Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens'Great Expectations

Both Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, and Great Expectations, written by Charles Dickens, have many Victorian similarities. Both novels are influenced by the same three elements. The first is the gothic novel, which instilled mystery, suspense, and horror into the work. The second is the romantic poets, which gave the literature liberty, individualism, and nature. The third is the Byronic hero, which consists of the outcast or rebel who is proud and melancholy and seeks a purer life. The results when all three combined are works of literature like Jane Eyre and Great Expectations. BOTH NOVELS CONVEY THE SAME VICTORIAN IDEOLOGIES COMMON FOR THE TIME PERIOD IN, WHICH THEY WERE WRITTEN. Brontë displays many of her experiences and beliefs through the main character, Jane, in her novel. As does Dickens, he portrays his own experiences and thoughts through Pip, the main character of Great Expectations.

Dickens and Brontë use setting as an important role in the search for domesticity. Great Expectations is a circular book, with Pip finding his childhood home at the end of the story finally filled with happiness and a real family (Chesterton, 102). Pip begins the novel in his village, innocent though oppressed. Moving to London, he becomes uncommon, but also loses his natural goodness. Paying his financial debts and living abroad after losing his “great expectations,” he regains his goodness, or at least pays for his sins, and can finally return to his childhood home. His physical traveling reflects his mental and emotional journeys. Only when he returns to his childhood place and childhood goodness can he begin to look for happiness again.

In contrast, the use of setting in Jane Eyre is linear (Martin, 154). Instead of returning to her childhood home to find domesticity, Jane cannot find home until she moves to a totally different place. Setting plays an equally important role as she moves from Gateshead Hall to Lowood to Thornfield to Moor House, and finally to Freudian Manor. She cannot find her native ideal at Gateshead Hall, the site of her childhood torment, or Lowood, a boarding school, of Thornfield, where Rochester hid his first wife and almost became a bigamist, or Moor House, where St. John’s presence constantly reminds her of true love’s rarity (Martin 155). She and ...

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...Joe through his pipe smoke and Jane with Rochester, as she had just saved his life from the fire. The feelings resulting from both of theses encounters renders sleep impossible. For Jane, her hopes first roll “triumphantly towards the bourne,”(Brontë) then “a counteracting breeze blew off land, and continually drove her back”(Brontë). This represents Jane’s repression of irrationality (Kramer 45). For Pip, his bed just has become uneasy and that uneasiness also comes from himself, as his own conscience bears down upon him for leaving Joe and Biddy to become a gentleman, and rejecting that sphere of life Joe and Biddy represent (Engel 135). In conclusion, in Pip’s case, anxiety comes from giving into his desires instead of following down the most logical path for his training and status.

Throughout both Jane Eyre and Great Expectations the reader can identify many universal themes of the Victorian period. It is shown through the similarities and differences of setting, social and gender mobility, the power of the unconscious, and the main character’s struggles with their internal passions, that Brontë and Dickens’ shared common bases for writing their works of literature.