英语毕业论文 从女权主义的角度比较《傲慢与偏见》和《简

A Comparative Study of the Heroines in Pride and

Prejudice and Jane Eyre from a Perspective of Feminism

ABSTRACT

Both Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte are remarkable and prominent women writers in the history of English literature. Their representative works —Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre—have been enjoying great popularity ever since their publication.By analyzing the two heroines —Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Eyre from the perspective of feminism, the thesis is an attempt to find what they have in common and what revelation they have to the contemporary women .

The body of the thesis consists of three chapters, besides Introduction and Conclusion. Chapter One is mainly about the lives of the two women writers, Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. Chapter Two introduces briefly the stories in Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. Chapter Three gives a comparative study of the two heroines in Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre based on feminism.

Key Words: independence, freedom, equality, feminism

从女权主义的角度比较

《傲慢与偏见》和《简·爱》中的女主人公

摘要

作为十九世纪英国两位杰出的女作家，简·奥斯汀和夏洛蒂·勃朗特各自的代表作《傲慢与偏见》和《简·爱》自出版以来深受广大读者的欢迎和文学评论者的广泛关注。论文从女权主义的角度分析了两部作品中的女主人公——伊丽莎白·班纳特和简·爱，旨在从她们身上找到一些对当地女性有所启示的共同点。

论文除引言和结论外，正文共分三章。引言主要介绍女性主义及其研究方法，以及论文的写作目的。第一章介绍了简·奥斯汀和夏洛蒂·勃朗特这两位女作家的生平。第二章主要介绍了《傲慢与偏见》和《简·爱》两部小说的故事梗概。第三章从女性主义的视角对两部作品中的两个女主角进行了比较分析，并提出了自己的见解。

关键词：独立自由平等女权主义

CONTENTS

Abstract---------------------------------------------------------------------Ⅰ摘要-------------------------------------------------------------------------ⅡIntroduction----------------------------------------------------------------1

1 Two Female Writers’ Lives--------------------------------------------

2 1.1 Jane Austen------------------------------------------------------------2

1.2 Charlotte Bront?------------------------------------------------------4

2 Stories in Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre----------------------6 2.1 Pride and Prejudice and Jane Austen’s Own Shadow----------6

2.2 Jane Eyre and Charlotte Bront?------------------------------------8

3 The Comparative Study of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre Based on Feminism-------------------------------------------------------11 3.1 Elizabeth Bennet’s Life in Pride and Prejudice------------------11 3.2 Jane’s Life in Jane Eyre---------------------------------------------11 3.3 My View about the Two Heoines from the Two Female Novelists-------------------------------------------------------------------12 Conclusion-----------------------------------------------------------------15

Introduction

Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre are two of the most famous novels written by women writers in England in the 19th century. Ever since their publication, both have attained great popularity among readers and attracted a lot of attention from critics.

According to Collins Cobuild Advanced Lerner’s English Dictionary, feminism refers to “the belief and aim that women should have the same rights, power, and opportunities as men”(2003:527). Sociologically, feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. It first appeared in France. Then, it began to spread through England and America and gradually became popular. Feminist theory emerged from these feminist movements and includes general theories and theories about the origins of inequality, and, in some cases, about the social construction of sex and gender, in a variety of disciplines. The movements’ history has been divided into three "waves" by feminists and scholars. The first wave is mainly concerned with women's right to vote and it refers mainly to women's suffrage movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The second wave refers to the ideas and actions associated with the women's liberation movement in the 1960s. The third wave, beginning in the 1990s, refers to a continuation of, and a reaction to, the perceived failures of second-wave feminism.

