{"id":170,"date":"2017-03-03T03:20:55","date_gmt":"2017-03-03T03:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/?p=170"},"modified":"2020-08-31T20:39:01","modified_gmt":"2020-08-31T20:39:01","slug":"how-gender-roles-are-defied-in-jane-eyre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/2017\/03\/03\/how-gender-roles-are-defied-in-jane-eyre\/","title":{"rendered":"How Gender Roles Are Defied in Jane Eyre"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI am glad you are no relation of mine: I will never call you aunt again as long as I live [\u2026] You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so: and you have no pity [\u2026] People think you a good woman, but you are bad; hard-hearted. You <\/em>are deceitful!\u201d (49)<\/p>\n

\u201cEre I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty.\u201d (49)<\/p>\n

In this passage, we see Jane defy her aunt, or as we would say in the 21st<\/sup> century, \u201cdrag\u201d her. This stood out to me as especially significant because up until this point in literature (for the most part, I don\u2019t want to discount any other works that may be less well-known or that I\u2019m forgetting), we haven\u2019t seen a female character speak her mind as bluntly, or to the extent that Jane doing in this passage. After so many years of being controlled by her aunt, Jane defies the role of women, and also children in this narrative\u2014normally, women were supposed to stay silent and obedient, much like children.<\/p>\n

What is interesting here is that even though Aunt Reed is a woman, most of the qualities Jane attributes to her are ones that wouldn\u2019t have been used to describe a female: \u201cwithout one bit of love or kindness,\u201d or \u201cyou are bad, hard-hearted.\u201d As shown in another text from this time period, Daisy Miller,<\/em> women were supposed to maintain an image of being kind, gentle, and nurturing. However, Jane and her Aunt go against these traditional female roles here\u2014but for different reasons. As mentioned previously, many of the adjectives used to describe Aunt Reed are not the typical \u201cfeminine\u201d descriptors. Rather, Aunt Reed is taking on a more masculine, authoritarian role through her oppression and control of Jane.<\/p>\n

In the second passage, where we hear an older Jane muse on her outburst, she seems liberated by her own actions. As a young female, Jane shows the reader her strong-willed, determined, and simply put: badass self. Whether it was meant to be a feminist statement or not, I, for one, felt that this passage would have opened up the 19th<\/sup> century reader to the notion that yes, school girls are capable of defending themselves too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI am glad you are no relation of mine: I will never call you aunt again as long as I live [\u2026] You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so: and you have no pity [\u2026] People think you a … Continue reading How Gender Roles Are Defied in Jane Eyre<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3464,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[138876,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spring-2017","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3464"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}