Charlotte Bronte’s Feminism and Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte’s Feminism and Jane Eyre

Author Name : Dr. Sunil Chauhan

ABSTRACT

Charlotte Bronte is considered one of the finest women Victorian novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Bronte sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels have become classics of English literature. Her second novel ‘Jane Eyre’ (1847) has been regarded as an outstanding romantic tale as well as feminist tale. She first published her works under the pen name Currer Bell. Even the works of The Bronte sisters’ is a specifically feminine anger in response to their patriarchal society, a feeling of being hunted and trapped and confined and degraded that is peculiar to women of great intelligence and few opportunities and resources. So you have Jane Eyre kicking and biting as she is tied down and admonished to sit still and be quiet, like a good girl; you have her chafing at her isolation in the schoolroom and remarking, “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.”

Keywords: - Exploitation, Oppression, Feminism, patriarchy society.