This Terrific Separation: The Experience of Girlhood in Jane Eyre and Northanger Abbey - Research Paper Example

?Sugar and Spice Jane Eyre and Catherine Morland are the creations of two beloved Victorian British women, Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen. They were born in a time where women were expected little more than to look pretty and secure a husband at balls many girls attended which afforded them their only permitted physical contact with the opposite sex. Girls did not have any legal rights at the time and the accomplishments they were encouraged to possess were nothing of greater significance than such things as piano playing, sewing and finery, drawing, and foreign languages. The only options for proper yet impoverished women were to become a governess or teacher, roles Charlotte and her sisters filled and felt very confined in. Charlotte believed a governess was not considered an equal member in the family she worked, nor even allowed her own existence. It was this state of bondage that Charlotte longed to escape through her writing, and it was when these writings of her and her sisters were discovered, that freedom was granted to her. Undoubtedly, marriage was the best opportunity for women; but neither Charlotte Bronte nor Jane Austen, had the spirit to marry for any consideration outside love. And so they made their own way, claiming their independence writing of the love and life for women they believed in, paving the course for all women to come. “If adventure will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad” (Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Chapter 1). Jane Eyre’s journey begins when she is cast out by her aunt of Gateshead Hall. She is sent to Lowood, a school for orphaned children. It is a difficult and dismal existence, harsh conditions created to break the spirits of young girls. Jane must learn to submit her passions to her reason. All journeys begin with emotional orphanage and Jane finds solace in the comfort of her friend Helen and teacher Miss Temple. “Well has Solomon said- Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith. I would not now have exchanged Lowood and all its privations for Gateshead and its daily luxuries.” (Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, chapter 8). The passion she learns to subdue never deserts Jane and it is through this passion that her yearning for more is expressed. “Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex." "I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen: that I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach...I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes..." (Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre Chapter 12). In the character of Jane we see a woman ahead of her times, not only in her independent spirit, but her education and the dignity she holds as a capable woman able to stand on her own. Charlotte wasn’t arguing for equal rights between men and women but only recognition that “the same heart and the same spirit animate both men and women, and that love is the pairing of equals in these spheres.” (George P. Landon, victorianweb.org). Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey does not encounter the struggles Jane does in loss of family, finance and circumstance. She gets taken by Mrs. Allen to the big city of Bath to have such life-altering experiences as her first ball. Born to a plain and average family without a single dashing young male in the neighborhood, her life up to the time of this visit to Bath had been without any exciting occurrences. “But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.” (Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Chapter 1). At the beginning of the novel, Jane describes Catherine as unable to learn anything before she is taught, “often inattentive and occasionally stupid.” The treasure for Catherine on her journey is in the lessons taught her that improve her ability to read both novels as well as the people around her. She becomes a better judge of character by story’s end when she comes to understand Isabella and General Tilney. Catherine adores gothic novels and these represent her means of escaping the mundane life she has led. Going to Bath has been the most thrilling thing to happen to her in her seventeen years. She loves reading stories of heroines captured into haunted abbeys, and shortly after she arrives in Bath she is invited to stay at an actual abbey that fatefully belongs to the family of Henry Tilney, whom she has recently met and formed an immediate crush on. When she meets Henry’s father who appears reserved and distant she lets her imagination get the best of her imagining that he killed his own wife and that the abbey she is staying at is as haunted as the ones in the storybooks she has read. There is also the “Red room” scene in Jane Eyre the room Jane is locked in for bad behavior and where her imagination turns to superstition. Their passions intensify unchecked in these fanciful notions with both negative and positive outcomes. These fantasies represent girls suppressed in their natural surroundings. It is visible even in the characters around them, the subservient role of females to males in that era. Mrs. Reed, Jane’s