Re-Defining Feminism :jane Eyre

Re-defining Feminism :Jane Eyre

Jane a novel written by Charlotte Bronte which has remained unambiguous and popular at the same time. The time it was written the novel was questioned on the grounds of morality  and ‘is a proof how deeply the love of illegitimate romance is implanted in our nature’. Jane Eyre as a book appeals to different audiences differently and strikes them indefinitely. From a child who reads the book in high school to a university graduate,to great feminists like Elaine Showalter, and critics like Susan Meyer and Elisabeth Bronfen. The novel being auto biographical in nature,where Jane our protagonist takes us the reader into different shades of life . Jane takes us from Gateshead ,to Lowood and to Thornfield Hall across the moor house.

In the whole essay I talk about the imagery used ,the romantic imagery in the novel. Further I proceed to discover Jane as a ‘Feminine Hero’ and the idea of femininity and then I conclude with the surface representation of love in the book .

On the surface level Jane Eyre is a novel that drags us amidst the dark woods of growing up ,adolescence to  an adult who has succeeded in making life better for herself. A popular book which was read by Queen Victoria herself and termed as a  ‘wonderful book’.

Many critics have termed it as a ‘dangerous book,'  and Raymond Williams goes ahead and says, ‘the power of Jane Eyre..needs no further adjectives.’ Critics comment upon the morality,the passionate arguments,the gothic nature of the novel, of “the madwoman on the attic” (Gilbert and Gubar). The other side is seeing the text as a feminist text,the ‘anger ’in the text which Virginia Woolf found and was later explored by many feminist critics. Although we can dissect the text and analyse what the narrator wants to say,in any way possible,be it using the feminist techniques,the marxist,liberal humanism,the structuralist or the post structuralist technique,to unravel the hidden or the unseen. I would still see the text as a simple one,wherein the narrator holds faith and trust in the reader,and trusts him enough to tell her story,without any hesitation and lets the reader judge her. Apart from that when we hand over the text to psychoanalytic analysis by critics like Doreen Roberts,many of the conventions, the cliches are destabilised by her analysis. She question the way our heroine Jane makes her progress from childhood to maturity , which holds the text as a bildungsroman genre,she says the way Jane feels about things when she was a child cannot change the way she sees them when she is an adult. Now moving on to the feminist approach.

But,before that it is important to note the time the novel was set in. The novel “Jane Eyre” was set in 1847. We can set the place of Jane Eyre with two threads,comparing it to the happenings of nineteenth century woman in England and at the same time with the rest of the world ,especially India, which Susan Meyer in her essay “Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre”.

Initially when we talk of the time when the novel came out in 1847,under the masculine pseudonym of Currer Bell,it was received well. But, slowly it was evident the book was in fact written by a woman, who was questioning the society’s double standards. She was in fact fighting for her sex, for equal rights and freedom, of dominance and defined it to a nineteenth century woman how she should behave. It was a class apart for other Bronte novels where we see the heroine pining for her loved one. Here Jane plays by her rules,she does not give up. This is one reason why the text is famous with feminists. The other side to this ,which we know by reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte. She tells us Charlotte was not in favour of women getting the right to vote but she did believe that they should have the right to work. The novel also mirrors Charlotte’s own life ,where she was also a governess,the only occupation considered respectable for middle-class women. We see when Jane comes to Thornfield ,she is relieved and grateful for the equal potion she shares with Mrs.Fairfax. The novel does not hint towards upward mobility but towards mobility of a woman towards being acclaimed and respected. womanhood-the