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How does bronte present female characters in jane eyre
The representation of women in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The representation of women in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
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They feasted upon it. They thirsted for it. Society looked down on them for it, but these women remained honey mad, remained desperate for salvation in flavor, and craved salvation in indulgence. Considered half-savage and more than a little deranged, they roamed, free to do what so many of the women in "civilized" society longed to do. In Honey Mad Women: Charlotte Bronte's Bilingual Heroines, Patricia Yaeger hypothesizes that "bilingual heroines... are also honey mad women: women who consume, to excess, the languages designed to consume them" (Yaeger 11). She applies this theory to Charlotte Bronte's heroines, but it is also applicable to other literary works such as The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, The Lais of Marie de France, The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, Lillian Hellman's plays, and the poetry of Sappho and Sylvia Plath.
Yaeger discusses several qualities of the honey-mad woman, and applies them to the female protagonists in Bronte's writing.
[b]y consuming not language, but languages, Bronte's bilingual heroines have discovered an alternative method of placing previously unsymbolized emotions and ideas into practice. The second language serves as an emancipatory function in Bronte's texts enacting a moment in which the novel's primary language is put into process, a moment of possible transformation when the writer forces her speech to break out of old representations of the feminine (Yaeger 12).
Yaeger gives several examples of this in Jane Eyre. First of all, the incident involving the word "slattern" was clearly an empowering moment in the novel. Yaeger explains that the word slattern "denigrates women, [which] calls attention to some slackness of spirit or body not shared by men" (Yaeger 1...
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..., liberation, and consciousness-raising.
Works Cited
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ed. Q.D. Leavis. New York: Penguin, 1966.
de France, Marie. The Lais of Marie de France. Second edition. New York: Penguin Classics, 1999.
Hellman, Lillian. Six Plays by Lillian Hellman. Vintage Books Edition. New York: Random House, 1960.
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. Perennial Classics edition. New York: Harper-Collins, 1999.
Plath, Sylvia. "Last Words.", February 25, 2001. May 07, 2003. http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/lastwords.html
Shikibu, Murasaki. The Tale of Genji. Vintage Classics. New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1985.
Yaeger, Patricia S. "Honey-Mad Women: Charlotte Bronte's Bilingual Heroines." An Annual of Victorian Literary and Cultural History. 14. 1986. p. 11-35.
In Stephen Dunn’s 2003 poem, “Charlotte Bronte in Leeds Point”, the famous author of Jane Eyre is placed into a modern setting of New Jersey. Although Charlotte Bronte lived in the early middle 1800’s, we find her alive and well in the present day in this poem. The poem connects itself to Bronte’s most popular novel, Jane Eyre in characters analysis and setting while speaking of common themes in the novel. Dunn also uses his poem to give Bronte’s writing purpose in modern day.
n a society where the social paradigm where women were solely for the benefit of males and your class was your limiting social factor, Bronte challenges the norms of the 19th century through the creation of a heroine in Jane Eyre. Through her journey through Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, and the Moor House, we as readers witness Jane constantly being ostracised as she chooses happiness over what others feel she should do. She demands respect and is not afraid to be passionate or rebel for what she believes in. Bronte titles this novel as a autobiography and uses it to combat her own life conflicts. She writes under a pseudonym of a male knowing that if she wrote as a women, her work would not be taken seriously. Charlotte uses Jane Eyre and
For readers who observe literature through a feminist lens, they will notice the depiction of female characters, and this makes a large statement on the author’s perception of feminism. Through portraying these women as specific female archetypes, the author creates sense of what roles women play in both their families and in society. In books such as The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the roles that the main female characters play are, in different instances, both comparable and dissimilar.
Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre may be superficially read as simply a sweet romance in which Jane ends up with the man of her dreams after overcoming many obstacles and challenges. But doing so misses the much deeper—richer—messages of Bronte's lasting masterpiece. A more thoughtful reading reveals this novel, especially its heroine Jane, challenging centuries-old gender roles which assume male supremacy, characterizing men as the dominant, more privileged gender, while women are oppressed into inferior and submissive roles. Of course this Victorian novel portrays the expected gender roles of both men and women in 19th century England, but Jane rises out of the patriarchy challenging the social roles assigned her with a personality marked by sass and self-assurance . Ms. Bronte, through Jane, ultimately demonstrates that women can live their lives on equal terms with—or independent of—men.
