The Mayor Of Casterbridge By Thomas Hardy Is A Novel That

The involvement of a family member with the previously misjudged character directly causes each heroine’s fallout of sorts with her future husband, who will henceforth be referred to as the hero. Catherine’s brother James becomes involved with Isabella before she is known to be such a determined flirt, but when she all but abandons him for Captain Tilney, it becomes known to General Tilney that Catherine’s family is not as rich as formerly supposed, and this results in

Furthermore, this demeaning and negative attitude Jane is exposed to is further instigated when her cousin, John Reed, expresses her situation by saying: "You have no business to take our books; you are a dependent, mama says; you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen's children like us". The truth of Jane's unfortunate situation is expressed against her which results in her feeling no true support from this family and confides only in her childhood nursemaid- Bessie, who although behaves inconsistently and has “a capricious and hasty temper”, is the closest mother figure to her. Furthermore, the friction between Jane and John is further emphasised when the first physical aspect of violence is introduced to the reader through a graphic portrayal, further showing the ultimate rejection Jane experienced

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.

Throughout Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre is afflicted with the feud between her moral values, and the way society perceives these notions. Jane ultimately obtains her happy ending, and Brontë’s shrewd denouement of St. John’s fate juxtaposes Jane’s blissful future with St. John’s tragic course of action. When Jane ends up at the Moor House, she is able to discover a nexus of love and family, and by doing so, she no longer feels fettered to Rochester. Moreover, Rochester is no longer Jane’s only form of psychological escape, and thus Jane is in a position to return to him without an aura of discontent. At the end of the novel, Jane is finally able to be irrevocably “blest beyond what language can express” (Brontë 459) because she is “absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh” (459).

Though Jane is well educated and possesses the etiquette and training of a person in upper class society, social prejudices limit her because she is simply a paid servant, in their eyes. While at Thornfield, Jane falls desperately in love with the owner of Thornfield Hall, Mr. Rochester. Jane is Mr. Rochester’s intellectual contemporary, but her social status prevents her from being his true equal. In the novel, Jane proclaims, “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you,—and full as much heart!” (Bronte 637). After Mr. Rochester finally proposes, Jane is hesitant to marry him because she feels as if he would be lowering himself to marry her. This feeling greatly increases after Jane discovers he is married to Bertha Mason, and that he keeps her locked away in Thornfield’s attic due to her insanity. Mr. Rochester proposes that Jane becomes his mistress, which, according to Victorian society, would be more fitting since Jane is a plain governess. Jane realizes that she can never compromise her morals that way and leaves Thornfield. While on her own, Jane still strives to gain independence, discovers new kin, and learns she has a wealthy uncle who has left her a large inheritance. After her loneliness and longing for Mr. Rochester becomes too great, she returns to Thornfield. Jane is

Brontë shows how cruelty passes through generations through Hindley’s mistreatment towards Heathcliff. From the moment Mr. Earnshaw adopts Heathcliff, Hindley enters a state of melancholy and loathes that his father clearly favors Heathcliff over him. Mr. Earnshaw’s adoption of Heathcliff upsets Hindley, his father clearly favors Heathcliff over him. Consequently, Hindley reciprocates this hatred when he meets Heathcliff, comparing him to satan and wishing for his death. Heathcliff, unable to act against these cruel words, silently absorbs them. This interaction reveals traits of each character: the maliciousness of Hindley’s character, who hates on the young Heathcliff without reason; and the timidity of Heathcliff, fostered by his inability to stand up for himself. Although timid at the moment, Heathcliff assimilates this cruelty so that he can inflict it upon others, just as Hindley does the same to him. This depicts how the victim of suffering develops into the bearer of cruelty. Soon after Mr. Earnshaw’s death, Hindley assumes control of his household and unleashes even more cruelty on Heathcliff. In a fit of

One would think that she would grow up to be unforgiving, but Jane explains that she “must resist those who punish [her] unjustly. It is as natural as that [she] should love those who show [her] affection, or submit to punishment when [she] feel it is deserved” (Bronte 119). Jane saying this to her young friend, Helen, exemplifies how Jane was beyond her years and how she grew into being a young woman of wisdom. Her development throughout the novel is shown by her beginning as an isolated orphan in her society, yet she ended as an heiress with a family of her own. Jane who creates her own family and happiness by being independent, remaining curious and maintaining self-respect.

