ENGLISH: [WOMEN IN LITERATURE CONTEXT]

Patriarchal society

• Early Victorian England published in 1847 was very patriarchal

• Women were expected to be submissive, domestic and dependent on men

• Their identities were often tied to their family or marriage

The ‘Angel in the House’ ideal

• A cultural model of womanhood - pure, self sacrificing and modest - reinforced women’s oppression

• Brontë challenges this ideal through Jane’s defiance and sense of justice

Education & voice

• Girls were often denied serious intellectual opportunities

• Literature became one of the few spaces where women could carve out authority - Brontë herself had to publish under the name “Currer Bell” to be taken seriously

Proto-feminist writing

• Jane Eyre is considered proto feminist because it gives a female protagonist strong objectivity, voice and moral authority

Other female characters in literature

• Dickens’ passive heroines (e.g Esther Summerson in Bleak House) or earlier Gothic women - all victims

• Brontë instead allows Jane to resist oppression and claim her own perspective

Narrative perspective

• Brontë uses a first person female narrator - rare for the time

• Giving Jane agency in telling her own story with her own personal thoughts and feelings

• This immediately challenges the silence imposed on women

In Chapter 1, Jane is introduced as socially oppressed

• Excluded from the Reed family, treated as an inferior, and reminded she is an orphan, poor, and dependent

• Symbolic of how women without wealth or social status were marginalised

In Chapter 1, Jane is introduced as psychologically oppressed

• Forced into silence (“be seated somewhere and remain silent”) she is denied both physical and verbal space

• Reflecting women’s silenced position in society

In Chapter 1, Jane is introduced as challenging oppression

• Jane retreats into books - reading becomes an act of self education and inner independence

• She expresses her feelings in narration, offering her perspective and challenging her silencing by others

• She rejects passive suffering; her imagination and voice assert her subjectivity

Good title name idea

• Women in literature often challenged oppression by telling their own stories. Jane does this from the very beginning - narrating her perspective in defiance of those who try to silence her

• Brontë, through Jane, exposes the constraints on women (family, class, gender roles) but also presents early resistance through education, imagination, and narrative authority