International Journal Of Literature And Languages
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VOLUME
Vol.05 Issue05 2025
PAGE NO.
115-127
10.37547/ijll/Volume05Issue05-31
The Role of Women in Modern English Novels
Naser Idan Fadheel
Ministry of Education, Wasit Education Directorate, Iraq
Received:
29 March 2025;
Accepted:
10 April 2025;
Published:
30 May 2025
Abstract:
The protagonist, Jane Eyre, of Jane Eyre, a novel by Charlotte Bront, rebels against gender stereotypes.
Charlotte Bronte spoke out against women's oppression through Jane Eyre. The novel's central theme is a
perspective on God; the freedom to choose or alter one's fate and achieve one's ambitions is crucial to a woman's
happiness. Achieving equality by believing in one's humanity requires individualism, the bedrock of independent
personhood. For all the passionate debates throughout history, the foundational principles of justice and morality
have always been women's inherent dignity and autonomy. The general agreement was that God created women
to be subservient to men and entirely inferior to them. Despite this, Jane Eyre defends the uniqueness of every
person's spirit as an essential component of human worth. Bront's views on women as independent beings are
shown to be contradictory in paratextual readings of the work. In the beginning, we see reason and religion
lauded as the foundation for moral conduct, the pathways to equality and individuality. Jane Eyre expresses
herself throughout the book as a free and autonomous person, a voice that not even patriarchal institutions can
censor.
Introduction:
Although novels hold a secure,
unquestioned place in twentieth century culture, they
have not always claimed such a position. The novel, as
everything else, had to have its beginning sometime,
and, for this genre, that “sometime” was the
eighteenth century. Called for by a greater literacy rate
and the increasing leisure time of a society which
fostered few forms of public entertainment, the novel
began as an experiment. Elaboration, of dates, names,
places and the minutiae of daily life, dispassionate
recounting of events instead of emotional responses to
them, projection of presumed authorial traits and
beliefs onto characters, broad satire of the times, and
very true or very wicked religious men characterized
the early novels.
About a century after these first novels were molded,
George Eliot shared top honors with Dickens as the
novelists of the day. Adam Bede, a large scale work will
plotted mostly within the travelogue genre, portrayed
the life and thinking of a little country known to few
metropolitan town dwellers. It was not a christened
character of the novel as in the sentimental fiction;
rather, here the protagonist was only the common
villagers making the country “live”. The whole
community thought and acted, moved up to the climax,
and was together punished or saved. Little women,
gossips, charwomen and discontented wives composed
average English villages in Adam Bede, who carried no
great thoughts or aspirations but only mundane
pleasures or pains. They were revealed under the
balmy smile of compassion in a novel of hard, ugly
truths vivid as the coarse strokes of a lugubrious
painting.
On the other side, The Mill on the Floss opened with a
line of lyricism, in which a great deal of poetry laid the
gorgeously wide stretching blue sky for its alternating
beauty and rage. Maggie, an uncommon character,
endowed with passionate intelligence, rebelled against
being moored to attentively guiding parents and
weekly-bathe Sunday school godmother. She thrilled
for the topsy-turvily compressive news of ugly female
cousins in the flat and unblinking crow like-eyed Mr.
Wakem born of artisanal family. From then on, torn
complete asunder between Legitimacy and Crime,
Maggie fell helplessly captive to the vicissitudes of a
fortune earned in decades.
2. Historical Context
The nineteenth century was characterized by the
emergence of women as a concern both in society and
the literary world. The ideal of womanhood, however,
remained static: women were viewed as pure creatures
who should limit their ideas to home affairs, leaving
public affairs to men. They were perceived as fragile,
innocent mirrors of their husbands, whose virtue would
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be reflected in them. Authors and male philosophers
judged women only in their roles as wives and mothers.
Those women who defied convention, expressing
opinions and trying to breach the private sphere, were
condemned. Those who went beyond modesty were
characterized as promiscuous, while those who sought
to resolve humiliations before the public by making
frantic actions were branded as imprudent women.
Charlotte Bronte, however, through her novel Jane
Eyre, presents a unique consciousness unthought of by
earlier authors. The story is told through the
perspective of Jane Eyre, the female protagonist, who
traverses the imaginary circulation between stock
conventions and predictable metaphors to provide a
fictional authenticity to a typically female empathy
expressed in letters penned outside the generic format
of the novel. The innumerable binary oppositions that
the eye perceives between the offense of the male
author and the defense put forward by the female
protagonist give rise to a new womanhood and an
authorial voice outside that of male writers. In this
struggle, Jane Eyre seeks to use all her access to speech
and literacy, enabling the venting of emotions long
repressed when benevolent imagination failed to
prescribe anything but painful silence (G. Cooke, 1987).
While Bronte's imaginative elaboration upon the
modern woman countered the implicit sentiment of
earlier women, Gustave Flaubert's ostensibly complete
file-case of a woman engaged in a quest for the lost
father provided a two-pronged strategy for the
containment of the emergent woman. Beyond all the
Burkinisms in the novel, the absence of a woman willing
to seize the pen and create a literary alternative to the
male voice upon male ground belied the presence of
female fountains and ponds ascribed allusions to the
turbulent condition of women in the nineteenth
century. The representation of women in two different
ways, outside and inside the homelike space, in both
cases showed a woman pursuing a procreative act
unless her zeal was met, leaving behind was a cliché
demeanor of bewilderment, unconcealment, and
parochialism.
3. Feminist Literary Criticism
Feminist literary criticism attempts to explore and
analyze texts from a perspective that reflects women’s
concerns, literature by women, books about women,
and issues concerning women’s position in the world. It
includes an analysis of female characters, themes, and
perspectives in literature as
well as women’s historical
context as readers and authors. Novels, along with
some other verbal art forms such as drama and folk
tales, have served as a temporary refuge from the
patriarchal society providing female authors, readers,
and characters with the creative means to articulate
their experiences. However, no text until the age of
modern literature interrogates and challenges the
conceptualization of women’s history, is ever
formalized in terms of an epistemological framework
and is ever validated as an instance of art. Because of
the urgency with which the female question should be
approached in social life, pressures on art from the
intellect and the emotions abound to replace a slow
and painstaking pursuit of form with sheer fury
(Fabijanac, 2011). Since the beginning of the 1990s,
some critical literary theorists, under the aegis of
feminist literary criticism, have started to examine the
construction of gender in literature. Their goal has been
to apply the findings of contemporary linguistics and
philosophy in analyzing how textual issues of gender
and the feminine construct ideological formations that
turn female authors as women and their writing as
literature into contingencies (Jane Macmillian, 1988).
