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Literary criticism for Jane Eyre
Literary Criticism on Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre character analysis
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Recommended: Literary criticism for Jane Eyre
Authors, Jean Rhys and Charlotte Bronte constructed their novels in completely different time periods and came from different influences in writing. Jean Rhys’s fiction book, Wide Sargasso Sea is an interesting relation to Jane Eyre. The female character of Jane Eyre forms into a furiously, passionate, independent young woman. The female character of Jean Rhys’s illustration is a character that Jane will know further on as Rochester’s crazy wife who is bolted in an attic. Jean Rhys further studies this character, where as Charlotte Bronte approved that it was left explained (Thorpe 175). Antoinette, considerably like Jane, evolves in a world with minimal amount of love to offer. Both these women are taken cared of as children by relatives, both had a lonely childhood, and both had lost their first friend. However, Jane is capable in defining herself by refusing the trademarks others place on her and shape her identity, while Antoinette is puzzled by having a body, spirit and life. She is mostly ignored by almost all except for Josephine and has very small communication with others, which puts a lock on her feeling of identity. Schapiro writes Wide Sargasso Sea “explores psychological conditions of profound isolation, self-division . . . the condition is bound up with another of the novels characteristically modernist themes: the conviction that betrayal is built into the fabric of life" (84).
Wide Sargasso Sea persistently proposes problems of its concepts of gender. Female characters in Rhys's novels are cruelly exposed to the gendered anf financial constraints of an imperial world" (Humm 187). This idea of an imperial world is constructed and controlled by the “white men.” While Jane is rejected, the outcome for Antoinet...
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... Maggie. "Third World Feminisms: Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea." Practicing Feminist Criticism: an introduction. Great Britain: Prentice Hall, 1995.
Madden, Diana. "Wild Child, Tropical Flower, Mad Wife: Female Identity in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea." International Women's Writing: New Landscapes of Identity. Ed. Anne E. Brown and Marjanne E. Gooze. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.
Rhys, Jean. A Norton Critical Edition: Wide Sargasso Sea. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.
Schapiro, Barbara Ann. "Boundaries and Betrayal in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea." Literature and the Relational Self. Ed. Jeffrey Berman. New York: New York University Press, 1994.
Thorpe, Michael. "'The Other Side': Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre." A Norton Critical Edition: Wide Sargasso Sea. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.
In A Place Where the Sea Remembers, is filled with guilt and regret, the main factors in the characters lives, and forgiving one other is hard to come by. Some of the characters experience the pain of trying to live wi...
M.L Stedman’s novel The Light Between Oceans challenges readers to recognise ideas about how the environment shapes and readjusts the identity of the main protagonist, Tom. It follows the tragic story of lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne and his wife Isabel who, after discovering a baby in a shipwrecked boat, must face the terrible consequences of their decision to raise the child as their own. Stedman traces the journey of his characters through the microcosmic setting of life on Janus Rock as well as the macrocosmic setting of Australia in the wake of World War One. The incandescence of Janus Light, the oil lamps, electric lamps, the candles and the darkness they stave off, all serve to illuminate the characters and their changing era. Through use of characterisation, figurative language such as metaphors, and setting, the author is able to structure the book as resting on a series of triangles, with different characters becoming the fulcrum at different times. This unity of environment intertwined with characters lives offers representations of shifting attitudes and values of the main protagonist before the resolution of the novel.
From mermaids to female Navy officers, the relationship between women and the sea, in both history and literature, has been a complicated one. Mariners traditionally had conflicting superstitions involving a woman’s place on a ship, and this sense of conflict spills over into two Early Modern works of drama—namely Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West and Shakespeare’s Pericles. Bess and Marina, the main female characters of both plays, walk a fine line between captors and masters of the sea, and similarly between the roles of strong heroines who act outside of their gender-roles and hetero-normative females who are mastered by the plays’ respective male characters. Indeed, the sea seems to have either a link to independence or confinement for both female protagonists, which ultimately relates to their “proper” (non-threatening) place as traditional wives and homemakers.
The novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë is an early 19th-century English literature; a literary work that is evocative and riveting. It depicts acts of betrayal between family members, loved ones and self-inflicted betrayal. The acts of betrayals are done by Mrs. Reed, Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre herself.
Jane Eyre has been acclaimed as one of the best gothic novels in the Victorian Era. With Bronte’s ability to make the pages come alive with mystery, tension, excitement, and a variety of other emotions. Readers are left with rich insight into the life of a strong female lead, Jane, who is obedient, impatient, and passionate as a child, but because of the emotional and physical abuse she endures, becomes brave, patient, and forgiving as an adult. She is a complex character overall but it is only because of the emotional and physical abuse she went through as a child that allowed her to become a dynamic character.
Weigman, Robyn. "Melville's Geography of Gender." American Literary History 1.4 (1989): 735-53. JSTOR. Web. 24 Nov. 2012.
-Ellen G Friedman, Breaking the Master Narrative: Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, in Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Princeton University Press, 1989,
In both ‘Eve Green’ and ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’, the protagonists experience fear in many guises. Although traumatic events in both Eve and Antoinette’s lives do lead to moments of sudden, striking fear, fear is also presented as having the potential to be subtle and muted, and therefore, “haunting”. Fletcher and Rhys seem to suggest that this form of fear is more damaging to the psyche than fear in its more conspicuous manifestations, as it is more deeply intertwined with the characterisations of the protagonists, therefore allowing for the fear to “pervade” the novels. As a result, it could be argued that fear has an almost constant presence in each novel, particularly because fear is seemingly linked to other prominent themes in each novel.
For the rioters, Coco the parrot, and Antoinette, fire offers an instrument of escape from and rebellion against the oppressive actions of their respective captors. Wide Sargasso Sea takes place shortly after the emancipation of Jamaican slaves. Annette's husbands, first Alexander Cosway and then Mr. Mason, have both profited immorally off of the exploitation of black Jamaicans. Unsurprisingly, the former slaves feel great hatred towards the Cosways--- hatred that boils over when the ex-slaves set fire to Annette's house (35). The significance of th...
Sarvan, Charles. ¡§Flight, Entrapment, and Madness in Jean Rhys¡¦ Wide Sargasso Sea.¡¨ The International Fiction Review. Vol 26.1&2:1999:82-96.
In conclusion, the novel of Wide Sargasso Sea paints a unique vision of the inherent racism within 19th century British culture. While the criticism that the portrayal character who are people of color is often one-sided and flat; they are painted through the eyes of the White and Creole characters that hold power and influence. This method of writing sets it apart vastly from that of Jane Eyre and Mansfield Park.
Rhys, Jean, and Judith L. Raiskin. "Wide Sargasso Sea." Wide Saragossa Sea: Backgrounds, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. 3-112. Print.
Racial tension is a major theme in “Wide Sargasso Sea”, with the mix of whites and blacks and white/blacks in the novel creating a cut-throat atmosphere which creates a hazardous place for Jamaica’s denizens. Many racial situations occur between whites and blacks, which Americans are use to due to the dangerous troubles between blacks and whites in the 1950s with a clear enemy: the whites. But Rhys tackles a more important point: an overall racial hostility between everybody living in Jamaica during the novels time period with no one to blame. Instead of using only racism, Rhys uses situations her readers could easily relate to such as: betrayal, adultery, and feeling of not belonging. Through her use of alternating points of views, Rhys uses racism shared by both characters and their actions/faults and thoughts to meld and to show the blame cannot be placed onto one person.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys confronts the possibility of another side to Jane Eyre. The story of Bertha, the first Mrs Rochester, Wide Sargasso Sea is not only a brilliant deconstruction of Brontë's legacy, but is also a damning history of colonialism in the Caribbean.
The novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys were produced at different times in history. Indeed, they were created in different centuries and depicted extensively divergent political, social and cultural settings. Despite their differences, the two novels can be compared in the presentation of female otherness, childhood, and the elements that concern adulthood. Indeed, these aspects have been depicted as threatening the female other in the society. The female other has been perceived as an unfathomable force that is demonic in nature but respects these enigmatic threatening characters.