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If you have yet to discover the unique voice of Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre, you have a special delight awaiting you.
For this most acclaimed of novels—"English," "Gothic, "romantic," "female"—is always a surprise, in the very authority, resonance, and inimitable voice of its heroine. "I resisted all the way," Jane Eyre states at the beginning of Chapter 2, and this attitude, this declaration of a unique and iconoclastic female rebelliousness, strikes the perfect note for the entire novel. That a woman will "resist" the terms of her destiny (social or spiritual) is not perhaps entirely new in English literature up to the publication of Jane Eyre in 1847: we have after all the willful heroines of certain of Shakespeares plays, and those of Jane Austens elegant comedies of manners. But Jane Eyre is a young woman wholly unprotected by social position, family, or independent wealth; she is without power; she is, as Charlotte Bronte judged herself, "small and plain and Quaker-like"— lacking the most superficial yet seemingly necessary qualities of femininity. ("You are not pretty any more than I am handsome," Rochester says bluntly.) Considered as a fictitious character and, in this instance, the vocal consciousness of a long and intricately plotted novel of considerable ambition, Jane Eyre was a risk for her young creator—had not Henry Fielding gambled, and lost, on the virtuous but impoverished and less than ravishingly beautiful heroine of his Amelia, of 1751, arousing the scorn of readers who had so applauded Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones? Jane Eyre, who seems to us, in retrospect, the very voice of highly educated but socially and economically disenfranchised gentility, as natural in her place in the literature of nineteenth-century England as Twains Huckleberry Finn is in our literature, was unique for her time. She speaks with an apparent artlessness that strikes the ear as disturbingly forthright. 本论文由英语论文网 www.51lunwen.org整理提供
One of the reasons for Jane Eyres authority over her own experience, and the confidence with which she assesses that experience, is that, as the romantically convoluted plot evolves, the reader learns that it is history rather than story. Jane Eyre, who is wife and mother in 1819, is recounting the events of 1799-1809 in a language that is unfailingly masterful precisely because it is after the fact: if the Romantic/Gothic novel be, in one sense, sheer wish, Janes triumph (wife to Lord Rochester after all and mother to his son—as it scarcely needs be said) represents a wish fulfillment of extraordinary dimensions. The material of legends and fairy tales, perhaps; yet also, sometimes, this time at least, of life. For we are led to believe Jane Eyres good fortune because we are led to believe her voice. It is, in its directness, its ruefulness and scarcely concealed rage, startlingly contemporary; and confirms the critical insight that all works of genius are contemporaneous both with their own times and with ours.
Jane Eyre is a story of hunger; unlike that more complex and perhaps more aesthetically "pure" novel, it is a story of hunger satisfied. That young Jane Eyre supplants the formerly exotic Bertha (the Creole heiress whom Rochester recklessly married in his youth) is not, given the terms of the novels logic, a matter of moral ambiguity: for in her deranged and diseased state Bertha is no longer a human woman but sheer appetite, and therefore beyond the range of Janes (and presumably