The growth of feminist literary criticism has put literary
critics in a dilemma: its excess of anger threatens to
stifle its aesthetic pleas. That the novel will be
denigrated to the real, the feminine forms of literature
will be scorned, and male authors will be vilified as
apocalyptical in their aggressive despotic stance is a
menace already perceivable. Its excess calamity needs
to be eroded through a tolerance of aggression more
difficult and painful than the direct blast of anger
directed at the powerful men in the face. In the long
universal history, women have been represented as the
‘Other’, and feminine nature has been ground to
exclusion.
4. Representation of Female Characters
On reading these works, one is led to speculate about
the degree to which male writers in the first half of this
century have striven to understand, to represent, and
to sympathize with women. Certainly, it was, and still
is, accomplished on various levels; the work of Golding
and Thomas Hardy elucidates a very different woman
than Graham Greene or Ian Fleming (Jane Macmillian,
1988). To a greater or lesser degree, either brooding,
noble, tragic figures, tragedy-in-the-making, or oil, are
theatrically bound by carnality, wit, and minute details.
Both men and women writers have been successful
interpreters and aberrant omissions, but it may be said
that excepting H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy, male
writers have, overall, hesitated to present, not
necessarily a woman character viewed by male
scrutiny, but the sole woman's view of the world.
Aside from background and differences in genre, there
is little to recommend an approach of women writers
omitted from the preeminent privilege. But the
précieuses in \textit{The New Woman}, and some four
or five Edwardian figures as well, have created varied
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versions of the woman’s be
nd of mind for a
prolongation, if not liberation, of a man’s world. As
needle predominantly preoccupied with the effulgent
frivolous odd women - misfits, eccentrics, and would-
be-suffragettes - a full-length accentuation of this
phase, excepting the singular existence of Woolf, has
been negligible (Alazzam, 2018). Although expositions
of out-of-access collated manuscripts were being
reconsidered, the larger quest was examined at too
advanced a state for informative attention broadly
discerned over here. Neither contemporaneous with
the vintage novels nor a flushed estate later, remote
enclaves focused on by British fiction, if ever of interest
at all, were scantily considered.
Here, by narrowing to frightsome memoir narratives,
men’s have been better known f
or the elaborateness
with which these imaginative ideas of the inner psyche
of women were explored at greater length and with
more lessening. Simply enlarging the still-prettily-in-
fairy-wings powers of evocation, mellifluousness, and
counterpoise for which the genre is noted, there is
lauded a mane of moirae, resembling ladies’ man and
cadre serrantsers, perched almost limed in explication
of narrative and round husband-loosers, who is parried
only with median prototypes for refresh, if richer-
ended representing disasters cannot be helped in silly
choosers.
4.1. Protagonists
The theme of women’s conflict with society (especially
social norms and ideals and family relations) as well as
with their own desires was dealt by nineteenth-century
English fiction. Many female novelists, including Mary
Ann Evans, later known as George Eliot, and Jane
Austen, bring their heroines into confrontation with
society and depict the heroine’s struggle and suffering.
Despite the fact that very little is known about Austen’s
life, it is easy to grasp her gender consciousness and
feminine views through her novels. She hints at the
revolutionary ideas that Victorian women were afraid
of expressing aloud and which had only begun to arise
in social consciousness at the time when she started
writing. These ideas are all-encompassing and involve
such themes as how women’s subordination to men is
socially constructed and maintained, how class
consciousness is transmitted from parents to children
and how it is acquired through education
–
in other
words, how moral blindness towards the subordinate
class is generated ((Pyeaam) Abbasi, 2014). In these
novels, a heroine confined to the domestic sphere still
recognizes classes both outside her environment and
within her family and is tormented by the incapacity to
fulfil her social responsibility as far as consciousness is
concerned. Finding a mate from a desirable class that
would guarantee her own happiness as well as moral
satisfaction proves a difficult task for the heroine, as
she must conquer a male mind conditioned to regard
the rest of the world as inferior.
The obstacles hence become twofold: first, silent
oppression combined with interested top-down mis-
education that blinds her perceptions. The learned and
well-mannered male, just as well as the female, is as
much a captive of class consciousness. The idealised
mate turns into an actually existing one, blindly praised
and idealised and also regarded contemptuously as an
untamed brute. After struggling through various
degrees of psychological and social blindness,
educating herself back to the original most crude liking,
humiliation and self-abasement, the heroine awakens
in a devotee’s self
-loathing resentment. Having
abandoned the ideal of co-living as slaves with the still
unknown brutish man caged in the domestic sphere,
she also foresees a downwards spiral of life devoid of
romantic and heroic blues and acceding the chastity
pregnancy and illness anxiety, because regards only her
own self-delusions as marks of greatness.
4.2. Antagonists
Women as antagonists in modern fiction can be divided
primarily into two categories: the anti-heroine and the
monstrous woman. After a general study of antagonist
characters to place both types of female antagonists,
there is analysis of the female anti-heroine in three
recent works: . Analysis of the monstrous woman
focuses largely on the female characters in the horror
drama serials, . The anti-heroine is an incredibly
complex character, and is viewed as an anti-heroine in
some narratives, a villain in others, or somewhere in
between in serials. She is the epitome of the ‘unlikeable
heroine.’ The role of the anti
-heroine ultimately
validates patriarchal narratives rather than dismantles
them. The anti-heroine character type is relatively
common in contemporary literature, film, and
television, only noticeably increasing in popularity in
this format in the last quarter of the 20th century. At its
simplest, the female character who embodies the
archetype of the anti-heroine is typically regarded as
the
‘female anti
-
hero’. A key trait of this character type
is often understood to be that what she does would in
most situations be considered wrong, unethical, or
immoral: she is selfish, petty, ruthless, or even possibly
remorseless. The actions taken or choices made by an
anti-hero, and particularly that of a contemporary anti-
heroine, are considered controversial or revenge-like
within the context of the narrative, meaning that either
the character is removed from the accepted moral
framework of her society or that within the rules of that
framework the character’s punishment does not match
the crime. That it is these characters and not their
counterpart anti-villains or male anti-heroes who are
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typically referred to as anti-heroines in the
contemporary narrative landscape indicates a rejection
of both traditional femininity and masculinity in favor
of a construction of femininity more in keeping with
male standards of morality, a hypermasculine
femininity in which the character’s value is ultimately
drawn from adherence to the patriarchal authority of
the narrative world. There is a sense, however, that the
anti-heroine character type ultimately presents moral
danger .
