Analyse the methods Charlotte Bronte uses to make the reader empathize with Jane Eyre in the opening chapters.

The first 200 words of this essay...

Analyse the methods Charlotte Bronte uses to make the reader empathize with Jane Eyre in the opening chapters. Reflect on how the novel portrays Victorian ideology and relate your analysis to the novel's literary context.

In this essay I shall analyse the methods which Charlotte Bronte uses to make the reader empathise with Jane Eyre in the first chapter. I will reflect on how the novel portrays Victorian ideology. Charlotte Bronte's literary context in this chapter makes the reader empathize with Jane.

Firstly the use of pathetic fallacy, relating to landscape and weather, emphasises the bleak, sad, lonely life that Jane leads "humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority". Perhaps "The cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre" reflects the empty unloving environment that Jane is growing up in.

Furthermore "in the leafless shrubbery" reflects the bareness of her existence.

When Jane is reading in the library the author chooses a book Bewick's History of British Birds which is a book full of references to isolation and coldness "those forlorn regions of dreary space- that reservoir of frost and snow". Again this seems to reflect Jane's unhappy situation. In a way