Jane Eyre Identity Essay

The significance of childhood in the formation of one’s identity is cemented in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre through Jane’s progression from a “poor orphan girl” to an independent and autonomous young women. Similarly, in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, childhood events shaping the fashioning of identity in adult life is evident through Pip’s quest for real gentility in the formation, distortion and redemption of his identity. Both Jane Eyre and Great Expectations feature a bildungsroman or coming-of-age plot where the story of Jane and Pip begins when they are young and progresses through to adulthood.

Greenblatt (year) argues that self-fashioning is the purposeful shaping and expression of identity, including ‘selves’ as a sense of personal order, certain mode of address to

An individual’s self-concept, the sum of one’s thoughts, feelings, and imaginations as to who they are, is also pertinent to the develop of one’s self (11). Burke (1980) supports that an individual’s self-concept has the ability to change based on situational influences (11).

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, is a bildungsroman novel, demonstrating the development of

Jane, the protagonist. It is a coming-of-age novel, where Jane progresses from a “poor orphan child” to an independent and autonomous young woman. Jane’s childhood consisted of continual abuse at the hands of her aunt, Mrs. Reed and her three children, John, Eliza and Georgiana. The opening scene sees Mrs Reed, who, “reclined on a sofa by the fire-side” surrounded by her “darlings about her,” looking “perfectly happy”, rejecting Jane from their company by highlighting her “inferiority” in lacking the “sociable and child-like disposition” that her own children possess. In a society where wealth, relations and connections, status, and education are most valued, “plain” Jane is perceived as lacking and as a result, is