4.3. Supporting Characters
The work of Jane Austen, particularly Pride and
Prejudice, has served as a powerful influence on
woman writers who have come after her. The Female
Wits in Augustan England who came on the shoulders
of Aphra Behn were so often not feminine at all.
Writers like Mary Lamb or Jane Austen skirted, rather
than opposed, the domestic ideals of womanhood. The
latter still found ways to present dynamic heroines that
never lost their proper feminine virtues (A Henthorne,
2015). Pride and Prejudice was not so much a
conversion to romantic love as it was an assertion of
the equal capacity of that love in all of its potentially
destructive and transformative passions. The foil to
Elizabeth represents one sort of womanhood that
exhaustively nurtures fine sensibilities but is only
questioned superficially.
In contrast, Elizabeth exhibits qualities that range her
from being flippant to impertinent. Her wit works
against her on one occasion; still she emerges whole
and desirable when she sees how such qualities
threaten her happiness (G. Cooke, 1987). In contrast to
Emma, a young woman possessed of fortune,
discernment, and a misguided desire to matchmake,
Elizabeth Bennet is decidedly nonpareil, her status as a
poor relation precluding her from such influence in
letter or in deed. After being spurned by Darcy, she
returns shaking an unfashionable feather out of her
hair. If fashionable society’s obsession with rank and
novelty is the malignancy, then Briarfield Hall’s dictate
of unfashionableness is the remedy. Elizabeth has
nothing but worldly poverty; still, she understands that
she must learn to display what intelligence she has. The
privileged place of Elizabeth implies that the duty of all
novelists and critics is to scrutinize literary expressions
of rank prejudice.
5. Themes Surrounding Women
Scholarship on fictive female characters relates to
Friedan’s arguments in The Feminine Mystique in two
significant ways. First, The Feminine Mystique traces
the evolution of popular portrayals of women during
the 1930s through the late 1950s, focusing on the
depictions presented by popular women’
s magazines.
Friedan argues that the arc of representation had gone
from female characters who were “independent,”
“career
-
minded” feminists who were often “the
winners” to housewives and mothers who were “the
losers.” Underscoring this shift, Friedan note
s that
Elizabeth Rose, a character in an early 1930s novel by
the romantic novelist Kathleen Winsor, gained
heroine’s bling by moving from obscurity to power in,
among other things, a consulting firm while others in
the novel “drifted into a fifteen
-room house in a lovely
suburb.” In contrast, the protagonist of a more
contemporary novel slides to wretchedness when she
drifts “to the Woman’s Club of Little Davis’ Corners next
to Little Davis’ Corners High.” More generally,
contemporary heroines' problems arise from failed
careers or inept attachments to men, and by 1955,
these novels’ formulas had become “lose
-go-to-
women” ( (Fender, 2018) ).
Second, the salience of such fictional depictions is
necessarily greater for women than for men within a
custom of li
terature that has more often been “a man’s
book.” Thus, a woman’s engagement with the world
through literature heightens the concern over its
impact on her fate. Friedan, however, framed her
investigation of portrayal and audience mostly through
periodicals and left a possible significant subject
untouched
—
novels. Married to a bestselling novelist,
she acknowledged the extensiveness of the problem
but observed female characters in published
bestsellers or best-
known works to have been “drawn
flat from the s
tart” and failed to “find a meaning and
motion.” This suggested absence of female character
agency opened a compelling subject for investigation,
as such novels were likely “largely permissive and
created for escape” rather than investigative or
purgative ( (Coon, 2019) ).
Four novels are analyzed that were, firstly, bestsellers
throughout the English-speaking world, and their
portrayal of women would seem particularly relevant
to hundreds of thousands of female readers; secondly,
with significant female characters among their,
defensibly universal, in-depth consideration of the
novels with important or representative characters
would cast light on their thought and trends. The novels
are: Star Money by Kathleen Winsor; Marjorie
Morningstar by Heron Wouk; The Man in the Gray
Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson; and Peyton Place by Grace
Metalious. Each resulted in a significant increase in
readership of the author’s later works. In addition, they
could be argued to positively establish a popular
tradition of women’s
fiction impacting upon later
novels by Francoise Sagan, Sylvia Plath, Muriel Spark,
Anne Tyler, and A. S. Byatt. Such novels would
ordinarily be studied in broader perspectives, such as
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with other contemporaneous novels, as texts, or
through their public reception.
5.1. Identity and Self-Discovery
A theme of endurance and resilience seems to be the
novel’s strongest point. With a far greater sense of
realism than many earlier works, it faces the
squandering of youth in an idiotic world of brick and
stucco,
a mean drabness punctured only by priests’
quarrels and people’s foolish hatred of each other. It
marvels at all the ways one can waste life, and is a
passionate hymn to the forces of endurance that
cheerfully defy these human follies. Foolish, tight-
banded child
—
a frail little figure with a plume upon her
straw hat, and a ribboned sateen ‘practical’ frock, yet
more frightened than any sheep. God has chosen a
strong instrument to work on her. “Ah! This is our slave
-
market, you see, women’s souls are taken
to be sold
here!” ((Pyeaam) Abbasi, 2014). Restless, a mind too
great for small trades and simple jobs, her dreams and
ambitions borne on the wings of the golden time of
childhood. Admiring disdain for poorer things she
senses outside of her odd taste of beauty, odd ideas of
fate.
An airship of British intelligence, coarse disease-
spotted M. Chiffon, and the lockjawed P. Binge are
worlds. In all delicate thinking souls like La Loque half-
slaves that enslave themselves gullibly cause a deep
tragedy; powder to the hand of the prosr at the
mulatto. Here comes a clause many sexes will refuse to
contract, and a subject male fellows do agree upon in
precocious boyish wisdom heir to an unheard fortune
in joules. The fashionably wealthy widow Garcia, the
miserable selection of societies despised by her
ladyship, among them a witty vouée, personas, and half
a dozen women moving either openly or silently in
continuous punishing erratic motions. Reason
preceded eminence, birth, prospects, prestige,
dignity
—
the patent act falsified crime, a cleanse of the
leaf, past and present.”
What do you think? And, what about herself, mere dust
motes to the air in the other’s eyes? An outcast, a
crushed insignificant mortal, a weakly wasted
phantasy, always at war? To live and succeed, why not
blend into the society one belongs to? Or, reasoning
aside, a woman quadrupled into tears is the prettiest of
sights!”. Rebellion, love, tragedy, madness, end all to
tell this little tome’s ceaseless hopefulness in
beginnings against endings.
