The Portrayal of Women in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley
©2014
Academic Paper
34 Pages
Summary
The present study aims at examining the portrayal of women in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley. The study is divided into four chapters in addition to a conclusion.
Chapter One: casts light on Charlotte Bronte as one of the most prominent female novelists in the nineteenth century. It also traces Charlotte Bronte as a subjective novelist who is concerned to convey a subjective impression.
Chapter Two: provides a historical and critical background of her age in which she matured and originated the main literary tendencies which affected and swayed her and decided the expression and manner of her writings.
Chapter Three: traces Charlotte Bronte's Contribution, Reputation and Influence. Moreover, Charlotte Bronte's writing is a powerful agent in her effect.
Chapter Four : is devoted to the portrayal of women in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, in which Charlotte Bronte sets up moral, spiritual and social problems such as the position of women, but evades a solution to the complications by dropping the problem and substituting the conventional solution of marriage.
Chapter One: casts light on Charlotte Bronte as one of the most prominent female novelists in the nineteenth century. It also traces Charlotte Bronte as a subjective novelist who is concerned to convey a subjective impression.
Chapter Two: provides a historical and critical background of her age in which she matured and originated the main literary tendencies which affected and swayed her and decided the expression and manner of her writings.
Chapter Three: traces Charlotte Bronte's Contribution, Reputation and Influence. Moreover, Charlotte Bronte's writing is a powerful agent in her effect.
Chapter Four : is devoted to the portrayal of women in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, in which Charlotte Bronte sets up moral, spiritual and social problems such as the position of women, but evades a solution to the complications by dropping the problem and substituting the conventional solution of marriage.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
Alhaj, Ali: The Portrayal of Women in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, Hamburg,
Anchor Academic Publishing 2015
PDF-eBook-ISBN: 978-3-95489-382-9
Druck/Herstellung: Anchor Academic Publishing, Hamburg, 2015
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© Anchor Academic Publishing, Imprint der Diplomica Verlag GmbH
Hermannstal 119k, 22119 Hamburg
http://www.diplomica-verlag.de, Hamburg 2015
Printed in Germany
Every writer's writing would last
Even if his hands die and depart
Dr. Ali Al-Bashir Mohammed
2
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my lovely parents.
3
Table of contents
Dedication ... 2
Table of contents ... 3
Preface ... 1
Chapter One ... 3
Introduction ... 3
Chapter Two ... 7
The Traits of Victorian English Society and Charlotte Bronte's Place in it... 7
1.0 Introduction ... 7
1.1The Social Background: ... 7
1.2 The Literal Background: ... 11
Chapter Three ... 16
Charlotte Bronte's Contribution, Reputation and Influence ... 16
2.1 Charlotte 's Life: Family background: ... 16
2.1 Charlotte's Contribution, Reputation & Influence ... 17
Chapter Four ... 21
The Portrayal of Women in Shirley ... 21
4.0 Introduction: ... 21
4.1 The Story of the Novel ... 21
4.2 Shirley and Idea of Women ... 23
4.3 Love and Marriage ... 25
References ... 27
1
Preface
The present study aims at examining the portrayal of women in Charlotte
Bronte's Shirley. The study is divided into four chapters in addition to a
conclusion.
Chapter One: casts light on Charlotte Bronte as one of the most prominent
female novelists in the nineteenth century. It also traces Charlotte Bronte as a
subjective novelist who is concerned to convey a subjective impression.
Chapter Two: provides a historical and critical background of her age in which
she matured and originated the main literary tendencies which affected and
swayed her and decided the expression and manner of her writings.
Chapter Three: traces Charlotte Bronte's Contribution, Reputation and
Influence. Moreover, Charlotte Bronte's writing is a powerful agent in her effect.
Chapter Four : is devoted to the portrayal of women in Charlotte Bronte's
Shirley, in which Charlotte Bronte sets up moral, spiritual and social problems
such as the position of women, but evades a solution to the complications by
dropping the problem and substituting the conventional solution of marriage.
2
Introduction
3
Chapter One
Introduction
Charlotte Bronte is perhaps one of the most prominent female novelists in the
nineteenth century .But she is in some ways even more typical .Of course, she is
not so great a novelist as Dickens; apart from anything else she had a narrower
range. Her range is confined to the inner life, the private passion. Indeed,
Charlotte has stood the test of time and her works are still fascinating enough to
attract readers and scholars of our time despite of her narrower range. Her
imagination is stimulated to create by certain aspects of man's inner life as that
of Dickens or Thackeray by certain aspects of his external life. As Thackeray
was the first English writer to make the novel the vehicle of a conscious
criticism of life, so Charlotte is the first to make it the vehicle of personal
revelation. She is the first subjective novelist (Patricia,1992: 45), the ancestor of
Proust and Mr. James Joyce and all the rest of the historians of the private
consciousness. And like her range is limited to those aspects of experience
which stimulate to significance and activity are the private consciousness of
their various heroes and heroines .
According to Gaskell ( 1990: 133) :
The life of Charlotte Bronte is very substance of her novels; three times
she summarized what she had imagined, seen or felt. In Jane Eyre she
depicted her imaginative life; in Villette, her true moral life; in Shirley,
coming out of herself a little- though very little in fact- and standing as it
were at the window of her soul, she depicted the corner of Yorkshire
where she lived and what little she had seen of human society.
Each of her book has therefore a very marked character in the first, Jane Eyre,
Villette, the best parts of Shirley, are not exercises of the mind, but cries of the
heart; not a deliberate self-diagnosis, but an involuntary self-revelation.
Fundamentally, her principal characters are all the same person; and that is
4
Charlotte Bronte. Her range is confined, not only to a direct expression of an
individuals' emotions and impression, but to a direct expression of Charlotte
Bronte's emotions and impressions. In this, her final limitations, we come indeed
to the distinguishing fact of her character as a novelist. The world she creates is
the world of her own inner life; she is her own subject .
This does not mean, of course, that she never writes about anything about her
own character .She is a story-teller, and a story shows character in action,
character, that is, as it appears in contact with the world of external event and
personality. Only the relation of Charlotte Bronte's imagination to this world is
different from that of most novelists.. In this context Gaskell (ibid,p132) points
out that;
Charlotte Bronte has struck only one cord of the human heart, the most
powerful it is true. In Shirley , the imagination alone speaks and when
imagination is sole master one can be sure that it will run to strange, fiery
passions , difficult of interpretations
Theirs, inspired as it is by some aspect of human life outside their own,
works, as it were objectively. Charlotte Bronte as a subjective novelist is
concerned to convey a subjective impression. Her picture of the external world
is a picture of her own reaction to the external world. But she did not write
novels in order to illustrate a particular moral precept. Such an obvious
procedure is deliberately rejected at the end of Shirley:
I think I now see then judicious reader putting on his spectacles to look for
the moral. It would be an insult to his sagacity to offer direction. I only say
God speed him in the quest. ( p.90).
Every page of Charlotte Bronte 's novels burns and breathes with vitality. Out
of her improbabilities and her absurdities, she constructed an original vision of
life; from the scattered, distorted fragments of experience which managed to
penetrate her huge self- absorption, she created a world.
Details
- Pages
- Type of Edition
- Originalausgabe
- Year
- 2014
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783954893829
- File size
- 652 KB
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2015 (February)
- Keywords
- Charlotte Bronte's Shirley women nineteenth century
