Feminist Issue in Jane Eyre
I see Charlotte’s Jane Eyre as an all-encompassing portrayal and thoroughgoing critique of Victorian society. It is far more comprehensive and eloquent than her previous but unpublished novel The Professor. This novel brings Charlotte very near to Charles Dickens in the sense that like many of the Dickinsonian novels, Jane Eyre vividly presents the socio-economic anomalies of the time, exposing the unbearable plights of the orphaned children (Oliver Twist). The first strength of the novel lies in the fact that it chronicles in a highly rapturous eloquence the life and living conditions, hopes and aspiration, sorrows and sufferings of the people belonging to different rungs of the social strata. And its second strength lies in the fact that it presents itself more than a social reportage: apart from presenting a strong critique on the unjust, discrepant, and anomalous social, political, economic structures, values, and practices of the age, it also envisions how the human society needs to be.
Most importantly, this novel gives voice to the marginalized class and gender, grinded into the exploitative feudalistic structure of the society. Certainly, the novel also comes as an evidence—as Altick argues: “By the beginning of the nineteenth century the powerful concept of “refinement” prescribed that all women outside the working class abstain from gainful employment except in cases of extreme necessity. It was such cases which resulted in a few Victorian women becoming professional writers.”—to the fact that Victorian middle (and in some cases working) class women were more engaged in the intellectual endeavors compared to their upper-class contemporaries. Charlotte’s novel narrates—though obliquely—her own story of higher aspirations and of hardships in the person of a governess. The successful publication of this novel, after the setback experienced with the first, is no less interesting story of self-revelation and self-empowerment through self-education and writing of a Victorian woman author who had to disguise her gender by using a penname of a male. With the success of this novel Charlotte—like Jane Eyre, the governess—is able to form an identity that she long struggled to establish.
Apart from the class issues, the whole of novel revolves around the most pressing issues of femininity and gender. There is no denying that Jane Eyre is a very radical in her opinions and actions about herself and her gender as a whole. She is both visionary and revolutionary: it is, indeed, uncanny for a woman of her time to say: “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; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex” (129-30). In my view Jane Eyre is far ahead of her time to raise the questions pertaining to gender and class oppression, which is why the novel received scathing reviews from various conservative reviewers. But like many other masterpieces of literature that heralded the coming of an age by studying the state of affairs of the power relation in the society, Jane Eyre heralds of the changes that were to take place long after. A strong call for the social reform, Jane Eyre, in my view, can be considered as a fictional version of J. S. Mill’s seminal work The Subjection of Women (1869).
