Houston Bass
Jane Eyre, By Charlotte Bronte Essay
7th Period Honors English
22 August 2008
Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Bronte, describes the growth of a young, unstable girl into a spiritually mature woman. The character, Jane, encounters key situations in which her morale and ethics are challenged, along with her faith in God and the trust in her own self. The challenges she faces include society’s class system, her search for romance and true love, and the male supremacy in her culture.
In the novel, Jane is scarred as a young child by the death of her parents. In Victorian society’s class system, she is placed next to slaves and beggars. According to her cousin, John Reed, in the early chapters of the novel, she has “no business to read our books,” and being “a dependent,” she “ought to beg, and not to live here with gentleman’s children.” These early words foreshadow the oppression of Jane throughout the rest of her life. She is viewed as a low, poor person and is not seen as the individual woman she is. Jane is sent to Lowood, a boarding school for orphaned girls, where even there, a sub-class system was set to distinguish the head of the school from the lowly school children. Here at this school Jane begins to realize that she despises the routines set by the school workers, but soon begins to excel and step out of the boundaries of her class system. Charlotte Bronte used Jane as a model to show how a bright, artistic, and intellectual person can be undermined and overlooked because of their class system.
During the course Jane Eyre’s life, she comes across numerous men who treat her in different manners; all affecting her outward look on men and the inward look on herself. A recurring them in the novel is marriage for reasons outside of love. St. John Rivers, a priest, wants to marry Jane for religious image reasons, while Mr. Rochester married Bertha Mason solely for money. But Jane merely wants to know love, so that she can know...