My wife and I noticed while watching a BBC production of Jane Eyre from the 1970s that Rochester consistantly calls Miss Ingram "Dona Biancha." Now, this makes sense since her name is Blanche and the French "blanche" in English is "white." So transposed into Italian we get "Dona Biancha" or "Lady White." However, in English folklore a "white lady:" is a common ghost in old castles or mansions. Thornfield does in fact boast a "white lady," though Mrs. Fairfax tells Jane that she's never heard of the house being haunted. That "white lady" is the very tangible Bertha Mason. This point highlights a close resemblance between Blanche and Bertha. Both are haughty, imperious, locally renowned for their beauty, olive-skinned, and drawn to Rochester. We might say that in choosing Blanche to make Jane jealous, Rochester is also acting out for her a rejection of his first wife as she was in her prime. It seems to be his twisted way of saying (to himself? to her a year after their wedding?) that even were his wife sane and still a beauty, he would infinitly prefer Jane to her.
I needed a break from A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (too many authors and too many styles coming in too fast) so I decided to turn back to an author whose work I've enjoyed exploring: Robert E. Howard. This time, however, I decided to skip over Howard's famous Conan yarns and instead take a look at one of his earlier creations, Solomon Kane. The idea of a puritan occult detective was too intriguing to pass up. I have the whole collection of Kane's tales and I do intend to blog them all. Right now, my little literary detour has only encompassed the first two short stories so I'm going to record my thoughts on them right away and get back to the rest as I have time. Skulls in the Stars Solomon Kane makes his debut with this classic bit of English Gothic including a haunted moor, a vengeful ghost, and a solitary miser. Howard's Kane fits the portrait of the archetypal puritan: grim, principled, metaphysical, with an iron sense of right and wrong. I h...
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