Charlotte Bronte's Jane Erye
温州师范学院外语系98英本（1）班 赵梅红
If you have yet to discover the unique voice of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre,
you have a special delight awaiting you.
For this most acclaimed of novels-"English," "Gothic,'' "romantic,"
"female"-is always a surprise, in the very authority, resonance, and
inimitable voice of its heroine. "I resisted all the way," Jane Eyre
states at the beginning of Chapter 2, and this attitude, this declaration of
a unique and iconoclastic female rebelliousness, strikes the perfect note for
the entire novel. That a woman will "resist" the terms of her destiny
(social or spiritual) is not perhaps entirely new in English literature up to
the publication of Jane Eyre in 1847: we have after all the willful heroines
of certain of Shakespeare's plays, and those of Jane Austen's elegant comedies
of manners. But Jane Eyre is a young woman wholly unprotected by social position,
family, or independent wealth; she is without power; she is, as Charlotte Bronte
judged herself, "small and plain and Quaker-like"- lacking the most
superficial yet seemingly necessary qualities of femininity. ("You are
not pretty any more than I am handsome," Rochester says bluntly.) Considered
as a fictitious character and, in this instance, the vocal consciousness of
a long and intricately plotted novel of considerable ambition, Jane Eyre was
a risk for her young creator-had not Henry Fielding gambled, and lost, on the
virtuous but impoverished and less than ravishingly beautiful heroine of his
Amelia, of 1751, arousing the scorn of readers who had so applauded Joseph Andrews
and Tom Jones? Jane Eyre, who seems to us, in retrospect, the very voice of
highly educated but socially and economically disenfranchised gentility, as
natural in her place in the literature of nineteenth-century England as Twain's
Huckleberry Finn is in our literature, was unique for her time. She speaks with
an apparent artlessness that strikes the ear as disturbingly forthright.
