Male Characters In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

In her first published novel Jane Eyre (1847), Charlotte Brontë portrays Jane, the protagonist, as a struggling spirit who is plain and simple in appearance but intellectual and courageous in nature. Examining the narrative structure of the novel, one can see that each household in which Jane finds herself is under the regulation of a dominant male master, who is surrounded by a group of dependent women. Each of the male character tries to chain her in a bond of slavery. While one wants to enslave her in passion, the other wants to imprison her in principle. This paper is an attempt to show that the male characters in the novel function as the catalysts to Jane for discovering her selfhood, learning her self-potentiality, and getting liberty.

Key words:

Discovery, freedom, power, realization, self-potentiality.

The wave of the Renaissance came to the English shore on the 16th century, but it did not give birth any major female writer; the Age of Enlightenment began in the 18th century but it did not light up ‘the unlit corridors of history’ (Woolf, 220) of English literature by the research of any female scientist or philosopher. Until the second half of the 18th century it was the male writers who enjoyed monopoly in the realms of English literature. In the early Victorian period (1837-1901), a galaxy of women novelists came forward in a procession, headed by the Brontë sisters, heralding a drastic change in the canon of English literature. Through her novels the eldest of the three Brontë sisters (two others: Emily, Anne), Charlotte Brontë (1816-55) criticized the conventional portrayal of the female characters (Angel-in the House) in the literature. Brontë

This quest for knowledge, more importantly for self-knowledge, structures Jane Eyre as a Bildungsroman. According to M.H. Abrams, “The subject of these novels is the development of the protagonist’s mind and character in the passage from childhood through varied experiences ̶ often through a spiritual crisis ̶ into maturity, which usually involves recognition of one’s identity and role in the world” (Abrams, 193). The novel is the product of first wave of feminism which “focuses on women’s gaining status as human beings with full civil, intellectual, social, economic and legal rights” (Scholz, 06). The novel can be studied by the discourses of Victorian psychology. Jane Eyre can be read as a quintessential expression of Victorian individualism and gives emphasis on self, subjectivity. “Throughout the nineteenth-century psychological theory” Sally Shuttleworth says, “one can see the emergence of a new emphasis on the centrality of opposition as the defining category of selfhood: in Esquirol’s insistence that selfhood only emerges with the ability to conceal, and in the phrenologists’ grounding of self in the experience of conflict, both internal, between the faculties themselves, and external, between the self and the world, a theory which, in turns, bears a strong relation to aspects of German Romantic psychology. Nowhere are these principles of opposition given more prominence than in a series of