Context & Writer's Techniques (AQA A-Level English Literature A): Revision Notes

Context & Writer's Techniques

Context

Understanding the historical and literary context of Jane Eyre is essential for analysing how Charlotte Brontë crafted this groundbreaking novel. Published during a period of significant social change, the text reflects and challenges the values of its time whilst drawing on established literary traditions.

Victorian England (1840s)

Jane Eyre was published in 1847, during the early Victorian period, a time characterised by strict social structures and moral expectations. Victorian society operated within a rigid class hierarchy, where birth and wealth determined one's opportunities and social standing. This stratification affected every aspect of life, from education and employment to marriage prospects.

For women particularly, the constraints were severe. Society imposed strict expectations regarding female behaviour, demanding modesty, obedience, and domesticity. Women faced limited opportunities in education, with most formal learning reserved for men or restricted to accomplishments deemed suitable for ladies. Employment options were similarly narrow, typically confined to roles as governesses, teachers, or domestic workers. Women could not own property independently once married, and their legal and economic rights were severely curtailed.

Function in the novel: Jane's struggle for independence and self-determination directly reflects these real constraints on women's social mobility. Her journey from orphaned dependent to independent woman challenges the limitations placed on Victorian women, making her story both personal and political.

Women's position and proto-feminism

Charlotte Brontë's novel represents a radical departure from conventional portrayals of women in Victorian literature. Rather than presenting a heroine defined by beauty, wealth, or social status, Brontë created Jane as a plain, poor, self-respecting heroine. This characterisation was revolutionary because it centred a woman's inner worth rather than her external attributes or social advantages.

Jane's character embodies proto-feminist ideas that challenged Victorian gender norms. She demands equality rather than mere social advancement, making her motivations fundamentally different from heroines who simply sought advantageous marriages. The novel presents a sustained critique of romantic, economic, and patriarchal power structures, exposing how each limits women's autonomy and self-realisation.

Brontë presents these ideas not through abstract argument but through Jane's lived experience, making them emotionally compelling.

Function in the novel: By centring a woman's interior life and her quest for independence, Brontë validated female experience and ambition in ways that Victorian society typically dismissed or condemned.

Industrialisation and class fluidity

The Victorian period witnessed rapid industrialisation, which created new forms of wealth alongside traditional landowning classes. This economic transformation introduced greater class fluidity than previous eras had known. Characters like Miss Temple represent new money derived from industry, whilst the Rivers family exemplify traditional landed classes. The Rochesters and Ingrams represent established wealth, creating a complex class landscape.

Brontë explores several dimensions of class relations through her narrative. She examines class prejudice, showing how characters like Blanche Ingram and the Reed family judge others based on birth rather than merit. The novel also investigates social ambition, questioning what motivates people to climb the social ladder and at what cost. Crucially, Brontë contrasts moral worth with birth and social status, suggesting that character matters more than breeding.

Religion and moral debates

Christianity permeates Jane Eyre, but Brontë presents three contrasting forms of Christian belief and practice, each with distinct moral implications. These contrasting models create a moral framework against which Jane must define her own beliefs.

Mr Brocklehurst represents hypocritical, punitive, and joyless religion. He uses Christian doctrine to justify cruelty to the Lowood pupils whilst his own family lives in luxury. His religion emphasises judgment and deprivation rather than compassion, making it a tool of oppression rather than spiritual growth.

Helen Burns embodies gentle, forgiving, and self-sacrificing Christianity. She accepts suffering with patience and forgives those who harm her, believing earthly trials lead to heavenly rewards. Her faith offers comfort but requires complete submission and self-abnegation.

St John Rivers demonstrates zealous, self-denying, and ambitious faith. His religion drives him towards missionary work, but his devotion is cold and joyless. He subordinates human feeling to abstract duty, making his Christianity emotionally arid despite his genuine commitment.

Gothic literary tradition

Brontë incorporates numerous elements from the Gothic literary tradition, a genre popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Gothic fiction typically features mystery, secrets, and supernatural hints that create an atmosphere of suspense and psychological intensity.

