Parallelism that Empowers Gender plays a significant role in both Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair and in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The protagonists in each of these novels contradict the expected roles of men and women through similar methods. Many parallels can be drawn between Jane Eyre and Thursday Next, exposing the true strength of these women in the face of society’s expectations of them. By investigating the gender roles of the Victorian Era in Jane Eyre and looking at the more modern presentation of gender roles in The Eyre Affair, a clear understanding of these author’s intentions to expose the gender issues can be seen. Jane Eyre is a classic novel in which orphan Jane opposes societal expectations by becoming an intelligent, …show more content…
Jasper Fforde empowers women to contradict gender roles in society through the parallelism of protagonist Thursday Next in The Eyre Affair with Jane Eyre of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
Jane Eyre and Thursday Next are two female protagonists who challenge society’s expectations through their undeniable intelligence and qualifications. Jane Eyre is a young women in the Victorian Era. According to Professor Kathryn Hughes, most women in the Victorian Era would have stayed home to tend to the domestic tasks, like cooking or cleaning because they were believed to be physically weaker. They also received little education because, at the time, it was believed that learning could harm women’s reproductive health (Hughes). Investigating women in the Victorian era, Sykes notes that women were thought to be unequal to men by nature (Sykes 1). This belief is greatly challenged by the protagonists in Jane Eyre and The Eyre Affair. Both Jane Eyre and Thursday Next contradict these ideas. These two intelligent women continually reveal just how educated they are. Thursday Next is incredibly knowledgeable of literature and of politics. She is
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In The Eyre Affair, Thursday Next is presented with an opportunity to move to Ohio and start a life with one of her coworkers. Although she heavily considers this option, Thursday ultimately decides to follow her heart and marry Landen Park-Laine. A similar plot is seen in Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Jane is presented with a marriage proposal and an opportunity to travel to India with St. John Rivers. While this is the chosen path in the first manuscript of Jane Eyre in Fforde’s novel, the ending is altered to parallel that of Thursday Next’s marriage plot. Jane, like Thursday, denies this proposal and follows her heart. She returns to Thornfield to marry Mr. Rochester. It would have been easy for these two women to succumb to societal expectations and rush into a marriage with suitable men for the purpose of conforming to society. Jane and Thursday empower women by proving that patience and love is the most rewarding. By rejecting their marriage proposals, Jane Eyre and Thursday Next empower other women to take control of their lives and choose their spouses. As C. Sykes examines Victorian literature in his essay, he recognizes that many authors reveal gender issues. While some define characters by his or “her marital status,” others reveal inequality through “female capabilities” (Sykes). Victorian literature, like Bronte’s Jane Eyre, reveal gender
The effect and influence that Brontë’s Jane Eyre has on its audience is profound, and this is emulated in Thursday. It is evident early in the text that Thursday’s childhood experiences and exposure with the characters and universe of Jane Eyre has caused her to, somewhat subconsciously, embody the character of Jane that she discovered within the pages of the novel. Thursday’s self-identity is molded and formed so much by the novel that the character of Thursday herself, can be almost directly transposed with Jane. Through the author’s use of intertextuality, Fforde is able to depict what would be perceived as a modern day, contemporary Jane Eyre, through the character of Thursday Next. Within the first exposure that Thursday directly has to the story of Jane Eyre, the effect of Brontë’s protagonist on the nine-year-old Thursday is unmistakable. Immediately, Thursday sees herself in the character and her beliefs surrounding her own self-image are visible, saying she “had realised not long ago that [she]. . . was no beauty. . . and had seen how the more attractive children gained favour more easily.” (Fforde 66), however, she finds somewhat of a role model within Jane Eyre, expressing that “in that young woman I could see how those principles could be inverted. I felt myself stand more upright and clench my jaw in subconscious mimicry of her pose.” (Fforde 66). This mimicry of Jane Eyre, even through the subtlety of the apery of her pose,
Jane Eyre and Incidents in the life of a slave girl are two opposite literary texts which, despite being 19th century texts, belong to different historical periods. Brontë sets her character in the Victorian England. Jacobs, on the other hand, writes about slavery during the civil war in order to relate the treatment of slaves, and more precisely that of female slaves. We will analyse, in this essay, the differences as well as the similarities which exist between Jane Eyre and Incidents in the life of a slave girl written by herself. We see that they differ in terms of genre, the period of history in which they find themselves, the way the characters are presented and so forth. However, they share some of the main
