...writers to speak for the oppressed women and because of that, “Jane Eyre” becomes the most influential novel due to Charlotte’s outspokenness. Jane Eyre is constantly belittled by male figures in her life. Even at a young age, Jane was looked down upon because she was a woman. John Reed and Mr. Brocklehurst degrade Jane to make sure she remains passive and obedient to men. When Jane answers to Mr. Brocklehurst telling him she does not...
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...Holloway English 4 9 December 2015 Social Statuses in Jane Eyre In Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the main character Jane is an orphan who lives with her very rich aunt. In the book, the issue of social status and slavery comes into play, and Jane encounters these different status’s and even in conflict trying to determine her own. Many times within the book, her social status changes and her perspective of who she is, compared to the other around her, is constantly changing. The lowest social status that someone is affiliated with in the book is that of a slave or that of a servant. Jane had many interactions with servants throughout her life. However Jane was not condescending toward the servants that she encountered. She treated them...
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...Reading Jane Eyre definitely proved to me that it is called a classic for a reason. It had profound techniques in conveying her points of view, which seems very personal. Although it was a long read, it had such quality and expertise, and the mystery of it all had kept me with it all. I try to stay positive before reading my book, but my feelings were a little mixed in the beginning; this novel has a monumental amount of prestige, but it does have some years behind it. I am so glad to have had the opportunity to give it a chance and experience the rhythmic tune this novel had. Jane Eyre made me think about our society as a whole; many of the issues considered in the text are very true now. The world still has class issues, as well as gender inequality and the fact that two centuries have gone by...
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...the definition of beauty. Does inner or outer beauty matter more? A female’s inner beauty has not always been appreciated by either sex, so women struggled to define it themselves. In literature, this is a commonly explored theme. In Jane Eyre, the protagonist Jane, abandons her desire for outer beauty and trades it for working on her inner qualities. She then sees herself as beautiful. She placed a higher value on her philosophy and knowledge before her value of outer appearances. The lessons from her childhood focused on outer beauty and were reinforced as she reached her adulthood. In each hardship Jane encountered, her inner beauty outweighed her external appearance. In the end, she was rewarded with a man who loves her for what she offered internally....
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...J GNST 200 Term Paper Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë One of the most brilliant works of Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre was published in 1847 during a time when women were considered social embellishments, and nothing more than offspring bearers for that matter. She defied these beliefs by doing something no women did in that time, write. This book was revolutionary, especially since the release of Jane Austen’s works, which had a lot more of a happy ending feel that were published a century before. Charlotte Brontë and her sisters Emily and Anne, wrote novels that were much more dark and mysterious. Jane Eyre became one of the most successful novels of its era. This novel is set in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and depicts themes such as social class, religion, and gender relations. The novel is a hybrid of three genres: a romantic novel, a bildungsroman novel, and a gothic novel. Each of these genres are used in Jane Eyre, and rightfully so. They help to tell the story of Jane Eyre’s life in the most mysterious, sometimes supernatural, and retrospective way. I believe that Charlotte Brontë depicted her life through the novel of Jane Eyre, she did this by using her own experiences in life, namely through some key developments from her life translated into Jane Eyre’s life. Jane Eyre and Charlotte Brontë embody each others lives. This is clear through all the similarities between the novel and real life. Some examples of these are: both Jane and Charlotte being...
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...Hide the Crazy Woman - The Figure of Bertha in Jane Eyre Introduction Over the time various famous and not so famous literary personalities have suffered from mental breakdowns. Very often writers themselves have written through their own “madness” and produced mad characters as a result. This is particularly true of many of the leading figures in Modernism, who all seem to have had some odd character traits. But even before Modernism the madman/woman was a very popular figure in literature. Just think of Shakespeare’s famous plays, where we encounter lunatics en masse. One of the most famous madwomen in English literature is Bertha, the locked up wife of Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre. In this paper I will look at Victorian madness in general and at the figure Bertha more closely. Furthermore I will also look, from a somewhat feminist perspective, at Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel in which Jean Rhys takes up the figure of Bertha again. I shall try to explain this rewriting of a canonical text in a postcolonial context. Historical Madness Early in the Victorian period the madness seems to be lurking in the shadows – especially in gothic fiction, but then madness was very much on everybody’s mind in those days. The Lunatics Act of 1845 required that all counties should have mental asylums, and this led to an enormous increase of mental patients admitted to public care.[1] Before that it was not unusual for husbands to “shut up” their madwomen behind...