The novel employs several classic Gothic features:

• Mystery and secrets pervade the narrative, most notably the concealed presence of Bertha Mason
• Supernatural hints appear throughout, though most can be explained rationally
• Eerie settings contribute significantly to the Gothic atmosphere, with Thornfield Hall's dark corridors and forbidden attic creating spaces of danger and secrecy

Function in the novel: Gothic techniques create emotional intensity and symbolise psychological states. The external Gothic elements—locked rooms, mysterious fires, nocturnal wanderings—externalise Jane's internal emotional and moral conflicts, making her psychological journey visible and dramatic.

The Bildungsroman tradition

Jane Eyre follows the Bildungsroman structure, a literary form that traces a protagonist's development from childhood to mature adulthood. This coming-of-age narrative pattern allows readers to understand how experiences shape identity and moral character.

The novel traces Jane's journey through several key stages:

• Childhood suffering at Gateshead and Lowood, experiences that forge her independence and self-reliance
• Moral education through various encounters and relationships, teaching her to distinguish genuine virtue from hypocrisy
• Emotional awakening, particularly her discovery of passionate love with Rochester
• Search for autonomy, which drives the entire plot as she seeks to balance independence with connection, passion with principle

Autobiographical resonances

Charlotte Brontë drew on her own experiences when creating Jane Eyre, lending the novel emotional authenticity and psychological depth. Brontë attended the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, where harsh conditions and inadequate food contributed to the deaths of her elder sisters Maria and Elizabeth. These traumatic experiences directly informed the depiction of Lowood School's harsh conditions, including the typhus outbreak that kills Helen Burns.

Brontë's work as a governess in various households similarly shapes Jane's position at Thornfield. Like Jane, Brontë experienced the governess's ambiguous social position—neither family member nor servant, educated yet employed, genteel yet dependent. This liminal status created particular challenges that Brontë understood intimately.

---

Writer's techniques

Charlotte Brontë employs sophisticated narrative techniques to achieve her thematic goals. Understanding these methods enhances appreciation of how the novel creates its effects.

First-person narrative (Bildungsroman voice)

The entire novel unfolds from Jane's perspective, creating an intimate relationship between narrator and reader. This first-person narration proves revolutionary for its time, particularly in centring a woman's subjective experience so completely.

The narrative employs double consciousness, meaning that both child Jane and adult Jane narrate simultaneously. We experience the immediacy of childhood experience—Jane's fear, confusion, and pain feel present and urgent. Yet we also benefit from reflective adult interpretation, as the mature Jane comments on her younger self's experiences with understanding and perspective. This dual perspective enriches the narrative, allowing readers both to feel with the child and to understand with the adult.

Functions:

Gothic techniques

Brontë uses Gothic elements strategically throughout the novel to create atmosphere and symbolic depth. These techniques transform what could be merely sensational plot devices into meaningful explorations of psychological states.

Key Gothic elements include:

• Storms, fire, and night-time wandering, which create atmosphere whilst symbolising emotional turbulence
• Thornfield's attic mysteries, generating suspense about Bertha's presence whilst raising questions about secrets and repression
• The 'supernatural' Red Room terror, representing Jane's psychological trauma and sense of injustice
• Rochester as the Byronic lover, brooding and morally ambiguous, attractive yet potentially dangerous

Symbolism

Brontë employs recurring symbols to reinforce major themes, allowing objects and natural phenomena to carry meaning beyond their literal presence.

Fire represents passion, destruction, and renewal. Bertha's fires threaten destruction, yet fire also purifies and transforms. The novel's conclusion sees Jane and Rochester experiencing a 'phoenix-like' renewal, rising from the ashes of their earlier mistakes to forge a more equal relationship.

Ice and cold symbolise emotional restraint and oppression. The cold environments of Lowood and St John's proposal represent emotional suppression and the denial of human warmth. Jane must navigate between destructive fire and deadening ice to find balanced passion.

Birds and flight embody freedom and aspiration. Jane frequently desires 'liberty,' comparing her longing to a caged bird yearning for open sky. This imagery connects her romantic and political desires—she seeks freedom in love as in life.

Function: These symbols reinforce themes of freedom, repression, and identity, creating a rich symbolic texture that rewards careful reading.

Character foils

Brontë uses character foils strategically to highlight different aspects of Jane's personality and moral values. By contrasting Jane with other characters, Brontë clarifies what makes Jane distinctive and admirable.

