{"id":34612,"date":"2011-03-03T07:33:57","date_gmt":"2011-03-03T12:33:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=34612"},"modified":"2015-06-27T08:33:06","modified_gmt":"2015-06-27T12:33:06","slug":"books-within-books-gullivers-travels-in-jane-eyre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=34612","title":{"rendered":"Books Within Books: Gulliver’s Travels<\/i> in Jane Eyre<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love it when books show up in books, when books play a huge part in a character’s life. Kind of like movies-in-movies<\/a>. In keeping with the Iranian theme here from last week here’s a post I wrote I about people in movies watching movies<\/a>, using Leila<\/i> as an example.<\/p>\n

Early on in Jane Eyre<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, when she is still suffering as a dependent in the Reed household, she asks Bessie, the secretly kind maid, to bring her Gulliver’s Travels<\/a>\"\"<\/i> from the library. Jane has just had a harrowing punishment locked up in the “red room”, where she became so panic-struck that she had to be carried out of there in a dead faint. The psychological effects of that punishment still linger. And Jane, the narrator, far in the future, looking back on her childhood, states, “No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this incident of the red-room: it only gave my nerves a shock, on which I feel the reverberation to this day.”<\/p>\n

So she asks for Gulliver’s Travels<\/i>. I love this section because it shows how books can seemingly change<\/i>, depending on your mental state or phase-of-life when you read them. It’s a perfect description of that phenomenon.<\/p>\n

I put both plate and tart away. Bessie asked if I would have a book: the word book<\/i> acted as a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch Gulliver’s Travels<\/i> from the library. This book I had again and again perused with delight. I considered it a narrative of facts, and discovered in it a vein of interest deeper than what I found in fairy tales: for as to the elves, having sought them in vain among foxglove leaves and bells, under mushrooms and beneath the ground-ivy mantling old wallnooks, I had at length made up my mind to the sad truth, that they were all gone out of England to some savage country where the woods were wilder and thicker, and the population more scant; whereas Lilliput and Brobdingnag being, in my creed, solid parts of the earth’s surface, I doubted not that I might one day, by taking a long voyage, see with my own eyes the little fields, houses, and trees, the diminutive people, the tiny cows, sheep, and birds of the one realm; and the cornfields forest-high, the mighty mastiffs, the monster cats, the tower-like men and women of the other. Yet, when this cherished volume was now placed in my hands – when I turned over its leaves, and sought in its marvellous pictures the charm I had, till now, never failed to find – all was eerie and dreary; the giants were gaunt goblins, the pigmies malevolent and fearful imps, Gulliver a most desolate wanderer in most dread and dangerous regions. I closed the book, which I dared no longer peruse, and put it on the table beside the untasted tart.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n