Novel, Jane Eyre, Reminds Us of Fairytales

From the very beginning of the novel Jane Eyre, one can not help but notice many scenes that remind us of several different fairytales, from Cinderella, to Beauty and The Beast, and possibly even Little Red Riding Hood. At first, one might think the novel is going to turn into just another Cinderella story but when Jane refuses to conform to what others tell her and will not accept just being another cookie-cutter princess like all the rest, we see that in actuality it is far from that.

The novel opens up at Gateshead, the affluent Reed family’s home, where the young orphan girl named Jane Eyre is living. Like in Cinderella, Jane is forced to live with her cruel aunt and her kids - which take on the role of Cinderella’s evil stepmother and stepsiblings - , due to the fact that she has no other family that she is aware of, where she is constantly tormented and mistreated. John, her cousin, she says “had not much affection for his mother and his sisters and an antipathy for me. He bullied and punished me; I had feared him, and every morsel of flesh on my bones shrank when he came near,” (Bronte 4). John bullies her all the time, but when he throws a book at her in Chapter One, Jane finally gives in to her emotions and the two cousins end up fighting. This is the first hint that Jane cannot just accept things as they are but instead she must speak her mind and act on her passions even though she is afraid to, since any other girl her age, especially in those times, would not react the way she did.

Jane Eyre wished for nothing more than to leave that horrible place behind and all the terrible people there along with it, and she hoped and prayed until that day finally came. Finally, ten miserable years later, it did. She arrives at ...

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...t woman with an understanding of the ways of the world, unlike the majority of women this time period. She is different from women of this era, "prudish, sexually-repressed Victorians, who cautiously guarded themselves against any temptation, no matter how slight,” (http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/sextheory.html ) These women appear to be conservative, afraid to speak their minds and afraid to be different even in the slightest ways. Jane herself says "I am not an angel . . . and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself" (Brontë, p. 221) showing Jane’s unwillingness to alter herself just to fit in. Charlotte Bronte created a female character that was equal to a male character, not in status or class but in emotional strength, which went against society’s beliefs because Victorians thought women were incapable of the emotional strength they believed men had.