Jane's Idealism: The Victorian Moral Code For Women

She is constantly changing positions of class to manipulate her surroundings and her current situation (Vanden Bossche 47). The article briefly elaborates on the concept of bildung[sroman], which “suggests that the Jane who has learned the importance of financial independence must be regressing if she makes a decision that limits that independence” however, Vanden Bossche proposes to perceive these actions as “making her choices strategically, not solely on the basis of a continuous identity but also in relation to her changing circumstances” (Vanden Bossche 58). The bildungsroman novel, Jane Eyre, revolves around how Jane’s struggles of class discourse and her ability to adjust to the current situation affect her throughout her youth. While Vanden Bossche does address the bildungsroman perspective of the novel, he fails to go further in depth of how it affects her societal standing and economic wealth and her path to independency. As exhibited in Bronte’s novel, Jane Eyre, Jane uses her ability to strategically manipulate her situation and adapt easily to any particular class in order to become independent. Along with these qualities Jane is also driven by passion, stubbornness, and a will to prove that she, like everyone else, is “a human being with an independent will” (Brontë 258). Throughout the

During the Victorian period, upper and middle class men and women existed in different spheres of life: the private sphere, and the public sphere. The private sphere, which included taking care of the home, entertaining guests, and raising children was dominated by women. Meanwhile men were superior in the public sphere, where they took part in politics and business. This lead to the archetypes of women being fragile and motherly, controlled by their emotions, and of men being rational and strong. Social norms, supported by laws, viewed women as “relative creatures” that were below men in the natural hierarchy and only defined in reference to men. These two ideas towards women created a gap of equality for women and constricted them to their sphere of domesticity. The suffrage movement, followed by the first and second waves of feminism gave rise to many civil rights for women, narrowing the gap of inequality. The quest for equality continues today, as these two spheres begin to merge, due to the rise in social media and the subsequent decreasing private life, and women gain more influence in the public sphere. While the forms of inequality are different and an issue for both genders, the Victorian ideas are still present and prominent today.

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is a novel which incorporates gothic features, in an otherwise realist narrative in order to highlight certain realist issues which Jane is forced to encounter in her 'auto-biographical', bildungsroman of a nineteenth-century woman. This is done by including mystery and supernatural characteristics in her experiences in both The Reed Household's 'red room' and Thornfield Hall. Bronte's writing works in a way which allows for us to explore many of the times contemporary issues which faced the protagonist, Jane and how she begins to break them down and understand them herself, by allowing for us to view these issues through the medium of the books gothic moments. By including these, supernatural and somewhat haunting contributions from the gothic entries we are able to explore Jane's desires and passions in a more subjective manner. Her willingness to seek out the seemingly supernatural in Thornfield Hall's attic indicates to us as readers that Jane does not feel content in conforming to the usual responses found in most gothic genres, fear, but instead caters toward her own curiosity and want for excitement.

Jane Eyre’s life was full of oppression, neglect and sorrow. The novel was formed around a few main ideas. One of those would be the search of love and acceptance. Jane wanted to find a family so desperately and she wanted to belong to people. More than this though, Jane wanted to be treated equally. She was denied equality because of her social status, her income,her lack of “beauty” and most of all because of her gender. The book Jane Eyre shows the struggle that women face while attempting to overcome oppression and inequality in the Victorian era.

During the victorian age, it was expected of a woman to be submissive and do what is told. However, Charlotte Brontё, a feminist of her time, went against society’s standards for women and spoke up about such injustice. Brontё went against traditional victorian etiquette when she developed a strong, independent, protagonist female main character, Jane in Jane Eyre, a coming of age novel, who did not follow proper victorian behavior.

In the Victorian Era, society’s views of men and women and their roles in the world were beginning to dramatically change, and not all were content with these changes. The novel Dracula, by Bram Stoker, represents the mindset that those who felt threatened by these changes had. Mina and the men of the vampire slaying group act in the traditional manner associated with their gender and represent the ideal way Stoker believed the sexes should behave meanwhile, Dracula and the female vampires are used to signify, and portray in a threatening light, those who didn’t conform to his society’s standards for men and women. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Stoker sets up traditional gender roles and ideals that he believed the sexes should embody and

In order to understand how women’s roles have changed over time, one must first look back to the nineteenth century, when brewing tension and a rigid social climate pushed some women to act differently than others. This is evident in Jane Eyre, in which Jane rises above the constraints placed on her gender. While living at Gateshead under her aunt’s supervision, Jane distances herself from being ladylike, responding to her aunt’s harsh words with sharp statements rather than submitting to her authority as her guardian. Jane also sought to further her education, studying hard to master every subject at the Lowood boarding school and conversing with her fellow student and close friend Helen,

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.

Charlotte Brontë’s classic literature novel Jane Eyre is a Bildungsroman novel, which concentrates on the moral growth of the protagonist Jane. Brontë explores and extrapolates why Jane has difficulty complying to Victorian conventions whilst she is at Gateshead. Furthermore, Thornfield can be seen as a major learning curve, where Jane experiences both duty and desire. Through the use of this delicate balance of the binary opposites, readers are given insight into

In both novels the double standards in society are notable, as women always take the blame and were punished for the same actions that men partook in regularly. Both authors cleverly expose the hypocrisy and double standards in society through the portrayal of their female protagonists.

Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex” (Bronte). During the beginning of her time at Thornfield, Jane begins to yearn for a life that differs from societies boundaries. She begins to doubt her fears the red-room instilled in her, therefore making Jane

Jane Eyre was written in a time where the Bildungsroman was a common form of literature. The importance was that the mid-nineteenth century was, "the age in which women were, for the first time, ranked equally with men as writers within a major genre" (Sussman 1). In many of these novels, the themes were the same; the protagonist dealt with the same issues, "search for autonomy and selfhood in opposition to the social constraints placed upon the female, including the demand for marriage" (Sussman). Jane Eyre fits this mould perfectly. Throughout the novel, the reader follows Jane Eyre on a journey of development from adolescence to maturity to show that a desire for freedom and change motivates people to search for their own identity.

The Victorian Age's morality also condemned any kind of sexual reference in literature. Victorian critics demanded from "serious" literature a didactic content and respect to the Victorian conventions which established that sex

The 1847 novel by Charlotte Brontë has seen numerous film adaptations, which only added to its vast popularity. The bildungsroman follows the plain-featured, poor, but honest, intelligent and dignified orphan’s development from an oppressed young girl to an independent woman who has found balance between her often conflicting principles and sentiments. In her quest for a home and a family to belong to, Jane Eyre searches for both intellectual and emotional fulfillment, while strongly making a statement about women’s role in the Victorian society, gender and social iniquity and discrimination. The themes of the novel remain