A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE STORY

JANE EYRE
By: Charlotte Bronte
 INTRODUCTION
Born in 1816, the eldest and most famous of the Bronte
children, charlotte was a poet and novelist best known for
her novel Jane Eyre (1847).Charlotte went to the clergy
daughters' school in 1824 with her three sisters, Emily,
Maria and Elizabeth. She blamed the school's deplorable
conditions on the deaths of her two older sisters and her own
poor state of health. Charlotte used her school as the basis
for the Lowood school in Jane Eyre. She served as the
motherly friend to her younger sisters, encouraging their
literary talents and willingness to publish their work. After
withdrawing his surviving children from boarding school,
their father schooled them at home, where they were
confined to a quiet room most of the day, so as not to disturb
their father's work. The Bronte children created their own
literary fictional worlds, which inspired their respective
literary careers.
 PHONOLOGY
-It tells us what sounds are in a language, how they do and can combine into
words, and explains why certain phonetic features are important to identifying a
word.

“Burns obeyed: I looked at her narrowly as she

emerged from the book-closet; she was just
putting back her handkerchief into her pocket,
and the trace of a tear glistened on her thin
cheek”.

<e> sound
 “And then my mind made its first earnest effort to
comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven
and hell; and for the first time it recoiled, baffled; and for the
first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw
all round an unfathomed gulf”.

<e> sound
“I went to my window, opened it, and looked out. There were
the two wings of the building; there was the garden; there
were the skirts of Lowood; there was the hilly horizon. My
eye passed all other objects to rest on those most remote, the
blue peaks; it was those I longed to surmount; all within their
boundary of rock and heath seemed prison-ground, exile
limits”.

<o> sound
 Phonology is largely concerned with the
contrastive sounds of a language.
Example:
<b> and <i> are contrastive

bill and ill

are literally different and have different meanings

<b> and <B> are not contrastive

book and Book

have the same meaning and it only mean one thing.
 SYNTAX
-Refers to the rules that govern the ways in which words
combine to form phrases, clauses, and sentences.

It’s the concept that enables people to know things like

adjectives generally come before the nouns they describe.

Examples:

long walks broken wall

stout leg pale throne

 How to start a question with a
question word.
EXAMPLES:

Why could I never please?

Why was it useless to try to win any one’s favor?

That subjects often come before verbs in non-question
sentences,
examples:
“I shook my head”,
“Bessie invited him to walk into the breakfast-room”,”Mrs. Reed answered”.

Prepositional phrases start with prepositions.

Examples:
”to be in your place.to my crib ”
”to the bed”.

Helping verbs come before main verbs.

Examples:
“can go”,” will do”, “was still”, “had heard”,
 Simple sentence with the structure: subject -verb

“The coach drew up”,

“Miss Miller was more ordinary ”

Compound sentence structure: Subject-verb-

object-conjunction-subject-verb.

I only know that the day seemed to me of a

preternatural length, and we appeared to
travel over hundreds of miles of road”.
 Complex sentence structure: Dependent clause-
subject-verb-object.
“Helen heard me patiently to the end: I
expected she would then make a remark,
but she said nothing” .

Compound-complex sentence structure: four

c l a u s e s , d e p e n d e n t a n d i n d e p e n d e nt .

“Miss miller assumed the fourth vacant

chair, which was that nearest the door,
and around which the smallest of the
children were assembled: to this
inferior class I was called, and placed
at the bottom of it”.
 MORPHOLOGY
-It is the study of words. Morphemes are the minimal units of words that
have a meaning and cannot be subdivided further. Free morphemes can
occur alone and bound morphemes must occur with another morpheme.

A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-

room, I slipped in there. It contained a
bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a
volume, taking care that it should be one
stored with pictures.

In this example, the free morpheme is "adjoin", and a bound

morpheme is "ed" for the word adjoined. It is bound because
although it has meaning, it cannot stand alone. It must be
attached to another morpheme to produce a word.
 Affixes are often the bound
morpheme.

