Thesis:
This paper examines the equivocal and often erratic nature of Bronte's radicalism, which makes her
response to the manorial ethos resistant to any consistent formulation. The religious rhetoric, especially, is the source of a covert endorsement of patriarchalism that subverts more liberal impulses
evident elsewhere. What emerges ultimately is not a dialectic between different orders of value, but a radical text which is qualified in significant ways by a conservative subtext.
Background:
In our own time, it has been sacralized as a handbook for feminists and revolutionaries, articulating
all the rage of the unaccommodated and dispossessed. But contemporary adulation of Bronte the radical feminist often overlooks the tenacity of her Tory convictions, which inform even Jane Eyre, arguably one of the most unorthodox of her novels. It is true that Bronte endeavors to inaugurate in Jane Eyre a new and different discourse about the structures of power in nineteenthcentury England.
Work Cited:
Parama Roy,"Unaccommodated Woman and the Poetics of Property in Jane Eyre" , Studies in English Literature, 29:4 (1989): 713-727
1 comment:
In _Jane Eyre_ we see a conflict between the author's reformism and challenge to society's view of women and her conservatism. These two sides to the novel give it a tension; on the one hand, it criticizes some of society's attitudes, especially towards relationships between men and women, but in the end Jane marries in a conventional way. More than that, she inherits money, which raises her social status, and Rochester loses his eyesight and his house in a tragedy which lowers his social status. Even in this respect, Bronte shows her concern with not breaking certain social conventions. According to those conventions, a low-class girl cannot marry a high-class man, so she makes Jane higher class and Rochester lower in order for them to be able to marry in a way that Victorian society would consider suitable.
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