Jane Eyre Case
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2. As a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled. (Virginia Woolf, Orlando). Discuss how the texts you have read subvert gender stereotypes.
In Jane Eyre the notion of gender is not seen as definable; neither rooted in the social stereotype or in the biological sex; the inner or the outer, but as a liminal space in imagination and intelligence; a multi-faceted thing. Women are not made inherently weak by Victorian society, 1 rather it is a stereotypical view that women should be so. Conversely, Robert Browning subverts the archetypal masculine identity in his non-acceptance of the intangible limitations of a gender and strives to define it physically. Victorian men are weakened by their dependency on the power they have over women.
Jane Eyre rejects the oppression of a patriarchal Victorian society; the ideal of marriage and religion, and is consequently uncertain of where she belongs. The image of women has been recreated or reproduced . . detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance. 2 Through Jane, Bronte redefines gender in terms of a single vision;3 in that of the female. J.E.D. Esquirol suggested that “the condition of selfhood is dependent on having something to conceal: it is the very disjunction between inner and outer form which creates the self.”4 This selfhood depends on the existence of not of an inner self of feeling, or an outer socialized self, but a self that occupies the space between what is presented and reserved from society. Jane resists categorization5 and instead invokes the subversive other and otherness. A stifling of Janes selfhood generates the projected double in the imagination. Born an orphan into Gateshead Hall, she is a discord,6 (p19) not a member of the true flock, butan interloper. (p78) She is unable to relate herself to other physical forms and so, finds her identity in myths and fiction; where she is able to form an idea of her own. (p12) John Reed exerts authority over economic and productive ownership and wants to keep Jane out of the way of the mirror and the windows, referring to a suspicion of female self awareness and knowledge. Victorian women [had] no business to take our books; (p13) the key to independent intellectual understanding was owned by men, not women.
Browning subtlety subverts the stereotypical patriarch model of victorian society in trying to overtly embody it and suppress the subversion of the domestic female. In doing so he ironically exposes a male speakers inadequate attempts to possess a Female Other. 7 Unlike Jane Eyre, Browning searches for his own identity not through an imagination of his other self, but through the physical other of the lover who defines himself in relation to women. As Simone De Beauvoir suggests; one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one. 8 There is no specific feminine nature but a woman merely is defined as and by the other of man. Using the dramatic monologue, he embodies the unstable psychological state of a male identity that claims ownership of a wandering female.
In Porphyrias Lover9 the utopian image of the female10 shut[ting] the cold (7) of patriarchal oppression out, sets a sullen wind (2) and vex[es] the lake. (4) This almost supernatural woman who glided in (6) depicts this self prescribed image of female existence as foreign and unnatural. Whilst she engages in subservient acts as she kneeled, (8) laid (12) and called, (15) they are ones that connote a sense of worship and undeniable sexuality. The male is passive whilst Porphyria embodies both the masculine notion of activity and feminine subservience; arguably becoming androgynous. Similarly, in Virginia Wolfs Orlando, freedom is presented only when Orlando is willing to burst through the illusion of gender ideals that society is forcing on her and become a sex of her own. She realizes that the indomitable nature of the spirit of the age . . . batters down anyone who tries to take a stand against it. 11(Woolf, p244) Like Porphyria and Jane, to become her own identity, she must shatter societys illusions by confrontation. (p200) Whilst the conventional image of the woman in the controlled domestic space is painted by Browning, it is one that is disrupted by Porphyrias literal and metaphorical undressing. She Withdrew the drooping cloak and shawl. (11) She reclaims the sexual space that the lover usually advocates and actively engages in her own objectification. There is no subtlety in the male gaze but she actively made his cheek lie (19) on her chest; placing the female passions of the heart at the forefront of their identity as opposed to the shoulder [that] bore/ Her head. (40) For men, a patriarchal society should be shaped by the head of reason and it is this that provokes the cementation of a particular female identity in killing her to regain a warped image of domestic bliss.
Sandra Gilbert contests that the red room establishes the symbolic pattern of Jane Eyre. 12 In this room, and throughout the novel Bronte uses narrative technique and the bildungsroman in a similar way to Dickens in Great Expectations enables the adult self to narrate the action of the younger self to document self discovery. The red room is a microcosm for her social imprisonment and indeed her first realization of escape. The passionate child self is able to answer the ceaseless inward question and see clearly into the rational adult self through a supernatural reflection in the looking-glass….all looked colder in that visionary hollow than in reality. (Bronte, p18) In the image of the mirror she realizes she is doubly trapped; in the image of her seen by others, and the image she has created as a result of their abandonment. Jane has no concrete connections to the physical social world and has to invent herself through the only material she has claim to; the passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and older ballads. (p9) In being told she is a discord (p19) she sees herself as a phantom, a half fairy, a half imp. (p18) Her female selfhood is not conformed to her, she instead creates her own definition of gender. She doesnt merely think of this gender but is able to conjecture this image into something physical in her mind, at least. Thus, it could be suggested that the works is not overtly feminist but merely strives for an equality