Difficult Words
- Damask - reversible fabric
- Marseilles – thick cotton fabric with a raised pattern. Also, a city in France.
- Consternation – sudden dismay
- Uncongenial – Well, congenial means favorable, so basically? Uncongenial = Sucky.
Audra’s Slang Summary
So, off to the red-room Jane was dragged. Red.
For blood….and hate….and (mostly) for all the red stuff in the
room. Why does this room matter? Oh, here’s the fun part. Mrs. Reed chose to lock Jane up in this room
because she knew it would scare Jane….because it was haunted. Or, at least, somebody had died in it. No one went
into that room, unless there were too many people staying in the house to avoid
it. Imagine being that lucky houseguest: “Thank
you so much, Mrs. Reed, for putting us up!
I’m just gonna go sleep in the hall…”
Turns out, Mr. Reed – Jane’s awesome (truly, he was awesome)
uncle on her mother’s side – was the one who died in it. Specifically, he died in the bed. And Jane was thrust into a chair directly
before the bed of death. To stare at it.
Just for fun.
So, Jane is (understandably) freaked out. She starts imagining that her angst will call
her dead uncle back from the grave to seek vengeance on his wife for not
keeping her promise to raise Jane as her own child….and this is a horrible idea
to her. Apparently, Jane dislikes ghosts
even more than Mrs. Reed. She tries to
calm herself down, but it just doesn’t work.
She screams to be released!...but, alas.
Mrs. Reed forces her back into the make-shift dungeon (after one of the
servants opened the door to see what was up), and locks her in for another hour….but
Jane doesn’t remember that hour. She
blacks out instead. (Thank goodness.)
Interesting Stuff, Inspired by the Book
Red Room
There was a “red room” at my grandma’s house. It wasn’t haunted. In fact, it had the best bed in the house, and
red blackout curtains that allowed you to comfortably sleep all day if you didn’t
smell fresh-baked cookies…it was awesome to get to stay in the red room. That’s right, Mrs. Reed, my grandma’s red
room was WAY better than yours! Also,
she’s nice. And a real person. So, take that!
Garters
Bessie and Abbot’s threat to tie Jane down with Abbot’s
garters made me wonder: What was the purpose of garters before now? Well, the answer is rather obvious, really,
if you think about where the garter is worn in today’s wedding tradition – it was
to hold up stockings before the invention of elastic.
Elastic was invented in 1820 by Thomas Hancock. Therefore, garters were not made of elastic
before then, and probably weren’t wide-spread for quite some time after that,
especially in the working class. (This
is just speculation, but is an instance in which my thoughts are enough to
convince me of something, and so I stop researching…)
Since this book was first published in 1847, and is being
presented as a first-hand account of Jane Eyre’s history, it stands to reason
that Abbot’s garters would, in fact, have been used to hold her stockings in
place on her “stout legs”. They just might have kept Jane in place too…since,
as I understand it, they would not have been stretchy.
TANGENT! Since 2013 is a couple of years after 1820, we have elastic now...and rubber bands. And magic tricks using them. Here's a video of a cool rubber band trick, and how to do it! :)
No comments:
Post a Comment