Autonomy In Jane Eyre

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In the novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë created the protagonist Jane as a way to not only accept the occurrences going on in her personal life at the time, but to also show readers how she dealt with those situations. All throughout the novel, Brontë indicates plenty of hints that she struggled to discover equilibrium between autonomy and love. Not only that, but she too had a very difficult time meeting others who could see and appreciate the true Brontë -- people who could see her as an equal and not a lower class. She used Jane’s voice, through the entire story, as a way to portray her attitudes towards gender, social class, and religion. From the beginning, Jane is constantly battling to overcome oppression and achieve equality. Jane …show more content…

Reed, “What would Uncle Reed say to you, if he were alive?” (Brontë 24). Mrs. Reed, at first, was terrified when Jane abruptly stated this. This is a major turning point for Jane, though, because it shows her strength to speak up and stand up for herself, which she does, in the next few chapters when she goes to school and meet people who aren’t abusive towards her. Here, she begins to find freedom, happiness and a sense of belonging. As the story progresses, Jane is sent to the school of Lowood and comes in contact with two important characters: Helen Burns and Mr. Brocklehurst. As Jane met each one of these characters, they each showed a different representation of a model of religion. However, Jane is creating and forming her own ides and opinions about faith, so she ends up rejecting these two models of religion. Mr. Brocklehurst was the hypocritical master of at the school of Lowood, was the first figure she met. Here, Brontë portrays all the threats and deceptions she witnessed during the Evangelical movement of the nineteenth-century through Mr. Brocklehurst. When Jane attends school at Lowood, she describes a situation in which Mr. Brocklehurst ordered for the natural curly hair of a student to be cut off so that it would lay flat. This is one of his attempts to cleanse his students of their pride; yet this system for subjecting the Martin