Résumé :
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This excerpt is from early in the novel when Jane is locked up by her aunt as punishment for fighting her bullying cousin, John. After reacting angrily to the ‘violent tyrannies’, Jane is imprisoned by hostile people who refuse to accept her intelligence and her personhood. Though she’s still a child, she forms very absolute character assessments and sees the world and its unfairness with total clarity: that is why she is so threatening to those with power. Over the course of the novel she must constantly tread this line: between being true to herself, the ‘strange little figure’ in the mirror, on the one hand, and conforming to the demands of a patriarchal society, on the other. How can a woman with limited resources break free in the nineteenth century, and make the case for what she deserves? What does it mean to use her voice? When will she stop feeling trapped?
When Jane Eyre was published in 1847 under the male pen name ‘Currer Bell’, a contemporary critic, Elizabeth Rigby, saw it as unacceptably rebellious, identifying within it, ‘the tone of the mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home’. Jane Eyre was apparently the product of a defiant, transgressive, and radical imagination—something that aligned Charlotte Brontë, in spirit at least, with a nineteenth-century working-class movement to secure voting rights for all men (Chartism). It was literature at its most unsettling.
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