Book Description

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Department of English and Linguistics), course: Proseminar I: Reading the Novel, language: English, abstract: 165 years after its first publication in England, Charlotte Brontë’s “female Bildungsroman” (Gilbert and Gubar 339) "Jane Eyre" still prompts questions for both its readership and the literary scholars of today. Depicting the protagonist’s development from a poor orphan girl to a young governess who “yearns for true liberty” (Gilbert and Gubar 347), Brontë evokes a utopian ideal of a strong-minded heroine who defies social customs by marrying her master, Edward Fairfax Rochester. When pondering over Brontë’s comment to her publisher in 1848, “[t]he standard hero[e]s and heroines of novels are personages in whom I could never . . . take an interest, believe to be natural or wish to imitate: were I obliged to copy these characters, I would simply not write at all” (qtd. in Brennan 16), one can draw conclusions about Brontë’s intention to reward her heroine with Rochester, who is widely accepted as the epitome of a Byronic hero (cf. Wootton 231, Gilbert and Gubar 337) – a “unique” (Thorslev 12) hero whose name re-fers to its real-life impersonator, the English Romantic poet George Gordon “Lord” Byron. As this paper is concerned with the question whether the Byronic hero embo-dies the desirable husband for a governess in nineteenth-century England, a brief overview of the reception of Byron and his works as a “cultural phenomenon” (Elfenbein 47) during Brontë’s time seems necessary and will be dealt with in the first part of this pa-per. Andrew Elfenbein’s study Byron and the Victorians from 1995 serves as a valuable source which particularly considers Byron’s female readership and offers reasons for his popularity among them. Since most scholars view Rochester as a Byronic hero while merely focussing on his physiognomy (cf. Wootton 231), the second part of this paper draws comparisons between Rochester’s character and the main features of a Byronic hero, as Peter L. Thorslev Jr. framed him in depth in his study The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes from 1962. In the third and last part of this paper, the social context of women in ge-neral and governesses in particular with due regard to love, marriage and legal rights will be taken into account. It will be argued that a marriage despite gender and social borders is enabled between the governess Jane and her master Rochester by making the latter Byronic, whereby Rochester becomes the epitome of a desirable husband for a governess in nineteenth-century England.