To me, there is nothing better than a well written heroine. This is why I love Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte."Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags".
I love the Bronte sisters. The daughters of a parson, I imagine Charlotte would have worn one outfit to school that was all conservative and changed into pink tulle and black leather in the bathrooms like Stephanie K in Degrassi High. Charlotte and her sisters would have listened to the Smiths, wrote their “dear diary” entries in locked books and worn eight hole Doc Martens. They would have been the girls you went to school with who smoked behind the bike shed and told the teachers to fuck off.
Jane Eyre was published in 1847 during the upright and corseted Victorian era. The novel follows the life of orphan Jane Eyre from a nunnery boarding school to her role as governess at Thornfield Manor to the ward of the Byronic Mr Rochester. Charlotte’s writing utilises the mysterious, supernatural, romantic and horrific The emphasis on themes of love and passion revealing the character’s internal development as she undergoes a succession of learning encounters with the external world. Phew! Heavy going huh?
In Jane Eyre, Charlotte writes of love – passionate, life shattering, fateful, painful, tragic love – in a time when women were not allowed to have these sorts of violent feelings and rarely allowed to chose their own mate. She questioned the truth in religious discourse and the confines of morality when these were the very fabric that held together Victorian life. The boundaries of social class were also explored in the relationships between characters. Not least, her writing commented on the expectation and constraints on women – explored in the mysterious stranger lurking in the darkness and locked in the attic at Thornfield and Jane’s own struggle between her head and her heart. The feminist movement like to claim this novel as one of the first feminist novels published but rather I see Bronte asking only for recognition that the same heart and the same spirit animate both men and women.
The writing has a dark gothic undertone where all is never as it seems and a violence is bubbling under the surface of every event and strained interaction. Where the female writers like Jane Austen were the witty conversation while sipping champagne and eating pink cupcakes with giggling aquaintences, Charlotte Bronte was a meaningful conversation drinking dark merlot and smoking ciggies in front of a fire at midnight with your best mates.
This novel taught me that strong, opinionated, practical, eccentric, interesting, fantastic men can want and fall in love with strong, opinionated, practical, eccentric, interesting, fantastic women. I learnt that in the world I wanted to be a part of, a woman’s substance can be valued over their looks. I learnt that being alone sometimes doesn’t mean ending up alone. I learnt that we mustn’t lock up our own madwoman in the attic of our fears. I learnt that although fate may play a part in our lives, we determine where we eventually will end up.