5.2. Love and Relationships
In The Diary of a Nodiv, the protagonist, Charles
Pooter of The Laurels, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway,
North London, recounts his commonplace daily life in
the first person and keeps a diary that records both his
exaltation and his frustration in horrid detail. His
explicit obsession with his own dignity, his constant
terror of ‘giddiness’ and self
-importance can at first
produce guffaws of laughter and later, inward groans
of recognition. At a time of period history where social
mobility and shabby genteelism were becoming
common in the wake of industrialisation, use of the
diary form and greater preoccupation with non-
‘action’
were both unprecedented and perfect in depicting the
professed ordinariness of men who saw their middle
class aggrandisement thwarted at every turn.
In The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate,
novelist, broadcaster and memoirist Nancy Mitford’s
witty depiction of a decadent upper-class family in the
British interwar years is notable for both its depth and
sophistication. While befitting domesticity and
appearing to mock the fashionable simplicities of a
‘love plot’, this comic ingénue/bird’s eye perspective
actually masks and effectively prioritises the
sociopolitical obsession with entitlement/ownership
that undermines it. These novels take seriously the
works of an earlier generation of Victorian and
Edwardian women novelists, notably Victorian
‘sensation’ novelists, and their complex analysis of
hidden motivations in the representation of love and
marriage as well as their anticipation of the sensitive
mapping of heterosexuality from an early age by
theorists.
Finally, Lady Audley’s Secret, a sensationalist novelist in
the sense of producing high Gothic matriarchal
melodramas laden with domestic murder, madness,
secrets and suspense along with an aguish fleet of
fateful coincidences, presents an attractive but
duplicitous young bride with a terrible secret who
disguises her illegitimacy, cuckolding, bigamy and
negligence through first-degree murder. In the hands
of an arch defender of women’s rights, police matron
who aligns herself to social cruells and pariahs, and
craft/plot masters, this complex plot becomes indeed a
grave and sombre ‘treatise’ rather than ‘ordinary’
fiction, with nail-biting suspense in only the first half.
By commandeering the similar trope of Japanese
lacquer screens, Hay could also well be recognised as
Braddon’s descendant
-continuation of the very
modern
Edwardian
obsession
with
class
duplicitousness, complexities of love and marriage,
miscegenation, duality of racial/sexual identity,
feminist pleas on behalf of horrible men and/or
dreadful mothers wherein women pridefully transgress
their lawful and proper spheres.
5.3. Empowerment and Independence
Since the earliest times, women had been judged
through various lenses of the patriarchal society, such
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as beauty, motherhood, virginity, and many others.
Even today, remnants of such stereotypes persist. The
role of women in modern English novels has always
been prominent. Women writers have tried to break
the shackles that the patriarchal society had imposed
on her. Feminism and female bonding are two
recurrent visions that have created an atmosphere
through which women have discovered their dignity,
beauty, and glory. While some authors have shown the
extent to which a woman can sacrifice for her family,
others have shown how women can fight against the
evil-doers of the world and how important it is for
women to uplift themselves in the intellectual,
economic, and political sph
eres (Majić Mazul, 2015).
Many female writers have shown how a woman
becomes a saint of her family sacrificing all her desires
and feelings. It is evident in "Pride and Prejudice" by
Jane Austen. The writer has purposefully created the
plot of the novel in such a way that each character
would show the excellence of Mrs. Bennet. The
husband of Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Bennet, is a wise yet
careless man who lets his family go vocal and daunted
by all the errors done by them. He uses irony in his tone
while speaking to Mrs. Bennet, who is a hysterical yet
affectionate mother. Mrs. Bennet is a comic character
who is unduly worried about the marriage of her
daughters, and because of this, accidents take place.
The riches, the sugar-coating of victory for her
daughters is well shown by Austen. It is Mrs. Bennet's
strategy that is intensely worked out to lure Mr. Bingley
who was to own Netherfield, and which earned success
in the first place.
Her ultimate greed to marry the eldest daughter away
from home brings ill-fate for the one and only character
Miss Bingley. The foolishness of Mrs. Bennet, calling
Mr. Bingley a single man and Mr. Darcy not dancing
with, and planning to make both of them dance, has
rendered cauliflower-like appearance to the entire
work. Mrs. Bennet's incessant lamentation in the
turmoil following the second ball has provided comic
relief to the story, more exquisitely in the latter part. In
spite of her non-compatibility with the expected
demeanor of a long-term wife, Mrs. Bennet still
experiences the dignified status of the female
protagonist.
6. Case Studies of Notable Novels
One of the most famous novels of the twentieth
century is To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
Criticized and praised for its experimental form,
Woolf’s most suggestion volume is
still influential
today. Woolf wrote this semi-autobiographical work to
express her closest feelings and thoughts about life and
death. Filled with surprising imagery, the novel unveils
the meaning of time in its unique lyrical manner. The
non-linear temporal structuring gives the profoundest
depth to the characters and the world. Encouraging the
modeling of a painter ‘to seize the moment,’ Woolf
highlights the nature of ‘the light’ that changes out of
time.
Using
poetic
devices
with
exquisitely
unpredictable wordings, Woolf exhibits the beauty of
art that reflects life without destroying its meaning
(Pounders, 1974). The second novel selected for the
present study is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen,
published about a century and a half earlier than
Woolf
’s novella. With its firm structure and lively, witty
conversation, Austen’s greatest work is widely
reviewed and enjoyed by readers of all ages and
genders. The marriage plot of the novel seems like a
romantic comedy, but its depth is hidden until the
reader understands the patriarchal society that both
selects and confines the characters (Alazzam, 2018).
Besides its powerful social critique, Pride and Prejudice
endows healthy models of both freedom-seeking
women and understanding men. Using its humor and
sarcasm, Austen shamefully draws the portrait of Mr.
Collins, the ridiculous suitor. In contrast, both Lizzy
Bennet and Mr. Darcy strive to overcome their follies
and prejudices. Their remarkable growth in character
and perception on love transports the audience into
the days of enlightenment. Both novels contain a
notable indirect discourse that represents the inner
psyche of the characters. By providing readers glimpses
of characters’ feelings and thoughts, these two
omniscient narrators offer multiple points of view and
lead readers to formulate spontaneous judgments.
Since consciousness is shown in a great flow, the
readers are invited to partly attend hearing the
characters’ inner speeches while experience many
ambivalences.
6.1. Novel A: Analysis
In the Victorian age, the ideal of woman was defined by
the three virtues of piety, purity, and submissiveness.
