Jane Eyre in the Age of Modernism (Farheen's Post)

I will be discussing the period of time in which Jane Eyre was published. It was the Victorian era of 1847. The Industrial Revolution marked the last vestiges of the Age of Enlightenment characterized by high rational thinking. Writers like Bernman place the start of modernism somewhere in the 16^th Century but the rejection of Enlightenment thinking can be seen in the writers, poets, and artists of the 19^th Century. They reflected the transformation that rapidity of change was bringing into the first very modern society. Unlike Austen who refused to feature modern life in her works, Charlotte Bronte reproduces the sense of living in that age.

This piece of a girl growing up, narrated in first person, reflects the changes in English thought. Previously, authors brought closure at the end of a narrative. Time now becomes a linear concept and with this comes the sense of moving forward, hence a female Bildungsroman (rather than a male) where we see growth and change and even towards the end there is no real closure to the narrative but the expectation of death of a character. We see stark changes from Jane the child, Jane the teenager at school, Jane the governess, Jane the cousin and finally Jane the wife.  There is fluidity of identities, a concept inherent to modern times. But this idea of time moving forward means that many people get left behind by the progress and the rise in wealth around them. This dispossesses, dislocates and alienates people who are separated from families to earn a living. This is why the book is heavily scarred with elements of orphanhood in Jane, her having no fixed abode and her literal homelessness as she travels to Whitcross. There is a sense of loss in her abject poverty and lack of kinship remedied only when a rich uncle leaves her an heiress (by the author’s storytelling intervention).  There is emphasis on earning a livelihood and, in the backdrop, the limitations for a female to find work in changing times. There is a rejection of established ideals in characters such as Helen Burns, St John, Miss Temple and so on. Had these characters formed part of other pieces before this period, they would’ve been idealized as role models. Now however the age required characters like Jane to negotiate the existential issues of the Western civilization living in the 19^th Century.  Also the individuality of self is a key feature of the novel. Young Jane says, “What does Bessie say I have done” rather than ‘What have I done’ refusing to internalize someone else’s perspective on the actions of the self. In the end, Jane doesn’t say ‘We are married’ or ‘He married me’; rather she stamps her individualism saying something as unprecedented as “Reader, I married him”. These elements, now common, were unique to modern writers and Jane Eyre can be said to be the product of modernism.