cousin John Reed. She was charged as guilty for the act and was put into a room called red room which is considered as a room with supernatural elements by Mrs Reed for a whole night. Later she was found ill and was taken out from the room. After that she had an argument with Mrs Reed and refuses to be treated as inferior and finally speaks out against the discrimination meted to her by the cousins and by her aunt with sharp and cold exposure. When Mrs Reed reproaches Jane for her deceitful act of telling a lie out of all reason, she defended her act and replied to her aunt’s charge saying ‘’ I am not deceitful. If I were, I should say I loved you, but I declare, I don’t love you. I dislike you the worst of anybody in the world except John …show more content…
The novel being written at a time when the society was a patriarchal society , dominated by man and by the rich and wealthy person of the society, the struggle Jane had to go through in order to find her individual identity, independence, equality and dignity seem impossible for a woman of no fortune and no physical beauty. Yet Jane never surrenders to those snobbish people who despise poor and the weak people. She defied most of the cultural standards and the societal norms of the Victorian period which was a man- dominated society and the poor people were oppressed. She lived in a ‘’world that measured the likelihood of woman’s success by the degree of her marriageability,’’ which included her familial connections, economic status and beauty ( Moglene 484). We can see from the relationships she had with men that she defied the generally accepted norms and tradions of the nineteenth- century women. Jane Eyre can be labelled as a feminist role model of the Victorian Era due to her commitment to dignity, independence , freedom of choice and her willingness to speak her mind. WORKS CITED: 1 Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. W.W. Norton and Company, Inc, New York: 1987. 2 Moglen, Helen. "The Creation of a Feminist Myth." Charlotte Bronte: The Self Conceived. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, n.d. Rpt. in Bronte 484-491 3 http://onlineessays.com/essays/literature/feminism-in-charlotte-brontes-jane-eyre.php Essay: Feminism in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre 4