Although many restrictions had been imposed on
women by Victorian society, women in the nineteenth
century began to show their existence in literature.
They began to claim their rights and exert influence in
fields such as literature and employment. The novels
Jane Eyre and Madame Bovary depict how the era and
the country defined women and the limitations
imposed on them at the same time. They also show the
silence of women and their voice against society,
though in different styles. This paper analyzes very
thoroughly the image of women in the Victorian age in
both novels ((Pyeaam) Abbasi, 2014). It is upon it that
the emphasis will be given on aspects
of women’s voice
in the two novels. Jane Eyre is the first-person narrative
of Jane, who is forced to live with her aunt and cousins,
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the Reeds, after she loses her parents. The very first
chapter portrays that Jane is an orphan girl who is these
cousins’
dependent. The setting is oppressive and dark
in such a way that it makes the readers feel sympathy
for Jane and contempt for the Reed family.
Dehumanized, all Jane expects is to disappear in the
eyes of the Reeds. They never stop patronizing and
abusing Jane. She starts to voice her thoughts by
complaining and hence defending herself, trying to
change her miserable situation. The voice begins with
silence, though. To Jane, Thornfield is a world of
miracle and happiness, in contrast with Gateshead and
Lowood. However, she is unaware of that miracles
cannot exist at the expense of dismay. All those nice
people are wrapped up in an abyss of darkness. Since
the fire incident, Jane has no voice (whether she should
leave Thornfield or stay). It is not until she learns from
Mr. Rochester that Bertha Mason is a mad woman who
locked in the attic that she begins to voice again, this
time calling for justice. And thus she takes action based
on her voice and passion. The notion that the writing
refers to is that this time, Jane is not afraid of the result
even though she may lose Mr. Rochester forever.
6.2. Novel B: Analysis
First, it is shown that the social code and family
institutions in the Victorian society are based on certain
requirements, to which individuals have to conform.
Victorian women are bound by these codes, and faced
with the growing constraints, modern women begin to
attempt negotiating with them. The underground
forces of women’s independence, however, are not
strong enough to overpower the rigid rules of society,
and women have to take either aggressive or regressive
measures. The protagonist in each novel, therefore, has
to either conform to the social conventions or rebel
against them, which prove fatal. Accordingly, a contrast
is made between the anxious anticipation and
enjoyment of a social engagement between the couple
in Pride and Prejudice with the painful dreading of the
same in The Mill on the Floss on the night preceding the
proposed marriage in the dreams of the heroines.
Other major events
are also similar in that the heroine’s
family take conscious and active measures to break off
with the suitor in both novels, resulting in the
separation and obliteration of the mutual feelings. The
letters exchanged with each other, following this
severance or punishment, clearly indicate the causes of
their respective conflicts, then a full-fledged analysis of
the resolution is made.
Using the detailed classification of the mechanisms of
repression and the generic dialectic of “conformity or
death,” invited by the protagonists’ cases and The Mill
on the Floss and Pride and Prejudice, the opening
sequences of both novels provide an insight into the
author’s discourse on marriage. The usage of irony and
comic narration is worthy of inspection, as they
seemi
ngly indicate the authors’ opposition to the
behaviour of the match-makers while tacitly passing
their judgments on the respective marriage customs
and ways. The very significance of this irony in
abbreviating the act of marriage in Pride and Prejudice
and in foregrounding the oppressive power of
individual pursuit of self-interest before, thus leading
to a complete, socially constructed idea of marriage in
The Mill on the Floss is elaborated on.
Jane Austen enshrined as a classic English writer was a
daughter of a clergyman who grew up and spent her
whole life in a little town of Bath, Hampshire. She
started writing at a very early age, and published her
first novel at twenty-five to the expressions of the
happiness for the success. Though Jane’s circumstan
ces
did not educate her to be discontent with her lot and
ambitioning positions, and her novels opened subtle,
scornful, maliciously humorous criticisms on the social
conducts and familial institutions in her society, her
means were busy observations and comic pictures, and
she did not seem to have a strong, sincere empathy
with her heroes. The novels, centered on love-seeking
well-bred girls from gentility with leather-bound desk
and inked quills, directed towards the wisdom of the
family life, written in a refined elegance were suffice to
gain admiration or critical acclaim, but the criticisms did
not seem as sharp as the truth ((Pyeaam) Abbasi, 2014).
6.3. Novel C: Analysis
Various characters with their development and harm
effect on her life. The narrati
ve gives voice to women’s
hurt along with the portrayal of Jane as an oppressed
confused female till the late 1800s. Because of the
class-sensitivity of the late Victorian literary society,
Jane Eyre started under a penname. Since under the
influence of societal convention had to change a female
writer’s life, the novel’s character sketch of Jane has to
be made sort of buttered one for the softer exposure
of the news concerning immorality, lechery, the
workings of lust and madness. In the times of the
discourse identity has been a key aspect of the
selection process. Drifting between the subjective and
the objective reasons of the discourse, Jane has had to
go through all sorts of abuses or discrimination in a sort
of race to find herself. Initial high-minded ideals
coupled with innocence and passivity like seeking
always an implicit explanation for the contradiction
between her beauty and the stony heart of the world
started by Jane’s visiting the Reed Street in Gateshead.
Her clear conception to escape moral offences
combined with the sharp tongue calling for aid from her
penitent heart gets detained to the mockery of the
similar group, who on receiving fell off to attention just
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for the innumerous charms before a perfect example of
what an English Lady should appear like. So, without
being a tame, and beaten or abused by far more useless
things in grey greyesses, fuzzes to frustration due to
lack of feminine counterparts and on account of being
faded out of provincial purgatory.
That
impairment
gained
new
strength
and
astonishment by having either taken implicitly ahead a
hitherto untried medium the ultimately controlling
narration or applying simultaneously masking
strategies of an initially blind eye or a much faded
authority above family matters to first assess the
malignance before as much damage under the control
of a female handle was needed to disentangle the
hindrances. A lot of character sketching has taken
around the affective aspect of the estate through brick
walls, a stone water pumping station with river below,
a forest gate honored fences and spying cabinets
against exorcismes, but also a lot above the discovery
there by Jane on having learnt the shapes inside and
canvas on the belly, chastity was of no help, or that
everything and everywhere was allowed to ridicule
some nice trouble, burden etc. So to imprison
imagination in the shape of painful sensing distances or
a bitten tongue hiding in a bottle of honey affected a
literary explosion of paradigm shifts within the
parameters of restrictive paradigm right around and
mostly because the main cause for such has been
familiarity. From this scenario it was to be understood
how the primary attempt to travel south to Morton was
over slow black moving trains to reach London, and
then across fearing to lose the black major race again
back to Yorkshire, to make this possible again to check
Jane’s light was still on.
