Blooms Literary Themes - THE HEROS ... - ymerleksi - home

Jane Eyre 87Jane Eyre is a Bildungsroman, a common Victorian fictionaltype, sometimes called an apprenticeship novel or a novel of development(other well-known examples are Charles Dickens’s DavidCopperfield and Great Expectations, George Eliot’s The Mill on theFloss, and William Makepeace Thackeray’s Pendennis. Twentiethcenturyexamples include David Herbert Lawrence’s Sons and Loversand James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). JeromeBuckley sums up the features of the Bildungsroman as: “childhood,the conflict of generations, provinciality, the larger society, selfeducation,alienation, ordeal by love, the search for a vocation anda working philosophy”(18)—a useful list that can mislead unlessadjusted for gender. Middle-class Victorian women did not usuallyseek, or find, careers, so “vocation” needs to mean some kind ofcalling other than paid employment. Similarly, girls and womenwere much less able to move around freely. Unlike David Copperfield,Jane Eyre cannot move to London and live in a flat whileseeking a living. Jane actually moves around much more than mostVictorian female protagonists.Others of Buckley’s characteristics apply very strongly to JaneEyre: For instance, “two love affairs or sexual encounters, onedebasing, one exalting” can describe Jane’s experience with Mr.Rochester and St. John Rivers, and her “first schooling, even if nottotally inadequate, may be frustrating insofar as it may suggestoptions not available to [her] in [her] current setting” (17). Janealso embodies in a strong way the Bildungsroman protagonist’ssearch for a model or preceptor (someone to whom she or he maybe “apprenticed”), the clearest example of which is Miss Temple atLowood School. Jane does not find a vocation in the modern senseof a career; her journey ends in marriage and a family. But she doespursue important goals in the course of Jane Eyre, and reachingthese constitutes the decisive and, in the world of the text, happyending of her quest.Let Jane identify her two drives: Very early in her narration of herstory, she explains her pitiful consolations for the miserable way herrelatives treat her: “To this crib I always took my doll; human beingsmust love something, and in the dearth of worthier objects of affection,I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a fadedgraven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow” (23). To her guardian