The Oppression Of Women In Jane Eyre And The Tenant Of Wildfell

In addition, both Jane Eyre and The Tenant of WildFell, the male protagonists use oppressive idiolect to mentally oppress women, by obscuring them be seen as fragile winged creatures, predominantly birds, who were better suited to the reduced horizons of the domestic sphere. In the fourteenth century, the noun ‘Burd’ was used describe a ‘maiden, young girl (Burd, 2014)’, but later was adopted in Victorian literature as a play on words, to represent young women as birds. In turn, during the nineteenth-century, the animalization of women as birds transitioned itself into mundane dialect, and later in the twentieth-century, to colloquially describe “a young women or a man’s girlfriend”. (Dictrionaries, 2017)However, in Victoria Britain, the word

In the light of this statement, commenting on a women’s domestic place within society from a highly regarded public figure, the patronizing diction used normalises the verbal oppression of women, whilst displaying the enormity of the problem. It could be argued that the oppressive dialect used by men of the Victorian era, was encouraged by social attitudes, and domestic ideals such as the angel of the house. In addition, both Mr Huntingdon and Rochester use constant zoomorphism, to personify the female protagonists as fragile winged creatures. For instance, In 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall', Mr Huntingdon’s dialect, creates an illusion of her fragility, regarding his wife as “some frail butterfly, he expressed himself fearful of rubbing the silver off my wings by bringing me into contact with society,". (Bronte, 1848)Perhaps, the choice of diction originates directly from the ideal of the Angel of the house: for instance the visual similarities between an angelic winged women, and fragile, yet mesmerizing winged

It could be argued that Rochester’s malevolent wife, Birtha Mason represents the complete oppression of a woman, by patriarchal domination In both novels, there is a prominent power struggle between partiarcle masculine power and famine inferiority. Referring back to their pertinent feminist reading of jane eye, Gilbert and Gubar note that in male-authored books, if women are not categorized as ‘angels’, then they are villainized as a ‘monster’ (Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar, 1979). Alike both female protagonist, the male figure uses zoomorphic diction to describe Birtha, depicting her as an almost primal being, who has lost all intellectual communication, and instead resorted to ‘snarl’ and “crawls like an animal.”(JE). In their pertinent feminist reading of Jane Eyre, Gilbert and Gubar describe bertha mason as Jane’s “truest and darkest double.’ (G&G). Their argument closely relates to the gothic motif of doubling, in which Birtha represents the potential outcome of Jane if she enters the marriage from a subordinated position. This is best exemplified, by Jane's temporary imprisonment in the red room, resulting in Mrs Reeds zoomorphic simile, describing Jane to become "like a mad cat"(JE), a domesticated animal. Her confinement places her momentarily in the position of Bertha, who was described by