During the Victorian era, the ideal woman’s life revolved around the domestic sphere of her family and the home. Middle class women were brought up to “be pure and innocent, tender and sexually undemanding, submissive and obedient” to fit the glorified “Angel in the House”, the Madonna-image of the time (Lundén et al, 147). Normally, girls were educated to be on display as ornaments. Women were not expected to express opinions of their own outside a very limited range of subjects, and certainly not be on a quest for own identity and aim to become independent such as the protagonist in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre was independent passionate woman who tried to against men who repressed woman from being educated and getting own human …show more content…
As punishment for her act of resistance, the eponymous heroine is confined to the frightful "red room" (Brontë, 5-14). Imprisoned for her insolence in the horrifying red room at Gateshead, Jane remembers: “My heart beat thick, my head grew hot, a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings: something seemed near me, I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down—I uttered a wild, involuntary cry—I rushed to the door and shook the lock in disparate effort.” (Brontë, 22) This opening confrontation sets the stage for what will be the central struggle of the work. Jane's struggle to make her voice heard and to express the truth of her own experience. Jane Eyre is very much the product of the specific time and place in which it was written, an environment in which a woman, especially an economically disadvantaged one, has to struggle greatly so that she might speak of her own vision of reality. According to the critic Maggie Berg, Jane Eyre reflects “the contradictory nature of Victorian society, a society that was in transition, and one in which people were forced to discover new ways of finding and defining identity” (Berg, 17). The world that Charlotte Bronte inhabited was rife with dichotomies.