Written by Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre tells the story of its title character as she matures and experiences all that life has to offer in 19th century England. Jane Eyre grows up as an orphan and seeks work as a governess at Thornfield Hall, where she meets and falls in love with Mr. Edward Rochester. After discovering that he is already married, she is introduced to St. John Rivers; he asks her to marry him for the sole purpose of being a missionary’s wife and she instead returns to Mr. Rochester, who she truly loves, and marries him. Throughout her journey, she learns many thing about Mr. Edward Rochester and St. John Rivers. Both men display similar characteristics, but as foils they exhibit many different characteristics as well. Both
Brontë shapes her female character in such a way that she deals with her “hunger, rebellion and anger” (Gilbert and Guber, 1979: 360), without entering into a visible conflict with society. Thus, Jane does not openly challenge the Victorian patriarchal system, because she knows how to encompass the imposed standards without letting them run her
Throughout the Victorian Age, male dominance deprived women from freedom of choice. In Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre repeatedly struggles to become an independent young lady due to the troublesome men in the story. There are several male characters who control, humiliate, and abuse their power over Jane. The author manages to depict patriarchal dominance through the characterization of John Reed, Mr. Brocklehurst, and Mr. Rochester.
Women who had no claim to wealth or beauty received the harshest of realities in America’s Victorian era. Author Charlotte Bronte – from America’s Victorian era – examines and follows the life of a girl born into these conditions in her gothic novel Jane Eyre (of which the main character’s name
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.
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.
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,
We never lose sight that Jane is plain, ordinary, and not the sexually repressed spinster who cannot resist her sexuality, as portrayed in in the critic Mary Pooveys argument in her essay ‘The Anathematized Race’ (Reader p. 195) who states, ‘The figure who epitomised the Victorian domestic ideal was also the figure who tried to destroy it.’ (Reader, 195). On the contrary, Bronte used this uncertain profession for Jane to illustrate the difference in social class and to portray the story from both a servant’s and aristocratic point of view, (CD 3) whilst also depicting Jane’s journey from her humble beginnings to equal stature with the man she loved.
Through the Victorian Age, male dominance deprived women from a certain freedom. In Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre repeatedly struggles to become an independent young lady due to the troublesome men in the story. John Reed controls Jane, Mr. Brocklehurst humiliates Jane, and Mr. Rochester sees women, in general, as objects. The author manages to depict patriarchal dominance through the characterization of John Reed, Mr. Brocklehurst, and Mr. Rochester.
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.
Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre embraces many feminist views in opposition to the Victorian feminine ideal. Charlotte Bronte herself was among the first feminist writers of her time, and wrote this book in order to send the message of feminism to a Victorian-Age Society in which women were looked upon as inferior and repressed by the society in which they lived. This novel embodies the ideology of equality between a man and woman in marriage, as well as in society at large. As a feminist writer, Charlotte Bronte created this novel to support and spread the idea of an independent woman who works for herself, thinks for herself, and acts of her own accord.
The novel in which Jane Eyre stars in can be seen criticizing many aspects of those times such as the role and nature of women, child negligence and social hardships for those in a lesser class. Jane Eyre’s alienation from society allows for a greater reveal of the story’s culture, values, and assumptions. It’s presented through the use of gender, class and character conflicts throughout the story. On multiple occasions, Jane is judged for the presented factors reflecting the type of society Jane lives in and what the times were like at that time.
Jane Eyre, a novel by Charlotte Brontë, contains several notable themes and messages sent to its readers. Jane Eyre is a coming of age novel that is a story of a girl's quest for equality and happiness. A common theme that recurs throughout the novel is the importance of independence.Charlotte Brontë utilizes several techniques to convey this message, incorporating her personal experiences, as well as including symbolism and motifs. Charlotte Bronte subjects Jane to several conflicts that occur because of Jane’s desire for independence and freedom, such as love, religion, and gender inequality.