There are four significant current practices of feminist approaches, which are gender studies, Marxist feminism, psychoanalytic feminism and minority feminist criticism. Marxist feminist criticism focuses on the relation between reading and social realities and combines study of class with that of gender. According to Marxist feminism, personal identity is not seen as separate from cultural identity. Indeed, feminism and feminist literary criticism are often defined as a matter of what is absent rather than what is present. In its diversity, feminism is concerned with the marginalization of all women; that is, with their being degraded to a minor and subordinate position. Feminists have been trying to explain how power imbalances resulted from gender are reflected in or challenged by literary texts. Literature often reflects the cultural assumptions and attitudes of its time, and that of course includes attitudes towards women — their status, roles, and expectations. Generally, the target of feminist criticism is to awaken or increase women’s individual consciousness, so as to break the shackles it has long since imposed on the female and call for their resistance against the unjust treatment to them.

After World War II, feminist criticism, a comparatively new kind of criticism, appeared as a literary branch of the women’s libera tion and is still popular today. In the later part of the 20th century, it becomes common for literary critics to pay attention to the feminist elements in Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. This thesis intends to make a comparison between the two heroines from a perspective of feminism. Through the comparison, the author hopes to find out the reflection of social realities in the literary works and women’s position in a certain period of history and the improvement of women’s position with the passage of t ime, hoping that the findings can shed some light on the present and into the future as well

1 Two Female Writers’ Lives

1.1 Jane Austen

More than two centuries ago, two female pioneering novelists from England, Jane Austen and Charlotte Bront?started a tough road to independence and equality. They were both smart and determined. What they insisted on have been put into their works and have deeply influenced many readers from all over the world. They hoped that one day women would have the same status and have right to pursue their own value in career, family and the society. They both claimed that women should be assured of justice to fight for their own value in different areas, even though the road was thorny and rough.

As is known to all, being pioneers to encourage women to pursue what they really want at that period was such a difficult thing that might lead the two female novelists to predicament. They knew the situations of themselves, too, thus they wrote two brave girls in their works to claim that even if they couldn’t see the day of success, they would advocate this spirit always.

Jane in Jane Eyre and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice are both aspired to be independent and equal at least in their little families. They are not only kind-hearted and pretty, but also strong and self-reliant. Two heroines are the ideal women of the two novelists, bearing the weight of two novelists’ wishes and expectations. What’s more, their happy endings are the novelists’ best wishes to all women in the world.

Jane Austen was born in a country clergyman’s family on December 16, 1775, in the parish of Steventon. She was brought up in an intelligent but restricted environment. Her father was a rector and a scholar with a private library. She was educated at home. In her father’s library, Jane acquired a thorough knowledge of eighteenth-century English literature. Although she did move to several places like Bath, Southampton and Chawton, she lived a quiet, retired and uneventful life. And her closest companion was her elder sister Cassandra, who, like her, never married. Austen began as a child to write novels for her family entertainment. Her works were later published anonymously due to the prejudice against women writers then. In 1817, she died in Winchester.

“Generally speaking, Jane Austen was a writer of the eighteenth century, though she lived mainly in the nineteenth century. She holds the ideals of the landlord class in politics, religion and moral principles; and her works show clearly her firm belief in the predominance of reason over passion, the sense of responsibility, good manners and clear-sighted judgment over the Romantic tendencies of emotion and

individuality. As a realistic writer, she considers it her duty to express in her works a discriminated and serious criticism of life, and to expose the follies and illusions of mankind. She shows contemptuous feelings towards snobbery, stupidity, worldliness and vulgarity through subtle satire and irony. And in style, she is a neoclassicism advocator, upholding those traditional ideas of order, reason, proportion and gracefulness in novel writing.”(Zhang Boxiang, 2005:223)

The works of Jane Austen are among the greatest achievements of English literature. With sharp observation and in meticulous detail, she presents the quiet, day-to-day country life of the upper-middle-class English. Her characteristic theme is that maturity is achieved through the loss of illusions. Faults of character displayed by the people of her novels are corrected when, through tribulation, lessons are learned. Even the most minor characters are vividly described in Austen’s unique lucid style. All these show a mind of the shrewdest intelligence adapting the available traditions and deepening the resources of art with consummate craftsmanship. Because of her sensitivity to universal patterns of human behavior, Jane Austen has brought the English novel to its maturity, and she has been regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists in Britain by many critics as well as by many readers.

