If you try to write a Jane Eyre essay, but don’t where to start, read through our sample that can help you.”Jane Eyre” by English writer Charlotte Bronte is a novel mainly respects autobiographical. It is dedicated to the story of a modest but proud and independent orphan girl. The heroine of the book, Jane Eyre, stubbornly struggles with the many obstacles that stand in her way to independent life and personal happiness.
Charlotte Bronte had the misfortune to love Monsieur Eje, a married man. Of course, it was a sublime love, more like a friendship. But Madame Ezhe arranged a grand scandal for her husband and a young teacher, demanded her departure. In a very refracted form, this tragic love is reflected in the novel “Jane Eyre”, in the history of Mr. Rochester, chained forever to an unbalanced and evil thing. Even its very appearance – a massive square forehead, rigid outline of the lips and chin – repeated to some extent the features of Monsieur Eje. To find more about similarities in the novel and Brontë’s personal life, check out the following Jane Eyre essay.
How does the novel relate to Charlotte Brontë’s personal life?
Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre is typical of the Victorian era in England. It depicts the life path of a spirited girl with a harsh fortune, for whom the principles and moral standards stood higher than love. Although it traces an autobiographical beginning, the novel Jane Eyre can be referred to as a fictional memoir since it is precisely known the events described in the story never happened to Charlotte Bronte.
Jane Eyre is a socio-psychological growing-up novel. The story consistently reveals the spiritual evolution of the heroine, describing the formation of a balanced, independent and perceptive personality of Jane. Although the book is often called autobiographical, not all characters and circumstances portrayed in it directly related to the author’s life. The life story of Jane Eyre after the childhood years in large part is a figment of the author’s imagination, while the dimension of her feelings is undoubtedly close to Bronte’s emotional experience (O’Rourke, James L. 132). The image of Jane also appears a combination of individually autobiographical and fictional features. Even the appearance of Jane Eyre, according to the testimony of most researchers of the works of Bronte, first of all, E. Gaskell, resembles the image of the writer herself (309).
The narrative, which develops from the heroine’s point of view, is evidently of a lyrical slant. To be more specific, Bronte herself grew up in a large family, surrounded by her brother and sisters, unlike Jane Eyre, who had endured all the pain of orphanhood and other people’s charity from her early childhood, Bronte was destined to outlive all of her close people, too. She died at the age of thirty-nine, having buried her brother and sisters, but not having enjoyed happiness of marriage and motherhood, with which she graciously endowed her literary heroine.
Because the novel is written in the first person, it bears many reflections and emotional torments of the heroine. That accuracy, attentiveness in depicting routine life (that usually serves another characteristic of memoirs) allows the reader to believe that all events indeed have happened. Such a technique was often used by writers to enhance authenticity and atmosphere in the text.
Nevertheless, it would be erroneous to claim that each aspect of the story had a fictional origin. Thus, in 1824, Charlotte and her three sisters were sent by their father to a school for the daughters of the clergy. There they were to be trained for the position of governesses. In this relation, there is a good reason why the boarding school in the town of Cowan Bridge became an archetype of the Lowood orphanage in the novel Jane Eyre (Gale, Cengage Learning 5-6). Moreover, the shared social role of the governess was a typical case of the time and the only perspective in life for representatives of the lower social strata trying to succeed. Malnutrition, cold and filth in the rooms, exhausting church services, and abusive treatment would steadily damage the health of children. Because of the typhus epidemic that broke out in 1825, forty-five schoolchildren of eighty were down. Charlotte’s two older sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, deceased whereas memories of them inspired the image of Helen Burns in the novel. The death of many inmates of the orphanage drew the public attention to the boarding school. Eventually, the authority and guardians were displaced. Patrick Bronte, the father, came to bury the two older daughters and take home the survived but weak daughters Charlotte and Emilia. He no longer tried to ensure their education in a free institution (Gale, Cengage Learning 5-6). Charlotte later studied in a comparatively expensively paid boarding school.
As a literary work, Jane Eyre is constructed according to the compositional laws of the romance novel. Everything that happens to Jane Eyre is the scenes of the personal growth through struggle, various hardships and challenges to comprehend her commitment, and realization of personal happiness through it (O’Rourke, James L. 132). The tendency for high romanticism in the portrayal of feelings is exceptionally definite in the novel, giving a peculiar charm to this book that is inseparable from its freedom-loving rebel spirit. The autobiography of Jane Eyre is an entirely anti-Christian work. It is full of discontent with the comfort of the rich and the privations of the poor. The novel Jane Eyre is imbued with the same rebellious spirit that manifested itself in Chartism. Also, the story is not free from unsophisticated and conventional romantic cliches. The dark image of the crazy wife of Rochester and the mysterious events in his castle resemble Gothic novels of the 18th century, which the Bronte sisters used to read.
As has been mentioned, the story in the novel is narrated from the first person. The tradition of such a narrative was born in the 18th century, at a time when the psychology of the hero began to attract the attention of writers. Along with other features of the literary techniques in Jane Eyre, this form of narration provides a deeper insight into the psychology of the characters.
The peculiar feature about the verbal portrait, as well as about one in painting, is conditioned, first of all, lies in an immediate appeal to the individuality of a particular person. Reliability, or as it is customary to say, portrait resemblance is an integral part of the genre. This similarity is traced through the accordance with the reconstructed image of the original, its living nature, which is known by the writer as an artistic whole, as an independent and completed design for verbal painting. It is in the holistic depiction of a person’s individuality which involves the uniqueness of a person’s ‘face,’ a way of thinking that manifests itself both in character, the manner of behavior, the language, in the biography, and the creative activity. Moreover, this concept also applies to various signs of individual existence, recreating the spiritual world of the person and revealing the artistic essence of the genre of the literary portrait.
Charlotte Bronte expressed herself as a master of the literary portrait. Carefulness in the choice of words and phrases used for the external depiction of images is a distinguishing trait of her writing, but the primary responsibility was to show the inner world of the people she painted. Charlotte Bronte subordinated everything to this goal and accomplished it with excellence due to the impressive correlation of her own feelings with those of Jane Eyre.
In the light of the mentioned above, a continuous internal monologue sheds light on reflections of Jane Eyer about the morals of the people around her, the norms of behavior, and own aspirations and experiences. It is notable that the internal monologue frequently manifests the views of Charlotte Bonthe herself.
Works Cited
Gale, Cengage Learning. A Study Guide For Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Farmington Hills, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2016,.
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn. The Life Of Charlotte Bronte. The Floating Press, 2011,.
O’Rourke, James L. Sex, Lies, And Autobiography: The Ethics Of Confession. Charlottesville, University Of Virginia Press, 2006,.
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