Gender Issues in Janes Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

CRITICAL OVER VIEW OF THE NOVEL 

Critical over view of Jane Eyre 

The prime appearance of Jane Eyre as a novel in, 1847 was seen as a great widely and critical accomplishment. One of the most celebrated Victorian critics, George Lewes claimed that it is’’ the best novel of the season’’1 . Besides the huge attacks that occurred in the quarterly review of December 1848, when the critic Elizabeth Rigby asserted that the main character Jane is “a personification of unregenerate and undisciplined spirit and seen the novel on general as an anti Christian’’ . Rigby criticism towards the novel perhaps accounts for some of the novel’s continuing popularity also the disobedience of its tone. Charlotte Bronte shed light for society’s major institutions including family, education, social class and Christianity . Moreover she asks the reader to take in consideration contemporary social and political issues: for instance woman situation and position in society, the real relationship between Great Britain and its colonies how important is artistic attempt in human life, what is the relationship of dreams and fantasy to reality, and what is the basic of efficient weeding? Those are the main point that Bronte illustrates in her novel, but in fact it did not provide any particular answer to none of them; however the readers of the novel can create their own answer, based on their own distinctive and personal analyses of the book and this is what makes out of Jane Eyre a book that need various reading. Even though the novel is a very long story over many chapters, but depending on its social message asking questions still related to modern readers. Also the literary genre keeps the book entertaining1 and enjoyable until the last moment of it. Besides the beautiful romantic story that followed the love between Rochester and Jane also illustrates the psychological or moral development of its main character the gothic and the spiritual quest. As a bildungsroman, the first person narration and the plot shows Jane’s growth from isolated and disliked orphan girl to glad married and self- governing women ‘’Reader, I married him. A quite wedding we had: he and I, the parson and clerk, were alone present’’3 this quotation comes after Jane has gone to ferndean and discovered that her lover, Rochester has become a blinded man. Up until this moment in the story, has always maintained a subservient position to Mr. Rochester. However, with the inheritance from her uncle, Jane is now an independent woman and can take charge of her own decisions and destiny. Besides the loss of Mr. Rochester’s eyesight, he as well turned to be deprived a weak on Jane. Simply he couldn’t get to his previous situation as a higher gentleman. And here is the swishing point of the case as a whole : Rochester is the subjugated partner but Jane was the superior in this relationship. Jane the main character of the novel takes the reader to long of self-knowledge, he became her assistant discovering and challenging the life with the heroine. The book’s gothic elements were emphasizing the supernatural the visionary, visionary and the horrific. Therefore, the presence of Mr. Reed’s ghost inside the reed room and the strange voices of Bertha’s laughter at Thorn field, and the gloomy and threatening personality are all good examples of the novel’s suspense as what provided in the quotation below: Shaking my hair from my eyes, I left my head and tried to look boldly round the dark room: at this moment a light gleamed on the wall. Was it, I asked myself, a ray from the mom penetrating some aperture in the blind? No, moonlight was still and this stirred, while I gazed it glided up to the ceiling and quivered over my head. I can now conjecture readily that this streak of light was in all likelihood a bleam from a lantern carried by someone across the lawn but then prepared as my mind was for horror shaken as my nerves were by agitation, I thought the swift-darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world. My heart beat thick, my head grew hot, a sound filled my ears which I deemed the rushing of wings: something seemed near me I was oppressed, suffocated endurance broke down I uttered a wild involuntary cry I rushed to the door and shook the lock in a desperate effort. (Bronte, p32) This citation provides what happened with Jane during