Jane Eyre's Quest For Identity

Jane Eyre is a personal journey for independence and belonging in an extremely unpleasant society. Jane Eyre is very distinctive from other romantic pieces of the era, in the fact that it portrays a woman searching for equality and dignity through independence from those who treat her as a second hand citizen. Finding independence is Jane’s only way to combat the situation she is stuck in time and time again throughout her life. Throughout Jane Eyre, Jane, attempts to find independence and a sense of belonging, while also attempting to form open and equal relationships.

Jane is an intelligent, honest, plain-featured young girl forced to contend with oppression, inequality, and hardship. Although she meets with a series of individuals who threaten her autonomy, Jane repeatedly succeeds at asserting herself and maintains her principles of justice, human dignity, and morality. She also values intellectual and emotional fulfilment. Her strong belief in gender and social equality challenges the Victorian prejudices against women and the poor.

difficult it was in the Victorian time for a woman to find a job and

Women in the Victorian era were supposed to be passive, pure, and idle; were not to be well educated; and were expected to marry.  Throughout Brontë's novel, Jane Eyre learns the realities of these social expectations and directly and indirectly speaks against them.

In its simplest form, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre tells the story of a young woman, Jane Eyre, who grows up poor, makes the decision to be independent, does so, and, eventually, marries rich. The novel follows her from her childhood to her reunion with the love of her life and she, throughout it, deals with classism and sexism and exhibits her own form of feminism. By the end, it becomes clear that, with this semi-autobiographical novel, Charlotte Bronte was providing a criticism on society’s discrimination toward those of a lower class, a subtle argument against the male-dominated society’s treatment of women, and an even subtler call to action for women to find their own agency outside of the men in their lives. On another end, however,

Femininity runs throughout the work of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. A variety of figures illustrate behaviors that Jane observes growing up. There are a number of positive role models that portray how to be a woman not just in the 19th century but in modern-day time. On the flip side there are role models that exemplify socially and morally unacceptable traits. Jane is a growing embodiment of both the good and bad mystique. But is there a right way to be a woman? The good of one person reflects on the rest of the population. What more for a woman to act one way and have it represent the rest of her kind? During Jane’s childhood, Mrs. Reed and Ms. Temple establish two distinct platforms of femininity. One platform values the virtues of compassion

The novel, Jane Eyre, can be seen as a struggle of Jane Eyre for finding her true ‘individuated self’. She resists the conventions by getting her female agency and her ability to signify within the patriarchal chain of signification. In order to get female-subjectivity, she undergoes self-castration through an act of displacement and resistance. On her quest for acquiring ‘self-realization’ and ‘self-certainty’ , she remains true to herself by putting herself first and caring for her own individual feelings and emotions. Even though she is longing for love and kinship, she never compromises her individual self-consciousness. She takes a heroic journey from being a marginalized character in the beginning of the novel towards a free, self-made individuated character. Instead of submitting to the dictates of the ‘Ideal Victorian social consciousness’, by sacrificing/compromising her self-esteem and self-respect, she is constantly on guard of her ‘Individual self-consciousness’. During this process of achieving and protecting her self-consciousness, she goes through

Jane Eyre, often interpreted as a bildungsroman, or a coming-of-age story, goes further than the traditional “happy ending,” commonly represented by getting married. Instead, the novel continues beyond this romantic expectation to tell full the story of Jane’s life, revealing her continual dissatisfaction with conventional expectations of her social era; as a result, many literary critics have taken it upon themselves to interpret this novel as a critique of the rigid class system present in 19th century Victorian society. One literary critic in particular, Chris R. Vanden Bossche, analyzes Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre through a Marxist lens, asserting the importance of class structure and social ideology as historical context and attributing this to the shaping of the novel as a whole. This approach of analysis properly addresses Brontë’s purposeful contrast of submission and rebellion used to emphasize Jane’s determined will for recognition as an equal individual.

The status quo is challenged by strong woman who refuse to conform to society’s expectations. These woman were not content being dominated by men and being forced to hold back their opinions. In Jane Eyre, we see a very strong and independent woman who freely expresses her thoughts and opinions, the opposite to a stereotypical Victorian woman. She is abolished from her aunt’s house due to her ‘bad’ behaviour. Woman of this era were expected to marry and they had no choice in the matter.

Imagine being an orphan, having no connections with family whatsoever, and being burdened with the idea that you will not be able to accomplish anything; how would you feel? How would you appeal to others? By a combination of analytical criticism and a close reading of Jane Eyre, the aim of this essay is to analyze how Jane’s identity evolves during her quest for love and independence and what influence the relationship with Mr. Rochester, and patriarchal traits has on her identity. Throughout the novel Jane Eyre, the theme of identity develops during her search for love and independence is strongly conveyed through the narrative strategy of Jane, as we follow the protagonist’s development from childhood to becoming a young woman.

Sharp flecks of metal and splintered wood rained onto the stone floor of Wolstencroft and into Jane’s face. She squeezed her eyes shut as she fell backward and smeared the blood across her face in a diagonal line, stinging as the shards sliced deeper in. She wiped away the stuck pieces as the smell of rotten garbage overwhelmed her and fumbled around the dusty-aired hall, fingers trailing across the shaking walls and rumbling floor boards. There was too much filth and chaos for her to see anything, but it didn’t take long before West found her.

In Grier English classes, we have discussed about the change of identity in many different books, for example, Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. Sometimes, the mental activities experienced by the characters that are facing great transformations resonate with our life. Within all of these books we read and suffered through with countless tests and projects, I find a very important lesson in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

“ . . . Women feel just as men feel . . . they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation . . . ” (Brontë 129-130). Charlotte Brontë, one of six Brontë siblings, was a feminist author who lived and wrote during the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was a time when England was going through a slow but significant change, mainly surrounding the Industrial Revolution, but still preceding the days of any major feminist movements. Brontë was angered that she had to write under a fake male name in order to have Jane Eyre published and read. Nevertheless, she was still completely focused on addressing issues concerning women, education, and marriage. Combining these topics, she produced one of the most popular novels in

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a novel that has a deep secret rooted within its very foundation. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea often seen as a prequel to Jane Eyre (as it is set a time that precedes the events of the novels) sets out to unearth the secrets that are hidden within Jane Eyre; it fills in the chasm that exists in Jane Eyre by providing the history of Edward Rochester’s Creole wife Bertha Mason nee Antoinette Cosway. In a 1979 interview with Elizabeth Vreeland Rhys explained her reason for writing Wide Sargasso Sea:

A feminist is a person whose beliefs and behavior are based on feminism (belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes). Jane Eyre is clearly a critique of assumptions about both gender and social class. It contains a strong feminist stance; it speaks to deep, timeless human urges and fears, using the principles of literature to chart the mind?s recesses. Thus, Jane Eyre is an epitome of femininity - a young independent individual steadfast in her morals and has strong Christian virtues, dominant, assertive and principled. That itself is no small feat.