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The Absence Of Family In Jane Eyre By Charlotte Bronte

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Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë has a heroine who refuses to be placed in the traditional female position of subservience and who disagrees with her superiors. She stands up for her rights, and ventures creative thoughts. Jane is a narrator who comments on the role of women in society and the greater constraint imposed on them.
Family was extremely important to a woman in the Victorian period. It provided emotional and financial support to her as a child and an unmarried woman. Later in life, it defined a woman as a wife and mother. Due to Jane being an orphan, she is cast into a sort of societal wilderness. Without a mother to show Jane her proper place in society and without a father to care for her until her husband can take his place, Jane is left totally astray from societal values. Lacking support, Jane has to face her problems head on and alone. …show more content…
Her painful solitude causes her to spend much of her early life in search of a family. Many characters serve as symbolic mothers for Jane. The very cruel parenting of her aunt, Mrs. Reed, causes Jane to suffer, forcing her to withdraw into a lonely shell of her former self. Miss Temple at Lowood is Jane’s first positive mother figure. Miss Temple shows compassion and caring which ultimately leads Jane on a path of self-fulfillment by encouraging studies in French and literature. Later, Jane encounters an even stronger sense of familial belonging with Diana, Mary, and St John Rivers. However, she rejects St John’s proposal of an dutiful and loveless marriage causing her to return to a more enlightened and humbled Rochester to start a true family once and for

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