her distressing experience inside the room which is very strange and confusing. Jane, even though she is the narrator of the is looking for convenient explanation for the indistinct light that she as a kid Jane as a child is very persuaded that the light that she saw was just initiation for Mr. Reed’s ghost. For her what is very obvious is that her fright before the question can be resolved is that the truth of seeing a ghost was itself a big shock and Jane will tell later that her anxiety will never recover from that chock. There is no doubt that Jane Eyre gained a great immediate and popular response among the audience and many critics admired the strength and brightness of Bronte’s writing style, others termed the surface and rude. Possibly the most recognized early review was that of Elizabeth Rigby which considered Jane Eyre as an ‘’anti Christian composition’’ meanwhile some other critics focusing on the authorship of the book. Several of those critics had doubted of the capacity of a female writer of writing such text, however EP whipped of the North American review contended that the book was a work of two a man and a woman. Latter on with following generation charlotte Bronte were work was seen from different perspective a critical assessments superior literary figure of the Bronte’s family Moreover, the prominent essay of David Cecil that was published in the early 1930s, announced Emily as a strong writer and mentioned a briefly end of Charlotte’s critical superiority in the eyes of some critics. Attached by this article some critics compared the work of Bronte of those of Emily the greater author for them disputing the originality and the intellectual quality of Charlotte’s novels. most of the studies of Bronte literary work are more interested in her personal life than her writings. By the beginning of the nineteenth century reviewers frequently examined the nature of Jane’s character however by the end of it, critics turned to define Jane as a woman with courage and dignity. More critical analyses were bound to the twentieth and twenty first century has tended to be more specific in their line of attack. The characters of Jane Rochester, Bertha have been often the case of analyze in the novel, reviewers have also discussed the nature and importation of Rochester’s disability. The novel’s strictures also were a case of study by many critics; they discussed its symbolism its bibliographical elements. Feminist literary criticism has given new to a revolution of woman to start in the ninetieth century. However twentieth and twenty first century debated the single theme of novel. The majority of reviewers agree that in Jane Eyre Bronte wanted to illustrate the equality in marriage between man and woman. In terms of Bronte’s novel as an example of gothic literature, many critics has posited that Bronte2 broadened3 the definition of gothic, Bronte did borrow liberally from the genre incorporating dark, mysterious and even supernatural elements into the plots of her novels. In this inflation 1958 essay, Robert B Hellman described Bronte’s work as new gothic novels that expand the gothic tradition by exploring the place of heightened in routine daily life. Bronte’s use of gothic literary elements as Hellman claimed that release her from the patterns of the novel of society and therefore permitted the flowering which increases wonderfully the sense of reality in the novel. A number of critics have suggested that Bronte expanded gothic convention towards her alternative female heroine. For instance, Tony wein in her 1999 essay classify Villette as a disappearance from traditional gothic literature because the female character, with their manipulation and survival mechanism are more portrayed as heroine rather evil, in which both adhered to an deviated from gothic convention, suggesting that Jane Eyre is a originator to the modern romance novel. The extremely personal quality of charlotte Bronte’s art was very portrayed by Virginia wolf in 1925 she claimed that charlotte had controlled the reader’s mind and drives him all the path she makes him she what she sees never lives him for a moment or permit him to go away. Therefore, by the end the reader finds himself from side with intelligence, observation and attack of charlotte Bronte. Extraordinary faces and figures of burly outline characteristics that she drown to the reader from her own perspective. 

