This paper is pided into five parts to analyze Jane Eyre’s attitude toward life. Part one briefly states main points. Part two mainly talks about literature review and relative theories briefly. Part three focuses on the Jane Eyre’s view of life experience. Part four analyzes Jane Eyre’s view of life. Part five is the conclusion of the paper.
II. Literature Review and Relative Theories
This chapter gives a general review of the previous studies related to the present paper. Jane Eyre, which is a classic novel in Victorian age in Britain, has attracted both readers and scholars from different countries of different ages in the world. Some scholars study Jane Eyre from the point of feminist; the others study it from the point of Jane Eyre’s character.
2.1. Literature Review
In recent years, many critics have been inclined to read Jane Eyre as a feminist novel. They think the theme of Jane Eyre is the liberty of female. With the continuous development of Civil Right Movement, women begin to fight for democracy, liberty and equality from all over the world. The sense of pursuing the equality of men and women were born. Therefore, the theory of criticism reflecting feminism was born.
Elaine showalter(2004) presents her interpretations from a feminism point of view and makes tremendous efforts to the researches of women’s works. Her book a Literature of Their Own (2004) reveals her high appreciation for Charlotte Bronte. According to Elaine Showalter, Jane Eyre is the heroine of fulfillment with an extraordinary range of women’s physical and social experience.
Jane Eyre is the first character who has great sense of struggling in the history of British literature. In the introduction of this novel’s third edition, Joyce Carol Oats once said: “There were many females who fought for liberty in British literature before the publication of Jane Eyre. However, there was no one like Jane Eyre who was poor and normal fighting against a patriarchal society consciously.” Therefore, many scholars from home and abroad have done many researches about this novel in view of feminism. In addition, some scholars have different ideas; they think Jane Eyre touches on a number of important themes while telling a compelling story, such as morality, independence, atonement and forgiveness, love and passion and so on.
Characters are the soul of a novel, which is especially true in Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre has described a young lady who was poor but kept her nose clean and pursued her own ideal love in her strong sense of economic independence and respectable personality. However, more scholars have used psychoanalytic view to discuss Jane Eyre’s self consciousness and self-humiliation and the characteristics of the writer Charlotte Bronte and so on. Kang Dan (2007) once said the writer Charlotte Bronte dared to pursue the self-value of feminism and tried to create harmonious love. In one of Guo Xiaomei’s (2001) writings, she said, although Jane Eyre has the female’s characteristics of gentleness and obedience, she has more male’s characteristics of braveness and activeness. Jane Eyre has reflected the hope of realizing the dream of equality between male and female. She has played a major role in encouraging women to pursue the life of equality, liberty and independence with a more active mind.
2.2. Relative Theories
Bronte had become quite familiar with the Bible since childhood and she had been greatly influenced by the rhythm and writing style of the Bible. She had used parallelism many times in Jane Eyre. The novel Jane Eyre has inherited progressive parallelism of the Bible, which looks simple but goes deeper step by step and makes the characters more distinct when describing them. Parallel structure not only strengthens the rhythm of language but also presents the characteristics distinctly. The writer is good at using the writing method Synonymous Parallelism to express her emotions. For example, when Jane Eyre saved Rochester in the big fire, she said, “Good-night again, sir. There is no debt, benefit, burden, obligation, in the case.” This sentence not only makes Rochester respect and love her more but also let readers understand Jane’s characteristics deeper and feel that the emotions are real and affective. Special language style, especially the skillful usage of metaphor and symbolism, is one important characteristic of Jane Eyre. Bronte has used many kinds of metaphor and symbolism in Jane Eyre. For example, fire, which has been mentioned for many times and throughout the whole novel, has much complicated symbolism. In this novel, fire is not only the symbol of brightness and warmness but also the symbol of the characters and feelings of the hero and heroine with multi-meanings; it is not only the symbol of the happy love of Jane Eyre and Rochester but also the symbol of the independent, passionate and rebelling character of Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre indicates the heroine’s destiny from different aspects. Finally, moon and fire have become main symbols of this novel. Also, there is much controversy about the theme of Jane Eyre. There is no doubt that through reading Jane Eyre, we can see female’s sense of being independent. 《简爱》中女主人公的人生观分析(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_18556.html