Relying on her own knowledge of Samuel Johnson’s works, as well as the knowledge of her Victorian readers, Bronte uses ...
This novel was one of the most radical books of the Victorian Era. It portrayed women as equals to men. It showed that it was possible that men could even be worse than women, through John and Jane. It taught the Victorians never to judge a book by its cover. The novel would not be as successful were it not for Charlotte Brontë’s talent in writing, and were it not for the literary devices employed.
Moglen, Helen. "The Creation of a Feminist Myth." Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987. 484-491. Print.
Due to traditional stereotypes of women, literature around the world is heavily male-dominant, with few female characters outside of cliché tropes. Whenever a female character is introduced, however, the assumption is that she will be a strong lead that challenges the patriarchal values. The authors of The Thousand and One Nights and Medea use their female centered stories to prove their contrasting beliefs on the role of women not only in literature, but also in society. A story with a female main character can be seen as empowering, but this is not always the case, as seen when comparing and contrasting Medea and The Thousand and One Nights.
With so many distortions, many readers may not appreciate Brontë's book. She takes common elements and greatly exaggerates them. She turns love into obsessive passion, contempt into lifelong vindictive hatred, and peaceful death into the equivalent of burning in hell. In doing so, she not only loaded the book with emotions, but vividly illustrated the outcome if one were to possess these emotions.
Brennan, Zoe. "Reader's Guide: Bronte's Jane Eyre." Ebrary. Continuum International Publishing 2 2010. Print. April 28, 2014
Bronte is known as one of the first revolutionary and challenging authoress’ with her text Jane Eyre. The society of her time was male dominated, women were marginally cast aside and treated as trophies for their male counterparts. Their main role in life was to be a mother and a wife, “ Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life……the more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it.” A quote from a letter Robert Southey wrote to Bronte. A clear sign of the mentality and opposition Bronte was up against. A woman’s “proper duties” of course being to tend and wait on her “master’s” every whim and need. Women during Bronte’s time had no clear voice, none that was of any merit, they were a silent category of society, silenced by their male oppressors. Bronte’s book was in fact written before the first women’s rights movement had happened, yet it puts forward an image of an independent strong character, of a passionate and almost rebellious nature. A character “refusing subservience, disagreeing with her superiors, standing up for her right’s, and venturing creative thoughts.” I put forward that Bronte throughout her text not only revises the themes of male power and oppression, but reconstructs them also. The text is a female bildungsroman of it’s time, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly tackling the patriarchal view of women.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte is a novel about a woman, Jane, moving from place to place on a path to find her own feeling of independence. Throughout her journey, Jane encounters many obstacles to her intelligence. Male dominance proves to be the biggest obstruction at each stop of Jane's journey. As Jane progressed through the novel her emotional growth was primarily supported by the people and the places she was around. This examination will look for textual support from different sections of Jane Eyre to review how Jane had grown emotionally and intellectually as she moved from location to location, as well as looking at critical analysis from Bronte critics as to how each location plays a role in Jane’s progression.
Throughout both Jane Eyre and Great Expectations the reader can identify many universal themes of the Victorian period. It is shown through the similarities and differences of setting, social and gender mobility, the power of the unconscious, and the main character’s struggles with their internal passions, that Brontë and Dickens’ shared common bases for writing their works of literature.
Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre, is not a book that can easily be viewed through one critical theory. However, by knowing the historical background of when Bronte developed her novel, readers are able to understand Jane Eyre on a deeper level. The Victorian era was a time of change, and what authors like Charlotte Bronte did was help increase the change by shedding light into problems in Victorian society. Jane Eyre touches on many of the issues in Victorian society like feminist issues, class struggles, and the relationship between Britain and its colonies. Not only can readers see how much society has changed, but also the similarities. By understanding the novel at a historical level, readers can understand the novel through the lense