Essay on A Comparison of Love in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea

Jane is desperate for love and therefore her vibrant passion creates her vivid personality. Charlotte Bronte’s writing style is complex, and emotion filled. Her sentences are contain numerous adjectives and sensual images. Brontes unique style is powerful and strong and filled with emotion and imagery as we captures in the life of Jane eyre. Jane is a strong willed and a strong-minded individual which shines through even at her earliest years. Living a Gateshead, Jane displayed her strong nature. For example, Charlotte writes about Jane after she was hit by her cousin, “my blood was still warm; the mood of the revolted slave was still bracing me with its bitter vigor." (p. 22)

   Jane Eyre, from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Antoinette Mason, from Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, both depict very different creeds. While Bronte created Jane with a Christian background, Rhys has birthed Antoinette into a more primitive, confused faith. Analyzing each writer's description of the red room will reveal the religious nature of their characters.

Reed--the woman whom conducted Jane prior to her schooling--slowly passed into the afterlife, Jane gingerly urges her aunt to love her in her death. She pleaded the dying woman to understand that she would not have hated her, would have loved her, if her aunt had so given her the possibility--she did not. Though--even by her deathbed--Jane Eyre disliked the woman wholeheartedly, she allowed her the peace of forgiveness and understanding that maturity had brought about to her through both her age and experience in love. She no longer found any anger, only sympathy towards the pathetic

In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Jane is an orphan who is often mistreated by the family and other people who surround her. Faced with constant abuse from her aunt and her cousins, Jane at a young age questions the treatment she receives: "All John Reed’s violent tyrannies, all his sister’s proud indifference, all his mother’s aversion, all the servants’ partiality, turned up in my disturbed mind like a dark deposit in a turbid well. Why was I always suffering, always brow-beaten, always accused, forever condemned?" (27; ch. 2). Despite her early suffering, as the novel progresses Jane is cared for and surrounded by various women who act as a sort of "substitute mother" in the way they guide,

How Charlotte Bronte Creates Sympathy for Jane in the First Two Chapters of the Novel

Violence is the most recurrent gothic convention used in Jane Eyre, which is prominent in Charlotte Brontë's effective development of the novel and the character of Jane Eyre, who, throughout this novel, is searching for a home in which she would have a sense of belonging and love which would ultimately resolve this exact unfulfilled need she had as a child. The neglect she experienced in her childhood is manifested in the way she is treated by her aunt, Mrs. Reed, as in the first page of the novel Jane Eyre admits: ‘Me, she had dispensed from joining the group, saying, 'She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance’’. This opening shows how there is a clear line of separation drawn between Jane and her relatives due to her complicated family background which consequently results in their reluctance to accept her into their environment. These complications lead to her maltreatment, which also adds on to the violence she experiences acting as a catalyst for the development of the character and her subconscious quest.

Although Bertha’s seclusion is a result of her insanity and unacceptable behaviour, Jane’s isolation seems to be the cause of some mental illness, throwing her into a panic attack in the red room where she believes her Uncle Reed’s ghost dwells. It must be noted, though, that Jane is a child at this point in the novel, with an active imagination. Bronte may be making a point then, that children should not be shunned for their inventiveness and imagination, as was so common in her day. However, there is a fine line, and socially acceptable age, that separates a healthy imagination from madness. There is a clear lack of this knowledge in Bertha, whom does not appear to have a firm grip on reality. Madness, however, does not merely deal with concepts of reality in “Jane Eyre.” Jane has bouts of uncontrollable speech, in which she must say what comes to her mind. Jane first loses control of her tongue in chapter IV, in which she accuses Mrs. Reed of wishing her dead, and later exclaims “I am not deceitful: if I were, I should say I loved you; but I declare, I do not love you: I dislike you the worst of anybody in the world except John Reed,” and goes on to evaluate the terrible treatment Mrs. Reed has given her, and the lack of love and compassion she has been shown while at Gateshead. In this instance, madness works in Jane’s favour. This temporary bout of mania allows Jane to finally express the

In the novel by Charlotte Bronte, "Jane Eyre", there is a constant battle of love versus autonomy in Jane, the main character. At points Jane feels as if she would give anything to be loved. Yet over the course of the book Jane needs to learn how to gain affection of others without sacrificing something in return.

Throughout Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë uses the character Jane as a tool to comment on the oppression that women were forced to endure at the time. Jane can be seen as representative of the women who suffered from repression during the Victorian period, a time when patriarchy was commonplace. Brontë herself was affected by the time period, because according to Wolfe, she was deprived “experience and intercourse and travel.” (70) Thus Jane offers a unique perspective as a woman who is both keenly aware of her position and yet trapped by it despite repeated attempts to elevate herself and escape the burden placed on by her different suitors. Although superficially it seems that Jane wants to break away from the relationships that further

Jane’s foster family, the Reeds, restrict her rights, refusing to treat her as an equal to the other members of the family. Jane, at a mere eight years old, is chastised by Mrs. Abbott, the nanny, who asserts, “you are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep” (Bronte 11). When Rochester imprisons Antoinette in England, he deprives her of any sense of humanity. The people in their lives who yielded power over them unjustly repressed both women.

Jane Eyre was born an orphan and raised under the hands of a heartless Aunt. Aunt Reed stressed to Jane that she was privileged to live so well without any

   Jean Rhys' complex text, Wide Sargasso Sea, came about as an attempt to re-invent an identity for Rochester's mad wife, Bertha Mason, in Jane Eyre, as Rhys felt that Bronte had totally misrepresented Creole women and the West Indies: 'why should she think Creole women are lunatics and all that? What a shame to make Rochester's wife, Bertha, the awful madwoman, and I immediately thought I'd write a story as it might really have been.' (Jean Rhys: the West Indian Novels, p144).  It is clear that Rhys wanted to reclaim a voice and a subjectivity for Bertha, the silenced Creole, and to subvert the assumptions made by the Victorian text.  She does so with startling results.

Charlotte Bronte created one of the first feminist novels--Jane Eyre--of her time period when she created the unique and feminist female heroine, Jane Eyre. Throughout the novel, Jane becomes stronger as she speaks out against antagonists. She presses to find happiness whether she is single or married and disregards society’s rules. The novel begins as Jane is a small, orphan child living with her aunt and cousins due to the death of her parents and her uncle. Jane 's aunt--Mrs. Reed--degrades her as she favors her biological children. Jane 's aunt--Mrs. Reed--degrades her as she favors her biological children. Her cousin--John Reed--hits her and then Mrs. Reed chooses to punish her instead and sends her to the room in which her uncle

If we look at the world, through Jane's eyes we see that she is a

Physical isolation is present in both texts, with Jane in Jane Eyre and Antoinette in the Wide Sargasso Sea experiencing absolute isolation