Pir, 1

Selcuk Pir

Professor Kristie Camacho

English 017-1323

27 February 2024

Response to Question Option 1: How Jane Challenges Traditional Gender Roles

The character development of the protagonist Jane in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

exemplifies the ways in which an underprivileged orphaned young woman can disavow societal

expectations from women and girls in the Victorian era. Jane is opinionated, independent,

ambitious, and has an incredible sense of survival and determination throughout the novel. She

survives the abuse of her aunt Mrs. Reed and her cousin John Reed and was able to make it out

alive from Lowood Academy where a lot of orphaned girls died from typhus or consumption.

Jane had to endure freezing cold temperatures, lack of nutritious food, the death of her best

friend Helen, and the singling out and otherization by the school’s headmaster Mr. Brocklehurst

and even became a teacher at Lowood academy then found a job as a governess teaching at an

aristocratic mansion. Jane is fiercely independent and defends her right to self-determination

when she says: “I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstances require me so to do. I need not

sell my soul to buy bliss” (Bronte 274)

Professor John Bowen of the University of York in the Youtube video by the British

Library titled “Jane Eyre: the Role of Women” describes Jane as an “assertive heroine in many

ways. She is the person who speaks the truth against powerful figures” (Bowen). In the Victorian

era women were expected to be a part of the cult of domesticity and be submissive towards male

figures who ran the household however Jane has challenged Mr. Rochester without hesitation

many times. She also broke the societal gender role expectations of women by pursuing jobs that
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paid her well and she even negotiated money with Mr. Rochester when it was time for her to visit

her dying aunt Mrs. Reed and she demanded her salary. Jane, instead of remaining a docile and

unwavering and a submissive member of the domestic sphere of Thornfield Hall, pursues her

own decisions and acts upon them with a strong-willed manner surprising even Mr. Rochester

plethora of times. Mr. Rochester calls Jane a “witch” multiple times throughout the novel and

that is a testament to Jane’s strong willed personality and self-determined nature.

Works Cited

Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Scholastic Classics, 2013

“Jane Eyre: The Role of Women.” YouTube, 6 June 2014,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0F-odUoWd4. Accessed 27 Feb. 2024.