Child Images in Jane Eyre A Psychological Projection of Charlotte Bront TEXTAREA td TR TR VALIGN
Charlotte Brontë started Jane Eyre in 1846 and finished it in 1847. ... The success temporarily swept away the gloomy omen that hang over the family, not only promising the Brontë sisters a badly needed economic independence, but also a stimulus for their further literary achievement. Before Jane Eyre, the Brontë sisters published nothing else but an uneventful collection of poems. Jane Eyre can be regarded as Charlotte Brontë’s successful maiden work, if not the first writing practice (She had already practiced a lot in her early Angrian stories along with her brother Patrick Branwell Brontë and two sisters Emily Brontë and Anne Brontë). ... In this sense, Charlotte Brontë is hard to be said an exception. Jane as a Child The novel begins with a child’s view of the world: a dreary, cold, stormy winter day and the winter landscape. Just as the bleak surrounding suggests, Jane feels alienated and isolated in a hostile family, where her aunt Mrs. ... However, a careful reader can hardly expect all the heroic actions and turbulent utterance from a ten-year child called Jane Eyre. Brontë herself may have sensed that oddity, so in the story little Jane is let to be called unchildlike and attached an eerie precocity to balance a reader’s common sense. But why should Charlotte risk the danger of betraying credibility to portrait a little girl in such furious and rebellious image? Some critics believe Byron must have had a very strong influence on Charlotte. As a child, “Charlotte wrote imitations of Byron’s works, moreover, Byron’s poetic and public image as depicted in, for example, Childe Harold, Manfred, and Cain, captured her imagination and formed her taste in heroes. ... ”1 Little Jane surely displays not a little amount of Byronic courage and solitude. However, if Charlotte’s personal background of writing the novel is fully taken into consideration, it may be safely concluded that here it may have something more to do with Charlotte’s own choice rather than other’s influence. Before Jane Eyre, the public were used to the always beautiful, soft, petty-tricky heroines in books, sometimes spiced with a pursuit of virtue, like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Charlotte would have fallen into that set pattern if she had not intended to create a new image. ... So when Jane Eyre appeared, critics were startled to find in the story a plain, independent, and well principled new woman dramatically in contrast to those conventional female characters.