D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE

1. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE

2. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • They who marry for love,[...] find time enough to repent their rash folly [...]. Thus, whether it be wit or beauty that a man's in love with, there are no great hopes of a lasting happiness; [...]. If a woman were duly principled, and taught [...] especially the true sentiments that men have of her, and the traps they lay for her under so many gilded compliments [...] women would marry more discreetly, and demean themselves better in a married state. • Astell "Some Reflections upon Marriage"

3. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • Reader, I married him. [...]I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. [...] No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am; ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward's society: he knows none of mine. (J. E., pp 474; 475-476)

4. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. […] Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. (J. E., p. 141)

5. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • Reader, this is a very different picture of my marriage from that which you were presented with in what I would call my "romantic" version. I will remind you: "When his firstborn was put into his arm, he could see that the boy had inherited his own eyes, as they once were- large, brilliant and black..." Well, events did not quite happen like this (Ch., p. 52)

6. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • "financial affairs were in an appalling state" (Ch, p. 62)

7. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • I'd created it for him [...], trying to follow the style of Charlotte's own careful hand [...] I'd come across some quill pens and a dozen or so sheets of yellowing manuscript paper- more than a century old [...] The pens, the paper germinated my idea (Ch. 126-27)

8. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • "Charlotte Bronte was an extraordinary liar" (Ch. p. 137). • "the true liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his [...] natural disdain of proof of any kind" (Oscar Wilde "The Decay of Lying")

9. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • Every age finds its own attic-room for its unique madness

10. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • “the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult […] emerged from this preoccupation with sex, which mounted throughout the nineteenth century- four privileged objects of knowledge, which were also targets and anchorage points for the ventures of knowledge (Foucault, The History of Sexuality)

11. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • “presence of slavery as historical residue and psychic contamination” Punter

12. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • “porno-tropics for the European imagination- a fantastic magin lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears”

13. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • We have never crossed the forbidden barrier (Ch. p. 153)

14. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • “You think I am your slave, Edward, but in truth you are mine!” (Ch., p. 116)

15. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • “I would dream, like Ariel, like Caliban, of freedom” (Ch., p. 66)

16. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • “It is with Poe that we first see the Gothic shifting away from an emphasis on props and sets- dark forests and lugubrious caverns, skeletons and thunderstorms- and towards a particular sensibility characterized by transgressive tendencies and extreme distortions of perception and affect. Poe's genius lies in his recognition of the sorts of structural analogies possible between the trappings and the sensibility, then in the deftness with which he splices them together”.Patrick McGrath, “Afterword: the new Gothic”, Conjunctions, 14, Spring 1990.

17. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • "[...]whose strongest, most dominant themes are transgression and decay, but which does not necessarily use the furniture of the Old Gothic [...] the castle and the forest and the stormy night and the dungeon and so on... Transgression and decay cover a lot of territory a lot of human behaviour [...] especially madness”. • Magali Falco (ed.) A collection of interviews with Patrick McGrath, Paris, Publibook, 2007,

18. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • I spoke about different characters as aspects of Charlotte – Miss Temple, the patient, longsuffering goody goody she was expected to be; Mr Rochester, the domineering, sexually experienced, cosmopolitan gentleman she would have loved to be; and Bertha Mason[…], the hysteria and madness produced by the impossible conflict. I paid graceful tribute to Wide Sargasso Sea, as a brilliant exploration of Bertha (continua prossima slide)

19. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • Finally, I talked of Grace Poole, Bertha’s jailer […]. “Grace kept Charlotte’s unruly id closely confined; she symbolises all that decorum and conventionality which cut off her breathing like a Victorian corset” […] “But Grace had the saving grace of getting drunk now and then; so allowing the ‘madwoman in the attic’ to escape for a while- allowing Charlotte, more importantly, to slash men, rip up wedding apparel, and set fire to beds” (Ch., pp. 119-120)

20. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • “may qualify a form of thinking, a structure of belief, an emotional response to life, a sexual act, an act of violence or murder” • “carries less of the moralistic reproach of the noun” • (Claire Pajaczkowska)

21. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • “From somewhere near the ceiling I looked down at our intertwined bodies, distantly, with amusement. It is said that newly dead people do this- look down at their corpses. The difference was, I wasn’t newly dead; I died a long time ago. I have drowned. I am underwater. I am Das Boot.” (Ch., pp. 71-72)

22. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • “Refuse or are afraid to invest any narcissistic libido in the body image. They may feel a dramatic change on self-conception and in relations to the external world. Self observations seem completely disinterested or disinvested, viewed from the point of a spectator or outsider” (Elizabeth Grosz)

23. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • “Tis a villain, sir/I do not love to look on” • (The Tempest 1.2. 310-311)

24. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • “ a form of recognition […]. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks )

25. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE

26. D.M THOMAS CHARLOTTE • “I saw the eyes of many infants, on either side, in the ditches. I knew they were aborted children, waiting for their mothers to pass, waiting to take revenge” (Ch., pp. 77-78)