Jane Eyre Analysis

Jane Eyre – Chapter 21 pages 207-208 ‘"Georgiana, a more vain and absurd animal than you was certainly never allowed to cumber the earth. You had no right to be born, for you make no use of life… Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition’

Wide Sargasso Sea – Part two pages 68-69 ‘She looked gloomy... She knocked out her pipe and stared back at me, her eyes had no expression at all’

In both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea the theme of independent women

In both extracts the authors present women who want to achieve independence, and they assert their independence through their speech. In Jane Eyre Eliza best encapsulates this longing for independence through speech such as ‘you have had to seek no one's company, conversation, sympathy, forbearance; you have lived, in short, as an independent being ought to do’ and ‘Then, too, existence for you must be a scene of continual change and excitement, or else the world is a dungeon: you must be admired, you must be courted, you must be flattered—you must have music, dancing, and society--or you languish, you die away’. Eliza uses declaratives throughout such as ‘must’ this repetition of declaratives fortify the image of Eliza as an independent woman in the readers head. Not only does Eliza use declaratives but she also sets the agenda of the conversation – ‘Georgiana, a more vain and absurd animal than you was certainly never allowed to cumber the earth’ this opening sentence sets the tone for the rest of the discourse. Eliza’s use of imperatives asserts her higher level of independence than Georgiana for example ‘Take one day; share it into sections’ Brontë may have chosen to present Eliza as so assertive to show that independent women are perhaps better or more powerful than dependent women. This ambition to achieve independence would have been truly radical to contemporary readers, who would expect women to be more...