aunt is dominated by her son John, who often abuses her and yet she calls him her little darling. He also torments Jane. Jane is a servant to Rochester until their shared love defines them as equal. Mrs. Allen in Northanger Abbey’s primary concern is the proper styling of her gowns and muslins and whether or not there is an acquaintance to be found in their outings. Isabella, Catherine’s new friend is a flirtatious girl whose primary interest is in charming the boys around her, and after she secures the engagement of Catherine’s brother, she is quick to address her attentions to the first guy who appears that has more wealth than he. In Jane Eyre, Blanche Ingram is a stark contrast to the intelligent and noble Jane, in her folly and frills. As a rich girl she comes to Thornfield to flirt with Rochester not because she is interested in or attracted to him, but because he is a man of wealth and her frivolous mother wishes to advertise her daughter’s charms as an inducement to him, his property and wealth. Rochester himself refers to Blanche as a “mercenary” which is comical. Both Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen use characters like Blanche and Isabella to portray the average women in those days as trophies, as pretty pieces of lace out to be purchased by the wealthy men; which in the time they lived was a common manner of courtship. They both then used simple, plain girls as Jane Eyre and Catherine Morland to show the simplicity and yet genuine substance of heart, soul and spirit men were looking to love, which is their equal, not a doll. So Charlotte and Jane also had to be unique in creating the heroes for their special heroines, which would be men like Rochester and Henry Tilney, who were decent minded men able and willing to hear and respect the opinions and feelings of Jane and Catherine and appreciate and admire their individualism. Charlotte Bronte considered her novel Jane Eyre an autobiography. She knew Jane, she was Jane. A simple, plain lady of great mind and passion, who was painfully reserved and quiet, unnoticed most of the time. She gives Jane Eyre her Rochester, who in her own life was a married man named Heger, who was her French professor and whom she loved enough to write letters that went unanswered by him. When Charlotte began pursuing a writing career for herself and sisters, she was told by the men she inquired that “women had no place in literature” and so it is no surprise in that period of Victorian Britain, that she published under the male surname Currer Bell. It was only after the misleading information of Emily Bronte’s publisher claiming Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre were written by the same author that she arrived at her publisher’s office in London to reveal their true identities as women. Charlotte and her sisters would read their stories to each other and when Charlotte was sharing Jane Eyre her sister Emily argued that her heroine needed to be more of a beauty to be interesting again supporting the Victorian view of women. Charlotte saw differently saying “I will show you a heroine as plain and small as myself who shall be as interesting as any of yours.” This she accomplished. Jane Eyre continues to be a favorite heroine and inspiration to many, as should Charlotte herself. She refused several offers of marriage in her life even the brother of her dear friend, because she did not find them to be her match. It was only after the death of her sisters and she was left quite alone that she married Arthur Bell Nichols, her father’s curate, a man she respected and cared for. She died within a year of marriage her unborn baby inside her. Jane Austen was as independent a spirit as Charlotte. She came from a family of eight children and the little money her parents had went to support the endeavors of her brothers. Jane and her sister Cassandra were like other Victorian women, desired to marry. Cassandra’s husband died and she never married another leaving her Jane’s constant companion. Jane fell in love with Thomas Lefroy who did not make her an offer of marriage because she did not have wealth to recommend her. She accepted the proposal of a friend, but less than twenty four hours later rejected his offer because she did not love him and could not marry without love. So she remained single and turned to her gift of writing as her source of income. Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen would not marry for fortune like so many girls of their time did. Instead they through their example “gave the gift of the modern woman, a woman determined to make her own way, and live her life by her own set of standards, dictated not by society but by herself, and herself alone.” (Melissa Lowes, victorianweb.org). Such endearing characters they created as Jane Eyre and Catherine Morland are fine models for women throughout the ages. References Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. 1803. Glutenberg.org. Project Glutenberg, January 21, 2010. Web July 13 2011. Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1846. Glutenberg.org Project Glutenberg, April 29 2007. Web July 13 2011. Landon, George and Lowes, Melissa. http://www.victorianweb.org October 23, 2002. Web August 1 2011. Read More