Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Bronte, describes the growth of a young, unstable girl into a spiritually mature woman. The character, Jane, encounters key situations in which her morale and ethics are challenged, along with her faith in God and the trust in her own self. The challenges she faces include societys class system, her search for romance and true love, and the male supremacy in her culture.
In the novel, Jane is scarred as a young child by the death of her parents. In Victorian societys class system, she is placed next to slaves and beggars. According to her cousin, John Reed, in the early chapters of the novel, she has no business to read our books, and being a dependent, she ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemans children. These early words foreshadow the oppression of Jane throughout the rest of her life. She is viewed as a low, poor person and is not seen as the individual woman she is. Jane is sent to Lowood, a boarding school for orphaned girls, where even there, a sub-class system was set to distinguish the head of the school from the lowly school children. Here at this school Jane begins to realize that she despises the routines set by the school workers, but soon begins to excel and step out of the boundaries of her class system. Charlotte Bronte used Jane as a model to show how a bright, artistic, and intellectual person can be undermined and overlooked because of their class system.
During the course Jane Eyres life, she comes across numerous men who treat her in different manners; all affecting her outward look on men and the inward look on herself. A recurring them in the novel is marriage for reasons outside of love. St. John Rivers, a priest, wants to marry Jane for religious image reasons, while Mr. Rochester married Bertha Mason solely for money. But Jane merely wants to know love, so that she can know herself. Jane exclaims to her best friend, Helen Burns, I know I should think well of myself; but that is not enough: if others dont love me, I would rather die than live. This conflict directly affects Jane when she discovers her fianc, Mr. Rochester, had previously married a woman for financial gain and then later proposed to Jane. She believes that marriage should be for love and love only, and without love Jane fears she will become nothing. Using this theme Bronte expresses a desire for women to be seen as thinking, breathing, nurturing human beings that can love and contribute to their spouse through marriage.
Throughout her life, Jane Eyre battles the mindset and societal confines of the Victorian era, a time in which the male sex dominates and females are nothing but sex, money, and land. Jane is an individual with neither land nor money, an outsider to the norms of the day. Through her frustrated eyes and voice of Bronte, the society is seen in its truest nature, a bigoted, patriarchal machine, complete with religious politics and segregated class systems, that crushes traditional moral and ethical standards.
Jane Eyre reveals many flaws and errors of human society, and Charlotte Bronte used Jane Eyre as a device to show how a lowly orphaned woman in a Victorian society could become more than a beggar. Jane also transcends the average woman and yearns for more than just a marriage and breaks the norm of man using wife for sex and money.
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