Jane Eyre: AS & A2 York Notes

Charlotte Brontë was of the class and gender that she depicts Jane as belonging to and, ever since Mrs Gaskell's seminal, "The Life of Charlotte Brontë" (1857) much of her own life is said to have been reflected by Jane's story. But, well aware of the limits placed on women in her position by her society, especially governesses, Brontë in my view knew very well that the novel was not, as Jane herself says, 'a regular autobiography'. Instead, it's a Bildungsroman written as if by Jane a number of years after events have passed and therefore giving her time for mature reflection. "Jane Eyre" both presents the reader with the facts with reference to the position of Victorian middle-class women, and appears to offer a real imaginative expoloration of the possibility, costs and rewards of stepping over the limits.

As a Bildungsroman, "Jane Eyre" is a 'coming of age' story. It is about the protagonist's progress from childhood to maturity and the struggle to find identity. That struggle, for a young woman limited by the demands of class and gender, is represented as painful, and Jane stops to pass comment and addresses us directly in the moments of most passionate feeling generated by the checks placed on her by her social position – moments such as that when she leaves Thornfield. 'Gentle reader,' she says, after subjecting herself to the demands of propriety as a property-less woman, 'may you never feel what I then felt!'

Jane must, it seems, follow the social conventions in order to maintain her respectability, which as Marxist feminist critics have observed is the only commodity she has. Ultimately, having behaved properly, having suppressed her passionate desire for Rochester, she marries well, which her class and gender suggest she ought to do. In this way, she might appear to live a life as restricted as any of the other young middling women who play a part in the novel, women such as Diana and Mary Rivers, and Georgiana Reed, who all also marry successfully – Diana and Mary because Jane has given them money and therefore the freedom to marry for love. Even the servant, Bessie, marries well in her own way, in her own class.

However, Jane's story is in my view unconventional, as Brontë's deliberate use of fairy tale suggests. Like Cinderella, she is liberated from the bonds of service and marries above herself; like Little Red Riding Hood, she escapes the wolf; like feminist versions of Bluebeard, she finds out her master's secrets, but escapes her predecessors' horrible end.

Jane, if not quite liberated, I would argue at least manages to avoid the potential pitfalls of her passionate nature and go back to reclaim what she most desires, having quite literally thrown off the most repressive hand in the book (that of St John Rivers as he proposes). As Gilbert and Gubar have observed, she is quite discordant within her family, and in her society, (an 'imp' as she observes of herself in the 'red room'), and we see this most clearly when she stands on the battlements of Thornfield and aches to have the freedom to see and experience the wider world – a desire expressed through the use of Chartist-like language, the language of rebellion: 'Millions' and 'masses'. It was this that made Victorian readers react as if the novel were almost a radical tract, a lesson in successful revolt. Though Jane might be said to be as trapped by class and gender as the other women in the novel, her strangeness sets her apart and allows the reader the liberty to make the ordinary seem unfamiliar, and so question the dominant codes of class and gender.