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...Summary: This paper discusses the ending of Jane Eyre, discussing whether it is a “good” ending. The paper draws on three criticisms of both the novel and Romantic literature in general to conclude that, yes, it is indeed a good ending because it both fits the prevailing realism of the main character’s worldview, and conforms to the predominant literary trends of the period. A Romantic Ending In An Anti-Romantic Novel: Does Jane Eyre End Well? This paper discusses the ending of Jane Eyre, discussing whether it is a “good” ending. The paper draws on three criticisms of both the novel and Romantic literature in general to conclude that, yes, it is indeed a good ending because it both fits the prevailing realism of the main character’s worldview, and conforms to the predominant literary trends of the period. The climate in which Charlotte Bronte wrote her magnum opus was one that had almost fully recovered from the rationalist excesses of the Enlightenment. The existing climate had replaced ‘scientific’ realism with Romanticism of the Byronic sort, drawing on the ancient ideals of chivalry and the new ideals of individual freedom to craft a literature in which suffering does not end with the last romantic sunset. Ultimately, concepts such as happiness cannot be guaranteed to skeptics like Jane Eyre and “hideous” men like Rochester -- only the divine union of passion can be guaranteed. Yet, for Bronte’s characters, this is sufficient reward and an appropriate...
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...novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. However, from all their criticisms in “Infection in the Sentence” what interested me the most was the one criticism that they had made on Victorian women writers depicting female characters as either the angel or as the monster of the story. This was widely evident in Jane Eyre where both Jane in her childhood and Bertha after marriage are depicted as madwomen. According to Gilbert and Gubar’s perception, nineteenth-century women writers did this to maintain womanhood for themselves and their heroines. This was something exceptionally different from the traditional male writers’ use of dichotomy (Hart 77). On the contrary to this dichotomy, in Jane Eyre I found that Jane was not just limited to being this monstrous image since she also had a more angelic and dispassionate side after Lowood. As a result, similar to what Gilbert and Gubar had discovered, Bronte did not blend in with the male literature dichotomy (what is the male literature dichotomy?), but rather decided to merge the two traits in her protagonist Jane Eyre and showed that Bertha was her dark double (Hart 77). Therefore, by providing personal perspectives from Jane Eyre and relating them to Gilbert and Gubar’s theory, this paper will try to prove that indeed Bertha Mason was the ultimate madwoman figure that Bronte had illustrated in a methodical and deliberate manner: by first developing the character and second by creating a dark double which Bronte herself and Jane could...
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...What has Jane Eyre learnt at Lowood? Importance of Education Jane greets this new stage of her life with excitement, as it represents an escape from the family home where she has suffered such unhappiness. She has realised from an early age that for a poor and friendless girl like herself, life offers few possibilities: " ‘If I had anywhere else to go, I should be glad to leave it; but I can never get away from Gateshead till I am a woman’ " (chapter 3). Thus Mrs Reed, in her haste to be rid of the responsibility of a child she so dislikes, unwittingly hands Jane a priceless asset for the Victorian woman: an education. Harsh Conditions at Lowood Jane soon finds that the conditions at Lowood are unforgiving. The school is run by a Mr Brocklehurst, who believes that the lower class girls who constitute his pupils are unworthy of kind or generous treatment: “it was bitter cold, and I dressed as well as I could for shivering, and washed when there was a basin at liberty, which did not occur soon, as there was but one basin to six girls, on the stands down the middle of the room” (chapter 5). Food is also in short supply, “a thin oaten cake shared into fragments” or inedible porridge, “a nauseous mess; burnt porridge is almost as bad as rotten potatoes; famine itself soon sickens over it. The spoons were moved slowly: I saw each girl taste her food and try to swallow it; but in most cases the effort was soon relinquished. Breakfast was over, and none had breakfasted”...
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...Secrets Have Consequences In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the main characters Jane Eyre, Edward Rochester, and Jane’s aunt, Mrs. Reed, learn that one lie or secret can accumulate into many lies or secrets and affects everyone around them as time progresses. In the beginning of the story Jane’s aunt, Mrs. Reed, hides things from Jane as a child, which affects her as a young adult, and Jane learns the secret of Thornfield which not only changes her life, but many others as well. In other words, characters’ lives, personalities, and so much more can change due to lies and secrets, just how Mrs. Reed keeps secrets and lies to Jane as a child that affect her as a young adult. Initially, Mrs. Reed kept secrets and lied to Jane as a young child to not allow Jane to have a good life as a child, and an adult due to her jealousy. For an example, as a child, Jane was punished for actions she did not do, but her cousin John did and got away with because of Mrs. Reed’s jealously. As her punishment, she was sent to the red-room which frightened Jane because her uncle, Mr. Reed, passed away in it. In the red-room there was a secret drawer in the closet. Inside of the secret drawer there were papers, clothes, a jewel-casket, a portrait of Mr. Reed, “and in those last words lies the secret of the red-room—the spell which kept it so lonely in spite of its grandeur” (8). While Jane was in the red-room she began to wonder why she deserved such awful treatment and what has she done to her aunt...
