Introduction

Lord Byron’s Descendants 51
rate (if not direct) her own story” (72). Traditionally, the novel is seen as a form of
resistance, or, as Gilbert and Gubar state, as “a pattern for countless others … a
story of enclosure and escape of difficulties Everywoman in a patriarchal society
must meet and overcome” (256). Nevertheless, Jane also has to live within a patriarchal
system in which she is expected to repress her desires. Although she is one
of the first heroines to recognise and admit those desires, she needs a Byronic
hero before she is able to free herself from oppressive conventions and let her
passions free.
One of the first critics to note the new concept of this female selfdetermination
in Brontë’s novel was a contemporary of Brontë, Margaret Oliphant,
a Scottish novelist and historical writer. She was the earliest critic to identify
Jane Eyre as a transformation within the female tradition of writing, as Jane is
more aggressive, independent and demanding than any female protagonist before:
Nobody perceived that it was the new generation nailing its colours to the
mast. No one would understand that this furious love-making was but a
wild declaration of the ‘Rights of Woman’ in a new aspect. (557)
Oliphant, although she recognises the new dynamics between men and women
that the novel presents, vehemently criticises Brontë’s radicalism in the novel,
arguing that it gives young women a wrong impression of courtship and marriage.
In “A Room of Ones Own” (1929) Virginia Woolf saw Brontë as one of the
women who had set the stage for the acceptance and recognition of female writers
and their work. Yet she judges Brontë’s writing as containing too much anger and
rage in her authorial voice that she sees as a distortion of the narration. As
Showalter comments on Brontë: “[P]erhaps no other writer of her time has impressed
her mark so clearly on contemporary literature, or drawn so many followers
onto her own peculiar path” (87). Either way, Brontë’s Jane Eyre has a special
significance in feminist criticism.
At a time when women were supposed to keep strictly within the bounds of
female decorum in their writing, both in style and subject, an obvious double
standard in literary works can be found. Accordingly, critics judged the literary
works of female writers differently than those of their male counterparts. Consequently,
female writers used male pseudonyms when publishing their works. During
the mid-Victorian era, women had only few opportunities for using their talents
to express their true identities. It was expected that they would be content
with their lives within a confined and limited sphere; when in fact these restrictions
and confinements drove many of them to madness by prohibiting their selffulfilment.
In Jane Eyre Brontë demonstrates that all women are symbolically disinherited
in a patriarchal society and that they have only a limited number of options
to come to terms with their lot. A woman could forsake all worldly aspirations
and pleasures and thereby deny her self, as the examples of Helen Burns and
Eliza Reed show who retreat into the promises of religion. Alternatively, they