简爱性格特征

Contents

Abstract (1)

Key Words (1)

摘要 (1)

关键词 (1)

1. Introduction (1)

2. The Social Status of women at Victorian Time (3)

2.1 Women‟s Status in Family (3)

2.2 Women‟s Education Situation (4)

2.3 Women‟s Job Choice (4)

3. The Feminist Consciousness in Jane Eyre (5)

3.1 The Character Analysis of the Main Women Images (5)

3.2 The Strong Feminist Consciousness Jane Expresses (10)

4. Conclusion (17)

Bibliography (17)

The Feminism in Jane Eyre

Abstract：Jane Eyre is reputed as the representative work of early English female literature. From the experience and feelings of her own, the author Charlotte Bronte wrote to challenge to the patriarchal society. The three main female images she created : Jane，Bertha and Helen have different attitudes towards their destiny and get different consequence. The struggle and compromise of women to their destiny is showed through these three women. This paper attempts to value the feminism in Jane Eyre through analyzing their images.

Key Words: rebellion; independence; equality

摘要：《简爱》被称为英国早期女性文学的代表作。作者夏洛蒂〃勃朗特从自身的体验和感受出发，用手中的笔向传统的男权社会挑战。她笔下的三个女性角色简、海伦和伯莎对自己的命运是三种不同的态度，也有着不同的结局。从她们身上可以看到男权社会中的女人对自己命运的抗争与妥协。本文将通过对三个女主人公形象的探讨，解读《简爱》中的女权主义。

关键词：反叛；独立；平等

1. Introduction

Jane Eyre is considered as charlotte‟s most representative work and one of the most popular and important novels of the Victorian Age. Jane Eyre tells the story of an orphan girl called Jane Eyre, the daughter of a poor parson. This small, plain, poor governess goes through a lot of hardship with a strong sense of equality and independence. She has great courage to challenge the tradition and to fall in love with her master Rochester, a man superior to her in many ways. When she knows his wife is still alive she leaves him resolutely. Finally, she marries him when he is in the most wretched situation.

Jane is a new woman image in English literature. Almost all the women images before 19th century were created by men. “Frailty, the name is woman”, a famous statement in Shakespeare‟s Hamlet reminds people of the conventional opinion of

woman‟s image in the patriarchal world. Besides, we “image her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater.”(Virginia Woolf, 1929：33) It betrays the truth. It can‟t be prescribed better than what Virginia Woolf says in her A Room of One’s Own:“Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.”(Virginia Woolf, 1929:11) As for Jane Eyre which written by the woman Charlotte challenged the tradition and express a true, fresh world inside women. She bravely expressed the feminist consciousness, the suffering of the English women in19th century and their resisting against the oppressive patriarchal society. The theme of Jane Eyre is women‟s strong desire to be independent. The heroine Jane Eyre, with her obscurity and inferiority, stands out as a representative of the middle-class working women struggling for their basic rights and equality as a human being. Jane, small and weak as she is, becomes a heroine fighting for the liberation of women. As the first manifestation of the exploited and maltreated women, Jane Eyre is perceived as a representative work of feminist writing, i.e., works reflecting the experience and defending the interest of the weaker sex.

Charlotte created three representative women in Jane Eyre who reflect the attitudes women deal with their destiny. She wrote Helen who showed to the world how a perfect angel to be persecuted to death. She wrote Bertha who made people find frightened how strong the revenge power was when a silent woman erupt in silence. And she wrote Jane, a new woman who did n‟t promise anybody to control her destiny and vindicated her rights as a human being from start to finish. This paper will begin with the social status of the women in 19th century, and discuss the feminism in Jane Eyre through analyzing the three main images: Helen, Bertha and Jane.