 |
[email protected] |
 |
3275638434 |
 |
 |
| Paper Publishing WeChat |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Is There a Feminist Text in Jane Eyre?—A Reappraisal
Yinghuei Chen
Full-Text PDF
XML 527 Views
DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2019.01.002
Asia University, Taichung, Taiwan
After the publication of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), which to many critics marked the beginning of a sustained thinking about women writing and feminist literary theory, it has become a commonplace to read Jane Eyre as a feminist text. Evidences in the novel, though not abundant, can be found to support such a reading. But Jane Eyre is not an enumeration of the rights of women, neither is it a manifesto or a catalogue of wrongs done unto women by society. Wherever the text refers to women having similar ambitions to men, as shown in a passage often quoted in Chapter XII of the book, we must bear in mind that Jane, an orphan placed in an unloving home, a brutal school and an unsympathetic employment environment, must make her way in life as best she can. She has no time for feminist sentiment, her survival allows for nothing outside of her own labor. To suggest that Jane is expressing herself as a feminist by taking up employment is ludicrous; she is merely surviving as countless male characters likewise do.
Jane’s pragmatism is given further heft by her reaction to Bertha’s death. Bertha dead is a problem solved, a barrier removed. If she has to tweak the narrative to allow for this then she will, the ex-servant’s reiteration of Bertha’s death is pregnant with self justification, not his but Jane’s. Indeed Jane’s good sense, adaptability and, above all, awareness of her personal circumstances are given as causes for her pragmatic decision-making. This may seem a brutal scheme of values but it is all she has to work with. Rather than searching for Brontë’s true voice in the text and, thereby, attempting to graft onto it a proto-feminism, we should instead recognize Jane’s true voice coming through that of the ex-servant. Far from being feminist, a thought Jane cannot indulge, she is the supreme realist, willing, in the final analysis to disregard even murder in the pursuit of her own safety and repose. Jane is an expression of Brontë in that both are women of dubious background, seeking success in a world so far out of their control that they must use any and all means either in their possession or available to them via an outside agency to get on.
women writing, feminist, a feminist text, proto-feminism, pragmatism realist
Briggs, A. (1983). A social history of England. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Brontë, C. (1971). Jane Eyre (A Norton critical edition). R. J. Dunn, (Ed.). New York: W. W. Norton.
Brontë, C. (2008). Villette (Oxford world’s classics). M. Smith, (Ed.) with an introduction by T. Dolin. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Brontë, C. (1987). The professor (Oxford world’s classics). M. Smith and H. Rosengarten (Eds.) with an introduction by M. Smith. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Brontë, E. (2003). Wuthering Heights (4th ed., a Norton critical edition). R. J. Dunn, (Ed.). New York: W. W. Norton.
Gaskell, E. (1996). The life of Charlotte Brontë (Oxford world’s classics). A. Easson, (Ed., intro., and notes). Oxford: Oxford UP.
Gérin, W. (1967). Charlotte Brontë: The evolution of genius. Oxford: Clarendon.
Gilbert, S. M., & Gubar, S. (1979). The madwoman in the attic: The woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination. New Haven: Yale UP.
Ingham, P. (2006). The Brontës. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Miller, L. (2002). The Brontë myth. New York: Vintage.
Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.). (1989). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Poliakoff, S. (2003). The lost prince. A BBC drama, London.
Poovey, M. (1997). Making a social body: British cultural formation, 1830-1864. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago P.
Rattle, A., & Vale, A. (2007). Amelia dyer: Angel maker: The woman who murdered babies for money. London: Andre Deutsch.
Rhys, J. (1999). Wide Sargasso Sea (a Norton critical edition). J. L. Raiskin, (Ed.). New York: W. W. Norton.
Said, E. W. (1993). Culture and imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Showalter, E. (1977). A literature of their own: British women novelists from Brontë to Lessing. New York: Princeton UP.
Thackeray, W. (2008). Vanity fair: A novel without a hero. J. Sutherland, (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.
Tillotson, K. (1956). Novels of the eighteen-forties. New York: Oxford UP.
Web, I. (1981). From custom to capital: The English novel and the industrial revolution. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Williams, R. (1970). The English novel: From Dickens to Lawrence. New York: Oxford UP.
Wood, P. (1991). Poverty and the workhouse in Victorian Britain. Phoenix Mill: Sutton Pub. Ltd.
Woolf, V. (1932). The common reader (first series). New York: HBJ.
Woolf, V. (1992). A room of one’s own and three guineas. Oxford: Oxford UP.