Brontë, Charlotte - Characteristics

Brontës'life

Charlotte, Emily and Anne were the daughters of an Anglican clergyman of Irish origin and had self-education, spending their lives in isolation in a remote part of North England, indeed some of her works are set in these parts (autobiographical element). Decided to use pseudonyms to publish their novels: Charlotte (Currer Bell) published Jane Eyre and married Arthur Bell Nicholls and died shortly after that moment.

Jane Eyre

She’s an orphan brought up by her hostile aunt, Mrs Reed. She is sent to Lowood School, where she becomes a teacher, and later accepts a job as a governess at Thornfield Hall (one of the few jobs available to educated but poor young women) and fell in love with its owner, Mr Rochester, but refused his proposal when she finds out he’s married (because she hears scream at night in Rochester’s house). After she leaves her job at Thornfield and goes to live with her cousin at Moor House where she meets John Rivers, a religious man who proposes to her but she refuses. She returns to Mr Rochester, in a new city, Ferndean, and she finds out he has become blind after a fire in which his wife, Berta, died, and they finally marry.

Characters

Jane is a young woman that speaks with frankness about herself. She acts following her convictions and is positive and rebellious. There are different settings as Gateshead, where she spent her childhood or Thornfield where she worked as a governess and all of these settings represent a phase in her development. She experiences the conflicts between spirit and flesh, duty and desire, denial and fulfillment. She fights to get a free spirit in a society divided in class and money-oriented. Although Jane is a poor woman without power, her manners are those of an aristocrat because she had a noble culture. But she was paid as a servants, indeed Jane remains without money while she was at Thornfield. When she realizes that she loves Rochester, Jane recognizes that she is his equal intellectually, but not socially. For this reason, she hesitates to marry him. Only after inheriting some money from the death of her uncle she decided to marry him as his equal, no longer dependent on him as a "master". But since the beginning, about cultural point of view, they're on the same level, because even if she’s from a lower class, she’s educated to be a governess, so she makes a social climb thanks to her culture. The character of Mr Rochester is based on the figure of the Byronic hero (embodied the romantic hero passionate, fascinating and proud, but sometimes melancholy and independent, and negative in some aspects), being not a seducer but a nobleman and he was attracted to Jane’s soul and personality rather than to her physical appearance. Bertha Mason was Mr Rochester’s wife, described as a monster and villain, she represents psychological instability and insecurity inside the home. She lives in the attic because of his madness. Her conditions, represent women conditions in victorian age.