7. The Evolution of Female Roles
There was a plethora of female-centric topics to cover
in contemporary British literature, from popular novels
to literary masterpieces. Novels about women written
by women were few and far between in the mid-to-late
twentieth century, but are now extremely common
(Saroff, 2014). The present paper aims to examine
prominent female characters in contemporary British
literature, analyzing female characterization. Three
major topics will be covered: romantic relationships,
social status, and women’s agency; those areas
represent the breadth of issues typically dealt with in
novels and demonstrate well how far women have
come in literature and life.
There is an extensive list of classic British literature
depicting women’s lives mainly as confined to
traditional gender roles. Emphasis in those novels is
placed on women as daughters, wives, and mothers.
Such topics are perhaps a depiction of the prevalent
cultural atmosphere several centuries before. Recent
British literature, on the other hand, captures an
increasing diversity in women’s lives. The portrayals of
prominent female characters indicate that wome
n’s
lives can hardly be confined to one or two culturally
accepted roles. The three characters’ unconventional
paths, especially in their romantic lives, deviate from
the predominantly female ideas of old. Nowadays,
many women are still confined to traditional gender
roles due to sociocultural restrictions or personal traits,
while more and more women venture beyond.
Gender inequality today is mainly realized through
feminist theory and solution, incorporation into
literature thereafter. Similarly, there is a long history of
radical recognition of gender inequity by female
authors, from earlier fiction commenting on women
being branded mad and poor when going against
traditional codes of conduct to later prose turning to
poignant and unconscious reflections on female
empowerment and independence but narrated in a
self-
loathing
style.
Those
works’
initial
misinterpretation is perhaps due to the trend of sexual
revolution and a false sense of equality in the twenty-
first century, but there is also the possibility of more
radical appeal not apparently imposed. There is
attested improvement in women’s position although
the full equality remains partly unrealistic as there are
always massively more men than women in top
hierarchy, especially in social intimacy.
8. Critiques of Gender Stereotypes
Up until the late 1950s, stories in women’s magazines
often addressing women’s search for independence
reflected the conception of “the feminine mystique”
(Fender, 2018). The most common depiction portrayed
women in their 20s as career girls, eager to break free
from the “cage of spinning houses.” All this changed
during the 1950s, when magazine fiction mostly
sidelined these feminist tales and began sporting
idealized portrayals of housewives. The aim of this
essay is to examine to what extent novels published in
the 1950s countered or perpetuated such gender
stereotypes. Specifically, the four novels under scrutiny
are Star Money (1950) by Kathleen Winsor, Marjorie
Morningstar (1955) by Herman Wouk, The Man in the
Gray Flannel Suit (1955) by Sloan Wilson, and Peyton
Place (1956) by Grace Metalious. These novels were
selected primarily because they were all published
between 1950 and 1958, were best-sellers in The New
York Times during their publication year, feature a
central female character, and are all set in the
contemporary U.S. The historical and sociocultural
background of the novels as addressed in the first
section reveals that the chosen period was impacted by
the aftermath of WWII. The American gain of world
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power was accompanied by the dissemination of a new
ideal: the obedient housewife-mother, leading women
who sought independence to search for it in different
societies. Each novel under scrutiny reckons with this
search for independence differently: Winsor’s nove
l
portrays a young woman who ultimately rejects the
ideal in her pursuit for independence; Wouk’s and
Wilson’s portray the budding independence of their
heroines, who embrace the ideal; and Metalious’s
complicates the ideal through the contrast between its
portrayal of an ordinary small-town girl, who to a large
extent embodies the ideal.
Then, in addition to a summary of the primary
characters’ pursuit for independence, each author’s
use of realism is scrutinized in exploring the specific
ways in which their novels reckon with this masculine
ideal of womanhood. This aspect includes personal and
social
background,
characterization,
affecting,
narrative point of view, form, tone, and style. Finally, a
discussion of the effectiveness of this search for
independence allows for a comparison of the societal
and literary implications of the four solutions and how
they are attained within the texts. These particular
aspects are elaborated on in the conclusion (Jane
Macmillian, 1988).
9. Intersectionality in Modern Novels
Recent decades have seen an increased interest in
postcolonial English language writing. The venerable
genres of the novel and the short story in the 19th
century were confronted with a new wave of fictional
writing from formerly colonised countries. This new
fiction (and poetry) is postcolonial in the sense that it is
written after colonialist intervention on the indigenous
culture, but is often also a commentary on the
consequences of this intervention. The colonial
language (English) is sometimes turned against its
former masters, but it can never fully extricate itself
from the hegemonic constraints of power.
The present study belongs quite basically to the field of
postcolonial studies, the intersection of literature with
cultural, historical, social and political studies. More
specifically, it will be examining postcolonial literature
in English related to the Anglo-
Indian women’s
situation and depicting the representation of women’s
identities. The three novelists have been chosen
because they cover a broad time span of Indian literary
production in English from colonial times to recent
issues faced by diasporic Anglo-Indians. Their saturated
white, English, Anglo-Indian, Indian and mixed-race
angulations are, respectively, readily analysable against
three categorical types of representation of female
identities shaped by the early white patriarchal
discourses gone awry.
Postcolonial analysis with its interrogative lens into
Anglo-
Indian women’s identities hints at a change that
recent writing attempts to rectify. Their white Anglo-
Indian heroines face new challenges, frozen in-
between a fading background and newer ones ahead,
negotiating conflicting performances of identity
through their writing within a diasporic setting. As
hybrids carrying a white burden, they shatter the
façade of postcolonial Englishness upheld by their
fathers through their British connections, foiling the
colonialist essentialisation that grants them privilege
over other women and their own protest against this
injustice (Molloy, 2003).
