Research Task 1:
1.
Class: Class can be seen as a social thing. People get divided into different classes. During the nineteenth century three broad classes emerged namely the upper class, the middle class and the working class. Your class determines the social conditions of what you are allowed to do.
Gender & Feminism: Gender represent the social roles which men and woman must take on. In the nineteenth century the men were seen as aggressive and rational where the woman were seen as a nurturing and emotional character. Feminism is the way woman are express. Woman fought for equality, they want to be equal to men.
Ideology: a set of beliefs that fit into a greater system. It can also be seen as a set of ideas which affect the way how people live their lives.
2.
· Charlotte Brontë criticizes her critics by stating that “conventionality is not morality” meaning that just because something is conventional and done by everyone that does not necessary mean that it is right. This can not only be applied to the 18th Century but also to the modern day. Charlotte was referring to the patriarchal society of those days and the fact that she was criticized for writing because she was a woman.
· When she speaks of Ahab who did not listen to Micaiah it is as if she is suggesting that the critics may even learn something if they make the effort to kisten to what other people has to say.
· The fact that she even thanks the people, who are against her book, shows us what unique person she is.
· Brontë wrote as Currer Bell as she knew that women’s work is to be liked on as prejudiced. She wanted people to read it without being prejudiced or critical.
· By using this rhetorical style it is as if she wants to say that these statements should be common knowledge instead of being criticized.
· She wrote this preface because of all the critics and praise she received and she wanted to give her point of view. She wanted to tell them how she felt about both comebacks.
3.
Through reading the excerpts from The Christian Remembrancer and The Quarterly Review we come to terms that Elizabeth Rigby is not sure whether it is a male or a female who wrote Jane Eyre, she says that “the name and the sex of the writer are still a mystery.” This shows us that gender ideologies play a big role in the Victorian era. As the people were not sure what the sex of the author was the novel were mostly read without prejudice look into it.
The novel were attacked by Elizabeth Rigby who said “never was unkindness more cordially repaid” which gives us the idea that she thinks that Brontë is taking revenge because she was not treated well during her life.
Rigby knows that the book was admired by many people but she thinks that it is only because it was a controversial novel for the eighteenth century.
Rigby is not very impressed by the characters in the novel as she says that Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre do things that “lie utterly beyond the bounds of probability.”
Jane was someone who dealt with unkindness rather well but according to Rigby she is repulsed by her sympathy for Jane Eyre as she says that Jane “dwell upon and treasure every slight and unkindness, real or fancied.”
Through saying “it pleased God to make her an orphan, friendless, and penniless-yet she thanks nobody, and least of all Him”(452), Rigby states that Jane were ungrateful for being an orphan. She says that Jane should be satisfied with what she has and her situation as it is God’s will. This brings us back to gender ideologies as Jane who are a woman should be satisfied with everything life throws at her, this was what expected of women in that era.
By stating that she does not want to “enter… into the question of whether the power of writing [is] above her” (453) shows us how people were prejudice towards woman in writing. This is ironic as Rigby is a woman herself who writes. Although she is a woman she beliefs that men are better in writing that woman.
I think that in whole the reception of Jane Eyre were more welcomed by middle-class readers as they can
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