Jane’s first encounter with betrayal was when she was still a child and her Uncle Reed brought her along to live with him and his family in Gateshead, after Jane’s parents had passed away. Jane’s Uncle Reed had promised to raise her as if she were one of his own children. However, this only lasted until Uncle Reed passed away. After Jane’s uncle had passed, Jane’s aunt and her three children had mistreated her and in some cases physically abused. On one particular day she was minding her own business whilst reading Bewick’s History of British Birds, her obnoxious cousin John Reed was looking for Jane. Once he finds her, he treats her as if she was inferior to him, he wants his cousin to refer to him as Master Reed. This already not being indicative of raising Jane as one of their own, her cousin John continues to undermine her even more and takes the book from her and ends up throwing it at her causing her to get a cut by

Furthermore, Jane says “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself” (Chapter 27, Bronte.) This statement greatly represents the growth that Jane has undergone. She no longer dreads the solitude that once haunted her because she respects herself enough to realize that she did not deserve to experience such great dismay. Through independence and self-recognition, Jane has discovered the importance of loving oneself. Without the reliance on the thoughts of others, the once extremely troubled girl found bliss through a lack of outside control. In regards to her relationship with Mr. Rochester, Jane understands that she must leave him behind to maintain her own well-being. She does not allow the wealth or proclaimed love from Rochester to skew her decisions and she does not linger to dominate the life of her lover. Instead, she moves forward to continue her endless pursuit of happiness and independence.

In “Jane Eyre”, Charlotte Bronte presents relatives Aunt Reed and Mr Mason as “cruel” in regards to their treatment of their family members, Aunt Reed sentencing Jane to the red room and Mr Mason allowing Bertha to be locked in the attic. However, the reader only understands the effects of Aunt Reed’s actions, through the use of older Jane’s narrative-monologue, which is present throughout this extract. “I was a discord in Gateshead; I was like nobody there; I had nothing in harmony with Mrs Reed or her children”, older Jane is looking back at her younger self, Bronte uses an extended metaphor by describing Jane as a “discord” in relation to the Reed families “harmony”, this highlights Jane’s feelings of being an unwanted outsider. Furthermore, the phrase” “;I was like nobody there;”, is separated from the rest of the text, like Jane is from the family and perpetuates her feelings of loneliness and being unwanted, she is “nobody” to them and overlooked similar to this brief sentence hidden between semi-colons.

In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Jane is an orphan who is often mistreated by the family and other people who surround her. Faced with constant abuse from her aunt and her cousins, Jane at a young age questions the treatment she receives: "All John Reed’s violent tyrannies, all his sister’s proud indifference, all his mother’s aversion, all the servants’ partiality, turned up in my disturbed mind like a dark deposit in a turbid well. Why was I always suffering, always brow-beaten, always accused, forever condemned?" (27; ch. 2). Despite her early suffering, as the novel progresses Jane is cared for and surrounded by various women who act as a sort of "substitute mother" in the way they guide,

(as he is not present in the start of the novel) it does later on in

In The Mayor of Casterbridge, the wife to a young man learns to cope with her husband’s drunken ways. The author portrays that he, Michael Henchard decides to auction his wife off to anybody who wants to buy her but not only her their daughter as well all because he would rather be a “free man” and states that he would be worth a thousand pound (pg.9) before he made the mistake to marry at such a young age as 18. After selling his wife, Henchard wonders if the night before had all been a dream but unfortunately it was more like a nightmare because there was money in his pocket from where the sailor had bought his wife Susan and daughter Elizabeth-Jane. His only thoughts at this point was to get out of situation he had put himself in as soon as as he could. After walking miles and miles his only feeling is to turn to God, so he makes a stop at a church near by when he arrives in a village. He begins to fall to his knees at the altar with both of his hands on the bible and afterwards makes his way to Casterbridge. He takes the blame for it as if he has no other choice to because it was all his fault as to why his wife and child was sold to a man that he didn't even know. By him taking full responsibility for his actions and the mistake that he’s made he now sets out and tries to correct what he has done.

In Hardy’s tragic novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, an entirely different relationship is portrayed that greatly differs from that of Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba Everdene’s in Far From the Madding Crowd. Unlike the latter, the beginning of The Mayor of Casterbridge articulates the marriage of Michael and Susan Henchard as expendable when the disconsolate Michael sells his wife and daughter to a sailor. The immediate separation—and later reunion—of the couple conveys a theme that the need for propriety can outweigh one’s quest for justice; and so, this broken and complicated relationship illustrates the commonality of faults in human nature. In the very first chapter of the novel, Michael implores the people at an auction to buy Susan and his daughter Elizabeth-Jane, remarking “the woman is no good to me. Who’ll have her?” (Hardy). This establishes a desperate view of Michael that is hard to shake in the real world considering that, “research has in fact found that it can take up to 6 months of regular contact with someone to change their initial impression” (McKay) which is why introducing a main character in a directly negative situation—even if the rest of the book tries to make up for that one event—will affect the way the

The Mayor of Casterbridge is an English novel written by Thomas Hardy in 1886 and is an exploration into the values of common people, and the reliance on status to achieve happiness. Michael Henchard is not unlike most men. He is tempered and blind often by selfish wants and gains, but maintains a human aspect of misery that is relatable. Man's inherent need and want of more transcend to other aspects such and relationships(whether romantic or of friendship) and the disparity of man with a need of want, and dissatisfaction. It is based upon character whether the man’s wants will help him and others or become his downfall. Henchard needs to want and achieve more to feel complete and without it he feels like nothing. The Mayor of Casterbridge truly examines life as one of confusion and emptiness,but there is more to be seen.