Medical Lens In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

Analyzing Jane Eyre through the Medical Lens

Jane Eyre is a Victorian Era bildungsroman by Charlotte Brontë that follows the development of the antagonist, Jane, throughout many tribulations reflective of the time period it was written. Focusing on the health criticisms throughout the novel, Alan Bewell’s “Jane Eyre and Victorian Medical Geography” takes an in-depth look at the medical practices of the Victorian Era and how they influenced Brontë’s work. Through a medical historical lens, Alan Bewell analyzes the trends of Victorian Era medicinal practices displayed in Jane Eyre. Applying his understanding of Victorian medical beliefs, Bewell criticizes the Victorian practices that are emphasized by Brontë’s choice of scenery and characters.

In the Victorian Era the practice of defining medical geographies was on the rise. Rather than searching for the cures to diseases, Victorian doctors focused on the classification of areas by health standards. Bewell capitalizes on the “important role that contemporary medical descriptions of "healthy" and "unhealthy" landscapes played in the nineteenth-century understanding of place” and their relation to how Jane Eyre is written (Bewell 774). The medical descriptions of landscapes contributed to public sentiments of areas around them. Places were considered to be disease-ridden due to the “science that sought to map the world's diseases, establishing correlations between the "places" where people lived and the eases from which they suffered” and often suffered with public favorability (Bewell 775). In return, areas were thought as being the source of disease and the efforts of doctors went to providing ways to mitigate the effects of the deleterious areas. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre uses setting to represent the health of areas in which Jane lives or visits. Brontë writes, “We had been

Evident in her use of characters and their physical descriptions, Brontë also aims to criticize the effects of colonialism. In Bewell’s article “Jane Eyre and Victorian Medical Geography” he highlights the question of colonialism in regards to the beliefs of English citizens while he, “[addresses] the question of English colonialism and the related issues of race, class, and gender, therefore, we need to be aware of the extent to which the positions that writers took in relation to these ideas-their politics and geopolitics, in other words-were frequently determined or underwritten by a tacit acceptance or rejection of contemporary medical geography, which argued that the most important question to ask of places was not "Are they pleasant?" but are they "healthy or not?” (Bewell 775). This new perspective on how the English looked at their conquests contributes to the overarching theory on how health could have been affected by outsiders and shaped the minds of citizens. Bewell’s comment highlights how the English viewed lands and people foreign to them in terms of public health and in turn how affects their personal lives. Charlotte Brontë uses characters to demonstrate the sentiments of English citizens towards that of foreigners. Demonstrated in her description of Bertha Mason, Brontë aims to show how foreigners were objectified by