Austen’s main literary concern is about the personal relationship of human beings. Therefore, her novels have a universal significance. It is her conviction that a man’s relationship to his wife and children is at least as important a part of his life as his concerns about his belief and career. As for her interest in the study of human beings in their relationships with other people in daily life, Jane Austen is particularly preoccupied with the relationship between men and women in love. She always argues that it is wrong to marry just for beauty or for money, but it is also wrong to marry without them.

When it comes to Jane Eyre, the structure is extremely deft or skillful; the characterization is very memorable; the irony has a radiant shrewdness unmatched elsewhere. At the heart of the novelist’s exploration of the marriage, property and intrigue lies the exhilarating suspense of the relationship between Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy, and Jane Austen’s delicate probing of the values of the gentry. The moments of high comedy in the novel are always related to deeper issues. Elizabeth’s rejection of the odious Mr. Collins suggests her independence and self-esteem. Some readers may think that Elizabeth was just the girl that Jane wanted to be. Though she didn’t get married in her life, she, just like Elizabeth in her novel, held a firm attitude that the essential of marriage is love, not anything else.

1.2 Charlotte Bront?

Charlotte Bront? was born on April 21, 1816. Her mother died in 1821, which created a lot of chaos. Three years later, Charlotte and her two older sisters, Maria and

Elizabeth, were sent to the newly-opened Cowan Bridge Clergy Daughters' School. However, conditions there were rather bad even by the standards of the time, and it was not long before Maria and Elizabeth became ill enough to be sent home. Soon they both died of consumption in the spring of 1825. Patrick brought Charlotte and her younger sister Emily, who had recently joined them at the school, back home as soon as the other girls became ill, but Charlotte never forgot what the school had been like.

In 1842 Charlotte went to school in Brussels with Emily, but her time there was less than two years, and it led to her eventual writing of Villette. Back home, Charlotte fell into chronic unemployment and severe hypochondria, actually thinking she was going blind. In 1846 the three sisters published a book of Poems, and though sales were very slow, the reviews were good and spurred on further literary endeavors. Charlotte's novel of this time, The Professor, was actually rather bad, suffering from a less-than-believable main character. In August of 1846 Charlotte began writing Jane Eyre. It was published in 1847 and turned out to be a great success.

However, this success was followed up by tragedy —her family were all dying off. In September 1848, Branwell died; in December 1848 and May 1849, Emily and Anne died from consumption respectively. Charlotte and her father clung to each other for comfort and support. Charlotte's grief was plain in the last third of her novel Shirley.

Later, Charlotte spent some time in London, meeting other writers of the day. Her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, proposed to Charlotte, and Patrick was absolutely furious about this, forbidding the marriage and saying some rather awful things about Arthur. In spite of her father’s objection, Charlotte seriously considered marrying Arthur, which she did, in June of 1854.

Fortunately for Arthur and Patrick, they'd learned to get along. They were of great comfort to each other after Charlotte's death, which for some reason, was the signal for a lot of gossip, some of it malicious, in the newspapers and magazines. To counteract this, Patrick and Arthur eventually asked Mrs. Gaskell, an author friend of Charlotte's, to write an authoritative biography. Unfortunately for them, Mrs. Gaskell got nearly all of her information from Ellen Nussey, who took great advantage of this to make Arthur seem a villain, and Patrick ended up represented as a stern, overbearing father. This was all accepted as true for many years, and made all of Charlotte's critics suddenly feel sorry for her.

“Charlotte’s works are all about the struggle of an individual consciousness towards self-realization, about some lonely and neglected young women with a fierce longing for love, understanding and a full, happy life. But brought up with strict orthodoxy, Charlotte would usually stick to the Puritanical code. She loves the beauty of nature but despises worldly ambition and success. In her mind, man’s life is composed of perpetual battle between sin and virtue, good and evil. All her heroine s’