Prefixes:
Indeed, profound, resolve, and
unless
Suffixes:
painful, inferiority, lighter, and
suggestion
 SEMANTICS
-determine our reading comprehension, how we
understand others, and even what decisions we make as
a result of our interpretations.

Synonyms are words with similar meaning.

expand: enlarge, dilate

Antonyms are words that have the opposite meaning .

misty: pellucid, unclouded, limpid, clear

Metaphor is an implied comparison using a word to mean

something similar to its literal meaning .

“The close of the afternoon service was a hilly road, where the
bitter winter wind, blowing over a range of snowy summits to
the north, almost flayed the skin from our faces”.
 A simile is a direct comparison using like or as.
“I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged like a Turk;
and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double
retirement”. “All John Reed’s violent tyrannies, all his sisters’ proud indifference, all
his mother’s aversion, all the servants’ partiality, turned up in my disturbed mind like
a dark deposit in a turbid well”. “I heard the rain still beating continuously on the
staircase window, and the wind howling in the grove behind the hall; I grew by
degrees cold as a stone, and then my courage sank”.

A hyperbole is exaggerated statements or claims not

meant to be taken literally.

”Mrs. Reed soon rallied her spirits: she shook me

most soundly, she boxed both my ears, and then left
me without a word”. “I saw a universal manifestation
of discontent when the fumes of the repast met the
nostrils of those destined to swallow it”.
A personification is the attribution of a personal nature
or human characteristics to something nonhuman, or
the representation of an abstract quality in human
form.

“The spoons moved slowly: I saw each girl

taste her food and try to swallow it; but in
most cases the effort was soon relinquished”.
“The clock measured the time duration of
each lesson, which at last struck twelve.
 LEXICOLOGY
-involves the examination of vocabulary in all its aspects: words and their
meanings, how words relate to one another, how they may combine with one
another, and the relationship between vocabulary and other levels of
language.

1. My seat, to which Bessie and the bitter miss abbot had left me
riveted, was a low ottoman near the marble chimney -piece; the bed
rose before me; to my right hand there was the high, dark
wardrobe, with subdued, broken reflections varying the gloss of its
panels; to my left were the muffled windows; a great looking -glass
between them repeated the vacant majesty of the bed and room.

Ottoman
; (Merriam Webster dictionary) a low piece of furniture that has soft
top and that you can put your feet on when you are sitting
;introduced into Europe in the late 18th century from Turkey, where,
piled with cushions, it was the central piece of domestic seating.
 2. .... nestling in a wreath of convolvuli and
rosebuds,
convolvuli ; (finedictionary.com) a twining plant with trumpet-shaped flowers, some
kinds of which (such as bindweed) are invasive weeds, while others, especially
morning glories, are cultivated for their bright flowers.

3. “I will indeed send her to school soon,”

murmured mrs. Reed sotto voce; and gathering up
her work, she abruptly quitted the apartment.

sotto voce

; (etymology) from Italian sotto ‘under’ + voce ‘voice’.

;(Cambridge English dictionary) in a quiet voice so that
only people near can hear
 CONCLUSION
Charlotte Brontë’s romantic gothic novel, featuring one
of literature’s most memorable heroines.In recounting her
story, Jane typically introduces a situation meant to provoke
conventional associations on the part of the reader (to whom,
as to a friend, Jane speaks candidly) and then, within a
paragraph or two, deftly qualifies or refutes it. The narrative’s
dialectic, it might be said, constitutes a plot motion of its own,
quite distinct from Jane’s activities. A thesis of sorts is
presented; but, should we respond to it, the narrator will set us
right: for she is always in control of her narrative. We learn,
with Jane, that what seems to be rarely is; even when Rochester
disguises himself as a fortune-telling gypsy, improbably fooling
his guests, Jane is keen enough to suspect “something of a
masquerade.”