Charlotte Bronte: jane eyre
"To you I am neither a man nor a woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me- the sole ground on which I accept your judgement." - Charlotte Bronte, to a critic (Oates, V) Charlotte Brontė's reputation may be explained in part by the astounding success of her first novel, Jane Eyre; it owes much also to the romantic appeal of her personal history, given prominence soon after her death by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell's excellent biography. Of greater importance are her explorations of emotional repression and the feminine psyche introduced a new depth and intensity to the study of character and motive in fiction. Charlotte Brontė was not in any formal sense a proponent of women's rights, but in her writing she speaks out strongly against the injustices suffered by women in a society that restricts their freedom of action and exploits their dependent status. Her protests grew out of her own experience, which provided much of the material for her fiction. She once insisted that "we only suffer reality to Suggest, never to dictate,"("Charlotte Bronte...", 9). Her novels include many characters and incidents recognizably drawn from her life, and her heroines have much
In 1812 he met, courted, and married Maria Branwell, a pious and educated young woman from Cornwall. " (Lodge, 114-143) One version of the novel's origin is that during a discussion with her sisters about the qualities necessary in a protagonist, Charlotte Brontė declared that she would show them "a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours" ("Charlotte Bronte. Charlotte Brontė conveys very powerfully the child's sense of alienation, helplessness, and anger in the face of adult oppression. Her new role as a wife kept her active and occupied, and her husband, now reconciled with her father, daily revealed qualities which won her respect and increased her attachment to him. She lacks their external attractiveness and confident air and is looked on with contempt even by the servants; only the solitary world of books and the imagination offers her any comfort, while her yearning for love must satisfy itself with an old doll. it was the publisher's objections on this score that led Brontė in her next work, Jane Eyre, to the mode of romantic melodrama. Maintaining her pseudonym of Currer Bell, Brontė sent off the manuscript of Jane Eyre on August 24, 1847, five days after completing the fair copy. Sanitation in Haworth was primitive; as late as 1850 a government inspector found open sewers and overflowing cesspits on the main street, next to outlets for drinking water. Her father, Patrick Brontė, a native of County Down in Ireland, had risen above the poverty of his family to become an undergraduate at St. Beautiful as the landscape might be around Haworth, physical conditions in this rugged little mill town must have been harsh and unpleasant for the parson's delicate wife. Reed reveals the danger of giving uncontrolled play to passionate feelings (Bronte, 21). Jane Eyre dominates her world, which exists only as it impinges on her consciousness; every action is filtered through the medium of her sensibility, every character lives only as an actor in the drama of her life. Gaskell as a "wild, rough population" among whom there was "little display of any of the amenities of life"(127, 168). Yet Emily's enigmatic romance, unique of its kind, was a dead end in English fiction, whereas the painful realism of Charlotte's studies of the human heart gave a fresh impetus and a new direction to the genre of the novel. Brontė sent Charlotte to join Maria and Elizabeth at the recently opened Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, near Tunstall in Lancashire.
Common topics in this essay:
Charlotte Brontė,
Jane Eyre,
Maria Branwell,
Aunt Reed,
Maria Elizabeth,
Sanitation Haworth,
Eyre August,
Wuthering Heights,
Haworth Brontė,
Cleghorn Gaskell's,
jane eyre,
charlotte brontė,
cowan bridge,
school cowan bridge,
warmth security,
daughters' school,
maria elizabeth,
clergy daughters',
school cowan,
english fiction,
chapters jane eyre,
clergy daughters' school,
daughters' school cowan,
lowood institution,
|