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...Patriarchal Oppression and Cultural Discrimination in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea “In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different” (Coco Chanel) “We may have all come in different ships but we’re in the same boat now” (Martin Luther King, Jr.) “Share our similarities, celebrate our differences” (Morgan Scott Peck) These quotations, which were uttered in the 20th century, have in common that to be different is regarded not only as tolerable but also as something that should be pursued. Also, they reflect the process of increasing tolerance towards females and foreigners, which in many countries has taken place during the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, with the result that, today, these two groups are widely, although by far not entirely, regarded as equal. However, only two centuries ago, people who were different or ‘other’ were considered subordinate or even frightening, and in the 19th century, this was true for both females and people from the orient or colonized people (Barry 134, 193). In Jane Eyre (JE), published in 1847, and in Wide Sargasso Sea (WSS), the prequel or paraquel of JE that was written about one hundred years later and published in 1966, the two female protagonists, Jane, a female orphan, and Antoinette, a female Creole, struggle against displacement and patriarchal oppression and, in Antoinette’s case, also against imperialistic domination. In JE, the reader learns that Jane can handle this pressure whereas Antoinette/Bertha1...
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...Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë An Electronic Classics Series Publication Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë is a publication of the Pennsylvania State University. This Portable Document file is furnished free and without any charge of any kind. Any person using this document file, for any purpose, and in any way does so at his or her own risk. Neither the Pennsylvania State University nor Jim Manis, Faculty Editor, nor anyone associated with the Pennsylvania State University assumes any responsibility for the material contained within the document or for the file as an electronic transmission, in any way. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, the Pennsylvania State University, Electronic Classics Series, Jim Manis, Faculty Editor, Hazleton, PA 18202-1291 is a Portable Document File produced as part of an ongoing student publication project to bring classical works of literature, in English, to free and easy access of those wishing to make use of them. Cover Design: Jim Manis Copyright © 2003 - 2012 The Pennsylvania State University is an equal opportunity university. Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë PREFA PREFACE A PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION of Jane Eyre being unnecessary, I gave none: this second edition demands a few words both of acknowledgment and miscellaneous remark. My thanks are due in three quarters. To the Public, for the indulgent ear it has inclined to a plain tale with few pretensions. To the Press, for the fair field its honest suffrage...
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...levels of understanding. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte has stood the test of time due to its impact on society, masterfully utilized motifs, and the continued relevance Bronte’s message has to readers. Emma, by Jane Austen will weather time equally as well as Jane Eyre, as both of the novels display incredible use of language in their distinctly different criticisms of English society in the 19th century. Both Authors employ motifs as a way to express dissatisfaction with society...
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...The husband was perceived as the person to obtain all control. Women's roles revolved around the four characteristics of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. These roles are all extremely demeaning and exhausting ones to have follow through with. However, it created fewer divorce cases between couples compared to modern society. During the Victorian Era, divorce cases were handled by the Church of England; which made it even more difficult due to how poor it was viewed as by most. The literature of the time shows us a few examples of couples trapped in marriages. One of the most famous being Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë....
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...Q2: Comparison of Jane Eyre and “Goblin Market” Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” are both texts written in the Victorian period. They both carry similar themes of the evils of patriarchy and the importance of empowering women to assert their identity in this time period. Both Jane Eyre and Laura are characters that are affected by the issues that mainly affected women in the male-dominated Victorian society. This is clearly portrayed when the men in both texts try to confine women physically and emotionally through deception and force. The different portrayal of both male and female characters also plays a very important role in communicating these issues. Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” can be read as a criticism of Victorian arrangement of marriage. She stresses the importance of women’s friendship as the main agent that can help in fighting against or changing society’s exploitation of women. The two sisters represent two different kinds of women; Lizzie, the submissive ones and Laura, those that fought against patriarchy, and the goblins represent the patriarchal system. It shows that women can control their destinies, gain some level of independence, and avoid society’s oppressive rules and work towards their liberation and happiness. In the Victorians society men where more educated, powerful and rich hence they dominated women. Women were subjugated to the home as housewives whilst their husbands earned money for the family. This gave the men even more...
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