Jane Eyre self awarness
Jane Eyre self-awarnessCharlotte Bronte was a strong-willed woman with extreme beliefs in self-awareness and individuality, a viewpoint that was tacitly condemned in those times. Throughout her novels Charlotte never failed to collide the main character with the discovery of her true worth. Jane Eyre was Charlotte's most popular novels and happens to beautifully demonstrate the main character gradually becoming in touch with her true self through life lessons.
The journey of Miss Jane Eyre begins at Gateshead where she is in the care of her cruel aunt who treats her like someone off the streets. In the words of Maggie Berg, a critic who wrote Jane Eyre: A Companion to the Novel, Jane sees herself as a "rebellious slave" and "hungerstricken". She is clearly the "scapegoat of the nursery" (pg. 47). In the eyes of her wicked aunt she was a "precocious actress" and was therefor regularly locked up like a dog. According to Berg the effect of these accounts drew attention to her self-dramatization. From the very moment Jane was able to read she was constantly attracted by the disguised portraits that she make for herself in books, ballads, and dolls. The recurring theme of self-awareness I saw in Jane Eyre started from the first time Jane saw herself in the mirror which consequentially gave her a fresh awareness of her own identity. When John "throws the book" at Jane Charlotte Bronte's attempt was to both literally and metaphorically symbolize the deprivation he was instigating of any sense of herself and her rights.
According to Jacques Lacan, the first identity of oneself in a mirror is the most decisive stage in human development. It provides the "awareness of oneself as an object of knowledge".
I had to cross before the looking glass; my fascinated glance involuntarily explored the depth it revealed. All looked colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality: and the strange little figure there gazing at me with a white face and arms specking the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit: I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessies's evening stories represented as coming out of lone, ferny dells in moors, and appearing before the eyes of belated travelers. (46)
Throughout her childhood at Gateshead Jane was treated in the most unjust manner, but never until she was locked up it the notorious "Red Room" had she ever admitted to hating her family. When she finally did get her hatred off her chest it yielded much relief, but was followed by intense guilt because such behavior is one that she was grown up not to condone within herself. Her guilt is what I believe to be her first lesson in her self-awareness. Every time she seemed to release herself, something I've always found to be healthy, she suppressed...
To view the complete essay, you be registered.