Jane Eyre: a Bildungsroman of a

womenThe plot of Jane Eyre follows the form of a Bildungsroman, which

is a novel that tells the story of a childísh maturation and focuses on the emotions and experiences that accompany and incite Jane’s growth to adulthood. In Jane Eyre, there are five distinct stages of development, each linked to a particular place:

• Janeís childhood at Gateshead• Her education at the Lowood School• Her time as a governess at Thornfield• Her time with the Rivers family at Morton and at Moor House• Her reunion with and marriage to Rochester.

From these experiences Jane becomes the mature woman who narrates the novel in a first-person narrative way.

Major Characters

• Jane Eyre: The protagonist and narrator of the novel, Jane is an intelligent, honest, plain-featured young girl that has to faced with oppression, inequality, and hardship. Although she meets with a series of persons who threaten her autonomy, Jane repeatedly succeeds at preserving herself and maintains her principles of justice, human dignity, and morality. She also values intellectual and emotional fulfillment. Her strong belief in social equality, challenging the Victorian prejudices against women and poors.

• Edward Rochester: Jane’s employer and the master of Thornfield, Rochester is a wealthy, passionate man with a dark secret that gives the reader much of the novel’s suspense. Rochester is unconventional, ready to go against to polite manners, propriety, and consideration of social class, in order to interact with Jane frankly and directly. He is a rude, impetuous, and has spent much of his life roaming about Europe trying to avoid the consequences of his youthful past. His problems are partly the result of his own recklessness, but he is a sympathetic figure, and has been describing as a suffering character because of his early marriage to Bertha.

• St. John Rivers: With his sisters, Mary and Diana, St. John is described as Jane’s benefactor after she runs away from Thornfield, giving her food and shelter. He is a well-mannered man, fair, blue-eyed, with a grecian profile, but cold and reserved, often controlled in his interactions with others. Because he is entirely alienated from his feelings and devoted solely to an austere ambition, St. John could be seen as a foil to Edward Rochester.

Themes and motifs

• Love vs authority

• The Stictness of victorian society

• The search for equality

LOVE vs AUTONOMY

Jane Eyre is above all the story of a researching-love person. Jane searches, not just romantic love, but also for a sense of being valued. Jane must learn how to gain love whitout sacrificing and harming herself in this process. Her fear of losing her autonomy motivates her refusal of Rochester’s marriage proposal. Jane believes that marrying Rochester while he still remains legally linked to Bertha would mean sacrifice her own moral integrity for the sake of emotional gratification. But also even when St. John proposes her to marry him, offering a relationship built in a moral and economic equality, Jane refuses him knowing that the marriage would remain loveless. Only after proving her self-sufficiency, at St. john’s home, she marry Rochester. The marriage can be in this way one between equals.

THE STRICTNESS OF SOCIETY

Jane Eyre is critical of Victorian England’s strict social hierarchy. Like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Jane is a figure of ambiguous class and, consequently, a source of extreme tension for the characters around her. Jane’s manners, sophistication, and education are the ones of an aristocrat, because Victorian-age governesses had to possess the culture of the aristocracy. Yet, as paid employees, they were more or less treated as servants:in fact Jane remains penniless and powerless while at Thornfield. She is edward’s intellectual equal, but not his social. Jane openly speaks out against class prejudice at certain in the book. However, it is also important to note that nowhere in Jane Eyre are society’s border lines bent.

SEARCH FOR EQUALITY

Jane struggles continually to achieve equality and to overcome oppression. In addition to class hierarchy, she fight against patriarchal domination against who believe women to be inferior to men. Three central male figures threaten jane’s desire for equality and dignity: Mr. Brocklehurst,the hypocritical master of the Lowood School, Edward Rochester, and St. John Rivers. Each tries to keep Jane in a submissive position, where she is unable to express her own thoughts and feelings. In her quest for independence and aknowledges, Jane must escape Brocklehurst, reject St. John, and come to Rochester only after ensuring that they may marry as equals.She will not depend solely on Rochester for love and she can be financially independent. Furthermore, Rochester is blind at the novel’s end and utterly dependent upon Jane to be his guide.

The symbolic figure of Bertha

She is a complex presence in Jane Eyre. She obstacles Jane’s happiness, but she also increases the growth of Jane’s self-understanding. The mystery surrounding Bertha establishes suspense and terror to the plot and the atmosphere. Further, Bertha serves as a remnant and reminder of Rochester’s youthful libertinism. She can also be interpreted as a symbol: she could represents the britain fear that psychologically “locked away” the other cultures during the period of imperialism; Bertha was in fact from jamaica. She also could be seen as the typical victorian-wife who is expected never to travel or work outside the house.it definitely is linked to the figure of moral and socialy inequality of women in 19th century. Particularly interesting is how Bertha’s insanity could serve as warning to Jane of what complete love to Rochester could bring.

A passage from JANE EYRE [1996]

The Puritanism and strictness into the Victorian age

[19th century]

Jane and Edward reveals each other their love

Bronte houses

Birth houseIn Thornton

The children room

Bronte parsonage at Haworth

Charlotte’s room at Haworth

The dining room at Haworth