Critical view over

 The Mill on the Floss Mary Ann Evens born in 1819, published all of her work under the pen name ‘George Eliot’’ because of the prevailing attitudes to women during her lifetime. Her third novel, The Mill One the Floss was written in the year 1859 and 1860 though the plot was set in 1829. The work reflects the attitudes of the Victorian era in which the author lived. When the novel appeared, at the beginning of April, it gained instant popularity and sustained or increased George Eliot’s reputation with the most thoughtful readers. with respect to the protagonist Maggie Tullivier, it is an interesting book: George Eliot has taken herself for a heroine so that the first two volumes come close to a spiritual autobiography. The story of a close relationship between Eliot and her own brother, the scenery also represents part of the environment of her own childhood .The heroine of the novel, Maggie Tullivier who was nine years old when the novel began and nineteen when she dies in the last chapter of the novel is a very complex and interesting character, who offers much potential for detailed critical analysis. She is not the ordinary Victorian girl and she is not presenting the real image of the angel in the house, but differs in many ways. Maggie’s deeds ware seen as a reflection of the expectation of mother, uncles and aunts together. Failing to the little lady, she determines to do the exact opposite and turns herself into a ‘’ queer thing’’. Therefore, it is a response to criticism she constantly receives and not to be compared with her neat and little cousin Lucy who is everything Maggie is not. It’s very obvious that Lucy is the little lady that Maggie fails to be. As she meets the demands of respectability she matches the expectations of parents as well as the principles of society. Though Maggie loves Lucy she knows that she cannot be like her. By cutting off her hair, Maggie makes a statement to her mother, and she doesn’t accede to the demands of propriety or respectability, she does quite the opposite. She cuts it off. 28 The mill on the Floss published on  April 1860, marks turning point in Eliot’s life . She began to work on it in January 1859, a month before Adam Bede, her first full-length novel, was published. Nearly at 40 years old she, had reached a moment of uncertainty; she couldn’t know that Adam Bede would be a triumphant success setting her to the road to fame and prosperity. The Mill on the Floss looks back on the place in the past, but a past that is still close enough to be recalled by the living, in this novel However Eliot is thinking in her own history in very immediate terms that she had allowed herself in her first fictional work to shed light on her sorrow for the unhappy life that she had lived in her childhood. Many details of Maggie Tolliver’s experiences draw directly on memories of rural Warwickshire, personal recollections which Eliot idealized as they grew more distant. Eliot’s fiction possesses Austrian’s neatness of finish, a comprehensiveness of detail, and a relish with the authoress, the fun of the play showing us, without the story line being broken, and the commentator declares that, every one most remember the consummate skill with which miss Austen manages this. On the author, unlike that of Miss Austen, and which brings her much closer to Charlotte Bronte that she is full of meditation on some of the most difficult problems of life, the destinies, the possibilities, and the religious protagonists of the mill on the floss, Maggie Tulliver, is entirely in the vein of characters Bronte showing that Eliot has thought as keenly and profoundly as the authoress of Jane Eyre on the particular under adverse out word circumstances. The critic Marget Oliphant meanwhile, preferred anonymity; she occasionally published periodical criticism as herself but was more often anonymous, and sometimes adopted an overtly masculine person. Her attitude differed somewhat from those of other male critics. For Marget Eliot as a writer of books, she was respected either as a woman or as an individual. However Sara Coleridge is an interesting case since her short venture into periodical criticism was ill-started. One collary of Identity and character being invested in periodical themselves rather than in individuals who wrote for them was that editors sometimes altred the texts of contributions to fit in with their sense of the veridical view point. Eliot often has the private emotional intensity of her narrative with a network of references to the intellectual concerns of the day, so too she balances its prevailing sadness of the day. Eliot was taken back when E.S Dallas contributing to what was in general chooses of praise for the novel among its first reviewers; found the Dalton family nothing more than a strangely selfish wretches. She commented later in Major Black wood: ‘’I’m so far from hating the Dotson myself, that am rather ghost to find them ticked with such very ugly adjectives, she was as far 29 from hating the Dotson sisters as she from overeating them, because they shared in her own most deeply felt identity.’’ It is prominent to mention that the most prospective comments on the narrative in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss has been proffered by Mary Jacob, who notes that the language of the novel maybe found to be not clear in the beginning of the book. Jacobs takes things as a starting point for a feminist analysis of the novel, demonstrating how the society of St. Ogg’s condemns Maggie’s privileged access to language as unreliable and incorrect, since for them clichés and dead metaphors have replaced the truth of linguistics expression. One of those pages I want to take Jacobs’s statement more literary still and documents radical nature on the basic of analysis of the novel, the result of which will suggest an even more trenchant critique of society, values and norms in those passages of the novel that employ the narrative technique called reflection.

