the affection in relationships other than marriage. The underrepresentation of Jane Eyre in the above graph is due a lack of repeated associations in the text selection, as it appears once with a wider variety of words. Rochester and Jane’s relationship, although passionate at times, if often tempered by rationality. Jane, always described with both fire and ice, allows herself to step back from her romance and consider how the marriage will affect her more objectively.