9.1. Race and Class
In modern english novels, so many factors exerted
influence on authors, one of which is that on space such
as social class and race. Through the analysis of race
and class in several modern novels, one can discover
that the various deployments of race, class, and space
have significant social implications. In this sense,
romance novels have been discovered to contrast the
English and nonEnglish races. In a Duel of Hearts, Sir
Philip is an English rural gentry whose heritage can be
traced to the Norman Conquest. On the other hand,
Hector, the rival to Sir Philip, is a Jew with Russian
descent. The processing of the Cossacks as Jews
shuffles ethnic and political discourses through
historical conflation. The archetypes of the Russian
Cossacks not only match the stereotypical qualities of
Jews in Britain but have long been associated with
large-scale anti-Semitism throughout Europe. Likewise,
novels have been examined for their deployment of
class. Classifies have been conventionalized as
coextensive with purity. Heirs are often depicted in
these novels not merely as the wealthy and powerful
but also as the degenerate and the filthy. In contrast
with the mythical frames of families, the dwellings of
bloodlines are often depicted as massive but filthy and
foul-smelling mansions with repulsive memories. Such
notions of space convey certain meaning beyond the
linguistic representation. In this sense, the point of
view of space and power is further questioned. The
works depict race and class not as stability but as
ongoing, never settled, and an unstable process. In
modern English country house novels, the white English
are imagined as possessing the land, while the Jews are
often disseminated with a displacement of familial
figuration, thus seen as outsiders. In contrast,
unsolicited esoteric views of social class and race have
been found in working-class novels, where the gentile
working-class is seen to develop perfect communalism
and uniformly homogenous qualities of family, thus
figured as respectable other. As represents the cliché
of respectability, or conversely as an embodiment of
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purity.
9.2. Sexual Orientation
The nineteenth century saw a relaxation of conventions
for the representation of same-sex desire in fiction,
allowing mistresses and lovers to be encoded.
However, the literatures of the British Isles, regarding
male love, were prone to strict censorship in ways that
differed from, and were eventually surpassed by, what
was permissible in the United States. The authorities’
initial injunctions arose from a litany of accounts of
sodomitical conspiracies, intolerable Beatitude Boy
encounters, and horror stories of newspaper and police
deviance. Critically examined here are the novellas The
Rose of Life (1905) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and The
Sphinx’s Lawyer (1906) by Julia Frankau, both of which
are set against the backgrounds of the extensive
biographical, literary, and legal discourses relating to
Wilde.
Professionally heterosexual, both narratives annotate
male performances of same-sex love at the turn of the
century. Both involve ultimately innocent Wildean
protagonists who succumb
—
via suggestion or
influence
—
to an initially experimental same-sex
intoxication. Braddon and Frankau offer queer men
marriage as a guaranteed form of rejuvenated
heterosexual remedy. Developmental narratives
dominate the analysis of male homoeroticism. But it is
a development reliant on fixed innateness, on inborn
queer sexual identity. Development carries both
negative connotations
—
of degeneration or cataclysmic
erring
—
and positive ones. Queerness is understood
naturalistically as an innate trait. But development
requires male suggestion and influence. The
Dickinsonian premise is behind these plots: for queer
men, moral awakening comes at the hands of women
(Markovic, 2021).
Queerness per se is that which is inborn or innate.
Young boys are pictured as “innocent children,”
unaware of men’s illicit desires. Such innocence is
desirable, but vexatious. All too soon, the feckless boys
fall into a dangerous world of adult male suggestion
and influence, entrapment or seduction by men. All
acceptable development must first overcome this
pitiable plight. Only then can it be picturable in its
integrity and virtue. But there are other, tawdrier
readings outside Whitm
an and Dickinson’s paradigms.
Such readings suggest a repudiation of female agency
in relation to the queer. Conversely, male influence is
almost universally detrimental (Persinger Adams,
2006).
10. Comparative Analysis with Male Characters
A comparative analysis of masculinity androgyny in
fictional novels highlighting the boundary between
rage and reason was undertaken. The established
themes were exceeded by morphological innovations
of characters in plots significantly challenging the
gender dichotomy and representing the characters
reacting to current situations without predetermined
mercy or cruelty demonstrating mixtures of rage and
compassion.
Key thematic models of civilization, domesticity,
sentimental or family tragedy, notorious nature of
crimes, pernicious or poisonous nature of novels are
examined to clarify their erroneous nature. The
sarcastically lenient softie towards bourgeois reasoning
is ontologized and counterplanned with rage of reason.
The conservative moral codex of the romantic family
tragedy sophistication and the anthropocentric hatred
of civilized manners, family cares, domesticity and
ordinary domestic devils are scrutinized. The
horrendous topics of deadly set off against the
transcendental endurance of crass bourgeois feistiness
are also discussed.
A technique of employing grotesque contests or
carnivalesque behaviorists or males criticized
boundaries of civilization with egalitarian punk techno-
pop and aphoristic expressions by way of exaltation is
investigated. There exist literary monsters of raw rage
of so-called modest gentlemen, who smile or touch
wood with mascara yet live in capitalistic surroundings
of revenant fathers, paralyzed mothers or sick
brothers. The theoretical background applied is
constructed of masculinity studies based on ontology.
11. Impact of Women Writers
Women writers have significantly impacted modern
English novels. The common opinion was that women
are authors only of trivial, silly novels, which do not
deserve broader public attention and which should
simply be disposed of. That opinion was evidently
predominant in the early 19th century when
innovations in narrative technique and freed plot
relegated all but a few attempts by women writers to
the category of trifles, nursery tales, and sentiment.
“No
w a girl of education will not write novels who is a
lady,” said one reviewer. In 1850, Susan Warner’s The
Wide, Wide World shattered that prediction, going
through 14 editions in two years and becoming the first
novel to reach the one million mark in sales. It sold best
of all Harper’s titles and, unlike others, did not go
entirely to the graveyard of forgotten bestsellers. In the
1850s alone the situation changed radically for both
publishers and authors. Soon, both sought to cater to
an ever-growing audience. Critics recognized that it
was dangerous to dismiss women novelists. Sensing a
lucrative goldmine, publishers smothered the market
with little indiscreet books, omnibuses of novels in
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cheap covers, which sometimes ran to two dozen
volumes in a single
binding (Majić Mazul, 2015).
However, as the production of novels written by
women increased, male authors felt threatened. This
anxiety proved to be unfounded, but it was
nevertheless powerful and widespread. It centered on
two related fears: that the wo
men would “rob men of
their markets, steal their subject matter, and snatch
away their young lady readers.” Every piece of fiction
written by women was instantly criticized and belittled,
not only by male writers who supervised the industry
but also by men
critics for whom writing was “man’s
business.” Patronizing male reviewers believed that
skillful and original writing was a trait possessed only by
men and only men were capable of tackling serious
subjects and grand themes. “Their utter lack of
intellect
ual vigor and original thought,” wrote one
reviewer after reading a book signed “Mrs.,” “is now
being openly elaborated upon by many critics. Just
another example of that unspeakably foolish nonsense
of moody ladies.” Consequently, they saw female
fiction as a personal diary of an over-emotional woman
who is objective and lost in the labyrinth of her own
thoughts. Whenever a book was published, the critique
meticulously quoted it and “robustly” chastised its
roundabouts and dramatic rhetoric but rarely stated
what it was about. Supposedly, female novels were
unreadable, and reviewing them was a shameful
audience of their inferiority. Predominantly negative
assessments of female fiction compelled female
authors to use male pseudonyms or write anonymously
to avoid critical degradation based on their sex.
