Jane Eyre and Victorian Women

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Jane Eyre and Victorian Women

Introduction

Whilst the Victorian era saw Britain becoming the epitome of power and wealth,  the status of women was a perfect  example of the discrepancy between this and the appalling social conditions.

Women were expected to remain pure and clean, and were expected to be treated as if they were holy yet had limited rights which meant that they could not vote, hold a job that wasn’t teaching or own property.

It was also believed that women should not be educated to the levels that men were.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said “Women exist in the main solely for the propagation of the species.”  These somewhat misogynistic words perhaps highlight the opinions that were held about women during the Victorian period.

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However, despite the barriers put up for women, the number of female writers increased greatly.

The catch was that in order to be taken seriously, they had to write under male aliases.

This includes Charlotte Brontë, who wrote Jane Eyre as Currer Bell and Mary Ann Evans who wrote Middlemarch as George Eliot two of the novels that we will be talking about.

Jane Eyre

Jane feels exiled and ostracized at the beginning of the novel, and the cruel treatment she receives from her Aunt Reed and her cousins only increases her feeling of alienation.

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