Jane versus Blanche Ingram contrasts inner worth with superficial beauty. Blanche possesses conventional beauty, accomplishments, and social advantages but lacks genuine feeling and moral depth. Jane's plain appearance masks profound emotional and moral richness, challenging Victorian assumptions about female worth.

Jane versus Bertha Mason juxtaposes repressed and unrestrained feminine emotion. Bertha represents what Victorian society feared—female passion and anger unleashed without restraint. Jane feels similar passions but channels them through moral consciousness, suggesting that women need expression rather than repression or explosion.

Jane versus St John contrasts emotional integrity with cold ambition. Both characters possess strong wills and moral seriousness, but St John subordinates all human feeling to abstract duty. Jane insists that genuine morality must include human warmth and self-respect, not just self-sacrifice.

Helen Burns versus Mr Brocklehurst opposes spiritual humility and religious hypocrisy. Both claim Christian faith, but Helen's gentle self-sacrifice contrasts utterly with Brocklehurst's punitive cruelty. This pairing shows that the same religious tradition can produce opposite moral outcomes.

Romantic and realist blending

Jane Eyre combines Romantic and Realist literary modes, creating a novel that feels both emotionally intense and credibly grounded.

Romantic elements include powerful emotion driving the plot forward, with Jane's passionate nature central to her character. The relationship between Jane and Rochester emphasises passion and imagination, reaching almost mystical intensity in their telepathic connection when Jane hears Rochester calling her name across the miles. The novel validates intense feeling as essential to full humanity.

Realist elements provide balancing credibility. Brontë includes social detail about education, work, and class that grounds the story in recognisable Victorian life. The novel traces everyday moral choices—how to respond to injustice, whether to compromise principle for security, how to balance independence with connection. Most importantly, the narrative presents credible psychological development, showing how experiences shape character over time.

Dialogue as moral test

Brontë uses dialogue strategically to reveal character and test moral positions. Conversations become opportunities for characters to demonstrate their values through speech.

The dialogue reveals distinct personalities through characteristic speech patterns:

• Jane's calm firmness appears in her measured responses, even when challenged
• Rochester's teasing but vulnerable interrogation shows his emotional complexity beneath his cynical surface
• St John's coldly rational persuasion demonstrates his subordination of feeling to duty
• Brocklehurst's punitive rhetoric exposes his hypocrisy and cruelty

Nature imagery

Natural imagery pervades the novel, reflecting Jane's emotional state and moral consciousness. Brontë uses landscape and weather to externalise internal conditions.

Nature reflects Jane's emotional landscape, with storms accompanying turmoil and sunshine marking happiness. The imagery also represents her moral truth—when Jane flees to the moors after discovering Bertha's existence, the wild landscape reflects her honest emotional devastation. Nature additionally symbolises her desire for freedom, with open spaces representing the liberty she craves.

Specific examples include:

• The moors represent renewal and self-discovery. Jane's time on the moors strips away social artifice, returning her to essential selfhood
• Gardens and orchards symbolise blossoming love, particularly in Jane and Rochester's courtship
• Storms represent conflict or transformation, with lightning striking the chestnut tree on the night of Rochester's proposal foreshadowing their separation

Foreshadowing and structural patterning

Brontë employs foreshadowing to create narrative unity and prepare readers for later revelations. Seemingly insignificant details gain meaning in retrospect.

• Mysterious laughter foreshadows Bertha's presence long before her reveal, creating unease and anticipation
• The split chestnut tree, struck by lightning on the night of Rochester's proposal, foreshadows Jane and Rochester's separation
• The telepathic 'Jane! Jane!' moment foreshadows their reunion, suggesting their deep spiritual connection survives physical separation

Social critique through satire

Brontë employs satire to expose and criticise various Victorian social ills. Through exaggeration and irony, she reveals the absurdity and injustice of certain attitudes and institutions.

The novel satirises:

• Class snobbery through characters like the Ingrams and Reed family, whose pretensions to superiority rest on nothing but inherited wealth
• Oppressive institutions like Lowood School that claim charitable purpose whilst inflicting suffering
• Limited opportunities for women, exposing how talent and intelligence count for nothing without male protection
• Hypocritical religion through Brocklehurst, who uses Christian doctrine to justify cruelty whilst living in luxury

---