Charlotte Brontë used the pseudonym of Currer Bell
when she published her novel Jane Eyre. It wasn’t so
much that she wanted it known that the author was a
woman as that she wanted it known that it was a novel
by a serious writer. Brontë wanted readers to ignore
her femininity and focus on the literary value of her
book. The desire is understandable since the year
before, Fanny Fern had written, “Woman as a novelist
is a new character, and men consider it a sort of
impertinence on her part in attempting.” Nevertheless,
“Jane Eyre”’s huge popularity prompted readers to
wonder who the actual author is. When the identity of
Charlotte Brontë was disclosed in the London Times,
and it was stated that “Currer Bell has n
ever been a
man of sound sense, of vigorous mind, of steady
judgment,” the public reception and criticism of the
book changed negatively.
12. Reader Reception and Interpretation
Reading accounts for a lot of the ways in which we can
view texts and evaluate what it is about them that
inspires readers to continue engaging with them. Thus
in order to promote women novelists and their works,
not only is it needed to discuss the range and diversity
of the texts in question but also to evaluate how they
were read and interpreted using theoretical
assumptions about reading. The second half of this
book is occupied with this analysis but it's worth also
noting at the outset some theories of reading as they’re
particularly pertinent in the context of female readers
of literary texts like novels. Reading too is a complex
and multifaceted activity with many implications and
possibilities. There are various approaches to reading
from simple styles of reading that concern how to
interpret the surface of a text like ‘what
is the
message?’ to complex ways of reading that interpret
textual meaning in a wider sense including the socio-
politico-economic-cultural contexts of the text. The
former can be seen to correlate more with traditional
literary criticism than with reader reception and
interpretation.
Women novelists of the late twentieth century to early
twenty-first centuries are a contentious group of
writers. Readers are set a mammoth task of negotiating
the political, social, cultural and textual landscape
produced by competing accounts of these writers.
Moreover, such descriptions are offered not only in
scholarly texts but also popular memoirs and
journalistic reviews and they are often at odds.
Questioning what is meant by the term ‘women
novelists’, one seeks through
analysis of reader
reception and interpretation of texts by these writers
to shed light on new movements of reading, as well as
how readers indigenise political positions concerning
relations of gender, sexuality and class across
times/places. More importantly, such inquiries
highlight tensions that can arise when theoretical
examination of reader reception engages with the ‘real’
world of reading, reminding one that both reception
(analysis) and interpretation (approach) are fraught
with difficulty (Carpenter, 2015).
13. Cultural Influences on Female Representation
Gender politics and cultural representation play a large
role in constructing equal rights and the perception of
shame. Thus, the lens through which women are
portrayed
culturally,
socially,
physically,
and
intellectually influences the need to challenge the
systems and progression of female equality. Using
various novels, cultural representations will be
explored to see how media influences women’s
perceptions of themselves as intellectual equals,
friends, mothers, daughters, and lovers. The results of
this research show that in ways, the author takes a
progressive turn, allowing women to be destructively
monstrous in a world that condemns their passion.
However, this is juxtaposed by traditional gender
stereotypes that reinforce patriarchy, causing women
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to either passively accept male dominance or become
prey to the jungle of men, unable to become winning
hunters themselves.
Conversely, cultural representations of women in
traditional tea ceremonies that, while different in social
expectation, share the same goals of female equality.
In these, women are the ones left making mistakes or
are attacked together as groups. Violently forced to
succumb to guilt for the mistakes that helped advance
women
’s rights, they aggressively attack their own,
showing that even women are not immune to cultural
expectations of conformity and group adherence.
Differences in male representations more clearly
delineate the variation of cultural values, where
modernity and overwhelming masculinity emdiv
savage beasts ruled by their brutish appetites or child-
like innocence completely incapable of the beast,
movement, or desires attributed almost universally to
concrete. Therefore, gender representations in various
media show that culture is important in how female
roles adapt as languages, values, and generations shift
and evolve.
14. CONCLUSION
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the eponymous heroine
of the novel, is a rebellion against stereotyping of
women. Charlotte Bronte used Jane Eyre as a voice to
speak out against the oppression of women. Female
happiness depends on autonomy to choose or reshape
destiny and fulfillment of aspirations, aspirations which
are a perspective on God that lies at the heart of the
novel. Individualism is the foundation of independent
personhood, which is needed in gaining equality by
being believed human. History felt such fervour about
women’s individuality and personhood, the inalienable
birthrights which were the conditions of justice and
morality. In effect, the consensus was that women
were wholly inferior to men, made by God to be their
helpmeets and subordinates. Nevertheless, Jane Eyre
argues, against all odds, in favour of the individualism
of all souls as a condition of human dignity. Para-textual
reading of the novel finds contradictions in Bronte’s
beliefs about women as autonomous persons. At the
onset, reason and faith are exalted as the means to
individuality and equality, the basis on which moral
action can be taken. For much of the novel, Jane Eyre
speaks as an independently existing right-held
individual, a voice even patriarchal institutions cannot
silence.
Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, in this novel,
Flaubert presents an image of women profoundly
affected by the influence of romantic literature,
women in desperate pursuit of happiness and love lost
to thoughtless sin, trivial infatuation and rebuked
capture into degradation. The obsession with and flight
from love is chronicled and sympathetically avoided
through an ironic perspective. Objectivity and
detachment are exalted as the conditions enabling
moral growth. Emma Bovary suffers through all the
frustration and bereavement romantic literature can
devise yet learns nothing of life; Madame Bovary could
have revealed the existence of an unseen remote
enclave of happiness; for Emma, no such hope exists.
Characterizes nineteenth-
century France a men’s world
in which women are marginalized, objectified,
dominated, distorted. All personification of things is
purely illusory, for desires only promise fulfilment.
Likewise, romantic love constitutes, for Emma, a value
imbued with sweetness and light which disposes her
soul to liberty. Such self-delusion is inseparable from
existential blindness. Flaw of character whereby desire
does not conform to reality emerges; life is devoid of
affectation, feeling and colour. Not only does French
society emerge as a male dominion; the sentiment of
love, in all its forms, is seen to seduce and dull thought
towards perfidy and unreason.
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