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Socio-Historical Lens In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

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In Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre, Brontë depicts the life of a young Jane, who meets a number of influential people, essential to her development into a civilized governess. Along her journey she struggles to conceal her emotion and passion for life, as it is improper for 19th century Victorian women. Louis James effectively analyzes the moral and religious hearth of the Victorian era through the socio-historic lens, which allows him to anatomize the content of Brontë’s novel and correlate it with history of this era. However, in his Victorian Novel, James fails to acknowledge the emotional significance that the colorful and religious hearth of the 19th century had on Jane Eyre. It is important to look at how the novel would have developed …show more content…

In the Victorian era, writers often wrote about their doubts with Christian beliefs and portrayed clergyman and ministers as “obnoxious hypocrites” (James 51). Brontë, growing up in a Methodist household (James 52), received her fair share of pious influences, but in contrast to other Victorian writers, she chose to take a different approach to the heavily talked about phenomenon. Brontë wrote novels that mirrored Christian publications. She described these works to be,” mad...full of miracles and apparitions, of preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticisms” (James 52). Ironically, in Jane Eyre, Jane’s see her mother in a dream, pleaing,” My daughter, flee temptation”, with Jane responding, “Mother I will”(Bronte 325). However, in the book, Jane does flee temptation, or listen to her religious conscious; instead, Jane marries Rochester. Possibly if Jane’s foundation of her religious beliefs were solidified, she would have been able to resist her desire to marry. It is evident that Jane’s relationship with God, is not a strong one, as she asks Helen Burns, “You are sure, then, Helen, that there is such a place as heaven; and our souls can get to it when we die” (Brontë 82). Jane putting Rochester before God is a simple illustration of the religious doubt in this era (James 51). Although Brontë experienced weariness in …show more content…

Although what James, fails to analyze is the emotional impact it had on the novel. James explains that, “The eyes of a time traveller to mid-nineteenth-century Britain would be confronted by an extravagance of variety, eccentricity and colour” (James 80). Brontë employs the use of color not only to allow her novel to come alive, but to embody her and Jane’s effervescence for passion and emotion. The multicolored, bold world Victorians lived in replicated the ideas and thoughts of women during this era. Women’s unique thoughts and ideas accented literature just as color accented the Victorians’ “walls and hoardings” (James 80). For example, Brontë describes the color red a number of times throughout the novel, as red signifies passion and emotion (Brontë 12). Bronte thoroughly describes the red room as,” A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask” (Bronte 12). Bronte allows the imagery of her text to shape the mood and tone of the novel. James neglected to address how the color of the century helped to introduce a world of passion into Bronte’s

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