The Story of Jane Eyre

The place of women in society was long subordinate to the male and remains so today to a great degree even in the supposedly enlightened Western democracies. In the nineteenth century, it was especially difficult for a woman to find any means of becoming independent, and women generally remained dependent on their fathers, their husbands, or some other male relative. Few women worked, and those who did generally worked in menial capacities and also had to face the scorn of society. A woman such as the title character in Emily Brontd's novel Jane Eyre is at the mercy of fortune in a number of ways. By the end of the nineteenth century, a woman like Virginia Woolf would represent a new type of independence, the independence of the artistic spirit, but at the same time her works show that the place of women in society as a whole had not changed a great deal. Jane Eyre can serve as an example of the difficulties which a woman had to overcome to achieve any sense of independence as a woman in her time.

The story of Jane Eyre takes place at the beginning of a shift from a largely agricultural society to an industrialized society, and this also meant a shift in the labor participation of women in society. Early labor participation was just as likely for women as for men, but in the nineteenth century, the labor force became more male as part of the process of industrialization:

In the eighteenth century, as cottage industries gave way to small textile factories, many emplo

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f. In the attic is his lunatic wife; the floor below is empty and deserted except for the antiques, echoes of a bygone era when the Fairfaxes and the society of which they were a part still existed; and one floor down from that is the modern world of the rich landowner, though it is a life that has been stifled by the reality of the two floors above pressing down on it. For Jane, though, this floor has special meaning as the first place she could have to herself and as a hint of grandeur she has never known personally before: When Mrs. Fairfax had bidden me a kind good-night, and I had fastened my door, gazed leisurely around, and in some measure effaced the eerie impression made by that wide hall, that dark and spacious staircase, and that long-cold gallery, by the livelier aspects of my little room, I remembered that after a day of bodily fatigue and mental anxiety, I was not at last in safe haven Jane feels real gratitude at her good fortune. The man is much like the house, mysterious and foreboding in part, but also with a spark of warmth that Jane perceives and for which she is grateful. There is a locked room within him as there is a locked room in the house, and as long as there is such a locked room in his soul,

Category: Literature - T