Jane Eyre

Abstract

In the novel Jane Eyre, the central consciousness is the narrator and heroine Jane Eyre herself, who tells the story of the first thirty years of her life. The autobiographical form that Charlotte Brontë has used, suggesting that it will present a subjective point of view, sets the novel in the Romantic tradition of writing, as it is the essence of Romantic philosophies that man only regards, and singles out for special comment, those aspects of life which are of importance to himself, making use of nature as a visible manifestation of the inward state. Coleridge, who is the most lucid commentator on that mode, states that the Romantic writer strives ‘to make the external internal, to make nature thought and thought nature’. This is what Charlotte Brontë has done in Jane Eyre: she not only gives the reader a picture of the evolution of Jane from childhood to adulthood, in the external events of education, independence, falling in love, and marriage, but she also depicts the internal changes that take place in Jane’s personality at these significant periods of her life. To present the prosaic events of a governess’s life, simultaneously with an account of her inward state, at any given point of time, requires a high standard of competency in writing, and in the systematic use of the chosen imagery, if the novel is to show a balance between event and attitude.