WOMEN’S POSITION IN SOCIETY 

Women’s value in society 

Women in the Victorian society were given very limited roles. Before the industrial revolution, women were seen as just accessories to their husbands’ success and had to be from ever- supportive for the men in their lives. They were taught from childhood to be very patient resignation, and to be very silent suffering. An ideal woman was not supposed to have sexual desires, and was actually owned, first by her father and then her husband. She could not divorce for infidelity alone even though it was allowed the other way around. A young girl was expected from the childhood to be so happy with the way the society role her own life, and to learn that being wife and a mother is the greatest reward she could dream of. She was taught that one day she could be her husband‘s biggest supporter and the reason of his success. When we talk about the women in the Victorian era many questions erases their selves like what was the definition of women in the Victorian era what was their main role in the society and what was their basic value. Actually the two novels Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Eliot’s The Mill on the floss are talking mainly about women marginalization in the Victorian society. Written in 1847, ‘’Jane Eyre’’ the novel concentrates on the role of women. It is a semibiography and closely reflected the real situation of Victorian society at that specific period of time. The novel is a buildungsroman and it takes us from the life of a low-class women struggle to create her own Identity in a male dominant world. And that’s exactly what Jane tried to convey through her novel in the quote bellow: Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men fell they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts us 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 privileges- 45 creatures, to playing on the piano and embroiling bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them; they seek to do more or to learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. (Bronte, p.96) This statement from the novel the novel explores the marginalization of women in the Victorian society and how they mistreated them and consider them as they have no feelings or emotions Therefore, in Jane Eyre, charlotte Bronte created a literary work that shook traditional conventions in Victorian England by showing the feminist view so clearly. It was a work that reflects denial ignorance of women’s sexual identity and passion. Jane Eyre shows that women are capable of being passionate of expressing fulfillment in a marriage where partners are equals. In the 19th century women in general had the same rights and duties but there was a very fine line dividing the lower class from the middle class and the middle class from the upper class. In general, women had very little rights regarding education, marriage and properties. They were considered their husbands properties before and after marriage, were trained to become one. Charlotte Bronte depicted all three classes of women and their rights and duties profusely in her novel Jane Eyre. Through out the course of the novel , there were three women whom fit perfectly in the social classes , which are: Blanch Ingram in the high class, Diana and Mary rivers in the middle class and Bessie in the lower class. Jane Eyre, the heroine of the novel, although being a lower class, allows herself to step out from the whole stereotype circle and create a totally new identity for herself. Blanche Ingram, a beautiful, wealthy, elegant yet aloof and showy woman is considered the personification of women in that class, she is everything that a woman from a high class shall be and that’s why Jane said that she is ‘’ showy but…Not genuine ‘’ Being high class, Miss Ingram’s rights to a little more education than the other classes but still doesn’t 46 possesses free will. Her duties to her husband are to be able to dress and carry herself elegantly and with etiquette in order exhibit her husband’s wealth and classes, she was expected to be able to read, sew, visit and receive guests, write letters and see to the honorable husband. Women were not supposed to have opinions regarding political issues and were only to talk about materialistic things such as clothes, jewelry and other accessories. Blanch Ingram possesses all these qualities at once and therefore’’ Most gentleman admire her’’. Contradictory to the above, an example of higher class women would be of bertha mason Mr. Rochester’s first wife. She possesses none of the above mentioned qualities and this is where Rochester’s male-dominant, misogynistic side is revealed as he locks her up in a room. Although Mrs. Rochester is crazy and mentally ill, and it wasn’t fear to burden Mr. Rochester unknowingly with her, this situation brings light to the misogynistic, male ego side of Mr. Rochester as he believes that being a male; he can lock up a female who was weak and fragile. In Jane Eyre, the women who portray the mid-lower class were Diana and Mary rivers. They fit perfectly well with the typical image of middle class ladies. They have a job as governess, ‘’ both possessed faces full of distinction that will let them have a job as governesses ‘’ both possessed faces full of distinction and intelligence. They are obedient to their brother as: they both were religious as St. John listening to his own needs as he asks Jane to be his wife only because a religious purpose. This again shows men think that they can rule over women being a missionary wife by using God’s name ‘’ God using nature intended for claims her without her approval. This improve to the reader of the novel that man, no matter how religious or good he might be, his ego will always make him dominant statement of being ‘’ the servant of an infallible master’’ as God doesn’t ask men to dominant women and make them do things against their will. In the novel Bronte illustrates another example, for Bessie Mrs. Reed caretaker and servant and she portrayed the lower class women. She was a good woman as she didn’t have anything extraordinary and so it would be reasonable to call her ordinary. 47 She did her house work well, listened to herself in the company of Mr. Reed, ‘’ that you are under obligation to Mrs. Reed: she keeps you. Bessie although is not educated but she is smart enough to know her place in society and is willing to accept it but Jane on the other hand doesn’t accept this and rebels against it from the very beginning like in the quote below from the novel :‘’ Master! How is he my master am I a servant?’’ (Bronte, p36) As the novel is written toward the letter part of the 19 century, it reflects the changes taking part in society at that time and one of the major changes was the emerges of the new women ‘’, where starting to realize and appreciate their roles in society and had started breaking and revolt against the constrains of society set for them. This new movement concept in the era and was the reasons for major reforms in favor of women. Therefore, Charlotte Bronte’s novel is realistic and it changes the role of women, religion and morality in Victorian society and so it makes Jane portray the new women that had just started to emerge from the era. Although, Jane is not completely a new woman, she possesses many of the characteristics found in these women. For one she is the only women in the novel that demands equality and respect from men and is adamant not to lose her individuality to man; ‘’ shall not be …. Eyre any longer but an ape in a harlequin’s jacket ‘’ I have as much soul, as you and fully as much heart’’ but she contradicts her statement when she says ‘’ I will keep the law given by god: sanctioned by man.’’ As the heroine of the story, Jane had a strong moral background and even if she rebels against man, she can’t go against the will of God. Therefore, as a strong woman that really presented Victorian women, she disobeys the laws of society and the most choking of these is when she gets married to her master, Mr. Rochester as it was considered almost as sin for someone from a higher class to get married to someone from a lower class and Rochester not only maries any lower class lady but he marries his governess: who is as close to being a servant, and that was the turning point in the novel. Because in the Victorian times, lower class people were not allowed to even peep or glance out of their metaphorical box but Jane not only peeps out of that box and rises her status to being high class as she gets married to Mr. Rochester and he is a noble class.