Jane Eyre : A Deep Secret Rooted Within Its Very Foundation

Secrets play a large role in Jane Eyre. Describe two of the most important plot secrets that provide turning points in the novel, and explain how they help or generate suspense or introduce conflict or resolution

Jane Eyre's literary success of the time has been cheaply commercialized. In other words, Bronte's novel never got the appreciation it deserved, in the areas it deserved. Many 19th century critics merely assigned literary themes to their reviews to "get it over with". Critics commended Jane Eyre for everything from its themes to its form. However, their surface examinations amount to nothing without careful consideration of the deeper underlying background in Jane's life where their hasty principles originate. The widely discussed free will of Jane's, her strong individuality, and independence are segments of a greater scheme, her life. For example: Jane's childhood serves as the

for; we are introduced to her from when she is young so we know and

Although she seemed to be the ideal bride, Rochester did not know about the insanity that ran in her family’s blood. But, he soon learned about it as he watched his wife become mad. Desperate, Rochester paid for a caretaker to tend to her in a hidden room in Thornfield Hall.

Through a close reading of the selected passage of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, a reader can see that Jane attempts to separate herself from her decisions by personifying her emotions and giving them a specific voice, which strongly reflects the societal views of the time. At this point in the story, Jane has discovered, on her wedding day, that Mr. Rochester is still married to a woman named Bertha, and that woman still lives in his house. Distraught, Jane locks herself in her room and tries to decide what she should do. When she wakes up the next day, she is again confronted with what she needs to do in the wake of her discovery.

Authors, Jean Rhys and Charlotte Bronte constructed their novels in completely different time periods and came from different influences in writing. Jean Rhys’s fiction book, Wide Sargasso Sea is an interesting relation to Jane Eyre. The female character of Jane Eyre forms into a furiously, passionate, independent young woman. The female character of Jean Rhys’s illustration is a character that Jane will know further on as Rochester’s crazy wife who is bolted in an attic. Jean Rhys further studies this character, where as Charlotte Bronte approved that it was left explained (Thorpe 175). Antoinette, considerably like Jane, evolves in a world with minimal amount of love to offer. Both these women are taken cared of as children by

The theme of isolation is explored in Bronte’s novel; Jane Eyre. This theme is also developed in The Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys. Both pieces present different types of isolation, such as isolation due to location and the isolation of a character due to their social status, such as Jane’s status as a governess. The various ways in which isolation is present in each of the texts show how inescapable and unavoidable isolation is for the characters in both Jane Eyre and The Wide Sargasso, with it being present in such a large way in their lives.

While scholarship on Jane Eyre tends to systematically associate fire with love and passion, the previous reading of Wide Sargasso Sea allows for a different interpretation of this motif within the novel. Interestingly, one of the first examples of this theme is the character of Helen Burns. Her name itself is connected to fire, and could be a way to foreshadow the end of the novel. More than foreshadowing, however, Helen is to Jane a foil of what Tia is to Antoinette. Jane too admires her friend’s freedom, but Helen’s freedom is spiritual when Tia’s is physical.

Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea follows the story of Antoinette Mason, who is widely known to mirror the character of Jane Eyre. In this novel, Antoinette, a white women with European descent born in West Indies during the post-emancipation era, struggles to fit into her surrounding and discover a sense of self. While most literary critics view Antoinette’s story as an example of someone who breaks free from society’s shackles that bind her and restrict her freedom, I believe this is a story of woman’s fall into the realms of insanity due to male superiority. Although this novel is successful in providing a backstory and painting a picture of an otherwise minor character in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the protagonist herself may have failed

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it,” stated Herman Melville. As implied, without theme, no novel can be considered “mighty” or have any depth. Theme is essential in any work of art. Jane Eyre is a novel by Charlotte Brontë that takes the reader through the experiences of Jane Eyre, from childhood to adulthood. This includes her love for Mr. Rochester, who is the master of Thornfield Hall, the school in which Jane works at as an adult. Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel by Jean Rhys, includes

“One is very crazy when in love” (Freud). Freud made this statement nearly one hundred years ago. As one of the founders of modern psychology what would he have to say about the mad woman in the attic? Was she mad, in love, suffering from hysteria, or simply a product of nature versus nurture? Neither of which were very kind to her. In Jane Eyre we as the readers are presented with a singular perspective in nearly true to form autobiographical narrative. From Jane’s viewpoint and from a mid 19th century depiction of mental illness, the original Mrs. Rochester is hardly a person to sympathize with. Yet there is much more to this tale that is desperately begging

   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.

In 1966, Jean Rhys published her novel ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’. The story depicts the life of Antoinette Cosway, her marriage to a mysterious Englishman, and her eventual descent into madness. The story is a prequel to ‘Jane Ayre’ by Charlotte Brontë, and gives the woman in the attic a voice. This essay looks at the use of narrative in ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’, and evaluates how this informs the interpreted meaning of the text.

Education serves as an influential period in every child’s life, as it teaches young adolescents skills and principles that allow them to prosper as an adult. The importance of education transcends through time periods, apparent in the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë in which the eight years Jane spends at Lowood Institution plays an undeniable role in her character development. Jane’s time at Lowood inculcated values of modesty and restraint into her lifestyle and also caused her to view God as a guardian figure.

The discussion about intertextuality shows that both these two novels contain feminism thoughts, just as Wang Tao’s study has supported that Wide Sargasso Sea is the transcendence of Jane Eyre at the reflection of feminism thoughts. If further explore, we can see that enough researches have been done to dig out the hidden ideas in the two novels. Liu Liang has “made a comparison of womanhood in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea by probing into their different attitudes towards patriarchy and sex to find the difference between modern feminism and older feminism”(129). The different experiences of the two heroines indicates that Jane Eyre contains the traditional feminism that women should pursuit equality at work opportunity, while Wide Sargasso Sea