Form and Ideology

1. Form and Ideology Two Approaches to the Classic Realist Text

2. The Classic Realist Text • “…classic realist fiction, the dominant literary form of the nineteenth century and arguably of the twentieth, ‘interpellates’ the reader, addresses itself to him or her directly, offering the reader as the place from which the text is most ‘obviously’ intelligible, the position of the subject in (and of) ideology” (52-53). • The Classic Realist text is, for Belsey, a vehicle designed to reproduce ideological discourses and subjects.

3. Part 1: The Hierarchy of Voices • “…a high degree of intelligibility is sustained throughout the narrative as a result of the hierarchy of voices in the text. The hierarchy works above all by means of a privileged voice which places as subordinate all the utterances that are literally or figuratively between inverted commas” (65). • The CR text privileges a particular authoritative voice(s) which arrests the play of meaning (to a certain extent) by filtering all of the novel’s events through a singular perspective which offers “the truth.”

4. Part 1: The Hierarchy of Voices • Often this voice is “omniscient” which, as Belsey suggests is a way of establishing authority on the basis of the voice’s “effacement of its own status as discourse” (66). • This voice seems to offer an unmediated truth about the meaning of the text, “suppressing the relationship between language and subjectivity” (67).

5. Part 1: The Hierarchy of Voices • In the case of “unreliable” or subjective narrators, the reader assumes a position of authority, given the ability to identify meanings that are seemingly not available to the text’s narrator/characters. • This is, of course, a ruse – an effect of the language practices of the text itself.

6. Part 1: The Hierarchy of Voices • Back to Jane! (the narrator and simultaneously the main character) • How does the narrator’s voice address and position us within the narrative? • What is the relationship between Jane the character and Jane the narrator? • What are the ramifications for the ideological effects of the novel? • Find a place in the text which might contribute to a conversation on this topic.

7. Part 2: Closure • “The consistency and continuity of the subject provides the conceptual framework of classic realism, but it is the characteristic of the action of the story, the narrative process itself, to disrupt subjectivity, to disturb the pattern of relationships between subject-positions which is presented as normal in the text” (69). • AKA – conflict drives the plot • Most of these conflicts present some sort of a test for identity, presenting challenges for or disruptions to the existing system of differences

8. Part 2: Closure • “But the movement of classic realist narrative towards closure ensures the reinstatement of order, sometimes a new order, sometimes the old restored, but always intelligible because familiar. Decisive choices are made, identity is established, the murder is exposed, or marriage generates a new set of subject-positions” (69). • The standard forms of resolution that narrative provides “paper” over any ideological contradictions or omissions that the narrative has indulged in.

9. Part 2: Closure • Make a list of all of the things that needed to happen for Jane Eyre to offer its “happy ending” • What is the result of this resolution? • Has it resolved the ideological conflicts that we have been tracing? • Does it reinstate a new order? If so, what is the nature and founding assumptions of that order?